strange stuff

Polly and the Millipede

2012-01-10T20:34:00.002+00:00

Once she had been soothsayer to the court, the last of a long line that had held that position from her family. She had spent her days examining the omens for the Great Pretender, but at night she had dreamed of a one eyed Viking warrior.

The man that would stride across the world like Odin, and shower gold on the worthy from his mighty staff. Only when her Viking finally came she found his exchequer was barren, and his coffers were empty. Night after night she had penned her appeals to the warrior begging him to shower her in gold. He never did, but she refused to give up hope.

Then the blue painted warriors who had formed an alliance with the bird people to sweep away the old order. They banished her Viking warrior to the icy wastes north of the river and threw her in a tower. These newcomers had no use for her visions of a world where gold fell from the skies.

At first she had prophesized that the walls of their city would come crashing down allowing her warrior to return and free her from her tower. But days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, with no sign of her warrior's return. She longed for her warrior to return. He might not have been able to give her what she needed, but he would at least pretend to listen to her visions. It had been a long time since anybody had. In the end just wanted to find anybody that was willing to listen.

Then one day she saw movement in her cell. A millipede was scuttling across the dirt floor. She reached out with one of her gnarled old hands to pluck up the creature and clutch it to her breast.

"Oh, Mr Millipede how smooth and shiny your carapace is. Will you be my friend? Yes, you shall be my friend. You might be small now, but you will grow. You will become as big like a man, and then you will be able to shower me in gold in the way that my Viking warrior never could."

The millipede chirped and she turned its sounds into words.

"Yes, yes I understand. We shall smite the brutes that claim to rule. The clothiers and heralds will hand over the gold that they have hidden beyond the sea. We shall cleanse our temples of the cheats, asset-strippers and vultures who now live there. The people will rejoice. The blue painted panjandrums of greed will be driven before us. The world is in ruins and we shall make it anew, together!"

Driven by its unthinking instincts the creature thrashed around to escape her grasp. She interpreted this as nods of agreement and laughed with delight. At last here was somebody that would come and listen to her visions, she thought. But she could hold the creature no longer, her fingers had become feeble with age. It slipped from her grasp and disappeared into a hole in the floor.

With her only friend now gone Polly tipped her head back and howled at the moon.

Not so inevitable

2011-08-26T15:35:00.000+00:00

The Greek banking system is now basically dead. The only thing keeping blood flowing around the corpse is the life support system provided by the EU, if that is turned off so is the greek financial system. Unfortunately for the EU that would mean all of the collatoral that the ECB took in exchange for earlier money transfusions will suddenly become worthless. At that point the ECB itself would find itself scarily close to backrupcy. Pro-EU people always use 'inevitablity' as their standard argument for why the UK should go along with ever closer union, but the only thing that looks inevitable is the self-destruction of the EU's centerpeice and the massive collateral damage that this will cause.

Make the looters pay

2011-08-11T13:42:00.001+00:00

Forget Guido's gadfly petition on capital punishment. I certainly won't be signing that one as the state has too much power as it is without letting it kill people. However there is one out there that I will sign once the ePetitions server come back online, and would urge other people to. This one simply wants parliament to debate looters losing their benefits. Show them that there are some consequences to their actions.

And suddenly violence is fashionable on the left again

2011-08-07T16:37:00.001+00:00

After the vicious psycho Anders Breivik decided that the best way to express his anti-immigrant views was to shoot up a summer camp the left suddenly lost it love of violence and denounced it, and anybody that they felt they could smear by association no matter how tangental. It looked like the shock of the horrible murders had finally taught them that violence was not a good thing. Then some riots spring up after one gangster gets shot while trying to murder a police officer and suddenly violence is the best way ever of expressing a political opinion. Even if the only opinion these rioters were expressing was that they wanted more consumer goods. A bit of rioting by people that could be badged as ‘the oppressed’ and violence was something to be praised again. Anybody that does praise the violence enough is not sufficiently ‘right on’ and will get their turn up against the wall when the revolution comes. Well, the anti-violence noises were nice while they lasted.

Come and leech says the EU

2011-08-02T18:52:00.002+00:00

Daniel Hannan is reporting that the EU now plans to force the UK to let new immigrants arrive without any way of supporting themselves so they can just leech off the welfare state. Part of me thinks great, more immigrants and anything that destroys the welfare state has got to be a good thing. Another part of me wonders if the Eurocrats are deliberately trying to kill their creation? Has the economic horror created by the Euro finally got to them? Or perhaps they just want to make sure that they have a way out after the Euro has turned the whole of continental europe into a riot plagued disaster zone and the value of all of the money that they have defrauded over the years gets reduced to nothing. Not that I would mind the EU committing Sepuku either. The EU is not just shooting itself in the foot by trying to hit as many hot button issues as it can in one go, it is also deliberately breaking its own rules. Not that we should really be surprised about that by now. More likely it is just the Eurocrats flexing their muscles and demonstrating their domination over the member states because they can.

