What Ever Happened to Basel II

Basel II, the invention of the Bank for International Settlements (www.bis.org), and more correctly entitled International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards: a Revised Framework, has so clearly and substantially failed.

And yet this has received almost no publicity. The Banks fucked up. As did the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank.

For those of you who are interested Basel II was intended to ensure that banks made provision for risks more effective and sensitive. The original report is available here. It is quite readable with a little effort, even for a non-banking person. It included a detailed frame work for all types of risk: operational risk, credit risk and market risk. It was intended to manage what is called “regulatory capital” . The capital ratio is the percentage of a bank's capital to its risk-weighted assets (RWA). Weights are defined by risk-sensitivity ratios detailed in the Basel II document. The core idea of risk-weighted assets is a move away from having a static requirement for capital adequacy. The approach is intended to be more flexible and is based on the riskiness of a bank's assets. So loans of various types have different risks. Loans secured by a letter of credit would be weighted riskier than a mortgage loan that is secured with collateral, assuming that the collateral had a realisable value. In calculating risk the assumed value of such collateral is reduced by what is called a haircut based on its volatility.

Irish financial institutions spent between €1 billion and €2 billion on implementing Basel II. The lower number is derived from the pure costs – software licences, consulting fees, additional hardware and other direct costs. The higher value would include an allowance for the time of personnel of the institutions working on its implementation.

For consulting and software companies – Accenture, BearingPoint, IBM, SAP, SAS and so on, Basel II represented a sloshing, lumbering gravy train. It was a fee-earning bonanza along the lines of the Year 2000 problem. These companies parasitised and devoured the floundering corpses of the institutions while the institutions accepted the huge costs.

And all for absolutely nothing.

Basel II is based a "three pillars" concept:

1. Minimum capital adequacy requirement to handle risk
2. Supervisory review by the appropriate regulator
3. Market disclosure and discipline

It failed in all three:

1. Not enough capital to handle actual risk
2. Incompetent regulator that could not or did not understand or act upon the inadequate information being made available
3. A market that failed to examine the incorrect information being presented and the schemes to avoid capital adequacy

At a very high level, the basic structure of Basel II is:

For example, under the Foundation Internal Rating-Based Calculation Approach for calculating Credit Risks banks are required to use regulator's prescribed LGD (Loss Given Default) parameters required for calculating the RWA (Risk Weighted Asset). Then total required capital is calculated as a fixed percentage of the estimated RWA. It is all very simple, if implemented, measured, monitored, reported on and understood correctly.

Banks estimate the PD (Probability of Default) for loans.

They also calculate Exposure at Default (EAD) or the extent to which a bank may be exposed in the event of a default.

It is a wonderfully complex framework that should be flawless in its structure and execution.

For example, for some details on how AIB approached the implementation of Basel II, see here.

What about all the commercial lending so extravagantly and incontinently indulged in by backs. This is called HVCRE or High-Volatility Commercial Real Estate

Paragraphs 227 and 228 of the BIS Basel II report contains the following:

227. High-volatility commercial real estate (HVCRE) lending is the financing of commercial real estate that exhibits higher loss rate volatility (i.e. higher asset correlation) compared to other types of SL (specialised lending). HVCRE includes:

Commercial real estate exposures secured by properties of types that are categorised by the national supervisor as sharing higher volatilities in portfolio default rates;

Loans financing any of the land acquisition, development and
construction (ADC) phases for properties of those types in such jurisdictions; and

Loans financing ADC of any other properties where the source of repayment at origination of the exposure is either the future uncertain sale of the property or cash flows whose source of repayment is substantially uncertain (e.g. the property has not yet been leased to the occupancy rate prevailing in that geographic market for that type of commercial real estate), unless the borrower has substantial equity at risk. Commercial ADC loans exempted from treatment as HVCRE loans on the basis of certainty of repayment of borrower equity are, however, ineligible for the additional reductions for SL exposures described in paragraph 277.

228. Where supervisors categorise certain types of commercial real estate exposures as HVCRE in their jurisdictions, they are required to make public such determinations. Other supervisors need to ensure that such treatment is then applied equally to banks under their supervision when making such HVCRE loans in that jurisdiction.

Duh. Where was the regulator when all the HVCRE lending was taking place that has so endangered Irish banks? Where were the banks' risk departments? Will anyone take responsibility? Will they fuck?

Never Trust a Barrister

Once again, we are seeing the results of appointing a barrister to a senior ministerial role.

Barristers are sole traders. They do not operate in teams. Barristers work on highly technical and specific aspects of problems in a rareified environment. They do no see a problem from initial definition to final resolution. Once the specific problem has been resolved they move on to the next problem without having to deal with the consequences of its implementation. Barristers are also not held accountable or responsible for their failures. They get paid anyway, irrespective of whether they win or lose a case. In the case of a loss, they might get paid less but still they get paid.

