Dangerous comparisons

There has been a lot of coverage lately regarding Sen. Hillary Clinton's decision to run for the Presidency of the US in the 2007 elections. (I use the word 'decision' loosely here as I'm sure I don't have to tell you how little of a surprise it comes to most of us that she's running.) Among the things that have been said of her is she is running as 'the new Margaret Thatcher'.

As one who grew up in the 'Thatcher Era' here in the UK, that is not a comparison that sits comfortably with me. Margaret Thatcher was - still is, until the embalming fluid finally dries out - a Conservative; a Conservative's Conservative, in fact. In terms of US politics that puts her firmly in the Republican territory, which is why she and ol' Ronnie R got on so famously well.

But to have a Democrat hailed as 'the new Margaret Thatcher'? Let's have a brief look at some of the events in Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister.

1. In 1981, she implemented a sharp rise in VAT to 15%, resulting in a short-term inflation spike to match. Employment, particularly in manufacturing, was hit badly. Unemployment doubled to 2 million.
2. She raised taxes again in 1982, causing inflation and interest rates to fall back. Unemployment kept on rising, and reached between 3.6 and 5 million.
3. By 1983, 5 years after taking office, manufacturing had fallen by 30% from its 1978 levels.
4. The powers of the Trades Unions were drastically curtailed by a series of reforms. In 1984 the miners' union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike to oppose proposals to close a large number of mines across England. Civil liberties were infringed by Police in controlling the riots and picket lines. After a year, the strike folded and the cuts went ahead. By 1994 only 15 mines remained open across the entire country, and over 200,000 jobs had been lost.
5. She began cuts in funding to higher education.
6. Though she had, early in her political career, been in favour of decriminalising male homosexuality, at the 1987 Conservative party conference Thatcher issued the statement "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay". A moral backlash ensued, resulting in the contraversion 'Clause 28', which stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Originally intended to 'protect' children from having homosexuality as a 'lifestyle' 'thrust upon them', it resulted in the subject being taboo in schools, and many, many confused and distraught teenagers with nowhere to turn.

Before you say anything, yes, I am biased. I don't like the woman, not one little bit. I don't like her, I don't respect her. She was strong, granted -- but then to be a politician you have to be, whether you're male or female.

I think, though, that calling a Democrat 'the new Margaret Thatcher' is asking for trouble. That's my opinion, I've said it, and now I'm through.

There's a lot of it about

Lately I've been engaged in a most interesting debate with some people I know electronically via an old-style BBS. (Users who have been around the internet awhile and who remember those things with fondness may pause now for wistful retrospection; users who have not the first clue what I'm on about --- it really doesn't matter.) The matter under discussion was shouting at one's partner and having arguments.

See, the page in question is entitled This Week I Have Mostly Done Wrong... It's a place for chaps to put down in writing for the delectation of other chaps what their wives, young ladies, young chaps or whoever have been telling them in no uncertain terms they've done wrong. I'm sure you're familiar with the scenario: you leave the bathroom seat up once too often and the next thing you know you're being reminded of the waitress you flirted with six years ago, two days after we'd got engaged, you know the one I'm talking about! and then there's the door on the bedroom wardrobe, it's still hanging half off it's hinges, and you offended my mother the last time she came to visit AND I HATE YOU!

... you know the sort of thing I'm talking about?

But the point in question was the methodology of the argument itself, not the subject matter. One chap had commented on the arguments he has with his lovely wife, the shouting and screaming that go on with neither side really listening to the other. How passionately he felt for her and how that translated into rows and arguments. What he actually said was this:

If you can honestly say you've never had that deep, enraged argument with any woman you've had, then I honestly think you've never loved. (And certainly not lived with one!)

Granted, I've never lived with a woman, although I've loved a few. I replied and made the point that, while I've been in my current relationship, I've never raised my voice and shouted at my Mate because of something he had (not) done. I've shouted to him, and I've shouted and vented my frustration at something else, but I've never, ever yelled and stomped and initiated a screaming argument with him. My point was twofold:

1. Neither of us thinks it's remotely necessary to scream in order to make a valid point. If there is a problem we talk it through, no matter how long it takes, and we never let the sun set on our anger. (It was good counsel back in Saint James's time, and it's good counsel now.)
2. I grew up in a house where there was a great deal of unhappiness, resentment and stress. One side of my family is genetically disposed towards depression (as am I), and that merely compounded matters. My father had a very stressful job and worked shifts as well. Without apportioning blame, it was frequently a case of walking on eggshells: any minor trauma could lead to a screaming match. Oh, my parents were good folks, not well off, doing the best they could -- but they were and are only human. The practical upshot was that I swore to myself when I started dating that I would never, ever shout at my lover/boyfriend/girlfriend/Mate/partner/Significant Other --- whoever it may be, whichever gender. I was not going to have the arguments in my relationship that my parents, bless them, had in theirs.

