Solstice Dusk

Educational Securitisation

2011-03-28T17:32:00.001+01:00

Could financial engineering techniques be used to solve the problems of sub prime schools?

Take the lowest graded pupils in a school. Destroy the link between the pupil and the grades and forget about the pupils – they are irrelevant. Take all the individual exam grades you have and cherry pick the best ones. You are bound to have an A in art here and a B in general studies there. Out of a hundred underachieving students, you should have enough decent grades there to create a dozen or so “super-senior” students. Plenty more will be investment grade (5 or more C level passes).

Hey presto. Financial engineering has been used to turn sub prime students into high value students - or Educational Diploma Backed Securities (EDBS). Triple A rated EDBS can be be sold on to top schools to boost their presence in the league tables.

Inevitably there will be a few tranches of sub investment grade – or junk – EDBS left over. Junk-rated EDBS is high risk but there might be some hedge funds who fancy their chances turning these students around. Obviously any junk-rated EDBS that went on to pass A levels or get good jobs would constitute a considerable achievement and the returns would be considerable, in terms of league table recognition.

Egypt riots. Made in America

2011-02-03T13:26:00.003Z

I copy here a very interesting comment in response to a WSJ article on Egypt. The author is Nikos Retsos, a retired professor:

Egypt’s turmoil is made in America. Here is what I see:
It has been announced in Cairo that the Egyptian army has asked the protesters to quit their protest and go go home. “Your voices were heard,” an army spokesman told demonstrators on Egyptian TV. “Go home now.” And that Egyptian army spokesman just reiterated Barack Obama’s statement to Egyptians earlier, which was “We heard your voices!” Was that a coincidence?

How the Egyptian army, which has promised earlier “it won’t quash the legitimate demands of the Great Egyptian people” became the mouthpiece of Barack Obama, and now tells the Egyptians to forget it? Well, politics have “TWO” phases: The “PUBLIC PHASE” which is usually a deceptive tactic to outmaneuver the enemy, a TROJAN HORSE, so to speak, and the “BEHIND TH SCENES” phase, which is what actually “the maneuver [the Trojan Horse] contains “INSIDE!”

Well, here is what happens in Egypt: Mubarak’s statement that he is leavings in September was a “Trojan Horse” designed by the U.S. and Israel with the same blueprint the Greeks used in Troy. “The Greeks told the Trojans that are leaving -like Mubarak did. And when the Trojans relaxed and let their guard down, the Greeks got out of the horse’s belly, attacked and conquered them!

The American Trojan Horse plan was brought to Egypt by the U.S. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom the U.S. dispatched to Egypt to salvage Mubarak with this plan: Step 1. Convincing the Egyptian army to publicly side with the demonstrators - TO GAIN THEIR TRUST! Step 2. Have Mubarak promise that he will be leaving when his term expires in September, and, until then, he will preside over an orderly transition - probably to pass control of the government to other strong pro-U.S. Egyptian politicians approved by the U.S. Step 3. Have the Egyptian army afterward tell the demonstrators: “Go home now. You have achieved your goals!”

And as the Trojan Horse helped the Greeks to achieve their goal, the American Trojan Horse seems to work for the U.S. and Mumarak by dividing the Egyptians. Will the Egyptians swallow the bait? The involvement of the Egyptian army on this plot to outmaneuver the revolution is quite treacherous, and I hope the Egyptian army will re-think the consequences, and it will have the guts to tell Admiral Mullen: Sorry, Sir. We cannot slaughter out people to save to save “your fetch boy” Mubarak!

Let’s not forget why the U.S. trains and equips foreign armies: TO CONTROL THEM! And it does not do that only with military hardware and training, but also with huge bribes, plus a guarantee of asylum to the U.S. with a hefty U.S. pension if need be. All former pro-U.S. South American dictators, and other military officials who formed “death Squads” with the CIA, are living luxury lives in sunny Florida. And that includes Luis Posada, a terrorist on CIA payroll who blew up a Cuban airliner. But Posada, and anyone killing U.S. foes, is considered a hero. Mubarak has killed hundreds of his people to keep Egypt under U.S. control, and he is a hero of the U.S. Industrial and Military Complex which controls Barack Obama and the US foreign policy. Neither the American people, nor Barack Obama, have control on what the U.S. government does globally. The investment barons and multinational corporations do under the so called “American Interests” which are above political parties and politicians.

