Marxism Marches On!?!

The downward path to the socialist utopia has become possessed by "the demons of quantification and control".

Today, Great Britain!?! ---- Tomorrow, the World?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Sunday Times [U.K.] article, Public services with a heart:

March 25, 2007 [/] Public services with a heart [/] Simon Jenkins

[...] One thing is for sure: the present model is not working. As Adam Curtis sets out in his current television series The Trap, a tradition of the public realm once built round autonomous institutions, elected leaders and public accountability has been overtaken by the demons of quantification and control. The means by which the Treasury regulates public money has become the means by which the centre controls everything on which money is spent.

To every activity is attached a pecuniary value and thus a performance. To every performance is attached a target and to every target a league table. The targets may seem to be guided by what people say they want in focus groups, but in reality they are “negotiated” by power blocs within the public service. Their enforcement depends on matrices of budgets, feedbacks and incentives, covered by quasi-contracts and internal pricing systems. Orwell’s future, depicted as “a boot stamping on a human face for ever”, is now a computer mouse implanted in the brain.

I remember once watching mesmerised as one of Blair’s “delivery czars”, Michael Barber, power-pointed his way through his latest public service targets in front of his beaming boss. Across the nation money was pouring in at the top of some Heath Robinson graph while out of the bottom were happy children learning, old people warming, hips replacing, roads mending, Africans no longer starving and prisoners trooping to jail. It was beautiful, clean and, above all, numerical. I was surprised that Barber was not wearing a white coat.

The quantification regime begun under Thatcher and John Major and perfected under Blair carried to its logical conclusion the ideal of government of the Webbs and early socialists. They took public services from churches, guilds, charities and public institutions and vested them in elected councils and ministries. The last quarter of the 20th century removed them yet further, to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office.

Lord Turnbull’s jibe last week that Brown was a “Stalinist” was hardly fair. It was under Turnbull as cabinet secretary that delivery teams mimicked Stalin’s pseudo-contractual Gosplan, with ministries reduced to gosarbitrazh boards negotiating the internal state market place. The new element is that in Britain the state retains control but subcontracts delivery, usually at much greater expense, to friends in the private sector.

Not a week passes without this system showing obvious signs of collapse. A computer sends thousands of passports to the wrong people, including terrorists. A call to an out-of-hours doctor in north Wales is answered uselessly by a call centre in Cardiff. As schools “teach the league table”, the number of 16-18s not in school or training rises under Labour by 20%. As GCSE results attract a bigger bonus than cutting truancy, school attendance falls.

Quantification makes computers honey-traps for ministers. John Reid and Patricia Hewitt are putty in the hands of their salesmen. Yet a 2005 survey showed that, of seven comparable governments, Britain had the highest computer “scrap rate”, the weakest contracts and the most uncompetitive market, quite apart from the poor value added of many of the machines. Yet these computers now have a validity of their own, blighting the NHS budget, farm payments, child support, ID cards, criminal records, tax credits and, most recently, doctor recruitment. They do not measure value but are a surrogate for it, so that what the computer cannot measure is valueless.

Yet government by numbers is easier to attack than to replace. The target culture may be the enemy of heart but Blair and Brown became obsessed with control because they felt a government machine they did not understand was blindly resisting them. Blair’s famous “scars on my back” was a reprise of Thatcher’s “I must have more power to smash socialism”.

But where is the politician to cry, “Give me less control, fewer numbers, no targets”? Cameron may deplore the NHS losing its heart to a computer, but with what will he replace the computer - himself?

[...] Locating a different way of governing public services - finding Cameron’s “heart of the NHS” - will be the great challenge of British politics over the next decade. The search is reflected in Curtis’s television series with its assertion of human freedom expressed not through atomised markets but through collective institutions and the ballot box. It is reflected in a new Civitas pamphlet by Danny Kruger, Cameron’s aide, pleading (yet again) for the little platoons. Society, says Kruger, has lost the intermediate tier of bonding institutions: not just schools, hospitals and police stations, but also pubs, shops and post offices. As a result, between the individual and the distant state there is only “social desertification”.

