Is This Serious ?

I saw a comment at Red Maria's traducing the saintly Sir Peter Vardy, philanthropic provider of half-decent education in the North-East. He's just nailed leftie paper Tribune after they accused his schools of teaching creationism (whatever that is - presumably the ridiculous idea that God said, 'let there be light', and there was light. Everyone knows that there wasn't anything at all, and then suddenly up popped a whole hot expanding universe - from nowhere, and with no reason. Makes far more sense).

The comment was "Money talks. ****s."

Who is this ignorant swearblogger, I thought. What's his blog like ? Lordy.

"Emergence

As dogma becomes exposed through increased communication, ideas begin to form from the emerging cognitive dissonance. These ideas are presented as rationalisations within the context and under the regulation of the existing memetic monopoly (as cause-and-effect demands). As knowledge advances and more of the unknown becomes known (diluting the power of the mythological other), these sporadic rationalisations become untenable and cognitive dissonance spreads with more veracity for it, eventually leading to a paradigm shift in political governance and identity creation."

And it's all like that. Page after page of cultural studies drivel, where occasional tiny grains of meaning glitter for a brief instant before submerging again under the turgid flow of his sentences. He's far more readable in two-word sentence mode - understanding is instant.

You do wonder if he's a student of John Hutnyk's. Or is the entire blog an elaborate hoax - a sort of Sokal of the blogosphere ?

Norman Dennis 1929 - 2010

Thanks to Ed West at the Telegraph for noting his passing.

"A Labour party member most of his life, and a compassionate socialist, he nonetheless became the leading critic of the British Left’s social liberalism which, he came to believe, was destroying society and in particular working-class life."

Peacefully, at home, on November 13, aged 81 years, Norman, beloved husband of Audrey, a loving father of Julia and John, father-in-law of Phil, devoted grandad of Robert, Sarah and Max. A short service at Sunderland Crematorium at 11.30am will be followed by a service at St Andrew's Church, Roker, at 12.30pm, to which all friends and family are warmly invited. Friday November 26.

Guardian obituary by Bob Hudson

In the late 1940s, a group of sociology students who would go on to shape and cement the discipline in Britain started their studies at the London School of Economics. Their number included AH ("Chelly") Halsey, Joe and Olive Banks, Michael Banton, Basil Bernstein, Percy Cohen, David Lockwood and Norman Dennis.

Unlike most members of this sociological establishment, Dennis, who has died aged 81, chose not to seek academic preferment (though chairs were certainly offered) but rather to focus his energies on community life, most notably in his home town of Sunderland. This preference became apparent in 1956 with his first major publication, Coal Is Our Life, the classic community study of "Ashton" (in fact Featherstone in West Yorkshire). Although this study tends to be overshadowed in popular opinion by the well-known Bethnal Green studies of the 1950s, it contains a much harder and less anecdotal edge, especially in analysing the ways in which economic forces structure social relations.

Dennis next turned his attention to the domains of housing and town planning. By then lecturing at the University of Newcastle and back in Sunderland, he was living in Millfield, an area which Sunderland council had selected for slum clearance against the wishes of most of the resident population. In his 1970 publication, People and Planning: the Sociology of Housing in Sunderland, he starkly exposed the social and technical weaknesses of the slum clearance programmes, the insensitivity of their implementation and the shallow nature of resident "participation". In undertaking this study, he achieved a rare degree of empathy with the people of Millfield. He became the secretary of their residents' association. and was in the vanguard of what would now be termed "communitarianism".

In 1972 his sense of empathy led to a further landmark publication. Public Participation and Planners' Blight was an excoriating analysis of the unwillingness of the bureaucratic-professional machine to listen to residents, and the failure of local politicians to challenge the narrative presented by their officials.

The previous year, he had been elected as Labour councillor for the Millfield ward, and I joined him as a fellow councillor for the same ward. It would be fair to say that his relatively short time as an elected member perplexed both the officials of Sunderland council and many of his political colleagues. However, the upshot was that many of the homes he defended from the slum clearance programme are still standing today as a testament to his description of them as "little palaces".

Some academics balked at the idea that a sociologist could be so intimately involved with his subject matter, thereby running the risk of "bias", but Dennis was never one for relativism – for him the possibility of an objective search for truth was not to be easily laid aside. It was a stance that led him into a final phase of work that (again) perplexed many – his association with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Institute for the Study of Civil Society.