The only question that remains in Egypt now is: Will the Egyptian army act like a U.S. puppet army to save Mubarak? Will the Egyptian generals become CIA puppets reminiscent Latin American generals Augusto Pinochet, Anastasio Somoza, Rios Mont, Jorge Videla, Alfredo Stroessner, and Raul Cedras, or the Vietnamese generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Van Cao Ky, and slaughter their people to protect American interests? We will see?

The Egyptian people shed their blood now, like the South Americans and the Vietnamese did in the last 50 years to shake off American puppet regimes. And if Obama is not an insidious hypocrite, he owns it to the Egyptian people to call Admiral Mullen in Cairo, and tell him to reverse course and tell the Egyptian army to protects the people, and force Mubarak out - like the Tunisian army chief, General Rachid Ammar did. There is history made in Egypt now. And I hope the Egyptian army follow the example of the Romanian army which relieved Romanians from Nicolae Ceausescu, and of the Tunisian army which relieved the Tunisians from Ben Ali. I hope the Egyptian generals remains on the right side of history, and that side is only inside the spirit of Gamal Abdel Nasser - not inside the American Trojan Horse of Admiral Mullen. The adage: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts [Trojan Horse],” should sound to Egyptians now as “Beware of Americans and Mubarak bearing democracy plans for you.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/simonnixon/2011/02/02/middle-east-turmoil-made-in-america/tab/comments/#comment-14

The phone is taking over!

2011-01-07T12:48:00.000Z

My first smartphone had implications for the other appliances I own but my recent upgrade to a Desire HD has signalled the real onset of a form of electronic colonisation in my life. The phenomenon occured to me in bed, shortly after retiring for the evening, when I noticed a surprising and at-first inexplicable resentment of my radio alarm clock. Thinking about it for a moment I realised I no longer wanted my alarm clock by my bed. Of course, my DHD is not the first phone I have had with alarm functionality. But it is the first phone I have had that has instilled in me the aggressive urge to consolidate all my electronic needs onto one device. Why should I use an alarm clock when I have my phone charging beside the bed? I thought. What is the point of sullying the area with unnecessary leads and clutter when my beautiful, portable phone does it all for me?

This thought brought with it the realisation that my phone was doing everything in its power to push everything else out of my life. The most obvious and immidiate casualty, and one that demonstrates that no appliance, no matter what status they hold in your life, is truly safe, is my Ipod: with the purchase of a 32gb SD card, the executive decision was taken that I would no longer carry around two gadgets, when one did the job. Obviously it has the added advantage of ensuring I do not miss phone calls when I am listening to loud music. The other obvious redundancy was my camera, although there will always be a time and a place for a dedicated camera and camcorder on special occasions, given the higher quality on offer, so perhaps in that instance redundancy is going a little too far. My old camera has been kept on in a consultant capacity.

The most tragic victim of the smartphone's increasingly expansionist domestic empire building is the laptop, which cuts a rather pathetic figure, lonely, all-but-forgotten in the corner of the room. For all the woes of the ipod, at least its fate was swift and sudden. Final. Like a top footballer whose career is ended prematurely by injury, it can, for all its sadness, reflect on a glorious career. But the laptop has seen its status reduced beyond all recognition, without the mercy of full retirement. It can go for weeks without being turned on or even thought of, before some task that can neither be done at work or easily on the phone comes up one evening and the poor thing has the dust blown off it and is brought back into the room. What is so bad about this? you might ask. It has, after all, retained a niche purpose, a role it can serve better than other products. And yet, like a warrior lying injured on the battlefield, slowly but surely bleeding out, its fate is inevitable. It is hard to see the laptop surviving the next generation of smartphones and tablets. Every day for the laptop is another day on electronic death row, without even the comfort of knowing the date of its execution.

The TV stands smugly, confident its 32 inch screen represents an offering no smartphone can ever hope to replicate or replace, but for its cousins, the remote controls, life is not so comfortable. The sky remote has already been stripped of one major responsibility, thanks to the Sky+ app. The fear has got to be that other functions will be lost over time.

