The Furrowed Brow
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What is Gen. Musharraf so afraid of if 'he' has Nawaz Sharif arrested and then deported?
Who orchistrated the violence against members of the Sharifs PML-N party across the country calling them 'trouble makers'?
Dictatorship or democracy, is now the time for Pakistan to make up its mind?
For those still interested in the debate, I can confirm that it is indeed the case (in my recent experience) that vehicles made by Volvo are hugely disproportionately responsible for the instances of car headlights turned on in bright daylight. Do please boycott them if you value my eyesight when it comes to my cardio-thoracic surgery duties...
... and speed humps are hugely disproportionately responsible for the instances of car headlights dazzling oncoming drivers and/or causing them to think they are being invited to cross in front of the vehicle negotiating the hump.
VH @3, there may also be rumours in at least one London borough that speed bumps mean that ambulances can't fulfil their function properly, and heart patients die on the way to Emergency units because the mobile defibrilators can't be installed properly en route, or some such.
Does anyone have any follow-up on this? I heard it a while back when someone on a R4 programme was being rude about the humps, but I don't have any more information than that.
To most Tories - state regulations are just another form of state control (nationalisation by stealth) – last month John Redwood told us that the next Tory government will remove state regulations, this week John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith tell us they plan to introduce more state regulations. Does David Cameron believe that a Tory nanny is wiser than a Labour nanny or is a nanny okay as long as she is green?
In just a few weeks Gordon Brown has been transformed from the iron chancellor to a very malleable prime minister. Not so long ago in his previous job Mr Brown was unyielding in his determination that there would be no budging from the two per cent pay limit on public sector pay imposed in order to keep the lid on inflation.
Recently it emerged that after a bit of muscle flexing by the public sector unions, Mr Brown has promptly capitulated and has approved inflation-busting pay rises for public sector staff. In effect he is bribing the public sector unions to keep them sweet, using taxpayers’ money.
The Labour administration has previous form of such cowardice in the face of union bullying. Two years ago, after strike threats from mouthy public sector union bosses, ministers scrapped plans for a much-needed reform of unsustainable public sector pensions. Experts recommended that the retirement age should be increased from 60 to 65, but this was abandoned for existing staff in the face of union pressure.
As a result I think we are storing up huge, unaffordable liabilities for our children and grandchildren. According an estimate by the Institute of Economic Affairs the public sector pension deficit is equivalent to a £1.025 trillion – and that’s not a typing error – black hole in the economy. Average earners would face tax rises of at least £2,000 a year to pay for these pensions. By 2045 taxpayers will be shouldering a £90 billion a year burden to subsidise generous public sector pensions.
People who work in the private sector – whose own dreams of retirement have been shattered partly by Mr Brown’s tax raid on company pensions – face having to work until 67 or later in order to fund gold-plated, inflation-proofed pensions for public sector workers who can retire at 60. Where’s the fairness in that?
One might think there would be protests in the streets or at least some political pressure to address this obvious inequity. But here’s the rub; the public sector now employs more than 5.8 million people – one in five of the working population in England, rising to 24 per cent in Scotland and 30 per cent in Northern Ireland.
Add that to the almost eight million people who are not working and you have a formidable voting block of almost 14 million non-productive people who have a vested interest in higher taxes and benefits and more comfy sinecures in the public sector. It is a cosy arrangement – they vote Labour and in return the government rewards them with lavish benefits, pay and, of course, pensions.
Such is the power of the public sector lobby that not even the Conservatives have any plans for meaningful reform. Very agreeable for some perhaps, but completely calamitous for the economy and a disaster for those productive workers who will have to pay the ruinous tax bills in 50 years’ time.
MOTP I disagree with nearly everything you have written. But don't have time to refute you line by line. Inflation is caused by many factors, including the raising of interest rates. Public sector pay rises only have to be funded in part, because the government deducts at least 33% at source.