Under this rubric he wrote a series of highly influential studies that railed against what he saw as the decay of the moral fabric of society. These included Families Without Fatherhood (1992 - pdf), Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family (1993 - pdf), The Invention of Permanent Poverty (1997), The Failure of Britain's Police (2003 - pdf) and Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000 - pdf). His call for a return to the moral world of the "respectable working class" of his childhood struck a chord with many, and he found himself transformed from an icon of the activist left to the academic darling of the right. At the same time, he remained an active member of the Labour party in Sunderland. The explanation for all of this lay in his commitment to "ethical socialism" – a philosophy he developed in English Ethical Socialism (1988), which he co-authored with Halsey. Central to this position is the doctrine of personal responsibility, even under unfavourable circumstances, for it is this multiplicity of personal decisions that will form history. In particular he saw reproductive and family decisions as crucial to human destiny, and (in Families Without Fatherhood) highlighted the adverse consequences of raising children without a father. In line with his opposition to postmodernism, Dennis felt no qualms in stating the moral truth as he saw it.

Dennis was born in Sunderland, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Green Terrace elementary school and Bede collegiate school, Sunderland. After graduating with a first from the LSE he worked at the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham, as well as spending time at Palo Alto, California, as a Rockefeller fellow. His heart, however, lay in Sunderland and he spent almost 40 years as a lecturer (and subsequently reader) in social studies at the nearby University of Newcastle.

A physically active man, and lifelong teetotaller, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia last July, though he remained active and alert until recently. Our families enjoyed a convivial meal in a Sunderland restaurant only weeks before his death, where he was in typically rumbustious form. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, and their two children, John and Julia.

• Norman Dennis, sociologist, born 16 August 1929; died 13 November 2010

Guardian tribute by Carol Roberton :

Norman wrote: "I went to the LSE instead of Corpus Christi, Oxford, partly because of [Harold] Laski, Miliband's mentor, but mainly because of RH Tawney" and he described how he had continued to advocate Tawney's "fellowship based on family" socialism.

But this, wrote Norman – "along with its closely related chapel and temperance socialism and the philosophies of the benign, enabling state in which co-operation and fellowship are the best bases for social organisation, not capitalist competition" – was "one of the great lost causes of our age. Who now has any memory that such ideas actually dominated Labour Party thinking, until they were all dumped into memory's hole of oblivion at the time of the countercultural revolution? I really ought to be on a national register of cultural monuments, as one of the sole surviving representatives of this point of view."

Norman the TV presenter - narrating this BBC documentary on the Durham miners.

Notice at Newcastle University.

Journal tribute from his daughter Julia.

For some reason there's nothing about his death on the Civitas website, despite the four of his books which are available there (links in the obit above). I'm very surprised at them - that's quite shameful.

His long essay "Defame Fathers, Create Crime?" is here.

Christian Institute tribute page - including an mp3 of 'Families without fatherhood'


With his passing, the ranks of radical, anti-our-new-Establishment sociologists are thin indeed. I can only think of Peter Saunders as keeping the flag flying.

Maybe Not So Good...

"The Dundee United and Scotland footballer David Goodwillie has been charged with raping a woman at a new year house party in West Lothian."




(frivolous comments about what is after all a serious criminal offence may be deleted)

"And this time, no more Mr Nice Guy!"

Baby Doc Duvalier returns to Haiti. That's all they need.

"Two white people wearing seatbelts — you've got to be cops"

"I have been away for four years, living as an ethnic minority in a monocultural part of the world, amassing a host of stories to tell to disbelieving friends.

On the whole, I am glad to return. I shan't miss some locals' assumptions that, being a white woman, if I was outside after dark, as I occasionally was, usually to walk the few metres between my house and the church, I must be a prostitute eager to give them a blow job. I shan't miss the abuse my priest husband received: the daubing of "Dirty white dogs" in red paint on the church door, the barrage of stones thrown at him by children shouting "Satan". He was called a "f***ing white bastard" more than once, though, notably, never when in a cassock. I will also not miss the way our garden acted as the local rubbish dump, with items ranging from duvets and TV sets, to rats (dead or twitching) glued to cardboard strips, a popular local method of vermin control to stem the large numbers of them which scuttled between the rubbish piled in gardens and on pavements."

What Third World hellhole can this be? Haiti?

I'm not sure, but I think it's either Small Heath or Sparkbrook.

(via)

Grooming Goes Mainstream

There's a meme (hate that word) about ideas whose time has come - something like the five stages of grief but different - to the effect that first they ignore it, then deny it, then say it's wicked, and a stage or two more before it moves to general acceptance. Anybody know how it goes?

The issue of 'grooming' of under age girls by predominantly Asian gangs, covered on this blog here, here and here, seems to have gone mainstream, following the publication of a UCL report which, while widely publicised, seems impossible to actually find on the Web.

