Sticks and stones

A few weeks ago, I happened to glance at the Motoring section of the Saturday Telegraph. I can't remember why, because I normally just chuck it into the recycling with Travel, Gardening, Vienna—Gateway to the East and such like. But anyway, I remember thinking it odd that noted left-wing BBC-style comedian Alexi Sayle was writing a column about motoring.

I called the president of Malawi a name he certainly wouldn’t hear at the Court of St James’s as he shot across my path.

[From Alexei Sayle: what your car says about you - Telegraph]

Well, sticks and stones, as they say. But hold on. Later I read that

The government of Malawi has officially confirmed the death of the country’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika. Government officials said Mutharika suffered a heart attack on April 5

[From Banda Sworn In as Malawi's President | News | English]

Coincidence? You be the judge. Personally, I found Alexi Sayle's swearing on his first album to be wonderful and expressive and listened to it many times, but I'd never realised how deadly his vernacular could be.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Fruit and cakes

Another bonkers New Labour doomed experiment in social control hits the buffers. I should explain to foreign readers that the British welfare state has been optimised to ensure that middle-class people face severe penalties should they decide to reproduce, part of a post-war Marxist drive to eradicate the bourgoisie, and find themselves taxed to penury. Meanwhile, the people least able to support and nurture the next generation are encourage to reproduce without limit. Anyway, hilariously, under the Brown junta, is was decided to give 600,000 women on benefit shopping vouchers for £322 per year while they are pregnant or have babies. Now, the results of this mental programme were entirely predictable to anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with the British underclass (eg, people like me who have to live near them, but not Cherie Blair or Harriet Harman). And guess what?

Now a Government survey of more than 2,000 retailers, health professionals and recipients has found that more than one in five knew of occasions when shops had swapped the tokens for products outside the scheme. Critics said the findings showed that the nanny state had encouraged “shameless behaviour” by those keen to exploit the system. As well as trading vouchers for alcohol and cigarettes, supermarkets and small convenience stores had allowed them to be used to pay for nappies, baby products, general groceries, bread, eggs and meat, the report found.

[From New mothers swap fruit vouchers for booze and cigarettes - Telegraph]

Who would have thought?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Hacked off

There was more on TV about the News of the World phone "hacking" scandal today. I've sort of lost interest in it, so I can't say I've been following every twist and turn. I assumed it was a battle in the BBC/Guardian vs. New International war, so I was unclear as to what was at the root of it (which, I think, was something to do with slebs being too thick to change the default passcode on their voicemail services). Anyway, I saw this thing about it on the news, and once again the newsreader used the example of Sienna Miller. They refer to her as an actress, but I've no idea who she is, and can't be bothered to go and look her up on IMDB. I didn't recognise her from any films, as far as I could tell. So why is she the "poster child" of the scandal? I assume she already has more money than I will ever have in my entire life and that she will never have to work again, so it's not like I'm going to feel sorry for her, and I'm pretty sure her voicemail messages weren't at the wikileaks level, so no-one cared about those either.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Local journalism

The local newspaper reports on the visit of some children from the Ukraine as part of a programme that goes back to the famous Chernobyl incident. The newspaper reports that "thousands" of children in the area develop bone cancer, leukemia and thyroid cancer every year. So I thought to myself "that sounds terrible, why isn't more being done to help these people", after all, if thousands of children are developing these terrible cancers a quarter of a century after the event, that should be on the front page, not BP and a bit of an oil leak. Nevertheless, I also had a terrible suspicion that the figure simply can't be true. Thousands? So I thought I'd try and find some figures. I went off to the UN and began to rummage around.

By 2002 [16 years after the disaster], more than 4,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group, and it is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers is attributable to radioiodine intake.

[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

That's far from "thousands" every year, but still terrible.

In a letter published yesterday in Nature, a British science journal, Dr. Vasily S. Kazakov of the Belarus Ministry of Health in Minsk and his colleagues say that the thyroid cancer rates in the regions most heavily irradiated began to soar in 1990. In Gomel, the most contaminated region studied, there used to be just one or two cases of thyroid children a year. But Kazakov and his colleagues found that there were 38 cases in 1991. In six regions of Belarus and the city of Minsk, the investigators found 131 cases of thyroid cancer in young children, some of whom were still in the womb when the Chernobyl accident occurred.

