Current Affairs

Cabinet Meeting after round 1 of Brexit negotiations

graham July 1, 2017 0 Comments

Chair: OK Item 1 on the Agenda – EU negotiations. Prime Minister, please report

PM: …we had a good meeting. Everybody was very nice. However, they want money.
Minister 1: How much money?
PM: Here is the breakdown
(admin. passes document looking like an invoice to other ministers)
Minister 2: What the Dickens? Minister 3: What’s this line down the bottom…”Surcharge – Nigel Farage being an arsehole in Brussels…100 million euros”?
Minister 4: They’re a bunch of highwaymen!
Minister 5: Did the subject of “soft Brexit” not come up
PM: Er… when I mentioned that they all looked at each other and then Guy said “so you want to pull out without really pulling out?”. Then they all laughed. I don’t know how to put this…they want rid of us. Macron has them all-a-giggle with his “France on the Move” stuff, and he and Angela couldn’t keep their eyes off each other. They also kept asking me how my “orange friends” were doing, and smiling all the time.
Minister 6: So, Prime Minister…we’re fucked aren’t we?
PM: Er..um…(shifts in seat)…have we written any position papers on what a very very soft Brexit look like?

Current Affairs

The awakening of the UK farming Industry..Part 3

graham June 23, 2017 0 Comments

Another AHA! moment as the UK farming industry suddenly appears to engage its brain about the practical consequences of Brexit. The soft fruit industry now realizes that without boots on the ground to pick the produce, the industry is likely to contract and possibly disappear.
As is now becoming usual, their public begging and pleading statement is a hoot.

British Summer Fruits chairman Laurence Olins said: “It is inconceivable that people who voted to leave the European Union wanted to destroy an iconic and incredibly competitive British horticulture industry, and see the end of buying British produce.
“But if we cannot ensure access to the seasonal workers needed to produce soft fruit in Britain, that will be an unintended consequence of Brexit, along with soaring prices and increased reliance on imports.”

Laurence, me old pal me old beauty, could I just perform some translation on that for you? here goes…

When our members voted by a majority to leave the EU last Summer in a fit of juvenile nihilistic pique, we didn’t stop to think that it it might destroy much of the British horticulture industry, and see the end of buying British produce.
Now we are crapping in our trousers.If we cannot rely on cheap labor from those countries with weird character sets and odd place names, what the f**k do we do? HELP!

Current Affairs

The failure of Jon Ossoff to win in GA-06

graham June 20, 2017 0 Comments

The failure of Jon Ossoff to win the special election in GA-06 is a damning indictment of the organizational and campaigning weaknesses of the Democratic Party.
From leading the race by 6 percentage points to losing today in 2 weeks? That takes a serious amount of organizational and messaging incompetence.
Ossoff played the last 10 days like an ultra-careful centrist, trying not to lose. Karen Handel went-all out with ad blitzes and mud-slinging. This was the 2000 Presidential Election all over again.
The Democratic Party has to understand and act on a fundamental reality. If you run down the middle of the road, you will get run over. Every time. Why would people vote for GOP lite when they can get the genuine article?
Here’s the underlying issue that the Democratic Party refuses to address. If you want to get out the vote, you have to run candidates that excite your natural supporters. The collection of milquetoast candidates that the Democratic Party often ends up with in elections do not excite the party base, nor do they impress young people, who will be a key voting group to be energized. Leaving aside ideology, the Republican Party currently does a far better job than the Democratic Party at running candidates that excite their core supporters. They seldom interfere in primary processes, unlike the Democratic Party, which never seems to be able to shake of the machine politics pathology of trying to fix the process to get the result that they think they need. Fixing primary processes may please centrists and establishment figures, but it sends a terrible and de-motivating message to party loyalists and young people, whose tolerance for cynical bullshit is still low, unlike the tolerance levels of the older and more cynical.
In addition the Democratic Party persistently falls prey to the “freezing in sight of the finish line” pathology, and I have seen it happen dozens of times.
1. New candidate is trumpeted by party at start of campaign, jumps out to big lead, looks to have race comfortably in hand.
2. Then suddenly, starting 3 weeks from polling day, candidate suddenly starts to act like they have to capture middle-of-the-road voters. They start talking all manner of conciliatory centrist guff.
3. Opponent goes all out on ad blitzes, FUD and all manner of mud-slinging.
4. Leading candidate determines that “say nothing and take the high road” is the right approach because it makes him or her seem to be statesmanlike and mature. Opposing candidate meanwhile is saying “***k that I’m going to damn well win”.
5. Candidate’s lead shrinks as fear of making a mistake adds to the “don’t piss anybody off” message being whispered in their ear by worried party grandees.
6. Would-be-supporters who were going to vote for candidate decide to not bother because candidate is a wimp. Uncommitted voters look at candidate and opponent and vote for opponent because damm it, they look like a winner.
7. Come election day, our former field-leading hero finishes second.

