80 years on, we might need some 21st Century Blueshirts!

Worrying reports in today’s newspapers about opposition politicians combining to prevent Government views being expressed at a public meeting, and about physical and verbal abuse of Government deputies.  One expects no better from Sinn Féin, of course, but it’s disappointing to see Fianna Fáil brazenly displaying their bully-boy DNA so soon after they destroyed the country’s economy and reputation.

A FINE Gael deputy has claimed he was “physically assaulted,” by a woman as he left the stage at a rally in support of retaining services for the elderly at a local hospital.

Peter Fitzpatrick was one of three government deputies who were not allowed address a crowd of 700 who took part in a march on Saturday afternoon in support of retaining long-term care for the elderly at the Cottage Hospital in Drogheda.

The alleged assault took place as they were leaving the stage after being prevented from using the microphone.

The crowd was told by a member of the Save Drogheda Cottage Hospital committee that it had been agreed that any TD who did not sign a pledge would not be allowed the microphone.

….. Both of the opposition TDs in Louth — Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and Fianna Fail’s Seamus Kirk — signed it and addressed the crowd.

All this reminds me of a time long ago (the 1930s to be precise), when Fianna Fáil and assorted other gangsters attempted to prevent Cumann na nGaedheal politicians from speaking at public meetings.  As a result, the Army Comrades Association (better known as the “Blueshirts”) found a role for themselves, and helped keep Ireland safe for democracy.

Maurice Manning, who wrote a book on the Blueshirts, said in 2001 that

“the fundamental question as to why the movement appeared in the first place …..  at least to those involved, was straightforward to protect freedom of speech and to ensure that those opposed to Fianna Fáil and the IRA were able to get a fair hearing and hold their public meetings

…..   The only meetings being broken up were those of Cumann na nGaedheal and the new Centre Party. Not a single Fianna Fáil meeting was disrupted during this entire period.

The disruption was organised. The IRA made it clear that there would be no free speech for traitors, and openly set about putting this into practice. In this they had the backing of many Fianna Fáil supporters.

It is significant, for example, that James Dillon, then deputy leader of the Centre Party, and as hostile then to Cumann na nGaedheal as he was to Fianna Fáil, was emphatic that had it not been for the Blueshirts, freedom of speech would have disappeared in 1933.

So while the fascist-like trappings of the Blueshirts (and the possibly true fascist leanings of a minority of members) have rightly come to be regarded as suspicious, I cannot help but feel that their transient success was simply a reaction to Fianna Fáil’s innately violent and anti-democratic nature.

If things go on like this, with democratically-elected politicians being refused the right to express their views, we may need a 21st century version of the Blueshirts!

AAAAAA revisited

In 1999, The Economist started to get worried about the proliferation of acronyms, particularly TLAs (three-letter acronyms).

The Economist would like to draw attention to a new shortage: of acronyms and abbreviations. So great is the demand in a world where new organisations spring up almost daily, and firms are increasingly known only by strings of initials, that there are simply not enough to go round….

The nasty truth is that there are only 17,576 different permutations of three letters. That is not enough, when a multi-national organisation such as the ECB requires no fewer than five sets of abbreviations in the languages of the EU. Add one more letter and the permutations number almost 457,000. Yet even this does not solve the dilemma. Is the CBOT the Chicago Board of Trade or the Central Bank of Turkey?

This is a clear market failure. In the market for cabbages or computers, prices would rise, encouraging greater supply or choking off demand. But the supply of abbreviations is fixed—and the price is stuck at zero. Demand cannot be satisfied. Yet multiple use of an abbreviation only creates confusion. The solution is simple. A new organisation is needed to tax and control the proliferation of initials. It might be called AAAAAA (the Association for the Alleviation of Absurd Acronyms and Asinine Abbreviations).

This article prompted a reply which struck a chord.

SIR—I am writing to complain about your misuse of one particular acronym.  AAAAAA is already allocated to the Association for the Abolition of Appalling Arbitrary Application of Apostrophe’s, of which I am an activist.

NICK KAY Derby

And that was in 1999, before the use of redundant apostrophes in plural nouns (the Greengrocer’s Apostrophe) became as prevalent as it is today.  Not to mention the new and horrific variant, the use of an apostrophe in the third person present tense of a verb, which I flagged here,  here and here.