What time is it?

2011-07-30T08:57:00.000+00:00

Via Maritime Compass a simple diagram for converting the time into a ship's watches and the number of bells.

#OpPayPay

2011-07-27T19:00:00.000+00:00

Just a quick note on the latest Anonymous protest against PayPal. This one appears to much better than their last attacks as they are simply trying to get out a viral campaign to get people to close their PayPal accounts using the Twitter #OpPayPay hash tag. Which is great, they are exercising their free speech to make their point, without unconvincing anybody that is not persuaded by their arguments. Good on them, and it shows a level of maturity that the likes of UKUncut could never hope to achieve. It has also had some significant short term effects (again more than the lefty boot boys of UKUncut can claim).

So is there anything that I would do related to #OpPayPal? Absolutely, I would buy as much PayPal stock as I could. They haven't really changed the fundamental thing that PayPal is still the most ubiquitous payment system on the web. Those that actually used PayPal will get new accounts eventually oncethey have forgetten the protest. Those that didn't won't, but then from PayPal's point of view that doesn't really matter since they were not getting any money from them anyway. This storm will pass and I doubt it will have any noticeable effect to PayPal's profits. All Anonymous as done is cause a panic which will temporarily depress the stock value, so if I had some spare cash I would grab what I could and wait for the stock to rebound.

So long and thanks for (killing) all the fish

2011-07-14T16:06:00.000+00:00

The EU finally looks like it will get rid of its idiotic rules that force fishermen to dump perfectly good fish back into the sea dead. Well that only took 30 years for the message to get home. The BBC is of course reporting this in the most fawning terms, rather a more truthful account of how it was the EU's stupid rules and power grabs that created the awful situation that we find ourselves in with the North sea as a text book example of a tragedy of the commons.

There are two ways of dealing with a Tragedy of the Commons, you can either privatise it or you can socialise it. The EU tried to socialise the North Sea fishing grounds when the UK joined, because at the time all the best North Sea fishing grounds belonged to the UK. It has been a disaster. Since socialising the North Sea through the CFP has been so bad those opposed to the CFP often suggest trying out the other option and privatising it, like Iceland sucessfully did.

When this comes up knee jerk EU-philes who cannot bear admitting that there might be something wrong with the EU will whine that fish swim and therefore the sea cannot possibly be drived up into areas that are owned by individuals, obviously never having heard of the term 'fishing ground'.

Fish do swim, but they swim to stay in the same areas: the areas with the best conditions for their particular species. If you are looking for a fish that likes sandy bottoms there is no point looking in an area with rock at the bottom because they will not be there. It is well known that lots of speices love wreaks, so much so that ships have been deliberately scuttled to create interesting drive areas. Recent research shows that Cod, for example, do not just love wreaks, they find a particular wreak that they especially like and stay there. Then you get to the other point that anti-privatisation folk don't seem to get: the sea is really big. When the UK joined the EU it gave away the rights to an area of sea equal to its entire land area. Divided between the few thousand active fishermen left in the country the sea areas that are being talked about are not the size of farmer's fields on land, they are the size of cities. It would take days of swimming for the fish to move between them, if they wanted to, and most of the time they won't want to because were they are provides the enviroment that they need.

Why are some countries rich?

2011-07-12T19:13:00.001+00:00

Pirates ... Yar!

2011-07-11T18:25:00.002+00:00

Due to the piracy problem around Somalia the government is floating the idea of advising British shipping companies to put armed guards on their vessels, since the Royal Navy is no longer up to the task of defending the shipping lanes after 60 years of neglect. This is not as far fetched as it may seem as there are armed merchantmen sailing the world's oceans today, when nuclear fuel is shipped from the reprocessing plant at Sellafield it goes on a pair of ships, so that they can help to defend each other, each of which is armed. Perhaps we are about to see a return to the days of the East India Company with armed flotillas of merchant ships duelling pirates out on the high seas, and knee breeches. Or maybe not.

At the moment the piracy business, and it is a business, will be quite an attractive one for any Somali old enough to pick up a Cutlass. The potential rewards are huge, but the risks are little more than that would face a legitament fisherman. Getting a prosecution for piracy in a court is to difficult that what normally happens is that they are taken back to Somali waters and release. If they are picked up by the navy of a particularly soft country, like the UK, there is the danger they could even demand asylum and so get themselves a life in the west sponging off the welfare state.