Torches. Portable games consoles. Satnav. The list of territories conquored is already impressive. Your diary, note book, A-Z and newspaper would testify the injury has not been confined to the electronic. The question now is where it will end. The logical conclusion has got to be the complete elimination of all other electronic devices, so that each and every person can carry a single "phone" with them at all times, that can satisfy every need that can be envisaged over the course of the day. It is already easy to imagine the demise of DVDs and other media players, with files streamed off phones onto TVs. But eventually, although we are some way off it, presumably the phone could project high quality images onto projectors or blank walls, replacing televitions themselves. Will the Playstation 4, 5 or 6 be a desktop device, confined to bedrooms or living rooms, or will it be encapsulated within a pocket sized device, complete with all telecommunications, camera and other needs added on? The brightest minds in science are presumably already focussed on how to ensure vital appliances such as fridges and ovens can one day be squeezed out of the home.

Mel

2010-07-29T09:56:00.003+01:00

See today that Melanie Phillips has joined Twitter. Will have to follow her. That woman fascinates me. Her views are so abhorant I sometimes find it hard to believe the whole thing isnt a joke - like a more realistic Punch and Judy show. "SHE'S BEHIND YOU!"

The cutting agenda

2010-05-24T10:52:00.000+01:00

I have found Clegg’s repositioning on the issue of cuts this year disappointing. As I have said, I have no problem with compromises or changed minds. But politicians need to be more open and honest with the voters if they want to avoid being seen as just another lot of lying, power-hungry opportunists, doing what is necessary to keep themselves in power.

I would love to have heard Clegg say: "As you know the LDs were against making the cuts too soon. We still believe this to be the case. However, our Conservative partners won the most votes on a platform of promising cuts sooner rather than later, and therefore we feel they have a mandate to do that. We have made our concerns very clear, and have indicated the areas we think would be most harmful to an economic recovery.” Hopefully exceptions could be made if they had concerns in specific areas and they could say they had managed to influence policy in those areas, but conceded there was perhaps a little room for cutting in some other areas.

Another option, of course, would be to say: “Now we have seen the books, and considering what has happened with Greece, we feel we lost the argument on this one. In the current circumstances, the Tory position has been vindicated. Let’s get cutting.” Some kind of hybrid of the two would be perfectly acceptable too.

I guess the second option is more or less what they are saying, but I would like to see it put a little more explicitly. I just don’t buy this argument that they didn’t really know what was going on with our books: they might not have had the specifics but they must have known things were dire. Likewise, while the Greece situation has taken us by surprise with its ferocity, we all knew it was on the cards. That’s what this whole debate about the urgency of cutting has been about – maintaining the confidence of the markets. Greece is just a live show – a reminder about what the stakes of this game are.

Surely coalition government doesn’t have to be about reinventing or glossing over the past, refusing to ever admit you got something wrong or pretending the two parties agree on everything.

Maybe Im in the minority on this. Presumably political PR believes any admission of having made an error will be a sign of political weakness, a chink in the armour that other parties will exploit. Maybe, taking everybody into account, it is better to keep trying to sound omniscient, rather than take a more plain-spoken approach. But I personally would find it refreshing.

Over egging the pudding

2010-05-21T12:53:00.003+01:00

This whole "new politics" thing is starting to get a little cringeworthy now. As a soundbyte it did its job but it seems like too many people are being taken in by it, believing this is the start of a completely new political way of life.
It isnt. Its a marriage of convenience. If we are lucky it could lead to PR. There is every chance it wont. Whatever it is, it was imposed by political gridlock and financial crisis, not enlightened ideas about how to conduct the affairs of state.
Constantly going on about new politics like it is something tangible, some wonderful new idea conceived by Clegg and Cameron, just shows the Lib Dems (and Tories) to be as beholden to the other kind of PR (public relations) as Labour were. And that is what this whole thing is starting to remind me of: the new deal. What was that again? Some magic, hitherto undiscovered solution to society's ills? No, it was called living on borrowed money. Lets not go on and on about this until it is shown to be something equally vacuuous.
The Lib Dems and in government, in a coalition, with the Conservatives. Lets just see what they can get done and stop banging on about how clever we are, and how much better than Labour. Or we will end up just like them.