Since 1999, we have seen the establishment of  The Apostrophe Protection Society, a small step towards sanity and integrity in written English. Ans in 2009, there was a fascinating article in the Daily Telegraph on 29th August:  ”Councils issue crib sheets to prevent grammatical howlers on signs”.  Here is a flavour:

Council staff are being issued with an “idiot’s guide” on how to use apostrophes and other punctuation marks correctly in a bid to stem their misuse in street signs and official notices.  Local authorities around the country have now resorted to issuing GCSE-style crib sheets to their staff in a bid to raise standards of grammar in their organisations.  Guidance for staff at Salford council states: “Do not assume that if you don’t know whether to use an apostrophe, then most of your readers won’t either.  Many of your readers will notice, and they will infer that you did not learn to write correctly. If a reader notices that you have used incorrect grammar, you will instantly lose credibility.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Drumm raises the ante for Anglo board – he claims, in effect, that they knowingly approved misleading accounts

Former Anglo-Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm, in challenging the bank’s lawsuit against him in his US bankruptcy case, said the transferring of Chairman Seán FitzPatrick’s loans of up to €120 million off Anglo’s books was “fully and properly signed off by the bank’s credit committee as well as several non-executive directors” (see for instance this report in the Irish Times).

I have written about this previously, but I continue to be mystified as to how the bank reported its “loans to key management personnel” in its annual reports to  shareholders.  Take, for instance, the 2007 report, which includes the extraordinarily incorrect statement that “Loans to key management personnel are made in the ordinary course of business on normal commercial terms”.

Here we have a bank which gave its former chief executive (a) tens of millions of euros in loans (b) on an interest-only basis, (c) without adequate security, and (d) allowed him the facility to re-draw the loans after temporarily repaying them for concealment purposes at year-end.  And the board were satisfied that this was “in the ordinary course of business on normal commercial terms”?

It seems to me that either the board (including Fitzpatrick) were guilty of a default in their duty to shareholders, and perhaps of a statutory offence, in allowing this to be published, or the management were guilty of concealing from non-executive directors what they knew about Fitzpatrick’s loans.  David Drumm now appears to be saying that the former is the case.  He could, of course, be “mistaken”.

By the way, false accounting is a criminal offence under the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001.   It arises inter alia where somebody, intending to make a gain, or to cause loss to another, “falsifies any account or any document made or required for any accounting purpose” or “in furnishing information for any purpose produces or makes use of any account, or any such document, which to his or her knowledge is or may be misleading, false or deceptive in a material particular.”

The Director of Corporate Enforcement said last week that his office is preparing a fourth file to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions in relation to Anglo-Irish Bank.  I would like to think that midnight oil is being burnt in the DPP’s office on this case, but I have a horrible feeling that it just ain’t so.  The DPP tried to defend his lack of speed earlier this year, but the points he made seemed to me to be less than convincing.

Incidentally, the current DPP, James Hamilton, takes early retirement this month, and the Government have appointed Claire Loftus as his successor.  She has been promoted from her role as the Head of the Directing Division in the DPP’s office, and before that she was the DPP’s chief prosecution solicitor from 2001 to 2009.  I hope she can move things forward at a faster rate than her predecessor, but unfortunately I can find no reason to believe that a long and successful career in our DPP’s office is an indicator of a dynamic and energetic character.  Maybe I will be proved wrong.  For the sake of the morale of the general populace, I hope so.

Increasing CGT rate would be economically pointless

With all the fuss about the release of the Government’s budgetary plan to German politicians, one aspect of the plan seems to have escaped with little or no comment.  There is apparently a statement that €100 million would be raised from a reform of capital gains tax (CGT).  For “reform”, presumably we can assume an increase is planned, probably a large one.

I’m puzzled as to how the Government expects to generate additional tax revenue by increasing the rate of CGT from its current rate of 25%.  The opposite effect is in fact likely.  (Increasing Capital Acquisitions Tax on legacies would no doubt increase the yield from capital taxes somewhat, although there would be significant leakage as estate planning strategies would become more cost effective, and thus more prevalent – more fees for lawyers and accountants).  CGT is largely a voluntary tax which very often can be avoided by the simple expedient of deferring the sale of the asset in question.  If the gain is large enough, one has the option of leaving the country to legitimately avoid the associated tax (as Denis O’Brien did when he sold Esat).

A Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in 1999 said this in the foreword to their report “Cutting Capital Gains Tax Rates: The Right Policy for The 21st Century“:

Proper taxation of capital gains is a complex issue. Capital gains differ from ordinary income in several respects. Because capital gains occur over time, their size is influenced by inflation. And, unlike most ordinary income, the realization of capital gains is largely a matter of choice.

In addition, there is a concentration issue – most people realize sizeable capital gains on only a few occasions such as when they sell a business or farm. As a result of these factors, capital gains are more sensitive to the rate of taxation than ordinary income.

The tax treatment of capital gains is particularly important since they are derived from entrepreneurial ventures. In modern high-tech economies, these activities are the engine that propels economic growth.