The targets are generally not the ship's either, what they are after are the crews so that they can be held to ransom. This is a very old business model, and one that was used a lot on the Barbary coasts. The European powers of the time that were the pirate's prey tried many methods of getting rid of them such as simply paying protection money only to find that once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. In the end the solution was to take the battle to the pirates by blockading bombarding their home ports which turned the risk/reward equation decisively against further pirate activities. But a return to that is a even less likely than a return of knee breeches as it would require a political establishment with balls.

The consequences of a Fiat Currency

2011-07-10T09:15:00.000+00:00

Libertarianism and Somalia

2011-07-08T18:52:00.000+00:00

One of the more annoying arguments against Libertarianism, or any reduction in government, is that somehow it is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to no government at all which would mean a lawless society where might is right. So not just the slippery slope fallacy you’ve got the slippery slope and a strawman.

Government is in no danger of withering away, if anything it has a continuous tendency to expand gobbling up more and more of civil society as it does. When fighting as hard as she could all Margret Thatcher could do was hold the state’s size the same. Even back in the victorian period Mikhail Bakunin pointed that out to Marx when he insisted that after the dictatorship of the Proletariat the state would whither away. Marx might not have lived to see it but he got his communist revolution and the state certainly did not whither away, it just got bigger as it tried to continue itself; just as was predicted.

Then there is the strawman that libertarians and those that want a small state actually want no state. Fine, point out the problems with having no state at all and the danger that without the state with its monopoly on violence you will get lots of competing violent factions seeking to tax everybody else. I don’t think that many Libertarians would have a problem with that. This is why they do not want to completely get rid of the state, but want it reduced so that all it does is stop the rise of competing warlords.

Though perhaps it would be good to look at one of the few places in the world that is completely without a government and is always brought up as if it was a model for Libertarians, Somalia. Somalia is a poverty-stricken, war torn, shit hole, but then it was still a poverty-stricken, war torn shit hole when it had a government. However despite having no government they do have the rule of law, they do have property rights, and by many measures life has actually improved for most people since the descent into anarchy when compared to how things were when there was a government. Hardly a slam dunk for the statists, even if it was not an enormous straw man.

Socialism makes people unethical

2011-07-07T16:11:00.001+00:00

Socialism makes people more unethical - fact.

The Euro deathwish

2011-07-07T16:09:00.000+00:00

The struggling economies of the Euro Area periphery need an interest rate rise like a hole in the head. So what does the European Central Bank give them? An interest rate rise. Greece will default, and the sooner the better for the Greeks, the question now are the other PIIGS. Portugal's debt has been downgraded to junk, much to the whining annoyance of the Chairman of the ECB, because that is what it is. The ECB has decided to ignore reality and keep on accepting Portuguese debt as collateral and I expect that there will be many banks eager to take up the ECB's offer of taking the junk off their hands. But even junk has some worth, the next stage is for the Portuguese government to be pushed into the same position as Greece and have to default at which point the debt will be worthless. The ECB seems as determined to drive itself into bankruptcy as it is to bankrupt the states that use its currency.

One rule for the ruled, another for the rulers

2011-06-30T17:48:00.002+00:00

Oh dear it looks like dear Lyn Brown has been caught out. Despite campaigning for an increase in the minimum wage, when other people have to pay, if the money is coming out of her own pocket she prefers not to pay anything at all.

The UK debt problem is between Ireland and Greece

2011-06-30T17:38:00.002+00:00

One in the eye for deficit deniers. The Economist has a chart showing how many cuts are needed to get government debt under control and back to safe levels, it is not pretty. The UK is way up the chart between Iceland and Greece, both of which are already bankrupt, which tells you how hard it will be to get the country back on an even keel, and so how vital it is to start now.

The EU wants kill the financial industry as well

2011-06-27T21:41:00.002+00:00

After the member states governments spent billions trying to keep the interbank lending market going the EU is going to kill it. They want to place a tax on all financial transactions which will make a large chunk of all low margin trades, like the millions of daily trades that keep the interbank mark going, unprofitable. The prospect of a profitable industry brought to its knees by government taxation is making the usual suspects on the left mastibate itself into a frenzy.

Of course the EU does not really care about any of the lefty wibble spouted by the Transaction Tax’s usual supporters, they are just after the money. The EU has been desperate to get more taxes under its direct control and so increase its direct income. It wants this to make it less reliant on the member states. They are just jumping on the bandwagon because it is going in a direction they like, the direction of higher taxes. The fact that this tax is not aimed at destroying the EU financial industry won’t mean that that will not be the result. I’m sure that estate agents on Bern will be rubbing their hands with glee, if this law goes into practice a very large chunk of the European financial industry is going to up sticks and move to Switzerland.

