+++ Apologies for the lack of blogging this month: there are busy times, there are less busy times, and I’ve had the former for the last few weeks +++

Yes, that’s right, my Oxford college’s JCR has finished off the 2009 committee session with a set of light-hearted motions in the final General Meeting of the term, faithfully minuted by me in my function as outgoing JCR Secretary, one of which involved the renaming of the JCR to ‘Gryffindor’ from the Harry Potter books and films, as well as the equivalent renaming of Christchurch College to ‘Slytherin’, Merton to ‘Ravenclaw’ and St Hugh’s to ‘Hufflepuff’.

The Cherwell (Oxford’s independent student newspaper) broke the news first, followed by the Telegraph and now the BBC. It really is going national! I wonder how long it is until (a) it gets brought up in PMQs or (b) someone from Warner Brothers complains that we’re in breach of copyright…

Just to clarify: the motion is only, and can only ever have been, a bit of humour to lighten up the end of a JCR session in which a lot of serious and unwieldy constitutional reforms were pushed through. To actually rename the JCR we would have to rename Magdalen College itself – and the fellows almost certainly wouldn’t allow that, however amusing it would be. The copyright issues would only be the first of a whole host of obstacles that would prevent this gentle whimsy from becoming legal, binding reality.

Apparently, being a grumpy git could help you make better long-term decisions where you, your life, your friends and whatever else you might care about are concerned – so at least claims Prof Joe Forgas, a researcher from the University of New South Wales. Seemingly, a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style”. Grumpiness for the win!

Though the site has now been taken down, slapnickgriffin.co.uk, as featured on Guido Fawkes, provided an amazing amount of procrastination potential yesterday. I myself managed a modest 1902 slaps, one for each of the Polish servicemen killed fighting for the UK in WW2 – who under BNP specifications would have been roundly expelled from the UK and left to the mercy of continental fascism… It would appear that 22 million slaps’ worth of people agreed with me…

I’m all in favour of altruistic acts of charitable donation, but it appears that some wealthy Germans have gone a step further and requested that the German government impose a 5pc wealth tax on them for two years in order to raise revenue to bring the country out of recession. I am pretty much at a loss to understand why these individuals, if they have oodles of money lying around that they have no need for, do not raise their charitable giving to social or religious foundations (of which Germany has a fair few), but instead assume that the government has a better idea than they themelves do of where the money should be spent.

To be fair, the idea smacks slightly of a publicity stunt, or at best a symbolic vote of confidence in the new centre-right coalition government – but even so, I am incredulous at how readily these wealthy Germans are prepared to give up elements of their economic liberty. That they expect the revenue raised by the notional 5pc tax to pay for anything other than politicians’ expenses and bureaucratic salaries is frankly laughable. And in economic terms, they have some seriously weird preferences if a smaller endowment is on a superior indifference curve to a larger one… but then, this is presumably the sort of case that the phrase ‘more money than sense’ was invented for…

Devil’s Kitchen has just concocted a post, referencing others posted by his other half Bella Gerens, and by the left-libertarian Unity, which altogether pretty much sum up what I like about libertarianism. The realisation that the only sphere over which anyone has, or should have, influence is the self; the belief that everyone has the same basic rights unless they forfeit them by attempting to transgress beyond their legitimate sphere of influence; and the acceptance that needs, desires and wants (broadly speaking, conceptions of the good) are unique to each individual and should be left to individuals to realise through own effort and negotiation, with the implication that there is no such thing as objective societal good, merely a whole lot of individual views that may or may not agree with each other.

All in all, very entertaining reading.

You will probably have become aware of the recent incident on the Tube at Holborn station, where a London Underground worker wholly overreacted to a customer’s complaint at having gotten his arm trapped in a closing train door. The entrepreneur and blogger Jonathan Macdonald, who managed to catch the latter part of the exchange on his cameraphone, was instantly catapulted to social media fame in the wake of the MSM’s latching onto his story, and has posted a very thoughtful follow-up piece about whether social media is altering the balance (arguably a democratic deficit) between journalists and ordinary people in terms of making, reporting and interpreting the news.