Now it's even the top story on Woman Sour. Far away are the days, seven years ago, when a Channel Four documentary on the subject was pulled, after pressure from West Yorkshire Police, because it might increase support for the BNP (aka 'increase community tensions'). What was once ignored by polite society, and only spoken of by racist knuckledraggers, is now almost prime-time, earnestly discussed by the great and the good. And now, when arrests are made, even the BBC no longer looks the other way.

But there was a price to pay for all those liberal blind eyes over so many years. It was paid by working-class Yorkshire and Lancashire girls like Emma, interviewed here. The Labour MP Ann Cryer, who's been a long-time campaigner on this issue, getting stick "from leading figures within her own party, not least from the former Labour leadership contender Diane Abbott", said 'Emma's description of her situation is pretty well identical to the situation of girls in Keighley whose mothers came to see me out of desperation, because they just couldn't get any action from West Yorkshire Police or Bradford Social Services'. The same West Yorkshire Police that was suppressing the evidence for political reasons, under its Chief Constable the late Colin Cramphorn, 'a man of liberal sympathies and a Guardian reader for many years'.

Just as 52 people had to die in London before the Labour Party started putting the lives of UK citizens ahead of not being like Norman Tebbit, girls have been raped and abused over a decade* while police, media and social services looked the other way.

On-street Grooming

Recent news reports have highlighted the prosecution of a gangs (sic) of predominantly Pakistani men for the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls. What's the best way to tackle this appauling (sic) crime without stereotyping and dividing communitites (sic)? We hear again from a young woman groomed by Pakistani teenagers from the age of 12 and then repeatedly raped. Ann Cryer, the former MP for Keighley, who's been speaking out on this issue for many years, and Yusuf Tai from Forward Thinking a group working with varied Muslim communities discuss possible ways to prevent crimes like this happening again.

* maybe a lot longer, if former Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell is right :

When I came to Blackburn in the 1970s, one of my main issues was the gangs of Asian men outside the old nightclub on top of the shopping centre who were picking up drunk white girls, specifically to abuse them. These were cars full of Asian lads in BMWs and Mercedes, offering lifts home to these young women, leading to incidents of rape and sexual assaults. From the first time I was posted to East Lancashire it has been a problem.

What Jack Straw has said so carefully is true: There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way. In recent years we have seen it specifically with victims aged just 14, 15 or 16-years-old who are out on the streets at night and groomed by predatory gangs. For people to just come out and call Mr Straw racist is wrong.

During the past decade there has been Operation Engage in Blackburn and Operation Awaken in Blackpool as the police has been able to feel more open about the situation. In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert - Jonathan Freedland

Freedland :

"The fear was that – for all his oratorical brilliance – Obama somehow lacked empathy, that he was a slightly chilly, aloof figure, that he struggled to connect emotionally.

We'll hear much less of that talk now.

For the address he gave at last night's memorial service for the victims of the Arizona shootings was elegiac, heartfelt and deeply moving."

Alas, it didn't actually move Mr Freedland, or connect with him emotionally - in the sense of altering his behaviour.

Here's that fine Obama speech :

"But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds...

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

And here's how much it moved Freedland :

"This was meant to be the Republicans' week, as they took control of the House of Representatives and its legislative agenda. Instead they look small – as well as defensive, fending off accusations that it was the violent rhetoric of the right that fuelled the current toxic political environment. None smaller than the de facto leader of today's Republican party, Sarah Palin, who preceded the Tucson address with an aggressive, self-regarding and petty-minded videotaped message that claimed she had been the victim of a "blood-libel"."

Maybe he was just too busy praising the speech to actually listen to it.

At Last ...

David Brooks in the NYT (emboldening mine) :

These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.

Yet such is the state of things. We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.

I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.

I've been saddened by the last few days, not so much by the dishonest media coverage - after all, 'Palin did it' is a more compelling narrative than 'he was a loony' - although it's still notable how all the outlets who just couldn't work out what could possibly make Major Hasan Malik shoot lots of people knew straight away that Sarah P. made Jared Loughner shoot lots of people. No, what's really bad is the nutty stuff in the comments at CiF and on left blogs. Jared Loughner's not the only reality-challenged loony out there, that's for sure.

"Free speech has no place in our society where the BNP are concerned..."

"... and this shows with the backing we receive from the prime Minister, David Cameron and other influential politicians who realise democracy is to fragile to be left in the hands and words of the nazi BNP.

Well done to the Police, shame you had no cause to lock him up."

