Scottish Political News

Union-run bank risks capital base to support Labour party.

Australian Foreign minister slams MSM for faking photos in Lebanon.

The BBC - All the news that's good for you.

The Englishman has been posting up a storm. Having found a RFID enabled bugging device in his wheelie-bin he was understandably miffed at the council for not having told him that this was going to be happening. And I don't suppose anyone is going to believe that this isn't a step towards billing by weight of rubbish produced, a step which will allow the councils to increase their tax take and their take home pay.

Now for an economic liberal, the idea of billing each person by weight of refuse produced is eminently sensible, and it's important not to lose sight of this. The problem will be that, as I've pointed out, the councils will use pay per kilo to squeeze taxpayers. What would be interesting is to find out if they would be able to enforce the use of their own collection services or if private contractors would step in to provide a cheaper service. Presumably if all your rubbish is collected by a third party your bill from the council for refuse collection would be nil.

Personally speaking I have no problem with allowing private sector companies to RFID tag my bin, on the grounds that they would only be using it for something innocuous like trying to sell me stuff - something I can opt out of fairly easily. With the state, the information becomes part of the all-encompassing national identity database - something I consider much more sinister.

Jock Coats has a good post on the subject.

It is conventional wisdom in gambling circles that when playing Blackjack, you must never split a pair of tens, the reason being that twenty is such a good hand that you can only reduce your chances of beating the dealer by splitting. This conclusion depends on a couple of assumptions and if either of them is false there exist circumstances where you should split your tens.

The first such assumption is that you do not know which cards remain in the deck. However, suppose that is false and consider the following case. You have a pair of tens, the dealer has a six and you have somehow deduced that all the remaining cards that have yet to be played are tens. Obviously, when the dealer plays he will go bust on twenty six and, whenever you split your tens, you will end up with two pairs of tens on the table. Therefore, to maximise your winnings, you should split as often as the house rules allow. It is thus imaginable that a sufficiently skillful card-counter will occasionally split his tens.

The other assumption is that you are playing Blackjack to maximise your winnings, or equivalently, and more accurately, minimise your losses. Other goals are possible, however. For instance, if you are trying to optimise your celebrity status, then I recommend that you split your tens.

So. Thursday night. Andy is playing Blackjack and has a ten dollar bet on the table. He is dealt a pair of tens and the dealer has a six. It is Andy's turn to play.

"I think I'll split."

Dealer gapes at Andy: "That's a pair of tens. Are you sure?"

"Yes. I'm going to split those tens."

Gasps of horror from the other players: "Oh no, you never split tens." "You're splitting a winning hand. Are you crazy?"

"Yes, I am crazy. I'm splitting those tens."

Dealer: "Okay. But hold on. I have to do something." Yells at the top of his voice: "He's splitting his tens!"

A nine is dealt on the first hand. Stand on that. A ten on the next. Split, obviously.

A stunned intake of collective breath around the table.

"He's splitting his tens!"

An eight. Stand. A ten. Split.

The crowd are used to it by now.

"He's splitting his tens!"

This is a four way split, the maximum allowed. The next two cards are both tens.

Andy has a nineteen, an eighteen, two twenties and forty dollars on the table.

The dealer has a six ... sixteen ... twenty six.

Andy wins forty bucks to rapturous applause.

In Ireland, most of the talk about e-government issues seems to centre around the voting machines debacle and how much it is costing to keep them in storage since it was determined that they were not appropriate for election purposes. However, in Scotland there has in fact been some considerable development in the range of internet based services provided by the Parliament and local authorities, even though in many cases they haven't perhaps received as much publicity as they deserve.

Not only are sessions of the Parliament streamed live on video webcasts (including committees) and have been since its inception, but there is also the interesting example of the use of e-petitions. This has been supported by the International Teledemocracy Centre at Napier University and has been published as a case study in the use of Microsoft SQL Server.

David McCann has pointed me to a current e-petition by Scotland First on requesting a referendum for Scottish independence. Of course, the petitions committee is only able to deal with issues within its remit and the constitution is a reserved power of Westminster. Still the more signatories the better the point is made.

Eaten by missionaries reports that, as many predicted, the smoking ban in Scotland is hitting the licensed trade pretty hard.

The Scottish Licensed Traders Association has said that its members report a 10 per cent reduction in alcohol sales north of the border since the smoking ban came into force.

How the Labour and LibDem politicians who voted this law into force can sleep at night is beyond me. I guess you need to be pretty selfish to be a politician.

(1) So, the Sheridan saga continues with suggestions of a new party emerging, centred around the Pollock commandante. This will be little more than a personal fan club and marks a sad state of affairs for the SSP and its supporters. Another classic example of the dangers of personality politics. Some of us always thought the suntan obsession was a very worrying indication of things to come! Certainly would have cast doubt on his party's health policies.

(2) As for the proposed use of the Solidarity name, I take Tommy is then looking to strengthen his catholic faith and pursue a host of right wing policies endorsed by his apparent new hero, Lech Walesa.

(3) Moving on to matters of more substance, the Scottish Indpendence Convention continues to meet regularly to plan its activities and I'm grateful to them for sending me information about forthcoming events. Next on the horizon is an event/launch in Inverness on September 30th as well as their support for the planned march in Edinburgh on September 30th.

I alluded to the theme last time round of the differences between blogging and journalism. I well know that all I'm doing here is, whenever I get some time, collecting together some links, news items and emerging ideas about the nature of citizenship, nationhood and the environment for anybody who's interested. The key aspect though is that it is an amateur endeavour constrained significantly by lack of time. Other bloggers, however, have set themselves considerably higher goals and see themselves at the vanguard of news reporting or as a new generation of "columnists" with their opinion being equally as worthy of dissemination as that of regular print media journalists. Of course they may be correct in that, but the distinction in terms of quality can sometimes be very stark indeed.

I was reminded of this after reading Nicholas Lemann's excellent article in this week's New Yorker - a magazine whose writers' eloquence is hard to find in much of the new citizens' media. Funnily enough, the theme came up again last night when watching The King of Comedy on BBC 4. To see Rupert Pupkin's obsession with the style and mannerisms of a talk show host being confused with the notions of worthy material/content and genuine talent. Maybe that's cruel, after all its only a minority of bloggers who see themselves as real journalists. And indeed citizen media does provide a whole set of interesting potential opportunities to address many contemporary social and political issues, the trouble is separating the hype and "talk radio" mentality from the genuine quality comment that will make us think and reconsider our conceptions.

This really is car crash TV but it is utterly compelling to watch as the SSP tear themselves apart in public. Is the (literally) defaced mural behind Rosie Kane of Tommy Sheridan?



This appears to be entirely from the United Left (Someone either has a keen sense of irony or they like George Orwell) faction/platform within the SSP.

Well, probably considered opinion, writing style and coherence.!But I don't mind, I'm just linking news items together and making the occassional off the cuff remark or observation. For more reflective input read Iain Macwhirter's blog (/column). One relatively recent posting makes interesting reading on the theme of small nations. Something we mentioned a wee while back here was that there is a developing realisation amongst those who study European economics that small nations of Scotland's size apparently are capable of doing very well indeed, economically speaking. Sitting here in Ireland, of course I have to concur, though where Scotland could potentially be even more successful is in the area of social justice were its latent collectivity to be uderpinned by economic and political autnomy. Anyway, forget me, read Iain.

The jury in the Tommy Sheridan defamation case has just come out in his favour - a verdict whcih stands to rock the Scottish Socialist Party asunder as several of its MSPs now potentially face perjury charges based on the evidence they offered during the trial.