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Humour Technology

The Guardian Monster

London Underground roundel logo
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Oh the Guardian, that normally well-regarded major UK newspaper, has had a ****ing brilliant idea. You see, if you read a story in the online version of the paper, you can share it on Facebook using their app.

Actually if you are logged into Facebook – even in another browser window you’ve forgotten is still open – it automatically posts the article you’re reading. It does say when you install it that the app will share what you read, but I don’t think the casual user will immediately realise this means “without even asking”. I certainly bloody didn’t.

So at long last, the Guardian has managed to fully automate the process of having someone reading over your shoulder. In this way online readers all over the world can partake of the authentic crowded London tube experience.

But that’s not even the worst part. The link it posts doesn’t actually go to the article, it – yes – offers to install the app. So you accept because you want to read the story. All your friends will then see what you’ve read and install the app so they can read it, which will tell all their friends what they’ve read… This thing is going to spread exactly like a virus.

Indeed the figures seem to be bearing that out. Two weeks ago, after being out only a month, they had their millionth install. At that rate we have about one week left to enjoy Facebook before it collapses under the sheer weight of Guardian links.

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Humour Politics

Psychodrachma

Photo of a young Hoagy Carmichael, published b...
My name is Bond. Collapsing Bond

I woke up this morning with just one thought in my head: As James Bond does most of his work outside his home country, he should apply for an International Licence to Kill.

The subconscious mind is weird, yet annoyingly trivial.

Anyway, the G20. Thought this is basically just another of those international showcase conferences where everyone makes the right noises and little of real substance is done, it did act as a deadline for the EU leaders to have their house looking pretty. Like a station mass, if you will. So they – Sarkozy in particular, as host – were not well pleased when Greece crapped on the doorstep. Batting the EU leaders’ kind offer back with a referendum threat has sent the markets into turmoil once more, just when Sarkozy and Merkel wanted to impress the world with their authoritative grip on the situation. It makes them look helpless and incompetent, so naturally they are enraged. It is now all right therefore to talk openly about dumping Greece unceremoniously out of the euro.

Greece will probably not hold the referendum – there is severe doubt that Papandreou could win the parliamentary vote necessary to hold one anyway – but I am making plans in case the opposite manifests, and it returns to its own currency. It’s a nice place to live. It has weather and wine, as well as all the olives and history you can eat. And when its currency is free to float again it will float ever downwards, as their relaxed taxation chases after their optimistic expenditure. So if I move there, but live on what I’m making here, I’m going to be relatively wealthy – increasingly so indeed. I’ll hardly need to work at all.

So that’s my retirement sorted. Unless Ireland leaves the euro too, in which case I’m buggered.

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Politics

Economics For Dummies

A Kouros, from the Archaic period. Archaeologi...
Beware Of Greeks Bearing Left

The Greeks played a game of brinkmanship and got a huge debt write-down from it. What did they learn from that? To do more brinkmanship.

So they’re getting a referendum on whether they’ll accept better terms, while we give it away without even a vote in parliament. €700 million to people who should, if they were treated like anyone else in a free market, have simply lost their money.

From this the banks learn that they can lend to people who can’t afford it and still make a profit, because those who did not the make the mistake of borrowing will be forced, by their government, to pay them back.

So what do we learn? That major international banks are our enemy, that the only way to fight them is to threaten the whole European economy, and our government is too supine to do that for us so the people will have to do it themselves.

Yes, some interesting lessons today.

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Humour Politics

Three Billion Between The Couch Cushions

Nuclear weapon test Mike (yield 10.4 Mt) on En...
You can't tell me that's not pretty

What’s three billion here or there?

Well… On the whole I think it’s better over here. If no one minds. Can I help you search for any more loose change? Whatever help you need, just ask. I’m not an accountant, but I could hardly be less competent than the shower you seem to have now.

Maybe it’s time to look more closely at the Department of Finance. While Ministers and Taoisigh must bear primary responsibility, the Department was the enabler of their problem. Could they be, you know, not actually very good? If they can just stumble across three billion here, how can we be sure that another few haven’t fallen through the cracks over the years?

