Categories
Politics

The Company Store

What is the strange hold she has over Enda Kenny?

One reason a lot of people will vote for the upcoming “austerity amendment” is that they assume it must, when it all comes down to it, be good for us. Sure it’s going to hurt, but in the long run it will help us have a stronger, better economy – right? It’s a natural assumption. And it would be dead wrong. The wholesale destruction of government spending if we succeed in making its insane deficit-slashing timetable – or the fines if we fail – will shrink the economy precipitously. Disastrously.

But why would the EU want to do that to us? It’s puzzling, but it’s not out of any personal animosity. We are but a small cog in this, and we don’t squeak half enough. It’s just that it’s a one-size-fits-no-one set of strictures that would burden even the healthiest European economy.

The Fiscal Compact has two main objectives. The more obvious one is to outlaw the sort of behaviour that got Greece into trouble – essentially, excessive public borrowing and spending. But note that that’s absolutely not what we did. We were good. We paid back debts when we had the money, we ran a surplus. And though our public spending rose, the highest it ever went was still only the Eurozone average. Very arguably we should have been spending well above that, our public services were still grossly underdeveloped even at the height of the boom. Yet this referendum will have the effect of cutting public spending more drastically than ever. And aside from hurting our most vulnerable, that will of course crush the economy even further. As I said a few days ago, it is the cure for the opposite disease to the one we have.

The second and more covert purpose of the compact though is, putting it as crudely as it deserves, to save Angela Merkel’s political future. In order to win her next election – she has about a year and a half left to go – she needs to convince the German people… Not that the Euro is good for them, no. That’s not enough. That the Euro is the Deutsche Mark. A currency run to Germany’s peculiar rules, for Germany’s peculiar circumstances.

Which are peculiarly set against Keynesian economics, the (well-proven) theory that the best thing a government can do in times of economic depression is borrow and spend to promote recovery. This technique lost favour in Germany essentially because it was employed by Hitler. In the Post-War era a new orthodoxy was needed, and they found it in “Ordoliberalism“, a system in which government must play only the most minimal role. It has worked for Germany so far, but Germany has been in almost continuous growth since it started. That might seem a recommendation, but ordoliberalism is a theory for the good times, utterly lost when facing a crisis of these proportions.

It seems likely that only the introduction of the Euro averted the failure of the German system. From being overburdened by the costs of Reunification with the post-Communist East, Germany went rapidly back to being the richest and most productive economy in Europe. Essentially, by selling more goods than ever before to the rest of Eurozone – while simultaneously lending us the money to buy them.

Germany had become Europe’s company store.

It is worth noting that Merkel’s approval rating is at an all-time high back home. She’s getting to project herself as tough by beating us up. So why is Enda Kenny agreeing to this? Is there some secret backroom agreement where he gets to be her bitch now in return for favours down the line? It’s the only way you can make sense of his apparently acting against the country’s interests. But we can’t depend on the existence of covert deal. Even if it exists, it can so easily be repudiated. And in return we are being asked to write vows of poverty into our own Constitution.

If this referendum passes, the best thing you could do would be to get out of the country as soon as you can. And be sure to bring your more vulnerable relatives with you.

Categories
Cosmography Humour

B-Doinnng

Happy Foot. No Honestly

It finally felt like Spring today.

I know, I know. It’s almost over. By Irish reckoning Summer begins on the first of May. Maybe it was the confusing “false start” we had. March warmer than usual, followed by April – often the nicest month of the year – being hellish cold. It discombobulated my internal sundials and anemometers, upset my sidereal clockwork, so I never tripped into Spring mode at all. Until today.

I can’t say why exactly. It was a little warm this morning, to be sure. And after a switch back to Siberia for the afternoon, I noticed that the wind became warmer again in the evening. But it certainly wasn’t a particularly nice day.

Maybe it was people who made it Spring. People were nice. Everyone I met seemed to be in a good mood. They smiled at me, they enjoined me to conversation, they treated me like a friend. Even my friends.

