The Trump Omnishambles

Before Peter Capaldi regenerated as the twelfth Doctor Who, his most well known role was as Malcolm Tucker, the fictional Director of Communications for the British government in The Thick of It and In The Loop. Spin doctor and Prime Minister's enforcer, Tucker uses  rumours, smears, or threats of violence to achieve his twin aims of spinning the party line and keeping ministers out of trouble. I thought of him this week when Donald Trump popped up on television and in various parts of the internet and tried to imagine exactly how Tucker would have handled him. I imagine there would have been lots of swearing and many reference to Trump's barnet; it would not be pretty.

 Warning! This video contains language that some may find offensive...very offensive.

If opinion polls are any guide then Donald Trump appears to be gathering more support than might be expected from someone with what can only be described, from this distance at least, as extreme views. A lot of what he says seems to be prefaced with a disclaimer that he is not "politically correct." Much of what he says could equally be prefaced by a similar statement omitting the word "politically." Look at Trump's thoughts on the internet. He wants to "close it off" to certain groups, children and the so called Islamic State (IS) in particular, without having the foggiest notion of how or if that could be achieved. Like a company director instructing his IT department to develop software to do something that is impossible or impractical or cost prohibitive, he imagines that if he can think of a thing then it can be done. Up to a point he is right that the internet could be closed off, in part. Countries like China and North Korea have done it, but crucially, only for their own citizens; if Trump thinks that because he can imagine blocking IS from using the internet then it can be done, then he is going to have to think again. And blocking the internet, or parts of it, to his own citizens could violate rights of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

 

Trump. Picture: businessinsider.com

But there again Trump has views on free speech; on the one hand he would restrict it for people whose views he disagrees with while maintaining his right to speak as freely as he wishes, even if the views he espouses are objectionable to a lot of people. His views that many Mexicans in the US are criminals and rapists for instance, or that Arab Americans cheered the 9/11 attacks, that Muslims should be banned from entering the US purely on religious grounds, are all opinions that many find repugnant, but the US constitution that he would ride roughshod over for others protects him when he voices his own particular beliefs. His outspoken views have resulted in  some in this country calling for his being banned from entering the UK, which while it might be questionable while he remains simply a Presidential candidate, would be even more problematic should he be elected. And there is the gauntlet that you run when you advocate free speech; sometimes you have to listen to things you find objectionable, but as the saying goes, sometimes you may object to what someone says while defending their right to say it.

There is a popular belief that the USA is quite an insular country; that may well be a myth, but Trump's pronouncements do little to discredit that view. Given the chance he would build a wall to keep Mexicans entering the USA illegally...and he believes he can get the Mexicans to pay for it. Trump wants Apple to build their computers, their iPads ,and their iPhones in the States. Forget the costs involved (Apple manufactures their devices overseas at costs they could not compete with at home), forget the changes to laws necessary to prevent Apple (and others) outsourcing their business and it could be done...but at what cost?

About 670 miles of fencing already exists along the US-Mexico border. It cost $2.4 billion. The entire border runs for 2,000 miles. Picture: Getty Images

Trump's popularity, he leads a number of opinion polls after all, may confuse and surprise many people, but an article in The Washington Post goes some way to explain it. In a nutshell, it said that Trump has simple answers to everything, taps into a dislike or mistrust that many people have of immigrants, that many Americans are sick of the political establishment, and lastly, he says things that people have been afraid to say. Terrorism and other threats to a nation's wellbeing are very real and reasonable fears. Demonising people, exploiting people's fears and their lack of understanding have served many politicians well in many countries for centuries. Trump is just another in a long line of them.

Should Trump's apparent popularity translate itself into nomination as Republican Presidential Candidate and ultimately lead him to the White House, would he be forced to tone down his controversial statements and proposed policies on the world stage? Behind all politicians are a raft of civil servants who understand better than their elected leaders how the world works, how diplomacy works. The real life Malcolm Tuckers wield as much power and influence as elected leaders and would doubtless reign him in should he ever sit in the Oval Office. Even so, based on his pronouncements so far, it seems probable that a Trump administration would be more confrontational than its predecessors.

