'Nother Solent

The creator of Dilbert lost the ability to talk. He could still sing, or lecture to large audiences. (No, this isn't a joke, even though it does come via IMAO.)

Attack ads incoming!

When presented with the contrast between the scurrilous political attack ads common in the US and the more decorous and infinitely less expensive political advertisements exhibited in Britain, Americans react in the same way British people do when presented with the contrast between the hard-bitten, smut-sniffing hounds of Fleet Street compared to earnest US journalists: they are barely able to conceal their pride. We play for real. You people do up the top buttons on your shirts.

When reading this article in the Times by Tom Baldwin deploring the attack ads in US politics ("candidates are plumbing new depths of taste and duplicity"), I felt inwardly sure that any one of our boys could drink any American j-school graduate (j-school, pshaw!, graduate, pshaw!) under the table and still get an exclusive interview with Heather Mills' other leg in time for the morning editions. This warmed my soul.

Bush League.

Alex Bensky writes, quoting this post:

"Those who think that a clueless idiot can get and keep the office of President of the United States may well be good children or pleasant neighbours but there is no need to take anything they say about politics seriously."

You know, Natalie, I am not an admirer of George Bush. I didn't vote for him either time and I guess I probably still wouldn't if I could do it over again. (I used to call myself a member of the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party. Now what?) But I never cease to be irked by the liberal trope that Bush is an idiot.

There are two widely taken standardized tests in the US that are relevant--the SAT or Scholastic Aptitude Test that until recently was taken by most university-bound high school students (it's still administered widely it's not the sole such national test anymore) and the Graduate Record Exam, required for graduate school applications in most situations. They are both considered rough-and-ready IQ tests, too. Bush slightly outscored John Kerry on both. They went to the same universities and although I can't find the references on the internet, I think their grades were roughly similar.

One of the many, many reasons I am a disaffected and former liberal is the widespread idea that those who oppose liberals are either stupid or evil. I don't know; I live in the city of Detroit and all around me, although not in my immediate neighborhood, are some indications that liberal social policy wasn't entirely effective. There are plenty of reasons to oppose Bush and his policies, but the smug and self-satisfied "he's an idiot" seems to be enough for a lot of people and pointing out, as I have done, that Bush's IQ is probably a tad above Kerry's generally does not provoke a thoughtful or reasoned response.

Well, as I get older I begin to think there was something in what someone told me long ago: "Politics is like baseball. They're both very complicated. You have to be smart enough to understand them, and dumb enough to think they're important." I am a baseball fan, by the way.

Euron Eurown.

In this post regular commenter JEM wrote

After all, if it's better for each country in Europe to have its own currency, how much better it would be if each county in the United Kingdom had its own currency too... or each town... or each street... or each house... After all, why should the Central Bank of 25 Typical Street hand over control of the 25 Typical Street Groat to the Central Bank of Typical Street and their Typical Street Groat?

Another correspondent is critical:

JEM, who writes, does not appear to understand that a currency is also a means of control by a state over its subjects. The main argument against the Euro is not that Sterling is a pround patriotic icon, as JEM appear (rather unobservantly) to think, but that putting control of something so fundamental to our life under the control of a foreign, corrupt and generally useless bunch of bureaucrats is probably a very bad idea. Perhaps JEM would also like to see centralised control of the water system, gas and electricity from Brussels?

However Squander Two (who will be much too busy today to read this - best wishes to his wife and soon to be born child) quotes JEM approvingly and makes a proposal of his own:

Those people who hate the Euro wouldn't have to use it. Those who love the Euro could use it as much as they liked. The rest of us — which I reckon would quickly become most of us — could just use whichever was the most sensible at the time. We'd get lots of the economic advantages of having the Euro, with few of the disadvantages (I reckon — I'm not an economist). The public would generate money out of nothing as they'd start to watch interest rates closely and switch currencies whenever profitable. And everyone in the country would get much much better at mental arithmetic. Lord knows the schools aren't teaching it to them.