The inquest usually concludes that candidate was not “moderate” enough, ignoring the reality that at one point the candidate had a large lead, so was a good match most of the way.
The “not moderate enough” verdict is the best one to avoid further unpleasant scrutiny, since it places the blame on the primary electors, not the campaigning or messaging, which usually falls prey to risk-aversion dictated by the party establishment, whose attitude is “we write the checks, you do as we say”.
A new variation on this explanation that I am already hearing is that Jon Ossoff could never have won the seat, since he is not a Republican. The implication being that the seat was always unwinnable by a Democrat. If that was the case, how the hell did tracking polls consistently show Ossoff with a significant lead? A hopeless cause is when you are always behind in the polls, not when you lead by a significant margin until the last few days (see Dais, Wendy). This race was winnable. Ossoff, for reasons that look all too familiar, was unable to hold on to his lead.
If the message is that the Republicans managed to energize their supporters to get out at the last minute and vote, well, time for the Democratic Party to learn how to energize their supporters. (HINT – They won’t do that by telling the candidate to shut up and start trying to not piss off middle-of-the-road voters. You have to get your natural supporters to come out on polling day).

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Thoughts on the UK general election results

graham June 9, 2017 0 Comments

The results are now complete, with the Conservative Party losing its overall majority (the infamous “hung parliament” scenario). At time of writing, the Conservatives seem to have decided that they can form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist Party’s 10 members of parliament.
The two biggest unanswered questions that the election result has thrown up are (1) what happens to the UK exit from the EU (aka Brexit) and (2) will a Conservative-DUP coalition be able to survive for any length of time? Thoughts on both topics below.

1. Brexit
I do not understand all of the earnest back-and-forth over “hard” or “soft Brexit (except that it does rather remind me of the discussions over pornography in the 1970’s…but i digress).
The UK has already given notice under Article 50 of its intent to leave the EU. That triggered a 2 year negotiation period. That clock started running a while ago.
The idea that the UK electorate has voted against Brexit, or has somehow voted against “hard” Brexit, makes no sense to me. The electorate could have sent a clear signal that they disapproved of Brexit by voting for candidates from other parties who supported the UK staying in the UE. They did not do so. I therefore have to assume that the UK electorate is either in favor of Brexit, or is resigned to it happening. The electorate voted in a way that weakened both of the pro-EU parties. That is not a “stop Brexit” message.
All of the signs are that the EU is definitely resigned to the UK leaving, and wants it to happen as expeditiously as possible.
As for the hard vs. soft concept…well, the UK has limited leverage in negotiations. When you are trying to leave a club, you don’t have many cards to play. If the UK wants to have an orderly Brexit, it will have to make concessions, A LOT of concessions. Anybody banging on about how the UK can be tough on EU negotiations was clearly asleep when Greece tried to re-negotiate its debt burden, or they came down from the hillside with the last rainstorm.
The UK, in truly petulant fashion, told the EU “We’re leaving” last Summer. The only credible way that the UK would be able to reverse that would have been to elect a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and the SNP dictating the terms. This did not happen.
Brexit is happening, whether the UK likes it or not. The UK election results changed a lot of UK political dynamics, but they will not change Brexit.
However, nobody in the UK who supported Brexit seems to be able to explain how the UK will create 750+ trading agreements to replace the existing agreements that the EU has with other countries. I call this the Clegg Question. Nick Clegg, who actually knows a lot about the EU, having studied it and worked within it, asked this question last year after the original referendum result, and the question was greeted with The Sound Of Silence, followed by soothing bullshit along the lines of “well of course the rest of the world wants to trade with us!”
In summary, many Brexit supporters seem to be confidently assuming a stampede by other countries to trade with us after the UK leaves the EU, an assumption that has next to no evidence to support it. Many countries that trade with the EU will want to continue that arrangement, the UK being a smaller trading partner than the rest of the EU. I am forced to conclude that a lot of the driver for the assumptions around Brexit is an outdated view not only of how world trade operates, but also of how important the UK is when compared to established trading blocs like the EU, NAFTA etc.