Trump's appeal seems to be largely with people who feel marginalised, impoverished by a remote, elitist cabal of business moguls and politicians (ironic, since Trump is one of the former and wants be become one of the latter). He promises solutions to problems without asking his supporters to consider what cost they will come at, what sacrifices will be needed.

To those of us on the eastern side of the pond, Trump's campaign has all the hallmarks of an omnishambles[1] and the first real test of his popularity comes this Monday in the Iowa caucus. As popular as the polls suggest Trump is, his advocates might consider that it is wise to be careful what you wish for; sometimes the solution can be just as unpalatable as the problem.

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[1] Omnishambles: A situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.

There's A Place In The World For A Gambler

In 2007, Novak Djokovic earned US$3,920,000 playing tennis. That same year, he alleges, someone offered him US$200,000 to lose a first-round match at a tournament in St. Petersburg, Russia, a tournament in which he did not, in the end, take part. A player ranked as highly as Djokovic, earning the sort of money that a top tennis professional can earn, is unlikely to risk his (or her) career even for a not insignificant amount like $200,000. But lower down the rankings, the temptation to throw a match for a sum that may exceed a player's earnings from not just one tournament, but several, must be huge. When you consider tennis, it is a game ripe for match fixing. Young, up and coming players, or older, journeymen players have to find the money to travel round the world, or at least across continents, to take part in tournaments they have little chance of winning and where the earnings barely cover their outgoings. To have someone offer you a large wad of cash to lose a match has to be extremely tempting.

Novak Djokovic says he refused to take a bribe in 2007. Picture: Sky Sports

Tennis is just the latest sport to find itself involved in scandal. Most recently we saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) embroiled in allegations of not just doping, but of covering up doping. This has resulted in Russia being banned from all athletics competitions, putting their participation at this summer's Rio Olympics in doubt, and three senior IAAF officials have been banned for life. A report by the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) independent commission heavily criticised IAAF president Lamine Diack, whose 16-year tenure ended in August 2015 when he was replaced by Lord Coe, who had been vice-president since 2007. Lord Coe has denied knowledge of the corruption that WADA has said was "embedded" within the organisation, and while former WADA president Dick Pound views Coe as the best person to clean up the IAAF, one has to look at that with a certain amount of scepticism, especially when Pound's own report says, "The IAAF council could not have been unaware of doping and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules," given that Coe was on that council.

Is Lord Coe the right man to restore the IAAF's image?

The four time Olympic gold medallist and now broadcaster Michael Johnson believes that the IAAF scandal surpasses that which has engulfed football's governing body, FIFA, in recent years and the goings on at FIFA have generated enough column inches and involved more high ranking officials than any sporting scandal of previous years. Add to football and athletics the spot fixing scandal that cricket found itself in during the 2010 England - Pakistan test series, and the frequent resurfacing of similar allegations, the scandal involving cyclist Lance Armstrong and the widespread belief that doping is endemic in that sport, and it begins to become increasingly difficult to believe that any sport is completely clean. Indeed, who would believe that sports in which huge sums of money can be won, either by participation or, more significantly, through gambling, could be anything other than tainted?

Personally, I have little interest in gambling, the odd flutter on the Lottery or the Grand National aside, but even if I did, I am now effectively barred from gambling on football matches or football related events anyway. In my capacity as a (very) part-time  and voluntary official of Romford FC, a club currently playing in the eighth tier of English football, I am technically prohibited by the Football Association (FA) from placing a bet with conventional bookmakers, spread betting companies, on betting exchanges or even with friends, on the outcome of any match, or any event during a match, or on any other football related matter (for example, the identity of the next manager of Leyton Orient), anywhere in the world. Yes, the FA actually prohibit a player or official of a football club playing at the eighth level of English football from placing a small wager on the outcome of the World Cup Final. You may consider this disproportionate, a very large hammer wielded at a very small nut, but it leaves no room for doubt, no capacity for interpretation, and for that reason, it is difficult to argue with.

