Aha, that explains it...

From The Soaraway Sun*:

SENSATIONAL declassified FBI files reveal how the White House was sent into a panic by suspected alien sacrifices of COWS.
More than 8,000 cattle were snatched by mystery aircraft, mutilated, then dropped from the skies above the US south west in the late 1970s, special agents told their directors.

Terrified farmers in New Mexico, Nebraska and Colorado feared they would be ripped apart by extraterrestrials in flying saucers. Details of the probe are spelled out in internal memos released by the FBI online.

The cattle killers took sick TROPHIES including tongues, lower lips, sex organs, eyes and ears. In some cases the doomed animal was drained entirely of its BLOOD...

And so on and so forth.

I think we might as well use this patently daft conspiracy theory to explain why cows are so violent against humans: either

a) they are getting their own back for us not protecting them against aliens, or

b) having done a few test runs, the aliens refined their techniques, kidnapped some cattle, mucked about with their DNA to turn them into cold-blooded killers and then returned them to their herds.

* Spotter's badge Sue

Frank Williams doesn't do irony

Unsurprisingly, quite a few sports men have come out in favour of the First Past The Post voting system, the logic being that most races work on the basis of 'first past the post'.

Fair enough, but this is probably one of the worst analogies they could have chosen. In a single race, the aim is to see who's fastest, and whoever is 'first past the post' wins. I sorely doubt whether people campaigning for the Alternative Vote system have any problems with that.

But let's turn to Formula One genius Sir Frank Williams. If Formula One were truly 'first past the post' system then they would only need to have one race each year, and the car/driver combination which wins that race would the World Champion, end of.

Actually, a Formula One season is in fact far more similar to the AV system. In 2010 (for example) there were nineteen races, and points are awarded as follows: winning car/driver 25 points, second 18 points all the way down to the tenth car/driver who gets 1 point.

At the end of the season, whichever driver got the most points is the Driver's Champion and whichever team (= two cars/drivers) gets the most points is the Constructors' Champion. So in theory, a driver could become Champion without winning a single race if he managed to finish second or third in nearly every race and two other drivers shared the first places and otherwise placed badly.
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The Daily Mail article (see first link) also embeds the hopelessly confused No2AV video, the main bits of which are two parties forming a coalition and promptly burning their manifestos - isn't that a bit like the result we just had under FPTP? Seeing as No2AV is largely funded by the same people who fund the Conservative Party, are they not admitting how hopelessly unprincipled they are?

Reader's Letter Of The Day

The FT published Carol's riposte to Landed Gent today (for my attempt, see here):

Sir, N B B. Davie-Thornhill states (Letters, April 12) that the cost of maintenance of the landscape of the estate which he owns in a National Park is considerably more than the potential income. Thus the imputed rent to which Roger Sandilands refers (Letters, April 6), and which he believes should be paid to the community, must be negative.

If this were true, then far from estate owners having to pay for the privilege of beneficial ownership of large swathes of our countryside, we should be paying them. I wonder if we could set up a few “test” auctions of these estates to see if they have any value at all.

Carol Wilcox, Secretary, Labour Land Campaign.

I suppose Landed Gent will then claim that "Yes, my estate is worth an absolute fortune, but only because of all the hard work I've put into trimming the hedges over the years". Maybe it will turn out it's all agricultural land which he farms himself, so the tax would be £nil anyway, we don't have enough detail to go on.

Annotated No2AV donor list

Over at Poplarmark's.

Highlight: GMB Union £10,000 - Probably not a Conservative party donor.

Via Neil Harding

Colonial Ruler

Andrew Lansley

Outbreak Of Commonsense...

... in Southwark:

Council chiefs implementing the largest budget cuts in London are to spend almost £8million on free school meals for every primary pupil to stop poorer children feeling "stigmatised". Labour-led Southwark council claims the scheme - which will also include middle-class children - will reduce obesity by giving pupils one healthy meal a day. (1)

But today the authority was accused of "strange and illogical" behaviour as it revealed it is also slashing £34 million from its budget as part of coalition cuts. (2) Ten day care centres for the elderly are under threat and £5.7 million has already been cut from social care and safeguarding children services. (3)

Tory Stephen Hammond called on the council to "see sense". He said: "This will cost them more money and would not appear to be good value-for-money." (4)

London Assembly health chairman James Cleverly [sic] said: "There are easier ways to prevent the stigmatisation of free school meals than this... (5) Universal benefits are inherently wasteful."(6)

1) Their motivation may be unsound, but it is better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than to do the wrong thing.

2) Those are 'coalition cuts' not council cuts (for sure, council quangocrats are protecting themselves and sacrificing 'front line services', see post of earlier today, separate topic).

3) Again, there is worthwhile spending and wasted spending. Don't make the best the enemy of the good.

4) It's fantastic value-for-money. Those "middle class parents" will end up paying for those lunches anyway, whether out of their taxes or out of their net incomes - and then there are more economies of scale if every child gets it and a huge reduction in bureaucracy in administering who's entitled and who isn't. Plus it makes life easier for parents whose children bicker about getting a packed lunch - the long suffering parent can tell them they are getting a school dinner because it's "free" and that's the end of that.

5) He 'cleverly' avoids explaining exactly how he would achieve this. So he's lying, basically.

