Second Money

Today I read that the FBI has closed down a site called Silk Road, with possible impact on Bitcoins.

I hadn’t heard of a Bitcoin. Apparently it’s a “virtual currency”. You buy bitcoins with real money, and use them online to buy stuff. When I heard about this, I was puzzled. I’ve heard of Second Life – a very useful resource for people who don’t have a first life. This sounded like a Second Income – for people who don’t have real money.

It turns out to be more like a Second Expenditure. Bitcoins are actually quite expensive. And then their value jumps up and down, like a real currency, even without the Feds taking an interest.

Which still leaves two questions. (1) Who determines that they are worth anything at all? And (2) Why not buy (online or otherwise) with pounds or dollars?

On the first point, the BBC explains that bitcoins “have value because enough people believe they do and there is a finite number of them”. Like Premiership footballers, or Royal Mail shares, or houses, or hostages, or snooker results. Or real money, come to that. Terry Pratchett wrote of “the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there forever – provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look.” (Does anything have intrinsic value? Another topic, another day.)

On the second point, an important point is that you can use bitcoins anonymously. It’s about privacy. Some people prefer to buy stuff without divulging their identity. That’s why I wear a balaclava when I go to Tesco. That’s also why money-launderers like bitcoins: and that’s why the FBI are interested in their use.

And if the bottom falls out of the Bitcoin? I guess the bad guys will just have to go back to trading in snooker results.

Let the right one in

Like a good Tory, Theresa May is very upset when people can’t find jobs, and would like to take any measure possible to help, as long as it doesn’t involve spending any money.

One problem, of course, is that people are coming from overseas and taking jobs as road-sweepers and dentists. (Of course, trouble-makers have suggested that such jobs are either beneath or beyond home-grown candidates.)

So Ms May is asking GPs to check up on people’s immigration status. Foreigners out – problem solved.

Trouble is, the GPs haven’t got time. Nor have the teachers, library staff, etc. who will doubtless be asked to join in.

So who can perform this splendid and worthwhile duty?

The unemployed, of course. The government already wants them to work for their dole. They won’t get the dignity of a proper contract or proper pay, of course. What they can be given – at a relatively small outlay – is a nice uniform and a big stick. Then send them out looking for foreigners.

Two birds, one stone. I wonder why it hasn’t been tried before?

The end of an earache

(Headline borrowed from The Guardian, November 1990)

When George Best died, former team-mates such as Denis Law wept openly. It was hardly a shock: Best had clearly been drinking himself to death for a long time. But I suspect his friends were also weeping for the career that was wasted thirty years earlier. And somehow they couldn’t weep before. Because when Best left Manchester United, there was still a chance he might find his way back: and as it became clear he wouldn’t, somehow the moment for weeping had passed.

In a similar way, perhaps, it was difficult to rejoice greatly when Thatcher resigned, because her party remained in power. (For over six years. And New Labour, despite its name, did nothing to change or refresh our travails.) So the moment for rejoicing passed. And now, in a mirror image of Law’s tears for Best, we are catching up on the partying we did not do 20 years ago.

Thatcher’s death is not in itself noteworthy or newsworthy. (I am sorry, did you think she was immortal?) She was 87. She retired long ago: any damage she did, she ceased to do in 1990. Some things she may have left beyond repair, like George Best’s liver: but many others we have destroyed without her help.

The important thing, having partied (or wept, if you prefer), is to put her behind us. The world has changed. Her policies are no longer relevant. Her insistence that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist is no longer helpful. Nor is her policy of closing down factories and communities, now that we hardly have any. The good news is, we don’t have to feel we are under her shadow any more. She’s gone. Let’s move on.

Funny peculiar

As a comedian, Stephen Fry knows that timing is everything.

All the more surprising, then, that in a recent edition of QI he told a rude limerick about a churchman and a choirboy. I don't know whether he was trying to score points for being Anti-Clerical, or for being Gay-And-Able-To-Laugh-About-It. But I would have thought "jokes" about child abuse were better left until the fuss about Jimmy Savile has died down a bit.

Waiting for the man to jump

Remember that scene in Lethal Weapon, when the policeman approaches the man on the high ledge? He handcuffs himself to the man, and (to our shock and amusement) the policeman jumps them both off. And he gets off the landing mat and says: That was fun, let’s do it again.

Now imagine, instead of one psychotic policeman there are fifty. And imagine the man on the ledge is the chief of police. And imagine they roped themselves to him inside the building, and then dragged him onto the precipice. And now they jump.

That would be silly.

But essentially, that is what is about to happen in the USA. And there doesn’t seem to be a soft landing – except if the Republicans land on their heads. Amusing? If America jumps off a fiscal cliff, we may laugh – just until we realise that the rope attached to the last man is tangled round our legs.

Collateral damage

Hemingway, I think, said that first-time spectators at bullfights are shocked, not at the death of the bull (for that is the point of the exercise) but at the death of the horses.

It seems that before the matador appears, men on horses stick spikes in the bull’s shoulders to make him angry. This works. He responds by charging at the horses. Their death is shocking because it is incidental: they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the police officers mown down like Space Invaders in Leon. Or Ben Kinsella.

Or Jacintha Saldanha.

I’m sure it is very amusing having a joke at the expense of someone rich and famous. I expect it is fun throwing rocks at fire crews, or attacking linesmen. And if those people suffer, I suppose they (like the bull) must accept this as their purpose in life. And if someone else dies because the fire engine fails to arrive, we shake our heads in sorrow and say we didn’t mean any harm.

But even convicted prisoners are protected by national and international law from being publicly humiliated. Nurses, it seems, are not. 

I don’t pretend, of course, that the UK has a clean record in the humane treatment of prisoners (or nurses). We used, for example, to send convicts to Australia. But these days, we recognise that this is cruel and inhuman. After all, Australia contains radio stations like 2Day FM.

Lest we remember

Can a TV celebrity – who turns out to have been a child-molester – be “erased” from the records? His blue plaques can be melted down; charities can drop his name like a hot (and diseased) potato. The damage to his victims is not so easily removed. Nor can we, who used to like the man, retrospectively alter that fact.

But, however symbolically, we can – and must – refuse to recognise any honour (formal or informal) which he enjoyed.

We are told, for example, that the Vatican need not posthumously withdraw a papal knighthood: because it ceases on the holder’s death. Not good enough. Better to declare that he never was a papal knight.

Can’t be done? Sure it can. Lance Armstrong is not a former champion: he never won the Tour de France. Look it up.

(Go further. Unlike papal knighthood, sainthood is intrinsically retrospective: it can only be awarded after the person dies. Can’t it similarly be withdrawn? Some of the church’s mediaeval “saints”, re-examined, might turn out to have been murderous bigots – in the manner of the 9/11 killers. Should they keep their honour?)

By the way, I’m not pointing any fingers at the broadcaster, the hospitals, the charities for whom a child-molester may have worked. They are rather victims (albeit very much secondary victims) of his duplicity.

In the same way, the Hillsborough revelations – however disturbing – will not erase the heroism of PC Bill Barker, who died defending a flood-hit community three years ago this month. Nor that of WPC Fiona Bone and WPC Nicola Hughes, recently murdered.

Nor (as we approach Remembrance Day) should we doubt the heroism of Lt Edward Drummond-Baxter and L/Cpl Siddhanta Kunwar, the latest of our soldiers to die in Afghanistan. If the war itself is idiotic, so was the “Great War” of 1914-18. And that does not stop us honouring those who served and died.

Their names will live forever.

Some names I would sooner forget.