?

Why can't South Iron produce a display to beat a big fish like Norn Iron was able to last night? The most persuasive reason I can see why Ireland isn’t competing like they used to is due to the lack of players - shaky central defense, uninterested full backs, no legs in midfield, a winger who used to try to beat a second player rather than fall automatically after the first, no big man for an out ball/set piece up front.

All valid reasons (well they are mine) but there is still no reason why the best team we have beaten since Holland, this week five years ago, is Albania.

It’s All About Self-Perception
To me it’s not the real cause. The biggest reason why we don’t look like we are capable of taking any decent team now, or for the foreseeable future, is mostly down to how we perceive ourselves.

The Keane Ideal
Keane's hissyfit in Saipan isnt to blame for this. If it wasn’t for his attitude we wouldn’t have beaten Holland or performed so well against Portugal, and its likely we would have drawn or lost to Cyprus. However, when we had a midfield with high class players (Charlton era) we had an attitude that we weren’t good enough to compete on one-to-one footballing skills with the big boys of the game. We had to sweat, work, and know what we wanted to do with the ball, when we got it back. We worked hard for the poorer teams, who were swamped admittedly by a midfield of Keane and Townsend, McGrath or Houghton, and caved in.

What Keane and his media backers have perpetuated is the idea that we should not have to view more vaunted footballing nations as naturally our superiors. We should not be happy with a draw away in Holland, a draw away in Portugal. If we can look at Germany and France in the eye and expect to beat them, then this new method of perceiving ourselves would translate itself into the belief that we are automatically better than the likes of Switzerland and Israel.

If They Don’t Want to Win, Don’t Pick Them
It is the coach's fault for picking players who do not work as hard nor play as intelligently as Keane, because it really is the only way that we can view the top teams as equals. It is coach's fault for not hammering home the fact that it is only when the entire team play with Keane's attitude towards work that then you might be good enough to win a world cup. Players that don’t particularly care - Carr and Harte being two culprits - shouldn’t be allowed to play. Players should not be tempted out of retirement, including Carsley. Ireland doesn’t have the talent to have players who don’t want to be there.

Elbow Grease
Until better players become available, we need to get back to the idea that we aren’t good enough to beat Holland, France, Spain on talent alone and take them on with elbow grease. They don’t like it up ‘em you know. I know that I would be overjoyed with a draw in Holland at this stage. I think we will struggle to beat Cyprus next time up, and unless Staunton can come up with a Rehagel type structure and organisation in the near future, I can see us getting hammered by Bellamy and Giggs also. I think we'll beat San Marino and Cyprus at home.

Also related: Keane is a lot mellower towards Staunton now he a manager.

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On Monday night we were treated to yet another RTE TV vehicle (or veh-hick-hell) for the successful Irish(y)/New York migrant comic Des Bishop. No one can accuse Des of failing to work hard at developing his act and establishing his career. I must admit a grudging admiration for his determination. But one thing you could not accuse him of is being funny.

The format of the show ties in the unquenchable desire (amongst TV execs) for reality TV with the televisual equivalent of the saxophone solo which often featured in Chart hits of the 80s. I’m referring of course to the usual slab of bland stand up comedy. Basically the idea behind the program is that Des hand picks several Ballymun based comic hopefuls from auditions tapes and then helps them through a series of comic workshops with the idea of turning them into bonafida stand-up comics in their own right. Yea, right.

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The post below, which uses an image created by an anonymous source and probably seen by almost every one with Internet access in the last couple of days has had a phenomenal impact on my normally barely visible webstats. Once upon a time I had hoped to increase visitor numbers by researching and writing brilliant, eloquent and fascinating blog posts that would demand to be read by any one interested in anything ever. But then I realized how difficult that was.

The story with the below image is that Jim sent me it in a mail late Monday afternoon. Recklessly, I put it up on the site straight away. But then, later that evening Jim added a comment below the Guardian’s News Blog piece about Steve Irwin’s passing with a link back to Dublin Opinion. His comment was enigmatic enough to get people to click it. He simply said: ‘All is not what it seems…’

When I checked my stats at Statcounter.com on Tuesday morning I was shocked by the sudden surge in numbers. But then when I checked the site it was down. ‘My God, I screamed, forcing eyes normally fixed on PC screens to scan curiously in my direction ‘they’ve keeled over the server’. A little investigation revealed that it was a coincidence. It just so happened that my hosting service was upgrading their Web servers at the time and many of their sites were down.

Once it was back up traffic increased and I felt a bit embarrassed that this little link, which I had so little personal involvement in producing, was getting me this excited. A couple of other blogs linked to it later in the day (one inadvertently very funny one, which I’ll talk about later) and then this evening TV Tattle added a link producing even more traffic than the Guardian news blog.

