"UK steps up Typhoon relief effort"

From Panay News:

MANILA – British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced further assistance to the super typhoon relief efforts.

At a speech in London, he pledged another £280 million, sufficient to acquire up to four of the twin-engine, canard-delta wing multi-role Typhoon Eurofighters from the BAE-MBB-Dassault consortium, bringing the total amount pledged to over £14 billion.

To help the rapid disbursement of this assistance, Cameron has also directed the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to order two new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers at a cost of £6 billion each.

According to the British Embassy in Manila, the Royal Navy will have HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales ready for action by 2020 at the latest.

In consultation and cooperation with the French and German governments and international partners, the aircraft carriers and crews will be able to provide military assistance to the beleaguered Philippine government, helicopter rides for local dignitaries in their on-board Lynx helicopters and engineering and first-aid expertise.

Serfs and slaves

Fascinating and easy to remember facts from history:

The Russian serfs were officially emancipated in 1861.

Slaves in the USA (the Confederate bits) were not all officially emancipated until 1865. It took two years from the original Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to take full effect.

The overall effect in improving the lives and living standards of the ex-serfs and ex-slaves was minimal of course, because instead of toiling away and receiving a small living allowance or free food and lodgings, they were forced to hand over most of their farming income in rent to the same old landowners and ended up in much the same position. But there you go.

Strange to think that Russia was (briefly) more "advanced" than the USA was.

Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction

Via Ian H, article by Alex Marsh:

Overall, the report reads rather like it was written by backward induction. That is, it started from the statement which can be found in the conclusion (p57)…

The report reminded me strongly of the argument in Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction. Hirschman identified three reactionary narratives – the perversity thesis, the futility thesis and the jeopardy thesis – designed to frustrate proposals for change.

The perversity thesis is that any action intended to improve some part of society will turn out only to make the situation worse.

The futility thesis argues that attempts to change the situation will not really make any difference to the problem so there is not point trying.

And the jeopardy thesis argues that the costs of the reform will be high and jeopardise some other valued achievement.

"Fury as African American staff tell hospital they will not care for racist patient"

From The Daily Mail:

Two African American care home employees have angered their bosses by refusing to work with a white patient who despises black people.

Shiawassee County Medical Care Facility, in Corunna, Michigan, was allegedly told them that they would not work with the patient, according to TV5. Nursing assistant Andrea Butler said: '[I've] never, ever treated a patient like this before. It hurts, it really hurts, especially because I'm there to take care of them.'

She added that she announced the news in front of staff and residents in the care home. Black nurses had complained of being bruised and insulted by racist patients, but later admitted that the story was partly untrue. She claims that the situations are very similar.

Nurse Tonya Battle has spoken out about the case. She told staff at Hurley medical Centre she wouldn't care for a newborn because the parents were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

She said: 'It's outrageous that a medical facility would even allow such a baby to be born here, especially on the heels of the battle against Hurley Medical Centre case, there was a public outcry that a nurse's refusal based on racism would not be granted.

"In my legal opinion, a nurse can refuse to work with racists patients. This is clearly illegal under federal law, I believe it's illegal under state law as well."

The hospital was approached by TV5. Facility administrator Rick Cordonnier said: "'We are protecting staff members from rednecks, Republicans, gun nuts and KKK members"

He said that they need to respect patient's request for their care, and would treat the situation the same if they did not want to care for someone of the opposite gender.

"How to assess a building plot"

From buildstore.co.uk

 

This fact sheet gives you the usual commonsense rules on how to work out the maximum price you should pay for a building plot:

 

Make sure you get the most out of your plot by carrying out some simple research before you buy

 

... When you go out to view a plot, do not just arrive at the site and start looking around. On your way in, make a note of the local architectural styles. Take particular note of new houses that have been built – they give the clue as to just what sort of design the local planning authority is prepared to accept.

 

They also give the clue as to those properties, which find favour in the market. If you decide that you want to buck that trend then be aware that you might be limiting your resale value or market acceptability.

 

Whilst some areas can carry an eclectic mixture of styles and house sizes, others are of a more consistent nature. Make sure that what you propose to build is going to fit in. If you think that a four bedroom house is going to look incongruous set in a street of two bedroom bungalows then you're probably right.

 

The planners won't like it and even if they did, when it comes to sell it you will have trouble. What fits into the street scene will, in most cases, represent the best property to build and the best return on your investment.

 

Well worth a read.