In 2004, Michael the Mouth McDowell made the comment that that gangland murders were on the decline and their activities represented “the last sting of the dying wasp” and presided over a substantial increase in crime, especially murder and manslaughter:

2004 – 45 or 1.11 per 100,000 of population
2005 – 65 or 1.57 per 100,000 of population
2005 – 67 or 1.58 per 100,000 of population

Now Brian Lenihan is demonstrating his incompetence in handling major issues. He is raising taxes when the rest of the world is reducing them. He is failing to demonstrate any leadership in handling the issue of bank capitalisation.

Misoxenia

I have to say that the use of xenophobia to mean hatred of foreigners annoys me. The word means fear of strangers or foreigners. There is a need for a separate word to describe hatred of foreigners for which I propose misoxenic.

So there. Pendantic moi? Non, bien sur.

Irish Retail Petrol Price Analysis

The purpose of this analysis is an attempt to answer the question regarding how abnormally expensive Irish petrol prices are. This analysis is restricted to 95 Octane unleaded petrol. The attached document contains the detailed results of this analysis. Performing this analysis involves gathering data from multiple sources:

• Price of crude oil – normally priced in USD
• Price of unleaded petrol (called EN 228 in the industry) – normally priced in USD
• USD to EUR exchange rates
• Effective excise and VAT rates
• Average selling price per litre

This information has to be normalised across changes in currency type and dates on which the information is available.

The EN 228 standard is defined by the Committee for European Standardisation – see http://www.cen.eu/. The relevant standard is EN 228:2008 - Automotive fuels - Unleaded petrol - Requirements and test methods and EU Directive 98/70/EC.

Similarly, diesel is defined by standard EN 590 EN 590:2004 Automotive fuels - Diesel - Requirements and test methods and EU Directive 93/38/EEC.

EN228 is priced in USD per tonne. A tonne of petrol is about 1,335 litres. (This can vary because the specific gravity of EN228 can vary from 720-775 Kg/cubic metre. A cubic metre is 1,000 litres so 1 tonne or 1,000 Kg represents from 1,389 to 1,290 litres. I have used a value of 1,335 litres of petrol per tonne.)

Excise duty increase in increments over the analysed interval. The Oct 2008 budget increased duty (before VAT) to €0.5088 per litre. Prior to that it was €0.4427 per litre for about three years. And so on.

The price of petrol consists of the following elements:

1. Buy price of litre of petrol
2. Excise duty
3. National Oil Reserves Agency levy of €0.01 per litre
4. Margin added by from retailer and supplier
5. VAT

according to (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ) x 5. However, the public buy price of petrol is not necessarily the price at which it is bought by retailers. Many retail petrol companies are part of larger entities that have direct access to the raw material and refining resources. But the calculated buy price is still a valid index against which sell prices can be compared. This is the price you and I would buy bulk refined fuel for resale at. Having stated this, the difference between the actual sell price of a litre of petrol at petrol stations and the derived buy price based on the public price of bulk refined petrol should be roughly constant. This is not the case as shown in the following chart (Click on the chart to see a larger version):

The left-hand scale shows the sell price. The right hand scale shows the buy price.

There have been long intervals when falls in the cost price have not been matched by falls in the price charged. Price increases are however passed on quickly. Price reductions are passed on slowly if at all.

So, the answer to the question “Are Irish motorists being ripped off?” is a fairly certain yes. The answer to the question “Are the Government doing anything to question retail petrol prices and ensure savings are passed to motorists?” is a definite no.

20th Century … The Century of …

The 20th century was the century of many greats. The largest population, the largest economic growth, greatest wealth, greatest advances in the sciences and in technology, the development of real medicine, the largest population, the largest number of wars with the greatest losses of life. But in the midst of these firsts and greatests is one that is so overpoweringly depressing and represents such a immensity of unjustified suffering. The 20th century was the century of genocide, mass civilian murder and racial, cultural, national and tribal purgings. The attached list shows just the largest of these events. It is also far from complete.

Starting with what is called the most forgotten mass extinction event of the 20th century – the systematic officially sanctioned casual murder of millions of citizens of the Congo Free State, an event that we should all remember given that it was exposed by our own Roger Casement – the number of mass murder events and the numbers killed increased unremittingly throughout the century.

This lists excludes deaths from events such as famines that were not explicitly man made - so the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s is not listed here – and events such as pandemics and combatants in wars. This list represents the larger events of the murder of civilians purely for their own sake, where even the feeble context of external justification has been removed.

The Turks feature three times: once for the well-known and now much denied Armenian genocide, recalled only because of the probably apocryphal statement by Hitler questioning who remembers the Armenians, to the less known and now long-forgotten Assyrian and Pontic Greek massacres.

Stalin ordered millions to their deaths just to fill quotas with the reasoning that because there must be a certain number of traitors in a given area, that number must be found and killed.

You’d think it would be hard to kill hundreds of thousands of people in circumstances where you are not using military and mechanistic tools and insulated by distance but evidently it is far from difficult. Statements such as “it is inconceivable that …” fall away to irrelevance in the face of the unstoppable sequence of mass slaughter events. The Croatians brutally and physically murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs from 1941 to 1944. The Serbs then revisited this brutality on the Bosnians 50 years later.

It is so hard to tolerate the thought of the accumulated personal pain that these deaths represent.

Critics may decry the world standing idly by as the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres took place. But the world has stood idly by and continues to remain disinterested and uninvolved as these events continue.

The ease with which a society turns from apparent civilisation to gorging on mass murder may seem extraordinary but the reality demonstrates it is so ordinary and routine. The frail restraints of civilisation are so simply snapped and what is then unleashed is appalling. I was going to write unimaginable but again history demonstrates that it can be both imagined and then effected so very easily.

Turnipnomics

Turnipman and Pretty Boy have exceeded all expectations.

The failure of the 2008 emergency budget to address the problem of a bloated, incompetent, inefficient public service is as annoying as it is unsurprising. The Irish public service has been allowed to increase in size and cost, completely out of proportion to increases in the population size and rate of inflation and to the services being provided. This is so grotesquely unfunny. One of the major costs to the economy, a cost that is dead in terms of return or value or productivity, has been left utterly unaddressed.

This is no more than plain cowardice where a collection of petty and small cuts and savings are substituted for one large cut that will really make a difference. No only have the resulting savings not been achieved but the problem of ever increasing and ever more costly public service is left unsolved.

The potential savings available if both the size and the cost of the public service were reduced is very substantial. These are enduring savings that will make a large contribution to the country’s overall long-term economic welfare.

In the years 1990 to 2007, the population increased by 23.77%. Over the same interval, the numbers in employment in the public service increased by 35.03%. The direct salary costs of the public service increased by 217.20% while the Consumer Price Index increased by 66.34% in those years. See this for a more detailed analysis.

If both the numbers of public servants and their costs increased in line with population growth and the Consumer Price Index, the increased cost over the years 1990 to 2007 would have been 105.88%. Note that this does not assume that any efficiencies and economies of loading or scope or scale would have been achieved. Instead the increase was 217.20%, more than twice what would have been expected, without efficiencies being achieved.

What did we all get for this abnormal expansion of the public service? Has the quality of services doubled? For example, has twice as much crime been solved or has crime reduced by 50%?

The cost per so-called public service per head of population increased from €1,612.09 in 1990 to €4,131.57 in 2007. That is an increase of 156.29%, well over twice the rate of inflation.

A family of four people now pays €16,526.28 for the privilege of having a public service. Does that represent anything like value for money? Not a fucking chance. What does your average family get for this huge expenditure? Bear in mind that this is just the salary costs and excludes all the other public service costs. This is just the cost of administration and management. Everything else is extra that you and I also pay for.

In the midst of this offensive joke of increasing public service costs over the last 19 years and especially over the last 11 years, Fianna Fail inserted public service pay benchmarking which has lead to a greater inflation of public service costs. Benchmarking was meant to deliver efficiencies but it has promoted and magnified manifest inefficiencies.

During an interval when productivity of the general population increased, that of the public service decreased while their cost also increased disproportionately. Put simply, there are more public servants doing less and costing much more than ever before.

We truly get the government we deserve. In the absence of a competent opposition, Fianna Fail has relinquished control of the country to public servants who have spinelessly allowed their numbers and costs to balloon without control.

Why We Voted Against the Lisbon Treaty - Episode 212

So when did:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has strongly criticised the Irish Government's unilateral action in providing a blanket State guarantee to Irish-owned bank.

At an emergency summit of the big four EU states in Paris at
the weekend, Dr Merkel said she was "not amused" by the scheme and called on the European Central Bank and the European Commission to engage in an early dialogue with the Government on it.

"We need a consolidated and coherent approach and we also have to see that the way we are proceeding naturally does not impact negatively on other member states," she said at the end of a summit held to propose ways to shore up confidence in the banking industry.

Germany on Sunday guaranteed all private bank accounts
and negotiated a 50 billion euros ($69 billion) bailout deal for Hypo Real Estate AG as Europe's second largest economy sought to ward off financial crisis.

become:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has announced a bailout plan for Hypo Real Estate.

The Finance Ministry and private banks reached a deal late Sunday to infuse an additional line of credit worth up to 15 billion euros ($21 billion) into the embattled real estate giant, expanding on an earlier 35 billion euro ($48 billion) bailout plan that would have found the government and private banks splitting the bill.

The earlier deal fell apart Saturday when Hypo announced that a consortium of unnamed financial institutions had backed out. That prompted banking executives and lawmakers to convene in the capital for feverish talks toward the new deal they unveiled late Sunday.

The new package includes the original 35 billion euros
($48.4 billion) plan with the government paying up to 27 billion euros ($37 billion) of that sum and banks funding the remainder as a line of credit.

The Tyranny of the Proper Noun

When I was growing up in Ireland during the times of the low-level civil war in Northern Ireland, I remember the ambivalence that I always felt when the announcement of the death of a person was made on the radio on television. If the person was described as a Catholic there was always the sense that the person was totally innocent and a random victim of Protestant terror. Similarly when the person was a Protestant, there was a sense that this individual was less than innocent and culpable to some degree in his death. It occurred to me that the presence of the proper noun in the description of the victim brought the prejudice of the listener to the fore. The death of a person on my side, however spurious an association, was a greater tragedy than the death of someone on the other side.

The public announcement of the death of a person is modified by the inclusion of the proper noun. This modifies the event in the mind of the observer. Their natural, however slight, handenness means their interpretation of the event moves to that direction.

Try removing the proper noun and describing the events in terms of the uncoloured facts when you next read or hear about a death in such circumstances.

Remove the proper nouns from a sentence such as “A 17-year-old Palestinian youth was shot dead by Israeli troops in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank today.” so it becomes “A 17-year-old youth was shot dead by troops in a refugee camp today.” How does this change your perception of the event?

Dinna ninna ninna ninna ninna nah Turnipman Turnipmaaaaan

It is hard to take the man seriously when he has a turnip for a head. Enough said.

Sisters of Smuggerhood

Today’s word describes the state of being a smug mother who can variously drive an enormous SUV or cycles with their child in some form a plastic seat at the back. The former drive slowly, badly and stop anywhere using their hazard lights that magically makes their car no longer an obstacle. The latter breaks lights and makes illegal turns with the child precariously vulnerable. I can cycle my bike the wrong way into oncoming traffic with my low carbon smugprint baby behind me because I have given birth. GIVEN BIRTH. Do you understand?

In each case the cloak of reproduction and the shield of procreation renders them impervious to any criticism. I have reproduced. The future of the entire race is in the back of my car/dangling from the back of my bicycle. I have a right to do this. My womb has flowered. Seed has burst forth.

Fuck you, you smug fuckers. When octopuses reproduce they do so once and their young devour them. Your brats should feed of your saggy corpse.

The Demise of the Gee

What ever happened to gee? It, in all it forms, used to be the primary alpha insult – gee, What a geebag, I have an awful taste of gee in my mouth, geehair, and so on,.

Now it’s all cunt this and cunt that: You cunting cunt, Fucking cunt. Gee is part of our culture and our heritage. It is part of what made us what we are. It separated us from the rest of the world. This was a secret word known only to us paddies, our own national shibboleth as Irish as red lemonade, Tayto crisps, a packet of Major. It is a little bit of Ireland that is being lost forever in a thin undifferentiated gruel of abusive and insulting language. Ah gee.

John Gormley is a Smug Know-it-All Fuck

The smug know-it-all git has published a report of flood risk – see http://www.environ.ie/en/DevelopmentandHousing/PlanningDevelopment/NationalSpatialStrategy/News/MainBody,18440,en.htm.

Buried within this is the following:

2.39 With regard to the increasingly frequent trend of paving over entire residential garden areas to provide off street car parking or hard landscaping under the exempted development provisions of the planning acts, the Department intends to review the Exempted Development Regulations to ensure that only those complying with sustainable d rainage principles will be exempted thus limiting the run-off which would otherwise contribute to overwhelming the drainage systems.

In the interim, in considering planning applications for new or extensions to residential development, which include significant hard surfacing, planning authorities should attach conditions to any grants of planning permissions which minimises and limits the extent of hard surfacing and paving as well as requiring the use of sustainable drainage techniques, including in particular permeable paving or surfaces such as gravel or slate chippings.

So the Greens are now proposing that planning permission is needed for paving a driveway. Have they performed an impact assessment on this and quantified the impact of this activity on flooding? Have they my fucking rectum. The controlling nanny-state Greens know what is best for all of us, even though we do not realise it. They simply cannot stand land apparently going to waste and be used for parking cars, which are also anathema to their worldview. Of course, this will also mean more public servants to process all these unnecessary planning applications, further adding to the cost.

Planning permission attracts a small direct cost in terms of fees to the appropriate local authority of around €50. However, applications have to be submitted with architect’s drawings and permission has to be advertised. So the total cost will be €700 or more.

So, what is the scope of the driveway paving problem. Some calculations and assumptions:

Number of Acres in Ireland 17,541,888
Number of Dwellings in Ireland 1,462,296
Assumed Proportion of Dwellings That Are Houses 80%
Assumed Proportion of Houses that Have Driveways 80%
Assumed Number of Dwellings With Driveways 935,869
Assumed Average Driveway Size (Square Yards) 150
Average Number of Driveways Per Acre 32
Assumed Number of Driveways Paved 25%
Total Acres of Paved Driveway 7,311
Proportion of Total Area of Ireland in Paved Driveways 0.04%

I am sure that some of these assumptions are incorrect. But at least it is an attempt to quantify the problem with something close to a methodical approach.

So all this is all over 0.04 % of the total area of Ireland. Never mind the remaining 99.96%. Let’s all focus our attention on this miniscule area. This all relates to the Green's dogmatic view of the world that is not restricted by the need to be realistic and practical.

Have Fianna Fail objected to this? No – that would require that the do something.

Have Fine Gael? Now – that would require they act as an opposition which is something they have never done in the past and will not be doing any time soon.

The Wearing of Islamic Veils in Irish Schools

The towelheads are looking for the right to have school children wear veils and other face and body coverings. They use a variety of specious arguments: we tolerate nuns wearing veils so why not muslim school girls, not allowing the wearing of veils is religious intolerance against Islam, and so on.

They constantly look for offence where no exists. They are a vocal and bigoted minority. They constantly look for societies to adapt themselves to their beliefs, except for Islamic countries where the reverse is applied.

This is all nonsense. It is immaterial drivel advanced as logic and reason. Putting in place a toleration or an acceptance of school girls wearing veils creates the likelihood of compulsion by the children’s parents and community. School girls who do not want to wear veils no longer have the excuse that veils are not allowed. Choice and option is eliminated. An atmosphere of intolerance is nurtured and encouraged.

Catholic nuns may or may not wear veils. They do so voluntarily as adults as a form of uniform to denote their religious office. Catholic priests wear a distinguishing uniform. So also do Islamic imams. The comparison of the voluntary wearing of veils by adults to indicate a role and a decision to allow intolerant parents force some of their children to cover themselves on the spurious justification of modesty is irrelevant. It is the reddest of red herrings.
Allowing the wearing of veils enables demands for more restrictive forms of covering. It will be the start of a process that must be and needs to be stopped.

Apparently within Islam, modesty applies exclusively to women. Men have no obligation to impose self-control. The female is obliged to cover in order not to tempt the male. Responsibility is removed from the male and imposed on the female. The burden of restraint is reversed. The logic of this is that some form of female covering may leave some residual male temptation and so the covering must be increased and further increased. This reasoning will allow the wearing of the veil to be used a basis for a semi-legitimatised request for additional, female only, covering.

Allowing exceptions based on religious beliefs needs to be considered carefully. It creates exceptions that would not be tolerated in other circumstances. Religious beliefs are promoted to a unbending and immovable absolute to which existing laws and normal modes of behaviour must adapt.

So, for example, Sikhs do not have to wear motorcycle helmets because of their requirement to wear a turban or more correctly not to cut their hair and to tie it daily. But there is no reason why they should not wear oversize helmets. In theory Sikhs also have to wear a kirpan – a short sword. However, you can bet that this alleged religious requirement has been rapidly dropped by Sikhs who travel by plane after the events of 11 September 2001.

The advocacy of the alleged rights of one group in contradiction of the rights of the larger incumbent group also represents in some a form of cultural displacement: where actions that would not be tolerated from one’s core community is all to easily tolerated from an external one. This hypocritical cultural displacement is all too common among those on the left.

However, expecting thought leadership from Irish politicans is a futile exercise. Being long-time experts at issue dodging, they simply say it is a matter for individual schools.

Lessons Learned by The Bad Buys

There are three lessons that the bad guys learn. They adsorb these lessons from birth, need no education in the application and acquire and practice them intuitively. There is an old lesson, old as any form of human grouping, a not so old lesson, derived from social changes, and a new lesson, a sign of recent times.

The old lesson is that it is impossibly simple for a small group of people to dominate, subjugate, enslave a much larger group. This has been the effective default form of human governance since the start of human collectives. There is a phrase used by the justifiers of the authoritarian and the totalitarian. It does along the following lines; “It is inconceivable that such a large population could be dominated by …”. The phrase is used to explain, for example, why Communist or Fascist dictatorships and their armies could not commit mass murder on their subjugated populace. But is it all too conceivable. Because it has happened countless times.

The second lesson is not so old. It is from times when the larger subjugated population started looking for rights based on historical and social trends and developments. The lesson is that you should never give into the requests for greater freedom, representation, leniency and other demands. That is a one-way and accelerating downwards path towards loss of domination. If you want to succeed as a bad guy, never give in. Give an inch and the people will demand miles of concessions and freedoms.

The third lesson is the newest of all. It is a lesson learned from observation and from inherent cunning. It is that, as a dictatorship is the modern age, the countries ranged against you are arranged along a spectrum, from profound hostility to considerably less certain opposition. As a coalition, your opponents are internally riven. Right-wing opponents are less implacable in their opposition to right-wing dictators. Similarly the left finds excuses for the left. This is further accentuated by internal divisions among your opposition. As a bad guy, you know intuitively how to exploit these differences to ensure there is no consensus for action against you. A fragmented opposition is less likely to be able to take effective, concerted action. Slice and dice, divide and conquer or, at least, divide and paralyse.

The current bad guys of the world – Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, China, Sudan and so on – know and apply these lessons to achieve continued existence. It is easy to dominate and continue to dominate your population. Never concede. Divide and conquer your opponents.

The Great Bertrando

One of the defining characteristics of Fine Gael in general and Enda Kenny in particular is their and his abject failure to land any real blow on Fianna Fail. This is compounded by their inability to follow-up issues, ask hard follow-on questions and generally demonstrate a lack of tenacity.

Bertie Ahern ran rings around Fine Gael for years. They failed to understand how to attack him. He had to be reduced to ridicule. They needed to create a caricature character that people would associate with him every time they saw or heard him.

So, I give you The Great Bertrando - I Came, I Saw, I Squandered.

The world's worst magician. He can take billions in tax supluses and spend them on achieving nothing. With sleight of hand and verbal wizardry, he can baffle tall people around his financial affairs, loans, dig-outs, bank accounts, bank drafts, foreign currencies, houses and party donations.

It Comes Around So Quickly - Celebrate Bisexuality Day

According to Wikipedia, today is Celebrate Bisexuality Day. Again, according to Wikipedia, “First observed in 1999, Celebrate Bisexuality Day is the brainchild of three United States bisexual rights activists — Wendy Curry of Maine, Michael Page of Florida, and Gigi Raven Wilbur of Texas.”

Once more, according to Wikipedia, “Curry previously from Maine, now resides in New Hampshire with her husband. She is employed as a software engineer.”

So, given that she is married, is she a dormant or retired or latent bisexual?
It appears that people use the word bisexual as the ultimate get out of jail card for having extra-partner relationships and they expect this to be accepted without question. A lesbian would be expected to stay committed to her partner if she said she was in a stable relationship. Similarly, the same would expected of be a gay man. But being a bisexual apparently results in an overwhelming, inexorable, relentless and perfectly excusable compulsion to have sex outside a relationship. Sorry dear I would love to stop having sex but I am bisexual. I really would only I could not be arsed. End of story, seven No Trumps, Grand Slam, Game Over, Gin, You Lose. No appeal. Unless you like it and are let watch. So that’s what YouTube was invented for. www.biwatchingtube.com, www.sharemybi.com, www.ratemybi.com – those domain names have got to be available.

Any link between this and the BBC story “Designer vagina trend 'worrying'” - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7629897.stm? Anyone fancy setting up http://www.ratemydesignavagina.com/ ?

Heteropaternal Superfecundity

A little known phrase and condition but one which is of relevance in all the Madelaine McCann disappearance mess whose first anniversary has now passed.

First a story. Some twenty years ago, a young woman from Kerry is south west Ireland was having a tawdry and incomprehensible affair with a weasel of a married man. She became pregnant. She hid the pregnancy by wearing loose fitting clothes. She lived at home with her mother, brothers and aunt who was an ex-nurse. The young woman gave birth to a child at home one evening. The child may or may not have been still born but was dead shortly after the birth. The aunt intervened and took control. The body of the child was buried close by the house.

At the same time, the body of a second newly born child was washed up on a beach about 20 miles away. A murder investigation was initiated.

The Irish police dispatched what was known as the Murder Squad from Dublin to investigate. The boys arrived, complete with attitudes, arrogance and expense claim forms, to show the local yokels just how these matters should be done.

They quickly discovered about the young woman and her pregnancy but no child. They interviewed the young woman and her family. With physical persuasion, all those interviewed signed identical confessions acknowledging their various parts in the disposal of the baby whose body had been washed up. Job sorted. Expense claim forms completed. Backs clapped. Hands shook. Shoulders enclosed with big hands. Big feed of drink all round and back to Dublin, neenaws crowing in congratulatory screeches.

Then matters unravelled. The confessions were withdrawn. The original child’s body was discovered. So now there are two babies. No problem says the Murder Squad – the young woman had twins and killed them both. The family witnessed one birth. The young woman on her own dealt with the other. However, the blood type of the original baby (these were days before DNA testing) was different from the baby whose body was washed-up on the beach. So the two babies could not have the same father. Hah said the Murder Squad. Heteropaternal Superfecundity. Twins with different fathers. The young woman had unprotected sex with two different men in very close succession and each fathered a child. No problem. The original confessions stand. Never mind that the only barely proven case of Heteropaternal Superfecundity occurred in the early nineteenth century. Never mind its deep physiological improbability in humans. It is common in, for example, cats but that is a specific evolutionary feature.

Controversy ensued. A legal tribunal (known as the Kerry Babies Tribunal) of inquiry was established to determine the facts. The Murder Squad boys stuck to their story. The family confessions – all the same, all containing the same errors – were voluntarily given and were valid. No violence was used. Heteropaternal Superfecundity. They did nothing wrong. The family were guilty.

This absurdity was rejected.

The lesson here is that the police had a conclusion and rammed every square, triangular, hexagonal and other shaped piece of evidence into the round hole of their prejudice, their stupidity, their arrogance and their absolutely certainty of their moral rightness contradicted by every fact.

And so with the Madelaine McCann disappearance investigation. I can credibly imagine that the Portuguese police have all the investigative skills and open attitude of the Irish police of the 1980s.

They had decided the McCanns are guilty of murder and are similarly rammed every inconveniently square shaped piece of evidence into the round hole of their incompetence and arrogance.

Now I am not defending the McCanns in any way. In other jurisdictions, they would have been charged with crimes such as reckless child abandonment. The certainty with which they left their three children alone in an apartment really does credibly suggest they administered some form of sedative so they could be sure there were no accidents while they were away. They are patently culpable in some form. They are not innocent parties in this affair. That role is reserved exclusively for the now long-dead Madelaine McCann.

But the Portuguese police had made up their minds and are thereafter attempted to retrofit every new item of evidence into this. Alleged DNA evidence in a car rented nearly four weeks after the child’s disappearance means the McCanns disposed of the body. Never mind the chain of events that would have had to happen to enable this – child’s body stored without being discovered for over three weeks, no significant decomposition that would have identified it or made its transportation difficult, body retrieved in the full glare of publicity, body moved and disposed of, no one following the parents, and so on. The general principle is that an aberration without a justifying continuum and context is just that: an aberration that is irrelevant when judged against the bigger picture.

So the police change their story in response to factual changes but with the same conclusion. The McCanns killed their child, accidentally or otherwise, and immediately disposed of the body. The McCanns allowed someone else to dispose of the body. The McCanns allowed their child to be kidnapped.

The real truth is probably some sequence of events along the lines of: the child was being observed by someone working in or living close to and with access to the resort and was abducted easily because it was deeply asleep. The child is now dead, the body dumped sea or buried in a desolate grave or an Algarve building site, long-devoured so it will never be discovered.

So Heteropaternal Superfecundity: a synonym for an absurd fixated idea pursued blindly to the exclusion of all rational alternatives, irrespective of how much new evidence arises.

Mugabe’s (Current) Last Great Crime

Which? There are so many. Genocide in Matebeleland. Murder of opponents. Rigging of elections. Vast corruption. Destruction of an economy. Enslavement and impoverishment of a population. Depopulation and forced migration. Theft of land to enrich his clique. Allowing millions of Zimbabweans to contract and then die from diseases.

There will be crimes to come such as his almost inevitable breaking the recent agreement with the MDC.

And yet among all these crimes, there is one small action that ranks as profoundly criminal. Mugabe has given sanctuary to Mengistu. Mengistu of Ethiopia. The perpetrator of the Red Terror in the late 1970s, genocide throughout his regime, forced resettlement and associated vast numbers of deaths within Ethiopia and failure to address the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s. The end result of these actions was the genocide of millions of civilians.

Mengistu is hidden away in Zimbabwe. He certainly does not have to face the ordeal that is day-to day living of the Zimbabwean people. His is insulated from any concerns about inflation and shortages. He was sentenced for the crime of genocide and Mugabe refuses to extradite him. As well as demonstrating contempt for the people of Zimbabwe, he shows the same disdain for those of other countries such as Ethiopia.

In a land reduced to utter indigence by profound criminality, it is just one small example but so indicative of Mugabe’s conceited contempt for his people and for other Africans.

Self Regulation is No Regulation

Self regulation is all too topical these days. There is a phrase used by those who favour self regulation. It goes along the lines of “It is inconceivable that X would do Y because of Z”. Firstly, always beware of any statement that begins with “It is inconceivable”. Generally that which is stated so confidently to be inconceivable is exactly the opposite. “It is inconceivable” is an excuse for the denial of logic and reason.

So, in the above, X is the group looking to justify self-regulation.Y goes something like “to perform an action that leads to short-term gains but leads to the potential for long-term large loss”. Z takes the form “because to do so would be so obviously against their self-interest as to be absurd”.

And yet the examples of the failure of self-regulation are pervasive.

It is inconceivable that American banks would profligately lend vast amounts of money in the form of property mortgages o people who cannot make repayments in order to generate short-term profits and bonuses because in the long-term this would lead to the virtual collapse of the banking industry. Piiiing. Wrong. It happened.