This post by Dr Jason Sturgess at Saddleworth News refers to the hustings for the forthcoming Oldham West by-election, held in the fine old village of Delph, which I tootled through on my L-plated bike many a time in my youth, on that long ride from Worcestershire to Yorkshire (via EU Referendum). I think I'll let you be the judge on this one. More reports here and here :




BNP candidate is removed from 'open' hustings in Delph.

Dear Readers,
I was in email contact with Cllr Hulme who organised the event and he refused to invite 5 of the candidates included myself. I informed him that the meeting broke Electoral commission rules on hustings, the Millgate Arts Centre building recieves public funding and the meeting was advertised as an open event. The people of Delph should have been allowed to ask any questions to any of the candidates, in controlling the meeting like they did and only allowing on candidates whose parties are already discredited with scandals, deceit and lies was an insult to the people of Saddleworth and anti-democratic. Cllr Hulmes reasons were unjustified and when he lost the argument his emails reverted to All capitals and in bold ie, shouting in text language.
Stephen Morris English Democrats

Delph website disagrees :

After comments about the conduct of the Hustings Meeting held on sunday 9th January, the following statement has been issued by the Delph DCA & Traffic Group :

"Setting the record straight.

No hustings or candidates question time in this constituency has EVER had all the candidates on the platform and there is no legal requirement to do so. On Thursday night the Oldham Chronicle organised a question time with just three candidates on the platform.

It is simply not practicable to hold a question time with more than 5 speakers and with 10 candidates a choice has to be made. On Sunday the three main candidates were joined by the Green candidate Peter Allen whose party has a councillor on Oldham Council and Paul Nuttall the UKIP candidate who is also an elected member of the European Parliament for the North West.

The BNP candidate asked for and was given tickets to be part of the audience at the event. Unfortunately the candidate and his supporters organised a 'sit in' protest which disrupted the start of the meeting, their behaviour threatening a breach of the peace. Having repeatedly refused polite requests from the organisers to end their 'sit in' protest on the platform and return to their seats in the audience , the organisers had no alternative but to ask the police to escort the BNP candidate and his entourage from the building.

The organisers would like to thank the police for the calm and professional way they dealt with a difficult situation.

Delph proceeded to have a cracking election meeting which was lively, entertaining and informative.

We have to wonder why the BNP picked on a small village community group when as far as we know the Oldham Chronicle received no complaints from them about the candidates meeting they organised in Denshaw last Thursday night.'

Delph Community Association and Delph Traffic Group are non-political community organisations. No Councillor from any political party was involved in the organisation of this event"

I doubt that statement about never having all the candidates together is true. For years Oldham was a two-member constituency with usually only four candidates, and in the 50s Oldham West only had two candidates. Did they never sit in the same room ?

Candidates are :

* Debbie Abrahams (Labour)
* Derek Adams (British National Party)
* Kashif Ali (Conservative)
* Peter Allen (Green Party)
* David Bishop (Bus-Pass Elvis Party)
* The Flying Brick (Monster Raving Loony Party)
* Loz Kaye (Pirate Party of the United Kingdom)
* Stephen Morris (English Democrats)
* Paul Nuttall MEP (UK Independence Party)
* Elwyn Watkins (Liberal Democrats)

At the last election :

General Election 2010: Oldham East and Saddleworth[9]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Phil Woolas	14,186	31.9	−10.7
	Liberal Democrat	Elwyn Watkins	14,083	31.6	−0.5
	Conservative	Kashif Ali	11,773	26.4	+8.7
	BNP	Alwyn Stott	2,546	5.7	+0.8
	UKIP	David Bentley	1,720	3.9	+1.8
	Christian	Gulzar Nazir	212	0.5	N/A
Majority			103	0.2	−10.2
Turnout			44,520	61.2	+4.4

"A Mother Is The Truest Friend We Have ..."

(in which the writer lauds dishonesty, perjury and assisting an offender)

" ...when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts."

Thus Washington Irving. He'd have been impressed with Jacqueline Binley.
















Photo - the magnificently named Heathcliff O'Malley.

"The son of Conservative MP Brian Binley has been jailed and his wife has narrowly avoided imprisonment after they concocted a string of lies to cover up a drink driving offence. Former police officer Matthew Binley, 27, was arrested after he crashed his Alfa Romeo in Northampton, Northants, whilst twice the drink-drive limit. He had attempted to evade capture by fleeing the vehicle but was taken into custody after officers spotted him hiding in a nearby bush. His mother Jacqueline Binley, 50, tried to take the blame, claiming she had been the one driving his car.
Despite not being at the scene of the accident she told officers she had caught a taxi home minutes before police arrived and arrested her son. The pair admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice while Mr Binley pleaded guilty to a further charge of drink driving."