Or maybe we could just forget about that for now and emphasise the upside. It’s three billion we didn’t know we had, the repayments we’re making on our children are already scheduled, so the obvious thing to do is get some real value out of it – with a big treat to cheer us all up.

As it should happen, today is the anniversary of the first hydrogen bomb – “For those times when ordinary nuclear weapons just aren’t enough”. Fifty-nine years they’ve been around, isn’t it high time we had one? And maybe a nice missile to show it in.

Then we’ll see how the bailout renegotiations go.

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Politics

The Democratic Post-Mortem

The campaign car of Joseph McGuinness, who won...
It’s taking a while, but it’s happening

Having done nothing to repudiate the last administration’s nationalisation of private debts, what did the government expect? The only reason the judge’s pay referendum passed was that a lot of the public thought it would hurt lawyers, whom after the Tribunal bills they hate almost as much.

People have had it demonstrated to them quite clearly that one party cannot (or won’t) do anything to reverse the mistakes of another. It makes it look like government is powerless in the face of our financial dependence on the EU. Which, when it comes down to it, seems to really mean dependence on major continental banks – the very banks by and large who lent excessively to ours. It should be eye-opening that the candidate of Sinn Féin, the only major party that declares it would repudiate the banks debts, out-polled Fine Gael‘s two to one.

Democracy has been suborned by capitalism when it should have been circumscribing it, and now it begins to feel like an exercise in futility. What sort of turnout is 52% for the most fiercely-contested Presidential election in the history of the state plus two referendums? Half of the population don’t think there’s any point. And the worrying thing is, they may be the half that’s right.

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Cosmography Humour

Tim Minchin Live In Galway

Darkside (Tim Minchin album)
Yipee

You know this wouldn’t be a bad lecture or TED talk, on the necessity of critical thinking. Dammit, it would make a pretty timely address to the United Nations too. Imagine that – a guy with a piano on the floor of the General Assembly.

But it’s none of these. It’s a comedy show – and a brilliant one.

Tim Minchin is a stand-up. It’s just that most of his routines rhyme and scan and are set to great music. It’s almost excessive in its wonderfulness, yet unlike other ostensibly clever comedians we could name Ricky Gervais, it’s not about him being clever. It’s about reality, honesty, and where we fail at them.

But it is clever. What did we do before we had comedy this smart? We were laughing at mud and funny-shaped pebbles. More than clever though, it is wise. Insightful, humanistic, brave stuff that takes a stand against a world full of willful ignorance. Is there an audience for that? Well 400 people in a venue in Ireland just gleefully applauded a song with the chorus “F*** the m*********ing Pope”.

And that’s two nights in a row, downstairs in the Radisson as part of the Bulmers Pear Galway Comedy Festival. Which took me aback. I thought I was into something a little bit obscure here, yet even way out west, in a country where Minchin has, to my knowledge, never even been on terrestrial TV, an enthusiastic capacity crowd gave him a standing ovation.

There’s hope for our species yet.

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Politics

Sinn Féin Out On The Final Count

Martin Mc Guinness.
My Goodness

It says a lot about the state of the parties in Ireland right now that the ‘government’ candidate and Sinn Féin’s were neck-and-neck all the way. In fact as I write they’ve just been eliminated together.

A quick explanation: In the Single Transferable Vote electoral system, you number candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference. Votes are initially distributed according to the first preference, after which the candidate with the fewest is eliminated and the votes that went to them are transferred to the one marked as second. This process continues until one candidate has a ‘quota’ of votes, which in a presidential election is simply 50% of the valid poll. (If someone had gotten over 50% of the first preference votes the contest would have been over then and there of course, but that rarely happens.)

This is good because it takes into account the fact that voters may not only prefer one candidate, but particularly despise another. For instance I gave Seán Gallagher my seventh preference – out of seven candidates.  (I could actually have not numbered him at all, but mathematically it would have made no difference.)  A simple majority system can actually help the most-despised get elected, if their opposition is split among the less objectionable candidates. A case in point is 1990, where it would have given us Brian Lenihan Snr as President.