The report concluded (see its executive summary) that:

The optimal tax rate is the rate that is best for the economy, and it is lower than the rate that provides the government with the most tax revenue. The current top statutory rate of 20 percent significantly exceeds the optimal tax rate.

Here in Ireland, the 1997 Budget reduced the rate of CGT from 40% to 20%. The then Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, was heavily criticized on the grounds that this would reduce revenues. He argued that revenues would rise substantially as a result of the lower rate. McCreevy was proved right (for once!) and revenues almost trebled , greatly exceeded official predictions.

Increasing the rate of CGT to 30% (as Fine Gael have proposed), or even higher, is unlikely to raise additional tax revenue in the medium term, and will reduce it in the long term. It would be a purely optical change, designed for political reasons to pacify left-wingers and give a spurious impression of greater fairness.

Is “material comfort” now a basic right of all citizens?

President Michael D. Higgins, in his inaugural address said: “… it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.”

Hang on a minute: does everybody have a basic right to material comfort, to be provided by the state if one’s own resources or efforts fail to deliver? What about the incurably indolent member of society?

The provision for needy citizens of basic shelter, and the avoidance of real hunger, admittedly seem reasonable demands on the State in any civilised country. But actual comfort?

I can probably live with Higgins’s assertion that “security” is a basic right, on the grounds that security is ill-defined and can mean different things to different people.

But comfort? This is just careless waffle, surely?

Did I miss a United Nations Declaration to the effect that everybody has a right not to be uncomfortable?  (The nearest the Universal Declaration of Human Rights comes is in Article 25, which says “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”)

My cunning plan to solve the Eurozone crisis

It’s simple really.  As John Maudlin says: “… the money to solve the crisis does not exist. The only way to find it is for the ECB to print money and print in size, enough to lower the value of the euro and make exports cheaper (which gives southern Europe a chance to grow out of its problems).”

That’s step one.  But there would remain the problem of the relative uncompetitiveness of the peripheral countries, especially Greece.  So here is my cunning plan, worthy of Baldrick at his best: all German workers would be required to be given a 30% wage increase by their employers.  (Same would happen in quasi-German satellites such as Finland, Austria, Netherlands.)

This would, at a stroke, level the competitiveness playing field within the Eurozone while, at the same time, putting lots of new Euros into the hands of Germans to spend on Greek holidays, Spanish wine and Italian shoes.

No votes for public sector employees?!

You may think that I am on occasion anti-public sector in my pronouncements (actually I’m not; I just think that Irish public sector management is lazy and inefficient and provides poor leadership).  Anyway, compared to the guy quoted below, I am a pussycat.

Dr J C Lester argues that only (net) taxpayers should be allowed to vote, thus ruling out state sector employees!

Why should people who are not taxpayers be allowed to vote money away from those who are? If we must have state services, it should at least be for those who pay for them to vote for which services they want and how much they wish to pay. To allow those providing, or living off, the services to vote is like allowing a shopkeeper to vote on what you must buy from him, or a beggar to vote on what you must give him….

… Consider state distribution of tax-money. We can see that this must create two social categories: those who are net taxpayers and those who are net tax recipients. Only the net taxpayers can be said to provide the state with tax-funds. The net tax recipients are paid out of taxation, plus any payments in newly created state-currency (which effectively taxes those who hold money). So to the extent that people are in the pay of the state they cannot be genuine taxpayers. A proof of this is that if their jobs were abolished the state would have more money to spend elsewhere, unlike those jobs in the genuinely taxpaying sector.

The writer, Jan Lester, is a leading member of the Libertarian Alliance.  The public sector seems to be a prevalent theme of writing on the LA website.  Its home page currently has a lead article by D.J. Webb called “Living off our Taxes”, of which the introduction gives a flavour:

There is nothing more frustrating than having to pay tax and national insurance so that public-sectors workers can earn more than you. People in the private sector face greater job insecurity and have less lavishly funded pension arrangements, where such arrangements even exist, and yet they are the golden goose that has to be repeated slaughtered in order that state workers can have secure and higher-paid jobs with astonishingly generous pension provision.

In case you were wondering, Webb was writing about the United Kingdom, not Ireland.  But, let’s be honest, he could have been writing about Ireland.

Embarrassing reality check: only 1 of the 7 presidential contenders could debate in our first official language

So, coincidentally or otherwise, we have elected as President the only candidate who actually can converse in our first official language (that’s the Irish language by the way).

From Irish Times on 19th October, reporting on the televised presidential debate held on our national Irish-language TV station, TG4.:

Only one of the seven, Mr [Michael D.] Higgins, is fluent in Irish. The format of the debate had each of the candidates read a short prepared statement in Irish. The debate, chaired by current affairs presenter Páidí Ó Lionáird, was conducted mostly in English, with Mr Higgins speaking in Irish.

