Tough

Had a bad hour, last night, on #NWN2: Not really impressed with the penultimate area, the Vale of Merdelain, a pointless, exhausting and difficult dungeon crawl. I don’t think it impacts the moral dilemmas for your companions or the virtue tests to come. Maybe its a just reward from poor choices as I am back in a fight where no-one can hit even 2nd tier enemies, not enough healing to keep alive, all the enchantment spells are useless against undead and suffering from a stupid un-signalled level drain. A far cry from the penultimate and final battles in “Beneath the Cobbles”.

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Law & Order

Silly me, I was provoked on Facebook by the comment that Britain was ruled by the ECHR. This led me to making a reply and so I started to look and see how many cases the British Government had lost. I found this at Channel 4, and this at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the 1st is a piece of political reportage, the later a piece of academic research. The C4 article reviews among other cases, the ECHR rulings that the UK may not universally remove voting rights from prisoners and that whole life sentences must have review provisions. Basically I agree with both these rulings.

Prison both punishes the malefactor, and offers opportunities for rehabilitation; it also protects society from re-offenders (for a time). The fact, well opinion, is that in the UK, most legislators and probably most voters are more interested in the first of these effects. But both voting and a review are rights, defined in Article 3 of the First Protocol, the right to vote and Articles 5 the Right to Liberty.

Punishment must fit crime, and we are not yet ready to let computers sentence the guilty. Judges rightly, take into account many circumstances when sentencing including the remorse of the guilty and guidelines from Parliament; they even sometimes take into account that society must be protected and that prisoners may be rehabilitated. Sentences, to be just, must be specific to the case. Blanket provisions such as those in Britain’s prisoner voting rules and whole life sentences breach this need. It’s to our shame that we need to be told this by a court filled with foreigners. It is however a better result and we should thank those judges.

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Sovereignty

Sovereignty

I don’t think the facts around Human Rights and Sovereignty are being well exercised. I have just seen a post on Facebook where someone claimed that Britain was being ruled by the ECHR in Strasbourg. In the words of Captain Blackadder, there’s only one problem with this theory. I thought I’d put this right …

Judgement

My father-in-law retired as a University Lecturer when they started so called 360 degree assessments and he was informed that he was a “student facilitator” rather than a facultator, (which generates a spelling error today). I too am now in a mad house, where judgement is being audited; we are creating work for checkers. Time to retire, I think.

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Alchemy

The New Statesman interviews Mervyn King, the most recent ex-Governor of the Bank of England. He’s just published a book, “The end of alchemy” and King is now exploring if Central Banks have run out of policy tools. They examine the problem of banks, “too big to fail”, King proposes a transition from the role of the Central Bank as a lender of last resort to that of a pawn broker or insurer, requiring the banks to pay for the underwriting of their customer deposits. Also they look at King’s assertion that people at work don’t have enough time to think and read, he observes that he only got this back when he got the top job at the Bank. It’s true of all of us though and it reminded me of Mike Threlfall who publicly stated that the desirable utilisation for his consultancy team was 50% since otherwise they ceased to be consultants. The article looks at the heavy reliance on Maths that King’s generation of economists depended upon, and the probability that they thus underestimated the reaction of people. Economic rationalism has been challenged by modern behavioural economists, and in the interview King argues that people (& firms) are pursuing “coping” strategies, rather than utility maximisation strategies and that the traditional macro economic tools no longer work. He’s quoted as saying, “People’s beliefs and expectations cannot be captured by an economist’s view of how the world works”. He’s obviously learned from the 2008 crash, but whether his lessons are enough is another matter. Traditional economists are turning away from austerity, and innovations in both macro-economics and monetary policy are being developed. I should read the economic press’ book reviews of his book. …