Is it the hat? It must be the hat. No, I’m not wearing a hat. Can’t be that then.

Or indeed anything about the way I was looking, in my Dunne’s Stores hoodie, too-long combat pants rolled up to reveal worn-out Czech foam rubber sandals and narsty pink bandage round my left ankle… Oh yeah, that was another thing. I started the day limping, now I’m cured. A Spring miracle!

Well all right, it was nearly better when I got up this morning. It is four days since I twisted it. The stupidest thing; I’d stood up to find my foot was asleep. As soon as I put weight on it, it just went. And I dropped like a stone, landing heavily right on top of it.

Yes folks, I fell on myself. That’s so clumsy it takes skill.

My ankle hurt like hell, I thought I’d broken it – until I remembered that any time I’d actually broken a bone it had never seemed all that bad. At first… Sprains on the other hand (or foot) always felt worse than they turned out to be. Maybe a breakage releases the body’s bedside-manner hormone, the one that tells you everything will be all right if you just stay still and calm and not flap around. This double shot of steam-pressed adrenaline was telling me to run away immediately from the source of danger, so I must have been basically all right.

And as the source of danger in this instance was basically myself I couldn’t really run away, so I just sat on the floor and swore volubly until I felt a little better. It was mostly just bruised I think. Though weirdly, the bruising is all around the edges of my foot, as if I have a slice of purple going right through it.

Anyway, I’m side-tracking here like crazy. Point is, my foot and my heart and my mind are all feeling well. It was a lovely day. And dammit, who knows, tomorrow might be even better.

Categories
Technology

The Missing Kies To Android Phone Syncing (2)

The MyPhoneExplorer Settings dialogue. Don't be scared.

When I told you about MyPhoneExplorer, the software that does for free what Samsung and other Android phone makers seem incapable of doing for money, I mentioned that there were helpful, comprehensive instructions. I did not, however, tell you where to find them… Here they are. There’s also a forum where you can ask any questions you might have. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s in German, it’s an easy language to pick up.

Oh OK, the English section is here.

What follows are a few things I discovered for myself that may help you set it up right. It’s worth noting first that there are two parts to the software – a desktop application for Windows, and a phone app available from Google Play. Don’t bother downloading the latter though. On first using the desktop version, go the the Settings dialogue in the File menu and tell it that your phone is an Android and that you connect by USB (or set it to Autodetect the connection). Then when you plug the phone in it will install the Android app itself.

All I wanted to do was back up my photos and other files, without having to remember. Backups that need to be remembered are backups that don’t get done. Not when I’m in charge. MyPhoneExplorer can sync over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but as I often recharge my phone by plugging it into a PC I thought the most dependable way would be to do it automatically whenever the USB cable connects.

For this to happen of course, the program must be running on the computer. So I searched through the menus trying to find the checkbox that would make it launch on startup. And searched, and searched. To save you some considerable time, there isn’t one. You have to do it the old-fashioned way by creating a shortcut in the Startup folder. (Find the MyPhoneExplorer folder in the All Programs menu, click and hold the program icon and drag it to the Startup folder.) You know it’s freeware when the author finds the simple way just too boring.

There are other options for you to play with. Many, many other options. For example, you can choose whether to sync your contacts with Outlook or some other program. Under the menu item “Advanced 2” you can select the folder where your photos will be copied, so if you’ve already set up Kies to put them in a certain location you may as well use the same one again. Several copies of your pictures on different computers = Good management. Several copies on the same computer = Pointless (but pretty normal).

The crucial settings for syncing though are under the menu item “Multi-Sync” (see picture). A Multi-sync is what it calls a pre-set choice of items to sync all in one go. You can select exactly what you want to be copied, and where to. And while all the usual ones are available – photos, contacts, calendar and so on – the great thing for the power user is that you can create custom file syncs. For example, I copy across podcasts I’ve downloaded to the PC during the day. In the opposite direction, I have it transfer things I drew or wrote on the phone.

