Quotulatiousness

July 1, 2011

Guardian contributer learns not to confuse “sociopathy” with “social network”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

Kia Abdullah will think twice before letting her inner sociopath out on Twitter in future:

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three young British men were killed in a bus crash in Thailand, just days after starting their gap year travels. A deeply tragic case — and one that will have left many British parents sick with worry. Annually about 100,000 young Brits take gap years.

But here’s a Twitter reaction from Kia Abdullah, a Guardian contributor:

Even if you think this sort of thing, sending it out immediately over Facebook or Twitter is just asking for a landslide of public abuse to land on your head. People who work in media have the least excuse for this kind of absent-minded faux pas, as they often pounce on celebrity or politician errors of exactly this sort.

Duleep Allirajah: “The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever”

Filed under: Britain, Soccer — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:32

He’s quite right: this has to be the nadir of international sporting debates:

Where do you stand on the controversial issue of a Great Britain football team? Disgusted that the British Olympic Association is threatening the independence and proud traditions of the home football nations? Angered that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish associations are trying to thwart the Olympic dreams of their young players? Or, like me, do you want to be woken up when The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever is over?

If you’re wondering why the proposal for a unified British football team has caused such controversy, let me explain. There has never been a single UK football association. Instead, all four countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have their own football associations. Each country is recognised by FIFA as a separate entity even though they are not sovereign nations. It’s one of the residual privileges enjoyed by the nation that invented the game. Although the Brits have minimal influence within FIFA, as the 2018 World Cup bid and the farcical presidential election demonstrated, all four UK nations are represented on the eight-member International Football Association Board (IFAB), which is the sport’s law-making body. The home nations also retain the right to appoint a FIFA vice-president. Although the English FA is keen on fielding a British team in the 2012 Games, the other national associations fear that their independence and FIFA privileges will be jeopardised as a result.

The debate took a farcical twist this week when the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that an ‘historic agreement’ had been reached with all the home nations to field a Great Britain team at the Olympics. However, no sooner had the BOA made its announcement than the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland football associations angrily denied that any agreement had been reached. Oops!

June 29, 2011

Canada’s Cormorant fleet to stay airborne thanks to former “Marine One” helicopters

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

The Cormorant is not quite the success story we hoped for when we bought the helicopters for our search and rescue operations. Part of the problem is that spare parts for the choppers are in very short supply. An unexpected source of spare parts just happened to come our way recently:

The helicopters sold to Canada are the so-called US101 version of the EH101 aircraft developed during the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and Italy by companies which are now grouped as AgustaWestland. The UK forces, after massive delays and cost overruns, eventually received two versions, both known as “Merlin” — a naval submarine-hunting variant and a cargo or troop-carrying one for the RAF. Both types finally reached frontline useability around 2004-2005, but their availability rates have been poor: perhaps due to the fact that the Merlin didn’t sell well worldwide and thus parts were at a premium.

However the Merlin did sell to the Bush administration, which was seeking to replace its ageing VH-3 Sea King presidential helicopters operated by the US Marines (the president’s chopper becomes “Marine One” when he is aboard, just as his airforce-operated plane becomes “Air Force One”). But the US101 project, managed by Lockheed on behalf of AgustaWestland, soon became mired in cost and time overruns every bit as bad as those which had hit the Royal Navy’s HM1.

The plan might well have been doomed from the outset, with requirements calling for 14 VIP seats, hardening against electromagnetic pulse, an executive washroom and communications equivalent to “a flying Oval Office” — a pretty big ask for an aircraft which can only lift four tonnes in its RAF cargo-carrying incarnation.

The US101 problems became bad enough that each new Marine One copter was projected to cost as much as an Air Force One jumbo jet, and the costs became an issue in the presidential election — with both Mr Obama and his opponent John McCain vying to issue the strongest condemnation of the aircraft. Obama in particular described it as “procurement amok”, and unsurprisingly it was axed as soon as he took office.

Now the Canadians, who also operate the EH101 under the name “Cormorant”, have snapped up the former presidential fleet of nine aircraft for $164m.

June 28, 2011

The Daily Mail tries to drum up moral outrage (again)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Patrick Hayes views with disdain the latest Freedom of Information trolling exercise performed by the Daily Mail in an attempt to spice up their “news” coverage:

Is Britain in the grip of a hidden crimewave? Are thousands of crimes being committed each year by feral youths, which the police know about but are powerless to prevent? Is Britain being stalked by troublemaking toddlers, committing vandalism with no comeuppance for their ‘crimes’ because of their tender age?

