Hollande’s €10,000 per month hair

July 13, 2016

A Socialist President of France has saddled the taxpayer with the cost of a hairdresser for €10,000 per month.

And Francois Hollande’s already sparse hair is not particularly photogenic.

Hollande's €10,000 per month hair

The Guardian: 

Wispy, thinning and suspiciously free of grey, François Hollande’s boring hairstyle has never been held to much scrutiny, unlike his wonky ties, which have their own website.

But now the balding pate of the French president is at the centre of an embarrassing scandal dubbed coiffeurgate after the weekly paper Le Canard Enchaîné revealed that his personal hairdresser is on contract for almost €10,000 a month, paid from the public purse.

The publication of the contract with the hairdresser, named as Olivier B, has sparked a row over extravagant spending by a Socialist president who once liked to see himself as “Mr Normal”. … 

The Canard Enchaîné reported that in addition to his salary, Hollande’s hairdresser was entitled to a housing allowance and other family benefits. He never had a stand-in to replace him and demands on him were so tough that he had “missed the births of his children”.

The hairdresser – employed since Hollande took office and accompanying him on most of his foreign trips – is contracted to “maintain absolute secrecy about his work and any information he may have gathered both during and after his contract”.

It is the prerogative of all good socialist leaders – “DO as I say – not as I do”

 

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Revelations of crony corruption at the Swedish National Audit Office

July 13, 2016

riksrevisionen

The Swedish National Audit Office is part of the central control power of the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament). It ensures that the Riksdag receives a coordinated and independent audit of the state finances. This assignment is unique as the Swedish NAO is the only body that can audit the entire state finances.

It is supposed to audit the entire chain of executive power. It is intended to be an independent organization under the Riksdag and independent of those audited. Both performance- and financial audits are within its ambit. But Dagens Nyheter has been carrying out an investigation and in recent days has been revealing that the Office is far from independent. Both in staffing and in its operations it seems to be riddled with “cronyism” and “crony corruption”. An Agency intended to be a check against corruption (among other things) has been found to be corrupt itself. One Auditor General (Susanne Ackum) has resigned. The Swedish branch of Transparency International has called for all the 3 Auditor Generals to resign and for integrity to be reestablished:

Transparency International Sweden reacts strongly to the investigation of the National Audit Office carried by Dagens Nyheter. 

It shows that the Auditors have acted with a lack of integrity and judgment.

The National Audit Office is to contribute to the proper use of the state’s resources and that state administration is handled efficiently. The three Auditors General have a strong mandate for the independent review and the authority is to be a cornerstone in the fight against corruption in Sweden.

When the National Audit management do not follow the basic principles of good governance, ie integrity, impartiality and objectivity, and do not even comply with the international code of ethics, confidence is destroyed not only for individuals but also for the important work the Agency conducts. Transparency International Sweden believes in this context that all Auditor Generals should offer to resign.

Transparency International Sweden welcomes the announced meeting  called by the Constitutional Committee with the Auditors. The Committee should also consider their role in the recruitment process for this important office.

Given the National Audit Office’s  central role as part of parliamentary control, Transparency International Sweden believes that it is important that the Constitution Committee immediately and forcefully act to restore the Authority’s integrity.

