Sliced and diced

For argument's sake, let us assume that this from the BBC is actually a good interpretation of what actually happened, and the whole thing is not false conclusions drawn on the basis of a carefully manipulated series of PR events. Maybe Zawahari was a fictitious character whom the Yanks photo-shopped into existence so that they could later claim credit for eliminating him with a non-existent weapon, what do we know?

The Zawahiri strike, he added, "sounds like a model application" of the [assassination] process. "It sounds like they were very careful and deliberate in this instance to find him in a location and at a time when they could hit just him and not harm any other person," Prof Banks said.

In the case of the Zawahiri strike, it has been suggested, but not confirmed, that the US also used a relatively unknown version of the Hellfire - the R9X - which deploys six blades to slice through targets using its kinetic energy.

In 2017, another al-Qaeda leader and one of Zawahiri's deputies, Abu Khayr al-Masri, was reportedly killed with an R9X Hellfire in Syria. Photos of his vehicle taken after the strike showed that the missile had cut a hole in the roof and shredded its occupants, but without signs of an explosion or any further destruction to the vehicle.

Here is a picture of said vehicle, from The Daily Mail, so that seems like a reasonable conclusion based on scanty evidence:
Anyway, returning to the story:

"... His family protested his innocence and said they were distraught. His wife was reported to be in pieces. Funnily enough, so was he."

The South will rise again!

Except, the Confederacy never really went away.

- They kept slavery by the back door until the advent of World War II. They arrested people (including a few whites) for very minor crimes and put them in chain gangs or imposed savage $ fines which they couldn't afford to pay off, thus making them debt slaves (see lengthy Knowing Better YouTube video);
- They had segregation (in one form or another) until the 1960s;
- There is a high overlap between the states which execute most prisoners and former Confederate states.

Today, let's look at the thirteen states with "trigger laws", i.e. the anti-abortion states.

Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee - the five Western-most Confederate States.
Missouri, Kentucky - half-in, half-out Confederate States (they were 'slave states').
Oklahoma - wasn't yet a state at the time of the Civil War, but probably would have been a Confederate State;
Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota - were largely unoccupied at the time of the Civil War and not yet states. These four form a large contiguous block along the US-Canada border between Washington/Oregon (Pacific coast) and Minnesota (Mid-West?). Only Montana is missing from that block. Either Montana is relatively progressive, or they never realised that abortion was legal in the first place.
(Funda)mentalist Utah directly to the south of Idaho/Wyoming.
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Or maybe this is the usual American "progressive coasts, conservative interior" divide? Confederate states without trigger laws are the ones with some Atlantic coastline, plus Alabama, although that will probably be next.

"More than 73 percent of Americans who die of COVID-19 are overweight or obese, CDC data reveal"

Says the headline in The Daily Mail.

That's hardly surprising is it? More than 73 per cent of Americans are overweight or obese, full stop.

The American Green Party's successful electoral strategy

Jill Stein, the Green Party's candidate did well in the 2016 Presidential Election, from Wiki: "Stein finished in 4th with over 1,457,216 votes (more than the previous three Green tickets combined) and 1.07% of the popular vote".

In the 2020 election, the Green Party candidate only got 339,000 votes. An apparent failure, but actually nothing of the sort. The Democrat strategists knew that losing votes to the Green candidate probably cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, so their 2020 candidate Joe Biden said he was in a favour of a Green New Deal (whatever that is) and clawed most of those votes back. Given how tight the margins were in swing states, that was a very sensible tactic. This is called "shifting the Overton Window", and now the Greens just have to hope he actually implements it.
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A similar thing happened to the Libertarian Party, their vote share went down from a very respectable 4.5 milion to 1.5 million votes (as far as I can make out), presumably because Trump (the very antithesis of actual libertarianism) took back most of the votes from right wing nutters who otherwise might have voted Libertarian.