6) Twat. Universal benefits - either everybody gets it or nobody does - are the best benefits and inherently cheap. I am (for example) in favour of universal education vouchers, as are proper Tories (i.e. UKIP), and being in favour of one but not the other is incoherent to the point of stupidity. That's not to mention the fact that means-testing is a particularly spiteful for of taxation and leads to incredibly high marginal tax rates etc.

Added bonus: we won't get these dreary statistics saying what percentage of children eligible for free school lunches attend which school, get into higher education etc.

What's not to like?

I thought of this before the article was posted so I look forward to my imminent Nobel Prize.

Charge every would-be migrant £30k to settle in Britain', says Nobel Prize-winning economist

Britain could slash its immigration levels by charging every would-be migrant £30,000 to settle in the country, a Nobel prize-winning economist has said.

Visas should be sold off at a high enough price so that only the most ‘suitable’ and motivated migrants move to the UK, Professor Gary Becker has suggested.

The scheme would raise over £600 million a year if 12,000 paid the fee, more than off-setting the cost of allowing in new migrants, he argued in a report to be published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank.

Source: Daily Wail

They should also make sure Asylum is wholly funded by Charity who would pay the 30 Grand rather than taxpayers!

George Osborne doesn't do logic either

Or facts. From The Daily Mail:

Mr Osborne said: ‘What really stinks is actually one of the ways the Yes campaign is funded. The Electoral Reform Society, which is actually running some of the referendum ballots, and is being paid to do that by the taxpayer, stands to benefit if AV comes in... that organisation, the Electoral Reform Society – part of it is a company that makes money – is funding the Yes campaign.

'That stinks frankly and is exactly the sort of dodgy, behind the scenes shenanigans that people don’t like about politics. The No campaign has asked for it to be investigated by the Electoral Commission and certainly I think there are some very, very serious questions that have to be answered.’

So what?

The ERS has been campaigning for PR (and by default AV over FPTP) for ages, and it has a subsidiary which prints ballot slips. There's no law says that contracts for printing ballot slips in future have to go to their subsidiary, and the idea that AV needs 'expensive counting machines' is nonsense.

You can do the numbers yourself, but by and large the number of ballot papers which have to be shuffled from one pile to another is about one-fifth of the votes cast, so that's the difference between counting a two-thirds turn-out and counting an eighty per cent turn-out. I've had run-ins with El Comm, what they really hate is donations from undisclosed parties; the Yes2AV have never made a secret about who gives them money... unlike the No2AV people, of course.

He claimed AV could have distorted key election results over previous decades as people’s second, third and subsequent preferences altered the outcome and allowed parties to stitch up coalition deals behind closed doors.

Yes, AV might have led to slightly different results than FPTP; that's the whole point. We could equally argue that FPTP produced a 'distorted' result compared to what the result under AV would have been.

As to 'stitch ups behind closed doors', good grief, try looking in the mirror, Georgie! And we will be able to see the electoral price that the Lib Dems have to pay for this in a few weeks' time - these 'stitch ups' are not a no-risk strategy.

Georgie then keeps on digging:

'For many people in this country their vote won’t count as much as voters who vote for extremist parties. If you want a fair voting system – if you want your voice heard in this country and want a say over how your community is governed, you would want your vote to count at least as much, if not more, than a BNP voter.'

Under FPTP votes are far from equal; the vote of a swing voter in a marginal constituency is worth infinitely more than a vote in a safe seat. Be that as it may; the idea that a ballot slip saying e.g. "BNP -1; Labour 2" has more influence on the outcome than one just saying "Labour - 1" is palpable nonsense; by and large they both have the same impact.

In this example, if the Labour candidate wins on the first round, the BNP/Labour ballot slip has no weight at all; if Labour wins after the BNP/Labour ballot slips are redistributed then the Labour and BNP/Labour ballot slips have the same weight; and if the Labour candidate doesn't win anyway, then neither the Labour nor the BNP/Labour ballot slip has any weight at all.

As ever, let me point out that the Tories are daft buggers: the single-member FPTP system is biased against them (for obscure mathematical reasons); what they should have proposed a referendum on is 'Multi-Member Constituencies' which is even better than AV, so there is no way the Lib Dems could have turned this down at the coalition negotiations.

Good summary

Allister Heath in today's City AM:

The government is right to seek to regain control of the public finances – but its inability to implement austerity properly could yet destroy the coalition. The wrong cuts are happening – and far too little meaningful restructuring of the public sector is taking place...

The result is a looming disaster for the coalition. Take cuts: yesterday, London Ambulance said that it would be cutting 560 frontline positions over the next five years, which is very bad news. Yet at the same time local councils are still recruiting politically correct non-jobs.

One recent investigation revealed that “walking coordinators", “obesity strategy officers”, and “active” workers are still being recruited. One council has just hired an “age friendly communities” manager, a walking and cycling officer, a “community conservation”officer and an “Energy Island” administrator.

Meanwhile, many bureaucrats prefer to shut services such as libraries* rather than seek the help of more efficient private providers to keep them going at a much cheaper cost.

Worth a read in full.

* Brent Council recently announced it was closing six libraries in order to 'save' £500,000 a year; at £80,000 per library per year, they seem like exccellent value to me (sure, that's no reason not to charge for internet use etc, which might get the net cost down to +/- nothing).