A technical glitch caused the Oban community fireworks display to be a bit more compressed than the original plan:
H/T to Roger Henry, who quipped “I imagine the fireworks guys realized that it was 30 minutes to closing time.”
November 8, 2011
November 3, 2011
So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?
Jonathan Kay tackles the crank-infested ground of Shakespeare’s works:
‘There are three infallible signs of the crank,” Catholic intellectual Joseph Bottum has written. “The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”
Very true. Take, for instance, Ignatius Donnelly, perhaps the greatest crank in American history. In the late 19th century, Donnelly wrote books such as Ragnarok, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet and that the contours of our Earth were formed by splatterings of extraterrestrial “gravel.” He also believed the secret identity of the Great Bard could be discovered by counting and multiplying all the different words in his plays. In his crank manifesto, The Great Cryptogram, he claimed to have discovered a secret cipher that proved Francis Bacon was the true author.
[. . .]
And then there was Sigmund Freud, one of the small handful of thinkers whose influence on Western culture arguably can be said to stand alongside Shakespeare’s.
For Freud, it all began in 1898, when a Danish literary critic named George Brandes published a book outlining the connections between Shakespeare’s life and literary works. Hamlet, for instance, was said to grow out of Shakespeare’s grief for his own father’s passing in 1601. Freud became fascinated by this theory at a critical point in his life — his own father had died in 1896. And he incorporated the notion into The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud argued that Hamlet “is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex”
Of course, all the back-and-forth among the Marlovians, Baconians, Oxfordians, and Stratfordians misses the point completely: the plays were clearly not written by William Shakespeare, but by a different chap of the same name.
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Is the UKIP Britain’s version of the Reform Party?
Britain’s Conservative Party didn’t suffer quite the electoral humiliation that the Canadian Tories did (dropping from a huge majority to only two seats in parliament), but they did suffer a split. In Canada, the western faction became the Reform Party which eventually took over the “main” party after several elections in the wilderness. The British conservative party didn’t suffer quite so dramatic a death-and-rebirth, but Peter Oborne makes a case for the UK Independence Party as Britain’s equivalent of the Reform Party:
The first manifestation of this split was the creation of the Anti-Federalist League by the distinguished historian Alan Sked in 1991, at just the time that the Maastricht Treaty was signed. The decision to deprive eight Conservative MPs of the whip in the mid-1990s was another significant moment. Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party took the disintegration process one stage further.
Sir James was far more successful than is widely appreciated, and forced the Conservative government to pledge a referendum on future European treaty changes. He also sucked away many Tory activists. When the Referendum Party folded after his death the following year, these activists tended not to return to the Conservatives. Many of them gave their loyalty to Ukip, the protest party led by Nigel Farage which now campaigns for Britain to leave the European Union.
In contrast to the racist BNP, which tends to attract former Labour supporters, Ukip is in reality the Conservative Party in exile. Many of its senior members wear covert coats and trilbies, making them look like off-duty cavalry officers. They are fiercely patriotic and independent.
[. . .]
If a Left-wing party had reached Ukip’s size and consequence, the media would be fascinated. But, because of its old-fashioned and decidedly provincial approach, it has been practically ignored. In the 2004 European elections, the party gained a sensational 16 per cent of the vote. Had it been the Greens or the Communists that had pulled off this feat, the BBC would have gone crazy. Instead it chose not to mention this event, coolly classifying Ukip as “other”.
For the metropolitan elite, the party scarcely exists. This is why last Sunday’s YouGov poll showing that support for Farage’s party had crept up to 7 per cent — just one point fewer than the Liberal Democrats — gained no coverage. But the significance of this is very great. I believe that Ukip is about to take over from the Lib Dems as Britain’s third largest political party.
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November 2, 2011
History pop quiz
Tim Black wants you to identify how long ago a certain communication to the royal family was written:
‘I write to formally request the consent of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to provisions to be included in the . . . Bill.’