But fair play to the 2020 Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson, she is realistic about all this and understand how it works. From the BBC:

"The Libertarian Party's baseline votes will continue to grow [sic]," Ms Jorgensen said in a statement. "The only way Democrats and Republicans can keep us down is by adopting our libertarian policies."
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To cut a long story short, the lesson for small parties is - if your policies and principles become widely accepted and politically palatable, the larger parties adopt them (or at least pretend to) and you lose votes.

"Natwest Three banker slams 'pernicious' US-UK extradition treaty"

From City AM:

Writing in The Times today, David Bermingham, one of the so-called Natwest Three, attacked the unfairness of the extradition treaty between the UK and the US...

"It is a near statistical certainty that someone extradited to the US will end up guilty, most probably through a plea bargain rather than going to trial, because the criminal justice system in the US is so heavily geared towards this outcome. Extradition becomes, in effect, a summary conviction, without the dull necessity of examining evidence."

Bermingham also pointed to the case of Anne Sacoolas, who the US is refusing to extradite to the UK to face a charge of causing death by dangerous driving. "As the case of Ms Sacoolas shows, the US looks after its own. Maybe, just maybe, the government will finally grow a spine and realise that acting as a poodle is not the mark of a special relationship with America, but simply supine," he said.

Yesterday, former Brexit secretary David Davis writing in the Mail on Sunday said that sending Lynch to the US to face trial would "cripple the City and Britain's ability to determine its own future".

He said: "We are now looking at the bizarre prospect that a UK citizen could be tried and potentially acquitted by an English judge, where the burden of proof against him is lower, but find himself in a US prison facing a charge where the burden is higher, before the UK case has even been decided."

Under the treaty there needs to be probable cause for the US to extradite its citizens to the UK, but just reasonable suspicion for Britain to be forced to extradite its citizens in the other direction.

Amen to all that.

Like most people, I've no particular sympathy for bankers, but they make sound points.

US court passes comedy sentence

From City AM:

British trader Navinder Sarao who was responsible for the so-called flash crash in 2010 has been sentenced to one year home incarceration. Sarao was arrested in 2015 and pleaded guilty to illegally manipulating the stock markets.

The sentence, which was handed down by a Chicago court yesterday, was thrown into doubt after lawyers said it would be unenforceable (1) outside the US, according to The Guardian.

Following recess, Judge Virginia Kendall of the northern district of Illinois, was satisfied Sarao would only be allowed to leave the house in a handful of circumstances (2). 

1. Of course it is not enforceable if Mr S is outside the UK.

2. I got the impression that Mr S is a computer geek who is perfectly happy staying at his parents' house 24/7, he now has a good excuse when his Mum tells me to go outside and get some fresh air or meet a nice girl. He probably punched the air and shouted "Yes!". Unless Judge Kendall ruled that his Mum can decide what those circumstances are?

3. Mr S was entirely innocent anyway, so this is a neat way of letting him off the hook.

"Mapping the U.S. by Property Value Instead of Land Area"

Excellent article and graphics at CityLab.com, worth a visit, here's the crux of it:

Metrocosm’s June cartograms include one that compares the property value of NYC neighborhoods with various U.S. states. The total value of all the residential property in Kentucky ($300 billion) falls just short of the value of all the housing property in Queens ($317 billion). The housing value of the Upper East Side all by itself is greater than that of six states.

Where it gets really interesting is at the county level.

This cartogram, which compares property values between counties across the continental United States, looks like bad news from a gastroenterologist. What this in fact shows is that just a handful of counties account for the vast majority of property values in the U.S. The distortion is so severe that it doesn’t look like a map of the U.S. at all.
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I am sure this is the same for most developed countries, see for example London houses worth more than Scotland, Wales and north combined.

Half the reason is population, even if house prices were the same across the country, London has approx. the same population and same amount of housing as NI, Wales and Scotland combined. That's easy.

The kicker is that population density amplifies this (agglomeration effects), so even if London's population were only half what it is and the same as Scotland's, London housing, with lots of people and homes in a fairly small area would be worth more than housing in Scotland, scattered across a much wider area.