The other candidates (surprise, surprise) all spoke of their desire to be fluent in the language, and promised to promote Irish if elected.  Translation: more coercion for the plebs, more taxpayers’ money to be wasted, but I can’t be bothered myself to learn the language.  Such hypocrisy.

This is both revealing and embarrassing.  We are the only EU country whose first official language is not spoken by the general  population.  6 out of 7 candidates for the highest office in our country never thought it necessary or important enough, throughout their entire career, to be sufficiently familiar with the Irish language to carry on a conversation.  And yet we spend tens of millions of euros annually in maintaining the fiction that Irish is a living language.

Fewer than 1% of Dáil and Senate debates are conducted in Irish, but Fianna Fáil succeeded (sic) in getting Irish recognised as a working language in the European Union.  So taxpayers have to pay for a small army of translators to be available just in case an MEP wants to use a cúpla focal.

Bad as that is, the cost is probably small compared to the millions wasted as a result of the Official Languages Act 2003.  For instance, Section 9(3) says that “The public has the right to expect that public bodies will send information …. to the public in general or to a class of the public in general in Irish or bilingually”.  So every piece of official bumph is 100% larger than it needs to be because it’s printed in both English and Irish.  You don’t get to choose which language you want your copy of a particular booklet to be written in; instead you get a jumbo version printed in both languages, which is wasteful beyond belief.

Our new President claims credit for establishing TG4 fifteen years ago.  It costs €33 million annually to run, and has an audience share of under 3%, basically a rounding error.  Indeed I suspect many of those viewers are watching subtitled programming in the second national language, or catching up on televised sport (for instance, Wimbledon tennis,  which bizarrely is transmitted live by TG4 with an Irish language commentary).

Previous Puckstownlane posts on this topic:  here and here.  And Michael Lewis exposed the folly of our Irish language posturing in his Vanity fair article, referenced here.  Ouch.

Ahern remains delusional

Apparently the press is to blame for the collapse of the Irish economy.  At least that appears to be the latest line being spun by Bertie Ahern.  Unbelievable. You couldn’t make it up.  See details of an interview with our dodgy, delusional, and disgraced former Taoiseach here.

A flavour of his ramblings:-

Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has called for an investigation into the media for what he said were failures to follow the economy because journalists were more concerned with following his dealings with the Mahon tribunal.

Mr Ahern said that from the time he began evidence to the tribunal, the media “just stopped following the economy”.

In an interview on Dublin City University’s radio station DCU FM, he said: “There should be an investigation into it. They should have been following the economy from August 2007, but they weren’t, they were following me. I think a lot of these guys really should have looked at themselves.

“The government were following the economy but the media weren’t. It was a very poor job by the media really. They were shown to be incompetent and that was the trouble – everything was on me.”

When will he ever recognise that the ultimate responsibility for the well-being of citizens came with the job of being Taoiseach, and it wasn’t just about lining his own pocket and being nice to his developer pals?  Trying to deflect responsibility to the media for our economic problems is beyond a joke.

Please, Bertie, get off the stage.

Thank you, Christian Jankowski, for exposing the real meaning of “conceptual” art

Last Wednesday’s Guardian had an article about the Frieze Art Fair, an international contemporary art fair that takes place every October in London.  Specifically, it dealt with Christian Jankowski’s cruel artistic joke “The Finest Art on Water”.  As their chief art writer, Charlotte Higgins, puts it:

….. one artist has taken the sometimes queasy-making connection between extreme wealth and the artworld to its logical conclusion: by attempting to sell a 65-metre superyacht at the fair.

Buy it as a boat (it will be built to order by CRN of Ancona, to the buyer’s specifications), and it costs €65m (£60m). Buy it as an artwork, authenticated by the German artist Christian Jankowski, and it will cost €75m. If that seems a little steep, a smaller, 10m Aquariva Cento motorboat is on display at the fair, among the Robert Rymans and Tacita Deans. That one’s €500,000 as a mere boat; €625,000 when officially designated art.

According to Jankowski, the boats are not artworks until he has handed out a certificate to the new owner, who will then have the right to call the vessel “Christian” (for the motorboat) or “Jankowski” (for the superyacht). There is nothing, he admits, to stop the owners calling the boats what they like even without paying the extra. But without the certificate, he said, “it won’t be sculpture”.

This brilliantly exposes the typical con-job that passes for conceptual art, much as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal famously did almost 100 years ago.  In 2004, Duchamp’s work was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century and it has been asserted that, with this single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and “severed forever the traditional link between the artist’s labour and the merit of the work”.

