Idea IS the format

This is the simplest explanation I’ve encountered of what’s just happened to the global financial system. The fact that it was originally used to describe the events leading up to the Great Depression is, well, depressing.

I was down at my parents’ house recently and my dad was lamenting the fact that his father was a banker, at a time when it was regarded as a highly reputable vocation.  In his day the purpose of a bank was to aggregate wealth, so that anybody needing to borrow some money in order to buy a house or start a business would have the opportunity to do so.

In that respect everybody was investing in each other, backing their readiness to work hard and create things of tangible value, stimulating the growth of the economy through inventiveness and endeavour.  A bank was able to make a decent profit on this, through the provision of what was an essentially administrative service.

Nowadays banking is rightly regarded as a dark art, driven by springs and principles very few of us could ever claim to fully understand.  My dad’s point was that a bank’s core value to the consumer hasn’t changed, but that we no longer differentiate between these necessary services and the devlishly intricate high-stakes gambling of the stockmarket.

We seem to somehow imagine that there is something reputable about share dealing, just because the men who practice it aren’t sitting in Ladbrokes reeking of stale smoke, fresh urine and abject desperation.

For my part, I can’t find anything reputable about sharking around the city in a sharp suit playing dice with somebody else’s money.  My money, in fact, and yours.  If it was their own hard-earned savings, do you think it would have end up tied up in sub-prime mortgages masquerading as Triple-A bonds?

And guess what?  Now they need to borrow some more, just to keep the game going, just to keep themselves in the next hand.  And they need somebody to lend it to them?  What kind of an idiot would do that?

Yup, you guessed it, that’d be you, and me, and anybody else who’s going to be paying taxes on the flipside of the next election, for about the next decade.  Because, of course, we all need a healthy banking sector.  We all need to be able to buy houses and and start businesses.  And that means paying for everything that goes with it, everything coming under the ever-widening remit of our ‘world-leading’ financial services sector.

Like my dad, I’ve never thought of socialism as a dirty word. I’m on the record that I’ll happily pay a little more of my earnings as taxes, if I feel confident that it’s being used for the benefit of society as a whole.  By which, in the broadest imaginable strokes, I mean the advancement of the welfare state, and the implementation of essentially humanitarian foreign policy.

When I stop feeling quite so benevolent is the point at which the same money is being used to indulge a cartel of greedy, morally bankrupt serial gamblers, who are at their most inventive when they’re doing their book-keeping.

No doubt they’ll argue that it was our mistake, yours and mine, that we borrowed beyond our means, and that we are the greedy ones, not them.

I disagree.

The first financial service I expect from my bank, my building society and my mortgage advisor is that they pool the extent of their knowledge and expertise in order to help me make informed decisions about borrowing.

If they can’t offer me that, they needn’t bother calling me up once a month to try and sell me a loan.  If they can’t offer me that, they become just another loan shark, feeding on weakness and misfortune to satisfy their own pathetic addiction.

As far as I’m concerned, they ought to want to invest in my long-term future, not to sell me down the river in the name of a fast buck.

Guess I’m kind of old-fashioned like that.

Picked this up on The Jed Report, the first port of call for anyone outside the US wanting some choice video comment and coverage in the build up to the election. Probably helps if you’re a left-winger. Of course, compared to Joe the Witch Hunter, who isn’t?

In other news, Colin Powell (Republican and Dubya’s former Secretary of State) eloquently endorses Barack Obama. Check out Jed’s montage below, picking out Powell’s key points and supporting them with highlights from the campaign trail so far:

This is from a few nights ago. McCain and Obama both spoke for ten minutes at the Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner. McCain’s routine is pretty good value, but for my money Obama edges him on material and delivery.  You’ll need to have been keeping up with the campaign in order to enjoy it, but, if you have, it’s well worth the ten minutes.

Interesting to note that there’s not one mention of Sarah Palin by either candidate.  I get the impression the Obama camp have taken a conscious decision to leave her out of it, given that Obama avoided any direct references to Palin during each of his debates, and Biden was very careful in how was seen to handle her at the VP equivalent.

The effect of this has been to leave her looking as marginalised as the angry right-wingers her rally performances appeal to, undermining her ability to gain any real traction with the middle ground, where this election is being fought and the outcome will be decided.

This has worked particularly well because John McCain himself hasn’t made any effort to counteract it.  Watching him try to defend his choice of Palin on Letterman, I think he’s happier than anybody to keep her off the agenda, and to restrict her media presence to a fleeting cameo on Saturday Night Live.  That’s probably also worth a look, given that it’s apparently comedy hour on Idea IS the format:

Long time readers of Idea IS the format may remember an early post entitled The Scrabble Series Part 1: Playing the Board, from way back in January.  I talked about the possibility of a second in the series, but never really expected to write it.

This is the new Scrabble app on Facebook, replacing an unofficial version muscled out by Mattel and Hasbro once they were ready to usurp its substantial userbase with their own mediocre alternatives.  Hasbro have rolled theirs out in the States, and Mattel have launched this version for the rest of the world.