So if anybody says "Land Value Tax would be a tax on London", that's quite true (I'm never sure whether this is an argument for or against LVT). Within London, land in the very centre (Zone 1) would probably be half the total, and land in the City and a few streets in the West End would be half of the total of Zone 1, and so on.

Just dig a canal across the UAE, problem solved.

According to the Americans, the Iranians are carrying out sporadic random attacks on oil tankers passing through the Straits of Hormuz. The Iranians are decrying this as a false flag operation etcetera.

As a proper arm chair internet warrior, with zero knowledge about civil engineering, local politics, shipping or the oil industry, my brilliant solution, that can't possibly not work and will definitely defuse the whole situation, is for the UAE to quickly dig a new canal so that oil tankers can bypass the Straits entirely.

They can do short route A (30 miles or so) across the top bit, or the UAE and Oman can co-operate and do longer route B (100 miles or so) from Dubai to Sohar.

I did put some thought into this - my first bright idea was build a pipeline along those routes, but it turns out it would take days to empty an oil tanker at the western end and days to fill another oil tanker at the eastern end, so I shelved that one.

The answer's obvious if you look at the map:

Three related articles.

1. There was an interesting article on page 15 of today's City AM, I can't find the text of the article online, but you can find a pdf here.

The headline was "Britain doesn't need a special trade deal to boost trade with the US" and the upshot was that the businesses in the UK and the US manage to buy and sell a huge volume of goods and services from each other, despite the fact that there is no 'free trade deal' between the US and the UK (qua EU Member State). The author gives half a dozen examples of particular restrictions which could be lifted on one side or the other, and concludes:

There's so much that can be done if both sides build on the strong foundations which already exist. Prioritising that rather than attempting a brand new FTA from scratch won't limit the scale of what we can achieve."

A good point. All-encompassing trade deals can take years to negotiate, because dozens of special interests on each side will hold the whole thing to ransom, so it's better to do it a bit at a time on an ad hoc basis.

(My caveat is that the author is Ben Digby, the CBI's International Director, and the CBI are Hard Remain, so they might be a bit biased, but fact is, we buy and sell a lot more from businesses in EU Member States than in the USA, so fair enough.)

2. The Daily Mash made a perfectly valid point with their article headed "If you don't want to eat chlorinated chicken, you could always just read the f***ing label, say experts."

3. I Tweeted the Mash article and @TraderPaulFX replied that most veg and salad in the UK are washed in chlorine. A quick Google indicates this to be correct, see e.g. here.

Today's statement of the obvious

From the BBC:

Bush was almost certainly the last US president to have fought in World War II.

Fun with numbers

From last week's City AM:

Re: Trump claims Nato spending win after US President warned over US membership

As Donald Trump calls for Nato members to spend more on defence, it is important to consider where the US currently spends its 3.5 per cent of GDOP.

According to figures from the US Department of Defense [sic], even the flagship European Defence Initiative only accounts for 0.67 per cent of the US defence budget, the majority being spent at home or in the Pacific. Only five per cent of US personnel are stationed in Europe - it is Japan that hosts the largest number.

By contrast, almost all defence expenditure by European Nato members occurs in the North Atlantic area. All Nato members should meet the two per cent target but it must be noted that a large proportion of the US's 3.5 per cent is spent elsewhere.

TH Dempster.

Former Confederate states more likely to impose death penalty.

A table in an articke at the BBC got me thinking.

The fifteen states who have executed most people since 1976 (in order of number of executions, not adjusted for population size) is as follows:

Texas
Virginia
Oklahoma*
Florida
Missouri
Georgia
Alabama
Ohio**
North Carolina
South Carolina
Arizona*                           
Arkansas
Louisiana
Mississippi
Indiana**

* Oklahoma and Arizona didn't become states until long after 1865. They were then federal territories (proto-states) which allowed slave ownership, so the chances are they would have joined the Confederation, but we'll never know for sure, so that gets it down to thirteen states.