Such analysis is always strong on criticism but weak on prescription. Like the Blairites who championed communitarianism before 1997, Cameron’s people want to put the heart back into families and voluntary institutions. Whenever there is a stabbing or a riot they wonder what happened to the local leaders who are so vocal in communities abroad. Where is Britain’s civic glue? The best that most British neighbourhoods can summon up is a vicar.
[My ellipses and emphasis]

7th Century Barbarians Win?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Winnipeg Sun .com article, Iraq shows that U.S. not up to fight:

Iraq shows that U.S. not up to fight [/] Sat, April 28, 2007 [/] By SALIM MANSUR

[...] Al-Qaida's strategy is seemingly working. Harry Reid, the U.S. Democratic Senate Majority Leader, has declared the war in Iraq is lost. Hence, the winners would be the terrorists -- the barbarian marauders from the 7th century taking full measure of the greatest Western power of the 21st century and its inability to stomach the cost of defeating them.

This defeatism is more than Vietnam revisited. It is, in part, the never-dead virus of isolationism in American politics that is re-infecting a near majority of Americans into believing that if they shut the door to the world beyond the oceans then that world will not exist, nor torment them.

This "politics as a snapshot of the society" is the result of nearly two generations of education and media messaging that have brought about what political philosopher Allan Bloom documented so well in his book, The Closing of the American Mind.

In America, the most advanced attributes of the "instant gratification society" are to be found. The media has created a culture where anything of substantive value has merely a half-life between the relentless downpour of the trivial and the sensational.[...] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Global Warmist Disorder Moderates!?!

Major Gorebot and Kyoto treaty symptoms are less evident in the latest U.N. report. But, despite the modicum of rationality now emerging, the report is best described in the celebrated words of Rowan and Martin's World War II German soldier:

Very interesting, -- But stupid!

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Guardian [U.K.] article, UN: we have the money and know-how to stop global warming:

UN: we have the money and know-how to stop global warming [/] Report obtained by the Guardian spells out strategy to reverse climate change [/] David Adam, environment correspondent [/] Saturday April 28, 2007

Global climate change experts will this week lay out a detailed plan to save the planet from the catastrophic effects of rising temperatures. Climate change could be stopped in its tracks using existing technology, but only if politicians do more to force businesses and individuals to take action.

The UN study will conclude that mankind has the knowhow to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 26bn tonnes by 2030 - more than enough to limit the expected temperature rise across the planet to 2-3C. [/] Such a move would cost the world economy billions of pounds over the next two decades, but this could be recouped by savings due to the health benefits of lower levels of air pollution. [/] Cheaper solutions could bring down emissions to 1990 levels, but that would still see average temperatures rise by as much as 4C this century, with devastating consequences for wildlife, agriculture and the availability of water.

[...] The best way to limit future emissions is to focus on clean development in developing countries.

[...] The report says that taking "optimal" mitigation measures might by 2030 stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at 445 to 534 parts per million, up from an estimated 430 ppm today. [/] It indicates that stabilising concentrations relatively quickly at 450 ppm - an unlikely scenario - could still limit the temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, which scientists say could avert severe damage. Achieving the 445-534 ppm range could cost up to 3% of global gross domestic product (GDP) over two decades, the draft says.

[...] Greater use of renewable energy, nuclear power and biofuels will be needed to stabilise emissions, [/] [...] And it calls for the wider use of technology to capture carbon dioxide spewed from power stations and store it underground, known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). The draft says: "A critical issue is how quickly new coal plants are going to be equipped with CCS, because retrofitting power plants with CCS later is economically unattractive." Energy companies in the developing world are building a handful of "capture ready" power stations, which can be adapted when the CCS technology is ready, but hundreds of plants being built throughout China and India are not so advanced and there will be no way to constrain their pollution./[...] Jim Watson, an energy policy researcher at Sussex University, said: "A lot of the plants that are being built and discussed in China are not up to the highest standards because they are being built by regional governments and utilities, and there isn't much coordination from the centre."

[...] The draft report says such voluntary agreements are not effective, but it also raises questions about the success of Kyoto-style treaties based on targets and carbon trading. It says the best approach is to tie development to investment in clean technology.

