The ones who caused the problem

The Irish economy is in a terrible state and I think that the time has come to apportion blame. It is very clear that there is one group who caused the ridiculous property bubble and they now deserve our contempt. They are responsible for the mess we are in and if there were any justice in the country they would be the ones who should be brought to account.

We can't possibly blame the people who sold their homes at the top of the market. They weren't being greedy, they were simply accepting the market price for what they sold. The bubble was not caused by foolish buyers who risked money they did not have to purchase property they could not afford at absurdly inflated prices. No.


There is one group to blame. They made a huge contribution to the property price inflation. This group of people was not driven by any altruistic motivations they simply want to make a buck. And indeed they did very well out of the economic growth. Without them there simply couldn't have been a boom. They fascilitated just about every property purchase. It is time to name and shame them. Though no doubt many of you have already guessed who they are. They are of course the furniture removal firms and their greedy employees.

Now let's spare a thought for the victims, such as the bank executives who have lost out. For example poor Jake DeSantis .

It will all be free in the future

Do you remember the days when companies used to charge for personal email accounts? Ah, perhaps you are too young. Well in future a lot more is going to come your way for free. For a start, right now mobile phone calls are absurdly over-priced. If you have a local wifi network, then you can now use skype on your phone for free. This is only the start.
Good news for people in general: Mobile phone charges are about to collapse.
The bad news for mobile companies, their profits will follow the prices and then will come the bankruptcies.


The music industry is falling behind the times. They cannot stop the sharing of music files online. If thepiratebay.com gets shut down, then you'll find 10,000 other similar sites in 200 countries round the world taking their place. So, the future is free music for all. Revenue will come from concert sales. Giving away free music online is a way of advertising concerts.

Cable TV is coming to an end. Why pay for 100 channels on Cable, when there are millions available online for free. Pay-TV is on the way out. It just can't compete with the pirates who stream films and live sport for free. Watch out for more embedded advertising, for example 5 second ads in the middle of sports matches.

Film industry are powerless to stop web-users sharing films online and so DVD sales and revenue from TV will plummet. Similarly cinema attendance will drop as everyone will have access to films even before the official release date. But the bottom line is that people want to see films and the film industry wants to continue making them. The obvious solution is to have embedded advertising. If the major source of revenue is from product placement, then film-makers will no longer see file-sharing sites as the enemy, but rather as their friend. Of course I expect the film industry to fight the file-sharers for a while more, but sooner or later they'll realise that the war is over and they've lost. It is time to re-build the industry in this new barely recognisable land-scape.

Most of the current crop of commercial TV stations round the world will go bankrupt. A few will see the new technology as an opportunity and will thrive. But most will want to cling to the past, with middle aged management who harp back to the good old days. Round the world state supported TV stations will limp on with hand-outs and money forcefully taken from the populations in taxes and licence fees. Their viewing figures will plummet.

Morally I think that is objectionable to forcibly take a licence fee from someone. It is an abuse of power. On the other hand, sharing a file with my neighbour is so much more noble, even if I've never met him and he lives in Ulaanbaatar.

But for those who are interested in making money, there will still be plenty of oportunities, but things will be different and they'll need to be very adaptable.

Locked Public Tennis Courts

I went for a jog this evening and passed some public tennis courts. It was a beautiful evening, the sun was shining, it was a nice temperature but all the courts were empty. The courts were locked! There was a very high fence round them.

I continued my jog and a little while later I saw a couple of children playing tennis on a road. They had no net and indeed no protection from on coming traffic. There weren't too many cars on that particular road and I guess the kids assumed that if one came round the corner they'd probably have enough time to get out of its way.

As a consequence of having locked courts:
* Fewer children in the area will play tennis than would otherwise be the case
* Bored children will get up to mischief rather than play tennis
* Children who do want to play will risk their lives by playing on the road
* Other children who really want to play on a real court will risk their lives by climbing over the high fences which are round the courts, since the gates are locked.
* Those that have the power to lock the courts will get a kick out of the fact that they have the power to prevent children playing.

From an insurance point of view, how can a child be allowed run through a park but not allowed on to a harmless tennis court?

I reckon the people who locked the courts are not stupid, they are just very poorly motivated.

Hang the painting not the painter

Memorable art should be edgy, it should captivate the public's interest. We need not insist on it being deferential to the powers that be.

The Cowen paintings which were left in the National Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy fit the bill. The two galleries now have a wonderful chance to hang fascinating paintings, with very interesting stories behind them. They have the potential to become their most viewed paintings. The only question is, do the gallery management have the courage to be relevant? Their first step should be to contact the artist and seek his permission to retain the paintings.

One of the great tragedies of art galleries is that not that many people go into them. The vast majority of the population don't step inside a gallery in any given year. By hanging the Cowen paintings curators will see their visitor numbers soar. They can let the public make up their own minds about the artistic merits of the pieces. At the very least, the paintings will bring new people who will then be introduced to the other paintings on the walls.

How often are the paintings in Irish galleries mentioned on the front page of BBC online or in the New York times?

I say hang the paintings on the wall, don't hang the artist.

