Author: David Landon Cole

In which the EU completely misses the point on headphones

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The European Commission is calling for a suggested maximum volume to be set on MP3 players, to protect users’ hearing

reports the BBC. One proposal is to have a limit of 85 dB, which can be overridden as far as 100 dB. This is a bit daft for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s a bad idea. If someone really wants to listen to music at an unsafely loud volume – say the front row of a rock concert – that’s their choice. If I want to listen, in my own home, to a popular beat combo at a high volume, but not inflict it on my family and neighbours, that’s my shout. You cannot listen to the Eroica quietly.

See what I mean?

Secondly, it won’t work. It will not be hard to simply remove the offending piece of technology – it’s really not that hard to join bits of wire together. Moreover, the 3.5mm plug is universal. One of its joys is that headphones bought in Taiwan will work on a CD player bought in Tennessee in my living room. This is eBay, currently listing over twenty thousand results for a search within ‘consumer electronics’ for ‘headphones’. In any case, it will just make people who do want to listen to loud music buy portable speakers.

Thirdly, it misses the point. Instead of going after people for damaging themselves, they should do something about annoying others. Specifically, by doing something to stop people playing bad music on bad speakers or bad headphones on the upstairs of the bus or on the train home. It’s really annoying. Encouraging them to go out and buy speakers to they can listen to loud (often shit, often SouljaBoy) music and stick it to the man is just dumb.

They’d have a lot more success if they just put a leaflet in with every pair of headphones sold – prominently, not folded in with the guarantee – saying that listening to loud music can damage your hearing and annoy people around you and here’s a link to the RNID’s Don’t Lose the Music webpage.

xD.

The goose that laid the leaden egg

Posted on by David Landon Cole

UK plc is not in a great state and today’s PBR is a recognition that recovery is not just around the corner.

We are in a worse condition than our G20 peers; alone still in recession and with three quarters of recession ahead of us. The question to be asked is why we are particularly affected.

Did Gordon Brown make mistakes during his Chancellorship? Of course he did. I think pushing PFI has to be up there; that having been said, we did have a good decade and independence for the Bank of England is recognised on all sides as having been a good move. With the wonder of hindsight, we might criticise the Second Lord of the Treasury for having stuck to Conservative spending plans for the first few years of the first Blair government; it seemed prudent at the time. General management of the economy was good.

What, then, has led us to this parlous state?

Put simply, it is over-reliance on the City. We were over-reliant on the City for growth, jobs and tax revenue. We thought the goose would keep laying golden eggs, so we didn’t support manufacturing and industry. Metalbashing seemed so twentieth century. There is a term for a country that over-relies on a single export – banana republic. Christopher Hitchens’ definition is worrying in its accuracy: “a money class fleeces the banking system while the very trunk of the national tree is permitted to rot and crash”.

If this crisis had been in car manufacture, perhaps Germany would now be worst hit, mutatis mutandis for other G20 states, with the caveat that they weren’t as reliant as we were on our bananas of choice.

All of a sudden, we have rediscovered metalbashing and decided it’s a jolly good idea after all. All of a sudden, we have realised that relying overly on a single industry is a bad idea. Pity that it has taken a crisis in the very industry we chose to make us realise that we were rather closer to a banana republic than we thought!

Let us look now at the architects of our downfall; where as the Spartan, Dracontius, accepted his exile, the bankers want rewards – from us!

If Labour made mistakes in its administration of the economy, they came from being too close to the policies of the current opposition and I do not think a further move towards laissez-faire is warranted.

I’m not going to be making much of Osborne and Cameron’s crocodile tears; the crash is as much of their ideological making as anyone else’s; they made the wrong calls in crises; and the last thing we need is a return to their policies for the economy. Yes, my party made mistakes; they were the same mistakes a Conservative government would have made; we were both wrong but at least Labour appears to be recognising the fact.

xD.

Birther sedevacantism

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Sedevacantists are a small minority within Catholicism who hold that Vatican II was illegitimate and so current Popes and the current Catholic church are shams.

