Australia

The way to get rid of louse eggs is to run a candle flame along the seams of your clothes. They make a popping sound as they burst.

My maternal grandfather told me that, when I was about seven years old. A gentle, smiling man, he would reminisce about the trivia of life in the trenches of the First World War, but never discuss the rest. Four brothers volunteered. Two died, one took a machine gun bullet in the hip and the fourth, my grandfather, came through three years in the trenches unscathed. His gravestone stands now in a quiet place in the Australian bush, planted squarely in the harsh red sand.

He met my grandmother in Brussels. She was English too, and in 1919 it was rare for a woman to represent a company overseas. But they fell in love and took a land grant in Australia. The skeleton of the first hut built there by the first settler still stands, wooden poles without fill or roof, like a dead copse, stark against the sky.

They built a new house. And she hated it, moved away, taught piano in a city, and died, much younger than I am now. My mother and her brothers harnessed horses to a buggy and drove them to school, tying them up in the shade. She also left, when she was fourteen, moving to stay with my great uncle, my grandfather's brother, in Melbourne.

His hip still bothered him. Decades later, he visited us in England and marvelled at my tame ferrets - he'd kept them all his life but didn't know they could sleep across a boy's shoulders, under his jumper, with a drowsy face occasionally peering out enquiringly before grunting, disappearing, and curling tighter into sleep.

The hip was still a problem. He'd refused treatment at first, in 1917, on the grounds that others needed it more. By the early 1970s, his doctor had been trying to cut his leg off for years, but he liked to walk. When he was younger his wife would put his meal on the table, wait, then call him. He wanted it to be cool enough to eat before he came in. I liked him, but he was a harsh man for a fourteen year old girl to live with, back in the 1940s.

My grandfather worked, bought up the neighbouring farms, left them to his sons and travelled round the world every three years after he retired. He learned to dive for pearls on the Great Barrier Reef in his seventies. One morning, a decade after that, he got up, put on his suit, straightened his tie, and died. My cousin Bobby found him three days later. In a climate like Australia's, that wasn't such an easy thing.

I've lost pretty much everything I ever owned, at one time or another. But the thing I miss most is a tacky Egyptian head, a tourist trinket given to me by my grandfather during one visit that was a stop on a cruise that had stopped in Egypt. Cruises were the stuff of my early childhood. My mother still has a certificate the ship's captain gave me on my third birthday, as we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

Fifteen years ago, I went to the house my grandfather died in for the first time since infancy. I didn't recognise it at all, though it seemed a lot smaller than it should be. Especially the kitchen. My uncle asked if I remembered it. I said I didn't, and he smiled to himself as he put the truck in gear.

A musician has silence...

Where were you on Christmas eve, 1962? And what should J Edgar Hoover be reincarnated as?

Hunter S Thompson and Keith Richard explain.

You know you're a conservative when...

Heh.

iPhone competitors

There's a good review of two competitors to the iPhone, the Nokia N95 and Helio Ocean, at Fox, written by Peter Svensson of AP.

And... yes that was just an excuse. I can't help myself. Via lgf, here's another competitor...

More on Wikipedia

We don't all agree about everything, and there's no objective viewpoint. A good writer of reference material tries to show the range of evidence and opinion that exists on a given topic, but arguably there's a better way.

Wikipedia entries, especially controversial political ones, are fought over by holders of opposing viewpoints. Take the entry on Israel. But also take the discussion pages and the article history. Anyone doing research, including school children, can see the full range of sentiment and disagreement, and read opposing viewpoints that range from the informed to the absurd.

No Wikipedia entry can be understood, or indeed used properly, without reference to these supplementary pages. But such additional material presents an opportunity to learn more about a subject, quickly, than has ever existed before.

What's more, by working in this way a person is placed in a position where they have to weigh and judge different, conflicting claims. And this, critical, approach to source material and the claims of historians, indeed to information generally, is in fact the true practice of history - not the uncritical acceptance of authority. That's why Geoffrey Elton used to call history a "bulwark against tyranny" - no reference, he called it this in my hearing during a talk, many years ago. Tyranny relies on misinformation and distortion, and critical thought and scepticism represent the first line of defence.

That's why the recent searches of Wikipedia edit histories have been so revealing. When someone at the GLA edits Ken Livingstone's entry, or someone from the Federal government in Australia edits that of John Howard, we see another aspect of this new medium for information. Tracks persist. So long as retrospective alterations of edit histories are not permitted - a big "so long", but one aided by third party storage mechanisms like Google cache and archive.org - any attempts to manipulate the past can be discovered in the future. And since you can download the whole of Wikipedia, which is what the wikiscanner developer did, you can place a brick in the wall that defends us from tyrants yourself.

[Updated]

No posts till this evening

Definitely. Deadline to meet.

Justice

I'd like to say I don't believe this:

A leading Jehovah's Witness who was branded an "evil monster" by his own sister was spared prison today, despite being convicted of 24 counts of indecent assault and gross indecency on children - one of which was committed on an 18-month-old baby.

Michael Porter, 38, of Barnet, north London, was handed a three-year community rehabilitation order despite having admitted to using his trusted position as a ministerial servant in the movement to indulge his habits as a paedophile.

At Bristol Crown Court, Judge Tom Crowther said he had opted not to jail him after hearing he had undergone therapy.

But I do.

Doh!

So, posting wasn't all that light after all. Why? Change of plan; I'm going to see The Simpsons Movie this evening.

