Dadblog

Before we start this, I am a Manchester United fan. There, I’ve said it. My family is from Manchester (some of them via North Wales), I lived there until I was about four (although I was born in Essex for reasons too complicated to go into here), and I’ve supported United ever since I can remember - in our family, it was either United or City, and my Dad supported United, so the choice was sort of made for me.

But enough about me. This is about Chelsea. The papers are full of a growing cacophony of praise for Jose Mourinho and his works, for the team of apparent superbeings he has created, for the relentless Blue march towards what could be English football’s first “quadruple” - Premiership, FA Cup, League Cup and Champions League.

Mourinho is a talented man, clearly. Some of the players he has in his side are exceptional. Chelsea are long overdue a winning streak. But still this is all very, very wrong. Because the reason for all this success is the money of Roman Abramovich, and this money was earned immorally.

Last May, Guardian Weekend ran an investigation into Abramovich’s millions. It includes this:

The Sibneft minder shrugs his shoulders and Sterhov continues. “After Abramovich won the ‘loans for shares’ auction in 1995, we became Sibneft employees and the company stopped our wages for two, three, four months at a time.”

The Sibneft minder nods vigorously. “It’s true. That’s right,” he says. “Our wages were held back.” Sterhov continues: “Sibneft said it couldn’t afford to pay us. The country was heading for another financial crisis, and by August 1998, when the economy collapsed for the second time, people here were desperate. Then Sibneft started saying that although it couldn’t pay our wages, it would buy any shares left over from the privatisations of 1992.”

Company shops sprang up in Noyabrsk and Muravlenko, where the Sibneft shares were accepted instead of money. “Food, fridges, anything,” says Sterhov - a claim that would be repeated by many Sibneft employees we interviewed in Muravlenko and Noyabrsk. This was not the only way that Sibneft ended up with the bulk of the shares. An account of Sibneft’s complex financial manoeuvrings, produced by Russian analysts and seen by Weekend, confirms that in August 1997 Sibneft issued 45 million new shares in one of its most profitable subsidiary companies.

Core shareholders such as Abramovich and his partners were able to increase their stake in this subsidiary from 61% to 78% in this closed share issue. As a result, the shares belonging to workers who had bought into the subsidiary in 1992 were watered down and significantly dropped in value. The Sibneft workers launched a futile legal action while the £168m in extra revenue raised by the share issue was used by Sibneft to settle tax liabilities.

Christopher Granville, chief strategist of United Financial Group, a brokerage in London, told us, “Sibneft’s minority shareholders were completely ripped off. The new shares were a closed subscription offered only to core shareholders.” The Sibneft minder sitting beside us chips in. “My shares plummeted in value, along with everyone else’s, when the 1997 closed share issue was announced.”

Read the article. It will shock you. And then get really cross with Richard Williams in today’s Guardian when he says this:

The source of Abramovich’s money will also be examined again, accompanied by the suggestion that it is not right for the proceeds of Siberian oil wells to fund such deals.

Whatever distaste one might feel for the way he acquired his billions, in a free society his right to spend them as he wishes can hardly be questioned. But if there is any truth in the Cole allegation, this might be a good opportunity to remind him of the need to play by the rules.

No, Richard. In a free society, a guy who patently ripped off thousands of people would not be able to purchase a public platform in such a way that an entire sport is distorted. In a free society, football clubs run efficiently and professionally should not see their fortunes undercut by one inhuman oligarch with an open wallet and a broken razor. I seem to remember Robert Maxwell getting into all sorts of trouble when he owned Oxford United. Isn’t Abramovich the bigger menace to decent society? And why is no-one asking that question?

This is fabulous: from an original idea by Russell Beattie, Interconnected has made an RSS feed of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, so you can read a page a day in your RSS reader.

More please. More more more.

Nice post on GU’s Newsblog today, are you a technosexual?: the word apparently means “a male with a strong aesthetic sense and a love of technology”. There’s “technomacho” as well, which is presumably a little more alpha geek (Sun Solaris rather than Mac Mini).  The first comment on the story rights asks why technosexuals have to be exclusively male. The second comment, hilariously, is this:

That would make Apple the Anne Summers of the technosexual shopping mall.  I’m amazed the Apple store on Regent St. doesn’t have little booths where you can disappear for 10 minutes and come out looking flushed.

Calvin and Hobbes, as any fule kno, is the finest comic strip in the known universe. One of the running gags is that Calvin likes to make snowmen which are a little, shall we say, vicious.

Well, someone’s done it. They’ve made real snow versions of those snowmen.  What a wonderful world we live in. (via Boing Boing).

From the Telegraph: Scientists serious about ‘electricity sickness’ claims:

Some researchers believe a proportion of the population suffers ill health, with symptoms including fatigue, severe headaches and skin problems, because of exposure to electromagnetic fields. Other scientists say there is no evidence.

The Swedish government, which recognised EHS as a physical impairment in 2000, calculates that 3.1 per cent of its population – 200,000 people – suffer from the condition. A recent warning by Sir William, head of the NRPB and the Health Protection Agency, that parents should limit their children’s use of mobile phones received widespread publicity.

However, his suggestion that another section of the population, as well as the young, could have extra sensitivity to exposure to either radio frequency fields from mobiles or electromagnetic fields in general did not.

The NRPB has commissioned Dr Neil Irvine, of the Health Protection Agency, to carry out a review of existing scientific literature on EHS.

Chris Morris isn’t behind this, is he?

Yes, yes, I know I’m very boring on the subject, but here we go again: religion in public life, specifically the fact that our education secretary, Ruth Kelly, is more than just a Catholic, she admits to receiving “spiritual support” from Opus Dei.