The comments touch on John Major's "hard ecu" idea and the distinction between legal tender and legal currency. One of them came from Tim Worstall who continues on the same theme in this post.

The various countries within the euro zone simply are not an optimal currency area. You can quite happily argue that the UK itself is too large and diverse to be one as well but the problems of tying most of a continent into one are of course greater than the one we have here.

Why have I given this post the title it has? Mostly, of course, because I could. But also because I have to admit that I will be unable to accompany you too much further into this debate; even supplemented by what I can scavenge, my store of knowledge of these issues will not last long.

Totem or medium of exchange?

JEM writes:

It is one thing to believe that the euro will 'break' and so we are better out of it. It is another to hope it will break, even when we are out of it anyway.

I confess I have always found much of the argument against the euro faintly puerile anyway.

The euro may have been assembled in a flawed way--I agree--but that is not to say that the idea of a common currency is of itself wrong in principle.

After all, if it's better for each country in Europe to have its own currency, how much better it would be if each county in the United Kingdom had its own currency too... or each town... or each street... or each house... After all, why should the Central Bank of 25 Typical Street hand over control of the 25 Typical Street Groat to the Central Bank of Typical Street and their Typical Street Groat?

Absurd? Yes. Of course. That's my point.

After all, what is money? A national totem? No, it's just a medium of exchange: a tool. There is nothing especially patriotic about pounds, and it is a delusion to suppose that we, here, determine its worth; that is actually determined exactly and precisely by what foreigners (Johnny Foreigners, mark you!) will pay for it. Full stop.

And I hope Milton Friedman lives on for many years.

"Fundamentally, they are looking for magic."

D-Ed reckoning summarises that paper on constructivist education I mentioned earlier.

To me, the title of "popularizer" is one of high honour. You will enjoy reading this. Includes entertaining tests and examples that will slip into your conversation five years hence. Not to mention a sentence incomprehensible to British readers.

When the political becomes the personal.

Yesterday I failed to flag up another - indeed the very first - post featured in Britblog roundup for a reason that is rather typical of me. I had already copied the bare link into Blogger for myself, but hadn't yet made a post of it. Now I have. Squander Two, about to become a father at the time of writing, has more than the usual fears common to his position. His wife is diabetic.

What this means, for those of you who don't know much about insulin, is that a heavily pregnant diabetic woman is injecting herself four times a day with what would usually be a lethal dose. As soon as she gives birth — within minutes, in fact — the required dose goes back down, not only to what it would be usually, but, as sugar is now being converted into milk instead of stored as fat, even further down that that.

So, you have nurses who know sod all about diabetes and are arrogant enough to overrule the instructions of diabetic consultants and the protests of experienced patients, in charge of giving insulin to a diabetic whose required dosage was about thirty-six units a couple of hours ago but who would now be killed stone dead if injected with even twenty units, whose ideal dosage is far lower than anything that has ever been recorded in her medical records, and who, on a drip and having just given birth, is in no condition to resist being given the medication. Really, it's amazing only two people have been killed.

So it was a great relief to us when, earlier this week, Vic's diabetic consultant told us that he has "an arrangement" with the nurses and midwives at our hospital whereby his patients are allowed to medicate themselves. He says they're all under strict instructions to allow his patients to inject their own insulin and to bow to their expertise over what dosage they should be taking. If there's any argument, we're to tell the nurses to call him, and he'll tell them that the ideal dose is whatever Vic says it is. Which is great.

For his patients.

For this is sheer luck. If we had a different postcode, Vic would have a different diabetic consultant, who might not have decided to overrule NHS policy and whose patients would therefore have to run the gauntlet whenever they went to hospital.

Emphasis added.

Britblog roundup time again. Take a particular look at the post from Adloyada on Putin's joking about allegations of rape laid against President Katzav of Israel. It's here.