Schrödinger's Ballot Box

In normal circumstances, today would be no different to any other with its mixture of joy, miracles and pleasantries and tragedies, anger and mourning.  Except we are in the course of a General Election campaign, ten days out from polling day and this is the point that the Labour vote nosedives.  This has happened for three decades now and has oft been explained by 'undecided' or wavering part of the electorate plumping for economic competence, traditionally believed to be the preserve of the Conservative Party.  Even in the heady days of 1997, the support for Labour collapsed by about ten percentage points, to ensure that Tony Blair bagged (or indeed blagged) fewer votes than John Major in 1992, though partially this was due to Labour supporters tactically voting for Liberal Democrat candidates to oust (or suppress) Conservatives.
Ironically, tactical voting may increase the Labour turnout as Unionists in Scotland try and keep out SNP candidates from winning seats.  Yet in England and Wales, the fear that Labour may be in hock to determined Scottish National Party zealots (though Ed Miliband could call the SNP's bluff and dare them to vote down a Labour government) has had its effect.  My mum is wavering in her vote because of fear of damaging the Union if she votes Labour and a Labour-SNP informal alliance is a hot-button issue in all the marginals Labour hopes to win.  Partly to scotch such talk south of the border and to say to former Labour supporters north of the border that a vote for the SNP isn't a surrogate protest vote for the Labour Party, Ed Miliband has ruled out even a 'confidence-and-supply' arrangement with the SNP.  Of course, by enough people not voting Labour because of the 'threat' of a Labour-SNP deal, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Labour becoming the largest party but falling short of an overall majority so far as to not be able even to team up with the Lib Dems (who will lose around half their seats).  It's the electoral equivalent for floating voters of Schrödinger's Cat.

Athens versus Rome

On the website of the Dogs Trust, it says it was formed 123 years ago.  While this is impressive, it is somewhat misleading.  The National Canine Defence League (NCDL) was formed in the late Victorian era, not the Dogs Trust - that rebranding occurred in 2003.  Also the NCDL began life in 1891 at the first Crufts - now I know that calendar years can overlap actual years (King George III reigned from 1760 to 1820 but that constituted 59 years and 96 days) but as Crufts on its own website refuses to delineate the date beyond '1891' but this year's Crufts took place in March, so unless there has been a drastic change in scheduling over the past century and a quarter and in the absence of countervailing evidence, the dogs charity was founded 124 years ago, though why this (mis)information needs be on the home page (instead of the e.g. 'background' page) is another matter.
It throws me back to an article Joe Klein did on Time magazine's backpage.  He had come across Harold Macmillan's advice that Britain "should play Athens to America's Rome," though like Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it," Macmillan may never have said it, as I cannot find reference to when, where or to whom he said it.  The former British prime minister did say, "these Americans represent the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go." and to Richard Crossman, we "are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ* [Allied Forces HeadQuarters] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius."
Anyway, like John Bolton (or Mr Pastry Face as cartoonist Steve Bell labelled him), the cantankerous George W Bush US ambassador to  the United Nations, Klein took umbrage at Macmillan's alleged both-ways patronising observation.  Mr Pastry Face fumed that 'flyover country' thought it could knock off 'rough colonial edges' through self-perceived 'superior suaveness'.  Klein, the author of Primary Colors (writing under a pseudonym, it was a close critique of Bill Clinton's first presidential election campaign) and infinitely more urbane than the Dubaya appointee, took issue on historical and geopolitical grounds.  His irritation burning on the page, he said that the roles should be reversed.  Britain was the Roman Empire, enforcing dominion over a quarter of the world through military means and America was Athens, a trading empire bringing civilisation and enlightenment to the known world, cultivating friendship rather than conquering others (tell that to the ancient inhabitants of Melos and the modern-day inhabitants of Grenada).
Put like that, the Dogs Trust faux pas doesn't seem so bad.  There are many American parallels with Rome - the dysfunctional political system, the overweening military - the US Navy has currently 325,000 personnel on active duty and a further 100,000 in reserve, ten times the size of the Royal Navy at the latter's height - that Eisenhower so feared the military-industrial complex, the ruthless approach to friends and foes, but above a claim to 'exceptionalism', the 'city on the hill', the final empire.  As Greece, Britain's age of geopolitical pre-eminence was over but its culture would still shine out, influencing the USA as much as the other way around and if you look at the repeated 'British invasions' of cultural, especially, musical icons, this is borne out.
Britain acquired an empire primarily to forestall others, first the French, then the Russians, finally the Germans.  This formed the basis of 'The Great Game' or, as the Russians called it, 'The Tournament of Shadows'.  It wasn't an accidental empire by any means but it came out of Palmerston's dictum "trade where possible, empire where necessary."  Rome's rise to greatness was to crush all of its rivals, where as Britain deliberately eschewed building a large standing army in the home islands and played European balance of power politics - you couldn't get further from a Roman empire if you tried.
If we are to compare Britain to Greece, one might look at other European vassals of the USA as Greek too.  The UK is Ptolemaic Egypt, heir to an old empire but much reduced and a willing collaborator with Rome.  France is Macedon, militarily proud and, with the Peloponnese under its thumb, a centre of great learning and culture in its own right.  Germany is Seleucia, driven by military reverses to be shorn of its eastern provinces and though truncated into modern-day Syria and Lebanon, still strategically important.  Spain is like Crete with a precarious economy and the Netherlands is like Rhodes, carrying so much trade in container ships that go through Rotterdam and far more gloriously in its past.  Russia is like the Carthaginian empire after the Second Punic War and America is like Rome approaching the end of the Republic but before Sulla marched on the Eternal City.  Imperfect parallels maybe but the power of Macmillan's apocryphal saying endures.

