More Zonkyness

Category: Politics

  • Freebie Holidays for MPs ?

    The BBC have tonight announced that numerous MPs have been accepting free trips for “research” (funny how the trips are always to fun sunny places though) and not declaring their interest. The MPs will undoubtedly claim that they need to make foreign trips to further their knowledge of far flung corners of the world.

    Perhaps.

    As someone who works in the public sector, if I were to get a free trip to say Barcelona on a jolly to look at some sort of IT trade fair paid for by an IT supplier, I would be very rightly likely to get sacked when discovered. Why should it be different for MPs ?

    Being fair (although I’m not inclined to be fair to MPs at the moment), these MPs may well be genuine in accepting trips to learn more about places such as the Maldives, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and many other places. But it looks bad.

    And not declaring the trip, and not declaring an interest when tabling a question has all the smell of rampant corruption.

    Given the current climate of distrust in MPs, they should stop accepting these free trips.

    Perhaps parliament should establish a yearly budget for research trips and allow MPs to fund trips out of this budget and when it is gone, no more trips to the sun. That at least will be much less likely to smell of corruption.

  • US Health Care Reform Passes – Good Or Bad News ?

    So a short while ago the Democrats pushed through their health care reform package through.

    Good or bad news ?

    Well, it seems that the share prices of health care companies went up at the news. Now this could be a glitch or perhaps the market investors know something we do not. Does this indicate that the reforms are still going to allow companies to make excessive profits – or even that their profits will grow ?

    Of course for the uninsured in the US, this will at least mean they get some form of decent health care which is definitely good news.

    But if the US does not take any action on the costs of their health care system, they will sooner or later be faced with a bill they cannot pay. The US currently spends twice the amount in terms of GDP per capita that their competitors do. And I doubt that the reform bill is going to make a bit of difference to the cost of health care.

  • Sexist Jokes

    There are five men and a single woman all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the woman says that as women are used to sacrificing themselves and that men are the better sex, she will sacrifice herself. The men all applaud her, and an hour later the woman is rescued.

    Mildly humorous ?

    Now try it the other way around :-

    There are five women and a single man all dangling from a rope, waiting for someone to rescue them. Unfortunately the rope starts to fray and they all decide that someone has to sacrifice themselves to save the others. After some time discussing who should sacrifice themselves, the man says that as men are used to sacrificing themselves and that women are the better sex, he will sacrifice herself. The women all applaud her, and an hour later the man is rescued.

    Still funny ?

    It sometimes seems that it is far more acceptable for men to be portrayed as stupid in jokes than women. Is this fair ? If it is wrong to portray women as stupid in jokes, it is wrong to portray men as stupid too; similarly if it is funny to read about stupid men, then it is funny to read about stupid women.

  • Mephedrone Deaths ??

    The media (I’ve picked the BBC but they are not the only ones) have come up with a news story about two teenagers who died after apparently taking mephedrone (apparently a legal recreational drug). The story is horribly slanted towards the point of view of those who want to make mephedrone illegal. That is not to say that the drug is in any way safe, but if you look beyond the headlines, it gets a little more interesting.

    The BBC (see the above) reported that the two teenagers had been drinking until the early hours before taking mephedrone, before (in a TV news report) also taking methadone. And then died. According to the report “post-mortems are being carried out”, but despite the fact that the cause of death is unknown (otherwise why bother with a post-mortem ?), the headlines imply that the cause of death was mephedrone.

    Why? It is perfectly possible to die from an overdose of alcohol alone, and when you combine it with another two recreational drugs, well who is to say which one is responsible ? Taking one recreational drug increases the risk of something nasty happening; taking three does not just increase the risk additionally – there may be poor interactions between the drugs to dramatically increase the risk.

    It may be that mephedrone killed these two teenagers. It may be that alcohol killed these two teenagers. It may even be that methadone killed these two teenagers.

    Or it could be the combination of two or even all three drugs was particularly dangerous and killed these two teenagers.

    Whilst mephedrone itself may be harmful and there may well be a case for making it a controlled substance, inaccurate reporting such as this does not help anyone make an informed decision about the risks of this “legal high”.

    This post originally referred to the drug in question as “methadrone” – a common mistake amongst those who have heard the drug’s name rather than seen it written; the correct spelling is “mephedrone”.

  • Marriage – That Great Church/State Institution ?

    Today when we consider marriage we think of it as an official ceremony performed by a representative of church or state; without their sanction, no “marriage” can be called such. It wasn’t always quite like that. Given the pressure to legalise marriage between two people of the same sex (apparently a “civil partnership” isn’t quite enough), it may come as a surprise that it is entirely possible that there have been single sex marriages in the past.

    The idea of marriage being a ceremony conducted by an official (a priest or state official) is actually relatively modern. It was not until the Council of Trent in the 16th century, that the church insisted that marriage could only be performed by a priest. Whilst the church had laws governing marriage, the ceremony itself was a private one between two individuals. This would often be followed by the priest blessing the marriage, but that was a separate ceremony.

    If you look at genuine early English churches (many of those old looking churches in sleepy villages are in fact 19th century), you will notice that many have quite large porches. There are various reasons for this, but principally it was a convenient place for conducting business that either didn’t require the whole church, or did not have any business in the church. And marriages were often conducted in this porch before the wedding party would enter the church for the priest to bless the marriage.

    Now in almost all circumstances, the marriage would be conducted in this way; in public with a notice published on the door of the church some time in advance for people to object to the marriage if there were suitable grounds. But there was nothing to stop anyone from having a private (and probably illegal) marriage in their own way. It was even accepted by the church that merely saying the phrase “I marry you” was enough to constitute a marriage – effectively a common law marriage which was abolished in 1753. Such a marriage may not have been accepted by secular law, but would as far as the church was concerned been a marriage.

    This would seem to indicate that marriage was originally a personal commitment between two people with nobody in authority sanctioning it. And only concerns over property rights and the urge that all authorities have to regulate everything changed that. Property? Of course to the rich, the effect of marriage on property ownership was exceptionally important – enough that many marriages were arranged principally to ensure that property ownership was preserved in some way.

    So we know that many marriages in the past were arranged marriages conducted for merging property holdings ? Well there is plenty of evidence that the rich conducted marriage in such a way, but there is little to say that the vast majority who were poor also did so. Why arrange a marriage for property when neither partner owns any land ?

    Of course there was also a tendency to pick a future partner for possible future earning power rather than for love. However we simply do not know enough about marriages in the past to say that love marriages did not exist.

    But enough of the past. What about the present ? Is it not time to tell governments everywhere to keep out of our private business and take back ownership of marriage ? It is no business of government or any other authority to tell individuals whom they can or cannot marry. Sure, there are plenty of reasons why marriage should be registered with the government, but why do they insist the ceremony must take place in front of an appropriate official ?

    The instant you allow private marriages, you solve so many problems that it is plainly (to me) an obvious thing to do :-

    • No nutters with an axe to grind can stop single-sex couples getting married, or impose any form of lesser marriage.
    • Private marriages mean you can get married anywhere – if I were to get married, my choice of spot would be on a hill north of Arundel overlooking Amberley mount. Not the kind of place that would normally be allowed by the government but why should they have a say on where I get married ?
    • It allows for marriages to be much cheaper. According to a quick search the average cost of getting married in the UK in 2006 (so it’ll have gone up since) is £25,000 – which is plainly ridiculous. Anyone can understand wanting an unforgettable day for a marriage, but surely it can be done for cheaper than this ? At this cost, many people put off getting married either because they just can’t afford it, or because they have better things to spend the money on – like putting down a deposit on a house!