So, history fans, in which democracy-forsaken year did a member of the Houses of Parliament open a letter to an heir to the throne with this line? Not sure? Perhaps this sentence will help: ‘Granted that these proposed changes . . . will apply to . . . contracts entered into by or on behalf of the Duchy of Cornwall, we should be very grateful to receive the consent of the Prince of Wales.’ There are plenty of clues there: the cowering, creeping tone; the excessive, almost fearful formality; and, of course, the sheer palpable deference towards the Crown. Surely this particular parliamentarian’s request must originate from some time before parliament began to forcibly assert its interests against those of the Crown during the seventeenth century? Perhaps it was even earlier: 1590 or maybe even 1565.
This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this week.
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October 31, 2011
Brendan O’Neill: Beware of “the poor”
Not the people who are poor, the imaginary construct of the underclass:
I think we should always be very sceptical whenever we hear the phrase ‘the poor’. And we should be super-sceptical whenever we hear the phrase ‘the underclass’.
Because I can guarantee you that every time you hear those phrases, you will discover far more about the person doing the talking than you will about the people being talked about. You will discover far more about the speaker’s own fears and prejudices than you will about the lived experiences or morality of those cash-strapped sections of society.
In no other area of public life does anecdotage trump evidence as fantastically as it does in discussions about ‘the poor’. In no other area of political debate is it so acceptable to marshal rumour and hearsay to your cause as it is in debates about the underclass or the residuum or whatever we’re calling it these days.
[. . .]
Of course, there is such a thing as ‘poor people’ — people who have less money than you. But there isn’t really such a thing as ‘the poor’, meaning a whole swathe of society who allegedly share the same degraded morality and who are all promiscuous and fond of booze and so on. I think the service that ‘the poor’ provide for the political and chattering classes today is as a kind of fodder for moralism, a kind of endless pit of anecdotes and horror stories that are used to motor moralistic campaigns and moralistic commentary.
[. . .]
Time and again, across the political spectrum, from the conservative right to the radical left, people cite ‘the poor’ and their depraved antics as a way of promoting their own prejudices. ‘The poor’ have become a kind of vast political library for politicians and opinion-formers, who go in, borrow an anecdote or a horrible image, and then use it to push their narrow political agendas.
The unreliability of this library, the fact that it is little more than a gallery of imaginary horrors that the chattering classes pilfer from, was brilliantly summed up in a recent Conservative Party report which claimed the following: ‘In the most deprived areas of England, 54 per cent are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18.’ Actually, it’s not 54 per cent but 5.4 per cent. But decimal points don’t matter when your aim is simply to paint a picture of doom designed to make you look morally upstanding in contrast to the immoral poor.
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British constitutional quirk: Prince Charles has a limited veto over some legislation
There are times when I think the British system of government compares poorly to that of Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork. This charming little hangover from medieval times, for instance:
Ministers have been forced to seek permission from Prince Charles to pass at least a dozen government bills, according to a Guardian investigation into a secretive constitutional loophole that gives him the right to veto legislation that might affect his private interests.
Since 2005, ministers from six departments have sought the Prince of Wales’ consent to draft bills on everything from road safety to gambling and the London Olympics, in an arrangement described by constitutional lawyers as a royal “nuclear deterrent” over public policy. Unlike royal assent to bills, which is exercised by the Queen as a matter of constitutional law, the prince’s power applies when a new bill might affect his own interests, in particular the Duchy of Cornwall, a private £700m property empire that last year provided him with an £18m income.
Neither the government nor Clarence House will reveal what, if any, alterations to legislation Charles has requested, or exactly why he was asked to grant consent to such a wide range of laws.
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October 30, 2011
“That will be the Age of Great Confusion”
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: the American habit of date notation is wrong, wrong, wrong:
An American, a Brit, and a Canadian schedule a business meeting for 02/04/12.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but here is how it plays out: The American plans for February 4, 2012. The Brit circles April 2, 2012 in his calendar. And the Canadian? Depends on who you ask.