These seemed like two perfectly good reasons for not shouting at my Mate. But others on the page found me emotionless ("How do you express your emotions, Mr Data?" asked one) and suggested that things between my Mate and I must be passionless. I replied again, explaining that I am passionate about things, but I don't have to prove it by shouting. (My preferred method of proving my passion involves bedsheets, the phone off the hook and an expensive home-cooked dinner, among other things.)

I'm glad to say at this point that other people agreed that their relationships, passionate and sex-filled as they are, could be quite passionate enough without shouting. Vindicated. Then someone asked, if I don't shout at my partner, do I support a sports team, and start shouting at a foul?

It was then that I lost my presence of mind. I did indeed shout --- well, I did the typographical equivalent AND STARTED TYPING LIKE THIS.

NO, I said, I DON'T SUPPORT A SPORTS TEAM and YES I CAN AND DO SHOUT BUT NOT AT HIM. And then, calmly and in a controlled manner, I explained again why I don't shout... et après ça, as it were, la déluge.

You wanted passion, you got it. That's something I feel passionately about. Sports is a waste of time, let's be honest. At the end of the day it means about as much as a gnat's turd. Love is important. More, right now, to me than ever before.

You all do as you want in your own relationships. I never said it was wrong; I was not criticising you, or accusing you of lack of manliness or passion or cojones or anything. All I said was, that I see no reason to shout and scream at someone I love. If y'all want to do that, y'all can have my share of it, and I hope it brings you much joy.

The problem with all of the above is that some people in the argument have taken up a very strange position, which is that if you do not agree with me, then you must be wrong.

What?

Not wrong from my position, but just plain wrong. Absolutely, unquestionably wrong and without possibility of appeal.

Yet there's so much of it about. I'm right, you're wrong; you're wrong, I'm right. How can so many people assert that their truth and only their truth is the right one? How can anybody be so arrogant and get away with it?

It's an attitude as old as the hills. It's an attitude that was endemic even before the Tribes of Israel starting toting around a box with a worse 'tude than anything even Terry Pratchett could come up with. And yet its ongoing prevalence I find distinctly disturbing. Particularly so in this day and age where 'cultural diversity' seems to be the touchstone and the mantra of civilised and peaceful society, in which the Muslim shall lie down with the Hindu and Pat Robertson with the Hare Krishnas.

Blog: Interrupted...

My apologies for the unexpected silence. This weekend has been suddenly and unduly stressful, and added to that there has been a genuine rash of subjects; so many, in fact, that I feel like a citizen of Pompeii asked for their thoughts on lava - no, pyroclastic flows - no, ash - no...

Draco's weekly top five

5. George Harrison, "My Sweet Lord" (recorded live).
4. Journey, "Faithfully" (recorded live).
3. Johann Sebastian Bach, "The Well-Tempered Klavier" Book 1, recorded by Jeno Jando (Naxos).
2. Don McLean, "Castles in the Air".
1. Snow Patrol, "Chasing Cars".

It never really was about sex, was it; it was about love...

"I bring a message of peace and brotherly love, and if you don't agree with me I shall smite you."

No wonder Christianity is so popular: it's a win-win scenario.

People are arguing this one as a matter of choice, of ideals and ethics and such. What bugs me most of all is that, if this goes the way that it doubtless will, a Christian hotelier/restaurateur/Madame will be able to turn a gay couple away from their hotel/restaurant/cathouse with impunity - but just let a gay owner try to turn a Christian/Jewish/Moslem/whatever couple away from their establishment. The Christians will argue that their faith is none of the owners' business and that they should be allowed in, despite the feelings of the proprietor, and to deny them their bed/dinner/favourite whore is an infringement of their rights, etc.

How is a person's sexuality any less private, any more somebody else's business, than someone's faith?! You can't get much more private than that. There's that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, towards the end, where the crowd is outside Brian's window and his mother comes out to try to get them to go away:

Man: Are you a virgin?
Mandy: I beg your pardon?!
Man: Well, if it's not a personal question... are you a virgin?
Mandy: IF IT'S NOT A PERSONAL QUESTION!?!? How much more personal can you get?!
Man: She is, yeah, gotta be.