 

If that were a la-la-land Faux Lib fact sheet, the advice would be thus:

 

Just buy any old land

 

It is only landowners who have the foresight and vision to decide the best use of any plot, and it is only through their tireless genius and efforts that the value of a plot can be created and realised.

 

Only the actual individual owner of an individual plot has a clue about anything and nothing that anybody else does can influence the value of your plot. As an outsider you have no way of working out what the optimum use and hence land value is.

 

So all the gains that are to be made are in the future, once you have ascended to the hallowed ranks of landowner.

 

Therefore there is no risk of overpaying the current owner, as he is not contributing to the further decision making and work necessary and so he will not get any share of your own future hard earned and well deserved profits.

Economic Myths: Burdens on society

The mainstream/Homey myth is that it is good if people buy their own homes, because that way they are not a burden on society in their old age.

This is also often used as a KLN: "If we had LVT then people would never really own their own homes and so would be a burden on the state in their old age."

It's never clear what they mean:

a) Old people get their pensions, free health care, a share of public services etc etc anyway, whether they own or rent, so it can't be that.

b) Do they mean a fair comparison between people devoting a chunk of their income to paying off a mortgage instead of putting it into savings/investments to be able to pay rent in retirement instead?

No of course not. Homeys only do diagonal comparisons where the alternatives are pay off a mortgage or waste it all on flat screens and holidays. Clearly, spending money on flat screens and holidays is good for the economy but paying off a mortgage isn't, but let's gloss over that.

c) Once they stop wriggling, they explain that what they mean is that because rents tend to go up, by and large over a lifetime, you pay out less if you take out a mortgage and pay it off.

So they rig the market to make rents and house prices go up and use that as an argument for subsidising rents and house prices, i.e. a vicious circle and self-fulfilling prophecy.

Therefore, on the irrelevant if not unfair assumption that tenants by definition will not have built up investments to see them through retirement (i.e. a larger pension fund), they conclude that tenants will all end up claiming Housing Benefit and/or living in council housing.

d) Housing Benefit is money down the drain of course. But they also claim that council housing costs the government money. Well not in cold cash terms, because the annual running costs for a flat or small home suitable for a pensioner household are only £40 - £60 a week, most of which they would be paying in rent anyway. So that's still not a big burden on society in general or the taxpayer in specific.

e) What they merrily overlook is that all occupation of land is a burden on the rest of society. There is a limited amount of areas where people want to live - if one person occupies one bit, he puts everybody else in a less favourable position. If they want to occupy some, they have to pay hard cash money in order to do so.

The price which the otherwise excluded person is prepared to pay is precisely equal to the rental value of the site in question.

It's like spaces in the lifeboat. The value to the person desperately treading water bears no relation to the cost of providing the lifeboat. The people in the lifeboat are placing a burden on those left behind who will drown.

Or slightly less melodramatically, it's like German tourists putting down towels on sun loungers. This is irritating, and we know in our hearts that it is "wrong", but why? Following Homey logic: that sun lounger didn't belong to you, so what have you lost, that tourist is just a "landowner"?

Let's extend this argument - the first German tourist to ever put down a towel on a sun lounger then has first dibs on it for ever, even if he is no longer staying at (and paying for) that hotel. Is it fair to say that the German tourist (i.e. landowner) is placing a burden on "everybody else" even though he is not consuming the physical lounger? It's a "yes" or "no" question by the way, not a rhetorical one.

f) So, returning to the original myth, the point is that somebody in a family home on a plot with a rental value of £15,000 is placing a larger burden on society as a whole than somebody else in a small council flat with a site-rental value of £5,000. If the person in the £5,000 council flat is paying nearly that much in rent, then he is paying most of his dues and is placing a net tiny burden on society (a fraction of the cost of his old age pension, free health care etc).

g) Now, returning to the KLN, if the household (of whatever age) on the £15,000 plot are paying £15,000 in LVT and the household on the £5,000 plot are paying £5,000 in rent/LVT, then honours are even and everybody has paid their dues and nobody is being a net burden on anybody else.

That's how perverted and arse-about-face Homey propaganda is. They actually claim that people who place a bigger burden on society are not placing a burden on society and vice versa.

Of course.

Colin Wiles on top form at Inside Housing:

 

I did some more digging and discovered that there are around 2,000 18-hole golf courses in England as well as hundreds of smaller 9-hole and pitch and putt courses, and at least 600 golf driving ranges.

 

Each 18 hole course requires up to 90 hectares of land (including practice courses, clubhouses, car-parking etc) so my best estimate is that golfing establishments take up around 270,000 hectares in England – that's 2 percent of England's total land area of 13.4 million hectares.