Promises, promises

What a surprise.  The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) rated the Liberal Democrats as having the most transparent, best costed manifesto of the major national parties.  It always is the case with the Lib Dems but precious little good it does them the way the electoral system is stacked.  What was most amusing was that The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph both cited the IFS as their major web headlines but with diametrically opposed slants.  Now coming from each stable that maybe isn't a surprise, except that that they're both quoting from from the same 'impartial' organisation.  The Guardian had it that a £30bn black hole in spending had been exposed and The Telegraph that the Tories were the 'only party' who could 'balance the books'.  As incompatible as these statements first appear, there is wriggle room but The Telegraph are the ones it seems stretching the truth the most (especially when it says the IFS declares that Labour will spend less on the NHS than the Tories - in trying to shoot the Labour goose on the NHS, they make Labour sound more financially prudent).  Though it is highly unlikely that I would ever vote Tory, I would never rule it out as that would deny me my democratic rights at my own hand, yet I have been very unimpressed by how vague the Conservative manifesto is this time around - evasive about where the cuts will fall, uncosted spending and tax cuts for the well-off, it all appears very unprofessional compared to manifestos of Labour and Lib Dems.  It may be about not committing oneself at the prospect of another coalition or unduly frightening the horses, I mean the votes, but it is disappointing that a party in government can not be clearer to the electorate about where it wants to take the country.

New tricks

The joy of a parent is seeing a child progress from total dependency to making ever greater strides towards independence.  Last night, with the spare mobile phone I gave her after I upgraded, she was taking photos of her meal (pasta pesto bolognese).  This morning, she work up at 7.30 a.m.  My wife heard this 'clump-clump' as she climbed out of her cot, her feet hitting the floor.  Kimberley walked along the corridor, down the stairs, took her nappy off and used the potty.  She then spent ten minutes downstairs in the living room playing before coming upstairs to demand attention from us (specifically Altaa; I stayed asleep).  That ten minutes of self-play will increase with time.