Quite what business it is who I, or anyone else sleeps with (as long as it's legal and not non-consensually abusive) is nobody's business but my own. If a person's religion can be secured by their 'rights', then so can a person's sexuality. After all, despite what might be argued, religion is a choice; sexuality... plain and simple is.

Irony is not just for laundry

The thunder surrounding the storm over the surrender of customer data by US phone companies to the National Security Agency just keeps on rolling.

Given that my Other Half lives in the US, it's hardly surprising that we talk a fair amount. Living apart for 95% of your relationship is difficult enough, but worrying that the call schedules, frequency, duration and all that jazz is being passed on to people who, frankly, don't have the first damned right to it is a stress I could live without. But that's just background, and not what I was going to write about.

Did you know, though, that such data are frequently bought? Because I didn't. I thought that Uncle Sam just held out his hand and the companies meekly put the data into it. But it seems that when he can't get what he wants by bullying he falls back on that good ol' American method: capitalism. According to a recent report by the Govt Accountability Office, the DoJ, DoS and DHS spend considerable sums (we're talking millions) annually to acquire commercial databases listing finances, phone numbers and biographical information.

Paranoid yet? It gets better.

See, when the Entities Up There collect data on their own behalf, they're bound by the Privacy Act, 1974, which limits how the data can be used and requires disclosure of what the Entities are doing with it. When they buy the data from the commercial sector, however, it's already been collected and collated, and they're just buying the results. The practical upshot of which is that the Fourth Amendment is being rather neatly sidestepped, and the Privacy Act is just so much toilet paper.

(Of course, don't expect them to admit to any of this. The DHS flat-out denied such action and the State Dept. "had no-one available for comment". How strange.)

Paranoid yet? It gets better.

You may or not be aware of the storm in the IT-cup (sorry) regarding Hewlett-Packard's recent spy scandal. For those of you with better things to do than follow such things, it came out in the back half of last year that HP had been using a method called "pretexting" to obtain phone records of its board members in an attempt to determine whether or not something had been leaked by someone to someone else. It's all very shady, I admit, but the fact was that this 1950s-B-movie-spy-thriller method actually worked: HP managed to get the records it wanted, using a team of specially hired sneaks to call up the phone companies and ask, directly or otherwise, for the info. And it worked: the phone companies yielded up the information. (Does this sound familiar yet?)

Cue squeals and cries of "foul!" and much ruckus, resignations en masse, apologies, grovelling on a Biblical scale and all sorts of other things. Oh, and lawsuits galore. Of course the only reason that all this happened is because HP got caught with its hand in the cookie jar: had it gone undetected, nothing would have been said.

You're probably wondering, and rightly, where I'm going with this. Well, here's the payoff. On Friday 12th January 2006 President George W Bush signed into lawmaking illegal the elegant art of pretexting, "the practice of gaining information about a third party's phone use without their permission." (Which is pretty hard on those poor investigators, and damned little praise for their wheedles, but life's cruel like that.) It creates criminal penalties (up to 10 years in chokey) for the "fraudulent or unauthorised acquisition or disclosure of confidential phone records information", according to a statement from the White House.

Maybe it's just me, but I wonder just how many people in the White House have noticed the irony of all this. After all, the US and UK Governments are running the biggest pretexting scam in history.

AND WE'RE LETTING THEM DO IT.

I'd like to think that this means that large swathes of the US Government is going to turn around and impeach itself, but somehow I doubt it's going to happen.

Save the planet: put your dick away

I do wish that the species homo sapiens would collectively grow up, wake up and smell the morning coffee. Also, smell the nasty smell coming from the pretty sandpit that spawned them and realise just how much they've been shitting in their own playpen.

It pisses me off, quite frankly, to hear all this specious nonsense that's currently being bandied about on the subject of climate change. No, wait, don't lynch me yet. See, I agree with the 'experts' that it's happening. It's bloody obvious that it's happening! In fact, it was bloody obvious from the start that it was going to happen at some point; the only question was when. You burn more and more, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere (where the hell else can it go?!), and of course it's going to reach a saturation point, especially if you reduce the system's capacity to remove the pollutants.

But what pisses me off in particular is humanity's blatant and total inability to trace back to the root of the problem

THEMSELVES.

THAT MEANS YOU, YES.

