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It may be silly that sport affects politics, but it does. In 1966, England won the soccer World Cup, and it definitely did rub off on the Labour Government then in power and on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. British proles can do it, who needs the bloody toffs?, etc. etc. Wilson certainly milked that win all he could for his political team.
So when, in the quarter-finals of the next World Cup in 1970, the England soccer team was gut-wrenchingly beaten 3-2 (after being 2-0 up) by the very same opponents they’d beaten in the 1966 final, West Germany, they were widely debited/credited with tipping the balance in favour of the Conservatives at the general election held very soon afterwards. The proles weren’t so cool after all, you see.
The England soccer team has never since scaled the heights of 1966, but the infusion of television money and foreign stars nevertheless gave English soccer in the 1990s a glamour and a cultural clout that it had probably never had before. Soccer now completely dominates the sports pages, having utterly routed the now very forlorn cricket as England’s “national game”. And (“New”) Labour has once again made use of all that in its propaganda about rebranding and modernising and generally being Cool Britannia.
There is now another World Cup approaching which may have a similar, although more muted, political effect, in the form of the Rugby Word Cup, which kicks off next Friday when host nation Australia plays Argentina in Sydney. England are strongly fancied to win this, although the truth is that any one of about half a dozen closely matched teams could win, of whom England are just one. If England do win or at least do very well (by winning through to the final in grand style and then being heroically and narrowly beaten, say), this could have party political vibes back here in Britain. If England disappoint, ditto, in the sense that the dog I am about to describe won’t have barked after all.
Basically, it would suit the Conservatives if the England rugby team were to triumph, while many Labour supporters would probably prefer England to make a humiliatingly early exit. → Continue reading: How the Rugby World Cup might influence British party politics
Over at Hit & Run, Jesse Walker notes that Robert Anton Wilson is a candidate in the California election, and reprints one of his position papers:
GUNS AND DOPE PARTY POSITION PAPER #23
Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said, “Son, you know eating all that candy isn’t good for you. It will give you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat.”
Little Tony replied, “My grandfather lived to be 107 years old.”
The man asked, “Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?”
Little Tony answered, “No, he minded his own fucking business.”
The US Centers for Disease Control (for our UK friends, that’s the same as “Centres for Disease Control”) recently admitted that gun control laws can’t be shown to do much of anything to reduce violence.
From the press release:
The Task Force review of the effects of various laws showed insufficient evidence to conclude whether firearms laws impact rates of violence.
Among the areas under task force review were: bans on specific firearms or ammunition, restrictions on firearm acquisition, waiting periods for firearm acquisition, firearm registration and licensing of firearm owners, “shall issue” concealed weapon carry laws, child access prevention laws, zero tolerance for firearms in schools, and combinations of firearm laws.
A finding of “insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness” means that, based on the current body of literature, the Task Force is unable to determine whether the intervention was effective or not. The task force agreed that additional scientific studies relating to these interventions might help to provide clearer answers.
A little background and a few points to consider:
The CDC has a long history of being virulently anti-gun. That it would make such an admission, even in such painfully hedged terms, is no small thing. The diversion of the Centers for DISEASE Control into the gun debate was a prime example of mission creep and of the notion that violence is not the result of personal decision and (ir)responsibility, but rather was the result of impersonal forces and even of inanimate objects.
Alternatively, this may also be cited as an example of the way that administrative agencies bend to the political winds – the CDC was pro-gun control under pro-gun control administrations, and now . . . . My acquaintance with the tenured civil servant class, though, tends to undercut this attack. The folks who generate these kinds of reports are very nearly untouchable, and if anything their motivation increases when they disagree with the politicals.
I have always said that the burden of proof rests on those who would restrict our liberties. This report would seem to pretty well indicate that the burden has not been met on gun control.
It will be interesting to see if this affects the coming expiration of the assault weapons ban. Bush has said he will sign an extension of the ban if it lands on his desk (another black mark on his permanent record). The CDC report should be useful to opponents of the ban.
About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as “Pierre55”, suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.
There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington…
STL today.com reports that Charter Communications Inc., third largest cable provider in the United States, filed a suit on Friday seeking to block the recording industry from obtaining the identities of Charter customers who allegedly shared copyrighted music over the Internet. Charter filed papers in U.S. District Court in St. Louis in a bid to quash subpoenas that the Recording Industry Association of America issued seeking the identities of about 150 Charter customers.
“We are the only major cable company that has not as yet provided the RIAA a single datum of information,” said Tom Hearity, vice president and associate general counsel for Charter.
Via Slashdot
Computerworld reports that despite the government’s recent efforts to integrate dozens of terrorist watch list databases, terrorists may still be slipping through major cracks in homeland defenses by stealing identities and using computers to create fraudulent travel documents.
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-District of Columbia), a self-proclaimed “card-carrying civil libertarian,” said the nature of the vulnerabilities has led her and others to rethink the issue of national ID cards.
However, Keith Kiser, chairman of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, said a national ID card is not needed and would probably require additional IT infrastructure currently not in place. Instead, Kiser argued that the IT infrastructure used throughout state motor vehicle departments to verify identities and issue valid driver’s licenses should be enhanced and standardized.