Now young (? 27 !) Mr Binley sounds like he's been just about all the kinds of fool a young fool can be.

"Matthew was dropped off at his Northampton flat at 11.30pm on May 22 last year after attending a friend's wedding and carried on the party at city centre nightclubs. However, for an unknown reason he decided to go for a late night drive in his Alfa Romeo, which he then crashed into a kerb before calling the RAC at 1.30am. The recovery driver noticed he 'appeared drunk' and immediately called police who found Mr Binley hiding in a nearby bush and arrested him on suspicion of drink driving. "

Now you or I might not decide on a quick spin round the block while soused - but we've all done things that with hindsight were inadvisable. Having pranged the car with no other vehicle or person involved, you'd think he'd give thanks for that fact, park the car as tidily as can, then put as much distance between himself and it as possible before calling the garage the following day. What possessed him to call the RAC ? (in the old days the RAC man would have called a taxi, not the police).

Having done the above, involving your blameless mother in an attempted cover-up is surely adding not just a cherry on the confection of foolishness, but a whole fruitbowl - with whipped cream and hundreds and thousands to boot, not to mention strawberry and chocolate sauce. But when a job (he was a police officer) is at stake, people will do a lot.

And she stepped up to the plate, despite considerable reservations. Fair play to her and to her fierce maternal instinct. The fact that it was a mad thing to do, with little chance of success, makes it all the more commendable.

'Wish Matthew would just bite the bullet and take the rap. I'm beginning to resent him asking me but I daren't tell him to his face.''

While she and her husband, MP Brian Binley, are entitled to think their son's been very silly, I hope Mr Binley is very proud of his wife (even if he can't say so publicly), and that his son's had the grace to apologise, to thank her, and to swear never to be such an idiot again.





(It's rarely that I bitterly regret not being a wealthy man. In such case, I would offer the Binleys a fortnight anywhere in the world, with all the spas, pampering and dining a woman could want*, and an expensive trip to the jewellers at the end. I know there are far more worthy people in the world, but something about this story just touches me, as it might touch any father with sons and a redhead wife)



* my experience in this area being limited, I'm making it up as I go along.


UPDATE - Susan looked at the story over my shoulder. "She's as daft as he is. I wouldn't lie for him if it were my son". Women are so unromantic.

We've Trashed Our Education - Now We'll Trash Yours

VSO - Primary Teacher Roles

We’re looking for primary teachers to work alongside teachers in the classroom and go overseas in roles as soon as possible in countries such as Thailand, Nepal, China and Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia. You’ll work with serving teachers in a cluster of primary schools, introducing them to more participatory, child centred methodology.

Lo, Nice White Lady descends from her flying machine to change the seating from those stuffy old rows into small groups of desks - after all, the children learn more from each other than from any teacher, don't they?

I can see the strategic goal driving this attempt to dumb down the remarkably successful Chinese education system, although I can't see the famously test-and-rote-heavy Chinese falling for it - they'll probably send them all to Tibet. But what have the poor Ghanaians, Rwandans and Nepalese done to deserve this?

FaceBook Friends

When a (tad mentally fragile is the impression I get) sensible shoe wearing 42-year old (from Brighton, natch), miffed at her significant other's infidelity, announced on Facebook that she'd taken an overdose, none of her 1,000-plus 'friends' called an ambulance.

Tangentially, I see that Facebook has 550 million users and is valued at 50 billion dollars.

We seem to be reliving the dot-com boom. Anyone remember Freeserve, Dixon's free (well, local-call-cost) ISP from pre-broadband days ?

Freeserve floated on the stock market in July 1999 (as Freeserve.com plc), at which point they had approximately 1.5 million subscribers and were valued at between £1.31bn and £1.51bn ($2.02bn and $2.34bn). By September 2000, Freeserve had more than 2 million active subscribers. This was vastly more than the incumbent telephone provider BT, something that was unique for a European ISP. Freeserve was bought by the France Télécom-owned company Wanadoo in 2000 for £1.65bn ($2.37bn).

I remember around float time thinking - "£1,000 per subscriber - and no subscription fee! How in heaven's name can they be worth even a tenth of that ?". I was an early adopter, getting Web access in the early 90s (when there was no local number to dial!), but even I was only spending a few hundred pounds a year online, and I just couldn't see how Freeserve were ever going to make hundreds, let alone thousands, out of each customer. They never did.