Prudence

Guido points out that bankruptcies and house repossessions are running at terrible levels - triple the level of the 1991-2 recession. They don't call Gordon Brown "Prudence" for nothing.



UPDATE: Tim points out in the comments that a recent change in bankruptcy legislation will change incidence - a very fair point. Since I was vaguely aware of this, it was a sloppy post. Looking it up, I see that bankruptcy has been made less onerous, which is likely to skew the figures upwards. It's still unlikely to be entered into lightly, I'd guess, but historical comparisons become less meaningful. I seem to recall, also reading some speculation that people with student loans - which have been introduced since 1992 - have declared themselves bankrupt in the (perhaps mistaken) idea that it's a get-out-of-jail-free card.

France to regulate American economy

At least, that's what they want:

France said Wednesday that the recent turmoil in credit markets had strengthened its case for tougher regulation of global financial markets and that it would press ahead with proposals at a fall meeting of Group of 7 finance ministers. …Lagarde said during an interview that she had not yet discussed the initiative with the United States or Britain, members of the G-7 who have been reluctant to ponder any regulation of financial markets in the past. But she said that France and Germany, two countries she described as being “at the heart” of the initiative, were determined to use the current crisis as a catalyst for a stricter global rule book. …”There is a growing case for better state involvement on a coordinated basis in various areas, one of which is stock markets and financial markets,” Lagarde added. …Economists and investors expressed skepticism as to how governments could enforce more transparency in markets that trade in such a vast variety of financial products, arguing that the correction in markets was a more effective way of forcing banks and investors to reassess and reprice the risk in their portfolios. …Lagarde…has blamed the crisis on the “typical excesses” of American capitalism. She said that a gambling culture in the markets was simply more widespread on the other side of the Atlantic.

Makes sense. The French economy just powers along:



H/T Cato and No Pasaran.

EU scolds Japan

For planning three hangings in one day.

Just kidding. Japan isn't America.

(Oh, here's the best bit. Japan did this to "ease overcrowding")

VMWare hole

Using VMWare to run potentially harmful software (like Windows 8-) ) in a sandbox? Whoops:

VMware's scripting API allows a malicious script on the host machine to execute programs, open URLs, and perform other privileged operations on any guest operating system open at the console, without requiring any credentials on the guest operating system. Furthermore, the script can execute programs even if you lock the desktop of the guest OS.

Social mobility

The Telegraph reports that:

Teenagers attending grammar schools are outperforming pupils from wealthy families who pay to go private, according to GCSE results published today.
[...]
There are currently only 164 grammars in England and Labour has blocked the opening of any more.

The consequence of this Labour policy has been lowered social mobility. Instead of being able to go to an academic school regardless of income or postcode, now most kids from poorer backgrounds are frozen out by house prices and an inability to afford fees.

Are they too old?

For years now they have been trundling on. Decades after their daring early days, now they are starting to look so tired and weary that we can be forgiven for hoping for gentle euthenasia.

Fatuous drivel about the Rolling Stones being superannuated has been dribbled onto newspaper pages almost since I was a teenager. It's time these space-fillers were gently led to their wheelchairs, and tucked up under a nice warm tartan rug while the greatest rock and roll band in the world storms on.

Mick, Keef and the boys are almost as old now as the musicians they tried to emulate in the 1960s. And they are making whole new generations of anal retentives squeal in outrage - though now it's tobacco rather than heroin and mars bars. Is there any more vivid sign of our decline into puritan authoritarianism?

Well founded

What exactly constitutes a well-founded fear of persecution - a test when asylum status is sought? How about this?

Pegah Emambakhsh is an Iranian national who sought asylum in the UK in 2005. Her claim was rejected and she was arrested in Sheffield on Monday 13th August 2007. She is scheduled for deportation to Iran on 27 August 2007.

If returned to Iran, she faces certain imprisonment, likely severe lashings and possibly even stoning to death. Her crime in Iran is her sexual orientation - she was in a same-sex relationship.

Ms Emambakhsh escaped from Iran, claiming asylum, after her lover was arrested, tortured and subsequently sentenced to death by stoning. Her father was also arrested and interrogated about her whereabouts. He was eventually released but not before he had been tortured himself.

Ms Emambakhsh has a more than well founded fear of persecution if she is returned to Iran. She belongs to a group of people - gays and lesbians - who, it is well known, are severely persecuted in Iran.

According to Iranian human rights campaigners, many lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs came to power in 1979.

Follow the link to find out how to help.

Banning anonymous blogging

First Syria, now China:

Blog service providers in China are "encouraged" to register users with their real names and contact information, according to a new government document that tones down an earlier proposal banning anonymous online blogging.
At least 10 major Chinese blog service providers have agreed to sign the "self-discipline pledge" issued by the Internet Society of China, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.

It's good there isn't a legal ban, but the trend is worrying. Those who complain about blog culture in the UK are leaning in this direction too, it seems to me.

French trawlers kill dolphins

In the Bay of Biscay. Now, if they were American, this would be a cause celebre in the guardian class* media:

Martin singled out French "pair trawlers" that sweep the ocean with huge nets twice the size of a football pitch strung out between them as being especially lethal to the marine mammals.

"Dolphins are sometimes trapped hundreds at a time, and are asphyxiated" when they cannot come up for air, he said. Most dolphins typically replenish their lungs with fresh air every five minutes or so, he explained.