The crucial one here though, if you want things to happen all by themselves, is “Start Multi-sync if connection is initiated automatically”. Once that is checked the program should detect when you’ve plugged the phone in and start to sync, making backing your phone up as easy as putting it on charge.

If it doesn’t start, I dunno what you’ve done wrong. Try poking things randomly.

Categories
Cosmography Politics

Positive No

Anti- austerity demonstration, Dublin, Ireland (2)
Anti- austerity demonstration, Dublin, Ireland (2) (Photo credit: Tom Szustek)

I’m just back from the meeting I plugged yesterday – “Let’s Get Fiscal: Women’s perspectives on the Austerity Treaty”. How was it? In a word, inspirational.

In a few more words, inspirational but surprisingly poorly-attended. I don’t know what kind of turnout I was expecting to a gig with the terms fiscal, women’s perspective, and austerity in the title, especially as we were there to watch a video link you could as easily have viewed from home, but it is a shame that more people didn’t come. It was an eye-opener.

For this reason: It was astonishingly positive in tone. Usually the No side in an EU referendum campaign dwells on fear of change and the unknown. This time though it’s the Yes one that, in a fine paradox, has to campaign negatively: Pass the referendum or terrible but inexactly specified things may happen. This meeting emphasized the opportunity that the vote presents – to take a stand against the recent trend in Europe towards the economics of austerity, against the enormous long-term damage this will do to the more vulnerable economies. And especially, to the more vulnerable people living in those economies.

This is a treaty that exists to placate financial markets, to benefit the very people who brought about the crash. We ought to know by now that greed is one thing you cannot placate. The more we socialise private debt, the more we rob from the poor to give to the rich, the more those markets will squeeze. They know a good thing when they see one. This referendum gives us a chance to say no, no more.

Let’s enjoy that.

Categories
Politics

Austerity, That’s What We Need More Of

austerity
austerity (Photo credit: 401K)

So Britain has gone back into negative growth, fairly conclusive evidence that budget-cutting your way out of recession is like clearing a path through the forest with a flamethrower.

Yet in the eurozone, we seem determined to repeat the error. The forthcoming Fiscal Compact is a legal undertaking not to go into budget deficit. A good thing in principle; of course a country should, in the good times, be creating budget surpluses that will see it through the bad. That’s just prudent. The thing that appears to be escaping them here though is that these are not the good times. These are, in point of fact, the really, really bad times.

We can sign a treaty to promise to balance the budget, sure. What we cannot do, is balance the budget. Not without the wholesale destruction of not simply welfare and health systems, but everything. Policing, education, investment, the fabric of the state.

So are we signing this treaty with the intention of breaking it? Perhaps it is meant purely as a pro forma sop to the markets, Or indeed to the German taxpayers, who seem to forget that they profited vastly from the eurozone boom and so have to be wheedled and cajoled now that it’s come to payback time. “Yes yes, of course everyone is going to balance their budget.” That doesn’t seem a proper way to go about things.

I don’t mean that a fiscal compact is a wholly bad idea. If we’re going to share a currency there have to be some rules. But remember, we had rules. We had the Stability and Growth Pact, of which this is merely a sterner reiteration. Did we break those rules in the boom? Nope. Right up to the Crash of 2008, we ran a surplus. France and Germany broke them, reckless to the effect that had on other countries. They benefited from the conditions that drove our economy to meltdown, and yet somehow it’s we who have to suffer again. This new treaty is the Big Two’s more rigorous attempt to discipline themselves, but what is merely chastisement to them may beat us to death.

Here in Ireland, our Supreme Court has judged that this compact amounts to a new international treaty with constitutional ramifications, and must be put to the people. This is a great aspect to our Constitution, but it means we’re yet again going to have a fraught and confusing public debate. Highly technical and highly political, the text of the treaty is hardly going to make for clear and balanced discussion. So it’s unlikely to be for the right reasons whichever side wins.