Written in myriad sequences between slashes or dashes, dates cause what one mathematician calls “maximum confusion.” They cause us to miss meetings and unwittingly eat sour yogurt. They are so prone to mix-ups, in fact, that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) made a declaration on the subject in 1988.
[. . .]
‘ISO 8601: Data Elements and Interchange Formats’ espouses year/month/day, abiding by the so-called big endian format, which orders the date from the largest element to the smallest (YYYY/MM/DD). Mr. Kramp chose this format for his bill. The ISO directive, embraced by the UN in its international trade protocols and by the European Union (although not by the individual countries), runs 33 pages.
[. . .]
And Canada, as Canadians will attest, is one of the worst culprits. Even the Canadian Payments Association, which regulates personal and business cheques, says it accepts day/month/year, month/day/year, and year/month/day, although it requires cheque producers to print guidance letters to clarify the sequencing.
[. . .]
Some measure of reprieve is around the corner: The year 2013 marks the end of what American mathematician Jim Blowers calls the “Age of Maximum Confusion.”
“After the year 2012, the year can no longer be confused with the month,” he noted on his blog. “But it can be confused with the day. That will be the Age of Great Confusion. For example, 07/11/13 could be 2007 November 13 or 2013 November 7, but not 2007 13-ember the 11th.”
This will go on, he wrote, until 2031, when the day cannot be confused with the month, although the month can still be confused with the day.
It makes sense to use big endian notation (biggest-to-smallest) or even little endian (smallest-to-biggest) but it makes no sense at all to mix up the sequence!
October 28, 2011
Royal succession rule change
Dedicated republicans, feel free to skip this item. Thanks to an agreement among the heads of government meeting at the Commonwealth meeting in Australia, the line of succession to the throne will now treat women equally:
Sons and daughters of any future UK monarch will have equal right to the throne, after Commonwealth leaders agreed to change succession laws.
The leaders of the 16 Commonwealth countries where the Queen is head of state unanimously approved the changes at a summit in Perth, Australia.
It means a first-born daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would take precedence over younger brothers.
The ban on the monarch being married to a Roman Catholic was also lifted.
Under the old succession laws, dating back more than 300 years, the heir to the throne is the first-born son of the monarch. Only when there are no sons, as in the case of the Queen’s father George VI, does the crown pass to the eldest daughter.
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October 26, 2011
When all the party leaders agree, it’s almost certainly a bad idea
Mick Hume on the consistent refusal of British politicians to allow the electorate any choice on EU involvement:
When all of Britain’s elitist, unrepresentative and interchangeable political leaders unite behind an issue in the name of ‘the national interest’, it is a sure sign that something is amiss. Exhibit A: the united front presented by Tory prime minister David Cameron, his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg and opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband against the demand for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. When this unappealing triumvirate is being cheered on by many in the high-minded media, alarm bells should really be ringing.
The official line from the Lib-Con government and the Labour opposition this week, as party leaders sought to marshal their MPs to vote against the parliamentary motion calling for an EU referendum, was that to have a national debate about the UK’s membership of the EU just now would not be in the national interest; it would be ‘a distraction’ from coping with Europe’s desperate economic and financial problems. As Cameron put in on the day of the vote, ‘it’s the wrong time to have this debate’ because ‘we’re in the middle of dealing with a crisis in the Eurozone’. A referendum now would be ‘rash’.
Turn that front-bench consensus on its head. It is precisely because of the parlous state of the Euro economy, and the paucity of solutions being offered by our rulers, that now is exactly the right time to have a major public debate on the future of the UK and Europe. The real ‘distraction’ that the Euro-elites fear today is democracy.