It's also over fishing by French, Spanish and UK trawlers - there are almost no anchovies left.


*This is surely the main class divide right now - between those who see their role as controlling, and those who do the producing. Guardian class media in the UK include The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC.

Curses

The Big Pharaoh on female circumcision:

I’ve spoke with several people in Luxor, both Muslim and Christian, and they all thought I dropped from Mars when I revealed that I am against FGC. “Why do you want to deprive a girl of her God given sexual sensation while you’re enjoing every bit of it. Why do you want to cut this tiny winy clitorious while your penis remains dangling there?” I tell them. What was their answer? Girls have stronger sexual feelings and they’re more prone to sleep around than boys!

Their answer tells us a lot about how girls and women are viewed in our male dominate society. Girls and women are viginas that grew legs and hands and a head. They are nothing but a walking vagina. Her honor and the family’s honor lies in her vagina and not in her brain cells. This rationale is a reason of why the hair cover is so wide spread here. Girls are vaginas and vaginas should be only penetrated by the husband and since girls have only vaginas and no brain cells then they need to get covered so they won’t attract a foreign penis and be solely kept for her husband’s penis.

(Spelling mistakes from the original - but how's your Arabic?)

Flat tax news

Via Cato, the Czech Republic is introducing the flat tax system. The Prague Monitorreports:

The reform package wil gradually lower the corporate tax rate from today's 24 percent to 21 percent next year, 20 percent in 2009 and 19 percent in 2010. The existing progressive taxation of personal income at 12 to 32 percent will be replaced by a flat tax of 15 percent in 2008 and 12.5% in 2009.

The personal income tax will be calculated from super-gross income, including social and health insurance contributions paid by the employee and the employer. This means effective taxation will be 23.1 percent of gross income in 2008 and 19.4 percent in 2009.

Simple, straightforward, easy to calculate, hard to find loopholes in, this must be the most rational taxation system.

Yes, and true

From Physorg:

Is it time to admit our climate is variable and the weather is hard to predict?

Yes. And:

Professor Clarke suggests: “Citizens demonstrating against climate change at power stations and airports this summer could be premature in their concerns but the residents of Tewkesbury, who are campaigning against new housing developments on their floodplain, have a better case”.

True.

An inconvenient truth

Research from Canada suggests:

... smoking bans result in smokers either quitting or reducing their cigarette consumption.
Statistics Canada found even personal prohibitions that make homes smoke-free also are effective in reducing smoking.

I'm a smoker, and have found it very difficult to give up. I've found myself smoking less since the ban came into force in England, last month. I oppose the ban, but I'm glad I've been smoking less.

What's a libertarian to do?

Fighting the crusaders

More news from the Glorious Resistance in Iraq:

Alleged Al Qaeda fighters attacked a Sunni village east of Baqouba on Thursday and killed a village leader who had led the community in an uprising against the terrorist organization, witnesses and police said.

The attack by about 25 gunmen on the Ibrahim al-Yahya village began at 6:30 a.m. when the fighters exploded a bomb at the house of the sheik, destroying his home and killing him and one member of his family.

Ten people were wounded, including four other members of the family and passers-by. Some of the wounded were hit by gunfire.

"They were shouting Allah Akbar and Curse be upon the Renegades," said Umm Ahmed, who was among the three women wounded in the attack. She refused to give her full name fearing retribution. "This attack will cause the uprising against them to spread to other villages."

AGW as pseudoscience

Motl explains.

EUReferendum summarises some of the difficulties climate alarmists are facing. I'd take issue with one thing:

It is now hard to think of a situation where there has been such a great divide between the politicians – who remain fixed in their beliefs about global warming, impervious to the increasingly vibrant debate – and the wider world, where scepticism is growing in intensity.

It's easy to understand why climate alarmism is attractive to politicians; it represents a complete excuse to save their voters, and interfere with every aspect of their lives in the process. But it might be a mistake to think they buy the arguments. Their support for most things hinges on a perception of what will be a successful electoral strategy, and little else. In Cameron's case at the moment, nothing else.

If Richard North at EUReferendum is right about the shift in the wider world, this might prove to be a miscalculation for Cameron, gaining little new support (the watermelon vote is not likely to switch to the Tories) while loosening still further the ties his leadership has with traditional Tory voters.

The problem, though, boils down to misrepresentation. Any politician who breaks ranks will face legions of envirowhackjobs, screaming "What about the kiddies??? What about the kittens???", and that's bad PR. Until a robust defence against these exploitative and groundless accusations of destroying the future and exterminating wildlife is developed, the impasse will continue.

Traffic

Pageloads heading into five figures this month, for the first time, which is nice.

Posting will be light or non existent until this evening.

UPDATE: American readers level pegging with UK, then Australia, Canada and India.

The moron race

Is David Cameron an idiot, or is this just what he thinks we want to hear?

Young tearaways who were stepping onto the crime ladder in their mid-teens needed to realise from early on that they would face unwelcome curbs on their own lifestyles if they persisted.

''Common sense suggests that with young people you need to hit them where it hurts: in their lifestyle and their aspirations.

"I'd like to see judges and magistrates tell a 15-year-old boy convicted of buying alcohol or causing a disturbance, that the next time he appears in court he'll have his driving licence delayed.

"And then I'd like that boy to tell his friends what the judge said.''

