The Bewilderness

Only a Belgian could view the people as a hindrance

The Telegraph had a headline: That Cameron would back down to demands from other governments on the European Council and transfer powers to Brussels. The two powers cited were budget overview at a transnational level and financial supervision of the City. Their reasoning was clear:

  A senior Belgian official has suggested that the Prime Minister will ultimately back down now that elections, and forming a government, were behind him. "We will wait until some weeks after the elections," said the official. "It is sometimes easier to discuss after elections." Belgian negotiators are convinced that Mr Cameron's hard line opposition to giving more sovereignty up to the EU, a pledge written into his coalition government's agreement, will be sacrificed in the interests of pragmatism. The senior source observed that no EU agreements would ever be possible if all European leaders stuck to the "totality" of their election manifestoes. "It is impossible to have compromise with total programmes," he said.

There is a clear positional conflict here between the Belgian position, publicised in advance for  motivations that remain opaque, and the contractarian position of the political manifesto. This is described as a totality, a misleading term as most manifestos are viewed as guidelines, to be nuanced for the needs of coalition government or just events.

It does reveal that the relationship between the representative government and the represented has lesser value than the pragmatic horsetrading at a European level in the eyes of a 'Belgian official'. Whereas the word 'totality' is used to denote an unrealistic perspective, realism is imported at a European level as presumably this is where real power resides. The wishes of the electorate must be overriden by the pragmatic requirements of day to day European politics. The iniquities of this view speaks for itself.

It is a point that the moral honour remains with the democrat who represents his constituents and the immoral abrogation of such promises rests with the official, in a perceived conflict of totalising democracy preventing the active delivery of policy. Only Brussels could have invented a system where the people are viewed as a hindrance.

.

Global slowdown

Monetary indicators down, Baltic index down, leading indicators down... And so far, none of the banks in this stimulus (falsely called a rally) have set out to really deleverage at the pace required. Pain deferred is pain postponed, and as welfare states implode, we must wonder what happens to the segregated communities, used to welfare, and now facing a crisis.

Is this why France has not yet engaged with austerity, aware that the cost may be too high in terms of unrest?.

Off beam

Kurzweil's new movie does appear to have brought out some detractors, who play the man, not the film. We can guess Alex Beam's sympathies with his praise for  Bill McKibben:

The only celebrity thinker who acquits himself with dignity is eco-pamphleteer Bill McKibben, who looks as if he has wandered into the wrong green room. McKibben expresses a healthy skepticism about Kurzweil’s finger-painted future.

But, it does seem inadequate to term a film 'narcissistic' if it includes a critical element. Narcissism requires a mirror, not peer review. So, off beam in his statement and reduced to accusing the film of name dropping:

What about “The Singularity Is Near?’’ The movie is codirected, written, and coproduced by Kurzweil, and features Kurzweil interacting with the Great Minds of the 1980s, such as Sherry Turkle, Mitch Kapor, Bill Joy, and Marvin Minsky, the latter actually a Great Mind of the 1960s and 1970s. Have you been wondering where Alan Dershowitz has been hiding? He plays a defense lawyer in the movie’s inane fictional subplot.

I suspect that this whole 'review' in the poorest sense of the word is off beam. There are better ways of telling us why this film may not be very good.

Temper scepticism and sympathy for the rapture of the nerds

Any stance we take towards the Singularity is one of distance and scepticism; the appropriate response to any teleology, no matter how grounded in rationality its authors and its followers claim. The mode of engagement to the concept is an assessment, not an acceptance, in the spirit of critical rationality.

John Horgan's rejection is an unsuitable stance, as engagement with the argument is dismissed for a portrayal of irrationality, structured as a chiliastic movement, no different from the Rapture. How can this description, presenting Kurzweil in the role of prophet, be true, wrapped in the opposition of Horgan? His critique fails a test of rationality: providing some meritorious proof that the Singularity movement approximates a blind faith in scientism.

The nearest that Horgan provides is scepticism on the scientific foundations of the new technology. In areas of such uncertainty, uncertainty is the best response. Even here Horgan has a searchlight amongst the pathways of the unknowable:

Actually, the major trend in both neuroscience and genetics over the past decade or two has been the discovery of deeper and deeper levels of complexity, which have thwarted medical applications. This theme emerged in several Times articles that bracketed its lengthy pro-Kurzweil press release. An excellent two-part report by Nicholas Wade and Andrew Pollack exposed how the decoding of the human genome has yielded little or no medical payoff. "Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits," Wade wrote. He added that "after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.".

Not exactly the premise given in other sources, where the outcome of tis complexity and our understanding of oncology becomes a positive, not a negative. This piece will temper one's scepticism with sympathy for the Singularitarians. Their goal seems much more humanistic than this arid pitch.