Banker bashing

2010-05-20T20:18:00.001+01:00

There’s a lot of banker bashing and anti finance sentiment out there. I understand that well enough. In terms of the sentiment behind it – the outrage that a sector can have caused such a lot of problems, and yet be so utterly immune to the repercussions of them. Of course I want “them” to be held to account. But who exactly is “them”? And more importantly, what can we do to put it right without hurting ourselves as much as we hurt them?

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the answers to these questions are.

What I have a slightly better idea about it the much easier issue of what some of the main pitfalls we need to avoid are. The biggest and most obvious of these – and the one we are currently marching directly towards – is that decisions are made for political reasons, rather than sound economic/financial ones – to quench this widespread feeling of outrage.

It is easy to rush out regulation to make life more difficult for bankers and other fat-cat finance types. It is easy to sell that regulation to angry voters, and the chances are this is a vote winning strategy in the short term.

But it is much harder to implement rules that will a) prevent the problems we have had in the past occurring again in the future (which must, at the end of the day, be the number one priority) b) reign in the excessive tendencies of some elements within the financial markets without penalising everyone else, (remember, many players in the financial markets are trading with money that belongs to everyday people: some of the biggest investors in the world are pension funds and endowments of educational establishments, and many of the hair-brained regulatory initiatives feeding through the system right now are going to lose them money – that is pensioners and students, not just bankers, who are out of pocket.) And c) how to do a) and b) without crippling our own economies, causing unemployment or one of the dreaded ‘flations (in or de, which will it be?).

It is easy to believe the finance industry is trying to use the politics of fear to blackmail the rest of society to leave it alone, threatening social and economic Armageddon if anyone tries to take away their bonuses. I don’t believe that for a minute. There is a way to rein them in without the price to society being too high to be worth paying. We may have to sacrifice some growth, but that is not necessarily the end of the world, when that growth manifests itself in things like unaffordably expensive housing.

But if this is going to happen right, it is also going to happen disappointingly slowly, as far as the public is concerned. And the measures, when they come, may not be sexy or spectacular. Public bloodletting of bankers and hedge fund managers might be satisfying, but it wont be helpful. Most importantly, it will require politicians around the world to put their differences aside and work together, compromising for the good of global financial cohesion, rather than short sighted national interest. Perhaps the recent political developments of the UK can serve as an example to the rest of the world.

In support of the new government

2010-05-17T11:19:00.003+01:00

I can understand why people are so ambivalent about this Lib Dem – Tory coalition, and my instinctive response to it was also negative. But the more I think about it the more I think it is for the best. It is the best of a collection of less-than-perfect outcomes. Which is a strange thing to say, I guess, given that with a relatively feeble performance at the election we (I keep saying “we” and then deleting and replacing with Lib Dems, but I am getting sick of doing it. To qualify, I am a Lib Dem voter, not a party member. But I do feel a certain loyalty to the party) have found ourselves with a taste of power.

Bottom line: we believe in PR. That system requires forming coalition governments based on what the public has voted for. If all the parties say, in effect: “We will never ally with the Tories” then PR is not representative or democratic. For better or worse, more people voted Tory at this election than for anyone else. So it is fair enough they be in office. Personally, I would rather the Lib Dems came in with them and exerted some influence over policy than the Tories had an outright majority and allowed their right wing to run riot.

And yes, this will involve compromises. But then, it’s not like we would be getting more Lib Dem policies through if we didn’t form part of this coalition. Given the choice of either 20% of our manifesto or 0%, I’d take 20%. And given the choice of 100% of the Tories’ or 80%, I’d take 80%. I actually think the compromises are pretty reasonable, in the main.

I’m sick to death – and its only been a couple of weeks – of people talking about how the two parties have been merged into one now, and hinting at the LDs as now being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tories (this position was most notably put forward, from what I have seen, by Mehdi Hasan on Question Time last week. For the record I thought he was great value. I imagine if the conversation hadn’t been predominantly about the coalition I would have agreed with a lot of what he said).

The LDs are not a subsidiary of the Conservatives. Of course both parties deserve to be represented in a debate, even if they both support the same government. They represent completely different people within the electorate, and have almost diametrically opposed ways of looking at life. When a Tory looks at criminal figures, he demands more prisons. When a Lib Dem looks at the same thing, he demands schools, youth clubs or economic opportunities, to try to prevent crime being committed in the first place. To most people in this country that sounds naïve. So be it.