But, more significantly, Jankowski’s “sculpture” also highlights the dark question which we find so difficult to deal with: how can it ever be justified to pay tens of millions of dollars/euros for any artwork, no matter how rare?  If I can pay a skilled artist a few thousand euros to create an exact duplicate of (say) Van Gogh’s Irises, brush stroke by brush stroke, so that nobody can distinguish it from the original, then why should I not get as much satisfaction from hanging that on my wall as I would if I had paid $54 million for it?  It is functionally and aesthetically identical, after all.

The $54 million is surely a lot to pay for the bragging rights and reflected glory associated with owning an object which, although in principle unique, can effectively be reproduced at will by a talented forger.

Christian Jankowski is doing us all a favour by taking conceptual art to its logical (illogical?) conclusion.  If he forces the art establishment to look in the mirror and to concede that concept alone should not (or should hardly ever) triumph over skill, beauty and wit, he will deserve a place in art history.

Surely this insurance product is a terrible idea?

The Sunday Business Post had an article yesterday describing how “a new type of insurance product could help consumers to cut the premium they pay on other insurance policies”.   As I read the article, I became increasingly concerned about the consequences of the product described.

Irish insurance firm Blue Insurances …. will launch an excess insurance policy in the coming weeks. …. An excess is the part of any insurance claim that you have to pay yourself. For example, on a policy with an excess of €100, the customer will pay the first €100 of the cost of any claim, with their insurer covering the balance ….. Blue Insurance’s new product will allow customers to insure the excess applied on a range of products, such as home insurance, motor insurance, pet insurance and travel insurance policies. Customers can insure to a total of €750 in excesses …. Typically with insurance policies, having a higher excess can help to reduce your overall premium.

Why is this a bad idea?  Because the normal policy excess exists for very good reasons:-

• by requiring that the insured person has a material financial interest in protecting against loss, the size and incidence of claims is lowered, and everybody gains through lower insurance premiums
• it eliminates small claims which are disproportionately expensive to administer – again, everybody benefits from lower premiums as a result

So the effect of this new product being made available will be a much higher level of claims generally.  And it’s clear that the people who will be attracted to this new offering will be those who (for a variety of reasons) are most likely to be making claims.  The result will be higher premiums and a net loss for everybody (except those who have the excess cover and actually make a claim).  This is a classic “Tragedy of the Commons” in the making.

I am at a loss to understand the business model being adopted by Blue Insurances here.  I can’t see how they will avoid massive losses on this product, as the people who are most incentivised to take up this policy are the worst risks from an insurance perspective, not to mention prospective scammers and fraudsters.  I predict that the product will be withdrawn or modified before long, but probably not before it has caused unnecessary cost and inconvenience for nearly everybody.

I hope the major insurance companies will react by declining cover to anybody who insures all of any policy excess; it’s essential that insured persons have some financial interest in avoiding claims.

Self-serving pre-budget submissions: they remind me of Bastiat’s famous candlestick makers’ petition

It’s an established part of the Irish economic and political cycle.  Just when we are starting to see Christmas goods appear in the shops (in October, damn it), then we also start to hear the plaintive and deceptive tones of the special-interest groups trying to bend the ear of the Minister for Finance, and promote their own causes at the expense of everybody else’s.

There is a pattern to these transparently self-serving submissions.  Reduce (or more likely these days, don’t increase) the tax on this activity or that product, they say, and the effect will be a wonderful growth in jobs and prosperity, which will more than offset the tax foregone.  Alternatively, NGOs and quangos fire off a fusillade of demands that this allowance or that subvention should not only not be reduced but that, because their constituents are uniquely vulnerable, it should be increased (with wholly beneficial effects on the economy, of course).

And newspapers and other media blandly regurgitate the related press release without adding some proper analysis.

I am reminded of the famous candlestick makers’ petition revealed to us by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) wherein they asked the French government “to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat”.

And how did our resourceful candlestick makers justify their demands? By pointing to the wonderful effects such a law would have on economic activity:

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

A wily bunch, these French candlestick makers.  But our own special-interest groups are more than a match for them.  I can already hear the thundering hooves as they launch their cavalry at the poor Minister, armed with blustering press releases and practised in tugging at our heart-strings.  Pass the popcorn.

Bad news: Sarah Palin not running for President in 2012

At least it’s bad news for Obama.  His best hope for re-election as POTUS was to have as an opponent a bonkers Tea-Party type (pardon the tautology).

His next best hope is that Michelle Bachmann is selected as the Republican contender.  In terms of who would be the ideal head-banger for Obama to have as an opponent, Bachmann runs Palin a close second.  The evidence for her madness is not hard to find, but I particularly like the following example, quoted from an article in the New Yorker, August 2011:

In the spring of 2009, during what appeared to be the beginnings of a swine-flu epidemic, Bachmann said, “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

Rick Perry is a paragon of sanity and erudition by comparison with Palin and Bachmann.