It's hard to choose the most moronic part of this. Is it the idea that for a 15 year old to buy alcohol (and I'll bet Cameron did at that age, just like me) is equivalent to causing a disturbance?

The idea that delaying teenagers getting driving licences, and thereby keeping the ones who don't drive illegally out of work, is a sensible suggestion?

Or perhaps it's the suggestion that a teenager will leave court to tell his friends what the judge said - I assume Cameron meant he or she would do this respectfully.

Oh, wait. No moron race would be complete without Beverley Hughes, the children's minister:

[she] accused Mr Cameron of "lurching to the right'' to appeal to his party's hardliners.

"The fact is that the Tories have no solutions and no family policies to speak of other than going back to a two-tier family tax policy that would disadvantage and treat as second class all children and families whose parents are widowed, separated or divorced.

"David Cameron is not proposing solutions for the future of our country, he is just lurching to the right to try to appease his divided party.''

This wet rag excuse for a policy is a lurch to the right?

Cameron has no policies except tax preferences for married couples? Er... oh, yes. And the one we're discussing.

Let's just say this slowly for them both: Children are programmed to push until they hit the boundary. They need discipline to let them know where this lies. Deferred punishments, especially ones that can be ignored, are ludicrous when applied to people whose horizons rarely extend very far into the future. Failing to give children these boundaries, right here, right now, is to betray them as well as the wider society.

It's really very FUCKING simple.

Mind killer

This piece, from Muck and Mystery, might have the best top and tail of any blog post I've read:

Drunkard's Walk

We progress by accident rather than intention. It's not that we don't have intentions, they just turn out to be naive and/or mistaken. However, we tend to airbrush that out of history.
[...]
More science, less politics. Politics is the mind killer - it has been said.

And while it's all worth reading, there's an eerie coincidence. Quite without reference to the newspaper of that name, someone called Jane Jacobs has written about what she calls "the guardian class". Does this ring any bells?

... those who seek to direct society rather than produce for society

UPDATE: Capt John Heinrichs mails from Canada with more info about Jane Jacobs. See here:

Tracing a path from architecture critic to urban prophet to all-purpose philosopher, Jacobs began by writing about sidewalks and finished with an account of Western civilization itself.

Good news

At least as far as I am concerned:

Study: Men With 'Cavemen' Faces Most Attractive to Women

Yup. Let's play it again:

Guys with bulldog-like faces have been chick magnets throughout human evolutionary history.

It's the jowls, I reckon.

Synchronicity

What's the biggest risk - something that kills lots of people or something that kills very few people? The answer, apparently, is the latter. And this was brought out by two recent pieces of writing. Emphasis added in both cases. Via kes, in an email, we have Malcolm Bull in the London Review of Books:

The ‘new normal’ is already losing much of its novelty, as 11 September 2001 fades into history. Unlike insurrection or invasion terrorism tends to be sporadic and ineffectual and is usually designed to adjust existing arrangements rather than take power as such. But governments, whose actuaries can determine how many of us will die each year in a variety of unpredictable ways, and how many of us will be saved by a variety of possible expedients, want none of us to be killed or even hurt by terrorism. A pinch of Anthrax working its way through the postal system is perceived as a threat of a different order from the MRSA bacteria sauntering down the hospital ward, even though it is the latter that will kill thousands.

And via Schneier, a piece from Real Clear Politics:

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu -- the boring kind -- kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn't want to hear that.

"I say, 'You need a flu shot.' You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, 'Don't talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?'"

Here's another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for "20/20," I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I'm sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

But the best line comes from the RCP opening paragraph, as quoted by Schneier:

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming "crisis" and the coming of bird flu.

Amen to that. If more people in the city had had technical knowledge, the dot com boom/crash would not have happened either.

Oh, and the other best line comes from Bull:

States don’t really mind their citizens dying (providing they don’t do it all at once) they just don’t like anyone else to kill them.

UPDATE: Couple of typos corrected.

Exploding elephants

"Never mind your stalker," says an email. "Did you see the film about how Edison hated cats?" By Crikey, she's right. Here it is, and while the elephant doesn't actually explode - I got a bit tabloidy with that title - it is electrocuted. I guess they did science differently in those days.




Thanks, Kes.

php security

PHP is such a widely used scripting language for dynamic website development that I've often been puzzled by the lack of a really effective security framework. Most developers, I suppose, wind up developing their own classes for sanitising user submitted data (to guard against sql injection and cross site scripting) and do things like tokenising forms to protect against automated attacks.

Core Security have released GRASP - which seems a bit of a cumbersome approach at first sight - you have to patch your PHP source code tree and recompile - which rules out the immediate application in a production environment. But it's worth playing with on a development machine. And, of course, trying to break it.

Oil for Jams

Brett at Harry's Place is circling some financial curiosities about the deal between Ken Livingstone and Hugo Chavez that will see an exchange of Venezuelan oil for London transport expertise(!)

Worth a slow read. It does seem a bit strange.

Moose farts

It seems that moose farts are threatening our very survival:

Researchers in Norway claim a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year, equivalent to the amount of CO2 caused by an 8,077-mile car trip, der Spiegel reported.

Norway’s national animal releases methane through burping and flatulence, as do cows, considered more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide.

There are estimated to be more than 100,000 moose in Norway.

All of them busy recycling vegetation that bacteria would otherwise break down, and that captured the compounds it is made up of as it grew, thereby making a closed system that has no effect whatsoever on the environment - a closed system that would operate whether or not meese were playing the bottom trumpet.