If this develops into anything, I may come back. In the meantime, see if you can revive share prices in order to restore pension funds, and get energy prices down to bring down other prices too.
Re ASBOs not working as mentioned in the PM Newsletter.
ASBOs will not work in one sense - they will not prevent anti-social behaviour happening.
However they work very well in another sense - they give the police a very effective way of bringing people who persistently offend back before the courts. I believe that this was their true purpose, whatever gloss was given by the politicos.
(6)
The usual Tory gibberish.
So it would only cost 1 billion by 2045 to give everyone such a pension.
Well, I'd accept that - - by pooling the private pensions funding and govt chipping in the billion and having an equal divi up.
A rich man having a funded pension for 2020 is just as much a claim on my grandchildren as is taxing them then.
They, the young, still have to produce THEN all the goods they will consume and all the goods the old will consume.
If my grandchildern look after those with dementia it absorbs the same amount of their work effort whether the demented have funded care packages or whether it comes out of (then) current taxation.
Go back to PPE school, David Cameron.
Would anyone care to endorse my idea for a maximum wage, applicable to Members of Parliament, maybe to players of football, etc? Maybe you could think it through, because I haven’t - yet.
Dr. H: Consider it endorsed! But I'd apply it across the spectrum (i.e. to include 'Captains of Industry', Film Stars, and all celebs (Sorry, Eddie, no exceptions for you, either!)
I'd work out something along the lines of - a minimum wage for all, plus agreed increments for things like: training, popularity, productivity, etc., so that there would be incentives in there, but of the type that don't preclude anyone in principle.
I think I'd better run for the air raid shelter quickly before the mob get me.
Jason Good @ 8, something in me finds ASBOs a cause for anxiety.
I have a feeling that the problem with ASBOs has been said to be that it is possible, using them, to eliminate the courts from the matter and 'convict' people without going through the awkward necessity of actually charging them in court and getting a conviction. If this is the case, ASBOs may 'work' in a way that seems slightly disquieting, since the reasons for their being made in the first place seem to vary a great deal with respect to the area in which they are given out rather than with respect to the actual offence that may have been committed. I'm not happy about allegations being accepted as fact, in other words.
'Anti-social behaviour' is said to cover for example a person whose mentality doesn't conform with what is regarded as the norm *looking over his garden fence* and thereby annoying his next-door neighbours. If it is possible to get an ASBO given to such a person on such grounds, in some areas, it's rather disquieting. At least, I find it so. This may be an exaggerated case, just as I'm sure that being proud of ASBOs is exaggerated, but it's worrying none the less because it rather implies that one person's complaint can make another person's freedom more dubious.
(The wording of the law also makes it possible for them to be used instead of a 'sectioning order', which may reduce the paperwork but isn't going to help someone with bipolar disorder so's you'd notice, I wouldn't have thought.)
Things that bypass the courts or the usual channels are nearly always misused in *some* cases, it seems to me, and there ought to be a system in place for checking the business. The idea that allegations need to be *proved* before they are used to alter someone's life seems to me to be iimportant, and I don't think that the point of view of a single person, whether a member of the public, a private policeman, or a magistrate, reporting or being reported to on someone else's 'anti-social behaviour', really amounts to proof that the 'villain' needs to be punished -- particularly since ASBOs are said not to be about punishment but about prevention. Allegations *must* be properly investigated, since they may have a life-long effect on the person about whom they are made if as a result of them someone gets a prison sentence, and I'm not convinced that this is always done in the case of ASBOs.
urg. For 'private policeman' in my last, please read just 'policeman'. Though I suppose someone in a security firm is a private policeman, that wasn't what I meant.
Dr. H: That's made me feel faintly smug. Like you, though, I think it's entirely unnecessary. Do you think they're colluding with Exide (other battery manufacturers are available)?
Incidentally, I think you'll find it's the case with Saabs.
DR H. (10), Big Sis (11):
Agreed completely. Make the maximum wage a set multiple of the minimum wage and include all perks at a set valuation rate.