So I understand those that believe the LDs are spiritually and in terms of policy closer to Labour. I just about agree (despite not liking Labour’s authoritarian streak, and finding the constant repetition about “tax credits for middle income families” faintly ludicrous in the context of the economic situation we are in. Trying to seduce the middle classes with goodies is SO 1997 – come on Brown, get with the programme: 2010 is all about manageable austerity). But that is not what people voted for. Let’s not feed the view that we are just a protest vote for alternative Labour voters by giving the impression we do not have the independence to go it alone.

I am proud the LD politicians who have their reservations about this have so far held their peace and seem to be trying to make it work. I appreciate a lot of what I said above has been said before. But I hope some of the criticisms of the party die down – at least those from within – and the debate turns to more constructive things.

Moral hazard

2008-07-24T13:26:00.000+01:00

There is a consensus among pretty much every mainstream politician from every party in the UK and most other countries in the West (no counting the Greens as mainstream) that the financial system we use is the best one available. Which is to say, there are not many Marxists left, besides good old Tony Benn.

Obviously the system has its problems – the two of the greatest concern to me being income inequality and environmental impact – but most would argue the system can be adapted to meet those challenges. I have my doubts – especially in the former case – I see no evidence that anyone has thought of a solution to the growing disparity between the poor and the rich. The “rising tide lifts all boats” argument is all well and good, but when you see the social degradation that seems to be an inevitable consequence of financial success you have to wonder whether things can keep going as they are.

But there is another well known problem with capitalism: moral hazard – the idea that capitalists, risk takers, the people with the money get paid to take risk and, in many cases, make a load more money, while when things go spectacularly wrong, (when it is the shirts off our backs they lose, not just their own) it is the taxpayer who bails them out. This is obviously an especially pertinent issue at the moment with what is going on with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and potentially dozens of other financial institutions in the US and Europe.

This problem inevitably leads to calls for greater accountability for these capitalist fat cats running the world’s banks, energy companies, mortgage lenders and others who put the system at risk. “Lock them up and throw away the key,” people cry with righteous indignation. It is a nice idea, in many ways: we are not asking for every bad executive decision to be met with a prison sentence, but for those taking excessive risk, knowing full well that they will be bailed out if things go wrong, to think twice about it.

Except we might as well hope for George Bush to be tried for war crimes in front of a jury comprising Iraqi widows. Because neither is going to happen. And what's more, it can’t really happen. There are too many executives from too many companies representing too large a proportion of the business world implicated in said excess. Letting them fail would do more harm than good, so you have to concentrate on trying to get it right before it happens again (in the next cycle). Sadly, by then people will find ways to argue things are different and the good times will lull people into forgetting all about this. It is how economic cycles work.

Apologists would also argue that, taken on a net basis, the system still works. It is high unlikely that more will be lost in this downturn than was earned during the bull market. If you look at the stock market since its inception, over practically any 20 year period the equity market has failed to make money – one notable exception being one 20 year period straddling the Depression (which goes to show that what is unlikely is not impossible).

At certain times things go wrong and the government has to step in. But for the most part the system generates wealth for people and governments alike. The trick will be to restrain the excesses - to create that magic wand that will allow the markets to be free on the upside and the down, but without putting the whole system at risk. But nobody – to my knowledge at least – knows how that can be achieved.

Who knows, this might even go some small way to redressing the inequality question: if the rich are allowed to lose all their money when something goes wrong, and the taxpayers’ money is spent more on bettering the lot of the poor than on reimbursing investors who lose their money in these financial crises, that can only be a good thing. It might also be an amusing spectacle, watching the rich lose all their money. Who knows, if someone can think of a way of turning it into a reality TV show, it might even happen.

Falafels in Regent's Park

2008-07-16T00:07:00.001+01:00

The green movement is defined by the people who are most convinced by it.

A month or so ago there was a green festival in Regent’s Park. It was a classic green event: organic bean burgers, veggie fajitas and falafels, flanked by homeopathy and acupuncture stalls. There were some displaying the gleaming marvel of the hybrid car. There was a bandstand with live music, which was going down well.

It was a good laugh – we went down as a family, met some friends and had some lunch, before having a wander and buying the odd hand-made wooden item from one of the many craft stalls. There was a good turn out and a reasonably diverse range of people – though the majority, of course, wore canvass shoes and hemp shirts. No harm in that.