All in all a typical envirostupid report.

Greenwich follies

Thirty years ago, Keith Richard was in trouble for taking heoin. Today, it's smoking on stage with Ronnie Woods:

The O2 was today warned that it could face a £2,500 fine if the Rolling Stones persisted in smoking during their remaining two gigs at the venue – tomorrow and Sunday.

Greenwich Council told the venue today that it had an obligation to enforce the legislation with a fine and potential prosecution if the ban is flouted.

The band's response?

"Ronnie and Keith have been smoking on stage for the last three decades and they're not going to stop for the next two," a source close to the band told Times Online.

There's another way to respond to council officials. During the mid 1970s I used to go to the Kursaal Ballroom in Southend to see Dr Feelgood. One night, a council official turned up, saying the band was too loud. When he ventured on stage, the bass player - the Big Figure - picked him up and dropped him into the audience.

The concert continued.

Another night, the cameras were there. It was this night:

Google innovation

Google has just announced the release of Google Sky, an astronomical version of Google Earth:

... with the new service - known as Sky - they can now fly through space, visiting more than 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies created from thousands of satellite photographs.

How come Google is innovating so rapidly, releasing new technologies faster than any other large organisation?

It's 20 percent time and Google Labs:

The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that's broken, you can use the time to fix it.

There's no better proof of the pragmatism of the free market. Leave people alone to innovate as they wish, and all kinds of wonderful things emerge.

Kamm and Wikipedia

Oliver Kamm's peculiar obsession with Wikipedia continues. Recently, Kamm has demonstrated that he understands the brevity of mailing list etiquette as imperfectly as he understands the way that Wikipedia is rooted in academic convention. This might be because the particular conventions in question derive from the practice of the physical sciences rather than the humanities - openness, peer review and testability, rather than the cathedral of authority.

Endarkenment

This new word describes well the descent into millenniarist superstition, new age drivel and religious resurgence of the past couple of decades. It's good to see some enlightened reaction. But why do this and spoil it with rank dishonesty:

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

The 45 minute business was based on intelligence, we now know, that was accepted as reliable by every major intelligence service:

The 45 minutes claim was based on a report which was received by the SIS from a source which that Service regarded as reliable.

Richard Dawkins is guilty of this sort of thing as well. In his book The God Delusion, he keeps making swipes at George W Bush, as though that has anything to do with his argument.

But to compare the 45 minute claim in the "dodgy dossier" with palmistry is dishonest, inaccurate and divisive. So it's bloody stupid.

Script kiddies

I drove down to London this evening to install a new server (a thing of beauty, by the way). Just received the automatic security report - yes, of course it's FreeBSD. It took precisely twenty minutes for the first script kiddy ssh assault to begin.

They're slipping.

My dark secret

I'm a big fan of the X Factor, American Idol and so on.

This is why:

Health roundup

While our envy-of-the-world-though-nobody-wants-to-copy-it state managed health service produces the worst cancer survival rates in western Europe, Michael Cannon at Cato explains one of the absurdities of state health provisioning:

That’s right. For the past 42 years, the federal government has paid hospitals to give grandma an infection, drop her on the floor, or leave a sponge inside her — and then paid the hospital more to put her back together again. That is, if the infection didn’t kill her.

Does anyone really believe that if each patient controlled the health care dollars that employers and the government now control, that it would take patients 42 years to stop rewarding hospitals for medical errors? In other areas of your life, how often do you give more money to a business that screwed you over?

"IT", chorus Windows users.

Natalie Solent at Samizdata reports on... well, go and read it for yourself. I'm too depressed to explain.

That picture is wrong. The part of it that is wrong is the "trying to help." The nurses declined to help.

Mars approach

Count slowly to four.

You're now about 25 miles closer to Mars than you were when you started reading. Watch for the two red eyes in the sky on August 27th:

At 3 o'clock in the morning on that date, Mars will rise in the eastern sky alongside the red giant star Aldebaran. The two red lights side-by-side will resemble two eerie, unblinking eyes.

And while Mars is on your mind, why not check the progress of Spirit and Opportunity, still exploring the surface, three years after landing. Another lander Phoenix, is heading for one of the poles.

Iraq notes

While Hilary Clinton says:

"I do not think the Iraqis are ready to do what they have to do for themselves yet," she said. "I think it is unacceptable for our troops to be caught in the crossfire of a sectarian civil war while the Iraqi government is on vacation."

Clinton said new tactics have brought some success against insurgents, particularly in Iraq's Anbar province.

"It's working. We're just years too late in changing our tactics," she said. "We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war."

Michael Totten explains how to spy in Iraq, and in passing shows the hostility of the locals to American invaders:

“We support you,” the man continued. “You support our back, we support your back. But you must understand: If you pull back, we will pull back. I will have no choice but to pull back if I can’t depend on you. It will be much harder for us to stand together. But as long as you stand firmly behind us we will support you against Moqtada al Sadr and the other bastards in the area.”
[...]
I tore off a hunk of barbecued chicken and rolled it into some bread. The spices tasted vaguely of lime.

“This is delicious,” I said. And it was.

One of us

Apparently:

New research has found that leaders are most effective when they transform themselves into ‘one of us’. The study by the University of Exeter, University of St Andrews and Australian National University shatters the stereotype that ‘good’ leaders must have a specific set of qualities. Instead, it shows that leaders must embody the qualities and opinions of the group they seek to influence, even down to personal appearance.