2. The fate of the Conservative-DUP coalition
It is unlikely that any coalition government between the Conservative Party and the DUP will survive more than a few months. The coalition will have only a tiny majority, and unless a working “nod and wink” back-channel arrangement is made with one of the other parties to bolster the majority, It will only take one disagreement between the coalition parties to end the tenure of the government. In this kind of situation, the coalition partner has disproportionate power, and the DUP is not a forward-looking party committed to equal rights for all orientations and groupings, which may lead to problems sooner rather than later.

Summary
The UK is a rudderless ship. Markets dislike uncertainty, hence the decline in the value of the Pound during and after the election result declarations.
The reason the ship is rudderless is that the UK electorate has been making bad decisions for the last 10 years. They first turned down the Alternative Vote proposal in a referendum, which would have made the entire electoral system a lot more representative of the voting patterns of the electorate (needless to say, the two existing major parties, beneficiaries of the “first past the post” system, campaigned against AV, successfully).
Then they decided to vote in favour of the UK leaving the EU, in a referendum marked by inept messaging by the Remain groups, and nativist, nationalistic and (in some cases) outright racist messaging by the Leave groups.
Now it is not entirely clear what they have decided. They almost took the car keys away from the Conservatives, but somebody picked them up off the floor and gave them back, with conditions. There are claims that the vote was against Brexit, but that seems illogical. My cynical take is that, overall, the electorate decided it didn’t much care for the Conservative Party’s governance, but is clueless about what to do instead.
The only good aspect of the election is that young people seem to have turned up to vote in large numbers.