It is inconceivable that the British government would reduce regulations that would ultimately allow matter from diseased animals to be incorporated into feed for herbivorous cattle that would lead to be spread of brain diseases in order to reduce regulatory overhead because to do so would lead to collapse of the British meat industry. Never happen.

It is inconceivable that the life assurance industry would mis-sell pension products in order to generate short-term profit and bonus gains because it would lead to vast claims for compensation in the future. Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is inconceivable that fishermen would overfish in order to make short-term money at the expense of long-term collapse of fish stocks. An so the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery.

And so on. The examples are legion.
Self regulation is no regulation. People, individually and collectively, ineffably pursue short-term gain and are incapable of taking into account any long-term implications of their actions. Short-term gain is better than long-term prudence. Those who pursue and justify self-regulation do so because they realise it means no regulation. Entities that are allowed to regulate themselves will not. The conflict between pursuit of their role as advocate of self-interest and self-regulation is fundamental and cannot be resolved. Self-regulation is not existent. It is flimsy onion-skin covering concealing gross self-interest.

Irish Civil Service Pay Analysis - Depressing Reading

You cannot beat engaging with detail. The attached analysis of the pay of Irish civil servants snappily entitled “Analysis of Irish Civil Service General Grade Increases from 2004 to 2008 Including Annual Increments and Pay Agreement Increases - For Civil Servants Who Pay Lower Rate of PRSI and No Pension Contribution” shows the effective pay increases obtained by civil servants. The dirty secret of civil service pay structures is annual increments. Even in the event of pay pauses, most civil servants (except those who have languished at the same grade for a considerable period of time) receive an annual pay increase called an increment. They also get pay increases on top of this.

The analysis applies to the rates of pay for civil servants who pay a low rate of PRSI and no pension contribution unlike the rest of the real world.

Some grades have long pay scales, that is, civil servants at those grades receive annual increments for up to 17 years before reaching a maximum. Others have shorter pay scales.

So, in the case of the Secretary General grade, this experienced a total increase over the four years from 2004 to 2008 of 37% which equates to an average annual increase of 8.16%. Note that this annual increase value is cumulative. So year 1 = 100%, year 1 = 100% x (1+ 8.16%), year 2 = 100% x (1+ 8.16%) x (1+ 8.16%), year 3 = 100% x (1+ 8.16%) x (1+ 8.16%) x (1+ 8.16%) and so on. This is known as CAGR (Cumulative Annual Growth Rate).

In the case of a person who was appointed to the Assistant Secretary grade in 2004, he or she got a 57% over the four years or 12.01% very year. Because this grade only has four pay scales in the grade, the increase lessens for those appointed to the grade before 2004. The worst case is a person who was Assistant Secretary for 10 or more years in 2004 and remained at this grade for another four years. This person got a 37% over four years or 8.28% every year. Not bad for someone who was not worthy of promotion in 14 years. And probably gets a free car space. And 35 days holidays a year. And only pays a very minor PRSI and no pension contribution but gets would get a pension of €75,000 a year (at current rates but that is linked to the pay scale of the grade and so increases every year) and a lump sum of €225,000 on retirement.

An so on for all other grades. The maximum increase experienced by a grade over this interval is an immensely unjustifiable 72% or 14.47% every year for four years.

Does this represent value for money? Does it my arse. This is significantly more than the rate of inflation in the same interval.

These people have been allowed to award themselves substantial increases that are in no way linked to improvements in performance and productivity or the service they are supposed to provide.

So, unless you a complete muppet that cannot get a promotion, the average effective annual pay increase achieved by civil servants is of the order of 10%. Even for those that are muppets the annual effective increases is of the order of 8%. An eminent group called the Civil Service Performance Verification Group has determined these increases are deserved.

The objective of benchmarking is to find examples of equivalent roles (responsibility, package, security) and to award comparable salaries. Did employees of other industries receive a consistent 10% annual increase over the last four years while working in roles where they received longer holidays, pay very low PRSI, no pension, work an average of 6.95 hours per day (139 hours per 4 weeks), are unsackable and totally immune to any economic problems? Did they like fuck.

Apparently all these advantages have no value according to those who invented the Irish version of benchmarking while their real value represents at least an extra 40% on top of the base salary.

This is simply a great big fucking joke. And the joke is on the rest of us who have to pay for a bloated, inefficient, overpaid, unproductive, whinging civil service. Fianna Fail have been in power and tolerated these increases being awarded without subjecting them to any scrutiny, analysis or objective investigation.

This is what I mean engaging with detail.

The civil service in Ireland needs to be called to account for this consistent rate of excessive increase for no return. Fianna Fail need to thrown out for this, among the many, many other failures. Unfortunately the incompetence of Fianna Fail is exceeded by the complete uselessness of Fine Gael and Labour who cannot ask a hard question and pursue it until it is answered.