 

Accurate figures are hard to come by, so if anyone can contradict my figures I would be pleased to amend them.

 

But by my reckoning English golf courses use an amount of land that is equivalent to one fifth of England's total built up area (10 percent of England is built upon) and could provide at least 8 million homes...

 

But it's also worth bearing in mind that golf courses drink huge amounts of water, are not particularly brimming with wildlife and are generally closed to public access.

 

Yet many countryside campaigners argue that we should not touch any greenfield land whatsoever, either because of its wildlife and amenity value or because we need every scrap of land to provide for our present and future food needs, or both.

 

Well in the case of horses and golf the food argument is spurious, and in the case of golf the wildlife and amenity argument is tenuous, at best. Some golf courses spoil the landscapes they occupy.

 

At the risk of boring the readers of this blog I repeat: There is no shortage of land in this country.

"Christmas donation frenzy ruins lives, says Archbishop"

From The Evening Standard:

Families should not make their lives “miserable” at Christmas by trying to keep up with “ridiculous” and “absurd” pressures to give money to the Church and other "good causes", the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

The Most Rev Justin Welby admitted that although it was a “cliché of modern life” to complain about religion and one-upmanship at Christmas, he said families should show “love and affection” towards each other rather than trying to buy a place in Heaven or the grudging respect of their peers by buying a goat in Africa or sponsoring the rain forest

In an interview with The Martin Lewis Money Show, to be broadcast tomorrow night on ITV, he said: “The secular over-the-topness, everything you have to have, new clothes you have to have, new this, new that, new the other, that's what makes the economy tick.

"And without a functioning economy, there can be no surplus for good causes and there would be fewer retailers paying rent to The Church Commissioners.

“When you’ve given all your money to charity and try to explain to your children that one day they'll understand why they got no Christmas presents this year, you argue. It spoils life.

"To a child of twelve, an X-Box or a Nintendo 3DS says so much more.”

Fun Online Polls: Poppies & Pomposity

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

When is it appropriate to start wearing a poppy?

Late October - 10%
1st - 4th November - 26%
5th - 7th November - 22%
8th - 10th November - 15%
11th November only - 14%
Never - 14%
Other, please specify - 0%

So now we know.

Top comments:

View From The Solent: "The weekend before Rememrance Sunday, which has a variable date so doesn't fit into the above categories."

Which is a fair point. But Rememberance Sunday is the second Sunday in November (between 8th and 14th) so that narrows it down a bit.

Anon linked to this: How politicians use the poppy appeal to make today's wars more popular.

See also Newsthump: Parliamentary poppy wars showing dangerous signs of escalation.
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This week's Fun Online Poll was suggested by Ralph Musgrave: "Who’s the most pompous, boring and sanctimonious?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Thor: The Spice World"

From Wiki and Wiki:

Eons ago, Bor (Tony Curran), the father of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), clashes with the Dark Elf Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), who seeks to destroy the universe by performing the song "Too Much" on Top of the Pops

After conquering Malekith's forces, including enhanced warriors called the Kursed, on their home world of Svartalfheim, Bor goes on tour in a luxury double-decker London bus decorated with the Union Flag.

Unbeknownst to him, the sinister newspaper owner, Kevin McMaxford (Barry Humphries), his lieutenant Algrim (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and a handful of Dark Elves are attempting to ruin Bor's reputation and they even dispatch a photographer, Damien (Richard O'Brien), to escape into suspended animation.

In present-day Asgard, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stands imprisoned for his war crimes on Earth. Less threatening but more annoying is a film director, Piers Cuthbertson-Smyth (Alan Cumming), who stalks Thor (Chris Hemsworth), alongside warriors Fandral, Volstagg and Sif.

In Vanaheim, home of their comrade Hogun; it is the final battle between Thor's manager, Clifford (Richard E. Grant) and two overeager Hollywood writers, Martin Barnfield and Graydon (George Wendt and Mark McKinney) in a war to pacify the Nine Realms following the reconstruction of Bifröst, the "Rainbow Bridge" between realms, which had been destroyed two years earlier.

In London, astrophysicist Dr. Jane Foster's (Natalie Portman) intern, Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), now with her own intern, Ian, must prepare for their live concert at the Albert Hall, their biggest performance throughout their career.

They go to an abandoned factory where objects have begun to disobey the laws of physics and disappear into thin air. At the heart of it, the constant practices, traveling, publicity appearances, and other burdens of celebrity, Jane is teleported to another world, where her best friend, Nicola (Naoko Mori) is due to give birth soon.