They base this, as I understand it, on three ideas. Firstly, the changes passed at Vatican II, particularly the removal of the doctrine of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (nothing saved outside the Church, or two fingers to ecumenism) as this means the Church no longer has a unique mission. Secondly, new procedures and practices, such as the Paul VI Mass, are held to be in conflict with established Catholic practice. Thirdly, they regard Paul VI as a heretic and therefore unable to be Pope, even if he appears to be in the role, and consider his successors – John Paul I, John Paul II and the current Benedict XVI – to be antipopes. They therefore consider the Chair of St Peter to be empty; sede vacante – empty chair – is the term used by the Catholic Church for the period between the death of one Pope and the coronation of the next.

All this stems from Vatican II (1962-65). Despite their irrelevance to contemporary debates within Catholicism, the presence of traditionalist Catholics within the Church and poor understanding of history, they carry on promulgating their beliefs that the Catholic Church is not Catholic and that the Pope is a fraud.

Compare and contrast with the birther movement in the USA. Wikipedia has a rather nice definition of birther from Rachel Maddow:

a specific new breed of American conspiracy theorists who believe that the real problem with Barack Obama being president is that he can’t possibly have been born in the United States. He’s not eligible to be president. The birth certificate is a fake. He’s a foreigner. Once this has been exposed, I guess, he will be run out of the White House and exposed for the alien, communist, Muslim, gay, drug dealer, al-Qaeda member that he is

I do wonder if in years to come, we will see something like sedevacantism over Obama. It is easy enough to make the transposition; Vatican II is replaced with the 2008 election (doubtless vitiated by the liberal media), Paul VI is replaced with Obama and all subsequent decisions are illegitimate, as Obama does not have the capacity (in birthers’ eyes) to be President and any officials, including Supreme Court Justice, appointed by him do not ‘really’ hold their posts. While they retain their love for America, they see its administration as illegitimate and the line of constitutional authority, rather than the line of papal succession, as broken and America loses its unique mission.

xD.

David Nutt’s presentation to the Westminster Skeptics in the Pub

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Professor David Nutt has kindly allowed me to put his presentation on estimating drug harms from Monday 16th.

[SWF]http://www.davecole.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/westminter-sceptics-nov-09-.swf, 520, 390[/SWF]

Click the image above to move to the next slide.

You can also see this as a full-screen flash presentation, a PDF or a PowerPoint.

Please note that these slides are copyright David Nutt and not covered by the Creative Commons license of the rest of this blog.

xD.

1937, 2009

Posted on by David Landon Cole

From the Guardian:

President Barack Obama, who pledged to eradicate childhood hunger, has described as “unsettling” the agriculture department survey, which says 50 million people in the US – one in six of the population – were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy at some point last year, in large part because of escalating unemployment or poorly paid jobs.

From FDR’s second inaugural address:

I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.

I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.

I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

There’s no doubt that the US in a much better position than it was after the Great Depression; still, all is a long way from well.

xD.

David Nutt and Evan Harris at #sitp Westminster

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Skeptics in the Pub logoI had the very great pleasure of listening to two first-rate speakers at Skeptics in the Pub Westminster this evening – Professor David Nutt and Dr Evan Harris MP.

Professor Nutt went through the advice that had been given by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to Alan Johnson and the frankly poor way in which that advice was dealt with, as well as briefly mentioning why he was sacked. As Evan Harris pointed out, this was largely for publishing an article in a scientific journal whose readership is not large.
Continue reading “David Nutt and Evan Harris at #sitp Westminster” →

Exploiting grief

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I have nothing but sympathy for Jacqui Janes. I can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through. No parent should have to bury their child, but it must be near-unendurable to wonder whether more could have been done to save Jamie Janes’ life.

I’d love to know if the Sun has passed money to Mrs Janes. I don’t begrudge her it, but if the PM called me up out of the blue, I doubt I’d have the presence of mind to record the conversation. It’d take me a minute or two of fiddling with the phone to work out how to do it. Unless, of course, I’d been primed to do it by person or persons unknown.

I think putting a private letter in the press is a little tasteless. I do wonder how this ended up in the Sun’s hands; was it sent from Mrs Janes’ initiative or were the Sun speaking to each bereaved family, just on the off chance?