The usual argument against this is that the top people will go where they can get the most money, so there will be a talent drain (or a fat-cat drain). I say it might be an idea to have people running companies who were interested in the job and the industry, rather than how much they make feather their own nests.
Sorry about my number blindness earlier, but the point still remains that no matter how its funded food drink and shelter to the old is exactly the same burden.
The numbers, £90 billion, £1.025 trillion etc suffer as they stand from a lack of context.
£90 billion at today's prices? What will National income be in 2045 then?
The 1.025 trillion - over how many years is that?
The tax 'burden' - -is it really a burden to the rich to pay proper taxes.
I thought people like Anita Roddick saw it as an honour to pay large tax bills. And the thing about taxation is that we the people get to decide how it should be spent rather than a single philanthropist deciding.
I want another nibble at Si's Tory piece, please.
It costs 500 quid a week all found in a West London old people's care home and maybe half that for an old person to be up and running under their own steam
Say by 2050 1/3 of the population is over retirement age and 1/4 of them in care homes.
So that the average pensioner is absorbing about £16,000 a year, SAY!!!!
Then that 1/3 of the population is well belwo its per capita share of National Income.
'Cos Si, if you over pay the ricjh you've got to tax it back.
If you divi-ed up the National Inome equally in the first place the tax burden would be zero.
Then you'd be happy? Or is your piece really about something else?
Re DIY (1)
well after the 'interview' with John Bolton on Monday eve, I now have the answer!
DIY (I just love the U.S.)
As I've spelt out elsewhere American academia offers the view that majority voting is fatally flawed and the only way to run a society that is rational, certainly honest, and allows even one person a proper set of rights is DICTATORSHIP!!!
(See again the link and Discussion 25 there for the dictatorship result. The Gibbard and Sen Theorems cover the other claims)
The theorems (called the Impossibility Theorems) filter through in the minds of advisors etc to dictatorships America likes and democracies she doesn't like.
Indeed here in England I saw the Theorems taught 'unanswered' to PGs from Iran, Iraq and African countries which were by no means democracies.
Is/Was it any surprise that we were unable to convince those contries peacefully that majority voting is desirable. Our academics concentrate on the opposite rhetorics!
To see how pernicious those theorems can be at a personal level I'll tell you about a major American academic who believes majority voting should be abolished. For him it causes nothing but confusion.
So what do you do if you want to change society, then?
Well, this academic was the only person in (email) contact with the Unabomber during the last two years of his freedom.
The two had been 'dynanical systems' theorists together at a much earlier stage.
This academic is known for particular arguments against majority voting and for the advocacy of a positional voting system (allocating points on the basis of the palce of each candidate in each voter's list) instead.
To support that view he has recourse to some philosophical arguments. Very bad ones in fact, he is no philosopher.
The curious thing is that the arguments he deploys against majority voting don't apply to it but DO apply to his preferred system.
It is not difficult to see . (You will have to retrieve the Discussions from archives on the Talk page there (Click on the blue double arrow icon at Removed Edit, to see how odd the claims are. The Wiki editor there doesn't like his hommage to his tutor marred by criticism of him))
One wonders what the Unabomber made of these claims of his friend as he misinformed him about majority voting and told him about a preferred system that is CLEARLY flawed. (And usefully so - see below)
i think we can count ourselves very lucky the Unabomber was stopped when he was.
What others seeking to convert society make of the American academic position I leave you to judge. The problem in part is that social scientists are mesmerised by fancy mathematicians and usually fancy mathematicians have little grasp of social philosophy. All of these attacks on democracy rest on downright bad philosphy expressed in high brow mathematical terms - with which most gradiates are unfamiliar.
If you ask why the proper resolution of these theorems is not taught whilst the theorems themselves are, the answer is simple. The theorems discourage political control of unfettered market systems and American academics get further up the greasy pole arguing against voting and for markets.
As I say, some palpably bad resolutions of the problems the Theorems present ARE tolerated in British and American academia They have useful purpose.
