Markets say Obama's policies will extend recession

The WSJ:

What's worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President's policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.

Third sector hurting, public sector bearing up well

The wires are humming with the news that the National Trust for Scotland is to lay off a fifth of its full-time workforce.  Given the carnage in the private sector, it was probably inevitable that the damage would extend to the third sector.

Still, civil servants are all right. No pain there. Obviously, their pension schemes are not looking quite so healthy as a year or so back, so us in the private sector are going to have to keep working quite a bit longer to keep their retirements nice and comfortable. 

Funny expression, civil servant, isn't it? When the master gets laid off, normally the servants are the next to go. It's different for civil servants apparently. Civil would seem to carry the extra meaning of "cannot be got rid of". Or maybe "cannot be afforded".

More on the origins of the credit crunch

Apologies for the slow posting. I've been laid a bit low for a couple of days.

My search for the origins of the credit crunch goes on. Having watched this video of a big-time American financial whizz (with the most delightful James Stewart accent to boot) explaining what happened, I think I may finally be beginning to get the gist of it.

This is relevant too.

Some new blogs

My recent spleen venting over the Home Education review has won me some kind words and links from various HE bloggers, so here, returning the compliment, are some links back.

What shall we do today?

Renegade parent

Head-desk

Blogging can throw together some fairly unlikely bedfellows, but with the coming of the civil liberties crisis (if that isn't too strong a phrase) I think things are likely to get stranger still. I've been having an interesting conversation over at Head-desk in particular, and I think it's fair to say that the site's owner is quite surprised to find herself engaging with someone quite as wild-eyed as me. It's rather cool really.

I've not yet had a guest posting on civil liberties from a star of kinky sex films, as has Heresiarch, but I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises to come before we're done. By the way, if you haven't read about civil liberties and kinky sex, I urge you to do so.

MPs vote to keep their addresses secret

MPs are clearly rattled by the Jacqui Smith affair - can't have the proles knowing how the second homes scam works. They are covering their tracks just as fast as they possibly can. As Spy Blog notes, the cockroaches have voted to keep details of their constituency homes secret.

Getting children to sign up for the database state

The government is lying.

That's not news, of course. Babies puke, teenagers mope, and politicians tell you any old cack they think they can get away with.

So what are they up to this time? According to a report by ARCH (Action on Rights for Children), the government has been telling local authorities that children from "around the age of 12" can usually give their consent to the sharing of personal information across government departments. Some local authorities have responded by telling their staff that from the age of 12, it is lawful for children to disclose information about themselves, their parents and their families without their parents' knowledge.

It turns out however that this advice is not actually a reflection of the law. It's more like wishful thinking, both on the part of politicians and civil servants. There is one minor upside to all this deceit, and that is that individual civil servants could apparently be held personally responsible if they follow up on the government's advice and start sharing data with only the children's consent. It's rare to find anyone in the public sector being held responsible for anything (it's called "democratic accountability") and a few penpushers being flung in the clink would be sure to encourager les autres.

Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncomfortably reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with children encouraged to inform on their parents by an overweening state?

Banning the Dutch prime minister

LabourHome is reporting that if an election were to be held in the Netherlands today, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party would probably emerge as the largest in the Dutch parliament.

Which would give Jacqui Smith the amusing problem of having to ban the Dutch prime minister from these shores.

de Soto on the credit crunch

Another interesting article explaining the credit crunch, this time by the eminent economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto spends a lot of time examining the importance of private property rights and how the lack on them prevents poor people improving their lives. This time though he's looking at how some rich people, namely the bankers, lost track of their property by securitising it and how this contributed to the global meltdown.

Something going down

What's happening to the press? Philip Pullman's article on civil liberties in the Times has disappeared into the ether, as apparently has one in the Daily Mail reporting that the BBC's Robert Peston was acting as a government stooge who was being fed stories by Downing Street that might distract attention from the size of the bale-out. The Mail story is still extant. The Pullman article though now seems to have disappeared from the Google cache too.

Here it is, just in case:

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum

On having a revolution

It's often said that the British people no longer care enough about being free to have a revolution. Some do, of course, but the naysayers respond that those who care are too few and too cowed.

I thought of this, when I read the back of a book that was lying on my bookshelves waiting to be read. It was David McCullough's "John Adams", the biography of the second American president which formed the basis of the recent TV series (if you missed it, it was brilliant). Here's the quote:

There was no American nation, no army at the start, no sweeping popular support for rebellion, nor much promise of success. No rebelling people had ever broken free from the grip of colonial empire, and those we call patriots were also celarly traitors to the King.

Maybe we're not so badly positioned after all.

Alcohol Concern: "We're not fakes, honest!"

Good to see that fakecharities.org is back up again, and making an impact to boot. That august publication Charity Finance has posted a news article about the new site, and even goes as far as to quote DK's rationale for setting it up, sweariness and all. That should shock the readers.

There's a couple of limp rebuttals from major charities, for example Alcohol Concern (67% grant-funded), who have this to say:

There’s no consideration in terms of being critical of government when thinking about funding. We are primarily a lobbying charity, we don’t really do public awareness, and if the fact that we get a grant mattered to the work we do we wouldn’t be able to do it.

They don't seem to get the point do they? If nobody is willing to fund your charity on a voluntary basis, that's because nobody values what you do. In fact, most people would probably say that Alcohol Concern is a public menace existing largely for the benefit of its staff.

The answer is clear. Close yourselves down and go and do something useful with your lives.

Know your enemy

Frank Field, writing in the Mail, reminisces about his meetings with Margaret Thatcher while she was PM. It contained this interesting point, which rather seems to support my pet theory that it is the civil service which is the real enemy:

There wasn’t much in her record as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government to suggest she would be a great Prime Minister.

But when she entered No10 she understood she had to get control of the Whitehall machine – and not be bypassed by it, as had occurred with so many of her predecessors.

There's no doubt that both Blair and Brown have been unable to introduce any meaningful reform of Leviathan. They have been ignored by the mandarins and have proved powerless to do anthing about it. The country is therefore left with the slender hope that David Cameron can do any better.

Oh dear.

Perhaps our best hope for salvation lies in a sudden collapse of government finances, sweeping aside the whole state edifice overnight. Painful, perhaps, but quick and decisive.

Too depressing to read?

I'm going to be adding this to my shopping list at Amazon. Not that I need to be any more depressed about the state of the country, but he may have some ideas on what to do about it.

So schools don't indoctrinate do they?

My intemperate rant about Home Education continues to attract interest. If nothing else, it has been useful in publicising the issue.

One thread people may not have seen is by Chris Dillow, who rather misses the point of my post when he gently takes me to task for not providing evidence that HE is better than school. The post was of course about civil liberties and whether the state has a stronger claim on children than the family. It doesn't matter if HE is better or worse on average.

In the comments, Shuggy, himself a schoolteacher, makes light of my suggestion that schools might be indoctrinating children rather than educating them. In my experience it is pretty much naked indoctrination most of the time.

Which brings us to the Englishman's post this morning in which he shows us one of his kids' homework for last night. This isn't indoctrination?

Update on Feb 26, 2009 by Bishop Hill

More reactions to the HE post:

Renegade Parent.

What shall we do today?

More evidence of global warming collapse

I was taken to task the other day for suggesting that the global warming consensus is collapsing. Here's more evidence though:

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.