How many of the Seven?

I fell to musing about the Seven Deadly Sins and how many I am guilty of - or, at least, just guilty enough to admit to.

Lust. “Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness, faith, love [and] peace...”

There are things - not people, you'll be pleased to know - that I would rather like to have. A private plane, to visit my Australian family and friends. A television with decent sound. A magic weight loss formula. But probably not to the degree that Lust implies. So No. Anyway, "youthful" counts me out.

Gluttony. “Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

Oh dear, if this means eating and drinking too much of things that may not be good for me - burgers, cream horns, Armagnac - and for my sake, rather than God's, then this is a definite Yes.

Greed. “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have."

In the sense that I want more than my fair share of the pie, or a richer lifestyle, definitely No. 

Sloth. “Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise.”

That's me. I'm the sluggard. Yes

Wrath. “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

I consider myself a courteous driver, maybe even very much so, but on occasion I might get angry - and shout extremely loud - when someone does something very stupid and dangerous on my piece of road. Does this count? I definitely leave it to the wrath of a Higher Being, so I suppose this is a Yes.

Envy. “A sound heart is life to the body, But envy is rottenness to the bones.”

This is a No. Can't say more than that.

Pride. “...Let not the mighty man boast of his might"

This is the most solid Yes. I generally believe I am the cleverest, most intelligent person I know. Brain the size of a planet. A view which takes a constant hammering when playing my son at Connect 4 sadly.

Total: 4/7. That's bad. Maybe I should repent and become a monk.

The Spell of the capital

Capital cities cast a spell over their countries. They are magnets, drawing to them money, culture, tourism, commerce and, in the case of London, Russian oligarchs and their 'unexplained' wealth (see Catherine Belton's Putin's People for her explanations), houses, yachts and the GRU. And now sanctions. Because of a country whose capital city's name has undergone a makeover. All my long life I have known that Ukraine's capital is Kiev. No longer. It's now Kyiv. Why?

I learned in school that the capital of China was Peking. We had to start using Beijing as its name in about 1979. I know, that's a post-colonial transliteration thing but worth mentioning. Maybe Kyiv is too.

Ho Chi Minh City used to be known as Saigon until the locals heard the musical Miss Saigon and hated it. Claude-Michel Schönberg flatly refused to rename it Miss Ho Chi Minh City. OK, it's not the capital; just thought you'd like to know.

I'm tempted to sneer at the fact that New Delhi is no longer new but it appears that ND is a district within what Wikipedia calls the 'megacity' of Delhi.

Capital cities seem to be a root cause of inequality within a country. What if we (the UK) declared that from now on Middlesbrough is our capital? Would that city shoot from #1 in the 'most deprived places in the UK' list of the highly esteemed Daily Mirror right up to #1 in their 'least deprived' list? Surely worth a go. If it works, we could move the capital around the country every ten years [this happens in Dido's Phoenicia in Civilization VI] and reap the benefits of capitalisation. Memo to Michael Gove, Secretary of State responsible for the government's 'levelling up' strategy.

Anyway, I'm off to the opera in Middlesbrough, followed tomorrow by a visit to the Middlesbrough Tate and dinner at the Middlesbrough Ritz. See, it's working already.

Oh and no, I'm not meaning to make light of the lot of the people of Ukraine - or those of other currently war-torn countries: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar (let me know if I have omitted your country).

Federalist Paper No. 9

The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection is the title of No. 9 in the series of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, eventually titled the Federalist Papers and setting the foundation of the United States constitution. In No.9 Hamilton argues "A FIRM Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection", interpreted by some as an argument against political parties. P. J. O'Rourke [see below] claims that Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, presages the 'tyranny' of today's two political parties in the US. Madison wrote ("with eerie prescience ... [describing] our Democratic and Republican presidential primaries and caucuses 228 years into the future", according to O'Rourke):

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

It seems the Founding Fathers were generally not in favour of political parties. According to history.com, in an essay by Sarah Pruitt entitled The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart, Alexander Hamilton once called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. According to O'Rourke, Thomas Jefferson claimed to oppose political parties and George Washington "detested political parties and didn't belong to one". 

I learned all this from a book I'm reading entitled How the Hell Did This Happen? by the afore-mentioned P. J. O'Rourke, of whom I hadn't heard until he died recently. Whereupon a number of political columnists whose writings I enjoy lauded him and quoted from his works. O'Rourke was a "political satirist" who wrote pieces - of a style of mini essays or (as I would say) blog posts - for various American publications.

How the Hell Did This Happen? - subtitled A Cautionary Tale of American Democracy - is a collection of 30 such pieces on the subject of the 2016 Presidential Election, from the early primaries until the election itself. This was the Trump vs Clinton election, which both candidates won - Hillary simply got more votes than Donald but apparently that wasn't good enough.

O'Rourke himself is a Republican supporter, although from what he describes as the "sane and moderate" wing of the party (In a later book he talks of being, politically, of the 'far-middle'). He mercilessly mocks the candidates of both parties who line up to attempt to win their party's nomination. As far as the Republican candidates are concerned, it's a bit like Jeff Daniels mouthing Aaron Sorkin's anti Tea Party rants in The Newsroom.

Perry, Santorum, Walker, Webb, Chafee, Pataki, Huckabee, Jindal, Graham, O'Malley, Paul, Fiorina, Biden, Bush, Christie, Carson, Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, Sanders, Clinton and Trump. That's not a list of presidential candidates. That's the worst law firm in the world.