The Yes camp will be monging fiscal fear: If we don’t pass it, we won’t be able to raise the money we desperately need to keep the country afloat. But wait, in order to borrow money we should pass a law against borrowing money? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. The No camp on the other hand will be upholding our economic sovereignty. A brave stand, which has been likened to defending the virginity of sex workers. There is only one economic sovereignty, and it’s called “having money”.

At the moment, it looks like we’ll pass it. The incorrect arguments of the mistaken pragmatists will be more persuasive than the incorrect arguments of the mistaken idealists. But it is not too late to change direction. We have a chance here to make a real and lasting difference.

Sure, the last time we turned down an EU treaty they pretty much gave us another chance to say the right answer. All we really did was delay it. But this time, a delay could make a difference. The cavalry – in the form of Hollande winning the French Presidential election – might just arrive in time. He has announced his intention to reopen the treaty, and at least take some of the emphasis off austerity. (Oh those crazy reckless Socialists.) Meanwhile, the other eurozone countries have a chance to absorb lessons like that coming out of the UK.

So Ireland could play a key role here in saving the EU from a tragic, destructive mistake. Enforcing balanced budgets in the long term is a sensible idea. Enforcing balanced budgets during an already murderous recession is not economics, it’s applied sadomasochism.

_________________________________

Let’s Get Fiscal: Women’s perspectives on the Austerity Treaty

Anyone in Dublin or Galway interested in a public meeting on austerity policies, with particular reference to their impact on women? You can attend the event physically at Feminist Open Forum, Central Hotel, Exchequer St, Dublin, or by live streaming at the One World Centre, 76 Prospect Hill, Galway.

Tonight, THURSDAY 26 April at 7pm.

Categories
Cosmography

Abandoned Cathedral

Click to see the animal and plant carvings

I mentioned our historic local graveyard last summer, but didn’t have pictures at the time. Here’s the fantastic Thirteenth Century Romanesque window from its tiny ruined cathedral. Click image for embiggening, the mediaeval details are gorgeous.

This and the surrounding monastic settlement are associated with Saint Brendan, called The Navigator, who may have reached North America in the early Sixth Century, hundreds of years before even Leif Ericson. We can’t be sure of course, there’s nothing you could even laughingly call documentary evidence, but the legend that Brendan had found islands to the west was widely known through Europe and is thought to have been taken by Columbus as evidence for his “small world” theory.

Of course there may be no basis in fact for the legend at all. Saint Brendan’s journey may not have been a sea voyage, but a spiritual, metaphorical one. He may not even have existed, but like so many Irish saints have been the Christianisation of a Celtic god or superhero. The legend certainly seems to borrow from the pre-Christian Voyage of Bran (perhaps the world’s oldest story involving time-travel to the future).

On the other hand… He would certainly have had the motivation. Irish monks were in the habit of taking sea voyages at that time, though scholarly debate continues over whether the main purpose of the trips was missionary or to seek an ever greater degree of hermetic asceticism. And such a long voyage seems to have been technically feasible, even with the crude leather ships of the time. Yes, leather.

And one curiosity: Among all the stuff about lighting a fire on an island only to find that they were camping on a whale, or being encircled by a sea serpent that bites its own tail, it is mentioned that they found an “island of grapes” – pretty much what the Vikings thought they’d found when they set foot on North America.

Hmm…

Categories
Technology

The Missing Kies

More Non-Fun With Samsung. It is amazing that a company rumoured to be the world’s No.1 phone maker can provide their customers with synchronisation software as enjoyable to use as being punched repeatedly in the face. Samsung Kies is slow, unstable, and just ill-conceived.

