Jim Stewart's Blog

The report is out – the UK economy grew by 15.5% (a record) between July and September. Things got so much better. In addition the government has supported employees by about 80%.

Overall everything means things are getting better for industry. At the same time we are seeing massive numbers of redundancies.

So where is the money going?

For the sake of transparency should we require company accounts to clearly state the amount of government support during the pandemic next to the profit line?

Should we recover grants and subsidies where companies post profits?

I was going to go out for a walk after this – looks like it might need to be a swim now.

I was interested in the news that the head of the FA has resigned for using unacceptable language. I had been thinking a lot about the acceptability of language recently. WARNING – THIS POST WILL INCLUDE LANGUAGE SOME PEOPLE FIND OFFENSIVE IN ORDER TO DISCUSS THE TERMS AND ISSUES.

I always remember one of my colleagues who came from India saying he found it hilarious when people said they were “Going for an Indian”. He said it sounded like cannibalism. Truth is we are often lazy in our language.

I can remember back in my young days people would talk about going to the “Chinky” for their Chinese food. Chinky is a term that some people will find offensive, I was thinking – at the same time we would go to the Chippy for fish and chips. The term Chinky was applied to the restaurant, not to the people. Is it still offensive to use the term about a restaurant rather than a person?

The term that caused so much offence for the FA boss was “coloured”. Some people say this is offensive because everybody has a colour. But the term coloured has links to racist legislation in the USA and South Africa, so that might be more applicable as a reason why some people are offended by it. Strangely the term “Person of color” is less likely to cause offence in the USA than in the UK. How important is the perception of a person in deciding on the acceptability of language?

I decided to search for a guide on unacceptable language and I was please to find a UK police guide. I was quite surprised by some of it.

As an example, it says the term “non-white” should not be used, while the term “white” is acceptable. It is acceptable to talk about the cricket team “West Indies”, but unacceptable to describe somebody as “West Indian”. You should avoid using the term “OAP” and “kids/children”. The issue I take from this is that it is not a mathematical formula you use to determine offensiveness, otherwise both “white” and “non-white” would be equally wrong.

There were some that I found hard to accept – for example “ethnic” should not be used, but “mixed ethnic group” is acceptable.

I have diabetes – but it is apparently offensive to describe me as “a diabetic”. I thought hard about that one, then I went to search for the use of the term “diabetic”. What I found was something that disturbed me. I used three search engines – and all of them changed the search from “diabetic” to “diabetes”. Try it out. It is wrong to define somebody by an illness, so I am a “person with diabetes”. Sorry, I will not be using three words when I can use one – yes this is lazy talking but I am lazy.

God Squad motorcycle club will be interested to hear that the term “god squad” is considered offensive and should be avoided by police.

I find it hard to understand why the term “Arab” is considered unacceptable, so if anybody knows please explain it to me. I was disturbed to read that using the term “I-tie” for a person from Thailand was offensive (since the term actually refers to Italians).

I was also disappointed to hear that it is offensive to ask “Are you married?”

None of the terms listed were terms that were offensive about white people. Do they exist? Well yes, how about “Bacon Bits” or “Wigger”?

All of this is interesting to me – because I believe a clever racist can avoid using racially offensive terms. Racism is about what is inside a person and not necessarily what come out of their mouth.

Which brings us back to the head of the FA. When he used that unacceptable word he was talking about the horrific racial abuse some players have to face. Was his language a sign of inner racism, or was it just a guy that was not up on the acceptable word list who was trying to fight racists?

Negotiations are about to start on how much the government will make the BBC charge us for licence fees. And all of a sudden the Culture secretary decides to tell a newspaper that he wonders if the BBC is needed.

Is this an attempt to slip out a story while we are all talking about vaccines?

Time to scrutinise the inside pages of your newspapers.

Quite disturbing watching the Rob Rinder history of his family. You have to wonder at how many people just followed orders when they were so inhuman. Could you buy people alive?

I always remember visiting Mauthausen and being surprised at how close houses were to such a massive concentration camp.

Truth is there are people walking among us that are capable of this sort of behaviour, we just seldom see it. At least most of us don’t see it. But some of us do, our emergency services.

I then look at the aggression we see against the emergency services in protests. Yes they get in the way, yes they can be annoying. But they are the people that stand between us and real evil.

I hear the calls for defunding police in the USA and I don’t feel convinced that it is the right answer (I would suggest additional funding for training).

If the world were perfect we would not need them – but the world is far from perfect, and as Rob Rinder said, the mound over the dead of his family was not the only one in the world, there are many more and they are not relegated to the past.

The good news tonight is that the infection rates in Crosby are now lower than they were a month ago and still falling faster than expected. At this rate the infection rate will be bellow 20 by Christmas week. And that is without taking in to account lockdown and the mass testing trial.

Tonight I decided to watch the 1994 film True Lies. In it they have all this cool futuristic tech, Now, 25 years later, this tech is commonplace. Retina and fingerprint scanning, voice adjustment etc. It reminded me of the original Star Trek series and the tech it portrayed, like the communicator/flip phone lookalike. Or the data pads.

The original moon landing had a computer that some compare to a commodore pet. When you dig in to it the commodore looks high tech compared to the one actually used. Technology is moving forward at an amazing rate.

But what about the tech in other films HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey? A computer that controls so much of the space ship that it can defend itself against humans (if you want to know where the name HAL came from try moving each letter one forward in the alphabet)? Does this sound similar to Skynet?

So how long will it be before we see the first computer caused deaths? We have already seen one in Tempe Arizona when an Uber car hit a pedestrian. Of course this was during a trial and the failure of a person to stop the car is important. But as self drive cars become more regular there may well be a point where a car must decide to kill somebody because there are limited options, all of which result in deaths (the trolley problem). A pedestrian steps in front of a self drive car and it is impossible to stop in time. So does it swerve to miss the person? What if swerving was likely to kill the driver? How would the computer decide who to kill? I know – crazy problem, not likely to occur. But you can’t stop the car and programme it at the time, so the ability to make this decision needs to be incorporated into the car programming. Not including it in the programming is actually programming the car to ignore the balancing of lives.

And there we have it – we are maybe a couple of years away from a computer being able to decide between who will die. Are we happy with that? As a society are we ready?

Well, if you want to get noticed use a headline like that.

Just a word of caution to everybody – Biden has NOT been elected as president. The electoral college does that, and that does not meet till mid-December. Not all of them will vote along party lines. In addition there are still votes to count, and in some areas the last votes to be counted as overseas military – who might just be Trump supporters. The fat lady has not sung, but she is warming her voice.

The second largest number of votes for a candidate went to Donald Trump. He got massive support. We need to ask why.

In 2016 I did a road trip around the USA. I met a lot of people and watched local TV. There were so many people suffering real hardship I started to see that people were desperate for somebody to save them – and Donald Trump was offering that. I was fairly convinced by the end of the trip that he would be elected.

But why were people suffering – Obama was a great man? This week I heard Bernie Sander’s brother dump on Obama for not helping so many people that needed him and supported him. I don’t know if that was true, but for some time I have been saying the biggest gun-crime issue in the USA is suicide. On that road trip I met two people that had seen people shoot themselves.

One of the challenges to the BLM movement I would make is that it might be more accurate to say Poor Lives Matter, because that is the demographic that seems to suffer most. During the Obama reign the inequality in the USA did not change much. During the Trump reign there were economic benefits for black men.

There is another aspect of Trump that struck me. He made promises in his campaign, and he stuck with them. Okay, the wall was a bit of a failure in respect of delivery (and I would question whether it would be effective). But he promised he would build a wall and he started to build a wall. There was an aspect of “I said I would do this and I will do it”. You might hate the policies, but the idea of somebody in politics saying they will do what they promised is pretty normal.

To me these are the two areas that stood out – he did actually improve the lot of some poorer middle class groups, and he did what he said despite people trying to stop him.

Both of these factors are important to a lot of people. How many of our political parties offer them?

As we head in to another 4 week lockdown people seem to be feeling fatigue. I worry for some. But there is good news out there. For 2 months I have been tracking the infection rate in a local area (5 MSOA areas combined for the geeks).

From this you can see the rate flattens – this is just before Tier 3 was introduced. Tier 3 has resulted in a sharp drop. Remember the first lockdown – the curve went up fast and came down slow – well this curve seems to be coming down at the same rate it has gone up – and we have not yet seen the effect of the lockdown, or the mass testing that started today. It looks like good news.

Over 150 years ago the Choctaw nation (one of the “civilised tribes”) were displaced from their homeland by the white settlers. Some estimate 1500 to 4000 died on the journey. A man of Irish decent, William Armstrong, became the superintendent of indian affairs in the region. He was reported to be somebody that lived by principles, and was considered part of the community.

Then came the Irish potato famine, and William called a meeting of the settlers in the area to raise money to send back to support people in Ireland. He raised $170 (over $5000 in todays money). They discovered that most of the money did not come from white settlers, but from the Choctaw elders. They felt empathy for the people that were starving in Ireland.

Recently there has been an appeal set up to help native americans in their struggle to cope with COVID. The appeal has gone viral in Ireland, and people there have donated $1m so far – often with notes of thanks linking back to the potato famine support.

Sometimes good breeds good breeds good.

There is good in the world – we sometimes just need to look for it – and sometimes we need to be it.

Why not go visit the campaign and scroll down to see the messages – and maybe add a donation of your own.

Roughly translated from Wienerish this means “I say, would you mind moving on old chap” (okay maybe there is a reference to a part of the body). As a gunman walked around Vienna this was what one of the locals shouted at him. He chose to speak out even when his life was at risk. It reminded me of this event.

We are taught to run away from threats, but there really needs to be a time when people speak out.

We do need to speak out, but we need to speak out for the right things. It isn’t as though the troubadours have not been telling us where to look.

In the USA the election lawyers are employed by both sides. The more you look at how the process works that more you end up with questions. Trump was right in one thing he said – this is an embarrassment to the country. But instead of taking sides, surely it is more important to raise a flag to say enough is enough – people matter it isn’t a game show.

Shocking news – climate change has a new victim – Fender Guitars. The wood used traditionally is now in short supply. Get your orders in – bulk buy like mad.

I just hope they don’t use the same wood for toilet paper. Could you imagine it?

Today the USA left the climate accord.

There are some ideas around to put a carbon tax on goods from countries. But then that just starts a trade war.

Should we focus on consumption? Do we want our rock guitars to be second class?

It makes me think about the things I consume by proxy.

For some time people have been banned from public singing. Next Sunday we get an exemption to sing two songs as long as one of them is the national anthem.

So we can sing praise to the queen, and only after that can we sing praise to God.

It does reveal a priority that some people have. And we see the same in the election results tonight. Good “Christian” people believing their candidate is blessed by God because, well because he is, you know. Truth is it is because sometimes people have different Gods, like wealth. I was pleased to see one woman from Arizona say she had decided that she had got her priority wrong last time – it had been personal greed.

Good to see people being prepared to be self critical. I wish leaders were.