In a word, no. Though you’d never know that by reading yesterday’s hysterical news reports. ‘As many as 3,000 criminals, including rapists, robbers and burglars, escaped punishment last year because they were too young to be prosecuted’, declared the Daily Mail. The paper published the results of a pretty shameless trawling exercise, having placed Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to police forces around Britain about underage crime. It managed to dredge up various accounts of childish ‘criminal’ activity, including a ‘rape’ in Levenmouth committed by two eight-year-old boys, a ‘kidnapping’ in Rochdale also carried out by an eight-year-old, and a ‘spate of vandalism’ conducted by a three-year-old boy and four-year-old girl.

The Mail received responses to its FOI request from 30 out of 52 police forces, discovering that ‘1,605 crimes were blamed on someone aged under 10 in the last financial year’. Guestimating how many crimes might have been committed by kids in those parts of Britain policed by the 22 forces that did not respond to its requests, it came up with a total of 3,000 offences. And rather than caution its readers that these figures only cover accusations of a crime, rather than guilt having been proven, the Mail implies its findings could be the tip of the iceberg: ‘Many police forces do not even record crimes where they believe youngsters under 10 have been responsible.’

June 24, 2011

Newspapers still trying to adapt to a vastly changed world

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

In a blog post at the Guardian, Roy Greenslade puts the financial changes into a bit of perspective:

So prepare — if you’re of a certain age — for a warm nostalgic bath. In 1950, with TV sets in only 9% of homes, a British street of 100 houses could be relied on to buy 140 newspapers a day and 220 on Sunday.

In 2010, with each of those houses containing an average of 2.6 TVs, the same street bought just 40 papers a day, Monday to Sunday.

Some advertising revenues fled to TV as it developed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but not in such great numbers as to ruin newspapers, which could still rely on huge circulation sales income.

In 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month, those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000 respectively.

It was one of the things that struck me on my first trip back to England in 1979 — although not as badly as the bone-chilling damp — was the profusion of newspapers available. I was used to Toronto, where you could get the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the horrible little upstart pleb rag, the Toronto Sun. Seeing all the different papers was quite an eye-opener.

No wonder why he chose to title the post “Those were the days, my friends, we’d thought they’d never end…”

June 19, 2011

“It is clear they are running out of options”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Greece — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:29

It looks as though the British banks are starting to get very nervous about Eurozone bank defaults:

Senior sources have revealed that leading banks, including Barclays and Standard Chartered, have radically reduced the amount of unsecured lending they are prepared to make available to eurozone banks, raising the prospect of a new credit crunch for the European banking system.

Standard Chartered is understood to have withdrawn tens of billions of pounds from the eurozone inter-bank lending market in recent months and cut its overall exposure by two-thirds in the past few weeks as it has become increasingly worried about the finances of other European banks.

Barclays has also cut its exposure in recent months as senior managers have become increasingly concerned about developments among banks with large exposures to the troubled European countries Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Portugal.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

June 17, 2011

Argentina: British PM “stupid” about the Falkland Islands

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Remember when the Royal Navy got gutted, reducing their ability to project force outside European waters? It appears that Argentina has drawn the obvious conclusion that the Falkland Islands are now back in play:

The Argentinian president has criticised David Cameron for insisting the Falkland Islands should remain a British territory.

Cristina Kirchner described the prime minister as “arrogant” and said his comments were an “expression of mediocrity and almost of stupidity”.

Cameron had been prompted by Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell during prime minister’s questions to remind Barack Obama that the British government would not accept any kind of negotiations over the south Atlantic islands, over which Argentina and Britain fought a 10-week war in 1982.

Cameron told the Commons: “I would say this: as long as the Falkland Islands want to be sovereign British territory, they should remain sovereign British territory — full stop, end of story.”

In her criticism of his comments, Kirchner said Britain “continues to be a crude colonial power in decline”.

Well, Mr. Cameron, you’ve given Argentina a ten-year window of opportunity here between your (in my opinion stupid) scrapping your last carriers and getting rid of their Harrier aircraft and the time that your next carrier comes into service. By the time you have HMS Queen Elizabeth in commission and with a full complement of aircraft, the Falkland Islands will likely be under Argentinian control.

If the government of Ronald Reagan had to be pushed into supporting Britain in 1982, there’s absolutely no chance that Barack Obama will lift a finger to help Britain in 2012 — in fact, it’s much more likely that Obama will decide that Argentina is more deserving of American help anyway.