Son et lumière et fury

Turkey is a country of contrasts.  An advocate of public free speech, one can be prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ if one calls the historically proven fact of the massacre of 1.5m-2m Armenians 100 years ago  ‘genocide’.  A member of NATO and seemingly close to the West, it has been steadily eroding its attitude to democracy and human rights.  It practises freedom of the press but locks up more journalists than Russia.

Comparing with Russia is apposite, if only as a yardstick as how a democracy can revert to authoritarianism.  Leviathan, by Andrey Zvyagintsev, received 35% of its funding from the Russian Ministry of Culture, yet was an unflinching, if oblique, critique of the forces that govern Russia today. The Russian Ministry of Culture subsequently altered its rules on funding yet it still got made in a reactionary climate.  Bakur (North), the first ever documentary set in the camps of the Turkish-outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was set to open the Istanbul International Film Festival before being pulled only hours before the screening.  Organisers received a letter from the Turkish Ministry of Culture claiming the film did not have the required registration certificate.

Now protest can take many forms, not just putting bodies on streets with placards.  Complying with the directive from Ankara prompted more than 100 film-makers to publish an open letter decrying government ‘oppression and censorship’.  More than 23 Turkish film-makers withdrew their entries from the festival, undermining the latter to the extent that the organisers announced that all competitions – and the closing ceremony – were cancelled.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will probably not lose too much sleep over such protests – indeed, it may do him some good ahead of June’s General Election as his conservative, Islamic base, the bedrock of the success of his Justice and Workers’ Party, will view it as another example of the secular, liberal elite trying to smear their leader.  But that it provoked such a furious reaction from the artistic community with the coded warning to the film festival’s organisers, proves that though the country may be free from military interference in politics, plurality is nevertheless under threat.

Twitter services and other social media have been interrupted on several occasions.  It will not have been lost on Ankara that Twitter was the main method of communication among those involved in the abortive Green revolution in Iran and the later Arab Spring.  Other echoes of the Arab Spring also are grim – the arrest of a 16-year old boy for insulting the president is eerily reminiscent of Syrian schoolchildren being taken into police custody and maltreated for daubing some anti-President Bashar al-Assad graffiti, the catalyst for what has become the Syrian civil war.  It is not surprising that Erdoğan should turn inwards to assert his power, given the comprehensive failure of his foreign policy vision, with relations with the EU at an all-time low, his (only recently mended) break with Israel and the supposed neo-Ottoman outreach to the Middle East torn asunder by Assad completely ignoring his advice.  A film that chronicles an internal rebellion is too near the knuckle for Ankara.

Maybe the allegations of a threat to free speech should be treated with caution as sour grapes from the traditional secular ruling nomenclatura who have lost out in the new political settlement that Erdoğan has forged.  In the immediate years after the 9/11 attacks in the USA, it became very fraught to criticise the George W Bush administration, the country and western band the Dixie Chicks finding to their cost (and leading to their recanting their disavowal of support); something similar happened when Miss Turkey recited a poem critical of Mr Erdoğan.  But whereas after eight years Bush’s approval ratings were less than 30% and he could serve no more terms, Erdoğan sees little slippage in his general popularity and takes this as validation to go on and on.  If June’s elections go his way and his party can change the constitution to deliver ever greater powers to the formerly symbolic role of president, more protests against the curtailment of artistic freedom seem certain but there will be a greater sentiment just to keep quit altogether.