The thirteen Confederate states were

Texas
Virginia
Florida
Georgia
Alabama
North Carolina
South Carolina
Arkansas
Louisiana
Tennessee**
Mississippi
and possibly, depending on whom you believe,
Kentucky**
Missouri

** You are left with exactly the same list of eleven states if you remove Ohio and Indiana from the first list, and Kentucky and Tennessee from the second. Interestingly, those four states are a contiguous bloc (arranged north to south), so they appear to have swapped places.

Ho hum, coincidence, causation or correlation..?

We know that the US justice system is incredibly racist and can assume that the former Confederate states are the most racist states. So I think it is correlation, i.e. having been a Confederate state and executing a large number of people have the same common cause.

US taxpayer funded health spending vs NHS

I stumbled across this somewhere or other recently, and it is quite chucklesome.

US taxpayer funded healthcare spending per capita $5,078 (about £3,600).

UK taxpayer funded spending (i.e. NHS), about £2,000 per capita.

Talk about shit value for money!

Fun Online Polls: Bitcoin, Trump and Russian interference in the Presidential election.

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Bitcoin is...

A decentralised digital currency - 25%
A massive great pyramid scheme - 63%
Other, please specify - 11%

A lot of people left a comment saying "both", with the benefit of hindsight, I should have included this as an option.

I'm with the majority on this, thanks to everybody who took part.

By the way, if you know how to sell Bitcoin, would you be so kind as to send me an email and explain? Ta!
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The whole Russiagate (are we calling it that yet?) saga rumbles on.

Originally, I assumed it was something that the Clinton team invented to discredit Trump, but now it looks as if Trump is really botching a cover-up i.e. there must be something in it.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"Did Trump collude with Russia in the 2016 Presidential election?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

US Sanctions

The list of countries on which the USA imposes sanctions grows every year, as does the severity of the sanctions, despite they hardly seem to work.

Traditional thinking is that imposing sanctions on any particular country is but a pin prick for the USA economy, it is a massive burden for the other country. My thinking is that as the list grows, those pin pricks turn into a proper wound, and things get markedly better for countries on the naughty list.

If the USA imposes sanctions on Country Z, then that's bad for the USA, very bad for Country Z but rather good for all the other pariah countries who now have a new trading partner. So Cuba can now trade with Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia etc and Country Z.

If the USA goes mental and imposes sanctions on PR China for having the temerity to trade with today's Bad Boys North Korea, and by extension on every country which trades with PR China, then I would assume that the rest of the world would decide to cut the USA loose and merrily trade with each other and with Russia, Iran etc and it would be the USA losing out massively, in which case, one would assume, it would meekly come back to the table.

But while I was reading around, I stumbled across this fine article explaining why sanctions don't achieve the desired effect with the concept of the J-curve (scroll down to end of article). Which is probably far more interesting than my hypotheticals above.

"Woman escapes car swallowed by Florida sinkhole"

A splendid video over at ABC News.

Don't forget, car parks are like governments... they might look strong and stable, but...

Fun Online Polls: USA military spending & "gifts for Islamists"

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Without Googling first, how much is the USA's annual military spending?

$100 billion - 3%
$200 billion - 4%
$300 billion - 7%
$400 billion - 14%
$500 billion - 19%
$600 billion - 52%

You are surprisingly well informed, more than half got it correct. When I first read that figure in an article or reader's letter somewhere, I assumed the person was wildly exaggerating for effect, I had to look it up to believe it.

IF you want to put that sort of insanely large figure in context, it's about equal to the entire military spending of the rest of the world put together, or three-quarters as much as the UK's entire government spending in a year (schools, hospitals, pensions, welfare, the lot).
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This week's made-to-order Trumpage was the travel ban.

Did he do this purely as an ineffective stunt or does he genuinely think it will reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks? The thinking man's Katie Hopkins points out that Trump was merely enacting something that the previous president had already set in motion.

The vocal minority promptly jumped on their chairs and started shouting. Britain's leading Muslim politician (or the Muslims' leading British politician, as they like to see it) said the international community must show “moral leadership” by speaking out against Donald Trump’s travel ban and even the normally temperate Amber Rudd said Trump travel ban is a 'propaganda opportunity' for Isis.