I decided to give it a thorough troubleshooting today, by removing anything on the computer that might have even a remote chance of interfering with it. My old Nokia syncing software, the crap that Apple piles on when you install Safari or iTunes – anything that might use Media Transfer Protocol basically – before removing and reinstalling Kies. It was a long shot, but it seemed to do some good. At least it will show thumbnails of photos now. That’s… something.

But I must confess – I discovered eventually that Kies wasn’t really failing to accomplish a basic task as I’d thought. It simply doesn’t do that task. Foolish me. Why would I think that a function with a name like “Sync Photos” would sync photos? My naïveté just appals me sometimes.

You see I wanted it to copy the pictures I’d taken with the phone and save them to the computer. On most parts of planet Earth that would mean creating a folder on your computer that always contains the same photographs as the phone. In, as we call it, sync.

For Samsung’s Kies however, syncing photos means copying them from the computer, to the phone. Because that’s what you want to do, isn’t it? Un-backup your pictures. Samsung it seems are so pleased with their phones that they think we’ll want to put all our photos on them, to show them off to their best advantage.

More seriously, they’re envisaging the phone as your central device, your hub. Things move to the phone, not away. All nice in theory, but complete crap in practice. The reality is that both for the sake of convenience and of  backing-up, you want the same files on both your phone and your computer. Synchronisation, as the name suggests, should be a two-way street.

(The cloud? If you have an Android phone you may have found it automatically uploading your photos to your Google account. The way of the future, right. The problem with the cloud is it’s altogether too nebulous. I’m not at all happy entrusting every picture I take to someone who mysteriously doesn’t even want paying for the service.)

So Kies won’t copy my pictures to the computer as a part of an automated syncing process. I have to do it manually. Which means I have to remember to do it manually. This is not good enough. All I want, ideally, is software that will copy my photographs. As well as synchronise any new contact info and events with my computer’s address book and calendar. Maybe copy over other important data too, like sketches I make on it. In the other direction, possibly copy any newly-downloaded podcasts to the phone so that I can listen to them on the move. And it would be nice if it could do that all automatically when I plugged my phone into the computer to charge. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Nope, not thanks to the Austrian guy who developed MyPhoneExplorer. This is everything that Kies should be but isn’t. On top of that it has some interesting features that Kies doesn’t think to include, like the facility to use your phone from your computer when it’s connected, making and taking calls and even typing texts on your keyboard. Plus it can archive your text messages, or indeed keep any data or application on the phone backed up.

It may take some time to set up – read the very useful help pages – but that’s because it can be made to do precisely what you want. And it’s free, though it does ask you to donate. You should. The amount of heartache it will save you is well worth a few euros. He has made life better.

Update: I should have mentioned that when installing it offers to give you a couple of other freeware programs. You can decline these though, and on principle I recommend that you do.

Works on most Android phones, not just Samsung’s, as well as Symbians from Sony Ericsson.

http://www.fjsoft.at/en/downloads.php

Categories
Politics

Fornication Once Again

Not a term you hear much these days, fornication. For those of you without the benefit of a Catholic education, fornication is the sin of having sex with someone who isn’t your spouse, a puzzling concept in a day and age when few still believe in sex after marriage.

Michelle Mulherin’s (FG) use of the word in a Dáil debate was amusing, but rather distracted from the issue. This being that the courts have found – years ago – that there are circumstances where a woman has a right to an abortion, but the legislature has never overturned existing or created new law to decriminalise it in those circumstances. It’s such a touchy subject that even an ostensibly woman-friendly party like Labour are avoiding it. (This attempt to correct the situation was sponsored by the tiny Socialist party.)

The basic problem is that the issue is not open to reasoned debate – not when a significant proportion of people (probably a minority now, but still a blocking one) stick with the Pope‘s opinion that human life and its concomitant rights begin at the moment of conception. It’s an extremist position, but it effectively closes down the subject. If abortion is murder, how can you even discuss it?