The way they are used is this. The theorems are presented as indisputable. The poor quality resolutions are presented as FAILED attempts (which they are) to resolve the Theorems.
'You see students, people have tried to overcome the Theorems but none can' is the message given out. These false solutions also commit crude philosophical errors in the language of advanced (?,!) mathematics.
Good grief!!!
byeee....
Mollyxx
The question, the answer, the silence.
The more I think about that sequence the more I realise its importance.
For Eddie Mair's first rate question illicited an answer which explains the Iraq War in a nutshell - as well as all the other things DIY, Molly and all, have commented on.
America had not in the least encouraged democracy in Iraq. In fact she had discouraged it using Saddam as a 'bastion' against Iran.
In threatening to invade Iraq in the cause of democracy she wrong footed Iraq society. No one in Iraq believed that she would or that if she did invade it was not to bring democracy.
(Remember the scepticism of the Iraqis in the Basra area as to whether Saddam would even be toppled).
The threat wrong footed the young Iraqi intelligensia precisely because among America's academic social scientists, the cleverest and the best, those equippped with the highest of high brow maths had been saying for decades that democracy was flawed and dictatorship rational.
This steady stream of anti - majority voting academic polemic was fed by America into Iraq via Iraqi post grads sent overseas to the UK and USA and by American advisors in Bagdad.
(The damage the theory did to the anti - Apartheid struggle by encouraging reactionary southern African whites is something I have detailed elsewhere).
And this US academic stream believes what it preaches.
America and American academia in particular was not equipped to argue for democracy at the time of 9/11. In fact just the opposite. Dictatorship was acknowledged as a legitimate indeed advantageous form by America's right wing academics - especially her economists.
It would have required years of careful argument, both inside America and in Bagdad, to persuade Iraq that democracy was a preferable future for her and that only majority rule could protect the rights of the Sunnis, the Shi'ites etc.
(Think how long that argument took in South Africa).
But America wanted war so that Middle East oil was firmly under her control, so that she had a major land army based in the Arabian peninsula and so that how the world thinks of America should be in terms of 'Shock and Awe' and US soldiers on the streets of Bagdad rather than 9/11 planes flying into the Twin Towers.
War then, because America does not value democracy enough. War, then, because American academics who find majority voting 'irrational' held the field. War because their influnce was felt in Washington and Bagdad.
War because these academics have disporportionate influence on the way America conducts policy.
(Its a frightening memory that, when she was gathering herself for her privatisation push, Thatcher would take herself off to educational 'institutes' in London to sit at the feet (literally) of F. A.Hayek, a pro - market economist who in '78 - '81 was largely unknown to mainstream economists here).
War, because America could not take the time and trouble to clear its own stables of anti - democratic thinking. War because she could not take the time carefully to argue the case for democracy in all those client state dictatorships she was and is fostering.
War, then, in Iraq because America does not beleive ultimately in democracy at home or abroad but in 'American strategic interest'. As Eddie Mair so brilliantly demonstrated in his interview.
War then because American strategic interests will not allow democracy to flourish.
Politician, flag & priest. In all the world I love them least. When nations wage their bloody wars, 'tis they alone have been the cause.
Those scientists who insist that race does not exist claim that Humans stopped evolving many thousands of years ago. But have all species also stopped evolving?
We are constantly being told that species are dying out at an unprecedented rate and given estimates of how many species went extinct last year.
However we never see any estimates of how many new species came into being last year. It would seem that God has stopped creating new species and when we have used up what we currently have there will be no species left at all?
We learn from the fossil record that in the past species used to come and go all the time. They thrive for a while then go extinct and are replaced by a new lot and so on. But it seems that this process has stopped?
So why did God stop creating new species and when was the last one created? Scientists are silent on this matter, but assure us that we are fast running out of species, a non renewable resource.
While mortgage rates are set to clime, the flight to continues.
