Author: old_wp_importer

The Corporation of the City of London is the pet anachronism of the capital’s finance industry. Local government for the square mile, the Corporation is a hodgepodge of archaic pomp which has been only superficially squashed into conformity with the rest of the country. It is government chosen by business, run as a business, lobbying for the interests of business.

Here, companies literally have the vote. The Corporation claims it “

act[s] rather like a trade body

, representing finance and business interests. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism thinks of it more as a lobbying body. It’s one embedded deeply in British government, to the point of having a special place in parliament:

Sitting facing the Speaker’s chair is Paul Double, a City of London official known as the Remembrancer. Described by Nicholas Shaxson in his book Treasure Islands as ‘the world’s oldest institutional lobbyist’, the Remembrancer scours every piece of parliamentary legislation….to ensure the Corporation’s interests are never undermined again. The Remembrancer enjoys an annual budget of £6m– a portion of which is spent on his six in-house lawyers.

Before the Tories came into power, homelessness in the UK had been steadily decreasing. Since then it has shot up — 37% in the past 2 years*. The government are doing their best to increase it further — removing housing benefit from the under-25s, for example, just plain evil.

There’s more. Previously, the homeless were entitled to council homes. They might be offered private accommodation, but had the right to turn it down. Now, under last year’s localism act, councils can put them into any rented accommodation.

Given how shoddy some private accommodation is, we can expect a lot of the homeless to be dumped in grim, unsafe housing where nobody would freely choose to live.

A consultation is now in progress, over what requirements there will be for private-sector accommodation. It’s pretty weak:

we would expect that a local authority officer, or a person acting on

behalf of the authority such as a letting agent, would visit the property. In

doing so they should take account of the property’s general condition and

state of repair, such as signs of damp, mould, loose or cracked windows.

No need for a detailed inspection by somebody qualified. No set standards for quality — “

there are difficulties with making legislation

that would prevent local authorities from using properties with Category 1 (or

any other) hazards

“.

All in all, it’s horrible stuff. We have until 26 July to respond to the consultation. I don’t have much hope, but this is one of the last chances to have any impact at all.

Iran, under sanctions, can’t sell its oil. Nor does it have anywhere to put it — the country has continued production, using up all storage capacity. So it’s down to the last resort: tankers.

Iran has insufficient space to store the crude it cannot sell. So while it furiously works to build storage capacity on shore, it has turned to mothballing at sea.

….

The unsold crude is being stored in what has been estimated to be two-thirds of the Iranian tanker fleet. Most of the ships are sailing in circles around the Persian Gulf as Iran tries to sell the mostly heavy crude at bargain-basement prices.

International oil experts estimate that Iran is now warehousing as much as 40 million barrels — roughly two weeks of production — on the tankers. An additional 10 million barrels are in storage on shore.

Slick mobile-phone payment methods have a big downside: they make it too easy to spend money:

the easier and cheaper it is to spend money, the less control we have over our own spending. Which in turn means that ultra-convenient payments, probably using your phone in some way or another, are realistically going to be a luxury for the middle classes and a cause of stress and danger for families living paycheck-to-paycheck.

The daily mash fantasizes about what happens when the Big Society meets de-mobbed soldiers:

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said: “This is the Big Society sprung into hard-hitting, shotgun-pumping, no-mercy action.

“The former soldiers will return to their once-peaceful home towns, only to find police cuts have turned them into hotbeds of drugs, gambling and prostitution, probably controlled by a gang called ‘The Skulls’ with mohicans and matching leather jackets.

“That’s when our heroes spring into life — paranoid, embittered and ready to start a war

What does it mean for a defendent to be found guilty “

beyond reasonable doubt

“? The courts aren’t telling. Not in the UK, not in the US, not in any of the other countries where it’s the basic standard of criminal justice. The US Supreme Court thinks that “Attempts to explain the term “reasonable doubt” do not usually result in making it any clearer to the minds of the jury“. So the most you get is state-level definitions, such as that of California:

It is not a mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs, and depending on moral evidence, is open to possible doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of the jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty, of the truth of the charge.

The courts, in particular, are vehemently opposed to any attempt to put a numerical probability to

beyond reasonable doubt

. It requires more than a 50% likelihood of guilt, and less than 100%. But between those, it’s anybody’s guess.

So what happens when you ask people? Teach them some basic probability, give them a definition of “beyond reasonable doubt”? It’s been tried. A fifth of people interpret it as 90%, with slightly lower numbers choosing 95% or 99%. But fully 27% think 80% certainty, or less, would be enough to convict.

