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TALLRITE BLOG 
ARCHIVE
This archive, organized into months, and indexed by time and alphabet, contains all issues since inception, including the current week.

ISSUE #155 - 24^th June 2007 [468+237=1005]

Click here for Word Version of Issue #155

From time to time I get accosted, outside a Church, inside a supermarket, wherever, by a young person seeking sponsorship for a trip to the developing world, usually Africa.  He/she plans to go there with a group, perhaps from school, to build facilities for needy locals, such as houses or classrooms or computer rooms or sports facilities.  When I say build, I mean that in the literal sense.  They will take shovels, buy bricks and cement and get to work with the hard graft of construction, under a merciless African sun or tropical downpour, putting up with poor accommodation, malarial mosquitoes and bouts of diarrhoea.  The purpose of the money they raise is to pay their own airfares and subsistence, as well as the building materials they will purchase. 

After their month or so, they will depart, suntanned, leaner, stronger, wiser, leaving behind the fruit of their honest labours, and with a real sense of achievement, having done something for those less fortunate than themselves. 

It isn't just adolescents who undertake such activities.  The Sunday Times recently ran a story about a software entrepreneur, Tanya Goodin, who brought all her 40 employees to Cape Town on a week-long team-building exercise which was spent constructing school facilities for deprived children.  The comment line at the end of the article positively glows with the admiration of readers for this display of philanthropy. 

Undoubtedly team spirit was much enhanced among her staff, and like the youngsters, they all came away feeling they had delivered something worthwhile.  In this case, it was a classroom block, some lavatories, a playground and a basketball court.  The whole enterprise cost the company £100,000 in materials, travel, accommodation and salaries. 

But such enterprises, whether by the young or the old are little more than sanctimonious nonsense. 

Since when did Africa run so short of unskilled - or indeed skilled -  construction labour that unskilled European workers now have to be flown on a 12,000 miles roundtrip for a week or a month? 

For that is what is happening.  On a continent where the average GDP per head works out at barely six dollars per day, or $5 if you exclude wealthy South Africa and the oil-rich Mediterranean states, what is a city slicker who earns several hundred dollars a day doing excavating trenches with shovels? 

The article in the Sunday Times draws attention to the poverty of the children whose school the software engineers are trying to help, by pointing out that their parents are unemployed and can't even afford to nourish them properly.  The irony of not tapping into Africa's surfeit of unused, ultra low cost, manual labourers too poor even to feed their families properly, in order to allow unskilled Europeans to do the job, seems to escape everyone.   

According to the CIA's World Factbook, Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from unemployment percentages that range from the twenties (Ghana, South Africa) to the eighties (Zimbabwe, Liberia).  So if there is one thing that is really going to help those unfortunate people it is paid work, of any nature. 

If, therefore, we Westerners want to do something to help, we should offer something that is not readily available. 

Such activities might seem less exciting than laying bricks, but they are of infinite more value to Africans. 

If, however, all I want to do is have an interesting break in an unfamiliar country and get lots of exercise, by all means I might as well build a schoolroom.  I just shouldn't delude myself that I'm doing it for the good of anyone but myself. 

Note: I wrote a letter to the Sunday Times
on this general theme, but it went unpublished. 

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Shifting Sands of the Centre Ground

Over the last decade or two, appealing to the “Centre” has become the Holy Grail of political parties throughout the West. 

In the good old bad old days, the political divide was clear.  In that mother of parliaments in Westminster,

Of course both pictures were always a caricature, but they helped to mobilise people in the direction of the polling booths, and thus to give MPs the chance of a further five years. 

But gradually, each side began to see (some of) the merits of the other. 

This became known as moving toward the centre ground.  With time, voters became exasperated with the extreme policies, whether of the Left or Right, so politicians served up Goldilocks mixtures, a bit of Left, a bit of Right, stealing ideas from each other. 

Today, this has reached such a stage that Europe's main parties are almost indistinguishable from each other from a Left-Right perspective, with their mixture of encouraging enterprise and protecting workforces.  What, for example, are the practical differences between Tony Blair's Labour and David Cameron's Tories?