So, OK, let’s posit this belief system. A politician comes along who admits to placing great store by, let’s say, the predictions of Nostradamus. But that needn’t affect their day-to-day work, they say. If I’m defence minister, the fact that I believe the world is going to be consumed in apocalyptic fire next Tuesday is neither here nor there. I’m still going to come into work every single day and prepare for things as if that belief wasn’t relevant.

Ridiculous analogy, I know. After all, Nostradamus was a historical figure with a documented life and a clear explanation as to how his beliefs were arrived at. Christ, on the other hand was….oh. And the Bible was written by….umm.

Why should I have faith in another person’s faith? Why should someone who believes that the world was created by a supernatural being be in charge of a national curriculum that teaches evolution? Why should someone who believes that contraception is a sin be in charge of a schools network where damaged, underprivileged and underaged girls are getting pregnant right now because they don’t have the experience or the educational equipment to understand what they are doing?

And what the hell is “spiritual support” anyway? Just because it sounds handwavy and supernatural doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask about it. If she was receiving “political support” from a shadowy Italian organisation, wouldn’t you worry?

Tom Coates directs a glorious stream of bile towards Vodafone, who have apparently essentially hacked all outgoing forms of email to include HTML and their own image so that, among other things, posting to Flickr on your phone is completely buggered:

What kind of cretinous organisation does this kind of thing? I mean I’m already paying to send multimedia messages and e-mails via their service - and they still want to cover it in advertising? I mean - I’d leave for the advertising and the HTML e-mails alone, but to make me pay for it too? Excruciating. I’m also an evangelist - promoting picture messaging via the Flickr box on my site - and a good customer. I pay more for data transfer each month than I do for making phone calls. What on earth were they thinking?

The same kind of organisation that thought Vizzavi was a good idea, I guess. Oooh, naughty.

Oh my God I think I’m in love with Ta-Da Lists.

CompleteTosh dives sweetly into the waters of I-told-you-so in a fab post about the suddenly successful machine that is Apple

It is only modest smugness, to be fair. My comments in December about Apple’s clear path to world domination and control of the digital music market turned out to be understated, compared to the storm of speculation - and reasonable amounts of supporting evidence - to suggest Apple’s really on the move.

First, let’s take the hard numbers: revenues up 74%, year on year, to $3.49 billion. Profits up from $63m last year to $295 million. Share price bouncing ten percent on the news, coming close to their dot.com boom peak.

But, more than that, let’s look at the fact Apple unveiled all three of the rumoured products: a low cost iPod, a low cost desktop computer, and an office suite. Given that all pre-show rumours are, essentially, wish-lists supported by vague knowledge of where Apple’s headed, this is a rare example of Jobs and co successfully meeting - even exceeding - expectations. Long-gone are the days where they’d churn out another colour of iMac and a few speed bumps, and expect everyone to be cheer (although cheer they did).

Completetosh links to a couple of other things it’s well worth reading including Tom Yager’s piece on how Apple is now in charge of its own destiny (for perhaps the first time since the early 80s).

But the question I’d really like to ask Jobs is this: how evil are you prepared to be to make it really, really big? How much DRM-freedom-disabling and walled-garden-get-lost-open-source-developers does it take to dominate the personal digital contentosphere?

I’ve just sent this to a film distributor and the Federation Against Copyright Theft:

Dear Prism Leisure and F.A.C.T

I have just sat down to watch a new DVD - David Lynch’s Dune - and was surprised to see the very strong F.A.C.T anti-piracy film which showed in cinemas last year tagged onto the front of the video, after the initial copyright message.

This surprise turned to irritation when I realised the DVD had been coded to prevent me skipping past the movie, or flicking directly to the DVD menu. This practice has already become common with the standard copyright notice, which is infuriating in itself. But now, with this additional video after the copyright notice, I am being forced to sit through even more stuff which I don’t want to watch.

I cannot understand why you think this is a good idea. First of all, anyone with half a brain knows and understands the message being conveyed. We all know piracy is a bad thing. We all know we’re not allowed to show these films in public places. We’ve heard the messages, seen the posters, watched the campaigns in the cinemas. This is all very, very familiar.

So what is the strategy here? Do you really think that showing us these notices and films again and again and again is convincing us to think and act in a certain way, when the vast majority of us are already acting in this way? Is there really anyone out there who watches these things and suddenly changes their ways, even those they’ve seen these notices on every video and DVD they’ve ever watched?

Much more seriously, you are responsible for temporarily disabling a piece of my property. I have purchased this DVD, legitimately. I own it. It belongs to me. I have not “licensed a right” from you. I have purchased this film for my personal use. I have also purchased my DVD player, again legitimately. It is mine. It belongs to me.

Yet for some reason you feel you have permission to disable my property, to prevent me doing something with it when I want to do it. Imagine how ridiculous this would be with another household item. Imagine if I had to listen to a legal statement before driving my car, using my oven, making a phone call. This ridiculous scenario would be made even more ridiculous if this legal statement was then followed by an enforced short movie designed to reinforce the preceding legal statement.

I think you can see that this would be a little odd.

So, by all means include copyright statements, warnings, threats, whatever. But don’t disable my ability to use my own equipment in the way I want to use it.

After all, why should I, your customer, be punished for the actions of pirates I know nothing about? And think about this: the more films I watch, the more often I have to watch these messages and videos. So the more business I give you, the more you punish me for it.

Perhaps you could explain your rationale for disabling my software and hardware in this way.

If you’d like to email them as well, the email addresses are dvd@prismleisure.com and contact@fact-uk.org.uk.  I’ll let you know how I get on….