How the Cookie law crumbles

2011-06-27T09:18:00.001+00:00

The EU has an amazing ability to lay waste to anything that it touches. Everything from fisheries to economies; once the EU gets hold of them they die. The next target for the EU's hug of death is the internet. The EU has specified that all websites that have users from the EU (which means basically all of them, no matter where they are based) that use Cookies (which means basically all of them) must get explicit consent from the users before placing the Cookie. Yep, the EU looked at common websites and decided that what they really needed was a blizzard of pop-ups that had to be clicked through before the site became usable. Being an EU directive this gets pushed though the beaurocracies of the members states without the democratic elements of their governments being able to look at the proposal and tell them that they were talking out of their collective arseholes. The directive has been pushed through the British beaurocracy in the normal way and was supposed to have already come into force; however nobody was ready, not even the Information Commisioner who is supposed to enforce the law, so it was delayed by a year.

Information Commissioner's Office is now compliant with the law that they were supposed to enforce and a Freedom of Information request has been issued for their statistics. The result is striking, after getting in line with the EU's directive there was a 90% drop in the apparent usage of their website. Of course we have no idea whether this is because these people opted out, or whether they simply left to go elsewhere because having to click through a blizzard of pop-ups is nobody's idea of good web experience. For web shops this is dangerous as this is potentially a large number of customers going elsewhere. For advertising funded sites this is disasterous as this is 90% of their revenue evapourating overnight. Thank you EU, can we leave yet?

Finally some sense on Greece

2011-06-20T16:38:00.000+00:00

Finally somebody there is a politican talking sense about the Greek debt crisis, and it is Boris Johnson. Greece is bankrupt, so it should go bankrupt. Greece, like the UK, has no option other than to cut the size of its state because nobody can spend more than they earn year after year. Greece cannot grow its way out of trouble because being shackled inside the Euro it is going to continue to loose competitiveness. It should therefore get out of the Euro so that its currency can float downwards to the level that is appropriate for their economy. Even if it could start growing again it will never pay back the loans that it has, so it should not take on more loans that it will not pay back either. Before this crisis is over there is going to be a lot of pain for those holding Greek debt, but delaying things will only make it worse as the debts will be larger. Therefore it should just hold up its hands and admit that nobody that anybody stuipd enough to lend it money is not going to get that money back before the outstanding debt that it is going to default on gets even larger.

Not that this will happen though for three reasons. If Greece defaults cause huge problems for France and Germany. It will bankrupt the European Central Bank. Plus it will destroy the myth that european integration is inevitable, and without that myth to fall back on Eu-philes don't have many arguments left to support their dreams. The EU elites will not allow such an obvious hole to get blown in the side of their project. Instead of the correct option there is also a second option, the EU (meaning Germany) could keep bailing Greece out for as long as it cannot pay back its loans and since Greece is bankrupt that means throwing money at Greece forever. For this they will expect some say Greek financial policy in return, so that they can claim that Taxpayers money is being not wasted (which it is), and so the wheels of EU integration continue to grind onwards lubricated by blood on the streets of Athens.

Labour wants to give the Army to the EU

2011-06-20T16:36:00.000+00:00

The Tories might be rather wet when it comes to the EU, but they are still the least worst of the major parties. Don't believe me? Even they would think twice before handing over our armed forces to the EU, which is exactly what Labour want to do. However insane this policy was probably inevitable as it manages to get a hat-trick of lefty ideological prejudices:

Deficit denial, check.

Dislike of the British armed forces, check.

Selling out to the EU, check.

Policy proposals based on blind ideological prejudice are probably what should be expected from an opposition at this part of the electoral cycle, but this really takes this to a level that shows they really don't care about winning the next election.

Spleen venting in progress

2011-06-19T12:05:00.001+00:00

Ed Balls wants Plan B, but is that plan B for Balls or plan B for Bankruptcy. At least he has admitted now that there will probably not be a double dip recession, though I’m sure that certain lefties are going to continue wibbling on about how it is inevitable. He has also finally learned that if you want to help the economy tax cuts work far better than state spending. Not that he would ever continence less state spending, being a lefty. Unfortunately there is no money left to spend, Labour has already spent it all.

Labour not only spent all the money the state has, they spent all the money that the state could borrow, and then printed more money and spent that. The money has all been spent, its gone, the deficit needs to be cut and the only way to do that is to cut what the state does. Thanks to Labour’s massive overspending the only choices are cutting the bloated state down to size, and cut by more than the fractions of a percent that George Osbourne plans, or the state going bankrupt.