If there are some haughty senior members of FF who think that we should only ever show groveling respect to our the taoisheach, then send them on an extended visit to North Korea, (at their own expense), so that they can see what happens to a country when all must be obsequious to their dear leader.

If we compare the paintings by Casby, with say a UK broad-sheet political satire cartoon, we then find that in fact Mr Casby was actually being much more kind.

I think the Polish magazine Wprost went too far when it published a doctored photo of Germany's Chancellor Merkel breast feeding the Polish Kaczynski twins. I'll let you the reader decide:

Cowen in the Nude

It has come to my attention that RTE, the state broadcaster, has stepped way out of line. They had on their news an item concerning a nude paining of Brian Cowen. They clearly don't understand their role in the state.



I am full of admiration for Michael Kennedy (FF TD), he has been standing up for our dear leader Brian Cowen and has asked the head of RTE, Cathal Goan, to consider his position. Mr Kennedy does indeed mean well. Though he is without a doubt being too soft.


I am very please to read that Goan, has apologised. We have no place in our country for journalism which mocks Mr Cowen. It does not matter that their article was factual, entertaining and of great interest the public.


Some enemies of the state abroad have a great interest in distributing anti-Irish propaganda. The BBC and The Times have both done a great disservice to themselves by publishing stories ridiculing Mr Cowen.

Now our solution is three-fold:

1. There should be jail sentences for those in the media who are disrespectful to our dear leader
2. To promote more patriotic journalism, news outlets should send their staff to train in North Korea, where they can learn how to show the sort of deference to a leader that he deserves.
3. We need to block the internet and publications from abroad. They are full of anti-Irish nonsense and often have nasty hidden agendas. We can learn from China here, they have their great-firewall.
   

As a first step, to send a clear message, Mr Goan should be sent to an FF gulag in Mayo for the rest of his natural life.

I followed the herd with the intelligence of a sheep

Here is a negative scenario for Ireland, which I'm not necessarily predicting, I'm just saying it is a possibility:
A couple of the banks default, triggering the government guarantee.
On the international money markets no-one wants to buy Irish Government bonds and so the government defaults. Thus no civil servants get paid.
There is then a 'run' on all banks causing the last standing banks to collapse. Then the real fun starts...
With massive deflation bankruptcies soar. When the government eventually gets back on its feet it finds it has massive debts which will take 30 difficult years to pay back.
Huge waves of emigration return and has a result we have hundreds of thousands of empty homes round the country which are worthless and are allowed to fall into ruin.
Just as we had deserted 'famine villages' in future we'll have 'credit crunch villages', those new developments round the country which will be left idle, a reminder of the folly of us all.

As for the blame for all this. Well, it's been caused by idiots, people just like me who bought a flat right at the top of the property market. When it came to understanding the real value of the flat I had followed the herd and used the intelligence of a sheep. We were all fools and kept pushing the property market up and up. We never looked down.

I had read of bubbles in markets before, the Amsterdam tulip bulb mania, the Wall Street bubble in the 1920's and so on. It is so easy to say 'oh those fools'. It is quite a different experience to be one be one of them.

I'm very confident there will be lots more market bubbles to come. It is just a part of human group dynamics. If you ask me how much is a tulip bulb worth, then I say, whatever someone will pay for it. If you can find a dimwit who'll pay you 4 fax oxen for one. Well then that's what is is worth. Looking back now we can see that it certainly is not a sustainable price, but there are fundamental reasons why can never have fore-sight like hind-sight.

One key element of economic markets is uncertainty. If they were predicatable, then they would be fundamentally different. I would never expect a group of gorillas to fully understand and be able to predict the dynamics of their own group interaction. A human, who is more intelligent has a chance to understand the gorillas. But to understand the dynamics of a group of humans, you'd need to be more intelligent than the members. If we had evolved to be more intelligent creatures, then we'd have an even more complex society, one which we still wouldn't be able to fully understand.

Freedom of Speech

It seems to me that one of the significant contributing factors in the Rwanda genocide was RTLM Radio which encouraged hatred and ultimately the slaughter of Tutsis. Though we will never know for sure, had the station been put off the air, I suspect, things would have turned out very much better.

If we always support the freedom of speech, then the radio should have been allow to pump out its calls for genocide.

If we were to ban all broadcasts that promotes violence, then a discussion on whether the US should continue to use military force in Afghanistan would not be allowed.

If we close down media that encourage the law to be broken, then we have stifled discussion on unjust laws.

If we censor pieces that are deemed incitement to hatred, then I would be unable to honestly write my thoughts on the Saudi Religious police who have arrested and charged a 75 year old woman with mingling with two young men, one of who she says she helped raise since he was a baby and the other was delivering some bread. The unfortunate old woman has been sentenced to 40 lashes and prison term. ( see UPI news report )

If we forbid the encouragement of the ethnic cleansing, then the Bible would at the very least need to be edited, removing for example the requests from God that Amalekite men, women, children and infants should be butchered, ( see Samuel Book 1, Chapter 15, verse 3) It cannot be claimed that the Amalekites are entirely a historical people, as the council of advisers in the Reformed Pastafarian Church call are known as the (modern, pacifist, pro-Israeli) Amalekites.

As is often the case, it seems that it is difficult to make up a blanket rule that will sensibly cover all scenarios.