So there you have it, a much less significant Tsunami of hits than Damian Mulley’s how-to-use-google-to-get-a-girl-and-get-laid post generated but a lot for this little blog. In the meantime I really should get back to that post I was writing about Globalization and the Irish economy, or maybe I should concentrate on the one that asks why the left is so weak in Israeli politics. That’ll bring them all back I know it will.

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Okay, I've just checked on Irishblogs.ie and as of 4:45 none of the many Irish blogs that have commented on the sad passing of Steve 'crickey' Irwin, crocodile hunter extraordinaire, have published this picture. So it's up to some dumb bastard like me to do the unthinkable.

Rest in Peace, Steve. I can only hope that it would give you a chuckle.

Urgent Update

It seems this image has brought a lot of good humoured international visitors to this site. Seeing as this is the case I’d like to bring your attention to some excellent Irish blogs that have good stuff on this awful news.

Here’s the best of Irish comment on the croc hunter who will hunt no more.

Also, here’s a fitting tribute.

Click here to see Irwin when a crocodile dies. What would happen when all the crocs hear he’s gone? Will they cry? Yes, you can see where I’m going with this.

Also worth a look: Every Stringray is a real and present danger.

And finally, Colonel Creedon’s opinion: "I always admire a man who has less fear than I have..." Colonel Creedon said after news of Irwin's death reached The Bunker "...but they say a man without any fear is insane and this guy was really nuts."

If you like a laugh of the Irish variety can I also interest you in the singularly funny Snackbox Diaries, the assembled wit of Blather and, for those not offended by potty mouth intransigents, the giant of Irish blog humour: Twenty Major.

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How much a story about the overweening power of the US Administration in world affairs gains traction seems to depend not on how new the information is, or how damning perhaps, but how much it seems to go against conventional wisdom. If what I suggest is true then the news about a new study that shows how US aid to countries that have recently won a two year membership of the UN Security Council increases suddenly at the beginning of their tenure should simply move around the periphery of the Internet, filling a number of political blogs with ‘chatter’ and then die out pretty rapidly.

So what I’m suggesting is that conventional wisdom would have it that its not at all surprising that ‘when a country takes over one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council, U.S. foreign aid jumps by almost 60%’ (to quote Stephen D. Levitt, Freakonomics author who comments on the paper here).

The paper, written by by Ilyana Kuziemko (a former research assistant of Levitts) and Eric Werker, and soon to be published in the Journal of Political Economy, finds ‘that a country’s U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members’ votes should be especially valuable) and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country’s election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control‘ (from the Abstract).

The authors manage to rule out all explanations other than bribery. However, the Internet has just chucked up this nice summary about an earlier version (from Marginal Revolution):

“The United Nation's Security Council has 5 permanent members and 10 non-permanent members, the latter are elected from regional groups and serve two year terms. Yesterday Eric Werker presented a fun paper at GMU showing that US foreign aid increases dramatically to countries elected to the Security Council.

The result isn't that surprising but Werker did a good job of ruling out explanations other than bribery. Foreign aid, for example, increases just as a country joins the council and drops just at it leaves. Foreign aid also increases especially dramatically in important years, as measured by the number of New York Times stories involving the council. Perhaps most interestingly, although US foreign aid is larger for democracies than for autocracies on average, autocracies get bigger increases in aid when they join the council. The result makes a lot of sense. Autocracts can sell their votes more easily than democratically elected leaders (no domestic constituencies to worry about) and transactions costs are lower - the aid goes directly to the vote seller.”

We’ll have to wait and see.

Original story via Metafilter

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The Guardian today has an entertaining article about the claim by the Irish company Steorn that they have found a way of developing free energy which flies in the face of the principle of conservation of energy.

The topic has gained much attention from Irish bloggers as thoroughly detailed by Adam McGuire. They display (to the skeptical Guardian journalist Steve Boggan) how the generator works ‘at their modest offices near the Liffey’ and discuss the reaction of utter disbelief and claims that they are ‘a CIA or oil-industry front intended to discredit research into free and clean energy’.

"It's the Pons-Fleischmann factor," says Sean McCarthy, chief executive of Steorn when talking about the extreme reactions they’ve been getting. He and Richard Walshe then ‘look at each other darkly’. Pons-Fleischmann is a reference to the claim made by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 that they had created a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature, with an experiment that hasn’t been successfully replicated since. The resulting controversy effectively sunk the careers of the two scientists.

Steve Boggan talks to Martin Fleischmann, now 79 and asks if he thinks it’ll work.

“I do accept that the existing [quantum electro-dynamic] paradigm is not adequate.”, says Fleischmann, “If what these men are saying turns out to be true, that would be proof that the paradigm was inadequate and we would have to come up with some new theory. But I don't think their claims are credible. No, I cannot see how the position of magnetic fields allows one to create energy."

But with a spark in his eye, he wishes them luck.

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