Except.

Of course I have no problem at all with people having different tastes and lifestyles. I don’t even consider myself really different from them, except for our taste in clothes. In terms of outlook on the world I imagine we are closer than we are to many other people you would walk past on a busy street.

But that is the point. There are a lot of people out there who have very different outlooks and lifestyles. And a lot of these people regard global warming as just another way of fleecing people out of more money, via slightly-more-expensive energy-saving bulbs or organic food.

These are the people this event did not speak to. In fact, some people who happened to be walking in Regent’s Park that day might have come to the conclusion that organic veggie sausages and global warming are one and the same thing. Which they are not.

Of course they are linked. There are all sorts of problems associated with meat consumption and the farming required to cater to our gargantuan meat eating world population. I am an enthusiastic meat eater but this is something I am aware of. I would be prepared to pay more for meat for something that was, shall we say, environmentally kosher, though I acknowledge I am in the privileged position of being able to afford to do so. In my heart I think probably people should probably eat less meat in their diets but this is a bridge I am not prepared to walk over yet. I seem to be making fine progress on this side of the bank.

But I digress. The real point is that the whole environmentalist cause is closely associated with a kind of Glastonbury / Woodstock crowd that scares off a lot of other people. Worse still, to some it makes the issue look like a trend – like flares – rather than something of substance. In a way it is funny: one group see it as the young finding their cause – their Woodstock – while others see it as a great political con imposed from the top. (Despite the fact George Bush – who you would imagine would be in on any global conspiracy – was one of the last people to be persuaded by it.)

Lumping them all together (as they invariably are) means many see global warming as synonymous with joss sticks, spiritual healing and herbal ecstasy. It makes it seem a joke to people who are generally cynical and don’t believe in spiritual healing – and therefore, by extension, global warming.

(Again, if spiritual healing could take on the pharmaceutical companies I would be all for it, but sadly I am pretty sure it can’t. As a substitute, spiritual healing is no match for the veggie sausage – which has come on a long way in recent years.)

Perhaps more important though was the huge consumer element to the event. (And for more on why that is bad see the post I wrote a couple of days ago.) It seems it is impossible to have a gathering of people without people wanting to sell you something you don’t need. Or others – myself included – wanting to buy it.

It goes to show what a formidable force consumerism is. Changing that seems impossible – and is probably not desirable if it can instead be conducted in a more sustainable way. Consumerism is freedom, and freedom is consumerism. It needn’t have been, but it is now and it is hard to see how it can go back.

One final thought about that day in Regent’s Park: there was a Tory stall. They were handing balloons out to children. I know one father who was secretly delighted when his son’s balloon burst. I found the site of that stall astonishing (I don’t know why, in retrospect) and revolting in equal measure. You could take the view that it shows the breadth of appeal this issue now enjoys. I think there is a great deal of truth in that, but in this particular instance I think a wolf in sheep’s clothing is more what springs to mind.

One Perfect Sunrise

2008-07-13T01:16:00.001+01:00

To listen to One Perfect Sunrise by Orbital is to realise you have reached a very important landmark in your life; equal in importance to how Jesus' disciples felt when they heard the sermon on the mount. It’s a bit like: hang on a second, nothing will ever be the same again. But for the better.

At its best music transports you from wherever you are, away from everything but the song itself. Different types of music transport you to different places. Some are angry or indignant. Some are euphoric. Some are harder to put into words, other than to say they are heavenly – which is to say they conjure up the image of what heaven would be like. One Perfect Sunrise is certainly one of those. Orbital do those kinds of songs well. There are four or five others in a similar mould: Halcyon; Dwr Budr; Belfast. But One Perfect Sunrise is special for being the last song on the last album Orbital made.

I can’t think of another example of a band declaring its intention to disband and producing a final song so fitting of their legacy. It is a work of art equal in grace and beauty to the Sistine Chapel or The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Mona Lisa is a hag in comparison.