All sporting bodies have uneasy relationships with bookmakers. There can be no doubt that the amounts of money that can be made by organised gambling syndicates through the manipulation of events leave all sports open to corruption. Long gone are the days when gambling was by and large limited to the actual outcome of a race or match, now there is so much in game betting on the next corner, the number of red or yellow cards, the next no ball, the next double fault, that bets can be fixed with no one the wiser. One might think that given the vast number of opportunities for manipulation of events that bodies like FIFA or the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) would lobby for greater controls to limit the spread of gambling within their sports. The truth is far removed. Sporting bodies seem to have adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy, even if like the English FA, they frown on their members participating in the bookmaker's activities. So while a footballer with Stoke City or West Ham United may be prohibited from placing a bet on any football match, his clubs are allowed to be sponsored by bookmakers, (Bet365 and Betway respectively). The Championship and Leagues One and Two are sponsored by Sky Bet and in 2012 the FA made bookmakers William Hill the "official betting partner" of the England team and the FA Cup while Norwich City have one stand sponsored by Coral, who offer fans mobile betting and at kiosks in the ground during matches. It may be hypocritical for an organisation to bar many of its members from gambling with a firm that it has as an official betting partner, but I suppose they are simply accepting the reality of the situation, that the bookies would exist and would make money from them anyway, so they may as well get some of it back in sponsorship.

 

Football fans can now place bets in grounds during games.

But what could sporting bodies do anyway? Back in 2013 more than £1 million was staked on Asian betting exchanges on a non-League game between Welling United and Billericay Town and while there was never any indication of wrong doing by players of either club, it just goes to show that any sporting event, anywhere in the world, will be gambled on by someone, somewhere else in the world. Any rules put in place by the FA to stop players or officials with English clubs gambling on games are not going to stop the gambling going on in the Far East or other parts of Europe and by extension, risking players being approached with financial inducements to influence events on the pitch.

Welling United's game with Billericay Town attracted more wagers than a Champions League game involving Barcelona played the same day.

To quote Dan Fogelberg, " There's a place in the world for a gambler" but increasingly it is looking like sport is not that place, well not if we want to maintain the illusion of integrity anyway. We all want to watch sports and believe that they are straight, that the outcome has not been fixed in advance either because an athlete has taken drugs or a tennis player has taken a bribe, but while there is money to be made from gambling on sport, I wouldn't bet on it.

As I Get Older

Janet and John taught me to read; Ladybird taught me about the world. The first Ladybird book was published in 1914 and the hardback format, comprising 56 pages (chosen so that book could be produced from a single 40 inch by 30 inch sheet) has been a familiar and comforting sight to millions of British children. That format has gone the way of many things that the early books were written about, like steam trains, but old style Ladybird books remain highly collectable, and it is probably for that reason, and to tap into a seam of nostalgia, that the imprint has been revived with a series of books for adults.

Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups are written and produced in a style that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who read Ladybirds as a child. The content, although presented in that familiar manner, is very different from what we remember. The illustrations may have been taken from earlier editions, but the text, while it mimics the manner of the old, is a parody...or is it? Well, yes of course it is a parody, but one that is just one step removed from the truth. As is so often the case with the absurd or the surreal, it needs to have enough of a root in reality to both amuse and make its point.

I bought Val How it Works: The Husband (Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups) for Christmas, and at 56 pages of large print text and alternate pages of illustrations, it isn't a challenging read, nor a long one, but it is a book that genuinely makes you laugh out loud (there are plenty of books that claim to make you laugh out loud, in my experience very few do). And the main reason it makes you laugh (well, made me - and Val - laugh) is because some of it is uncannily accurate. The husband, it says, "has a very big memory. He can remember football scores (and) all his old car number plates," however, "he cannot remember what his wife asked him to bring back from the shops. This is because his brain is full up, not because he was not listening." 

Easy to remember.

There is a grain of truth here; research suggests that women speak about 20,000 words a day, while men get by on 7,000. Men's brains may not be full up, but there's a possibility that after a certain point, we run out of temporary memory because we cannot assimilate that many words in a day.