The coalition is preferable to what came before

There is a strange reversal of fortune in economic policymaking as we hear the left-wing party in Britain make common cause with the President of the United States. Tying themselves to Obama's coattails has become the leitmotif of the budget response. More public spending is required to stave off a potential recession. Isn't that the medicine which got us into this mess in the first place?

The faces that have spun this line include Blanchflower, Labour and Keynes's biographer, Skidelsky? But does not the record of the Brown government undermine these arguments on Keynesian terms? Did he not argue that deficit expenditure during a recession should be offset by a primary surplus during periods of growth? We will pass over the practical absurdity of this requirement, demonstrating a naive faith in the managerial class within the UK Treasury. And minor pundits will list these disciples as authorities in their own response.

These annoyances and citations pale at the heinous omission of responsibility. Labour politicians speak as if they have a monopoly on the ethics of justice, using a rhetoric of value checking, dropping "fairness", "social justice" and "progressive" into soundbites as if they were lovestruck fans namedropping the X Factor. The category least favoured to opine on our present predicament is the crop of mediocrities masquerading as leadership candidates.

Mendacity haunts their claim on mass unemployment (just as US statistics are also worthless). The number of unemployed can be extended to the economically inactive. Take the wider definition and full unemployment becomes a temporary phenomenon of the mid 20th century. Labour was happy to fund and subsidise this inactivity: trading dignity for votes.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Coalition, they are preferable to what came before.

State pensions are a Ponzi scheme, as we all know, Now you are forced to contribute whether you like it or not. Look at Argentina: they sequestrated your assets.

Cloud Sherpa

First of the new jobs on the wave of innovation following the Great Recession. Cloud computing has been creeping up the purchasing decisions of many companies. A level of complexity has now been reached where guides are required: herald the cloud sherpa!

Most IT departments can’t afford the time to obsessively follow cloud vendors already on the market, analyze the trade-offs between offerings, and track every new development. Companies will need specialized guides who can help them sort through services, build systems by connecting possibly disparate vendors, and ensure that the result delivers the desired performance … and the cost savings.

Labou's client state commences its death rattle

What should we call this sovereign debt crisis? There does not appear to be one overall name that we can apply to the phenomenon. Even in the year after the downturn, the consensus is revolving around the Great Recession. Markets are still not reacting with confidence to the Special Purpose Vehicle designed to issue debt shoring up the PIGS. It will allay the crisis and delay the reckoning.

Of concern is the lack of decoupling between Britain and the Eurozone. Despite Cameron's scaremongering speech yesterday, Fitch has greeted the latest well-trawled measures with some scepticism.

The FTSE 100 also closed down 0.8pc at 5028.15 as the uncertainty in Europe continued, and after Fitch, the ratings agency, issued a veiled warning that the Coalition Government would have to do more than was currently implied to reduce the deficit, or put Britain's AAA credit rating at renewed risk.

Within hours, the Chancellor announced that he was running his sliderule over benefits, tax credits and public sector pensions, as Labour's client state commences its death rattle.

A respite in the Frankfurt salient

I suppose this is what you call a respite. Even though markets fell and the € remained below the significant $1.20, the Eurozone was committed to its hairshirt, a puritanical straitjacket of catastrophic proportions. Whilst I argued for reform of their welfarism for many years, they wish to self-destruct their Ponzi schemes as quickly as possible for small pieces of paper. This is Hitchhiker's Guide madness.

European finance ministers attempted to calm nerves by finalising details of a safety net for the eurozone and moving to tighten up budget discipline. Ministers from the 16 nations that share the single currency were due to agree arrangements to allow a Special Purpose Vehicle to raise up to €440bn (£363bn) to lend to eurozone nations that run into Greek-style problems, officials said.

They were also due to discuss ways of avoiding another Greek debt crisis by tightening surveillance of national budgets and introducing earlier and tougher sanctions against countries that breach EU deficit limits or misrepresent their statistics.

Free up space

The US space industry (or that part of it which depends upon NASA and Pentagon subvention) is under threat from European and Asian rivals. Not because of protectionism in the classical sense of tariffs but because US export controls do not allow US firms to compete at all. And they are falling behind.

Export control reform in the United States has made progress, but "the proof will be in the execution of it," Lambert said.

"We need to do this. We have second- and third-tiers [companies] going out of business because they can't export and they're not competitive in the global marketplace," he said. "I think we're coming to terms rather quickly with a design and a framework that will allow us over time to transition to a much more effective export promotion strategy as opposed to an export control strategy."

A new riff on the damage that governments can cause because they are not nimble enough to respond to the marketplace. But the removal of restrictions on exporting space industry and allowing a competitive industry to develop is paramount, if newspace is to survive.