Tony Blair has been the most successful political leader of his generation. So that's what we look like is it?

Oh dear. I think it is.

Asburd

A member of a gang that, despite having been served with ASBOs, terrorised a housing estate pleads guilty to murder:

Greater Manchester Police said that the gang had spread “havoc and intimidation” among residents, leaving them too frightened to testify.

One shopkeeper, who declined to be named, said: “Whilst we are all thankful that the gang has been broken up, it’s very unfortunate that it took a big tragedy for it to happen.

“We would be broken into all the time and people’s cars would be stolen and set on fire. They were swaggering around thinking they owned the place and we were put through hell.”

Inspector Jonathan Clarke said: “I think the fact that Stanway has been convicted of murder has sent out a few shockwaves to those who used to look up to him and his associates.”

The Inspector could use a few shockwaves himself; if the police had done anything effective to protect the residents of the estate, a murder would not have been committed. It's a perverse view of policing that waits for a murder to be committed before crowing over the eventual sentence.

Another such gang member currently serving a life sentence for the murder of headmaster Philip Lawrence is told he will not be deported after his release because such deportation would breach his human rights:

... lawyers for Chindamo argued that the attempt by the Home Office to deport him to Italy, where he had not lived since he was 5, breached his human rights.

I think the lawyers were right. Chindamo is an Italian national and any deportations within the EU, where there is freedom of movement, often without passports, for citizens, are of dubious practicality and legality. What's more, Chindamo has lived here long enough. Deportation would be quite different to, say, deporting a recent Somali immigrant who shot a police officer. In the latter case, I think deportation is in order regardless of the dangers the deportee might face in Somalia.

But what unites both of these cases is a scenario where gangs of kids have been permitted by the police to run amok, terrorising and stealing, until their behaviour escalates to murder. They are just kids - even gang members can be children - and have been betrayed, just as much as the victims, by lax policing. A clip around the ear, or even a good kicking, from a police officer would have saved lives - the lives of the victims and also the lives of the culprits who have now to live in prison or under licence for the rest of their lives.

Effective zero-tolerance policing would have saved lives.

Inequality

Chris Dillow posted recently about inequality. As always when he writes about this, I think his assumption that inequality is wrong clouds his thinking.

The Economist's blog asks egalitarians to point to some "tangible harm" from income inequality.
In some senses, the question is silly. To see why, imagine a slave society in which the slaves are reasonably content. It would be hard to point to a tangible harm, but something would be wrong.

Would it really be hard to point to a tangible harm? In fact, Chris points to one himself: "freedom creates prosperity better than slavery". But I'm still trying to imagine a contented slave society. If I'm trying to make a point about the real world, I can't really predicate it on a non-existent or impossible assumption. But that's what Chris does.

This just shows that the "tangible harm" criterion is psychologically, economically and philosophically naive. Psychologically so, beecause people adapt to their circumstances, so "losers" don't feel too bad.

Here's that assumption, that inequality is an unnatural state and "losers" would have to "adjust" to it. There's no basis for this - in fact, inequality is plainly the natural state. That doesn't make it right, but it does make a nonsense of the argument.

Economically, because a gain foregone should count as much as a tangible cost; in a slave society no-one can see that freedom creates prosperity better than slavery, but this fact should surely count in our judgment.

Well, quite. But since any form of redistribution involves a loss of freedom, this isn't exactly an argument for redistribution.

And philosophically, because inequality matters for more than consequentialist reasons. Justice matters too.

Yes, it does. But redistribution - which is at least in part the removal of wealth from those who have created it and the passing on of that wealth to people who have not created it - is not justice. In fact, the transfer of wealth from the diligent and hard-working to the feckless would be unjust.

Anyhow, let's address the question. Aside from the ill-health which the Economist mentions - as if death were not tangible enough - I'd cite five other possible harms

This is misleading, because worse health for some is not an inevitable effect of inequality in an advanced society (in Britain, it's more a cultural artifact, but one that correlates with wealth), and worse health care isn't a harm at all; it's an absence of benefit - which is quite different. But let's run with it anyway. Universal health care is certainly a transfer of wealth, a form of redistribution. But it's indirect - the provision of a benefit rather than the transfer of money that could buy that benefit. People who are healthy have not had their relative equality affected very much by this provision. Assuming the tax that pays for this falls unequally - which it does in practice, then there will be an effect. But at the moment, the consequence of high marginal tax rates for the poor is that it falls most heavily on the poor, which worsens inequality. It's also at least arguable that the inefficiencies intrinsic to the state provision of anything at all, including health, means that except for paupers an attempt to provide state health care means a worse service at greater cost for all but the very wealthy. In other words, the contribution to equality is at best mixed.

1. Crime. Basic economics says the relatively poor commit more crime than the relatively rich. This is because their opportunities to make money honestly are more limited, and the cost of being imprisonment - foregone earnings - is lower. Empirical work corroborates this. Is it really a coincidence that unequal countries (south America) have more crime than egalitarian ones (Japan, Korea, Scandinavia).