Dagens Nyheter: Revelations about the National Audit Office

  1. Auditor General Ulf Bengtsson has interfered in an audit review of a decision which he himself was involved in.
  2. He gave his explicit support to a County governor audited by the National Audit Office.
  3. One of the National Audit Office’s senior managers had a private  SMS contact with the audited governor and promised to help her.
  4. The head of the Agency Supervisory Board warned the National Audit Office that DN was conducting an investigation. (DN had contacted him to get expert help in assessing unpublished data).
  5. The Auditors may have violated their own ethics rules. The internal guidelines say that employees may not take a position in a pending case.
  6. Auditor General Susanne Ackum has promised jobs to people before they are announced. E-mails reveal how she has given away jobs before a proper recruitment process has even started.
  7. Those recruited by Ackum receive on average 6,500 kronor per month more than their colleagues in similar positions. Her closest colleague gets 114,000 kronor/month.
  8. Those recruited by Susanne Ackum will lead audit examinations of policies that they themselves have helped to implement while at the Cabinet Office.
  9. Susanne Ackum has allowed people outside the National Audit Office, including the Cabinet Office, to take part in and influence the ongoing audits.
  10. At least one review has been shut down after Susanne Ackum discussed it with an official at the Cabinet Office.
  11. Even Susanne Ackum’s live-in partner has been allowed to read internal working documents and comment on documents not yet published.
  12. The National Audit Office’s chief economist is a well established political debater who has previously taken positions on matters related to taxes and the tax system. Now he is to lead the National Audit’s impartial review of the tax system.
  13. The Auditors have dropped an unusually high number of audits. They have canceled audit missions which had already consumed 19,000 man hours, at a cost of nearly ten million.

I am not all that surprised and just a little shocked that the Agency which is supposed to be a check on corruption is rife with cronyism. But it should be remembered that the entire Swedish party political system is built on “cronyism”. Party membership is tiny compared to the number of voters for each party. Yet it is this tiny membership which controls all public (tax-payer funded) positions. It is friends, and friends of friends, which governs. Not that that is any different to any “party democracy” in Europe. It only demonstrates once again that “party democracies” are quite different  – and often in conflict with –  “people democracies”.

 

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Not quite sunset over the Baltic

July 12, 2016

At this time of year, at this latitude, “sunset” is a rather diffuse business. Sometime after 10 pm the sun dips below the horizon a little east of North and then appears again around 3 am a little south of East.

These were taken on the Baltic (latitude c. 59.7ºN), while just leaving the Stockholm archipelago, looking roughly North-North-West at about 9pm.

baltic sunset 2

baltic sunset 1

Summer’s not over, but the days are getting shorter again.

 

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Black lives don’t matter – to other blacks

July 10, 2016

I dislike the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. It is fundamentally racist in that it implies that all other lives don’t matter. If it had been “Even Black Lives Matter” or “Black Lives Do Matter”, I would find the slogan more accurate and far more powerful. As it stands “Black Lives Matter” is a lie among blacks.

After the dreadful events of last week in the US one wonders what Obama has done for race relations in the last 8 years? Not much according to Politico (which is unashamedly pro-Obama):

Did Obama fail Black America?

….. Take criminal justice. Nothing in the day-to-day lives of black Americans is more menacing than their vulnerability to criminality on the one hand and mistreatment by police on the other. Yet on neither front has Obama focused the attention of the nation. … 

The president remains quiet. That has been a recurring pattern when it comes to African-American concerns. He might work on black issues behind the scenes. But he won’t be caught promoting them out front, not even now, when he is free of the burden of seeking reelection.

But returning to the slogan, what is abundantly clear is that black lives matter least to other blacks. This is from Professor Heather Mac Donald’s speech delivered on April 27, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center:

Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population. Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of whites alone. The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. The nation’s police killed 987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force. The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent of police victims would be black. Officer use of force will occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods. In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, for example, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, 45 percent of all assault defendants—but only 15 percent of the population. Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths—but don’t expect to hear that from the media or from the political enablers of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The “black lives matter” slogan might have some greater validity and be more convincing if  blacks did not kill each other so easily and in such great numbers. For blacks more than others – the statistics say –  lives don’t matter.

 

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The incontrovertible truth is that Iraq would have been a better place without Blair

July 6, 2016

There will be reams written about Chilcot but my view of Tony Blair does not change very much. If anything, I am more than ever convinced of Blair’s poodle-like fawning in Bush’s presence and his glorified image of himself.

“Flawed intelligence” and “actions in good faith” are Tony Blair’s defence. Certainly Blair’s character was (and still is) seriously flawed. That he has native cunning and intelligence is apparent but it is seriously skewed. Greed and self-glorification would seem to be his primary goals. “Good faith” is defined as being based on “sincere beliefs or motives without any malice or the desire to defraud others” and that certainly does not apply. He had malice aplenty and he wanted to impress Bush. His own country and his own soldiers and all of Iraq’s population were just collateral damage along the way to satisfying his enormous ego.

