Stop Press - Blair is thick!

Heard saying 'nucular' for 'nuclear' on Radio 4 today. Either he's picked up something nasty from his friend George, or he's been thick all the time, and we never realised!.

What a loser!

According to Classic FM this morning, Haydn wrote 'something like 104 different symphonies'.

Well, like, Duhhh!!!

Fancy wasting time writing all those different ones? Think of the time he could have saved if he'd written 'something like' 52 of them the same! What a dummy, eh?

'Democracy' - Blush-style

So the Iraqi people have accepted the new constitution, have they? Well, this is clearly a new definition of the term 'accepted', that I've never encountered before. The Sunni areas had majorities against the constitution, but as they would have needed two thirds voting against, they didn't apparently reject it enough.

Bush and Blair - the Blush axis - just don't have a clue about democracy, do they? Despite all the incessant babble, it's actually nothing more than a verbal talisman for them, isn't it? Blair's already demonstrated his total lack of understanding of the concept, by pushing through Scottish and Welsh devolution on a minority of the popular vote. Now the two of them have reinvented the rule book again with a stunning piece of Orwellian double think in which 'No' now means 'Yes'. Provided Tony says so, of course.

Bush is clearly too stupid to understand the issue, but Blair is perfectly able to understand, and we can only conclude that the manipulation is deliberate and malicious. Scary to be in the hands of someone like this, isn't it?

American 'English'

A piece on the BBC website today by Harold Evans, inspires the following thoughts.

I disagree with his statement that there are '250 million Americans speaking English'. Few literate people would subscribe to the notion that the language spoken in the US is English. I suppose the furthest I'd be prepared to go down that road would be to concede the existence of American English, as distinct from UK English - a distinction that seems to exist in the world of computer software.

There should, I feel, be no objection to the introduction of new words into the language from the US, once they have become widely used here. However, another and altogether more pernicious phenomenon is the changing of pronunciations of established English words in imported US usages. In many cases this takes the form of a shift of the emphasis in a word, with the outcome that the resulting pronunciation serves to obscure the meaning. A good example of this is the word kilometre. This word belongs in a 'suite' of nouns representing the metric units of length, all of which were, from the time of their adoption into the language, pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable - eg KILometre, CENTimetre, MILLimetre. A couple of decades ago the Americanism kilOmetre (with the emhasis on the second syllable) started to creep into use over here. Unfortunately, this lifts the word out of its semantic context and dumps it unceremoniously into the company of, for example, thermOmeter, hydrOmeter, anemOmeter etc all of which are measuring devices not lengths (the irony is the existence of the perfectly legitimate mileOmeter!). Other examples are conTROVersy for CONtroversy, REsearch for reSEARCH etc

I fully accept all the assertions that English is a living language and that usage, rather than a set of ancient rules, should determine its content. However, I also believe that pronunciation should serve to illuminate, not to obscure meaning. If you'd never heard of a kilometre, how would you construe its meaning, hearing the pronunciation kil-O-metre? Is it, for example, something used by terrorists to determine the efficacy of a bombing campaign?

People will readily adopt these unfortunate Americanisms if they are exposed to them by the broadcast media. It's the responsibility of the BBC as the public service broadcaster in the UK, to uphold standards, and to proceed with extreme caution in exposing the public to neologisms, where their adoption into common usage will obscure meaning or otherwise damage the rich texture of the English language. Sadly it is not a responsibility to which the BBC accords any priority or importance.

Climate change - the facts

At this time, with the G8 summit under way, and the media full of ill-informed nonsense about this topic, now seems like a good time to put the record straight.

Firstly, there need be no dispute that climate change is happening. We have a naturally variable climate, and it has always been so. At present, we're in a period of very gradual warming - about 0.7 deg C in the past 100 years. This is a very short period in historical terms, a mere blip in a temperature record having huge swings from prehistoric arid conditions to ice ages, and displaying all the lower order 'noise' associated with any naturally variable phenomenon. There is no reason to suppose that this blip is any more than a part of that 'noise'.

One of the many, and poorly understood control mechanisms that regulate our climate is the so-called greenhouse effect. Here, incoming solar radiation is absorbed, in certain precisely defined frequency bands, by atmospheric gases, and then re-radiated as heat. Water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane are amongst the greenhouse gases, but the chief emphasis has been on carbon dioxide (CO2), since it is emitted in large quantities, not only by natural biological processes, but also, either directly or indirectly, as a result of virtually all of mankind's domestic, commercial and industrial activities.

So if CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you may ask, the more of it we release into the atmosphere the hotter we get, right?

Wrong.

For these reasons:

• As mentioned above, the greenhouse gases only absorb energy in narrow, precisely defined frequency bands. In the case of CO2, nearly all the energy available in those bands is already being absorbed by the existing CO2 in the atmosphere - we say that these bands are near to saturation. What this means is that releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere can make very little difference to the greenhouse effect.
• In the historic record of atmospheric CO2 concentration and global average temperature, extending back over hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 and temperature can be seen tracking each other closely. Unfortunately for the proponents of the notion that mankind is causing the warming, the CO2 changes lag behind the temperature changes, and so cannot have caused them. In fact there are no examples in the records of a rise in CO2 concentration followed by a tracking rise in temperature. The conclusion is inescapable - changes in CO2 do not cause changes in temperature.

