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Fully charged	[May. 15th, 2012\|05:35 pm]
Charlie Brooks reckons his missus cannot get a fair trial? Since when did her profession ever respect that constraint? From misattributing to blatantly fabricating statements, the press has lost all rights to such a claim. Hypocrite. Mind you, Rahere notes the increasing incidence of environmental intervention in European affairs of late. From the wind blowing out the Olympic flame to the plane taking President Hollande on his first international intervention on behalf of Greece getting hit by lightning, someone up there is taking pot shots. Which should make Murdoch worry. If he does not like the comment that he is not a fit and proper person in the terms of the Companies Act, then the only conclusion is that a fit and proper person must take responsibility for his chief lieutenant's peccadilloes. Which means the Hunt is on for Cameron.
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On Black-Scholes	[Apr. 28th, 2012\|12:08 pm]
The BBC has published a halfway-fair description of the mathematical failure of the crash - halfway because it stops short of the core of the problem, which is that the model incrementally improves the cover as the market moves. The problem is not in the cover, but in the exposure, the gap it leaves uncovered. Create enough options and you have a huge exposed, uncovered position which compounds - by splitting any option into legs which come back to the exposure (ie GBP:EUR becomes GBP:USD and USD:EUR), you can end up in a position where one leg is highly lossmaking, therefore covered, while the other is highly profitable, therefore uncovered, leaving you taking just the profit against a neutral underlying exposure. Contrast that with the banks' partly-exposed position on the other side and the laddies are onto a serious loser as a whole. Let it not be said that I'm sympathetic to the banks, they ignored basic Treasury ethics of keeping full cover in preference of gambling with other peoples' money - money for which they pay a pittance in the belief that the punter's taking no risks. Obviously this is simply another form of rebranding junk debt, aided and abetted by the Rottings Agencies - I so rename them because they no more rate trust than Honest Jack the Bookie.
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Intellect and property	[Feb. 24th, 2012\|09:34 pm]
The interesting aspect of Murphy v Sky is not so much the decision, which clearly establishes that Sky has been putting the squeeze on the Press (nothing new there then), as the clear subordination of corporate policy to the Single Market. Let me first dispose of the Sky squeeze accusation. The Press has made a big thing of Karen Murphy still being subject to licence constraints in the logos on the broadcast, given that the Premier League lost the essence of their case, in that a sporting event is not a work subject to copyright law. That's important as it concerns a number of putative infringements of our rights by the Olympics. The Court then extended that opinion to subordinate copyright to the single market, by arguing that even if such a provision existed in National Law, the pricing consequent to its exercise should take into account the Single Market. This may not be good news for Greece (who must by now surely be regretting the inversion of "timeo Danaos" in reaction to the serious abuse of the bases of International Law consequential on their economic improbity duing the candidature period), albeit that it has doubtless provided a temporary boost to their cable subscriptions, but it most certainly does cover the general alternative angle the Premier League and Sky have attempted to take refuge in, that their logos are part of the broadcast and are subject to licence in the UK. By entering into contract terms with Sky, the Premier League entered into a legal relationship bounded by its separate sale of a similar contract to the Greek distributor, and it is entirely the Premier League's responsibility (and not Mrs Murphy's) that the Sky logo was therefore part of the sale to the Greek distributor. Mrs Murphy entered into an entirely innocent and legal contract with the Greek house, and thereby acquired rights to the entire signal, without exception, and thereby the Premier League and Sky's case falls: this is the entire sense of the rider to the judgement, preserving the right to copyright but on a level playing field. That was self-evident in the ECJ's press release, yet the Press have swallowed Sky's nonsense proposition that the two are separate and distinct eidetic concepts. All the Court has decided is that what's good for the Greeks is good for the Brits, and vice-versa: if we can afford to buy and, if necessary, transport, elsewhere, then good for us. But examine in greater depth the phrase "what is necessary to ensure appropriate remuneration for the holders of the rights concerned". That is wide, very wide, and presumes that the supplier and customer have equal rights, a fundamental principle of the Law of Contract: no longer can Coke price differently in two different countries and block imports from the cheaper (and yes, I saw that happening with my own eyes some thirty-odd years ago), nor the Insurance markets price differently in the UK. The same for power - after all, EDF is now a big player selling in the UK, so why shouldn't the Belgians be able to buy here too? My fuel bill now I'm back is a fifth of what I was paying there.