Do the ice bucket challenge - big of him

It never fails to amuse when the criminals bungle so badly as to effectively hand themselves in and sign confessions.  Facebook has become a sort of honey trap for low intelligence lowlife bragging about their burgled goods - the term 'thick as thieves' gaining new meaning.  But it can entrap others who are so careful in their lives except when it comes to leaving a digital footprint.
One such was ex-soldier, Andrew O'Clee, who, despite marrying his first wife Michelle in 2008, liked the institution so much that he married again in 2011 to Philippa, whilst still being married to Michelle.  Forging the decree absolute, he tricked his blood family into thinking that he was divorced from Michelle.  Meanwhile, he pretended with Michelle that a fraud case had caused him to enter the Witness Protection Programme, causing him to be away from home for long periods.  He knew what worked because he used the same kind of platinum engagement ring to ask successfully for Philippa's hand.  It all worked so well until the charity craze Ice Bucket Challenge reared its chilly head.
Tagged in a video of his taking the challenge with his second wife, as 'Uncle Andrew and Auntie Philippa', it popped up on the newsfeed of Michelle's sister who saw it on Andrew's brother's page (well they were all once related and technically still were) - the cheating doofus had forgotten the primary medium for the masses of the Ice Bucket Challenge was via Facebook!  From there, Michelle found that 'Auntie Philippa' had a profile picture of her marrying Andrew, along with a whole trove of photos of the second wedding, which she submitted to the police.  After the trial, 'Uncle Andrew' was subsequently jailed for eight months for bigamy.  He'll soon have a real decree absolute to add to his forged one for his records with Michelle sure to take him for every thing she can but where do his assets end and those of Auntie Philippa (who has stood by her now undivided man) begin?  The lawyers must be licking their lips.

(Ink) Stains on Society

Today, another slew of journalistic lowlife walked free from a court case hanging over them as the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all charges against them.  Yesterday, several other hacks were acquitted of conspiracy to corrupt public servants - it seems juries are more willing to convict those policemen, prison officers, etc. who accept the bribes than the journalists who wafted the money under the noses in the first place.  This probably stems from a deep-seated British aversion to jailing journalists, fearful of emulating more repressive regimes around the world.  One Chinese investigative reporter was handed a seven-year prison sentence for exposing a secret communist document mandating a crack down on western values, democracy, civil liberties and the rights of the individual.
It's a fine sentiment but no-one is above the law, even though many journalists thought they were.  If someone has committed a crime, they deserve to be punished, irrespective of their profession.  The Court of Appeal is on the side of wrongdoers, saying that the severity of offence is not one that should be brought before the courts.  This all follows on from the ludicrous acquittal of Rebekah Brooks and her coterie - it is inconceivable that when having a deep-rooted love affair with Andy Coulson that they did not talk shop, pertinently phone hacking - passion and plausible deniability are not natural bedfellows, unlike Brooks (then Wade) and Coulson.  Coulson himself was only convicted because he admitted he hacked phones and claimed he thought it wasn't illegal - if he hadn't condemned himself out of his own mouth, the jury might have been moved to acquit him as well.  In seeking to assert British values of freedom of speech, juries are unwittingly undermining judicial process - another core British pillar of our rights.  Had they suffered as did Christopher Jefferies or the family of Milly Dowler, they may have been of a different opinion but doesn't that expose something rotten at the heart of British society?
The Leveson inquiry was supposed to lance this boil.  Countless reporters and editors (including the likable Ian Hislop) decried its recommendations, saying there was no need for reform as existing law was being enforced.  The hollowness of that argument is apparent today.  Industrial phone-hacking and blagging went on but it seems no-one is responsible for all that.  Now, two parallel codes of conduct are in operation - the one drawn up and run by the editors and the other set up by royal charter (the latter not dissimilar to that used by Denmark, that bastion of oppression).  By not joining the royal charter code of conduct, editors are potentially exposing themselves to severe financial penalties in libel cases (even if they win, they still have to pay their own costs) - it seems a price they are willing to pay if they can continue to trash the lives of ordinary people and shirk impartiality.  And, unless they are directly affected, the British people are happy to abet them in this.