Current Affairs

Gregg Allman

graham June 4, 2017 0 Comments

Gregg Allman, the remaining half of the Allman brothers, passed away suddenly last week at the age of 69.
In reality, he had been dodging the Grim Reeper for the best part of 10 years, since discovering that he was suffering from liver failure due partly to Hepatitis C. His prodigious prior alcohol ingestion probably had a lot to do with the liver issue also. After a liver transplant and a difficult recovery, Allman had been touring intermittently, in between further bouts of ill-health.
Many people with drug and alcholol abuse problems are essentially self-medicating to address deep trauma. In Gregg Allman’s case, the trauma dated back to 1971 and 1972.
By the Fall of 1971, the Allman Brothers, the band that Gregg and his elder brother Duane had formed in Jacksonville FL in 1969, had matured into one of the great live musical acts. The band, built around the twin guitar playing of Duane and Dickey Betts, with Gregg providing Hammond organ and gritty vocals, with two touch drummers in Butch Trucks and Jai Johnny Johansen, and with Berry Oakley maturing into one of the great bass players, had toured non-stop for over 2 years, sometimes playing 2 sets a night, and had gradually morphed into an ensemble that was beginning to blur the boundaries between blues, rock and jazz.
The band’s first two studio LPs, “Allman Brothers Band” and “Idlewild South”, contained interesting original compositions that bore only a passing relationship to the blues. Tunes like “Dreams” and “Midnight Rider” impressed fellow musicians, but it soon became clear that the Allman Brothers were a far better live band than a studio band. In the studio, they often sounded stilted and tentative. Live, they soon became a pin-sharp band, capable of playing almost anything and interpreting other people’s tunes in a way that made it sound like only they could have written and arranged them.
Although the band’s initial repertoire was rooted in the blues, the cliched 12-bar blues form soon became a minority part of the band’s book of tunes. In addition to their own tunes, based on other musical forms, or modified blues forms, they also had a book of interpretations of old blues-based tunes, again with modifications to the musical forms.
By the time that Tom Dowd captured the band live at the Fillmore East in early 1971, to create one of the great live rock albums, the band was beginning to move into a zone that made them almost unclassifiable. A tune like “Hot ‘Lanta”, finished literally days before the Fillmore dates, illustrates the direction shift. Based on the blues form, the tune cycles through the theme, solos from the guitarists and the drummers, to a very slow melancholic hanging ending quite unlike any blues band’s standard cliche-ridden ending.
Film and audio records of the Fillmore dates and other concerts from the same time show clearly that although Gregg Allman, by virtue of being the band’s singer, looked and sounded like the frontman, this was Duane’s band. Duane directed the band on-stage, and it is his voice making most of the between-song announcements. Duane was constantly moving forward, in his own playing and with the band’s book of tunes.
And then, everything collapsed. On 29th October 1971, Duane Allman was fatally injured in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Georgia. Just over one year later, Berry Oakley would die in remarkably similar circumstances, also as the result of a motorcycle accident.
Suddenly, the Allman Brothers, who were well-positioned to make a major musical impact, were leaderless. Gregg and Dickey Betts became the leaders of the band after Duane’s death, and replaced Duane Allman’s fiery guitar with the jazz-tinged piano of Chuck Leavell. With Betts now a major compositional force, and taking over a lot of the lead vocals, the band rapidly morphed away from jazz-influenced blues and towards country-rock, becoming the de facto leaders of the whole “Southern Rock” movement of the early to mid 1970s. For several years, the band enjoyed massive success with hits like “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica”.
Then, slowly, the band fell apart, and it became clear after the fact that Gregg Allman, like many musicians, had been captured by drink and drugs, from which he had difficulty escaping. He testified against a band roadie to avoid jail time for hard drug possession, which effectively broke up the band in 1975.
After that, Allman embarked on a long period of intemittent activity, blighted by substance abuse. There was a short-lived marriage to Cher, which produced an odd LP “Allman and Woman”, a failed attempt at sounding like Ashford and Simpson. There were Allman band tours, and reformations of the Allman Brothers. The band toured in several incarnations for many years, without or without Dickey Betts.
Listening to a tune like “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed” 45 years after it was recorded, one is struck by the acuity of the composition and the sheer tightness and pin-sharp playing of the original band, and it is impossible to wonder how great the Allman Brothers could have been as a band without the deaths of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. Sadly, Gregg Allman probably spent a lot of the rest of his life wondering the same thing, and this may be why he died suddenly a week ago, after a difficult life.

Current Affairs, Music

Round-up – Thursday 1st June

graham June 1, 2017 0 Comments

1. US Withdrawal from the Paris Accords – the pathology
On one level, this was predictable.
The prevailing sentiment of the current Administration is based on a combination of anti-globalist sentiment and juvenile petulance. If they think that a treaty, or agreement with another country or group of countries is not equitable for the United States, they just metaphorically sweep the papers off the table, kick over the chair and walk out of the room.
Geopolitics is complex and subtle. Donald Trump and his band of followers lack the ability to understand complexity, and certainly lack any degree of subtlety when dealing with other nations. Of course, among Trump’s supporters, many of whom are deeply skeptical and hostile to globalization (which they blame for loss of jobs in the USA), the decision to leave the Paris Accords is one more sign that Trump Is The Man. The protests and complaints from others will be dismissed as the whinings of the losing elites. (As for the impact on the image of the USA in the rest of the world…pffft. The USA needs to be feared, and if those other freeloaders don’t get that, why…nice little capital city you got there, be a shame if a cruise missile was to hit it…)