National College of Art and Design – learning how to paint and draw is optional

My recent scribblings on Dublin Contemporary 2011 and on Richard Serra’s “challenging” works prompted me to think further about the root causes of the questionable integrity and vacuousness of much contemporary art, and its general lack of any discernible skill.

There was a heavy clue in The Sunday Times Culture section of 24th July (Irish edition).   Cristín Leach had a fascinating article entitled “New graduate shows raise the question of whether art should be led by ideas or skills”.  It is mainly about Dublin’s National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and how it now emphasises teaching students how to conceptualise rather than how to draw or paint properly.

While NCAD was the subject matter of the article, I suspect that a similar analysis could be written about almost any school of art in the western world.  Below I am quoting some extracts from the article.  The actual article is behind a pay wall, so I’m trying to balance my wish to give readers a good sense of what it is saying with the retention of a degree of respect for copyright issues.  I should also admit that I have seriously cherry-picked the extracts to suit my own perspective, and that Cristín Leach was more balanced in her article (although I have a suspicion where her sympathies lie).

…..“Every year, people say to me there’s hardly any painting,” says Robert Armstrong, the head of painting at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), of visitors to each summer’s graduate art shows…… He mentions …..Bob Glynn, who graduated with a pseudo-architectural installation made from found scraps of wood and carpet, John Ryan, who made sculptures from the trays in which he had mixed his paint, and Tom Boland, who filled a room with cardboard boxes into which words and phrases had been cut with a scalpel……

It’s hardly news that, in 2011, painting graduates are not necessarily painting. It’s a predictable result of the way in which art is taught at third level: concept first, medium second. …. He points out that students who want to learn to paint or attend life drawing classes still can, although many don’t “It’s an option and it’s available regularly. A very small percentage take it up because a lot of people don’t see the value in it any more.”

They’re wrong, says the painter Mick O’Dea, who attended NCAD in the late 1970s and taught there from 1981 to 1999. “Painting is the kind of art that you learn as you are doing it,” he says. “The concept is never divorced from the activity. It’s through the activity that the concept becomes clear. If you go to an art college that emphasises concept, it can be to the detriment of the activity. You need to be encouraged to get your hands dirty.”   O’Dea is the principal of the recently re-established Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) School, which, he says, has emerged out of necessity. “The people involved feel this drawing-and-painting issue needs to be addressed,” he says.…..

…. among the current crop of graduates are some with ideas and no understanding of how to execute them, or lacking the skill to do so. This isn’t necessarily the college’s fault. If the students haven’t gained the skills it’s maybe because they haven’t sought them out. In the current system, the onus is on the student to take what they want from their time in college.  Teaching is more discursive now,” says Napier, the head of fine art at NCAD. His idea of a successful student is one who has learnt to self-educate, to make connections, to ask the right questions. “I think it’s a more flexible, empowered way to come out of art college into today’s art world.

“A person standing up telling you something is no substitute for someone keeping their mouth shut and doing it,” says O’Dea. So at the RHA, teaching is by demonstration.

… a successful NCAD graduate has been well taught under Napier’s definition if, 10 years after graduation, they turn up at the RHA and say, ‘I need to learn to draw now.’ That’s concept-before-medium in action.

Having read the article, the question I was left with is: how much does NCAD get in taxpayers’ money to perpetuate this empty, derivative and self-indulgent approach to art and design?

The Government is still playing footsie with Denis O’Brien

Why is Fine Gael still cosying up to DO’B?

This from the front page of today’s Irish Times: Ex-Esat chief refuses to take part in forum with O’Brien

Former chief executive of Esat Barry Maloney has written to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste saying he is no longer willing to take part in the Global Irish Economic Forum in Dublin this weekend because his former business associate Denis O’Brien is attending …..  in letters sent to Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore, Mr Maloney said he would not attend this event, given that Mr O’Brien would be a participant, despite the severe criticisms made of him by the Moriarty tribunal in its final report …… a senior Government source expressed confidence in Mr O’Brien, who was involved in many important Irish businesses and charities and had an important contribution to make to the forum.

As I wrote in June, when he was invited to meet the Queen of England:  “Mr O’Brien has denied any wrongdoing, and the issues dealt with by Moriarty may be tested in some form in a court of law.  But in the meantime, surely we are right to expect some circumspection from our political establishment in dealings with Mr O’Brien, and that they should keep him at arm’s length on our behalf.”

Is there nobody in Fine Gael who has the integrity and backbone to stand up and be counted on this?

