Monthly Archives: January 2009

busy busy busy

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No TBTM today – but I love this quote from +Alan: “And the Atheism? It sounds as though God views atheism as a harmless eccentricity, which probably doesn’t really exist as much as people think, infinitely better than pretending to believe, which is a ruddy menace…”

Some places that predicted the financial crisis

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Just for the record, there were several places that predicted the present economic crisis, starting from a point many years ago. Some just in general terms, but some in very specific terms. These are some of the ones that I read, but I’m sure there are others.

Nouriel Roubini
Financial Armageddon
The Automatic Earth
Clusterf**k Nation
Global Guerrillas
Club Orlov
Ann Pettifor
And, in general terms (eg here) yours truly.

So when someone in the mainstream media (or Gordon Brown) says ‘nobody predicted this’ you’ll be able to say that actually, people did predict it, it was foreseeable, it’s just that you’re incompetent…

TBTM20090122

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Can you imagine Elijah being prosecuted for mocking the prophets of Baal? Does not the assertion of the supremacy of one God over the pantheon of others necessitate the humiliation of these false gods and idols? Is not the very choice to follow one particular faith over another an act of ‘discrimination’? Islam is not a race, but a religio-political ideology. And now it appears that a Dutch MP – a citizen of the EU – may be prosecuted for daring to criticise an ideology. This decision will have every member of the BNP wringing their hands with glee, and leave every libertarian of moderate political persuasion profoundly perplexed. Doubtless no British MP will dare to comment on this story at all (not even those who profess to be immensely concerned about the erosion of liberties) for fear of inciting the BNP to excessive gloating or of offending the UK’s Muslim population and thereby losing their votes with two elections imminent.

Are newspaper articles ‘telephoned in’?

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I ask after reading this mildly interesting article about U2 in the Daily Telegraph.

There are two glaring errors in it for a reader: ‘pedalling’ when it should be ‘peddling’, and ‘reign’ when it should be ‘rein’. Two things: a) spell-checkers wouldn’t have picked this up, and b) was the article dictated? I can’t believe the Telegraph would employ someone whose grasp of the English language was that poor (or maybe I’m naive on that one) but I can imagine that they employ typists who wouldn’t necessarily pick up exactly what the writer was trying to say. (Of course, the ‘typists’ may simply be electronic ones.)

Perhaps I’m just having another Victor Meldrew moment.

TBTE20090120

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That was a good speech. My one quibble was the deference to Happy Motoring rather than talking about the need to invest in rail. But I love the reference to virtue, and the tone seemed exactly right. Didn’t expect anything less of course.

TBTE20090119

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“The only reality-based solution to dealing with bankrupt, insolvent institutions is to let them fail and let them file for bankruptcy protection. Once this has happened their debt is largely discharged. To not do so, or as Ben Bernanke’s plan would have it, to give all of these insolvent institutions billions of dollars to keep them afloat, means that (1) a multi-trillion dollar deficit becomes the tax burden of future generations of Americans, (2) those who became rich on their own excesses are not held to account and retain their individual wealth while the majority of Americans struggle to get by, and (3) the speculators and gamblers who went into debt are released from any responsibility—they are free to find new ways to exploit the system, and they know that if, in the near future, they run up bad debts again, relief awaits in the form of help from the government. Hence there is no deterrent to this type of behavior. And so Ben Bernanke’s plan, at best, creates an enormous tax burden for future generations of Americans while simultaneously doing nothing to deter would-be speculators and Ponzi-schemers from plying their trade time and time again. In other words, the Bernanke and Obama plans are not solutions, they are obfuscations. They do nothing to change the system that has brought us to this point.”

(One of my favourite sites.)

Conservative or Liberal?

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OK, first read this report.
Then watch this report.

Seems to me that conservatives and liberals can agree on how appalling this is, even if they disagree about how to characterise what is wrong. A conservative might talk about institutions that have stood the test of time; the liberal might talk about human rights violations. What I’m interested to know, however, is how to characterise the sort of government that would do these things, that would make these things possible, that would be in hock to private interests in such a craven way. Fascistic?

I just can’t believe it! (I find myself having more and more regular Victor Meldrew moments….)