Tourists go now while the chance is still there

When the USSR ceased to exist on Christmas Day 1991, President George Bush as he was then simply known (middle initials HW requiring addition from 2001 onwards) went on national television and intoned seriously about the 'end of communism'.  That the most populous country in the world was still communist, former adversaries North Korea and Vietnam maintained their socialist regimes and a small country ninety miles of the coast of America seemed to elude him.
Cuba, which had slipped the then president's mind at the time, was being deliberately recognised by a successor.  But when Barack Obama declaimed that the "Cold War was over," he wasn't forgetting about East Asia, but providing a rationale for burying the hatchet with Havana.  Shaking hands with Raúl Castro is a defining moment and it take a brave president to break off relations now, despite Marco Rubio's protestations.  Finally, Cuba will begin the shed its battered Fifties timewarp reality and the lives of the people will improve.  It's not foregone that a middle-class will lead to democracy but it's more likely that Cuba will now come under pressure from its neighbours to liberalise now that it is no longer a martyr.

Hanging on the telephone

Just a few days after thinking Labour can secure a majority in England and Wales alone, along comes a Guardian/ICM poll which puts the Tories into a six-point lead, potentially enough to secure David Cameron without the hassle of a coalition (although with the hassle of truculent backbenchers wishing to exert maximum leverage from a wafer-thin majority).  It certainly is in contrast to a slew of other polls putting Labour in the lead and even the pollsters themselves admit that the sample "may be a touch too Tory" and "within the margin of error, but only just."  Then the critical factor emerges - it was a phone interview.
Bob Worcester, the veteran pollster, was wariest of all of write-in polls ('voodoo polls' in his words) but telephone polling wasn't far behind.  Invariably, such call outs will be done to those who possess landlines i.e. have listed numbers unlike mobiles.  And those who possess a landline phone (these days) and are at home when called tend to be the well-off and pensioners, both groups more likely to vote for right-wing stability, in the British case in the form of the Conservative Party.  Though an outlier, conversely it may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, galvanising the Tory grassroots troops and demoralising the Labour side, such is the fragility of the new normal in British politics.

Day blah of the election campaign

While most publications came out denouncing the viciously personal attack by the gregarious Defence Secretary Michael Fallon (and all Tory interviewees refused to repeat or support his words), The Daily Mail, that stalwart purveyor of the ad hominem diatribe, claimed it to be "refreshing" to see such poison, I mean, passion into the electoral campaign.  But it is no surprise that Paul Dacre and his cohorts should enjoy Fallon's outburst accusing the Labour leader of treachery, both within his family and on the international stage - The Wail after all published a highly dubious feature on the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, Ed's dad, with the banner headline "The Man Who Hated Britain" with a sidebar editorial saying the 'sins of the father' would be transmitted to those of the son.  When Miliband was given a right of reply, it was a marginalised piece fighting for attention with a reprint of the direly contentious feature (which was twice as big) on the same inside page spread.
If religion is the opium of the masses, in the opinion of Karl Marx, then The Daily Mail is the strychnine, in mine.  The famously smudgeable ink must have psychotropic attributes as it is absorbed into the bloodstream of the readers to make them suggestible and susceptible to such rancid claptrap.  But maybe Miliband could take it as a compliment that he is feared by the right-wing tabloids.  The (non-)revelation that he had a 'secret' relationship with the "BBC's Stephanie Flanders' shows how desperate the hacks have become - Ed must be red because he was bumping ugly with an employee of a dastardly left-wing bastion.  It also gave them a reason to publish a very comely picture of Ms Flanders in power boots and elegant stitchings.  As UKIP sheds support, with as many 'returning home' to Labour as to the Conservatives, the main party of opposition enjoying a buoyantly healthy lead in London over the Tories (despite Boris 'The Animal' Johnson's efforts) and Miliband finally drawing ahead of David Cameron in the personal competency stakes, a Labour wipeout in Scotland may be academic.  For all talk of a hung parliament, Labour may just scrape a tiny majority.  We shall see as Labour support over the last 45 years always nosedives ten days out from the ballot boxes being placed in situ but at the moment that is small consolation for the propaganda machines of the right-wing press.
However, for the first time since the campaign started, The Daily Telegraph ran with a main story critical of the Tories over a refusal to maintain a two per cent level of GDP spending on defence.  And here we return to Fallon's hyperbole about Miliband kowtowing to the SNP and ditching the UK's nuclear 'deterrent', thus betraying the country.  Just get rid of the £30bn per annum useless phallic submarines and the mutliple warhead-tipped wangs they carry.  Of the four Trident submarines only one is ever on active duty - would the Americans, under whose nuclear umbrella Germany, Italy and Spain happily exist, be really concerned about the depletion of NATO forces by one submarine?  It's not really independent as it couldn't be used without the say-so of the Americans anyway.  It is just a keyring fob on the ignition key of the American juggernaut.  It fires up Scottish nationalists by being based at Faslane thus endangering the UK's constitutional integrity.  It would never be used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or against ISIS and Russia is a declining power that is resulting to media disinformation and cyber attack precisely because it can't compete militarily (much of its nuclear force is inoperable for that matter, for so long have they rusted in their silos).  To give them up would not endanger the UK's permanent seat on the UN Security Council, not that this country really deserves such a seat these days but wielding a veto would block any attempt at defenestration.  Finally, it would be a wonderful example to the world and especially to Iran that the West can show humility and genuine commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world.  And Britain could easily meet its two per cent of GDP target by spending it on military hardware that will get an outing.  As Professor Paul Kennedy said in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, just as the construction and subsequent possession of a few dreadnoughts by Austria-Hungary and Piedmontese Italy pre-Great War was a sign of weakness (being relatively insignificant powers) rather than strength, so is ownership of an expensive vanity deterrent that isn't even independent.