Lawmakers and federal homeland security experts argued in favor of wider deployment of biometric technologies and standardization of driver’s licenses throughout the country. Currently, 21 states don’t require proof of legal residence to get a driver’s license. In addition, there are 240 variations of driver’s licenses used throughout the 50 states. California and New Mexico also issue valid driver’s licenses to noncitizens, and Arizona is debating the issue. Chairman of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, Keith Kiser, said:
I don’t disagree that a biometric identifier is a great place to be and we should be trying to get there. But we [conducted] a two-year study of biometrics and our conclusion at this point is that although biometrics work great on a one-to-one match, it’s awfully hard to find a technology that works on a one-to-300 million match, which is what we really need to [have] to have an effective biometric identifier.
So much for European unity:
Seven out of ten German voters would reject the euro if they were given the chance, a new poll has shown.
Maybe surprisingly, it is younger Germans that are the most eurosceptic, with 73 percent of 18-24 year olds saying they would reject the euro.
The poll also showed that French voters would reject the euro, but by a much more slender margin (approximately 51-49). This has provoked fears that French voters may use a referendum on the Constitution to voice their concerns about the euro.
Nothing surprising to me. The European Union is yesterday’s solution to the day before’s problem. It is a sullen, unloved political dinosaur fixed only by a combination of political inertia and the career-ambitions of a cossetted technocratic cadre. It is doomed.
One of the most notorious features of Britain’s socialist-inspired near-collapse of the 1970’s were the insanely militant trade unions who helped drive much of our remaining smokestack industries either out of the country or onto the scrapheap.
Industrial disputes were such a common feature fo everyday life that they became a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. I can remember in particular a popular joke about a trade union official who calls a meeting of his members to announce that, from now on, they would only have to work on Wednesdays.
A moment’s silence while this sinks in. Then one worker shouts from the back: “What, every bloody Wednesday”?
I wonder if a Gallic version of this joke has been doing the rounds in France:
The French government called yesterday for a renegotiation of the 35-hour working week introduced four years ago by the previous, Socialist-led government to create jobs and reduce unemployment.
It begs the questions of exactly what these people have rattling around in their heads that leads them to believe that forcing everyone to work less will create jobs? I suppose we should call it the ‘fixed quantity of time fallacy’.
Left-wing politicians countered that the government was starting a “witch-hunt” to disguise its bad economic and budgetary management. Even independent economists poured scorn on the government’s arguments and figures.
Well, I would love to know exactly who these ‘independent economists’ are. Unless they actually meant to say ‘economists from the Independent‘ in which case their opinions deserve about as much respect as those of French left-wing politicians.
But the Grand Union of Philosophy Professors (which probably counts most of the adult population among its members) is not going to lie down for this. In fact, they will vote with their feet. From the cafes and bookshops they will pour forth onto the streets of Paris in droves and legions, complete with banners, drums, whistles and George Bush rubber face-masks. Nobody is going to tell them to work for a living when they can agitate for a living instead. Street protest is their last growth industry.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001
This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven’t attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:
- The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section “Things Are Getting Better” and examines “Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?”
- Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.
- Can Human prosperity Continue? The “Are we living on borrowed time?” worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.
- Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).
- Tomorrow’s Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that “anthropogenic” additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth’s temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.
- The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn’t clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.
For those who find Mondays blue and tired and for those who might be inspired to a change of career… Ladies and gentlemen I give you:
Dissect a frog online!
Via Monkeyfarts
Note: Any resemblence to characters real or imagined is purely coincidental and the editorial team of Samizdata.net shall not be held responsible for any dissections of the insinuated individual.
Telegraph reports that Gordon Brown and Jack Straw are leading a rearguard action to block David Blunkett’s plans for national identity cards despite Tony Blair’s backing for the scheme.
Mr Blunkett wants a compulsory scheme and has proposed that those who do not qualify for the card will not be able to work legally or get access to health care, education and public services. But so far he has failed to get Cabinet backing. Cabinet sources say a “fierce battle” is being waged with Mr Brown and Mr Straw expressing the strongest doubts.
The Chancellor has said that the Treasury will not meet the cost of issuing the cards, which are expected to cost individuals up to £40. Several other ministers, including Charles Clarke, Education Secretary, Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons, and Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry Secretary, have voiced reservations about the cards
Telegraph opinion section had a good editorial on identity cards last week.
Having failed to win the argument during its six-month consultation period on what it then called “entitlement cards”, the Government now seems determined to press ahead with a national, compulsory ID card scheme. This has been a most peculiar exercise in policy presentation, perhaps because the Cabinet is divided and because opinion polls suggest several million people would defy the law by refusing to apply for one.
It draw attention to the fact that the government seems unable to make up its mind precisely what these cards will actually achieve.
It is important to be clear what Mr Blair is proposing: every person in the land will be required to pay £40, give over an image of his or her iris, and have private information stored on a central database. This is an uncomfortable thought in itself. To suggest that this is all about protecting civil liberties is simply insulting.
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