Dan O’Brien on Irish House Prices

Dan O’Brien had a good piece in Saturday’s Irish Times about house prices in Ireland.  But a couple of comments should be made.

Firstly, Dan (or the sub-editor) gave the piece the title “How low can house prices go?”  While the article was interesting in many respects, I don’t recall him answering that particular question.  OK, so headlines are always making false promises which the actual article fails to deliver;  not exactly Man Bites Dog.  Also, if you read the article expecting to see Dan’s own view, you would have been disappointed.

In fairness he does say “If the 2011 rate of decline in residential property prices continues for another 12 months, prices will fall by about 15 per cent from their current level. Given the headwinds facing the market, that is more likely than not.”  And he also notes that the Banks’ Stress Tests had a baseline assumption “that prices will fall by a further 20 per cent before the market hits bottom. In their worst-case scenario, the decline would be almost 30 per cent. That would bring the fall from the 2007 peak to 59 per cent.”

But it would have been nice to have the personal view of the Economics Editor of the Irish Times on the matter.

Secondly, and more surprisingly, Dan doesn’t seem too hot on the calculation of percentages.  Two sentences in the article offer contrasting views on the extent of the rise in Irish house prices during the bubble phase:

Compare “In the decade from the index’s start date, in early 1997, Irish property prices quadrupled” with “Although the US did not look out of the ordinary in the property-price rises it experienced from 1997 to 2006 (130 per cent compared with Ireland’s 400 per cent), it has suffered the second-worst rich-world crash (after Ireland)…”

Surely Dan doesn’t think that if a number quadruples, it has risen by 400%?  Surely he knows that it has only risen by 300%?  Must be an error by the pesky sub-editor again.

You’ve heard of Godwin’s Law; here’s PuckstownLane’s Law

Mike Godwin observed that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and/or the Nazis.  His law has become an established part of modern media and Internet culture.

I would like to propose a new law which states that, given enough time, in any discussion about Irish nationalist or Republican issues, someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by calling its proponent a “West Brit”. And just as with Godwin’s Law, the use of this term means (a) the discussion has come to a conclusion and (b) the person who uses it has ipso facto lost the argument.

You OK with that, Martin McGuinness?  No, I didn’t think so.  (See this report.)

Lowry should read Bastiat

So former Fine Gaeler Michael Lowry is miffed that the Government has turned down the plan he was promoting for a super-casino in Tipperary. That’s not a surprise, nor is it a surprise that the present incumbents have taken the first available opportunity to stick it to Michael, given his disgraceful and self-serving support of the last Government.  Of course it’s always possible that the fact that Lowry (whom Matt Cooper described as the most disreputable politician he’d ever met) was involved had nothing to do with the decision, and that it was made entirely on its merits. Anyway, the decision was undoubtedly the right one, whatever the reasons for it.

The Irish Times reported that

Mr Lowry …. said he wanted to support plans that would bring an economic boost and up to 2,000 jobs to his Tipperary North constituency….Thurles Chamber of Commerce president Austin Broderick said the area was “totally devastated” by the Government’s refusal to allow a large casino. “It’s unreal. One thousand jobs gone down the Swanee…”

Here we go again, with alleged job creation/saving potential being used to justify everything from continuance of dodgy tax breaks to loss-making capital investments, to opening yet more shops.  John Kay has neatly disposed of similar fallacies (see here), but to see the rebuttal done elegantly and forcefully, one needs to travel far back in time and read the works of Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), particularly his famous Parable of the Broken Window.

In Bastiat’s tale, a man’s son breaks a pane of glass, meaning the man will have  to pay to replace it. The onlookers consider the situation and decide that the  boy has actually done the community a service because his father will have to  pay the glazier to replace the broken pane.  The glazier will then presumably spend the extra money on something else,  thus helping the local economy. The onlookers come to believe that breaking  windows stimulates the economy, but Bastiat exposes the fallacy. By breaking the window, the man’s son has reduced his  father’s disposable  income, meaning his father will not be able purchase new shoes or some  other luxury good. Thus, the broken window might help the glazier, but at the  same time, it robs other industries and reduces the amount being spent on  other goods. Net result: a loss to the economy overall.

Building a super-casino in Tipperary may create jobs, but overall it will have a negative effect on the economy as it will divert limited investment capacity from more sensible (and more socially responsible?) projects which, as it happens, would also create jobs.

Dispatches from the Frontline of Idiocy

The following examples of illiteracy or barbarism were all encountered in the past two weeks.  I wish I could stop noticing such things.  Or even, dare I say it, stop getting bothered by them.  But I say, old chap, WE MUST HAVE STANDARDS!

First up is a stand at the Irish Antique Dealers’ Fair.  Presumably a Mr Yeat is somehow involved, but I’m not sure why he claims to own the country.  They surely don’t mean W.B. Yeats, and the part of Sligo associated with him?