[From 9/92 "Nature" magazine: Thyroid Cancer 7.5 yrs after Chernobyl soaring]

So in the most heavily contaminated area, there were an additional hundred cases of thyroid cancer (for comparison, about 2,000 people per annum get thyroid cancer in the UK) in the years immediately after the event. What about the other cancers mentioned. The British Journal of Cancer (1996) 73, 1006-1012, reports on leukemia.

There was a slight increase in the incidence of childhood leukaemia in Europe during this period,but the overall geographical pattern of change bears no relation to estimated exposure to radiation resulting from the accident. We conclude that at this stage of follow-up any changes in incidence consequent upon the Chernobyl accident remain undetectable against the usual background rates. Our results are consistent with current estimates of the leukaemogenic risk of radiation exposure, which, outside the immediate vicinity of the accident, was small.

What do the UN say? Do they agree? Well, yes they do.

there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers or leukaemia due to radiation in the most affected populations. Neither is there any proof of other non-malignant disorders that are related to ionizing radiation.

[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

So with the exception of thyroid cancer in people who were babies and lived closed to the event, no-one appears to be getting cancer because of Chernobyl. Not what I was expecting to find. By far the most interesting result of my trawl around, though, was this:

There were widespread psychological reactions to the accident, which were due to fear of the radiation, not to the actual radiation doses.

There is a tendency to attribute increases in the rates of all cancers over time to the Chernobyl accident, but it should be noted that increases were also observed before the accident in the affected areas. Moreover, a general increase in mortality has been reported in recent years in most areas of the former Soviet Union, and this must be taken into account when interpreting the results of Chernobyl-related studies.

[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

Those kids still deserve our help, but it's important to have the proper perspective. Generally speaking, I think the UN's assessment holds true for nuclear power in the UK as much as in Russia. The problem is the fear of nuclear power, not nuclear power itself (especially since as far as I am aware, all research seems to show that our bodies are far more tolerant of low-level ionising radiation than we thought back it the early days).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Headcaselines

Looking at today's paper reminded me of last month when I was in the office on April Fool's Day being teased by my fellow workers because I couldn't figure out which of the news stories in the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian were the traditional April 1st spoof stories and which were real. At the time this was most amusing, but since then I've begun to worry: isn't there something rather unsettling about living in a country where you can no longer distinguish between reality and clumsy satire? In the news over the last few days there have been stories of a female soldier who has won a payout for sexual discrimination from the Army because she couldn't go on parade because she couldn't sort out child care for her daughter, a major high street store selling padded bras for 7 year-old girls, a complaint that wildlife film makers such as David Attenborough don't pay attention to animals right to privacy and school that has suspended a teacher for saying "blackboard" instead of the politically-correct "chalkboard". OK, so I made one of them up, but you'll never guess which one. Does that disturb you as much as it disturbs me?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

We are all Icelanders now

Well, I've go to say I'm with Iceland on this one. The plucky Norse are going to have a referendum over whether to force their citizens to pay billions to the British and Dutch governments to compensate for failed banks.

Half of me wants to congratulate plucky little Iceland for its decision not to sign into law a bill to repay more than $5bn lost by savers in Britain and the Netherlands when the island’s banks collapsed. I’m an admirer of those who give the old two fingers to oppressive international pressure, and in this case in particular, Britain’s attempt to invoke anti-terrorist laws to get the money back was an absolute disgrace

[From Iceland's disgraceful decision not to pay up over stricken banks – Telegraph Blogs]

I agree. Remember how this all started?

The October 2008 collapse of one bank, Landsbanki Islands, triggered the trouble. Hundreds of thousands of British and Dutch depositors, wooed by high interest rates, had placed money with Landsbanki through an Internet arm operating in those countries called Icesave.

[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

But surely this must have come out the blue, and you can't blame people for leaving their money in these collapsing banks, since in October 2009 no-one could have foreseen their imminent default. Really? Then read this article from February 2008

That said, Kaupthing is fully covered by the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Under this, all your savings are guaranteed up to £35,000. If you have more than this with the bank, perhaps now is the time to pare your savings down and redistribute them among its high-interest paying rivals such as ICICI or Bradford & Bingley.