Difficult to remember

Apparently, the husband "finds some things very difficult. Being wrong is one of these things." Amen to that, although I somehow think that most people, man or woman, husband or wife, find being wrong difficult, although there is I suppose a corollary, that being wrong should be quite easy, considering how we usually get better at things with practice.

While I find that as I get older I become increasingly like my father (I think most men, for better or for ill, eventually start to morph into their fathers), I have not inherited his DIY skills. Now my father was a man who, coming from a generation for whom 'make do and mend' was a way of life, was adept at most jobs around the house. He was a fairly decent woodworker for instance, making bookcases and frames for home made secondary glazing, skills which I have singularly failed to inherit. I have always felt (and you may consider this a self serving justification if you wish) that DIY is a task which is more likely to be performed successfully if you have the right tools, but given that the cost of buying the right tools might be an expense that cannot be justified for the occasional task, it is often more cost effective to pay someone to do a job. An alternative, as suggested by The Husband , is to improvise, thus a screw driver may be pressed into service to open a jar of pickled onions and a shoe may be used as a substitute for a hammer when putting up pictures. In my experience there are few jobs that do not require the services of a bradawl, while I also find that a screwdriver is probably the most versatile  tool a man can own...sometimes it can even be used for tightening screws.

Men, as the book accurately tells us, find it difficult to talk about their feelings. If you gather a group of men together they will talk about anything but their feelings, even if this means talking about a subject they know nothing about (not that any of them will admit such ignorance). When I have met up with some of my old friends, Val will ask me later about their wives and children; on most occasions I have to admit that beyond being able to confirm that they are OK, I know little or nothing. It is comforting to know that I am by no means unique in this respect, because our invaluable guide suggests that this is typical of the husband.

The Husband also reveals that as he grows older, "he starts to make lots of funny little noises," for instance he "pom-pom-poms as he goes from room to room." I have to confess I do make odd noises at certain times; sitting down or getting up, reaching up for something or just randomly. I also find myself singing (reciting might be a better term for it) random snatches of songs. This does seem a uniquely male trait; I have never heard a woman do it, but I have worked with many men who, in an otherwise quiet office, would suddenly burst into song. It would always be the same song, always the same line - I do it myself, it's a sort of verbal tic, or as the book says, is done to prove you are still there.

As well as this book, I find increasingly that there are things I read, or quizzes that I complete, that prove that as I get older I am becoming more set in my ways and at the same time (and somewhat contradictorily) slightly eccentric, but I am comforted by the fact that while on the face of it some of the character traits described in this book may be thought odd, I am obviously not unusual in exhibiting them. I was going to say that I'm normal in displaying them, but then I remembered that just because something is common or not unusual, it is not necessarily normal.

One of the things that I have always prided myself on is my memory. Increasingly however, I find that it is becoming an unreliable, if not hostile, witness. The only succour I can take is that again, I am not unusual, as this list proves, as apart from any others I find numbers five and ten to be particularly true.

To address number five I have a little notebook for things I need to remember. Now if only I could remember where it is, I'd be laughing.

No Static At All

I bought a DAB radio recently. I didn't intend to, it came with the new car I bought. And I'd not previously considered buying a DAB radio for use in the house because there has never been an incentive to do so.  I'm not alone in that it seems, because while the UK currently has the world's biggest digital radio network, less than half the UK's adult population owned a DAD radio in 2013 (the last year I can find figures for). In fact, in 2013 sales of DAB radios were lower than they had been in 2009. Indications are that, unlike television, which went digital in the UK in October 2012, a complete switch to digital radio in this country is unlikely before 2020.

DAB Radio

 

New car

Despite the anecdotal belief that DAB radio has better sound quality, the fact is that in the UK the majority of radio stations broadcasting digitally do so using a bit rate level of 128 kbps with the MP2 audio codec, which provides poorer sound quality than FM[1].  The techradar website says that "many DAB radio stations in the UK are broadcast at just 64kbps mono using the MP2 codec. That really is mono not stereo. That really is MP2 and not MP3."[2] Not, I'll be honest, that that means much to me in terms of what I'm listening to in the car. Since my stations of choice for listening while driving are generally talk stations like BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5, the difference I am enjoying is that the latter station, which is only otherwise broadcast on Medium Wave, has lost the "snap, crackle and pop" that you associate with MW. I cannot detect any discernible difference in sound quality between FM and DAB, however, except that DAB has a tendency to break up when I drive into a multi-storey car park and the signal disappears for a split second or so every now and then. But then listening while driving is perhaps not the best time to compare audio fidelity.