Another experiment asked half of a group to act as jurors, declaring defendents guilty or not. The other half put a numerical figure on how likely they were to be guilty. Matching up the decisions of the two groups should show what probability corresponds to “beyond reasonable doubt”. Here it seems a guilty verdict requires

0.70 – 0.74

probability of guilt.

Baked into my head somewhere is the idea that pensioners mostly live in grinding poverty, barring a very few who are resting on 40 years of civil service pension or the like.

I was wrong. The rate of poverty among the elderly is lower than among children or adults.

Ursula Le Guin, aside from being a great writer, has the knack of being on the right side in any debate going. Currently, she’s doing sterling work defending genre fiction against put-downs. That is, not so much trying to break out of the ghetto, as taking pride in it.

It really got going in a tussle with Margaret Atwood over the definitions of Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy, and Literary Fiction. Atwood, official Great Treasure of Canadian Literature, has built a career on writing SF that is presented as literary fiction. Le Guin has accepted her position in the genre ghetto, and won critical acceptance in spite of that.

Now, along comes a New Yorker article, beating on genre with a series of backhanded compliments:

Commercial and genre writers aim at delivering less rarefied pleasures. And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better. For the longest time, there was little ambiguity between literary fiction and genre fiction: one was good for you, one simply tasted good.

…Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story.

In wades Le Guin, beautifully calling Mr. New Yorker on his apparent belief that Great Fiction just isn’t fun:

Anybody who reads a lot is, if you like, an addict. The people who put their initials on the fly-leaf of a library copy of a mystery so that they won’t keep checking the same book out over and over are story addicts. So is the ten-year-old with his nose in The Hobbit, oblivious to dinnertime or cataclysm. So is the old woman rereading War and Peace for the eighth time. So is the scholar who studies the Odyssey for forty years.

In Foreign Policy, Sean Kane argues that the situation in Libya isn’t as fractius as it seems. Yes, there are plenty of disputes. But they tend to be local, continuations of long-standing rivalries. Generally, the mood is oddly content:

Eight months after the brutal death of Qaddafi marked the end of the civil conflict that followed Libya’s popular uprising, support for the regime change appears to have if anything grown. Even if some of this backing falls into the “everyone loves a winner” category, a full 97 percent of Libyans surveyed by Oxford Research International in January thought the revolution was absolutely or somewhat right.

Kane also tells the sotry of the “Rat Purifiers”, as a demonstration of Libyan unpleasantness without national consequences:

The central actor in the drama was a memorably named revolutionary militia called Purifying the Tyrant’s Rats Brigade that attempted to “liberate” 300 cars from a farm outside of the city….

A rolling car chase around town ensued between the Rat Purifiers and other revolutionary brigades that now make up Benghazi police. The show lasted from late afternoon until the early morning hours and was punctuated by frequent and escalating salvos of shooting, including the use of heavy caliber anti-aircraft guns. The net result of all this sturm und drang was exactly two persons injured…by stab wounds. Benghazi’s revolutionaries either have preposterous aim or were not actually trying to hit each other.

But, howeve you spin it, you can’t ignore the way in which Libyan cities are turning against the centre.

Benghazi has recently birthed a proto-federalism movement advocating for its own autonomous region. Misrata meanwhile holds the ministry of interior. It is sometimes characterized by its critics as a virtual city-state and its brigades police large swathes of the center of the country. Zintan’s revolutionary prize was the ministry of defense. Its fighters are deployed around the country at key infrastructure sites

Reuters reports on government raids on opposition activists. They focus on Ksenia Sobchak:

Putin’s critics say he is doing his best to follow tradition.

“I never thought we would return to such repression in this country,” [said socialite-turned-activist] Sobchak, whose late father, a mayor of St. Petersburg, gave Putin a start in politics two decades ago and was one of the liberal politicians credited with advancing democracy in Russia after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

She said investigators forced her to read intimate letters out loud and “didn’t even let me get dressed for some time” after she was roused from sleep and answered the door.

“They would not let me go to the bathroom alone,” Sobchak said on Ekho Moskvy radio. “There was not even a woman there, I had to do this in front of man in a mask with machinegun.”

Sobchak is a rough Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton — reality TV host, fashion designer, target of lust and envy. So there’s a sheen of titillation helping the news to spread, but below that is pretty transparent intimidation of activists. According to the Moscow Times:

The round of questioning began with surprise raids Monday morning at the homes of several leading opposition figures and their relatives. They were all summoned to appear for questioning early Tuesday, forcing them to miss a highly anticipated, large-scale rally in Moscow.

It’s not the worst treatment of politicians in Russia, and there doubtless exist respectable-sounding legal justifications. Still, not particulaly cheery news.