The Filter^

Melanie Phillips - Voice of Reason

This from today's 'Daily Politics' show on BBC2.

Eve Pollard (broadcaster and Jounalist): "You may say that there are extremists in other communities, but, let's be honest, no Christians or Jews have tried to blow people up in this country in the last ten years have they."

No one challenged this statement.

Here's a link to the BBC's coverage of the IRA bomb that destroyed most of Manchester City Centre in 1996.

The 1996 Docklands bomb resulted in 39 casualties.

29 people were killed by the Omagh bomb in 1998.

Sorry Eve, perhaps the first two are just over ten years ago now, so we can write them off. Oh, and Omagh isn't mainland Britain, so who really cares about it? I guess you're right then, it's just those scarf-headed Mussey-wuzzes that are causing the problems.

Melanie Philips (Daily Mail): "The attitude of the british people toward the Muslim community is the most benign and sympathetic out of all European countries, but British Muslims hate their country and the West more than anyone else."

She clutched a copy of her book "Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within" as she said this.

Brazilian Name

Anthony Evans = Evaldo
Thomas Conolly = Conisco
Matthew Whitfield = Whitficos

Get your Brazilian name here

TJ Eckleberg

According to BBC News:

The feeling of being watched makes people act more honestly, even if the eyes are not real, a study suggests

The methodology for the study was a field experiment: setting up an honesty box and then seeing how people respond. Another type of this sort of analysis is What the bagel man saw(,pdf), by the Freakonomists.

Free Trade: cornerstone of development

Owen Barder asks whether we've Made Poverty History, and takes stock of progress since Gleneagles. I'll point out that he uses "we" to mean governments, which gives a biased and distorted account of how growth actually occurs - despite it's improvements/successes we shouldn't view economic development through the lens of agencies such as the DfID. Owen perpetuates the myth that prosperity is the result of good government, rather than the truth that poverty is the result of bad government. He also cites this remarkable observation from Greg Mankiw:

Compare the numbers from two articles in today's NY Times:

Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and one of the world's wealthiest men, plans to donate the bulk of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four other philanthropies starting in July.

According to the study [by the International Food Policy Research Institute], a deal similar to what is now on the table — modest cuts in real tariffs, limited cuts in domestic support payments, full elimination of export subsidies and 97 percent duty- and quota-free access for exports from the poorest countries — would create global gains of $54 billion per year.

In other words, success in the Doha round of international trade talks would give the world more every year than what Buffett can give once after a lifetime of being the world's most successful investor.

Finally, this comment on Mankiw's blog made me laugh:

The role of micro people is to provide macro people with elasticities

Gayness (and then something about individualism)

According to BBC News a Canadian study suggests that male homosexuality is determined by genetic factors (what they call "maternal memory") rather than sociological ones. In other words, "rearing" doesn't make you gay:

"If rearing or social factors associated with older male siblings underlies the fraternal birth-order effect [the link between the number of older brothers and male homosexuality], then the number of non-biological older brothers should predict men's sexual orientation, but they do not.

"These results support a prenatal origin to sexual orientation development in men."

What I find disappointing is how a gay rights group have responded to this evidence:

Andy Forrest, a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall, said: "Increasingly, credible evidence appears to indicate that being gay is genetically determined rather than being a so-called lifestyle choice.

"It adds further weight to the argument that lesbian and gay people should be treated equally in society and not discriminated against for something that's just as inherent as skin colour."

Why should the nature/nurture argument affect homosexual discrimination? It's as if he's saying "We don't want to be gay so don't hold us against it - there's nothing we can do!". I'd have hoped that a gay rights group would be more concerned with saying "We're humans and are free to choose and live our lives however we wish". It seems awfully defeatist and apologetic.

Whilst we're on the subject of nature/nurture check out Bryan Caplan's: An Economist's Guide to Happier Parenting. Also, whilst we're at it (are we?) Radio 4 had two wonderfully complimentary stories about individualism yesterday:

Summerhill School is 85 years old this year, yet its philosophy - a free school where the pupils are equal in status to the teachers and lessons are optional - is yet to catch on. It's one of only two such schools in the UK and ZOË NEILL READHEAD, the daughter of the school's founder, is the current Principal. She discusses the theories behind the educational example that the school is still trying to promote. Summerhill and A S Neill is edited by Mark Vaughan and published by Open University Press.

Asked to describe the archetypal artist, we would probably think of a bohemian type, quirkily dressed, with unusual ideas about life and a tendency to be a bit different. But where did this characterisation come from? A new exhibition at the National Gallery looks into the roots of the image of the Artist. LOIS OLIVER is one of the curators of the new exhibition, Rebels and Martyrs, which shows how the image we know today began with Romanticism. Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century is at the National Gallery from 28 June to 28 August.

The News

Quinn saw the news, and makes two excellent points. Firstly he points out how old the footage is that the BBC uses to accompany stories on crime:

If the BBC has so little evidence of crime on film that they have to
rely on a blurred and grainy image from yesteryear, then perhaps the
justice gap isn’t as wide as some people fear

Exactly: it's all information cascades. Notice how the headlines on the stories about Michael Lynch all mention knives. Five years ago it wouldn't have been.

Secondly Quinn points out the blatant homophobia inherent within the way the media has reported the story of a foster couple who've been found guily of sexual offences

looking through the story, I cannot see how the sexuality of the
offenders is relevant, other than to perhaps confirm some people’s
prejudices. Indeed the judge stressed that "this is not about
homosexuality, it is about abuse of trust", so what does the fact that
the offenders are gay have to do with anything?

Nice one Quinn!

ABC for central bankers

the Austrian Business Cycle theory can be very well applied to explain the current global as well as domestic financial imbalances.

That's Kaushik Das , an economist for SBI Capital Markets ltd, writing for The Financial Express. ABC is on the rise: trust me, i'm on it.

Regression by Eye

On my travels across cyberspace looking for intuitive and erudite methods to teach econometrics, I've come across "Regression by Eye". It'll throw up a scatter graph and you have to estimate the line of best fit. I'm hopeless. I struggle to get the right slope.

However I've also learnt that the Gaussian distribution (i.e "normal") was not discovered by Gauss - it's an example of Stigler's law of eponymy: "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer". Which reminds me of my A-level Economics class, where my teacher introduced us to The Phillip's Curve by saying:

This is The Phillips Curve, and it's named after a famous economist called Mr Curve.

I find that bloody funny!

Banksy Strikes

"Art terrorist"/anarchitect "Bansky" has stencilled a witty and provocative piece in Bristol (see here). But this being the World Cup take a look at this gem. Here's his manifesto, worth quoting in full:

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who  was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
 

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a  barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and  childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and  thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in herhand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their  appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity

Source: Imperial War museum

 

HAPPY (joy) PiCNiCS FUN FUN

Forget silly rotten world, no more sludge and slither and the sedge has withered from the lake. And no birds sing. No. Birds sing! Sing sing a songy song all the day long. [Hate: tate: tat]. Forget Tate cardboardworld mumbly member discount escalator escapades. Let's Pick Nikolaus. Pick Nick. Picnic.

You can't have a picnic in a living room Tate Britain. Ha ha ha as we escape your clutches. You can't stamp your brand on the freedom of picnics you wippersnapper.

Only M&S can do that.