It’s not half as tactile or easy-to-use as Scrabulous was, and I’ve been tending to avoid online Scrabble anyway, being that it can end up being a very disruptive element in the context of my already undisciplined ways, so it’s taken me a while to get to trying it out.

I have settled down recently for a game or two though, and on both occasions we started and concluded the games in the same sitting.  The game shown above was played tonight between myself and the auld enemy, Walter Micklethwait, currently to be found tickling trout and building bothies in the Cairngorms.

Walter and I see each other far too rarely these days, given that we once enjoyed the spoils of living in the same building down Homerton way.  Between instant messenger and the Scrabble board it felt tonight as though we’d almost sat down together for a couple of hours, catching up on each others news, and matching each other very well on the board.

I’m of a mind to continue this trend, playing the occasional sit-down game in amiable company, rather than having any number of different matches on the go at any given time.  It allows you to develop a definite continuity, in terms of how you play the board and manage your hand.  It also forces you to play a faster game, which better equips you for playing my father-in-law.

This is the point at which, following the single-post precedent for my Scrabble series, I now relate this in some way to the work I do marketing movies on the web.  I could easily post-rationalise it into a look at the value of giving something and/or someone your full attention, but that would be boring.

What I will tell you is that the company and conversation is key.  When I’m stimulated and enjoying myself, I play better, win more often and lose more graciously.  I’m able to appreciate the other guy, and ready to play a little loose and try to find the moves to earn their respect.

A good creative company offers exactly that – good company. The conversations that guide and stimulate your progress should be compelling ones, even if you’re losing.

If you’re reading this chances are you are trying to access one of the picture galleries on Ploggle – we call them ‘plogs’.

Due to a recent abuse of our service we’ve taken all the plogs offline, and are now re-activating them on request. If you have a plog and would like us to make it available to the world once more, please send an email to daniellight@gmail.com including your username, password and the name of the plog(s) you’d like us to re-activate.

If you are not the owner of a plog, but there is one in particular you would like to see back online, either email me or post details in a comment below, and I’ll look into it.

We’re not accepting any new registrations with Ploggle until further notice.

You can find out why it was necessary to shut Ploggle down in the first place by reading this post, and can read all about the history of Ploggle here.

[UPDATED 10.30am 18/10/08] Figured exactly why I rate this so highly – Fincher tells more of a story in sixty seconds than a lot of film directors manage in two hours, and he does it with a hell of a lot more style. If The Wire is the very best of long-form cinema, this must be the ultra-short-form equivalent.

When she was asked by Charles Gibson of CBS news if she had paused even for a moment to consider whether she was experienced enough to run as McCain’s VP, Sarah Palin famously told him “no, because you can’t blink”.  You can wink, of course, by all means, wink away, but you can’t blink.  That’s all well and good, but somebody should have told John McCain.

Here’s a little slice of the Blinkmeister in action:

By my reckoning McCain blinks 57 times in just 28 seconds.  That’s more than twice a second. On that basis, he would have blinked a total of 7,332 times through the course of last night’s hour-long debate.  (By contrast, Obama can be seen here blinking just 20 times.  That puts him at a mere 2,571 blinks overall.  Compared to McCain, Obama’s catching flies on his eyeballs.  He’s like a bush-baby on crystal meth.  The man is certainly not blinking every 0.491 seconds, not like Blinky McBlinkster over there.)

Stay with me on this.  A normal person under no undue pressure blink just 960 times in an hour.  Opinions appear divided on whether rapid blinking is evidence that the somebody is trying to be deceitful, but it seems to be more widely accepted that “to assess mental stress, especially in a social situation, blinking is supposed to be one of the more reliable biological measurements.”  McCain certainly appeared to be undergoing a certain amount of mental stress.

Not only did McCain appear somewhat stressed, but, occasionally, just a little frustrated.  One might even say… angry.

It was ironic that McCain was the less composed of the two men, being that Obama was the subject of more frequent slurs on his character.  McCain finally dared to level some of the charges his campaign has put to Obama relating to his various ‘associations’.

Obama provided a brief convincing rebuttal of McCain’s smear, then tried to refocus the discussion on his policies.  McCain followed his lead, turning his attention to… Obama’s policies.  Of course, if you had a platform as makeshift as McCain’s you probably wouldn’t want to stand on it either.  Or under it. Or anywhere near it.

With time running out, McCain needed to find the knockout punch from somewhere.  Stress was turning to anger, anger to desperation, and eventually desperation turned to… melodrama:

(Of course, to appreciate this you’d probably need to know that this…

…is one of the most viewed videos on Youtube. It’s been watched over 5 million times.  Mostly, I’ll wager, by Democrats.)

Obama, meanwhile…

In previous debates, I’ve detected a lot of vitriol directed at John McCain.  When I say vitriol, I mean, say, something like this:

Last night, by the end of the debate, a more generous spirit was starting to emerge.  As McCain summed up telling us all about the long line of McCains who had served in the army, travelling the world, meeting new and interesting people, and killing them, it was hard not to feel a twinge of pity for the old war-horse.  Seeming humble, some might even say broken, he finished by asking the American people to grant him the honour of serving as their President.