Leaving aside the rampaging elephant in the room – namely the fact that TfL find it logically consistent and somehow justified to ratchet up fare prices at the same time as tolerating behaviour as foul as that of this employee – the speed with which the story went from anecdotal afternoon incident to all over the evening news shows just how ferociously fast information travels nowadays. As Mr Macdonald points out, the multiple prongs of Facebook, Twitter and direct contact with the MSM meant that researchers were scouring Google and the blogosphere within less than an hour of the blogpost going up – perhaps most pleasingly, this means that the MSM themselves have realised that it is not Reuters or Bloomberg who produce news, nor even the pretty pictures to go with it, but usually ordinary people operating entirely on their own.

So in celebration of the growing democratisation and, I suppose, privatisation (as opposed to corporatisation) of current affairs, here’s the YouTube video of the incident for you to savour:

I am no longer ill with swine flu. So I thought I’d celebrate by doing a Statwatch. Commodities have had a clean sweep of doing well, as have equities, with the Dow briefly nipping above 10000 points during the last week. The recovery in the interbank lending rates has been supported by some surges in IRS rates, while euro has sustained its strength of recent weeks, reaching 94p against sterling on Monday after news of Gordon Brown’s plans to sell off £16bn of government assets in a bid to pay off the considerable budget deficit, before dropping back to 91p by the end of the week. All in all an exciting week…

Markets summary:

£/€ XR: 0.9108 (-0.0033 from last fortnight)

$/£ XR: 1.6355 (+0.0359)

€/$ XR: 0.6709 (-0.0130)

FTSE 100: 5190.24 (+196.86)

Dax: 5743.39 (+271.05)

Nikkei 225: 10257.56 (+583.07)

Dow Jones: 9995.91 (+508.24)

S&P 500: 1087.68 (+62.47)

SONIA: 0.45pc (+0.01)

EONIA: 0.34pc (0.00)

Fed Funds: 0.13pc (+0.02)

£ Libor 3m: 0.57250pc (+0.03125)

€ Euribor 3m: 0.74pc (-0.01)

US$ Libor 3m: 0.28406pc (0.00000)

Interest-rate swaps:

€ 2yr: 1.84pc (+0.15)

€ 5yr: 2.79pc (+0.11)

€ 10yr: 3.53pc (+0.09)

£ 2yr: 1.87pc (+0.09)

£ 5yr: 3.25pc (+0.08)

£ 10yr: 3.92pc (+0.11)

$ 2yr: 1.32pc (+0.08)

$ 5yr: 2.73pc (+0.17)

$ 10yr: 3.61pc (+0.24)

Commodities:

Brent crude oil: $77.14 (+$9.39)

Heating oil: $2.03 (+$0.25)

Natural gas: $4.79 (+$0.11)

Ethanol: $1.79 (+$0.04)

Gold: $1054.00 (+$47.00)

Silver: 1749 (+116)

Copper: 283.80 (+13.80)

Platinum: $1354.00 (+$66.00)

Palladium: $332.90 (+$32.15)

Cocoa: £2119.00 (+£134.00)

Coffee (Robusta): $1460.00 (+$68.00)

Coffee (Arabica): $142.85 (+$11.45)

Corn: 372.00 (+38.50)

Because I unfortunately seem to have acquired piggy flu. Normal service will resume when I’ve nursed myself back to health.

Well well! An article on the BBC that doesn’t wibble on about how we’re all going to die of nonexistent anthropogenic global warming. Turns out that solar energy may be responsible for everything in the atmosphere after all. But then the people who actually research the data behind the AGW scare rather than just parroting it or (worse) using it as bases for their own models knew that all along. Maybe the BBC are getting scared that the population will want the license fee cut if they keep up the eco-propaganda? Who knows…

In lieu of proper political blogging, since I have university exams crowding out my life till tomorrow afternoon, here is an article I found in what should be called the ‘Weird and Wonderful‘ section of the BBC website: it concerns a recently-invented instrument, the Eigenharp, which looks like a cross between a space-age guitar-synthesiser and a bassoon. Basically it can turn any relatively competent musician into a one-man orchestra. Kitschy? Perhaps, but I think not after seeing how sophisticatedly it works. Will it replace conventional instruments? At £4000 a pop I suspect not, particularly as it is still only a cool-looking digital instrument with only imitation timbres. Will someone write a concerto for Eigenharp, recorded by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle, which will be played at a Proms concert between Martinu’s 3rd symphony and Nancarrow’s Contraption #1 for computer-driven player-piano? Almost certainly.

In any case, here’s a video demonstrating the uses of the Eigenharp: