The way to hell says Czech PM

That's what he thinks of the Obama print money and fiscally abuse unborn children plan to stimulate the US economy says the BBC. See, the Czech Republics knows a bit about hell, as the allies left in the strangling embrace of Stalin and Chris Trotter's beloved Soviet Union for 40 years, rolling some tanks in halfway just to remind everyone of who was boss. The Czech's know a bit about the difference between freedom and statism, which given the Czech Republic's current (6 month) Presidency of the EU is good news for the EU (for now).

Czech (outgoing) PM Mirek Topolanek considers the size of the US budget deficit and the long list of protectionist "Buy America" provisions in the print money and fiscally abuse unborn children plan to be disastrous, as it follows just the same creeping path of protectionism that damaged the global economy in the mid-late 1930s.

He also says the EU is uninterested in pursuing any more of additional stimulus package to follow the US.

Now whilst this comes on the eve of another announcement, wouldn't you think the world would be better off, with Mr Topolanek's term as PM ending, appointing him instead of Helen Clark to run a bloated corrupt and lazy UN megabureaucracy?

Working hard in the Middle East

Yes, that's been me. 14-16 hour days (yes boo hoo all you strict 8 hour wage slaves, life's rough for you), interminable meetings which are 10% in English as the rest is Arabic, dealing with a public sector that works a 6 hour day, noticing a common thread among those I meet who are innovative and hard working, and those who are bureaucratic (those who are innovative and hard working have PCs on their desks, those who don't aren't - a rule that does not apply in the Western world). Reminding myself to always take toilet paper with me, as I am unsure why my bum should be wet with the basic bidet. Remembering that hotel food, even at a five star establishment, is at best average, at worst bizarrely awful (rolls with houmus and labnah, consistently overcooked fish). Not touching the tap water, but not knowing what water is used for the endless cups of tea offered. Remembering that Nescafe is code for diluted instant coffee with 3 or more teaspoons of sugar in it. Wondering why the same fruit and desserts sit exposed in the hotel room for the whole two weeks. Tolerating the rather common practice of smoking inside offices while meetings occur. Tolerating the very common practice of answering phone calls in the middle of meetings, and constant interruptions from virtually anyone - unless you are meeting the CEO or a Deputy.

However, appreciating that in Egypt (but not the UAE), the internet is wide open - unless, of course, you want to insult the President and ruling party. Also appreciating the relative secularism, which is seen in the diversity of TV, movie and internet content available (yet to encounter a blocked website - unlike the UAE where many are blocked). Perhaps the funniest point is how I found in a music store a boxed set of the racist 1970s UK comedy TV show "Mind Your Language"! You wont find that in the UK with much ease I suspect.

Britain loses its toy human

Jade Goody is a name that provokes much emotion. She died today, a young woman of 27 with cervical cancer. That is mildly notable, perhaps a useful warning to young women to be aware that cancer is not necessarily a disease of the old.

However, for me I’ve known far too many people already, younger and older than me, who have battled cancer. Those are people I give (and gave) a damn about, and so the narcotic the media is addicted to regarding Jade Goody’s illness tastes rather bitter to me. It is why I have refused to comment until today. Young death is sad, but nobody I know who suffered from culture was thrown millions by the media because a guilty tasteless public wanted to watch.

The Daily Telegraph calls her “the poster girl of the curious contemporary cult of talentless celebrity”. This was something I noted some time ago when I hoped her career would end after she was obnoxious to Shilpa Shetty. She seemed an anomaly, hopefully she has been a lesson.

The history of Jade Goody says much about the taste and standards of the British tabloid media, which of course reflects its keen consumers. Jade herself did well materially out of being a toy the media and public could abuse, embrace and abuse again, before embracing her (after briefly abusing her again) on news of her terminal illness.

It is a spectacle that should cause more than a few to reflect on how a young woman became a national sport.

Most of the media is being kind to her memory, but the Daily Telegraph’s obituary best describes how Jade Goody’s media career progressed and regressed. The interest in Jade Goody has been perverted. It glorified in her being dim, laughing at her like a retarded child who didn’t know better. It savoured being as unspeakably cruel as possible, both the right wing and left wing tabloids ripped into her. The Telegraph reporting:

“The Sun called her a hippo, then a baboon, before launching its campaign to "vote out the pig". The Sunday Mirror rejected porcine comparisons on the ground that it was "insulting – to pigs"…"Here she is: fat-rolled, Michelin girl Jade in all her preposterous lack of glory," thundered the Daily Mirror”

The Daily Mirror is purportedly centre left too. What culture glorifies in such sadistic language. Jade, after all, was hardly any worse than millions of the British lumpen proletariat, except she was making a lot of money out of simply being that way. She typified the desires of the barely educated hedonistic poor, who wanted to be rich and to get there by doing or being nothing other than their talentless selves. Yet they were jealous. What were the people who “travelled across England to the BB house, where they waved placards and greeted her emergence, spilling out of a pink dress several sizes too small, with chants of "burn the pig"” saying about themselves?

Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph concludes this for me well:

“A streak of callousness goes with being young, and always has done; but the peculiar brutality shown by twentysomethings towards the cancer-stricken Jade, for no better reason than that they didn't like her, is a miserable and worrying sign of the times.”

Many think her cancer story will save lives, maybe it will help some in the short term. However, she will be forgotten as her memory was always timebound by the short term memory of the tasteless who enjoyed her foibles and revelled in hating her.

A better outcome would be for those who joined in the consumption of a rather clueless woman's life as entertainment to move on and treat culture as a celebration of life, achievement and beautiful things and experiences that inspire us to wonder and awe - rather than inspire a near schizophrenic fascination and vitriol for someone who was none of those things, but similarly hardly deserving of the parasitical sadism that earned her money (and the loathsome Max Clifford who did well out of her too).

A good start would be to stop buying the Daily Mirror and the Sun, for obvious reasons.

It's time to move on and up, but many in Britain need to reflect on this sad little episode and what it says about the psyche of all too many.

State gangsterism

Matt McCarten is at it again in the NZ Herald, slagging off capitalism this time in the form of the tobacco industry. Now I don't have any interest in that industry. I personally loathe the smell of tobacco smoke, and would be happy if smoking faded away into history. I've known people I loved whose lives were undoubtedly shortened by smoking.

He sees the industry as a sign capitalism has failed, now nobody has bothered to tell Matt that the proportion of people smoking in the most anti-Western capitalist countries - that prohibit Western tobacco companies - According to Wikipedia 26.3% of men and 21.5% of women in the US smoke, 29.7% and 27.5% in New Zealand. Yet in Cuba 43.4% of men and 28.3% of women smoke, in Iran 29.6% of men smoke (but for obvious reasons only 5.5% of women), in North Korea (no report quoted) most men smoke (women don't), in Belarus (the last bastion of totalitarianism in the former USSR) 63.5% of men smoke and 21.1% of women smoke.

Capitalism? No - it is cultural.

However, you can see Matt's point of view explained in one sentence:

"I've never heard a convincing argument as to the benefit of smoking"

No? Well I have one - it gives a lot of people pleasure. However he misses the point - it doesn't matter whether or not YOU see a benefit - it is called freedom of choice. I don't know the benefit of bungie jumping, or the benefit of genital piercing, or the benefit of eating rotten cabbage or coprophagia (if you don't know don't look it up online), or belonging to a student union.

The point is Matt that just because YOU don't see a benefit in something that you find distasteful and risky, doesn't mean you should decide.

Now the tobacco industry is certainly far more having the moral high ground. It obfuscated and denied overwhelming scientific evidence that sustained use of its products causes respiratory diseases and exacerbates cardio-vascular disease. Of course it did - why wouldn't it? It continues to sell and push its products in developing countries, obfuscating these facts, with its defence that it is about market share. That, is partly the truth, but it also wants more customers.

So I have little time for these peddlers of truth evasion. It was right for the tobacco industry to be held to account for death caused by its products when it openly advertised them as being healthy or ignored proven health issues with the products. I am not talking about nonsense like "Corporate Social Responsibility" as the only appropriate response is laws on fraud and negligence to cover the failure of the tobacco industry to be honest about the nature of its products. Sadly most countries don't have a capitalism legal system to allow this discipline to be placed on them.

However he gets it wrong when he argues against free choice, because, in fact, it is about that. The health risks of smoking are widely known in modern Western society, you know about it as a child. People take up smoking aware of this, and people stop smoking as well. Yes the tax on tobacco is an appalling way to pay for the state health sector costs. A better way would be for those who smoke to be able to buy health care that takes into account their lifestyle risk factors, in fact as should everyone. You smoke, you eat fatty sugary foods, you sit around all day, you pay a fortune or don't qualify.

Matt wouldn't like people being accountable for their choices though - because he believes smokers don't choose - he believes individuals are vulnerable little lambs that his all embracing nanny state should protect and provide for.

So when he says "I like to think it has dawned on most people that unfettered capitalism is just a form of gangsterism and is past its use-by date." Where has he seen this? Where are private property rights fully protected? Where is free banking? Where is the state only providing defence and law and order? Oh yes, the crony capitalist mixed economies dominated by state control of the money supply, and a significant part of GDP, are "unfettered".