Is that clear? It's about as clear as I can make it on here.

Back when the human population was limited by such things as high infant mortality, puerperal fever and the inability to grow obscene quantities of victuals, this wasn't such a problem. But then medicine improved, along came sulphanilamide and all those other wonderful drugs that were dished out by the handfuls in the postbellum period (causing another set of problems, natch), the amount of food blossomed... and we lived longer, for the most part. And, indeed, in much of the Western world we were encouraged to have children. That's where the Baby Boomers and Gen-X come from.

And, here in Britain at least, we're still encouraged to keep breeding. The number of young people walking around with children who are still children themselves beggars belief. I want to slap them and encourage them to take up some other occupation besides fucking themselves raw with anything that's handy -- I mean, are they really so stupid that they can't think of anything else to do besides smoke, drink, whinge and fuck?!

But back to the main thread of this. The point is that the root cause of global warming is humanity's inability to accept that it's overpopulating the planet. It needs to get over itself, and the religious imperatives laid upon it, fast. Better still, now. Industry has grown to such an extent that it's largely mechanised and automated. In the UK now there are roughly 60 million people - that's far too many! 300 million in the US - why?! There's no requirement for so many humans, and all they are doing is draining the resources of the planet.

Have you ever seen Earth from space? Have you? No? Well, go and look at her. She's beautiful. Get onto Google Earth, if you can't find a picture, and look at her. See how small she is in the middle of all that space. See how small you are... and consider how much damage you're causing to that planet that's so much bigger than you are, and still so infinitesimally, excruciatingly tiny in the midst of all that black nothingness around it. Remember: it's your home. It's our home. It's all of our homes... It gives you air to breathe and food to eat. It gives you the beauty of sunrise and sunset and the majesty of thunderstorms. There are places of heart-stopping beauty and creatures of divine ugliness.

For the love of the planet, fucking stop breeding. Fuck if you must, but stop breeding. Reduce the head count.

Just think: if humans were rabbits, they'd be culled. (Anybody remember myxomatosis?) At current levels, humans are nothing more than a macroscopic parasite. And I'm waiting for Dame Nature to come up with her sulphanilamide, and sort them all out.

Night thoughts

Strange what comes to you when you're staring at the ceiling and trying to go to sleep.

I don't sleep easily, and never have. One of the downsides to this is near-constant mild fatigue. One of the few upsides is that it gives you lots of time to think about random things that the Real World (tm) keeps your mind from wandering on to. A little light prompting is required, of course, and that night it was a trailer on the BBC World Service about a programme exploring the nature of infinity, from the point of view of mathematics. Infinity, it said, is a concept and not a number, and as a result isn't quantifiable, and, arguably, doesn't exist.

Fascinating and heady stuff for 01:59 BST, I'm sure you'll all agree.

So, there I was, pondering the nature of infinity through the six electromechanical chimes (five short, one long) of the BBC hour signal.

If infinity doesn't exist (thought I to myself), then it's nothing, and since nothing is zero then ∞=0.

... how profound, wizard!

Then my mind meandered a little further, well off the beaten track and into the forest of the far beyond.

Remember those two rules we were taught in primary school or thereabouts, by our maths teachers and our calculators?

1. The result of dividing any number by itself is 1; n/n=1.
2. The result of dividing any number by zero is infinity; n/0=-E-, said our calculators; 'Cannot divide by zero' says the computer. Rubbish, of course you can, but you just can't work with the result.

Anyway, back to a sleepless night in my lair.

If you divide infinity by 1, I thought, then the obvious answer is infinity: ∞/1=∞, logically. Similarly, 1/1=1, and o/1=0. On that I agreed with myself.

What if you divide by infinity? Well, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that, given as infinity is such a large number, any number divided by it is going to be as near to zero as makes no odds, so we get 1/∞=0, 0/∞=0 and ∞/∞=0. Which doesn't make sense, really, since we know from statement 1 above that any number divided by itself yields a quotient of 1; so ∞/∞=1.

That's treating infinity as a number. Treat it as a concept, as per the World Service, and we get ∞/∞ → 0/0= ...

... and there my mind stopped, caught in a paradox. What do we get?

Any number divided by itself yields a quotient of 1. (Check.) But any number divided by 0 yields a quotient of infinity. (Check.) And any number divided by infinity yields a quotient of 0. (Check.)

So if ∞/0=∞ and ∞/∞=0 (or 1), does that mean that 0=1=∞?