Next is a greeting (sic) card, of the smutty variety.  The humour is somewhat spoiled by the failure to distinguish between “effect” and “affect”.  This is a common enough howler, I suppose, although it’s slightly depressing to see it writ large on a product which presumably went through many hands and took a lot of effort in its production.

Similarly, another blogger called Pencil&Spoon did a posting on a beer bottle label which was full of spelling and punctuation errors.  I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting liberally, as what he has written echoes my thoughts on such matters.

“What makes these mistakes especially frustrating is that the front of the label has obviously been well-designed and lots of effort has gone into it …. Even the paper it’s printed on is of a high quality. For this level of design and detail it must have passed by a few people and for none of them to spot those errors is just not good. As the front …. looks bold and well designed, I feel some confidence that the beer will also have had the same effort put into it. The shoddy spelling on the back makes me think again. ….I know some people aren’t good with spelling and grammar, I understand that, but there’s always someone around to take a look at it and check it…..Breweries: please try not to make spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes on your beer labels. …Even a small typo can send the message that you are sloppy and careless.”

Next up, when I saw the mass of warning signage and verbiage on a simple pool air mattress (we used to call them “lilos”), I became all nostalgic for the good old days when we were not treated like idiots and when judges didn’t entertain ridiculous personal injury claims by people who obviously qualify for the Darwin Awards (which “salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it).

Let’s fight Ryanair’s nastiness with a campaign of obstruction!

I previously wrote about the various annoyances inflicted on passengers by Ryanair (see here and here).  The main one that bugs me is the failure to have either allocated seat numbers or, at the very least, to board passengers according to a ticket number issued as they arrive at the gate.  If my local butcher can do this, why can’t Ryanair? The cattle-like queuing at every Ryanair departure counter from about 30 minutes before boarding actually starts is a complete pain .

But now I am almost equally annoyed by the nonsense they go on with as regards cabin baggage.  Firstly, they try to catch you out by having a smaller than expected limit on cabin bag dimensions.  The International Air Transport Association (IATA) standard hand baggage allowance is 56cm x 45cm x 25cm, but Ryanair allows just 55cm x 40cm x 20cm. This means that the bag you have used without a problem on Aer Lingus, easyJet or British Airways may not be allowed on a Ryanair flight.  And if you fall victim to this trick, they will charge you dearly for putting the bag in the hold.  Ryanair are practically the only airline not to follow IATA guidance on this.

Then there is their insistence on passengers putting absolutely everything in the single piece of hand baggage before you board: your laptop,  handbag, paperback book, duty free, camera etc all must be squashed into the bag.  Most airlines are not so demanding; Aer Lingus, for instance, says that “additional small items (camera, personal stereo, overcoat, handbag or laptop) are allowed”.  And the net result of Ryanair’s policy is that boarding is slowed down while passengers, having selected their seat,  extract from their cases the items they will need on the flight – books, iPads, magazines, personal stereos etc.

So at first I couldn’t understand Ryanair’s logic for the strict enforcement of this rule.  But light dawned on me recently, when it became apparent that the rule does not seem to apply at certain airports, and in fact “duty-free” shops at these airports advertise that a duty-free bag is allowed on all flights (including Ryanair’s it would seem) , in addition to the normal cabin bag.    Not surprising that they would make a point of this, as people are much less likely to buy stuff at airports if they are forced to squeeze them into an already full cabin bag.

So here is what I believe is happening.  Ryanair negotiates individually with airports for handling charges.  Airports kick up about Ryanair’s cabin baggage policy as it deters passengers from patronising the airport’s retail tenants, who are thus less able to pay the exorbitant rents to the airport.  Ryanair says: charge us less for handling and we will allow passengers to bring purchases on board separately.  Result: more money for Ryanair, higher rents for the airport, higher prices at the airport shops.

I have no documentary proof of this scam, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.

It’s time to fight back!  Here is what all passengers should do: after being forced to put everything into the single piece of cabin baggage, make sure to take as long as possible extracting what you need when you arrive at the seat.  Don’t be afraid to block the aisle in so doing.  There really is no rush.  After all, if you hadn’t been the victim of Ryanair’s arbitrary and oppressive cabin baggage policy, you wouldn’t have to  cause a delay at all.  So take your time.  What are they going to do, throw you off for being a little bit slow and bumbling when you get to your seat?  Hardly.

If sufficient people were to fight back in this manner, Ryanair would find their turn-around time stretching out and causing them flight delays.  A hit to their bottom line, in other words.  The only thing that will get their attention.

So come on Ryanair passengers, stop being sheep, and give them a taste of their own medicine!