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Shredded	[Feb. 1st, 2012\|12:29 am]
Some time ago, I was fairly prominent of the Peston blog calling for the cosy culture of insider collaboration to be terminated. The removal of Goodwin's gong is simple justice: but let us not stop there. From the nepotism of the Straw dynasty, to the magic, well, not so much circle as roundabout, of the bank bosses, the responsiblisation of the clowns who wrought so much harm to our society must continue. For example, his unofficial biographer suggests he will feel scapegoated. Not half as much as those who had no hand in the crash and yet lost their jobs without the kind of parachute Goodwin still enjoys, and without the assets base he has behind him. True justice would reduce him to living in a council house on a state pension and benefits without assets. After all, it's what happens to other thieves, the only difference is one of scale. In terms of sheer historicity, one of the last formal degradations was apparently imposed on Sir Francis Mitchell in 1621 for grievous exactions, who had his spurs broken, his belt cut and his sword broken over his head. Oh, those were the days...The thought of half the city being forced to shuffle home with their trousers around their ankles is not without appeal.
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In everything, spin, spin, spin	[Jan. 3rd, 2012\|05:03 pm]
Or at least that is how the Met seems to think they can get away with the most outrageous comment on the Steven Lawrence convictions as "a great day for the Metropolitan Police. We nerver gave up on it". Bullshit. If they never gave up on it, how come narry a copper from Eltham, or even more significantly Chislehurst, cop shops has seen any disciplinary action against them? I lived in Blackheath at the time and it was no secret that the BNP in Welling was protected by Eltham nick - nor, for that matter, that these thugs who have lived in mockery of the standards they claimed to espouse, were close friends to half the coppers from Chislehurst. If that were not insult enough, rolling Cressida Dick out, the officer responsible for the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube, added injury to the damage. It shows how uncaring - or rather, overtly racist - the top command of the Met still is. Nor is it much better in half of London now. An element of August's riots was an us-and-them attitude on both sides, not something conducive to effective order. Perhaps the Met is too broke to repair. Let us hope not. But time is running desperately short. The first step is to outlaw the BNP, and anything they may attempt to mutate into - there are lessons to be learned fromn Belgium's recent plight in not achieving a clean sweep of the Vlaams Blok, which simply changed its last name to Belang (Tendency) and continued in the same old business of holding the rest of the country to ransom. Let us never get into such a position as to allow such a band of thugs the balance of power. But with such a bunch of clowns in charge, there really is very little hope left.
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Poor ol' Pete	[Dec. 19th, 2011\|11:32 am]
At the risk of turning a tad morbid (and in these times, that has a charming logic to it), one must commiserate with St Peter, doorman to the Stars. After dealing with a top atheist, he in short order had to deal with a lassie whose great ambition was to lay a blanket on the ground somewhere (and in this country, that's a definition of exhibitionism, unless one's bound for Norfolk, somewhere north of Stafford, or west of Oswestry), and then in short order two heads of State, one great, one minable, as the French say - and in that pair, Havel and Kim Jong Il, one sees the classic example of the old saying, that the first shall be last and the last, first. His son, Kim Jong Un, is already being hailed as The Great, even though he has achieved nothing as yet, and has the sole advantage that, in starting from so low, he would find it hard not to lift his nation upwards, yet at the cost of reining back the very military who are the greatest threat to his rule, and who he would need to keep control. If every there were a poisoned chalice, that surely is it! And on the other, Vaclav Havel, who while leading his Nation through the most tempestuous of times, in which it chamged hegemonies and separated amicably, yet managed to retain a sense of the ironical about the power he weilded, a lesson Cameron would do well to learn. Looking ahead, it is Korea we have most to fret about. Whether one can read a countdown from Il to Un, is a rhetorical question designed to point out that now above all else is the time to point out that that particular sabre is very rusty indeed: North Korea must be told, and told directly, that the use of a single nuclear weapon would have immediate and complete retaliation in force, it would be suicide for his nation.Its national autonomy is not challenged, but it must reverse its policy of threat. it's no more credible than a boy with a penknife: he may hurt, but in acting thus, he will destroy himself, and the real man, the world leader, shows him how risible the threat really is. That, however, is unlikely to be any great consolation for the dead on both sides. Now, therefore, is the time for a sense of realism: we all, to some extent, greater or lesser, face certain regrets at this time of year, the impulsion to New Years Resolutions. Whether the memory of those gone, or those moribund, or of friendships loosed, or of hatreds nurtured, part of it is the fear of the future. Next year is 2012, and, which I fear brings the death of a number of the irresolute. For those immersed in apocalypticism, I advise you to reread your sources, and realise you cannot possibly know what you claim, you misunderstand the hints you are clutching at The sceptics might call it conspiracy theory, were it not that your fears are not based in conspiracy: I can no more explain your suspicions than you can, except that you misread what you find: you claim to work in faith, but that faith is abandonned early in your work. And to the rest, smile! However hard it gets, illegitimis non carborundum! Don't let the bastards grind you down!