Would Iraq have been better off today with Saddam still around? That is impossible to answer. In fact, that is the wrong question. But it is incontrovertible that Iraq would have been better off without Tony Blair or George Bush.

Just as the real question today is whether the Ukraine or the Middle East would not have been better off without the sanctimonious interference of the EU, Obama and Kerry?

 

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Australia has the slowest election results in the world

July 6, 2016

Now 5 days after the Australian election the only clarity is that Labour will not be able to form a government and the Liberal coalition (with some independent support) may be able to just cobble together a majority.

It isn’t that electrons move slower in the Southern Hemisphere.  The Australian Electoral Commission just does not use electrons. It isn’t that Australians are sluggish in winter. It isn’t that they still use pigeon post in the bush (for pigeons are a lot faster than the AEC). Or that they still use dak runners. It isn’t that with the compulsory voting used in Australia, that the AEC first identifies all the “criminals” who haven’t voted before beginning the count. It isn’t – as vicious rumour would have it – that the unions insist that all vote counters must be permitted a tea-break for every 100 votes counted. It isn’t that every count has to be done in triplicate. It isn’t that the Australian Parliament does not have a Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, but that is a body driven entirely by its fears and is not particularly courageous.

Or that the AEC is  grossly understaffed and has only 3 vote counters who are qualified.

Temporary Australian Electoral Commission workers

But whatever it is, results from a general election in Australia are the slowest in the world. All the seats in Parliament may not be settled for another 2 weeks. The Senate results may not be known till August. The Philippines, Bangladesh, India and even Rwanda are faster.

ABC News: “The fact the country has ground to a halt, as a result of a labour-intensive process that consumes nearly 75,000 people, to arrive at a result that could potentially be delivered in minutes electronically is intensely frustrating,” Dr David Glance, head of University of Western Australia Centre for Software Practice (UWACSP), said.

It is not that there are no suggestions as to how the medieval system used by the AEC could be improved (it is difficult to imagine any action which could make it worse). There are many countries which still use paper ballots but they all include some form of electronic enhancement of the counting process.

Veri.vote:

Distrust of full electronic voting has seen the nation persist with pencil-and-paper methods primary schools and community halls, though the issue has been considered after every federal election since 2001. In the 2000 US presidential election, punched card machines failed spectacularly after 170,000 votes were rejected as unreadable in parts of Florida. The voting debacle in that state was considered pivotal to the ­victory of George Bush over Democrat candidate Al Gore.

The veri.vote team say electoral commissions around Australia might now look more favourably on their technology, given the ­agonising delay of several days — or weeks in the case of the Senate — before winners are known.

Rumours are also emerging the Australian Electoral Commission faces irregularities on top of counting a remaining 3 million votes, including 1.5 million postal votes.

Veri.vote co-founder Cam ­Sinclair says such problems raise memories of the catastrophic WA Senate election, which was re-run in 2014 after 1370 ballot papers went missing. He says he was a scrutineer watching as 200 volunteers spent three weeks counting a second round of votes, in an antiquated system dating to the late 1800s.

“It’s such a cumbersome process of manual counting and handling large bits of paper,” he says. “That experience solidified my belief that there’s a better way.”

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters held 20 hearings and reviewed more than 200 submissions before deciding ­Australia should stick to its largely paper-based system.

“Millions of Australians are now holding their breath to hear their nation’s fate, but the results literally move at the speed of paper,” says Mr Newnham. “With our system, you could get a result and a sausage sizzle on the same day.”

 

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Hillary Clinton being “extremely careless” passes the test for criminal “gross negligence”

July 6, 2016

This is the Director of the FBI about a Secretary of State

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

By any standard of exercise of professional competence this is tantamount to a description of gross negligence.

The Legal Dictionary: Gross negligence is a conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care, which is likely to cause foreseeable grave injury or harm to persons, property, or both. It is conduct that is extreme when compared with ordinary Negligence, which is a mere failure to exercise reasonable care. Ordinary negligence and gross negligence differ in degree of inattention, while both differ from willful and wanton conduct, which is conduct that is reasonably considered to cause injury. 

Clinton Free Pass

That Hillary Clinton gets away with gross negligence can only confirm for those of the anti-establishment persuasion that the system is rigged and plays right into Donald Trump’s narrative. In this case receiving no formal censure can actually be worse for Hillary Clinton than being formally charged with some relatively trivial misdemeanour.

As always with a case amounting to gross negligence – in any field – it is a matter of incompetence.

Andrew Mccarthy writes in the National Review:

There is no way of getting around this:

According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

There are two take-aways here:

  1. Hillary Clinton has been given a “free pass” by the establishment for a clear case of a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18), and
  2. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton displayed incompetence.

 

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Wimbledon trivia – but elegant

July 4, 2016

Mathematics trivia – but I do like the elegant solution.

At Wimbledon the men’s and women’s tournaments each start with 128 players. The question somebody asked yesterday was how many matches would be played in each tournament. Of course the winner would play 7 matches in 7 rounds (27 = 128).

The long-winded solution to the total number of matches = 64+32+16+8+4+2+1 = 127

But the elegant solution is, of course, that with 128 players and one winner there are only 127 losers and therefore 127 matches are necessary and sufficient for them to lose.

Clearly with 2n participants there must be  2n-1 matches.

And more generally, formulated as a matter of logic,

“In any knockout tournament, the number of matches is one per loser and therefore one less than the number of contestants”

 

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Bangladeshi militants are trying to “prove” themselves to ISIS

July 4, 2016

Sunni Muslim fanatics from Bangladesh come very low within the racial hierarchy that is inherent within ISIS. They are considered inferior fighters and in Iraq and Syria they are never given any command responsibilities. “They are usually housed in groups in small barracks and are paid less than the Arab fighters and are provided inferior equipment”  but they provide convenient “cannon fodder” (suicide missions), The racial hierarchy within ISIS (all Sunni) seems to be:

  1. Arabs from the “home countries” (S. Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Gulf states)
  2. North African “Maghrebian” Arabs ( Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt)
  3. “Light skinned” Muslims from central Asia (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan….)
  4. South Asian Muslims (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia..)
  5. African (dark-skinned) Muslims (Somalia, Nigeria …)

The Bangladesh government insists that the spate of Islamic atrocities and the hacking to death of foreigners, intellectuals, hindus, christians and secularists are not being “directed” by ISIS. Some think this is denial on the part of the government, but I think the government is probably correct. ISIS may be vaguely aware of the activities of these maniacs and gives them some encouragement but probably does not “direct” them. ISIS is not that concerned or interested in Bangladeshi affairs. In fact the “disinterest” shown by ISIS in the Bangladeshis is probably a key part of their motivation to get some attention from ISIS.

france24: Eighteen of the 20 civilians who were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery were foreigners. Nearly all were hacked to death with machetes, even though the hostage-takers had plenty of firearms. The attack was even more shocking as it came on the final weekend of Ramadan, with survivors describing how the hostage-takers made clear their targets were non-Muslims, separating locals from the foreigners.

Around 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million people are Muslims but the state is officially secular. “By hacking people to death… they wanted to show the world that they can go to any extent for jihad,” said K G Suresh, a senior fellow at New Delhi’s Vivekananda International Foundation think-tank. “Once they attack a restaurant popular with foreigners on a Friday night their message is clear who they want to go after. By sparing Muslims, they wanted to send out the message that they are only against Westerners.”

According to the monitoring group SITE, the Islamic State organisation claimed responsibility for the attack which it said had targeted “citizens of crusader states”. But Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s secular government has long insisted neither IS nor Al-Qaeda have gained a foothold in Bangladesh despite both groups claiming many previous attacks.

I suspect that Bangladeshi Muslim fanatics are going for increasingly “spectacular” atrocities, where their “success” is measured by how much attention they manage to get from ISIS. Ultimately their atrocities are driven by their own perception of racial inferiority to their Arab role-models.