Of course, one of Kaupthing's main rivals is its Icelandic colleague Landsbanki, the origins of the popular Icesave account. You may also have concerns over Icesave at the moment, given the amount of print expressing concern over Iceland's banking system since the Moody's report three weeks ago

[From Could Kaupthing Edge be the next Northern Rock? | This is Money ]

Can you see the problem with compensating the people who put their money in these high interest accounts? It means that people like me who left their money in the Nationwide at 5% instead of moving it to the First Bank of the Vikings at 6% are being officially called dicks by the ruling elite. Everyone may as well take all of their money out of (for example) Barclays at 1% and put it in the Savings Bank of Upper Wazooristan at 2% and not give a shit about it because when it goes down the Swanee, poorer taxpayers will bail them out. This is madness and it was clear at the time that bailing the banksters out was wrong.

A full-scale bailout would undermine any sense of personal or corporate culpability for the risks that were taken that did not pay off. Doing so would almost guarantee repeat fiascos in the future.

[From Matthew Elliott: Taxpayers should not have to bail out banks | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]

Indeed. By all means go after the investment bankers, lawyers, financial advisers and executives involved with the failed institutions, but why should taxpayers have to fork out, whether Icelandic or British. The British government (ie, the British taxpayer) has just lost another TWENTY SIX BILLION POUNDS on LBG and RBS and there's plenty more to come. The people who made stupid decisions about how to run these banks have got off (in many cases literally) scot free.

Britain and the Netherlands stepped in to cover their own citizens, and then demanded the money back

[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

It was the British government that decided to exceed the deposit insurance, so I can't see what that has to do with the population of Iceland. Iceland has already agreed to honour the EU Deposit Guarantee which covers almost all retail depositors. If the British government wants to take legal action against the banks involved, it should go ahead and sue the banksters, not penalise the Icelandic public. If the Icelandic government is liable for regulating a bank that was run appallingly badly, then so is the British government, so why don't the Icelanders sue the FSA for allowing Kaupting to set up a retail operation in the UK a few months before it collapsed.

We can't send a gunboat because we haven't got any, they beat us in the last Cod War and if we send our aircraft carrier the Icelanders will just climb on board and claim asylum. One day, the saga of how they defeated Marxist lecturer Gordon Brown and Trotskyite solicitor Alastair Darling will be sung round the camp fires alongside the story of Hen-Thorir and others.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The other tsunami

How do you get to be an MP? And where are all of the prostitutes? I started wondering about this because I read that

On Monday, Labour MP Fiona McTaggart asked Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Olympics whether she had commissioned any research on the effect of increased visitor numbers for the London 2012 Olympics on demand for the sex industry.

[From MPs prepare to beat off phantom Olympic hooker invasion • The Register]

I was wondering when this tidal wave of prostitutes would arrive. When I was last in Woking town centre after 10pm (last week) I did notice a number of very scantily glad young woman (all wearing mini skirts and shoulderless dresses despite a wind chill of -12) simultaneously shivering and smoking. But they were hardly of normal build, let alone size zero, and too badly-dressed to be Eastern European prostitutes. But then the name, and topic, rang a bell. I had a vague memory of reading a newspaper report that all of this stuff about sporting event-related tart tsunamis had been completely made up, and sure enough, it had been. When even The Guardian says that it's a "moral panic", you know they must be on shaky ground. In fact that august body came up with a rather nice phrase for ill-informed, evidence-free government lunatics egging each other on in order to waste public money:

The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.

[From Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic | UK news | The Guardian]

That's rather a good way to put it, and I will certainly use it again! But it led me to think: how do you get to be an MP? Surely, you'd think, you must have a certain amount of intelligence. Surely you would know when you are parroting made-up rubbish? So much for evidence-based policy.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Current affairs

As I'm always moaning about how rubbish everything is today, I thought it important to point out that I do not withdraw from modern life into order to live in the past, refusing to trade the certainties of reaction for the uncertainties of revolution. That's not true. I tale a keen interest in current affairs and always try to be bang up to date on the key issues affecting Britain. Here I am just a couple of days ago reading the Saturday newspaper.

Not this Saturday, obviously, but Saturday, 19th February 1881. I'm reading the Illustrated London News for that day. The editorial I was reading said, amongst other things, that...

[Britain] should be glad to get out of Afghanistan without any breach of national honour, but it is even at this moment doubtful, notwithstanding the obvious and declared decision of the Government, whether we shall be able to give complete effect to the policy we have resolved upon.

Well, well. Now if I had been reading an actual Saturday newspaper for 23rd May 2009, I would have been reading about Jordan and Peter, MP's expenses and the finals of Britain's (not) Got Talent.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]