Facebook are valued at getting on for $100 per subscriber - which subscribers include my wife and four children. No way are they currently anywhere near making that sort of money out of them. The valuation is an order of magnitude lower than 12 years back, but it's still much too high.

Does anyone know what the theory behind this valuation is ? OK, there's advertising - but IMHO that's not going to be anything like $10 p.a. per user in post-cost profit - $5 billion a year. And if that were possible, what's the likelihood that it will stay the course and not go the way of MySpace? Up to now - admittedly a short history - Internet social network sites have been popular for a few years then the buzz wears off as something new arrives. Unless Facebook can somehow capture the 'something new' - i.e. make it more likely that new entrants to social networking will choose to implement inside rather than outside Facebook (e.g. Farmville, which my daughter and her friends all played last year but have now stopped), there's a risk that it'll in its turn suffer the fate of Bebo, worth $850 million only a couple of years ago and now worth $10 million as users moved to Facebook.

Let's assume it survives, and Mark Zuckerberg becomes the Bill Gates of social networking. I still can't see it as worth $50 billion - unless they can find a way of sucking in shopping sites, like some black hole of the Web. In which case Google vs Facebook will be a battle to behold.

BTW, is it just me, or has Google become a worse search engine lately ? It doesn't seem to pick up those obscure pages that perfectly match the search criterion any more. Instead you wade through pages of link-farming guff and big commercial sites before finding what you want on page 7.

Stealing The Bin-Bags ....

That the lazy Brits just don't want to steal :

Clothes donated by members of the public to charity are being stolen by organised criminals and sold abroad, depriving leading charities of millions of pounds for good causes. Gangs from Eastern Europe are believed to be responsible for a growing number of raids on doorstep collection bags and clothing banks, attracted by a trebling in the price for old clothing in the past three years.

Tuesday Night Music - Days Like This Keep Me Warm

Simple, but strangely uplifting. I've said before that the Polyphonic Spree were a Principal Edwards Magic Theatre for the Noughties.

Word Of The Day

"Insinuendo" - Edwin Greenwood's description of the media coverage of the unfortunate (presuming his innocence) Christopher Jefferies.


UPDATE - the Mirror says his favourite poem is this - the story of a man who was hanged for cutting his wife’s throat !

But the Mail reports that he loved Christina Rossetti - and Rossetti often wrote about death !

All I can say is, he's lucky he's not teaching now. My son's GCSE syllabus includes Robert Browning - and one of the poems is Porphyria's Lover - an everyday tale of a psychopath strangler.

The Things They Say

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, farmer, high-class sausage purveyor and Conservative candidate, on being black in Britain. Maybe he doesn't mean it the way it sounds :

"Our parents established beachheads in the cities; it is now up to our generation to move out of those beachheads and claim the rest of Britain as our own."

And via commenter Fellist, former Labour MP for Sparkbrook Roy Hattersley (see also this post) :

For more than 30 years, I took the votes of Birmingham Muslims for granted. The Muslims themselves I treated with more respect. But if, at any time between 1964 and 1997 I heard of a Khan, Saleem or Iqbal who did not support Labour I was both outraged and astonished.

My presumption was justified. It was the Muslim vote - increased by an influx of families from Kashmir, the Punjab and other parts of Birmingham - which expanded my majority from barely 1,200 to more than 12,000...

I always assumed that their mothers and aunts (often on instruction) voted the same way as their husbands.

China - Genius Genes, Gentlemen and State Power

As I said a while back, if China can set up a eugenic policy for a few Olympic basketball medals, what might they not do for a few more Nobel-winning scientists ?

Some of the world's fastest supercomputers are being set up in Hong Kong to address the age-old mystery of human intelligence.

The study of intelligence quotient (IQ) is being conducted by BGI Hong Kong, [formerly] known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. It will survey DNA samples from 1,000 child prodigies from China's best high schools, comparing them with samples from 1,000 children of average intelligence, searching for genetic variations.

The study will examine protein coding genes of the extremely smart children, many of whom are expected to enroll at Harvard, Yale or Cambridge. The results will be correlated with each youngster's school test scores, in hopes of learning how specific genetic variations affect intelligence.

The study, which started in 2009 in Shenzhen, is moving to a new facility in Tai Po. By the end of this month, 115 of the world's fastest sequencers - the HiSeq 2000 - will have relocated to the city. They will be able to sequence the equivalent of 1,000 human genomes a day, and soon surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States to become the world's largest sequencing centre.

The study by BGI, which receives strong financial backing from the Shenzhen and mainland governments, will be the largest-scale examination of its kind. Ethical and privacy concerns have hindered such work in America and Europe.