House of Geek

I am shocked and outraged, nay incandescent (lightbulb) with fury.  Though my respect for the cartoon Inspector Gadget knows no limits - indeed I am listening to the theme right now as I type this - I have just learned (secondhand) that @misfitsmedia may have said that the iPad was inspired by Penny's book from the series.  Scandalous!  The iPad was clearly inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation - you often see Geordi LaForge and his cohorts in Engineering carrying about a touch-screen tablet device, a far closer approximation than Penny's multi-operational tome.  Sure, Inspector Gadget has the heads-up chronology, the final episode screened over a year before Star Trek: TNG's first, but the two devices look nothing alike.  I'm sure Levar Burton would have something to say on this were he to know.
And don't get me started on Ed Miliband's recent admission that Rosamund Pike would make a great Bond.  Is this an April Fool's Joke?  Talented and sexy as she is, Pike could never be Bond,  Has no-one heard of Modesty Blaise?  Idris Elba is too old (Chiwetel Ejiofor on the other hand, however...), Pike has too much vagina.
If we're going to be geeky, let's just get it right.  Please.

International round-up of the important games

There were some grudge matches in international football this week but I really have't had time much to put my thoughts down.  Of course, the highlight has to be the battle of the minnows - Lichtenstein versus San Marino.  The former are actually moving up in the world, having recently beaten Moldova away (a first competitive away win in almost 20 years) while San Marino remains resolutely at the bottom of the world (rankings at least).  So, technically, it was a mismatch and lived up to that with a prosaic win for the Alpine principality over (allegedly) Earth's oldest republic.  Luxembourg had their hearts broken with their opponents Turkey scoring in the 87th minute to take the game 2-1.  Panama took on their upwardly mobile World Cup Quarter-finals (and it could have been so much more) neighbours Cost Rica and promptly lost.  Belarus hosted Gabon in one of this planet's more unlikely pairings (not unlike the Chinese-Albanian axis of the 1960s) - one of those games which seemed to have been arranged for the connivance of match fixers.  The pitch action was nothing toe write home about (once Mink's security services had steamed open then resealed the envelopes), the hosts winning 1-0.  Maybe the fixture was more an opportunity for dignitaries on both sides to swap notes on democracy suppression.  Oh and England and Italy played out some 90 minutes together.