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Hutch outs	[Dec. 16th, 2011\|05:03 pm]
So the atheists mourn the passing of an icon - why? If he was right, there's an end to it, so why remember him rather than his thinking, if in any way innovative - which it doesn't seem to have been? And if he was not, then there's a old joke best told by the past doric of John Laurie, a tale concerning the hell;-and-damnation presbyterian minister talking about such a person before St Peter, complaining that they had never understood the Gospel. "Ye dinna know?" quoth the Dominee, "Ye dinna know? Well, ye knoo the noo..." My point not so much being the mocking of a bigot (which he was, an atheist bigot) as to point out the uncanny similarities in these forms of belief with those of religious dogma: one can have infinite relish in the way both tie themselves in identical knots on the basis of "so there". Any thought of actually trying it out is beyond them, and both tend towards the hypocritical, the domination of the ego over pragmaticism. There's a selection of his presentations on the Grauniad's webshite, and if you take his style and level of argument and put them in the voice of an Irish whiskey-priest, you'd have as coherent an argument, namely utterly unconvincing. Well, if it matters to you, he noos the noo. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. Which is a simplification on the Pascale games-theory analysis of the subject which the man never had the courage to address. And finally, if this drives you crazy, enjoy it, you whiskey-atheist.
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Non mea culpa	[Dec. 12th, 2011\|09:05 am]
So the FSA in a feat of the blithering obvious takes three years to corroborate Rahere's findings on RBS, analysed in a spare couple of hours from his real job, yet misses the even more insulting reality that even though they admit their own failings, they are doing nothing effective about any of it. If it were not that they're clearing their own desks before closure in 2012, which somewhat forced their hands, they'd be a disgrace: it's no wonder Hector Sants was to be seen powwowing in the St Pauls protest camp recently, he's about to join their number. But other than crowing, what is my point? Shift your blinking arses. The old version of the Creed split between the quick and the dead, and although the former in the language of the time really meant the living, none the less the parity remains good: in these times if you want to survive, get your skates on, mate. In general management terms, in the framework of the eternal triangle of speed, cost and beauty, of which you get just two, the answer's obvious: we cannot afford to faff around with beauty, particularly when nobody lnows what it is. And that applies to the next useless target on the list, the Elven Safety bunch. Elvres were never friends of humanity, and they are just a figleaf for the refusal of the Law to hold directors responsible for their failings. Ah, a common thread! Before anyone pitches in, Rahere's family knows well what happens if they retain carte blanche, one of his own ancestors having died cut in half by a broken hawser, and on his wife's side, grandfather and great grandfather killed in the mines. The real reason for this is that the Law must apply equally to all, and Health and Safety should be in proprotion to the rest of the commercial mix, not something which is optional (and first to be abandoned in the search for unmitigated growth, as has happened in the past), nor something which becomes the moderator of all else which happens, a necessary correction for past misdemeanours but one which must now rein itslef back. The first step of a real solution is to give inquests some teeth, and insist they be used, and not far behind it to put the HSE boards investigating industrial accidents under the same régime - it is too often mere chance that one does not become the other. If you take a post of responsibility, whether foreman, manager, or director, in return for the greater pay you take greater responsibility, and for that you must be accountable. Part of the problem is that we do all possible to deny that fact, and it subverts enterprise, the sole channel by which we will find our way out of this. The Law is supposedly about holding people accountable for their acts, yet it does not seem to want to do so. Yes, there are problems with the prison service, but on the other hand that should not be the be-all and end-all of justice: at a first level, the Law must surely be admonitory, requiring people to cease and desist from the action they have failed at: prison should be reserved for those who do not to respect it. yes, that means that certain people must be told they are unfit to act in a position of responsibility, and must cease to do so, perhaps for a period but most decidedly never in a probationary, suspended form. And to that end, Companies House must cease to be an Agency of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, but rather of the Ministry of Justice, as it is in Belgium: it must be easy for the public to identify who is responsible for what (a failing in the Belgian system, reported but not corrected), and thereby to hold them to account subject to the Law. Which extends beyond simple Company Law, to include all who have potential conflicts of interest, the entire Civil Service and political machine for starters. What is not covered by this, of course, is the unregistered Association, and that needs tightening up on: members of a trainspotters club should not be subject to the same rigour as members of an al-quaida cell, nor of some unregistered freemasonic band of justiciars.