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October 25, 2011
Gangs not to blame for London’s August riots
Brendan O’Neill debunks the widespread story that the August riots were either gang-led or pre-planned by gangsters:
In the aftermath of the riots, police, politicians and penmen all arrived at the same conclusion: gangs have taken over parts of England. Organised cliques of mask-wearing, territory-protecting youth, who divide themselves into ‘elders’, ‘soldiers’ and ‘youngers’, are turning bits of London and other English cities into something akin to south-central LA. These gangs orchestrated the violence, we’re told, as a way of staking their claim over local patches of land and warning off the ‘Feds’ (police). It is now apparently time, says David Cameron, for a war against ‘gang culture’.
There’s only one problem with these claims: they are complete and utter bunkum. No doubt gangs exist in some parts of urban England, and no doubt some of them are criminal. But there is no ‘gang culture’ and gangs were not responsible for the recent rioting in London and elsewhere. ‘Gang culture’ is almost entirely the imaginary creation of a political elite which prefers to fantasise that urban implosion is a product of gang conspiracies, rather than face up to the harsh reality that the riots were triggered by the twin crises of community solidarity and state authority.
[. . .]
Perusing the press, it was hard to tell if you were reading genuine reports about English cities or drafts for a movie about the life and times of 50 Cent. ‘Inside the deadly world of gangs’, screamed newspaper headlines, inviting readers to peer at these violent groups where new recruits as young as nine are referred to as ‘Tinies’ or ‘Babies’, while teenage members are known as ‘Soldiers’ and the overlords have the title ‘General’. Apparently there are 171 such gangs in London alone. Journalists write about being ‘embedded’ with the police, as if they’re in Iraq rather than England, and observing an ‘inner-city underworld’. This underworld exploded into the overworld two weeks ago, we’re told, when these military-style gangs ‘orchestrated’ looting through social media or by ‘laying on minibuses to ferry yobs into and around towns’.
[. . .]
Often, the hotheaded claims about Britain being overrun with hundreds of gangs simply do not stand up to scrutiny. So the Metropolitan Police claims there are 171 gangs in London, while the Home Office says there are 356 gang members in London. As one study pointed out, this would mean ‘around two people per gang’
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October 19, 2011
Four year sentence for . . . posting an idiotic suggestion to Facebook
Patrick Hayes attempts to point out that the sentence imposed on Facebook idiot Jordan Blackshaw is both disproportional and a clear and present danger to free speech rights in Britain:
Did you know that all it took for people to trash their own neighbourhoods this summer, such was the ‘collective insanity’ then gripping the UK, was for someone to suggest they do so on Facebook? A few words saying something like ‘let’s have a riot’ and, hey presto, off people went to have a riot.
This didn’t happen, of course. But it is a view of last August’s riots that seems to provide the rationale behind the sentencing of 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw. This was the man, lest we forget, who on 9 August set up a Facebook ‘event’ entitled ‘Smash Down in Northwich town’. This hardly inspiring suggestion involved would-be rioters meeting up for said ‘smash down’ outside a local McDonald’s.
In explaining why Blackshaw was to receive a four-year jail sentence for doing nothing more than publishing words online, the judge claimed that ‘this happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation’. Blackshaw’s conduct, he continued, ‘was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood’. Yesterday, Blackshaw’s appeal against the harsh sentencing, alongside that of another ‘Facebook rioter’, was rejected by the Crown Court.
So, how many people responded to Blackshaw’s online suggestion during this period of ‘collective insanity’? The answer is one: Blackshaw himself. (He was immediately arrested). In fact, only nine of his 147 Facebook friends even responded online. Yet the reason for this collective no-show, at least as far as the judge was concerned, was ‘the prompt and efficient actions of police’ who eventually took Blackshaw’s Facebook page offline.
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October 18, 2011
Politicians should stop lecturing us about our “obesity epidemic”
Rob Lyons in the Yorkshire Post:
I would argue that the obesity panic is greatly exaggerated, that the “cure” for it doesn’t work, and that it usually gets promoted by politicians who have no better way to justify their existence.