Where to begin?

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re trying to access Ploggle, either as one of our few thousand registered users, or because you want to look at somebody else’s photo gallery.  Here are the things you need to know, at their very simplest:

1. We have taken Ploggle offline, because of an official complaint about the use of the site to host indecent images of children.
2. We have no current plans to bring Ploggle back online.
3. If you are a user of Ploggle, we will be making all your photos available to download as soon as possible.

We received a formal notification from our web hosting company earlier today that the site had violated the following clause of their terms of service:

1.4.4) Sites must not contain pornographic or other lewd material. Adult Material includes all pornography, erotic images, or otherwise lewd or obscene content. The designation of “adult material” is left entirely to the discretion of Fasthosts.

This was as a response to a complaint by the Internet Watch Foundation.  One positive we can take from this is that they were able to monitor the content on Ploggle in a way that we were not, and we’re grateful to them for drawing our attention to this.

You can read the back-story of Ploggle on one of my previous posts – suffice it say say it’s a web-based photo gallery service that anyone can freely sign up to and post pictures to, a bit like Flickr.

It’s been running for almost five years now, and has never looked like becoming in any way commercially viable, but it has brought us – and, we hope, other people – a great deal of pleasure.  That is the sole reason why we have both invested the time, effort and money required to keep it up and running.

What’s particularly upsetting about this development is that so many people, including ourselves, use Ploggle to share pictures of our families, including young children.  To think of somebody using it as a vehicle for child pornography is very disturbing, and makes us realise that the time has come to reassess Ploggle’s future.

It may be that we decide to put the site back up for its existing users, and refuse to accept any new members.  That would mean a complete sweep through the hundreds of thousands of photos on the server in order to check for any other content of this nature, eliminating the possibility of a further issue, which might lead to prosecution.

Alternatively, we could put the site back up, but require active users to specifically request that their content is brought back online.  This would make the task of content moderation a bit more manageable, but would require more time and effort on our part in terms of processing requests as they arrive.

The other option is to shut Ploggle down for good.  It would be a terrible shame to do so, but I think this latest development has caused us to question whether it is really worth the effort of overcoming this kind of obstacle.

WHATEVER WE DECIDE TO DO, OUR FIRST PRIORITY WILL BE TO MAKE SURE THAT ALL OUR USERS CAN DOWNLOAD ANY PHOTOS THEY HAVE UPLOADED TO PLOGGLE.  WE WILL LET YOU KNOW HOW AS SOON AS WE HAVE A MECHANISM TO DO SO IN PLACE.

If you are a Ploggle user, either posting photos or enjoying someone else’s galleries, you can use the comments box below to tell us what you think, or you can reach me at daniellight@gmail.com.

If enough people feel strongly enough that they would like us to bring Ploggle back online, we will try to find a way to do so.

I’m reading on TIMES ONLINE that McCain and Palin have ‘fallen out’ over the direction of their campaign. There’s not much in the article to substantiate this, beyond a quote from ‘a leading Republican consultant’ suggesting that she can see things getting away from them, and has one eye on topping the ticket in 2012.

I find the idea that Palin’s reputation and political future could outlive this election as terrifying as it is ridiculous. The McCain campaign has been awash with mistakes, a fact a growing number of staunch Republican consultants and commentators seem ready to admit, but surely the single greatest mistake was his choice of running mate.

To think of her being back here in four years time looking to oust an incumbent Obama seems just absurd. Surely the GOP will be able to muster somebody better than Palin, she being so inextricably linked to what’s shaping up as one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns in their history.

I’d have thought the big upside for them when they lose this election will be sending her straight back to the middle of nowhere, exiling the politics of hate-mongering and provincial ignorance in the process.

Or, as Time Blog‘s Ana Marie Cox put it:

Just back from the hospital. Turns out this is what the damn medics put in my leg:

The plate’s pinned to the larger of the two broken bones, the tibia. That’s the one that had the break and the spiral fracture.  If you look at the picture top right you can see the break in the fibula. From what I gather this gear is in for keeps, so I guess I better get used to being trousered by airport security for the rest of my days.

The leg itself looked happy enough when they took the cast off, insofar as it didn’t come away in their hands, nor has it turned a malodorous verdant hue.  I counted sixteen stitches in total, along the line of promises to be a nice tidy scar.

Needless to say, though the body heals, there are scars on the inside that will last forever.  Getting ripped on morphine in South Korean A+E.  Washing down a cocktail of five different painkillers with a glass of Krug flying first class with Korean Air.  Lolling around in bed for a fortnight, waited on hand and foot, getting loaded on codeine and intravenous election commentary.

These are the memories are a part of me now, they will be with me forever.  Please, don’t pity me.  One day I’ll look back and laugh.  With the help, that is, of a little bit of nitrous oxide.