Is this really any more than saying that people will not steal money they have no valid claim to if that same money has been taken by the state and handed to them anyway? I thought there was supposed to be a moral component to this argument. I'm sure there's truth in it, but the idea that the common human impulse to force of arms and predation is best handled by the state acting as predator on behalf of criminals is not persuasive to me. In fact, one of the unarguably valid roles of the state is to protect the property of citizens against this sort of predation. Moreover, it is worth looking at things like cultural norms and prison regimes in, say, Japan before isolating equality as the reason for a social trend.

2. Lower social mobility. Societies with higher income inequality have lower social mobility. Politics in the US and the national media in the UK are now largely hereditary occupations. Many of you might think this unhealthy.

Blimmin flip, Chris. The lowered social mobility in Britain is a consequence of egalitarian politics. To the extent that there is a relationship at all, higher income inequality follows from this, it doesn't cause it.

3. Slower growth. There are some reasons to think inequality can retard growth, say, by reducing social capital and therefore investment, or by creating credit constraints that prevent potential entrepreneurs.

And there are reasons to think this is just plain wrong. Few societies have had less redistribution, more inequality or higher growth than Hong Kong between 1960 and 1980. Hong Kong's growth was the direct consequence of Cowperthwaite's laissez faire policies - of his refusal to redistribute.

4. Bad customer service and job dissatisfaction. The inequalities that matter are not merely of income, but of power. Some people have it, some don't. And in companies, these inequalities breed slovenliness and inefficiency. Cloke and Goldsmith put it thus:

Through years of experience, employees learn that it is safer to suppress their innate capacity to solve problems and wait instead for commands from above. They lose their initiative and ability to see how things can be improved. They learn not to care and to accept things as they are. They justify making mistakes and are allowed to be irresponsible and pass the blame to others for their mistakes. They become mindlessly obedient, fatalistic, intransigent and hostile.

The thing is, inequalities of power stem, to a very large degree in the contemporary world, from a lack of personal autonomy and freedom. We see egalitarian council officials taking babies away from the poor taxpayers who pay their salaries, in their attempt to meet an egalitarian government's adoption targets. A prerequisite for greater personal autonomy is a less intrusive - and by definition less egalitarian - state. Managerialism is a consequence of the type of thinking that leads to egalitarianism.

5. Inner-city blight. Another consequence of inequalities in power is that poor areas become bad areas, with urban decay, poor schools and crime, because the poor lack the power to get the state to provide proper policing and schools.

It's impossible to separate inner city blight from egalitarian central planning - the same planning that built the sink estates and housing projects in a direct attempt to redistribute wealth.

So, there are almost certainly tangible harms from inequality. The more awkward question for egalitarians is: would there be more harm done by reducing inequality?

No, these effects, where they are effects at all, are the effects of egalitarianism, not inequality. And while that is certainly an important question to ask of egalitarians, a more important one - one I have never seen a good answer to - is why equality is seen as being desirable, in a world that is plainly and intrinsically unequal and that draws its strength and adaptability from that very fact.

EU Referendum

A petition, run by the Daily Telegraph, has attracted 50,000 signatures calling for a referendum on the EU constitutional Treaty. The government will undoubtedly ignore it.

This is actually a battle by proxy. Important though it may be that we have the promised referendum - because it was promised in Labour's election manifesto - this is not really the issue.

The people of Britain want a referendum on our membership of the EU, period. It is deeply unpopular. The political and media establishments are, on the whole, determined to prevent this from happening, for the same reason - they know the EU is deeply unpopular.

And so this strange battle continues, wherein the great and the good conspire to end European democracy and self-determination, and the people try to express their disapproval.

Kruger fight...

Watch this all the way through. It's absolutely gripping, but I won't say anything to spoil it.

Life begins with a Facebook account

I have a feeling that this is not as guileless as it sounds:

It already has its own Facebook page and more than 100 people want to be its friend — but Bubba Waring, described by its mother as "the world's most famous fetus," hasn't actually been born yet.
[...]
... instead of creating a profile under her own name, Gillis said she thought it would be better to do it from her unborn child's perspective.
[...]
Gillis said she and her husband had been amazed by the reaction.

"I'm considering whether I should just open it up to the public because I'm just receiving the most ridiculous number of e-mails and friend requests," she said. "We're not going to find out its gender, so it'll be a surprise to everybody when the baby is born."

Why am I suspicious?

At present, 25 people are listed as the baby's "friends", but publicity surrounding the profile has prompted others to come forward and apply to be part of Bubba Waring's (as yet unstarted) life.

That's not such a big reaction. I sense the presence of pro life activists somewhere down the line.

By the way, they don't test for the gender of babies, but rather for their sex. Gender is a useful word that comprehends the diversity of human sexuality, but it isn't the same as sex and conflating the two words is an error.

Amber alerts

An arrested child molester in France explained how he came to have a packet of Viagra in his pocket:

Evrard, whose most recent conviction for sexual crimes was only three years ago and who had been described as one psychiatrist as “barely readaptable”, told detectives that he had been given a prescription for the pills in prison after telling a doctor there that he had erection problems.

Perhaps he's lying. If not, it's a revealing story, not just because he is a paedophile. Being unable to get an erection might be no bad thing in prison; the sexual frustration endured by long term prisoners is much more profound and more enduring in its effects than is commonly realised.

Of course, it depends where you get arrested. American prisoners get sued for masturbating; in the Netherlands, they can hire prostitutes. Perhaps hard core porn and Viagra is a Gallic compromise.

Reading further:

The boy was snatched from the streets of Roubaix, near Lille, last weekend. He was found - with Evrard in a garage used by the man - thanks in part to a new French alert system for missing children.