It seems the 'smart money' is going into government debt and thus driving the price of same up and its yield (effective interest rate) down. The 'target rate for federal funds is 5.25%, but if you look at the charts, you'll see the effective yield on 30 year bonds has fallen to 4.641% and continues falling.
Time to move to 'safe havens' to weather the coming storm?
xx
ed
Still nibbling at Si on the elderly. (Thats good, innit? The F. Brow keeps you thinking till
'We get it straight or say good night
We can work it out')
Isn't the place to start, to work out how much we're prepared to give the elderly?
Like maintenance arragements. Are they full adults, including the care they receive? Or 0.8 or 1.5?
When life expectency is 90 are those over 60 to be allocated about 1/3 of National Income (net of investment) in total?
Whatever we decide, that seems to me to be the most important question. That moral judgement as to how much product each sector, here the aged, should be able to absorb.
After that how it is to be funded seems an unimportant question and how it IS actually funded makes no difference to the productive effort required in supporting them.
Personally I think we should support the old to the same standard we support employed adults.
Why they reward each other differently all trying as hard as they can, all giving of their best, is one of life's perpetual mysteries as far as I'm concerned.
Like I said, why should the 6th person home in the London marathon get less prize money than the first home?
You think the 6th person home wasn't trying or should be less well off than the fifth person home and so on?
So the old at 85 should be treated differently, be given better care, if they were graduates or if they bought their council house in London in the eighties than if they worked all their lives in a clothing factory in Leicester or travelled half way round the world to pick cockles in Morecombe Bay?
Shouldn't all these people be treated equally well and as well as we can afford?
To fix minds remember that someone on benefits in England is on world average income (the Stern Report).
To fix minds remember the cost of global warming and the cost of eliminating world poverty.
And of course the cost of looking after our elderly.
After all that is dealt with is there anything at all that could usefully be left to the markets?
How else can all that be dealt with except by equality? World equality?
And you were saying about the tax bills the rich face to help look after the old?
Know-all columnist Will Hutton, writing in the Observer at the weekend, said of the Tube workers' strike that it "has only confirmed millions of people's doubts about unionism" and reminded people of the "trigger-happy striking of the 1970s and 80s."
Hutton then contradicted himself by claiming that the trade unions have lost six million members since the 1980s, while forgetting that union membership flourished when workers were taking industrial action to protect their living standards and jobs.
Hutton's amnesia extends to the draconian anti-trade union laws, the vilifying of trade unions by his mass media and the effects of privatisation across the public sector.
The unelected Hutton, who claims to know what millions of people think, joins in the media demonisation of elected RMT leader Bob Crow, referring to him as an "ex-communist and member of the awkward squad."
The truth is that, when workers overwhelmingly elect to go on strike to protect their living standards and pensions, it always brings more workers back into the trade union movement and encourages other unions to consider taking action to defend their jobs and fight for a decent wage.
This is the real fear that anti-union hacks like Hutton have and why they pour scorn on militant trade unionism.
mac;
What did I say (supposedly)? There is nothing by me on this thread.
Stop dragging me into your hypothesising on absolute equality for all. I've made no comment on the elderly anywhere. So whoever you *think* it might be, it ain't me.
Make your points using your own arguments. Back them up with hard fact. Quote your sources. Make it coherent, so that it doesn''t read like the musings of someone on hallucinogenic drugs and I might even read one of your posts from beginning to end.
Other than that; I repeat, leave me out.
Si.
iSi, sorry, I thought you were Man in the Street.
None of what I said needs referencing. Its a suggestion as to how we should decide how to treat the elderly.
If you want a reference to a economic system that could deliver whatever ti is we decide, try L. Pasinetti's Lectures in the Theory of Production.
The advantage of the systems he analyses there is that we can decide in advance what goods we need (from bandages for the elderly to houses for the homeless in Nairobi) and then choose the production system that best delivers them.