Ho hum. What bothers me is the asymmetry of all this.

Mrs Merkel in Germany tried the opposite tactic and welcomed in a million Muslims. She was rewarded with an overall increase in crimes against women and spate of terror attacks, culminating in the Berlin Christmas Market attack.

Merkel's policy looks like a "gift to Islamists" to me, so how can Trump's polar opposite policy also be a "gift to Islamists"? Or is the world so f---ed up that both are?

It's a tricky question, so I will turn it round for this week's Fun Online Poll and ask which policy people would prefer for this country.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Testing Times: Whose Independent Missile Test Anyway?

Testing times again for a Defense Secretary over the latest Trident Program. It was never, ever simple though. Back in the 1960’s everybody understood that the British goal of Nato was to keep the American Empire in, the Germans down, and the Russian Empire out. But it was never clear how the British, sub-launched, ‘independent’, Doomsday weapons contributed to this system.

At that time the American’s made some deals with Russia (Salt 1,2) that they would limit methods of shooting down the incoming missiles. The Russian deployed what anti-ballistic missiles they were allowed to own around Moscow. The problem for the British, who had Polaris, was that it could only deliver 16x2 warheads. Not enough to wipe out the target.

But it may well have been the case that Britain, in Polaris, had an ‘independent’ system. Because we quickly made clever party balloons that would deploy in space and spoof the Soviet counter missile control systems around Moscow (Christ comrade! It looks like 16x10 ish warheads). So keeping the end of the world in our hands too. The Americans had to admit that we were very clever. But they had to make sure we couldn’t do that again.

Why? The British ‘independent’ system, Washington knew, was never designed to scare the Russians, but was always designed to scare them. We threated to trip the exchange between American and the USSR by making the attack look big enough to be the first American wave on Moscow. That’s it then: a 1960s ‘independent’ British system actually targets the American political elite, because, in the end, we did not trust them much more than we trusted the Russians.

Now Trident D3,4,5 does not need to spoof (I bet it does though). But is it independent? Thinking about the headlines; who really tested the missile? I conjecture, given the non-classified history above, that the British test was actually a deeper American test. The Americans were showing the Russians and the Chinese that there is no independent British deterrent, and that they will be the ones who decide the fate of the world not the British. 'All telemetery old chap, don't you know'.

So what is all the smoke and fire about an Independent Nuclear Deterrent? Simple. I suspect that, by chance, the British and Americans have alighted on this hugely expensive mechanism as our particular method of paying our tribute to the American Empire. We are just servants to the empire, but everybody in the US and UK Military Industrial complex is happy, are they not?

Fun Online Polls: Group think & USA military spending

The results to last fortnight's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who is most in thrall to group think?

Tabloid readers 33 votes
Academics 67 votes
Journalists generally 57 votes
the BBC in particular 79 votes
Economists 56 votes
Other, please specify 10 votes

114 voters in total, over half chose the BBC and academics. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have include "climate scientists" as a category.

Suggestion for other included: non-smokers, smokers, actors, politicians, Students/SJWs/#GenerationSnowflake* and visitors to this blog.

* I dislike SJWs as much as the next man, but what worries me is that the term "snowflake" is being extended to everybody under 40 who don't own their own home and realise somewhere that they are being conned.
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This week's Fun Online Poll, in the context of the general Donald Trump tomfoolery:

"Without Googling first, how much is the USA's annual military spending?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun With Numbers

US election, share of popular vote:

Hillary Clinton, Democratic Party, 48%, 59,814,018 votes

Donald Trump, Republican Party, 47%, 59,611,678 votes

Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party, 3%, 4,058,500 votes

Jill Stein, Green Party, 1%, 1,213,103 votes

This is how George W Bush was elected in 2000, as it happens.

And well done, Gary Johnson, I would have voted for you*, and failing that I'd have voted Jill Stein just for the heck of it.

* Obvs, he's a Faux Libertarian not a proper libertarian, as the American Libertarian Party thinks that VAT is better than income tax and income tax is better than LVT i.e. they have it completely arse-backwards, but hey.