But that doesn't mean the old Left-Right ideas and passions have gone away.  If you are of one persuasion or the other, the challenge is to shift the balance in your preferred direction.  But these days it must be done by stealth, because if it results in damage you naturally don't want to be blamed, but if it succeeds you also want to stay quiet so that you can continue doing more without stirring up a fuss.  Moreover, while failure is an orphan, success has many fathers, so you will never be able to claim sole credit in any case because so many others will be scrambling to grab the plaudits.   

The last few years have seen an interesting experiment in this process here in that economic success that is Ireland, popularly known as the Celtic Tiger. 

There are two big parties, Fine Gael and Fine Fail, who wander around in the centre without any ideology to speak of, because they are no more than relics of opposing sides in the Civil War of 1922/23, who garner most of their votes from descendents of those ancient antagonists.  All but one of the small other parties are Leftish to different degrees. 

The exception is the Progressive Democrats, which broke away from Fianna Fail in 1985 as an avowedly liberal party committed to enterprise, free trade, capitalism and low taxes.  This caught the imagination of many voters and as a result the PDs found themselves in coalition with Fianna Fail almost continuously from 1989 to 2007.   Punching well above their weight, they had a huge influence in persuading Fianna Fail to encourage foreign investment, open up the economy, cut trade barriers and reduce taxes, all shibboleths of the Right, and to this extent they were largely responsible for the unprecedented economic boom that ensued.  But Fianna Fail naturally claimed all this as its own, while no other party dared rubbish policies that had made the Irish the wealthiest in Europe (GDP $44,500 per person) after oil-rich Norway and miniscule Luxembourg, richer even than the US ($44,000). 

Imperceptibly, the “centre” had moved smartly to the Right, but was still called the centre. 

Things were going swimmingly, everyone who wanted a job could get one, people had money to spend.  Because of the low tax rates, tax revenues were soaring beyond projection year after year, which prompted the Taoiseach in 2005 to declare (somewhat irrationally) that “the era of tax-cutting was over”.  

Then, last year, the PDs caused outrage among all the other parties by announcing that stamp duty (9%) on house sales was too high, the state didn't need the annual €2.6 billion it generates, and so it should be abolished as it acts as sand in the wheels of house conveyancing (true).  Also, they said, income tax should come down (again). 

But the loss of revenue would ruin public services and victimise the poor, everyone exclaimed in horror.  The PDs were shouted down. 

But guess what?  In the general election a few weeks ago, every single party's manifesto contained pledges to reduce stamp duty and/or income tax.  Even rabidly Marxist Sinn Féin tabled some modest tax-reduction measures and notably avoided proposing tax increases. 

After the election, mighty Fianna Fail once again emerged as the party with most seats, so formed a coalition with its previous partners, the PDs, but also with a newly invigorated Green party.  Within days of taking office, the new team were reducing stamp duty (albeit only for first time buyers) and promising income tax cuts to follow for both rich and poor. 

But the irony is that the PDs, having convincingly won this argument, lost four of their six seats.  Why was this so if their ideas are so popular?  Because their ideas are no longer their ideas; they are now everyone's.  The centre ground, thanks to their inspiring leadership over the past two decades has shifted dramatically to the Right, though everyone still calls it the centre (don't want to frighten the horses).  Thus, the PDs have effectively worked themselves out of a job; their success has made them superfluous.  Their only chance for survival is therefore to develop, once more, exciting new ideas that set them apart from the mainstream and get them noticed again. 

For their part, the Leftwing Labour party has experienced its own epiphany, but from a different perspective.  It has steadily lost the Leftwing argument to the PDs and is thus rapidly becoming a redundant party of little more than bad-tempered protest.  Too many of its traditional trade-unionist cohorts are busy enjoying their new-found, capitalist-generated wealth, to want to upset the economic apple-cart. 

A new dynamic has appeared in 2007, however, because the Greens returned six parliamentarians, making them the new kingmakers in place of the PDs.  As a result, they have entered Government for the first time, and secured three ministerships, including of course that of the Environment.  But in my view, this means we will undoubtedly see them eventually suffer a similar fate as the PDs.  That is because more and more people are becoming convinced by the green agenda, whether it is the big one of climate change and carbon footprints, or less headline grabbing measures such as the need to

The Greens are passionate about these things; the rest of us generally support them but with perhaps less enthusiasm and effort. 