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Europe went thattaway...over the cliff	[Dec. 9th, 2011\|10:12 am]
We must set the UK's postition aside for the moment, and look at what Europe just did. Nothing. Sarkosy was right a week ago, Europe had a fortnight to come up with something, and now has a week to do summat, but proposes some future waffle-fest. A statement which suggests the 17 Eurozone members (and 6 aspirants, poor souls) have no choice left, thanks to Greece. Some democracy! It might have been useful to have taken these measures to reduce the internal stresses of incompatible taxation and financing some time ago, but this is too little too late. When Standard and Poors threatened the European credit rating recently and was utterly ignored, the first wheel went over the edge: the refusal to address the ECB's role saw the entire thing fly over the side. Let's go slightly further in talking about the non-Euro bloc states first. There are ten, Latvia, Lithuania and Denmark (members of the ERM, shadowing with the intention of joining the Euro), Bulgaria, Poland and Romania (aspirant members suffering from convergence problems), the UK, Sweden, Hungary and the Czech Republic (who not signed up to this), That analysis is revealing: the split is between those who are locked into the Euro and those with some choice in the matter. The only salvation may be to view the UK as a lifeboat. We frankly are now staring at a 425-era crash, where one of the power blocks, by refusing to take responsibility for itself, has condemned itself to dismemberment. That is now inevitable: nature, and above all else poltical nature, abhores a vacuum, and that is what we visibly now have in Europe. But there is time left, to replace the 40% of our trade going to Europe with new business in the rest of the world. The other thing to do now is to decide what price others wanting to join us in the boat will have to pay. One minor aspect is the Labour accusation that by failing to plan, Cameron ran his head into a brick wall. That is typical of their tactics, the experienced hands of the Foreign Office were disposed of under their watch (as was, slightly later, Rahere, albeit comfortably enough for him not to be bovvered) and replaced by incompetent Labour placemen. The UK's position has long been evident, and yet nothing was done to capitalise on it, in a way several former associates were perhaps open to: Poland, for instance, reproaches us for casting them adrift. It is, of course, economic nonsense that such a thing can happen, this circling of the wagons should demonstrate that the combined strength of those economies covers the debt adequately: but the wagons are not circled, they can and will still be picked off piecemeal, simply because one can have however big a bazooka one wishes, if one isn't going to use it then it's as much use as a drinking-straw peashooter.
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How dare they?	[Dec. 8th, 2011\|10:45 pm]
The word going round Brussels tonight is that the squeeze is on, pushing for a Franco-German Befehl-est-Commande solution in the teeth of all other interest, including the British - Cameron's had the bum's rush. Now, that may be all very well as a measure of desperation in a world of realpolitik, but the butcher's bill to pay will be horrendous. That such a thing should happen is clear evidence of a complete and terminal failure of the Sherpa system, where the undergrowth is cleared by the Embassies' First Secretaries before the outstanding substantiative points are negociated between the Ambassadors, allowing the Politicians to figurehead the final decisions. That DC takes his own portfolio is for starters a dire condemnation of the Foreign Office, whose experienced career diplomats were shown the door under labour in favour of their own placemen, who lack both education and vision into the bargain. We see such as Jack Straw's son Will with an ever-increasing visibility for no better reason than pure nepotism, a situation which leads to e Belgian scenario where the entire political system is so riddled with dynasties it has become utterly incompetent to run a whelk stall. But what is the culmination Rahere denounces is that they base it on the entire history of post-war Europe, finding its way into a form of stability. But the Commission, supposedly to be endowed with nigh on draconian powers over all Member States, not just those of the Euro zone, was never part of this, having only been formed in 1958, and it was not authoritative as late as 1965 during the Empty Chair crisis - indeed, the disparate administrations only came together in 1967! It has spurned every detail of the Organisation which held the ball during that time, the Western European Union, which held the ball until 2001, and it has crashed the operation within a mere five months of going it alone - Consilium Delenda Est. It is all very well for Italy to accept the rule of technocrats in the framework of that disaster for democracy, the media dictator Flavio Berlusconi, who would probably still be elected tomorrow if another vote were held, and quite another for France and Germany to do exactly what was promised in the margins of the Treaty of Lisbon, not to turn the Commission into a dictatorship to remove democracy from the UK. That such a thing should even be under discussion should have Cameron doing a smart about turn, announcing as he walks out of the meeting that the UK is finally going to hold the referendum which formed part of his manifesto, and whose result will undoubtedly be the withdrawal of the UK from Europe, closely followed by a considerable number of other States. As earnest of the Commission's double-dealing, it claims that the Coal and Steel Community, an industry-specific body, was operational from 1952, but one could as easily claim a European federation of Stamp Collectors was doing the job: it wasn't, end of story, in either case.
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