You can say that again. When a decent and humane sort like Charles Murray gets called a Nazi and a racist for writing about IQ, the likelihood of a Western government sponsoring a massive IQ/genetics research program ain't terribly high.

BTW, I'm no expert, but mightn't it be more productive to compare exceptional children with their less brilliant siblings ? I'm sure Professor Hsu knows what he's doing.

Ever since Nazi Germany misused science to support its murderous racist and anti-Semitic theories, Western societies have been extremely sensitive about linking genetics to IQ.

Yup. Even though we ain't German and we ain't Nazis, no one wants to be branded by association - which is what UK lefties will do the moment the subject's raised. But China doesn't seem to have a great deal of liberal guilt about such things - they're more into 'what works'.

Be interesting (as in the apocryphal Chinese curse) to see what comes out of this. East Asians are already among the cleverest people in the world as measured by IQ. If they could find some way of turbocharging that ... on the other hand the simplest thing would be to drop the one-child policy for clever girls.

(In the UK the cleverest girls have the fewest children - dysgenics rather than eugenics).



UPDATE - a vision of the future ? via Professor Hsu, Mark Lilla at New Republic on the two Westerners influencing bright young Chinese - Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

I had heard that Strauss was popular there, as was, to my surprise, Carl Schmitt, the Weimar anti-liberal (and Nazi - LT) legal theorist... Strauss and Schmitt are at the center of intellectual debate, but they are being read by everyone, whatever their partisan leanings; as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.” And the interest has little to do with nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. It is a response to crisis—a widely shared belief that the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history has been broken and that everything, politically and intellectually, is now up for grabs.

... Liberal thought, the young ones now feel, just doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future. For example, everyone I spoke with, across the political spectrum, agrees that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one—a state that follows the rule of law, is less capricious, can control local corruption, and can perform and carry out long-term planning. Their disagreements all seem to be about how a strong state should exercise its power over the economy and how its newfound power should be exercised in international affairs. Similarly, there was complete consensus about China’s right to defend its national interests, just differences over what those interests are. When my turn to talk about American politics came, and I tried to explain the Tea Party movement’s goal of “getting government off our backs,” I was met with blank stares and ironic smiles.

That makes sense to me. Chinese national interest demands better governance, not less government. The national interest is expressed by Schmitt :

Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction. Classical liberalism treats sovereignty as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves; Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.”

... The Chinese tradition of political thought that begins with Confucius, though in a way statist, is altogether different: Its aim is to build a just social hierarchy where every person has a station and is bound to others by clear obligations, including the ruler, who is there to serve. Central to the functioning of such a state are the “gentlemen” (or “gentry” in some Confucius translations), men of character and conscience trained to serve the ruler by making him a better one—more rational and concerned with the people’s good. Though the Chinese students I met clearly wanted to épater their teachers and me by constantly referring to Schmitt, the truth is that they want a good society, not just a strong one.

And the better governance comes from Strauss's gentlemen :

Taking a cue from Aristotle, Strauss distinguished between philosophers, on the one hand, and practical men who embody civic virtue and are devoted to the public good, on the other: While knowing what constitutes the good society requires philosophy, he taught, bringing it about and maintaining it requires gentlemen. Aristocracies recognize this need, democracies don’t ... But for the young Chinese I met, the distinction between sages and statesmen and the idea of an elite class educated to serve the public good make perfect sense because they are already rooted in the Chinese political tradition. What makes Strauss additionally appealing to them, apart from the grand tapestry of Western political theory he lays before them, is that he makes this ideal philosophically respectable without reference to Confucius or religion or Chinese history. He provides a bridge between their ancient tradition and our own. No one I met talked about a post-Communist China, for obvious reasons. But students did speak openly about the need for a new gentry class to direct China’s affairs, to strengthen the state by making it wiser and more just.

Now this is all fascinating stuff, implying a future China a little like Victorian Britain, with an elite class of gentlemen born (or bred) to rule in the national interest. But the British were always sceptical of ideology, let alone an ideology like Schmitt's, with its theory of 'the enemy' or 'the other', not to mention a love of dictatorship and 'decisive action'. Schmitt considered the Night of the Long Knives to be "the highest form of administrative law" - not a guy you'd want to be up in front of in court.

When I see people like Andy Newman worshipping at the People's Shrine, I do wonder - is he just making his obeisances to whatever rising power isn't British (hedging his bets by also backing Islam), or is he genuinely confusing some idealised Socialist Republic in his skull with the reality of the PRC ? What I see in these young Chinese patriots is a desire for something more like the "ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and devotion to duty" which Glubb Pasha describes in a rising empire.