Nevertheless, now that the Greens are in government, more and more of their green objectives will be adopted into legislation, while the other parties too will embrace the new, popular greenery wherever they can. 

Of course, the Greens also espouse a lot of socialist and anti-war (ie pro the other side) nonsense, but within government most of this will be mercilessly squeezed out of them by their Right-leaning partners.  So the Greens will perforce turn a shade of blue, while the other parties get a strong tinge of green. 

And come the next election in five years, the Greens will have so persuaded the rest of us of the errors of our (dirty) ways, that they will have nothing new to say.  Like the PDs, unless they then come up with something radically innovative (and sensible) they will have made themselves superfluous, a victim of their own success. 

The diagram above illustrates, with judicious use of colours, the dynamic of Ireland's smaller parties, as this has developed over the past twenty years and continues in to the future.  Note how the so-called “Centre” has slowly shifted with time, silently like a sand dune, to the Right and towards Greenery. 

One thing is sure.  When the next ballot rolls around in 2012, the ruling Fianna Fail will call itself, then as now as always, a “centrist party of the people”, and certainly not a bunch of right-wing greenophiles.  And the other parties will by and large have manifestos that tend Rightward and Greenward, whatever they may say to the contrary. 

However, because of the change of landscape and the widespread support for such leanings, such a mixture will in fact constitute the new centre ground.   

It will then be up to the minority parties - Labour, the PDs, the Greens - to dream up new, distinctive raisons d'etre, or to self-annihilate. 

Such are the perils of the shifting sands of the mythical centre ground. 

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What Really Happened in the Middle East

Most public discourse about Israel paints Israel as the oppressor, the human rights abuser, the ruthless over-armed enemy of peace-yearning Palestinians.  The latter are undeserving victims, condemned to live in squalid refugee camps, without jobs, prevented from free movement by the occupier, refused their own state, denied the possibility of returning to their own home towns and villages from which they and their forebears were brutally expelled in 1948 by the ruthless Israeli military machine. 

To those who subscribe to this view, and indeed those that don't, I would suggest studying the high-quality latest video put together by the Terrorism Awareness Project.  It's a pro-Israel organisation, but that does not detract from the video's veracity.  It's called “What Really Happened in the Middle East”, and all statements and quotations are backed up with references.

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Escaping from the Boot of a Car

Getting thrown into the boot of a car (or trunk, as Americans prefer) is for many abductors the preferred method of moving you from A to B, whether it be by insurgents in Iraq or drug-dealers in Los Angeles.  Why it even happened in a recent episode of a TV soap, the ghastly Coronation Street. 

So here are some easy tips for escaping.  Of course you must print off this particular post and keep a copy in your pocket at all times, together with a small torch and spare batteries, so you can read it in the dark of the boot ... 

If you are in a boot that has no wall separating the backseats and the boot, try to get the seats down.

Check for a boot cable underneath the carpet or upholstery.

Look for a tool in the boot.

Dismantle the car's brake lights by yanking wires and pushing or kicking the lights out.

But be aware ...

Just thought you'd like to know this tip from a fascinating little survival manual. 

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Week 155's Letter to the Press

Only one letter this week, to the Sunday Times, and it wasn't published, probably because it was regarded as being nasty to well-meaning people doing stuff in Africa.  This week's lead post, “Do-Gooders Building Buildings in Developing World”, expands on the theme of the letter. 

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ISSUE #154 - 17^th June 2007 [604]

Click here for Word Version of Issue #154

Combustible Demographic Youth Bulge

Other than large scale loss of life, what have these events got in common?

In each case, there was/is a demographic youth bulge, which can be defined as “30% of the population being between 15 and 29 years”.  In particular it means that 30% of the males are in the prime of youth. 

So far OK. 

The 7/7 London bombers, in order to kill 52 innocents, combined three relatively harmless domestic chemicals - hair bleach (hydrogen peroxide), nail polish remover (acetone), acid from a car battery (sulphuric) - which then turned into the deadly explosive triacetone triperoxide. 