Others do take different stances. That humanity begins at birth, or that there is some stage of development after which a foetus may be said to be human. The latter though is really passing the buck. There is no medical definition of humanity, the start of human life – conception, birth, some point in between – is a matter of how you define life and how you define humanity, a philosophical question with no definitive answer in science, or indeed in scripture.

This being the case, can we not accept that the only relevant opinion here is that of the woman?

Categories
Cosmography

Copyright Law Used To Harm Artist. Again

Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) perc...
Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) perched on a Silver Wattle (Acacia dealbata), Waterworks Reserve, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s an advert on TV from Colman’s the English mustard people for their instant beef gravy. It features a dancing bull. Made out of gravy. Dancing. All over the table. To I Like The Way (You Move). Semi-translucent. Gelatinous. Gravy.

It makes me want to vomit. And not want to vomit, for fear that what came out would dance.

By a weird series of associations I’m reminded of Land Down Under, the other other Australian national anthem. Remember the flute solo on that? The guy who played it was found dead yesterday. Greg Ham.

Did you hear he was sued for that solo? By the holders of the copyright to the famous Australian campfire song Kookaburra. It was a great source of sadness to him apparently, and coming so soon before his death – an appeal was dismissed just a year ago – you wonder if there wasn’t a connection.

I’m terribly disappointed that that’s the way I’m going to be remembered – for copying something.

Of course, it’s not copying. If you know both tunes – and you probably do – you can certainly hear a similarity. But not an imitation, something a lot more subtle than that. It’s a musical allusion, a vital part of how composition works. One tune has its associations. Another alludes to it, subtly weaving those associations into its melody. Poetry often does something similar. It is not theft, but art.

The composer of Kookaburra doesn’t appear to have thought she was being ripped off. But after her death, and thirty years after Land Down Under was a hit, her publishing company realised there was some free money to be made. In doing so it was they who committed theft. Their license to cheerfully exploit other people’s creativity enabled them to rob a talented musician of five per cent of the proceeds of his most successful recording. But far worse, they stole his reputation.

Categories
Cosmography

So What If It’s Sharia Law?

This image has nothing to do with the article, I just like it.
(Image by Glyn Lowe Photoworks via Flickr)

It didn’t take them long to find a hater, did it?

A Muslim – an Irish man, not a furriner – was talking on the radio about a hold-up with the new Muslim graveyard in Dundalk. They’ve been campaigning for this for six years, and thought they had secured it – only to be told by the local authority that, according to a law of 1888, all burials are supposed to be in a coffin. Islamic practice is to bury a person directly in the ground.

It should be a human interest story about a community unable to bury their own family members in the town where they live. But, someone has to phone in to complain that Muslims “Always want things their way”. Ireland’s Mr. Creeping Sharia.

Now don’t get me wrong, I revile Islam. The religion is anathema to me because… Well, because it’s a religion. I pretty much despise them all. Religions are dangerous confusions of morality and mythology, systems of absolute authority founded on fear of the different and the unknown.

Which you have every right to believe in. A right, what’s more, that I will defend to the death. This is what religious activists pretend not to understand about secularism. We don’t want to stop you doing your religion. We want to stop you stopping other people doing their religion. The law should not impose one person’s faith on another. Freedom of conscience is sacrosanct. I might think that what you believe causes a great deal of harm to you, but as long as it doesn’t cause you to harm others I have to respect your right to believe it.

Of course there will be times when beliefs and the law conflict, and it goes without saying that the law of the land has primacy – whatever the Catholic Church chooses to believe. But the entire point of democracy is that law can be changed. It is not holy writ, it is decided by people to suit their will and their changing needs. So we can accommodate other people’s traditions – if we want it to.

It would be different if the tradition could harm others, if say there was a danger of disease associated with coffinless burial, but I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting that. The law of 1888 serves no function now except to make life that much harder for a small minority. And it seems only to be supported by the sort of bigoted zero-sum shithead who phones into radio programmes to advocate making life harder for minorities.

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