“Chinese tradition has many good things, but we’ve ditched them,” Wan told me. “I feel there have to be people to carry them on.” She came from a middle-class home, and Tang’s humble roots and old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has a smooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our character lacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseverance you get from conquering hardships. Those virtues, I don’t see them in myself and many people my age.”

Those who came into conflict with Victorian Britannia usually came off worse - she was pretty robust about defending her interests. How robust will a 'Schmitt-powered' Chinese elite be?

How Greenbaum Was My Valley

A fascinating history of the Jews in Wales, from a 1975 edition of the Jewish Chronicle. Interesting for the light it shines not only on Jewish but on Welsh culture as was :

"The brooding hills and green valleys of South Wales are evocative of so many things. To the Jewish traveller they speak of a life's story exceedingly strange and affecting. He sees an alien figure bent low under his outsize pack, walking up hill and down dale for mile after lonely mile. At the mining village tucked away beneath a dark hill, children greet him with: "The packman has come!" He knocks on doors, his only English words, "anything wanting?" (Welsh is a double-sealed book.)

Come Friday, he makes for home and family, Sabbath in synagogue and the Chevra Shass, the talmudic study circle. He is a learned Jew, among the few precious possessions he has brought from in der heim is his shass, his well-fingered volumes of the Talmud, and a desire to 'learn' more. He has brought his determination to keep 'the Law' whatever the difficulties. And so if he was caught on his way by the advent of the Sabbath, he would leave his pack and the small pile of money he had earned on the table of a friendly miner's cottage, and come back for his treasure on Sunday knowing it would all be there untouched."

A little like the story of the Mohammeds of Stornoway, that - their patriarch walked the hills of 50s Lewis with a suitcase. But the story in Wales is of communities growing with the boom years, then decline and in many places disappearance as economic opportunity shrank and (as with the Mohammeds) the younger generation moved away.

Among the other gems are the shortage of marriageable youth in Swansea, Jewish miners, the first Welsh-born Jew (Levi Michael, 1754, in Haverfordwest of all places), the sad decline of the Port Talbot synagogue (derelict in 1975, now built over) the Welsh-speaker who tells the author, only half in jest: "To be a real Welshman, you must be chapel", and the fact (new to me) that Churchill sent troops to Tredegar in 1911 after anti-Jewish riots.

Being a 1975 piece, there is no mention of the most famous Welsh Jew of all, a man who saved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, from burglary, assault and crime of all sorts by his decision, as 1995 Home Secretary, to start locking up criminals- the Blessed Michael Howard.

Quote of the Day

"For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase."

(the anonymous 1841 author of Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World, discussing the women of Ancient Rome - "During upwards of six hundred years, the virtues had been found sufficient to please. They now found it necessary to call in the accomplishments.")


UPDATE - I forgot Glubb Pasha :

"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. "

On Sheridan and Scabs

I don’t understand, so talk me through this one.

a) Tommy Sheridan visits clubs and fesses up to the SSP when the press find out

b) SSP advise him to ‘lay low and say nuthin’

c) TS decides to brazen it out in the libel court

d) SSP comrades know they’ll be called as witnesses, and as I understand they have no choice about turning up. Their only choice is whether to lie and commit perjury or tell the truth. They (mostly) tell the truth.

e) but TS rhetoric wins the day, and he brilliantly persuades the jury. Result!

f) and immediately afterwards he publicly calls the truthful SSP members ’scabs’ and announces that he intends to ‘destroy them’

Now at this point our SSP comrades, like Colin Fox, are socialists in good standing, who gave TS sensible advice that he ignored. TS, hitherto a socialist in good standing, asserts that their unwillingness to risk jail for his family-man reputation renders them ’scabs’ to be ‘destroyed’ by unspecified means.

OK. At this point, who are the good guys and who the bad guys? The people with the correct analysis or the guy who wants to destroy them because they wouldn’t put their testes in a vice for him? Not for socialism, not for a principle, but to perpetuate a false image of a Great Leader?

Now I’m not too sure about going to the police with affidavits and secret tape recordings. But one socialist has insulted and threatened to destroy other socialists - on completely insufficient and self-interested grounds. Don’t they have a right to self-defence - in the last resort, to destroy the man who’s trying to destroy them?

(this piece of course assumes that d) is correct. My whole analysis rests on the assumption that the SSP exec had no choice about testifying in court.

Is this correct ? I don’t know Scots law. Martin ?

If it’s not correct and they were under no obligation to testify, then my analysis falls to bits - because the exec should then, from an SSP perspective, have lain low and said nuthin - leaving TS in his own juice rather than adding their own.)