 

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Juncker’s days seem numbered as Merkel cracks the whip

July 3, 2016

About a week ago I wondered why Jean-Claude Juncker hadn’t resigned after the Brexit vote.  He is not unaware that much of the “leave” motivation is linked to the behaviour of Brussels bureaucrats and that his name is high on that list.

I wrote then:

The President of the European Commission – a former PM of Luxembourg – is the living face of the privileged, protected, arrogant, unaccountable bureaucracy that is Brussels. The EC – more than anybody – else is the reason for the deep and widespread dissatisfaction in Europe with the way in which the EU operates and where it is headed.

It is time for Jean-Claude Juncker to resign. And that means that the leaders of the core countries need to tell him to go.

The politicians are now realising that Juncker is part of the problem. It would seem that Jean-Claude is not Angela Merkel’s favourite person at the moment. Juncker particularly riled the Germans, the French and the Spanish when he invited Nicola Sturgeon to came calling and then went on German TV to talk about independence for Scotland and N Ireland. The French and Spanish will not thank him for encouraging talk of Catalonia and the Basque country. Moreover it seems Merkel wants to keep the Brexit negotiations at the political level and to keep the Brussels bureaucrats away from the key decisions. If the reports in the Sunday Times, Express and Telegraph, among others, are correct, Juncker will be gone within 12 months.

The Telegraph: Angela Merkel could move to oust Europe’s federalist chief Jean-Claude Juncker ‘within the next year’, a Germany government minister has said, in a sign of deepening European divisions over how to respond to Britain’s Brexit vote.

The German chancellor’s frustration with the European Commission chief came as Europe split over whether to use the Brexit negotiations as a trigger to deepen European integration or take a more pragmatic approach to Britain as it heads for the exit door.

“The pressure on him [Juncker] to resign will only become greater and Chancellor Merkel will eventually have to deal with this next year,” an unnamed German minister told The Sunday Times, adding that Berlin had been furious with Mr Juncker “gloating” over the UK referendum result.

Mr Juncker’s constant and unabashed calls for “more Europe”, as well as his reported drinking problem has led to several of Europe other dissenting members – including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – to lay some of the blame for Brexit at his door.

Since the June 23 vote both the Czech and Polish foreign ministers have called publicly for Mr Juncker to resign – moves that one senior EU official dismissed last week as “predictable”. However, the rumblings from Berlin now represent a much more serious threat to Mr Juncker’s tenure. …….

“Everyone is determined that this negotiation is handled in the European Council – i.e. between the 27 heads of government – and not by the Commission, the eurocrats and the EU ‘theologians’ in Brussels,” a senior UK source told The Telegraph.

In a signal that battle has partly already been won, Mrs Merkel pointedly met with French and Italian leaders in Berlin last week, excluding Mr Juncker from the conversation.

Sunday Express: The fuming German chancellor is planning to wield the axe on the bungling bureaucrat, who is facing calls from across the continent to resign. Senior ministers in Berlin have been dismayed by Mr Juncker’s confrontational approach to Britain over the last fortnight and now believe he is “part of the problem”. 

…… In particular there is fury and bewilderment in Berlin at his decision to welcome Nicola Sturgeon to Brussels and then talk openly on German television encouraging Scottish and Northern Irish independence. ………… 

Support for the beleaguered Brussels chief appears to be ebbing away fast in Germany with the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper urging him to resign in a recent editorial. It wrote: “Juncker once again shows in a fatal way how little he sees himself to be a president of the Commission that represents the whole of the EU.”

That UK newspapers are contemptuous of Juncker is not all that surprising. But even the Letzebuerg Privat from his home country is pretty damning today:

There are three good reasons for a political resignation: a glaring failure in office, a scandal or a dramatic loss of acceptance. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker meets all three conditions for his overdue resignation. 

Disastrous Juncker

The EU needs deep reform in many areas. But most of all it needs to puncture the bloated egos of its many arrogant, privileged and protected bureaucrats.

And Jean-Claude Juncker’s name leads all the rest.

 

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