For starters, obesity rates have stopped rising for adults, and are actually falling for children. The latest figures from the Health Survey for England, the best source of information we have, show that in 2009, 22.1 per cent of men were obese — compared to 24.1 per cent in 2008; for women, the new figure was 23.9 per cent, as against 24.9 per cent in 2008.
In 2004, 19.4 per cent of boys aged two to 15 were regarded as obese; in 2009, that figure was down to 16.1 per cent. The equivalent figures for girls were 18.5 per cent (2004) and 15.3 per cent (2009).
Even then, what the medical profession regards as obesity and what we commonly recognise as obesity are two different things. About one in four adults is classed as obese.
Now, think about your workmates and friends. Would you really regard a quarter of them as obese? I’ll bet few of them match up to the typical picture that accompanies every story about obesity: a morbidly obese person, whose clothes are straining to hold in their tummies. Such very overweight people only make up about two per cent of the population.
In truth, distinctions between normal weight, overweight and obesity are pretty arbitrary lines, based on something called body mass index (BMI) — that’s your weight in kilos divided the square of your height in metres. BMI is not a particularly good predictor of health, except at the extremes. Those who are mildly obese have much the same life expectancy and health outcomes as those who are normal weight. Being a little underweight is almost certainly worse for you than being mildly obese.
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October 17, 2011
It was “a moment of mass credulity on the part of the nation’s media”
Cory Doctorow points out that no “adult content” filter is a replacement for parental guidance and supervision:
Last week’s announcement of a national scheme to “block adult content at the point of subscription” (as the BBC’s website had it) was a moment of mass credulity on the part of the nation’s media, and an example of how complex technical questions and hot-button save-the-children political pandering are a marriage made in hell when it comes to critical analysis in the press.
Under No 10’s proposal, the UK’s major ISPs — BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin — will invite new subscribers to opt in or out of an “adult content filter.” But for all the splashy reporting on this that dominated the news cycle, no one seemed to be asking exactly what “adult content” is, and how the filters’ operators will be able to find and block it.
Adult content covers a lot of ground. While the media of the day kept mentioning pornography in this context, existing “adult” filters often block gambling sites and dating sites (both subjects that are generally considered “adult” but aren’t anything like pornography), while others block information about reproductive health and counselling services aimed at GBLT teens (gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender).
[. . .]
The web is vast, and adult content is a term that is so broad as to be meaningless. Even if we could all agree on what adult content was, there simply aren’t enough bluenoses and pecksniffs to examine and correctly classify even a large fraction of the web, let alone all of it (despite the Radio 4 newsreader’s repeated assertion that the new filter would “block all adult content”.)
What that means is that parents who opt their families into the scheme are in for a nasty shock: first, when their kids (inevitably) discover the vast quantities of actual, no-fooling pornography that the filter misses; and second, when they themselves discover that their internet is now substantially broken, with equally vast swathes of legitimate material blocked.
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October 13, 2011
BBC’s Top Gear GPS deal violates BBC’s own rules
Due to editorial rules, a Top Gear-branded GPS using Jeremy Clarkson’s voice will be withdrawn:
The BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, will now will now donate all proceeds from the sales to Children In Need to bypass rules that prevent the show’s presenters endorsing motoring products.
The Top Gear satnav features Clarkson giving instructions in typically sardonic style — amusing for Top Gear fans, no doubt, but it may begin to grate on the 100th journey.
“Keep left — if you’re not sure which side left is you really shouldn’t be on the road,” he tells drivers.
“After 700 yards, assuming this car can make it that far, you have reached your destination, with the aid of 32 satellites and me — well done.”
The corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, said no more of the Top Gear satnavs, made by TomTom, would be produced.
A plan to allow existing TomTom owners to download Clarkson’s voice to update their models has now been dropped.
Given how many people have complained about the default voices provided with their GPS units, I can see why adding Jeremy Clarkson’s dulcet tones to the mix could hardly have made the situation any worse.