He says "You only have to look at what has happened in the United States to realise that even they now accept that doing business without morality is unsustainable."

Indeed, but what about the gangsterism that is government?

What business would survive based on charging its customers whether or not they used its services, and charging them prices based on how much money the customers earned in the past year?

What business would promise health care, but would remove offering services or procedures at various locations with no notice, even though you paid into the "scheme" all your life? That same scheme means you faced waiting lists when you needed procedures deemed "non urgent", even though you were in a lot of pain at the time. That's called state health care.

What business would promise you a retirement income, and after taking more of your income every year as you get old, give your inheritance absolutely nothing if you die the day before you're due to collect, and would vary what is paid out based on political fiat? That same system means that the average Maori man (who dies at age 65) never receives a cent of National Superannuation.

Yes I know what gangsterism is Matt.

The Pope's reckless stupidity

Following on from the Pope's pre-Christmas statement that humanity needs "saving" from homosexuals because "a blurring of the distinction between male and female could lead to the "self-destruction" of the human race" (which apparently hasn't happened for countless other species where homosexual behaviour is observed). The "God given" variations in hormones and behaviour of human beings apparently should mean a whole segment of humanity should deny who they are because of a powerful celibate self sacrificing man.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the Pope is now saying HIV "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

The absence of logic is astonishing.

You may as well say that using condoms makes the likelihood of pregnancy higher.

The simple mathematical truth is that near universal condom use would dramatically contain the spread of HIV. It would NOT eliminate it, but by dramatically cutting the rate of transmission it will reduce it. After all, this is in part what happened among homosexual men in the Western world. Partly promiscuity reduced, but predominantly condom use became the norm - the rate of transmission reduced significantly.

To say it aggravate the problem is an utter lie, a reckless misnomer that will result in people having unprotected sex because they'll say "condoms make it worse".

He, no doubt thinks, that it is better people abstain from sex, with the threat of HIV being the incentive to abstain. He also probably thinks that the existence of condoms makes it more likely people will have sex, and more likely HIV will be transmitted.

So let's look at the scenarios behind his statement. Assume there are 100,000 in a country who are sexually mature and unmarried, let's assume 15% of those have HIV, so 15,000 are already infected (about the rate in South Africa). Of them, one third are undiagnosed. The scenarios below are rough mathematically, as I haven't exponentially included the chain effect of passing on the virus, but you should get the idea:

Scenario 1: Pope's ideal: All abstain from sex, except after marriage. Assume over 5 years half marry. So 50,000 marry. Of them 15% of the people in those marriages have HIV, of whom one third don't know. It takes 14 acts of intercourse for ALL those married to someone with HIV to be statistically certain of infection. The odds are that married couples will achieve this in 2-3 weeks and may produce children, also infected.

Scenario 2: Pope's policy, promiscuous lifestyle: All have sex with 5 partners over this period, on average 20 times with each person (sex once a fortnight). Those knowingly with HIV restrict this to 2. Odds are that over half of the population have sex with an infected person, and that there is a near certain chance of infection. Around 40,000 get infected. This is given that the rate of HIV infection for unprotected sex is 7%.

Scenario 3: 100% condom use, promiscuous lifestyle: As scenario 2, but all encounters involve a condom. According to a report by the National Institutes of Health (USA) condoms reduce the risk of HIV transmission by 87% (to 0.9%). As a result, while over half the population STILL has sex with an infected person, the odds of infection have dropped from virtually 100% (20 encounters with 7% chance each time), to 18%. Around 15,300 get infected.

Scenario 4: 100% condom use, half marry rest abstain: As scenario 1, but all who are married use condoms. 50,000 married, 15% married to people infected, but it takes them to have sex 111 times in that period before they statistically are all infected, a period of perhaps 6 months, during which HIV testing would have been available to them both easily.

My point is simple. Condoms reduce the incidence of HIV transmission. It works for people who are promiscuous and those who are not. Unless, the Pope wants everyone with HIV to remain unmarried.

It is sheer reckless stupidity, which barely shields the suffering Augustine ascetism of the Vatican. The Pope is either ignorant or would rather more Africans caught HIV as "punishment" for not following the church's teachings than they use simple proven technology to prevent disease transmission.

My problem is, it isn't clear which one it is, or whether it is actually both.

(As an aside, what I'd really like to know is why the church remains obsessed with sex (I can make some psychological assumptions) provisions in the Old Testament, but not those related to shellfish, hair and the like. My first guess is that if we all treated shellfish eating as a hedonistic pleasure, and sex as mundane and uninteresting as breathing, it may be different - it's about sacrifice, denial and suffering).