Similarly, the youth bulge seems to be one ingredient of another deadly explosive mixture.  The other two otherwise harmless (indeed beneficial) components appear to be sufficient food not to be hungry and a modicum of education to give you a sense of the world around you. 

Young men are famously aggressive and full of hormones, each of whom wants some success and recognition in life.  That is, unless he is so hungry he can think only of food, or of such limited mental development that he doesn't really see the attraction of personal advancement. 

But when there is an excess of young men in a society, and they are reasonably well fed and aware, something often - in the absence of sufficient opportunities at home - happens. 

Trouble. 

Thus it was that the Vikings and European imperialists, with famously high birthrates, exported their well-fed excess males to kill/replace/dominate other males in foreign lands. 

The Irish bulge, on the other hand, accompanied as it was by poor nutrition at the best of times and starvation when the potato blight struck, was solved either by death or by flight abroad.  The hungry young males simply didn't have the energy to pick fights or foment serious revolution. 

But the violent upheavals at home that took place in Russia in 1917, in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and in China in the 1930s, that in each place fostered the rise and flowering of pernicious ideologies and foul tyrants, coincided with youth bulges, (relatively) replete bellies and a modicum of schooling. 

In the modern day, the example of the combustible mix that, right now, jumps out of our TV screens every day is Gaza, once an Israeli settlement by the sea, now little more than a terrorist squat consumed by a savage civil war.  The three ingredients?

So, without the organization or military prowess to successfully invade and conquer others, they are fighting and killing each other in the time-honoured fashion, and will probably continue to do so until the excess of young males has culled itself sufficiently through wanton if rational violence. 

But note how UNWRA and other do-gooders are contributing to the problem with their no-strings-attached, never-ending aid (an annual $127m for Gaza alone, being 46% of UNWRA's total budget).  Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the EU earmarked another €60 million for this year for Gaza and only suspended the giving earlier in the month when the fighting became so ferocious their aid workers had to flee. 

Here is a table of interesting statistics gleaned from the CIA's World Factbook. 

The low median ages in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia mean they are, like Gaza, basically swarming with aware (largely literate), hyped-up teenagers for whom food is not the overwhelming preoccupation, and who have little to do but cause trouble. 

Iran, on the other hand, passed this point back in the 1980s. At the height of its war against Iraq, the ruling mullahs happily sent thousands of surplus, overactive youngsters to their doom by using them as cannon fodder in the trenches and human mine clearers.  The demographic age-spread is better balanced today and the birth rate has dropped below the replacement level, so it's future looks less excitable, despite the nuclear aspirations of its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  

The figures for the West Bank go some way towards explaining why it is a little calmer than Gaza. 

But I add in Zimbabwe to show that the equation of

youth + food + education = trouble

is not water-tight.  Or perhaps Robert Mugabe, through his iron fist and ruthless willingness to kill his own citizens, is able to keep a lid on an otherwise combustible mix. 

That was certainly Saddam's methodology before his downfall.  Bob Woodward, in his new book “State of Denial”, quotes Saddam giving deadly advice to Saudi Arabia's Prince Fahd about dealing with troublemakers:

“Kill [all of them] ... Every man in this group who has a brother or father – kill them. If they have a cousin who you think is man enough to go for revenge, kill him ... You must spread the fear of God in everything that belongs to them, and that’s the only way you can sleep at night.”

The theory behind the equation is not my own.  I only came across the concept of a youth bulge and what it can lead to when I read a recent English translation of an interview with a German sociology professor, Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen.  In 2003, he published “Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen” [Sons and World Domination: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations].  It is said to be sensational and politically incorrect, though largely unheard of in the English-speaking world. 

The interview is published on a blog called Gates of Vienna, in a post entitled “A Continent of Losers”.

I found it breathtaking. 

The professor believes that 80% of world history is about young men in nations with a surplus of sons, creating trouble. This trouble may take many forms —

I tried to illustrate some of this in my opening paragraphs. 

The brutal conclusions he draws is that we in the West must therefore stop incentivising high birthrates, whether in troublespots such as Gaza or among marginalised immigrant populations, and we should close off much foreign aid to countries with a youth bulge.  This means the young men will either become listless and non-violent through hunger, or else kill themselves off until their numbers match society’s ability to provide positions for the survivors.