It’s no great secret that Gordon Brown is visually impaired and doesn’t write particularly legibly. Perhaps he should have rewritten the letter; perhaps not. If it has be checked by someone else, it probably would have been rewritten; there’s the rub. Instead of the PM’s honest & personal feelings, future letters will be drafted, scrutinised and typed up by a Wykehamist and then just signed by the PM, with all trace of human emotion and fallibility erased lest it end up on the front page of the gutter press.

The Sun seems to be using the anger occasioned by the loss of a son and soldier to score party political points. That dishonours his memory.

xD.

UPDATE 2150 – lots of other people have expressed similar sentiments to me, but there are a couple of particularly apposite posts by Bob Piper that I’d like to flag up. One is also called Exploiting Grief; the other is a fill-in-the-blanks form from 1916 that passed for a letter of condolence.

We’ve been expecting you

Posted on by David Landon Cole

It’s been a familiar line, on whose veracity I will not comment, that while the right-of-centre was merrily blogging away, the left-of-centre blogosphere was somewhat flaccid. Part of the reason for this, so the trope goes, was that Labour was in power. The Tories stole a march because they could freely open fire at teh evil ZaNuLab while the left were stuck being subservient toadies or, for a slightly more considered view, because there was not much point sticking it to the Tories and a lot of Labour-aligned people were fed up with the party.

Well, the times they are a-changing. The statements made by Mr Cameron et al are no longer the posturing of an opposition, but the positions of a government in waiting. This gives broadly Labour-aligned blogs something to bite into – ‘our teeth are in the real meat’ – and means the Tories are becoming more self-regarding.

We have Liberal Conspiracy, which is now part of the scenery, but a few other progressive blogs covering the breadth of politics have appeared – Next Left, Left Foot Forward, LabourList – while there is a storm brewing on the Tory-aligned blogosphere regarding Europe.

That last point reflects a debate going on in the parliamentary party (my suspicion is that there is not a similar debate in the voluntary party but I stand ready to be corrected). The Labour-aligned blogosphere isn’t quite there yet, although I suspect some of the running made by blogs on the Tories’ fellow members of the ECR in general and one or two characters in particular will be picked up nationally.

The prophecy was that, once out of power, Labour blogging would really take off. It would appear that it’s starting to do so; whether this is a knell for the Labour government or a tool to keep us in government, I don’t know. It is, however, overdue.

xD.

Re-Open Nominations

Posted on by David Landon Cole

In and amongst all the debates about reforming the electoral system, I’d like to flag up one that I particularly like. It’s simple, cheap and effective – Re-Open Nominations (RON).

The idea is very simple. On every ballot paper, at the bottom, is a candidate called RON. If RON wins, nominations are re-opened and the election is held again. Simple.

“A-ha”, I hear you cry, “but what about local councils?”

Local council wards each elect three councillors. If RON comes in the top three, anyone who would have been elected but comes below RON isn’t elected; anyone who beats RON is elected.

So, if the ward was Hogwarts and three were to be elected, only Alastor Moody would be elected and there would be a new election for the remaining two places:

Alastor Moody (elected)
RON (‘elected’)
Sirius Black (not elected)
Arabella Figg (not elected)
Albus Dumbledore (not elected)

Similarly, mutatis mutandis for Euro elections and the GLA.

Now, the advantages. People can express discontent with all the available options and, in instances where there’s only one candidate, means that they’re not elected by default. It’s slightly different to ‘none of the above’ in that it’s more constructive; someone isn’t necessarily elected just because no-one less crap ran.

xD.

Still there…

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I am very proud of some of the things I achieved while active in the LSE Students’ Union. A little while ago, I was contacted by LSESU asking if, as part of the redecoration of the bar, they could have a silhouette of me and a quote to go on the wall. I duly obliged; this evening, I saw it on the wall of the Three Tuns for the first time.

Silhouette 1

This is the wall, with the outlines of JFK, Cherie Blair, the two mascots (beaver and penguin) and a few other notables and not-so-notables including yours truly.

Silhouette 2

🙂

The quote says

42 real heads of government, 17 Nobel laureates, 2 fictional heads of government and at least 2 terrorists have been to the LSE. Countless others have changed the world.

Before you finish, just ask yourself – do we really need another accountant?

xD.