Rubio is the least insane candidate (low bar) with the best chance (faint hope) of actually beating Hillary.

... typical of modern Americans is Trump's bad taste ... he puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie.

... the candidate who was so far ahead of Hillary that we didn't know who it was yet was the screwy-kablooey commander of the Vermont-Cong, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Claiming, as [Mike] Huckabee did on July 26, that the president of the United States "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven" is not a cogent critique of the Iran nuclear deal however bad the deal is.

[Biden] told the House Democratic Caucus, "If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30% chance we're going to get it wrong".

Maybe Carly Fiorina could run America the way she ran Hewlett-Packard ... Between July 1999 and February 2005, when Carly was CEO, H-P's stock price fell 65 per cent.

Members of the electorate would go into the ballot booth, see the two names Clinton and Bush and think to themselves "Gosh, I'm getting forgetful. I did this already".

This is a very entertaining, amusing and beautifully written book. Not a page goes by without a reminder of how witty and insightful the author is. These are pieces I wish I could have written.

In the final pages, The Revolt Against The Elites, O'Rourke discusses how we (it applies not just to the USA) are "daunted at the pace of material change, unnerved over social transfigurations,  fretful about economic instability, and terrified by terrorism." He concludes ...

Fear is a bad schoolmarm. We've got a monster at the blackboard. How can we learn even 1 + 1 when all we can think is, "EEEK! Teacher is huge and slimy and has tentacles and two ugly heads!"

So we turn to the big, stupid bully at the back of the classroom. 

Yats

Apparently there's a new craze. Yats. A Yat is a singular collection of five emojis. A super-emoji. You can choose your five emojis, combine them into a Yat and use it as a social media signature. Or even your username.

Each Yat is unique so, once you have bought your Yat, no-one else can have that combination of emojis. I don't know how many possible combinations are possible because I don't know - or care - how many emojis there are in existence.

Note that word 'bought'. You have to purchase your Yat. And that may cost you tens of thousands of dollars, payable in some kind of cryptocurrency I think. Although presumably you can sell your Yat in a few months' time in the online Yatmarket and make huge profits. Or losses.

It's like going to your local rubbish dump, picking up hundreds of dirty, useless items, packaging them in groups of five items in shiny coloured foil and selling them as unique works of art on eBay. Equally valuable contributions to society.

Compare this with Wordle. I've never used Wordle but it was created to allow people to use the power of the internet and smartphones to simply have some fun - for free. Whoever created Yats - I'm not going to name them because they don't deserve recognition [although, come to think of it, I'm writing about their product] - are guilty of egregious greed, exploitation of the free resources of the internet, creating an unsustainable bubble, you name it, there isn't a cultural crime they haven't committed.

But, if you're rich and stupid, give it a go; have some fun. Yats were designed for you.

And yes, I know, the Wordle creator sold out to the New York Times, so maybe from now on providing people with fun may become less of a priority. We'll see.

Less than One - points don't always mean prizes

When playing Championship Manager - the classic 01/02 version obviously - when your team gets promoted the target for the first season at the higher level is, in my experience, to make sure you have at least the number of points equal to the number of games you've played. If you end up like that at the end of the season you'll generally avoid relegation. In the Premier League, with 20 teams each playing 38 games, you'll mostly be safe when you get to 38 points.

As with all the best simulation games, this reflects real life. In only 4 of the last 18 seasons has that not been enough. In 2002/2003 West Ham were relegated with 42 points so you need to be cautious about applying this 'rule'. Maybe they eased off when they got to 38, or perhaps they were  playing too much Championship Manager. Anyway, I thought I'd check out how this revelation affects teams in the top 4 English divisions at the moment.

In the Premier League there are actually seven teams - all the way up to Brentford in 14th place - with fewer points than games played. Seven struggling teams; I know because I watched some of them this weekend. This should definitely give encouragement to those in the bottom three places.

In the Championship, four teams seem to be battling it out on this basis. It's affected by the fact that Derby County were deducted 21 points, and Reading 6 points, for various breaches of financial rules, meaning their positions are probably not true reflections of their performances. You'd guess this means the bottom two, Peterborough and Barnsley, are near certainties for relegation, even at this stage.

League One (I know, for those of you baffled by almost everything about the noble sport of Association Football, these are prime examples of the weirdness of our national game) has four clubs within the points < games rule but plenty of teams immediately above them who could get sucked into the relegation battle. This league also features four relegation places so maybe this means you need points > games, I'm not sure about that.

League Two has only two clubs relegated at the end of the season (often a relief to CM 0102 players) so I'd guess you could be safe with fewer points than games. There are currently three within the recommended margin but another four very much in the mix. Although this seems like the easiest league in which to avoid relegation - and heart attacks when playing the game - there is going to be a rare old battle in real life this year.

Good luck to all these teams - I'll be following your progress.

Today's a big day for Australia

Australia. My second home. Well, that's an exaggeration but my Son #1 lives there. In Newcastle. Not the cold, windy one up north in the UK but the other in sunny New South Wales. My daughter in law is an Aussie and they moved there, I dunno, about 15 years ago. It's a great country and I have enjoyed many a trip there over the years, particularly at Christmas times.

Australia has had one of the strictest border policies in the world to attempt to keep Covid out - ask Novak Djokovic - but today is Freedom Day. The day when they open their borders to fully vaccinated visitors (again, ask Novak for details). I haven't seen my Aussie grandsons for over three years so am actively thinking about a trip. The temptation is to go sooner rather than later but definitely Christmas is on the cards. We'll see.