2. The Tech sector leadership conundrum and fallout from administration actions
Immediately after the election of Donald Trump, a number of IT and Tech sector senior executives met with Trump. It was obvious why they met with him – Trump was the President-elect, and they needed to try and form a working relationship with the new leader of the Executive Branch.
The decision by those executives put them in an interesting bind. IT and Tech sector employees are generally well-educated, mobile, well-paid knowledge workers. They are generally globalist and forward-thinking in their worldview – and not likely to be supporters of Donald Trump. (anecdotally, most of my current work colleagues are not fans of Donald Trump, and many of them are not GOP supporters).
The tech employers are therefore finding themselves in a scenario where their employees’ value system and their public position of engagement with the Trump administration are at odds. While there is no requirement for employers’ public positions to match the worldviews of their employees, (the primary responsibility of leaders is to the stockholders), it is never a good idea to alienate employees. Tech employees are mobile and have other options.
Which brings us to the fallout..one of the leading Tech CEOs, Elon Musk, has resigned from his role as a member of the Presidential Council. Robert Iger of Disney has also resigned. This may be the beginning of a wider exodus of business leaders. Most business leaders are not climate change skeptics, and are deeply adverse to uncertainty, which is one of the inevitable outcomes of having a carnival barker in the role of POTUS. The actions of the administration are threatening to global stability,

Current Affairs, Uncategorized

The outrage over Kathy Griffin and the exaggeration of celebrity impact

graham June 1, 2017 0 Comments

There is a lot of nonsense being talked about celebrities in the wake of the controversy over Kathy Griffin’s waving of a fake severed head of Donald Trump.
Celebrities are merely instances of homo sapiens, just like us. To use the old saying, hey put their pants on one leg at a time. They might be well-known public figures, but that doesn’t magically multiply their intellect or wisdom. In fact it may well reduce their overall wisdom, since many celebrities live in a bubble, cut off from the real world as most of us know it. This is one reason why many celebrity utterances sound disconnected from reality.
Numerous instances exist from prior election cycles of electors creating models of Barack Obama being hung in effigy, and Hillary Clinton models in jail clothing, and also a severed head model of Hillary Clinton. The action by Kathy Griffin is not a new development in public discourse. People who deny that reality are unserious partisans, and I have no interest in a debate on that topic.
As is normal when people are informed that their in-group is guilty of equally bad behavior, the people in question have been furiously rationalizing the behavior away. The most common attempted rationalization is that Fred Doe from Upper Podunk, who hung Barack Obama in effigy from his porch, is not a celebrity, unlike Kathy Griffin, so Kathy Griffin’s action is much worse.
This is bullshit. If you attach more importance to the words and actions of a celebrity, you’re the fool here. The USA has a fatal fascination with celebrity, as proven by the tendency of electors to be impressed by all manner of celebrities when they decide to run for elective office. If you buy this rationalization, you are perpetuating that naive fascination. Celebrities are not inviolate idols. They are regular people, and their words and actions should be assessed on that basis. Words can be multiplied across communication channels, but that does not magically convert gibberish to nonsense. (It’s like using ALL CAPS in comments on the internet. It might make you feel more important, but it makes you look like one of a combination of angry, pompous or unable to use a keyboard).
Charles Barkley had a memorable response to some of this a few years ago, when asked whether NBA players ought to be more conscious of being role models in their actions and words because of their impact on young people. “Why should NBA players be role models for kids? What about their parents?” was his response.
Let me be blunt. If you think that the words and actions of a person are any more powerful because they are a celebrity, you’re a dupe for the showbiz approach to the evaluation of facts, truth and what is wise.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

How to spot a Twitter bot

graham May 30, 2017 0 Comments

This series of tweets is a good primer for how to spot a bot.
This is important information. All of the evidence that is visible in Twitter shows that Donald Trump is gearing up to fight a propaganda battle using social media. He has blocked opposing Twitter users who have large numbers of followers, in order to choke off propagation of messages that oppose his own, and his account has been collecting millions of new followers in the last 3 days, nearly all of which appear to be bots. Those bots are, in turn, Following the top 20+ Twitter users worldwide.
The tactics seem quite clear (and given that a lot of Twitter data is in the public domain, the aims of the tactics cannot be hidden). Trump is likely to use the bots to re-tweet his tweets to the bot followers, saturating Twitter with millions of copies of his original Tweets, plus whatever supporting verbiage is attached to the tweets. This will overwhelm many Twitter users and accounts with pro-Trump messages. Think of this as a DMOS (Distributed Monopolization Of Service) attack on Twitter, to swamp out any oppositional messaging.
Twitter could, of course, stop this all pretty quickly if they suspended Trump’s two accounts (his personal one and the White House official POTUS account). They have every legal right to do so, but I suspect that they will be very reluctant to do that. However…if the alternative is to see the Twitter platform reduced to partisan irrelevance, they may have to take action. There are other social networks waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces (notably Mastodon). If Twitter is seen as a platform dominated by white noise generated by robots, it will die quickly.