The point STILL remains that having decided how much of the national effort is to be devoted to the old, whether it is funded from taxation or by employee contribution or through a separate fund the burden on the future is exactly the same.
iSi, sorry to annoy you. It wasn't my intention.
Cheers,
imac.
FT Fong (23)
Can you name a scientist who claims "that we are fast running out of species"?
God doesn't make species - natural selection and random mutation do that.
Sid
Si, being quoted as having said something you haven't is nothing new, is it? I'm becoming quite inured to being called a leftie here on the basis of things I haven't said, by people who seem to have no idea whatsoever about my poitical affiliations if any, for example.
I've pretty-much decided to take it as flattery, in fact: folk with little to say but who reckon that attack is the best form of defence latch onto my name as a stalking-horse? well bless their little cotton socks, let 'em: hard words butter no parsnips, or something. :-)
I'm not sure mac falls into that category, on account of mac *does* seem to have something to say, mind, and just aimed it at the wrong person. I can't quite work out who it *is* aimed at.... possibly at Fate, Chance, Kings and Desperate Men, and I now await enlightenment. Mac?
MOTP (6)
You didn't answer me before, and I doubt you will again; but for the record, if taxpayers contribute £90 billion to 'generous' public service pensions, they would get £15 million each (assuming there are 6 million of them and they all retire and are all still alive). More than that, actually - since that is not the whole bill, just a subsidy. Now that's what I call generous!
You make a foolish dichotomy between 'productive' and 'non-productive' workers. I'm a teacher; if I teach a child to read and write and add up, and they set up a factory to make and sell things, have I not contributed?
You don't say which public servants get 'lavish' wages from the government. I don't suppose there's any point asking you to let us know who they are?
Sid
Sid @ 31, I don't know about these lavish payments, but a bloke I know who works for DEFRA gets pay low enough for him to qualify for housing benefit, as a single man living alone. That doesn't seem to me to be a case of gross overpayment. But maybe DEFRA employees aren't public servants.
mac, sorry: I wrote myy comment before yours appeared, and all is now cleared up. It was Desperate Men your comments were aimed at, right?
I thought it might be nice to have a smoothed brow.
With iPM in mind.
As a computer user seeing what enthusiasts are on about (in terms of its potentials) and how rapidly the world is changing is something that has come to me one step at a time.
Haltingly sometimes too.
But inevitably.
On one occassion of such an advance a memory suddenly triggered.
I was being inducted into the Hull Uni. system in 1986.
Suddenly a memory 30 years old overtook me.
My mind went back to those David Attenborough programmes in black and white in the 50's like Zoo Quest (where he hunted Dragon Lizards).
In one programme on the Malaysian archipeligo he came across Dyak people living in huts on stilts spearing fish from dug out canoes wearing loin cloths and sporting rich dark hair cut in exact almost Mary Quant - style Beatles haircuts. Attentborough was the first Westerner they'd seen.
I saw the programme in the council house I was brought up in, my dad a West London man, a gardener, through and through, my mother his posh voiced wife from North London. I was studying maths physics and chemistry in a London school. I got there on the tube and played Elvis records on my gramophone when I got home.
I just could not do one of the exercises the inductors at Hull had given us (No change there then).
I turned to the person next to me. She was wearing a summer dress in bold blue and green stripes.
The memeory hit me like a hammer.
I blurted out, without the remotest possibility of stopping myself:
'Excuse me' (my mother's influence) 'but you're a Dyak aren't you?'
One of the great embarrassing moments in the history of WASP males? Well yes, except that she was and came from the very village Attenborough filmed.
Her grandfather was very prominent in the film and she had made a brief appearance in her mother's arms.
She explained to me how to do the exercise. I was thrilled. The world had been turned upside down as it should be.
If all changes are as sweet as that then bring i on!!!
My first realisation of the power of the web as such is so politically fraught that I'm going to tell you a 'translated' version of it.
Not now though. That's enough brow smoothing for one evening.
Sweet dreams.
Thanks for that, Mac.
Goodnight all
ed