I often think about modern artists – be they musicians, DJs, rappers or whatever – in the pantheon of artistic greats over the ages. Of course Mozart is always going to be held in higher esteem than the Hartnoll brothers. And of course I am not seriously refuting that. But I do wonder what Mozart would be about if he was alive today. I can’t help but think he would be in the Orbital / Aphex Twin school of music. I think he would have had a crack at DJing too. (I can’t mix.) Sasha is the closest to what I think he might have been like, composing something unique, even though you are actually using other peoples’ music, by creating later upon layer of sound. That is why Northern Exposure is my favourite single album. Sasha and the Hartnoll brothers would have taken 1700’s European courts by storm.

The Kingdom

2008-07-13T00:19:00.004+01:00

I watched a film tonight that I had been really looking forward to. The Kingdom could have been really good. In the first fifteen minutes of the film I was struck – as I have been plenty of times before – by what a fascinating place Saudi Arabia is. I was well settled on the sofa, hoping for some insight into the lives of Saudis, political intrigue in the halls of power and some thought provoking hypothesising about the relationships between the extremists and members of the royal family.

There is very little of that in The Kingdom: what you have here is your average US action movie. And there is a place for that. As far as fairly formulaic terrorism films go, it was enjoyable enough. I liked the cast – there were a lot of people in it who I have enjoyed in other things (Michael out of Arrested Development, Lyla from Friday Night Lights and Ari from Entourage, for example).

The problem with formulaic, self-congratulatory, flag-waving American terrorism films is the complete focus they have on the highly moral, remarkably capable FBI agent, fighting to make the world a better place and get back to his loving family. It is not that I don’t believe in those characters – I’m sure there are plenty of them around, (though there are some less capable ones too – more films about FBI ineptitude please) – it is just that there are so many films about them.

To reiterate my original point, what I really wanted to know about was the lives of the Saudis. But far from revealing anything about them, they were dismissed, effectively, as utterly incompetent, one-dimensional characters, to a man. One Saudi policeman, charged with babysitting the Americans who visit the kingdom, comes good in the end. He also has children and wants to see an end to the violence, and in a touching exchange, the main American bloke proves he has grown fond of his Arab companion by asking his name. A real tear-jerker.

The Saudis, it seems, are incapable of investigating a terrorist strike themselves. But was it a cover up? A crippling lack of experience among the police and National Guard? There were certainly elements of both, but it was all rolled in together and portrayed as a demenour of generic uncooperativeness.

I know very little about the quality of the Saudi security services, and of course I would expect the US to have far more ability in this area. But I found it incredibly patronising that they were portrayed as so utterly hapless they hadn’t bothered to interview witnesses, examine evidence or do anything else at all by the time the US contingent had been flown in from Washington.

That observation, and resentment about the absence of any depth to the Saudi characters in the film, played on my mind throughout the film. Instead of an exposé of the highly complex and deeply fascinating world of Saudi politics, (or a film speculating intelligently about what those relationships might be in what, Ill admit, is a very secretive society), we got that formulaic, self-congratulatory, flag-waving American terrorism film. It could have been in New York, Los Angeles or London. The only difference would have been less frequent subtitles.

Are environmentalism and capitalism compatible?

2008-07-12T01:11:00.005+01:00

OK on the one hand the two are desperately trying to coexist, via carbon trading, the development of renewable technologies and – although this one is accidental – the massive rises in the price of oil.

There are plenty more areas, however, where the two forces are in opposition. Capitalism is synonymous with consumerism: capitalism works on the basis that people get paid to work in companies that produce things to sell. Regardless of whether they actually need them. Demand, where it does not occur naturally, has to be manufactured through ever-more sophisticated and invasive marketing. If the aim was to ensure every family had a car, that would not provide enough work to the masses of people who currently work for car companies. So the aim has to be for everyone to have a new car. So the world keeps making and making and making things and the old things have to be thrown away to make room for the new ones.

It is often said: “They don’t make things like they used to.” I wonder how many people consider the implications of this. People used to be made to last, because consumerism was in its infancy, and companies had not considered the possibility of reaching a point of saturation in their markets. So manufacturers were not concerned about whether they could sell a car to a family that already had one, because there were plenty of families without one to target.

Now items are made with a very limited shelf life. It is a balancing act: maintaining brand credibility through the perception of quality, while ensuring the need to replace products relatively frequently. And it is not only through things breaking down, and becoming “cheaper to replace than to fix.” It is through the holding back of innovations that have already been thought up in order to sell lesser innovations first. Don’t think that Gillette haven’t already had the idea of a razor with eight blades (for the closest ever shave). It is just that before that they have to surprise us with offerings with six and seven blades.