And unless Europe's laissez-faire immigration policies shift to a strictly abilities basis, most European countries will hollow out into chaotic immigrants slums with enclaves of elderly natives.  Faced with ever-rising taxes required to support not only their own rapidly ageing populations but also the 30% of immigrants who are unskilled or unwilling to work, the talented native populations will simply emigrate to the welcoming, merit-based Anglo-Saxon worlds of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, exacerbating the problem they are escaping from.  In fact, this is already happening in the Netherlands, Poland, France, Germany and elsewhere. 

And when unskilled people from the developing world try to enter the Anglo countries, where meritocratic points systems assess the suitability of would-be immigrants, they are politely refused but quietly reminded that it will be much easier for them to get into Europe. 

The more this process continues, moreover, the less easy will it be for European countries to attract talent from other corners of the world, such as the Far East.  For what clever person is going to immigrate, knowing the burden he/she will have to bear of a huge and growing non-productive sector? 

It's a depressing scenario, and Prof Heinsohn offers little by way of comfortable solutions for Europeans.  Cut welfare at home, cut aid abroad, exhort native Europeans to produce more babies, discriminate against unskilled immigrants, turn a blind eye to foreign conflict when driven by a youth bulge. 

Imagine how any European politician would be torn to shreds by the media and multicultural élites were he/she ever brave enough to propose some or all of such a programme. 

Meanwhile, the demographic youth bulge continues to work its malign magic, not only in far away places, but also among immigrant communities living within Britain, France, Scandinavia, Germany, Holland and other countries.  Examples? 

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Predictable Apprentice

Once again, BBC's The Apprentice made compulsive viewing as sixteen would-be young candidates applied for a senior job with Sir Alan Sugar, boss of electronics giant Amstrad.  Week by week, they were mercilessly whittled down by Sir Alan, until just two remained, Simon (Ambrose) and Kristina (Grimes). 

The bets were all that Irishwoman Kristina would win, as she was undoubtedly the more capable contestant, in terms of maturity, ability, common sense, power of analysis, vision, ambition, courage and above all potential to grow even better. 

But I knew the Cambridge graduate with the posh accent would become Sir Alan's Apprentice, despite the latter's known disdain for anyone who speaks properly (“Wot woz you thinking?” as he regularly demands).  And so I was able to collect on all the bets I laid. 

The reason Simon defeated Kristina was twofold.

Firstly, this was the third show of the series.  The first was won by a black guy, the second by a white single mother.  Therefore it certainly wasn't going to be won by another white single mother, so it had to be the white guy, posh accent or not. 

The second reason I backed Simon was due to a personality characteristic of Sir Alan that I described two years ago after the first series ended: 

“Sir Alan is a bully who likes to surround himself with yes-men, and yesmanship is a more important quality to him than potential.  He fears “gobby” people like Paul and Saira (to use Saira's own self-description), who are prepared to stand up to him and tell him he's wrong about something and why.  

Like most bullies, he can dish it out but he can't take it.”

Simon, bright and capable lad that he undoubtedly is, is respectful and submissive. 

Kristina on the other hand is prepared to stand up for herself when the occasion, in her judgment, demands. 

Sir Alan is afraid of such people, very afraid.  So Kristina had to go. 

It was all so predictable. 

In the same vein, next year's winning Apprentice will be a brown-skinned woman, without children, who has a polite attitude and a regional accent.  Anyone want to place an early bet?

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Five-Coin Trick

Here is a great way to remove money from your friends and relatives. 

Explain to them the five-coin trick described in the video below. 

Tell them what they have to do.  Show them how to do it.  Several times.  Then offer them say €$£20 if they can do it without cheating, but they have to pay you say €$£1 if they fail.  Keep showing them how to do it (though do it fairly rapidly, with no explanatory words).  Keep making the offer.  And watch your €$£s, and their frustration, mount up.  They'll never get it right.  If you don't like the sound of money, use beer as your currency, but eventually you'll be too drunk to remember the astonishingly simple routine yourself. 

It's not even a trick, just a pattern of five easy moves.  See for yourself. 

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Week 154's Letters to the Press

Three letters this week.  One was published (and elicited a private reply from the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland).  The other two were follow-ups to previously published letters.