June 14, 2011

Random links

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

A few links which don’t lend themselves to becoming full blog posts:

June 13, 2011

AC Grayling’s “embryo London humanities university … has induced apoplexy in the old left”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Simon Jenkins marvels at the over-the-top response to the announcement of a new private university in London:

This has been a purple week for red rage. The hirsute philosopher, AC Grayling, may call himself a “pinko” but his embryo London humanities university in Bedford Square has induced apoplexy in the old left. He and 13 high-octane scholars are having their lectures “targeted”. The Guardian is in ideological meltdown. Foyles has been hit by a smoke bomb. The Kropotkin of our age, Terry Eagleton, claims to be fit to vomit. Bloomsbury has not been so excited since semen was spotted on Vanessa Bell’s dress.

Britain’s professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists’ lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.

What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.

British carbon tax may spark de-industrialization

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

The current British government’s global warming/climate change programs, combined with the European Union’s policies, may have triggered a race to the exits by British industry:

Now, the CBI and Britain’s leading chemical firms have warned that the proposed “carbon floor” tax (also unique in the world) will make our industry so uncompetitive that, unless the policy is changed, it will lead inevitably to mass plant closures and job losses. Similarly, the European Metals Association warned last week that the EU’s various “anti-carbon” policies are becoming so costly that they are already forcing steel, aluminium and other producers in their energy-intensive industry to relocate outside Europe, losing hundreds of thousands more jobs.

At one end of the scale, then, whole industries are protesting that the soaring costs of “climate change” measures will amount, in effect, to a colossal economic suicide note. At the other, we begin to see how the obsession with “climate change” will push our own household energy bills through the roof, driving millions more people into “fuel poverty”. Apart from anything else, by 2020 our Government expects us to pay £100 billion for a further 10,000 useless, subsidised windmills, plus £40 billion to connect them to the National Grid. These costs alone would almost double our present electricity bills.

Furthermore, we are all unwittingly having to pay billions for the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Reduction scheme, higher airline taxes, higher vehicle duties, highly paid “low-carbon officers” in our council offices, and heaven knows what else besides. With the new carbon floor tax soon due to raise our energy bills by further billions, we can see why the Government’s own forecast — that the Climate Change Act will cost us up to £18 billion annually until 2050 — might well be an underestimate.

Most terrifying of all, however, is the extent to which our politicians remain firmly locked in their little green bubble, oblivious to the practical implications of the measures they have set in train. As for what purpose it all serves, we may note last week’s report that China, already the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, is now also the world’s largest energy user. Each year it increases the world’s CO2 emissions by more than the total that Britain emits annually.

June 11, 2011

PTerry plans his own end, in his own time

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Short of a miracle cure for Alzheimer’s, Terry Pratchett outlines how he plans to commit suicide:

Terry Pratchett, a 62-year-old British writer of comic fantasy novels who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, says he intends to commit suicide, sitting in a lawn chair outside his country home, listening to the classical church music of Thomas Tallis on his iPod, with a glass of brandy in one hand and a potion of life-ending pills in the other.

“Perhaps, a second brandy, if there is time,” the euthanasia and assisted-suicide advocate quips.

“And since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ ”

On Monday, Mr. Pratchett will play host to a real-life suicide when BBC2 television airs a controversial documentary in which he helps a 71-year-old man with motor neurone disease kill himself in Switzerland.

June 10, 2011

Royal Navy still regrets decision to retire their aircraft carriers

Filed under: Africa, Britain — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

With a significant portion of the Royal Navy deployed in the Mediterranean, the hasty decision to take HMS Ark Royal out of service looks even dumber now:

Just at the very moment that the decisions of the October 2010 “Strategic Defence Review” start to bite, the Royal Navy is being asked by government to do more than ever. With the crisis in Libya and the Middle East showing no signs of ending, RN warships are spread thin across the globe. A quick snapshot of the fleet shows the pace of operations. With such a tiny fleet, our naval ports are almost empty and there are few vessels able to provide reliefs should the Libya crisis continue or escalate.

RN ships involved in Operation Ellamy off Libya include HMS Ocean, HMS Albion, HMS Sutherland, HMS Liverpool, HMS Brocklesby and HMS Bangor and HMS Triumph. The RFA is playing an increasing role with RFA Fort Rosalie, RFA Wave Knight supporting them. RFA Argus, RFA Fort Victoria and RFA Cardigan Bay are ready off Yemen should UK citizens need to be evacuated. RN patrols in the Arabian Gulf continue (as they have since 1980) with HMS St Albans sailing this week to relieve HMS Iron Duke in addition to the 4 permanently deployed RN minehunters in the Gulf. HMS Richmond is involved in exercises in the Far East and HMS Edinburgh has sailed to relieve HMS York in the South Atlantic along with HMS Scott. RFA Wave Knight is in the Caribbean ready to provide relief in case of hurricanes.