Then there is Jeff Randall of the Telegraph who has woken up to the fact that the Bank of England is trying to stealthily default on the massive debt that Labour created through inflation. Hello! It really took you this long to figure that out? The Bank of England spent the entire last year of Labour’s term of office printing money simply to stop the government going bankrupt. Of course there has been lots of inflation, and of course there will continue to be lots of inflation. Lots of inflation is what always happens when the state starts printing money to sustain itself, and under Labour the state printed a lot. Only once all of that money has worked its way into the system and reduced the value of money until it balances with the amount of value in the system will we go back to more normal inflation rates.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out Bob

2011-06-04T17:43:00.003+00:00

Some good news from the coalition, which doesn't happen very often. They are going to try and make sure those earning more than £100,000 a year loose their subsidised council houses, so they can be used for people that actually need them. The lefties will squeal, but then lefties always squeal whenever anybody even thinks about the state spending less money no matter how close to bankrupt it is. What I want to know is why it took so long to make such an obviously correct decision? I understand why such fabulously rich people were able to get council housing, it was so that well connected lefties (such as Bob Crow and Ken Livingstone's mate Lee Jasper) could live high on the hog at tax payers expense. That is what always happens when the left get power. What I don't understand is why Cameron's first act as he got through the doors of Number 10 wasn't to throw the sponging scum out and let them pay their way like everybody else.

It is the Left that lives in a parallel world

2011-04-19T07:12:00.003+00:00

Over at the Illiberal Conspiracy Duncan Weldon is wibbling that right wingers live in a parallel world to the left, and in his long, evidence free, screed that would the only part that might hold any truth. The world that right wingers live in be the parallel world were it is perfectly possible to cut government spending during a recession, like the USA did in the 1919-1920 recession, without generating a depression. A world where Hoover’s massive spending could not get him out of the Great Depression, nor could FDR by spending even more. Just like the massive government spending by the Japanese government could not get them out of their Lost Decade, or the high government spending by British governments could not get the country moving during the 1970s.

This would be the parallel world where higher debt means lower growth, but trying to deal with this debt through tax increases are more likely to cause recessions that spending cuts because tax increases are highly contractionary.

In the lefty world the solution to absolutely everything if for the government to spend more and more money that it does not have. Running a 10% deficit is fine to them, and in their world spending more than you earn forever has no consequences, such as having your debt rating downgraded making this debt more and more expensive.

The right might be a parallel world to the one the lefties imagine themselves to be in, but it is the real world. The world were debts have to be paid back and money does not rain from the skies. The world were actions have consequences.

Another day of lefty violence

2011-03-27T19:20:00.003+00:00

Another day of lefty protests, so another day of riots. They compare themselves with Libyan rebels or those in Egypt, yet they forget that those fighting against these socialist tyrants do not have any peaceful means of having their say in the running of their country. In this country everybody gets a vote, including these Labour Party boot boys; we recently had an election, and they lost.

Faux-anarchists decided to smash up some banks and Starbucks franchises, ‘cos they’re like capitalist pigs init. The faux-anarchists clearly not seeing the irony in proclaiming anarchy, while smashing things up in protest that the state might not grow quite as quickly as it had been doing.

Then Tarquin and Jocasta decided to occupy Fortnum and Mason, as the only shop that mummy goes to they must have figured that they could bring the entire economy to a stop.

Inflation will get worse

2011-03-22T15:28:00.000+00:00

Inflation is up, again. Labour spent their entire last year in office using freshly printed money to pay for the bloated public sector that they had created, and when you print money you get inflation. As J M Keynes said when the same thing happened in the 1920s:

"The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance."

This new money is starting to leak out into the economy with obvious results. Luckily it is leaking out slowly, had it all gone in one go the UK would have been like Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Labour had a choice, they could have cut their spending but having spent so much time building up the payroll vote they were not going to ditch it just before an election. So they printed money instead knowing that they would probably loose anyway and so it would be for the next government to clean up the mess. They got to use their payroll vote to cushion the blow at the election knowing the problems would land on somebody else's desk, so you can see why Labour was so keen on it

Keeping the public sector bloated was not the only reason that this was such a good move for Labour because inflation helps debtors (like the state) and hurts those that save to help make themselves self reliant, who Labour hate. However back in the 1920s money printing, and the inflation that it brought, destroyed the middle classes who were the rock of stability to the liberal and democratic Weimar Republic leading to a choice between being thrown into a Fascist tyranny or a Socialist one. Again the attractions to Labour are obvious.

There has been a lot of money printing going on so there will be a lot of inflation to come. This is only the start.