Everything is geared towards selling and consumption. And consumerism leads to the rapid consumption of the world’s finite resources. It makes any plans to curb energy consumption look largely fanciful: can efficiency gains offset the elevation of emerging economies to the same level of consumerism the West has enjoyed in recent decades? It is hard to see.

I have long counted myself as an economic liberal. I have been convinced of the case for free markets as a force for poverty reduction and the elevation of living standards around the world. (When emerging markets get stiffed by the West it is rarely free trade per se causing the problem, but the lack of its consistency in application. In essence, rich countries want free trade when it suits them, but protect their own workers when it doesn’t.)

But if the environmentalist agenda is to be taken seriously it is increasingly difficult to justify this view. The difficulty comes in settling on a viable alternative to the current political and economic system. Capitalism is too comfortable for people to relinquish it easily. It is system that rewards greed and channels it into productivity. There is no reason to suspect that a system that puts the planet above the individual will fare any better than one that tried to put society’s interests first (communism).

Following this line of thought, however, perhaps the next stage in history’s development will see the outbreak of environmentalist revolutions in countries particularly concerned about, or affected by, global warming and/ or resource depletion. Followed, presumably, by the emergence of environmentalist dictatorships. These would descend, over time, into the inevitably self serving and power hoarding cradles of corruption that is the fate of all but a handful of dictatorships, no matter how ideologically sound they were at the point of conception.

(This is not to say that democracies are not self serving or power hoarding, but that, when they work well, they recognise this trait in themselves, and seek to offset this tendency by diversifying the power bases in a system of checks and balances.)

Can democracy evolve away from unfettered capitalism towards environmentalism? Socialism wove itself into the fabric of democracy so that, in the main, it rose above party politics, so that in the UK we have a consensus that the state has to look after workers. Marx would presumably feel a little placated: the rich still get richer on the backs of the poor, but at least the poor get sick leave, paid holiday time and some oversight in the quality of their conditions. It is a lot less than he hoped for, but a vast improvement on what he was confronted with in his day.

And it is on this same trajectory that we are currently moving. Not a radical rethink of the system by which we live, but a moderation of the existing system in the right general direction. The question is: will this be enough? Will carbon trading, a few dozen windmills dotted around the country and, as Brown would remind us, a cut down in wastage be enough?

There is a definite generational divide in this debate and it is obvious treating the environmental situation as an impending cataclysmic event alienates many people – people of all ages, though the younger generation certainly see it as more serious. The older generation have lived through various threats to civilization and fancy this is just another issue that mankind will muddle through – like the Cold War or the Millennium Bug. And that is quite possibly true. But that is not to deny the problem: just as the Cold War left us with a legacy of problems around the world, so too will “The War on Carbon.”

A better analogy is probably the Industrial Revolution (in this context it is probably more helpful to think of it as the first stage in an ongoing revolution – or evolution). It became obvious the pollution caused by those early factories and mills had to be brought under control when London was caked in black soot. Industry cleaned its act up. The same with early urbanisation and hygiene, after plagues made it obvious city life demanded higher standards. We need to replicate those efforts, and perhaps once the full extent of the problem becomes clear it will be possible to adapt the system sufficiently to resolve the fundamental problems we have with our system.

Political engagement

2008-07-11T00:14:00.002+01:00

I've just been watching Question Time - one of the television highlights of the week. Amazed to hear the level of congratulation from some members of the audience, and self congratulation from Douglas Alexander, the Labour politician in attendance, about the G8 discussing the world food crisis.

Why should they deserve even the slightest bit of praise for that? They are politicians of the world’s richest countries; it is their job to discuss these issues. If they solved them they would deserve some credit. Talk about setting the benchmark low for political achievements.

It strikes me as being as damning about the level of engagement and expectation of the public with politics and its puppets as typical election turnouts. The former certainly helps explain the latter: if you are only voting for which face is going to turn up to a conference and talk about something (without making any progress towards actually doing anything useful, you understand) then why bother taking the time out of your day?

It isn’t quite as simple as that, of course. Either that or I am more optimistic than many. I am enormously frustrated by politics and the inability of politicians to resolve the problems that face them. But it doesn’t stop me being interested in it.