What I do like about DAB is the choice. Scrolling through the list of available stations I have found a few that speak to me as a man of my age, principally Absolute Radio 80's, which, as the name suggests, plays music from the 1980's. We all probably have a decade that we remember with more affection than any other, a decade we would happily travel back to and experience again, given the chance, and for me that decade would be the 1980's, for a whole host of reasons. And it's the music that evokes such memories and transported me back thirty odd years, music from Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera, Culture Club and Queen, The Rolling Stones and The Cure; a sound track to years when I was in my 20's.

There was some great music produced in the 1980's with Thompson Twins and Steve Winwood just two of the acts that would get in my all time Top Ten, but surpassing them all, the album that for me is the 1980's, would have to be The Lexicon of Love, by ABC. In fact I would go further than to say this is the album of the 1980's, it has to be in my personal top five; if I ever had to compile a list of Desert Island Discs, this would be the first one on the list, which may come as a surprise to those who know me and my particular taste for prog, from Genesis to Big Big Train, from Yes to Porcupine Tree.

What is it about The Lexicon of Love that is so special? Firstly it is the medium it was initially released in, that is to say, vinyl. The norm for a vinyl LP being around twenty minutes per side, ABC's album comes in at 37 minutes 25 seconds. Concise, lean and without a wasted second or any padding, this album is an exemplar of how to make a pop record. The tendency today to pad a CD out to over an hour with superfluous remixes and demos of dubious merit did not apply in 1982 when this was released, because although the first commercial CD was released that same year[3] it wasn't until 1985 when Dire Straits released Brothers In Arms that the UK CD market took off.

Secondly there's the sound. The lush strings and sax combine with the more typical pop sound of guitars and keyboards in a way that no other album before or since has achieved in my opinion. And it's infectious, the sort of album that you want to sing along to (in my case, in the car, alone, as my singing is terrible). I'll admit that the lyrics aren't especially deep, although they are at least better than on a subsequent ABC album, Beauty Stab, where "mustn't grumble" is rhymed with "apple crumble" (the song is That Was Then But This Is Now), however this album is testament to the saying, "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," and the parts are pretty damned good anyway. After the austerity of the 1970's, aka the decade that style forgot, the 1980's bands like ABC and Duran Duran were at the forefront of the fashion parade and the whole package of The Lexicon of Love, including the album sleeve screams "style!"

In 1978, Steely Dan promised "FM (No Static at All)" and despite the claims made by DAB's supporters, I repeat that I haven't detected any real difference in sound quality between the formats. Whether the future is FM, or DAB, or internet radio however, there are two elements of music radio that tend to have me reaching for the off button; adverts and DJs. Television adverts are bad enough but there must be a special place in Hell reserved for those who write or produce radio ads, although given the fact that by the sound of most of them they are done on a budget of a couple of quid, it should come as little surprise that they are so dreadful. As for DJs, even the best of them spout such inane drivel and give the impression that needletime[4] is still in place (or more probably they just like the sound of their own voices). I once heard a critic (it may even have been an actual DJ) state that ultimately all DJs chatter is as interesting as the temperature of their coffee and it is difficult to argue with that.

If nothing else, DAB radio, or more specifically Absolute Radio '80s has taken me on a nostalgic trip down memory lane and made me dig out some CDs that hadn't seen the light of day for a while, but The Lexicon of Love is the one playing in my head.

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[1] Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_in_the_United_Kingdom#Criticisms_of_DAB_in_the_UK)

[2] http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/why-dab-radio-in-the-uk-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it-1217586

[3] Billy Joel: "52nd Street" was released in Japan in 1982.

[4] Needletime was the restriction that existed limiting the amount of recorded music UK radio stations could play in a 24 hour period. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_time