That fleet is spread very thin indeed. If something else happens, the Royal Navy probably can’t provide any significant forces to address it: there aren’t any more ships to send.

June 8, 2011

“RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane”

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

Lewis Page talks about claims from a Pakistani Air Force fighter pilot that their F-16s had “shot down” Royal Air Force Typhoons in three separate air training exercises in Turkey.

The RAF Typhoon, formerly known as the Eurofighter, should nonetheless have been vastly superior in air-to-air combat whether BVR or close in within visual range (WVR). The cripplingly expensive, long-delayed Eurofighter was specifically designed to address the defects of its predecessor the Tornado F3 — famously almost useless in close-in, dogfighting-style air combat. The Typhoon was meant to see off such deadly in-close threats as Soviet “Fulcrums” and “Flankers” using short-range missiles fired using helmet-mounted sight systems: such planes were thought well able to beat not just Tornados but F-16s in close fighting, and this expectation was borne out after the Cold War when the Luftwaffe inherited some from the East German air force and tried them out in exercises.

Thus it is that huge emphasis was placed on manoeuvring capability and dogfighting in the design of the Eurofighter. The expensive Euro-jet was initially designed, in fact, as a pure fighter with no ground attack options at all — bomber capability has had to be retrofitted subsequently at still more expense. Despite lacking various modern technologies such as Stealth and thrust-vectoring the resulting Typhoon is generally touted as being one of the best air-to-air combat planes in the world right now. Certainly it is meant to be good in close fighting: it is armed with the Advanced Short Range Air to Air Missile (ASRAAM) which as its name suggests is intended for the close WVR fight.

Perhaps the account above is simply a lie, or anyway a bit of a fighter pilot tall story. But the pilot quoted will be easily identifiable inside his community if not to the outside world, and he could expect a lot of flak for telling a lie on such a matter in public. It seems likelier that the story is the truth as he perceived it: that the RAF’s new superfighter was thrashed in the very type of combat it is supposed to be best at by a 1970s-era plane, albeit much modernised.

June 7, 2011

Intolerance of educational experimentation

Filed under: Britain, Education, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Brendan O’Neill surveys the range of responses to the proposed establishment of a new private for-profit university in London:

It is ‘odious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘parasitic’, ‘hypocritical’, a ‘travesty’, a ‘money-grubbing’ scheme, and ‘it would be better all-round if its doors never opened’. Wow. What is it? A whorehouse? A Satanic church? A junk-food chain that specialises in feeding fat straight into children’s veins via a drip? In fact it’s a proposed new London-based university, called the New College of the Humanities, which says it will teach students the best of literature, culture and history for a fee of £18,000 a year. And yet judging from the unhinged coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had proposed opening a Ratko Mladic fanclub in Islington.

The response to Professor AC Grayling’s educational experiment, for which he has recruited other ‘star’ professors such as Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson, has been extraordinarily intolerant. No sooner had the press release about the new university been emailed than Grayling and Co. were being accused of selling out working-class students and the ideal of ‘education for all’ by opening an institution that only the wealthy (and those lucky enough to secure a scholarship) will be able to afford. As one journalist summarised, the initiative has met with ‘universal scorn from commentators in the national press’. Journalists have described the university as a ‘disgrace’, ‘nauseous’ and ‘disgustingly elitist’. The Twittersphere, always keen to ape the pronouncements of its heroes on the op-ed pages, heaped 140-character fury upon Grayling’s vain/pathetic/evil/doomed initiative.

Not to be outdone, members of the University of London Union and other radical student groups called an ‘emergency meeting’ last night. Not an emergency meeting to discuss the corrosion of liberty and free speech in the West or the future of the Arab uprisings — as radical students might have done in the past — but an emergency meeting to discuss how to crush this new uni. ULU’s vice president called for it to be blacklisted, insisting that the University of London refuse to recognise or work with this ‘repugnant’ institution. There was a serious debate about how to shut it down before it had even opened. One left-wing group said we must ‘stop Grayling’s sham university’ because it’s the ‘thin end of the wedge [of privatisation]’. Without so much as a whiff of self-awareness or irony, it went on to describe New College as ‘an attack on free education’. Yes, that’s right — this educational institution must be smashed in order to defend ‘free education’. Perhaps we should also burn its books in the name of defending book-reading.

Of course, if the quality of teaching at the New College of the Humanities is not up to an acceptable standard, it will fail and the university will close. That does not appear to be any part of the motivation for all the screaming and wailing. It rather implies that they’re actually afraid it will succeed, which might start raising questions about the existing university system.

June 6, 2011

Colour footage of D-Day, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:25

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

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