The fact is that the control mechanisms for our climate are extremely complex, and poorly understood. In the light of this, it is highly irresponsible for the scientists to encourage politicans and activists to tub-thump over climate change. Whether or not the predictions being made, and the scare stories so beloved of the media, are to be believed, the theory and the evidence simply do not support the idea that the hugely expensive and damaging changes being urged can make any difference.

Of course all this stuff is grist to the mill of the scientific establishment. The more it gets talked up and agitated about, the more disposed the research councils are to provide the juicy contracts, particularly if under pressure from politicians who see the topic as a potential vote-winner. I never thought I'd have to say this, but thank heavens for the obstinacy and pig-headedness of George W! For all the wrong reasons, the US are slowing the pace of 'action' (heaven help us) on climate change to the point where the bandwagon could run its course and be quietly forgotten, just like all the other previous armageddon fads, without any of the devastating political and fiscal changes being called for, ever actually coming to pass.

Running sore

So UK Athletics have stripped Mark Lewis-Francis of his silver medal, after traces of cannabis were detected in a routine drugs test. Who the hell do they think they are? Is cannabis a performance enhancing drug? If you've ever taken it, did it make you feel like breaking a sprint record, or chilling on the sofa? This drugs war in sport has gone too far. There was an arguable case for regulating the use of performance enhancing drugs, but this does not extend to a right for UKA to control all aspects of an athlete's life.

Taking drugs is a personal decision and nobody (including the government) has any right to interfere with that decision. The same applies in any walk of life. For example, sacking, or in any other way disciplining, an employee for actions (even illegal ones) outside work is a cast iron unfair dismissal case. My actions outside work are no business at all of my employer, unless they interfere in any way with my ability to do my job properly.

Hopefully Lewis-Francis will appeal against this wholly unjustifiable action by UKA.

Some thoughts on elections

The most recent debacle set me thinking again about the fragmentation or de-federalisation of the UK, as promoted largely unsuccessfully by John Prescott. The two main events in this process were the devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales in the first parliament of this New Labour administration. These were widely acclaimed, by the government and by supporters of the devolution process in those countries, as a triumph for democracy, but let's take a look at the figures.

In Scotland, the turnout was 60.4%, and of those voting 74.3% wanted a Scottish parliament, whilst only 63.5% wanted it to have tax-varying powers. A thumping majority for devolution and a ringing endorsement of the process? Yes, if Blair and co were to be believed. But, recalling my introduction to electoral politics back in the Wadham JCR, I seem to recall that the requirements for constitutional change are usually rather more exacting than the simple majority vote that suffices to change a government. This makes perfect sense, when you consider that the constitution defines the terms and conditions by which we delegate power to the government. It is clearly important therefore that it be reasonably difficult to change it. For this reason, any respectable, civilised nation requires a bare minimum of a popular majority for this purpose.

So how do the figures stack up now? The proportion for a Scottish parliament now becomes just under a sad minority of 45%, and for tax-raising powers, a wilting 38%. So now where's the resounding democratic success story? The fact is that fewer than half of the eligible voters wanted this parliament, and not many more than third wanted a parliament with tax-raising powers. For the government to have gone ahead with devolution in Scotland, far from being a triumph for democracy, was to fly in the face of the expressed wishes of the Scottish electorate.

In the Welsh case, the picture is even worse - only a quarter of the electorate wanted a parliament. No tax-raising powers were on offer here - probably just as well!

Eight years later, we have a talking shop in Wales, with no executive powers. The three-quarters of the Welsh electorate that didn't want it should be justifiably indignant about the waste of tax-payers' money, but at least the assembly doesn't presume to make or change law. The Scots, however, have every reason to take to the streets over the abuse that has been perpetrated on their democratic rights.

Firstly there's the scandal over the costs of the new parliament building, which rose exponentially from an initial estimate of £40 million and now looks like having exceeded £500 million (I couldn't find a final cost anywhere, perhaps unsurprisingly, but in final quarter 2004 the cost was reported to stand at £431 million), and all for a facility that the majority of the Scots didn't want. More importantly, however, there's the fact that this assembly, which can have no legitimate executive authority, enacts legislation illegally.

So should we be surprised that this government moves in such undemocratic ways, its wonders to under-perform? This is the party that has paid lip-service to electoral reform when it suited them to cuddle up to the Liberals, but has since quietly and conveniently forgotten about it; that has just entered its third term with the smallest share of the popular vote since the 1867 Reform Act. Had it not been so stomach-turning, it would have been amusing on Question Time last night to hear the assembled luminaries falling over themselves to espouse the electoral reform notion, although come to think of it, Harriet Harman was rather quiet on the subject!

But there you go - we're stuck with it. To paraphrase Clinton's 1992 electoral strategy, "It's the system, stupid", and it ain't gonna change. Plus ca change...

Thought for the day ...

A suicide bomber is literally a demographic timebomb. Things can only get progressively better.