Current Affairs - US, Uncategorized

The backdrop of the GOP win in the Montana special election

graham May 26, 2017 0 Comments

This commentary (extracted from Twitter) by Anne Helen Petersen, explains some of the backdrop to the election win by Greg Gianforte in Montana. (There is another factor not discussed in this analysis, namely the massive fundraising difference between the GOP and the Democratic Party in Montana).

Leading up to tonight’s results, want to relate the best recap I’ve heard about how Montana politics got the way they are today
This theory comes from Ron Moody, an old-timer out of Lewistown, Montana, a former wildlife warden, & keen political observer
with added context from And Bill Spoja, a lawyer and rancher who’s lived in Lewistown his whole life
Both remember a time when Montana was truly purple. But since the ‘90s, many counties, including theirs, have gone much darker red
Looking back, it’s clear that a major part of the shift was Rush Limbaugh on the radio and Fox News on the tv
But the overall shift in the state came from somewhere else: well-off conservatives moving to Montana from urban areas
These people were increasingly frustrated with liberal politics of the city, sold their houses, and bought houses double the size in Montana
….With ample money leftover to live on. They came to Montana because it matched a conservative dream of America, where men are men, etc.
They mostly came to Western Montana, but the tide extended all the way over to Lewistown, in the Eastern part of the state
This meshes with previous reporting in Flathead region, where people would go on vaca & love how overwhelmingly white it was, then move here
So it’s these New Montanans, fleeing California/Arizona/Texas cities, combined with Limbaugh/Fox inflammation of existing MT conservatives
You could definitely include Gianforte in that first group: moved to Bozeman in the 1990s, fundamentalist Christian, Conservative
The ideology of the prosperity gospel runs strong through both groups: that Puritan idea that your chosenness is manifest in success/wealth
So even if Gianforte is broadly unlikeable with his base, his success, like Trump’s, is testament enough to his worthiness, his Elect-ness
As for Quist, GOP has underestimated how many people have known/met Quist over 3 decades — especially in rural areas
Quist went to 49 counties, all reservations. Brought out “gravel-road” Dems who’d been silent/invisible for years b/c of strength of GOP
He won the nomination in part by going out to rural counties w/dormant Democratic organizations — whose delegates then voted for him at convention
So there’s a little background theory from some Montana old-timers.
And then a bodyslam happened. So who the fuck knows.
But this is just further proof that the best/most interesting people to talk to on the campaign trail are almost always over the age of 70
They have the context, they have the history, and they have very little fear of speaking their minds.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

The psychology of leaking in organizations

graham May 13, 2017 0 Comments

When the most accurate and substantive information about what is occurring with any organization is being revealed internally and/or externally via unauthorized communication, this shows that one or more of the following is true:
1. The leadership of the organization has no credibility with the employees, and is not respected by them
2. The leadership is engaging in abuses of power
3. The leadership is asking employees to engage in behaviors that are unethical and/or illegal
4. Leadership is unable or unwilling to communicate effectively or usefully to employees and external partners and customers
Systemic and endemic leaks occur for two main reasons:
– as a means of promulgating facts and truth, as a counter to The Official Position (which is regarded by the leakers as untrue and deceptive)
– a cry for help, along the lines of “this organization is dysfunctional and is unable to address that dysfunctionality internally, so we need external help”.
Leakers usually engage in internal dissent first, only to be told to Shut The Hell Up, since the organization is usually incapable of distinguishing between dissent and disloyalty. This is always true in authoritarian organizations, where unconditional loyalty and obeisance to leadership is the single most important behavior prized by leadership.
The standard focus on punishing leakers by many organizations sually sends the message that the organization is in denial about its dysfunctionalities, and intends to sweep it under the carpet by punishing leakers, rather than by addressing the root causes of dissatisfaction.
The current avalanche of leaks from within government bodies under the Trump administration provides compelling evidence that the leadership being provided by the Executive Branch is both deficient and dysfunctional.

Current Affairs