[...] Sector by sector [/] Transport [/] Despite breakthroughs in cleaner options, such as hybrid cars, the sector is the fastest growing source of emissions, the report says. It highlights emerging technologies such as cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells and biofuels. Some campaigners warn that increasing use of biofuels could worsen problems such as food shortages, as farmers scramble to meet demand. The IPCC suggests this could be eased by a switch to biofuels made from waste cellulose. The report says government policies such as mandatory carbon dioxide emission standards are crucial, but that hikes in car tax, fuel duty and moves such as road pricing will be less effective as incomes rise. Better public transport can make a significant contribution.

[...] Waste [/] The IPCC says post-consumer waste, such as plastic bags, generates less than 5% of global emissions, [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Ban Shopping As Therapy?!?

It is the duty of government to protect the mental heath of all those in its jurisdiction according to Karl Marx and his more devout followers in Sweden.

Today the politicians are pouncing on Goldie Hawn. Tomorrow they will be pouncing on you!?!

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a The Local .se [Sweden] article, Politicians pounce on Goldie Hawn ad:

Politicians pounce on Goldie Hawn ad [/] Published: 26th April 2007 17:13 CET

A group of local politicians from Sollefteå in northern Sweden have lodged a complaint to the Swedish Consumer Agency (Konsumentverket) after viewing an advert that promotes shopping. [/] The three-member consumer delegation - consisting of Micael Melander from the Social Democrats, Tonny Molander of the Greens and Left Party representative Niklas Lind - discussed the advertisement for clothing chain Kapp-Ahl at a meeting on March 23rd.

The triumvirate took exception to the ad on the basis that it fosters the development of retail therapy. [/] "It's an ad where a young girl is really depressed because her boyfriend has just broken up with her. Goldie Hawn, who is an actress, encourages her to indulge in some comfort shopping.

"We think that because there are so many people with shopping problems it's not a good idea to encourage people to practice comfort shopping," Micael Melander told financial news site Dina Pengar. [/] [...] "We think that they are exploiting young people by showing that all problems should be solved by shopping. There have to be some sort of ethical limits," said Niklas Lind. [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Democracy: A False Religion?!?

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Town Hall article, Superstitions of Democracy:

Superstitions of Democracy [/] By William F. Buckley [/] Wednesday, April 25, 2007

[...] The disasters in Africa have fed on the hobgoblins of the 20th century, which were that colonialism was inherently oppressive and that democracy was the key to progress and to national and indeed spiritual redemption. An aspect of this terrible superstition is that governments tend to be judged on democratic paradigms. [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Va. Tech Killer Autistic

It is of interest that this obvious diagnosis does not seem to have been even contemplated by our media and their expert consultants despite four days of vast and detailed wall-to-wall coverage..

I report and link. You decide. - J :)

From a Mirror [UK] article, Grandad's anger at uni [Virginia Tech] murderer:

EXCLUSIVE: Grandad's anger at uni [Virginia Tech] murderer [/] Graham Brough In South Korea 20/04/2007

[...] Yang-Sun revealed the eight-year-old was diagnosed as autistic soon after his family emigrated to the US.

She said: "He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around and when others called his name he just answered yes or no but never showed any feelings or motions.

"We started to worry that he was autistic - that was the big concern of his mother. He was even a loner as a child.

"Soon after they got to America his mother was so worried about his inability to talk she took him to hospital and he was diagnosed as autistic." [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Delphi forums on Autism and Asperger's Disorder:

Welcome To AAA Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorders - Help and Support. We provide support, news, information, advocacy, for families dealing with this disorder. This is a Partners In Autisms Organization annex. Visit our web site for more current information. [Link now goes to Health-Reports.com Autism info.] [...]

Welcome To AspergerJungle

This Forum is intended for adult Aspies and NTs (neuro typicals) to meet and rid themselves of frustrations they might feel towards each other. It is for kicking, screaming and releasing those pent up feelings without fear of any comeback and perhaps end up with a dialogue for greater understanding of each other [...] [My ellipses and emphasis]