Sinn Féin’s McGuinness and Fine Gael‘s Mitchell were eliminated simultaneously because distributing the next-preference votes of either could not have elected the other, a logically valid time-saver. It is now theoretically possible that their redistributed votes could push Seán Gallagher over the finish line ahead of Michael D. Higgins in the most astonishing electoral reversal since, well, since yesterday. But that won’t happen. Both Sinn Féin and Fine Gael voters are going to strongly prefer the official Labour candidate over the unofficial Fianna Fáil. In fact all other candidates have conceded, so the count is something of a formality at this stage.

But to get back to the original point, Michael D. was never really seen as representative of government – perhaps because he’s a socialist. Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell was taken by the electorate to be the official candidate of a government swept to power in February on a mandate for change – yet there is little between his vote and that for the man who is widely believed to have been leader of the IRA. I was surprised by this. I really thought Martin McGuinness would do better.

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Politics

It’s A Halloween Miracle

Presidential Election Campaign 2011 - Michael D
Ladies, Gentlemen, The President

Kind of a weak headline I know, but I have a rule about not using the C-word before November. Winter during an economic recession is depressing enough.

But wow, what an electoral rollercoaster ride. You have to ask if the polls were ever right about Gallagher’s huge lead. What I’d be most curious about is how the people who said they were going to vote to pollsters compare to the numbers who actually bothered. The Michael D. vote probably represented more loyalty.

Well this comes as a relief. I think we would have regretted a Gallagher presidency.

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Politics

No On Both Referendums

"Well Connected" - Photo Irish Independent

Turnout is low. Too low.

Late in the day as it is, I want to urge people to get out and reject both referendums. There is a lot of confusion about them, I do not think government has paid sufficient attention to explaining them – in itself a reason to refuse their request for a change – and in particular there seems to be misunderstanding over the judges’ pay issue with many associating it with the exorbitant legal costs, of the Tribunals in particular.

The legal profession does need to be reined in, but this amendment simply has nothing to do with that. It is the fees charged by barristers and law firms that make legal action so expensive. Judges are paid by the state, and the cost of employing them is almost trivial by comparison.

Of course reducing their pay would save some cash. But not a lot, and it would come at the price of a very important principle. What is there to stop a future government, with a bill being tested in the Supreme Court for constitutionality, threatening judges with drastic pay reductions? If this amendment passes, nothing.

The independence of the judiciary is essential to a free country, and we shouldn’t even be dreaming of compromising it.

As for the other amendment, I think the Oireachtas should have the power to hold parliamentary enquiries. But I would rather we did without them for a bit longer than give excessive powers to government. This amendment seems very vague, and I simply can’t believe that broad new powers for TDs and Senators won’t end up being abused for political ends. We need to examine this more carefully.

And as for the Presidency, that’s turned from a fun game into a desperate last-minute attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of Fianna Fáil. You may not be a fan of Michael D., but he’s the only one now who can prevent our next President being a man who, increasingly, looks like a new Bertie Ahern.

Please, get out there and help.

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Politics

So How Will I Vote?

The Presidential Flag

Great feeling of power here. Because the polls open soon there’s a reporting moratorium. Broadcast media have to shut up about the Presidential election. Print media don’t though. So today, blogging is officially print… If you want to be sure not to break any laws, print this off and only read that.

Two things sadden me about the election. The first is that the man who is within an ace of becoming our next President was until recently a member of Fianna Fáil. To my mind he still is in all but name. The McGuinness ambush may have been rather tabloidesque, but at least it alerted a much larger section of the public to this. It doesn’t matter a damn whether he collected a cheque personally, if it was before or after the event or if the donor had a criminal conviction. What matters is that Seán Gallagher was fundraising for Fianna Fáil right into the Cowen era. Surely that is enough to disqualify him as a prospective President.

The other thing is that the case for Michael D. Higgins never seems to have been made somehow. It looked for a good while that he was simply going to drift into the Presidency mainly on the strength of there being nothing particularly wrong with him. Which would have been a shame really, because he is probably the candidate with the most positives. He’s a nice man with a genuine, active interest in justice and human rights, very much in the mould of Mary Robinson. I believe there are more good reasons to vote for Michael D. than anyone.

OK yeah, I kind of wanted David Norris to win. But that wasn’t for good reasons. More for the entertainment potential. It’s gone beyond fun and games now though. No one but the mild-mannered academic socialist can prevent the next President of Ireland being a product of our worst ever government.

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