Perhaps this is based on the American Amber Alert system:

AMBER Alert is a proven success and has helped rescue more than 324 children nationwide. More than 90 percent of those recoveries have occurred since AMBER Alert became a nationally coordinated effort in 2002. With 50 statewide AMBER plans now in place, we are meeting President Bush's goal of a National AMBER Alert network. As the National AMBER Alert Coordinator, I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong and seamless network in place to protect our children.

Since 2002. Trials predate the national rollout.

There is absolutely no excuse for the UK's failure to adopt this proven system.

Elvis remembered

One of the best Elvis-30-years-on retrospectives I've read came from... a former spook. It's worth a read:

Elvis wasn't the original rocker, but he was the first to synthesize bluegrass, R&B, rock, gospel and rockabilly into a seamless, searing package.

Art and hate

Via Booker Rising.

Brussels demonstration

I'm glad that a demonstration scheduled for Sept 9th has been granted permission to go ahead in Brussels. From the organisers' website:

The people present on 9/9 have a few questions:
- Who was aware of the 9/11 attacks within the EU before they took place?
- Why are all proposals concerning any monetary reform still unanswered?
- Why did all NATO members sign an agreement in October 2001 on the invasion of Afghanistan, without having any proof of a relationship between the attacks and that country?
- Why didn't the European countries, participating in the Coalition Forces of the Nato, ask any further investigations, before agreeing with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan?
- Why are no answers given to the many questions rising from the 911 investigations from scientists, scholars, governmental responsibles, members of secret services, fireman, survivors, pilots and air traffic responsibles?

That's right, they are lunatics. But everyone, lunatics included, has an absolute right in any functional democracy to protest. That's why I support the right of Brian Haw to protest in front of Parliament, although he also seems to be completely barmy.

However, another demonstration, planned for the 11th September, also in Brussels, has been banned. I have been feeling some misgivings about Stop the Islamicisation of Europe. For one thing, I'm not at all sure what they want to stop. It's all a bit light on specifics. However, the ban puts things in a different light. Interestingly, it has also been the spark that has seen support for the demonstration start to spread, to the political left as well as to the right.

So I'm going to Brussels on Sept 11th. I am going to support the right of this organisation to exercise their freedom of expression.

Some people might have been deterred by the ban. But at least one person will be going because of it.

UPDATE: One of the left wing supporters of the demonstration, Pat Condell, recorded this about the ban: "we're governed by unprincipled, vote-whoring cultural apologists..."



The tagline of Condell's website is:

Hi, I'm Pat Condell.
I don't respect your beliefs
and I don't care if you're offended.
Cheers.

Just the black notes

I don't share his faith, but you should know Wintley Phipps.



And while we're on the Amazing Grace wagon, here it is in Cherokee:

Moderate Muslims

I came across mountainoflight.co.uk while browsing YouTube. I'll embed the video I found at the end of this post. Mountainoflight is obviously linked with Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. I have a prejudice against Cat, but not because he's a Muslim. I have another prejudice about that.

The first prejudice comes from my childhood. I'm somewhat antipodean, and a New Zealand relative stayed with my family when I was young. He loved Cat Stevens and would play his tapes, loudly and constantly. I preferred the Rolling Stones, and after he left I never wanted to hear another Cat song as long as I lived. I've outlived that particular wish.

The Muslim prejudice boils down to his attitude to Salman Rushdie. I call it a prejudice because I acknowledge I have an immediate negative reaction to him based on this affair, although he said he had been misinterpreted, that he did not endorse the fatwa against Rushdie but rather stated what the Islamic sentence against apostates is. I'm not sure that explanation helps, I'm afraid.

In fairness, Yusuf Islam has been very generous, charitably, including towards the victims of the 9/11 attacks which he condemned absolutely and immediately.

But I still have this prejudice. Why? Well, here's an example from mountainoflight:

If everybody believed and followed one way, there would be no wars and peace would fill the earth.

This is just John Lennon crossed with Sayyid Qutb: peace, man, when everyone is a Muslim. It's fascism dressed in a peacenik's old T shirt and jeans.

And there are some very stupid and ugly things about the song on this video. It's a lament about the death toll of Muslims, in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya. Nowhere does it mention the non-Muslim help that came for the Bosnian Muslims. Nowhere does it mention Sudan. Nowhere does it mention the deaths caused by other Muslims. So why am I posting it?

Well, it's Muslims making music, and the thought that this would give bin Laden bowel disorders is justification enough for that. It's also extremely well done. It's also worth listening to as a piece of music. But most of all, it is a perspective we need to understand, even if we disagree with it, because it is moderation, in Islamic terms. It's a form of moderation. These are people we can live with, which is lucky because that's what we have to do.

And compromise is a two-way street. If we ask Muslims to adjust - and that's exactly what we should ask - then we need to be willing to do the same ourselves, and at the minimum to listen to what they have to say. To listen to things like this:

Saturday night acapella guitar solo

From a Cuban group. Seriously. No instruments.



And while I'm at it, I understand beatboxing is about imitating instruments with your mouth, but what is it called when you take all the parts, simultaneously?

Beatboxen?

A brave woman

In Bakuba, Iraq, via BlackFive's Someone you should know series:

The tests are taken during the month of June and the results determine whether or not students pass to the next higher level of education.

The directors of the schools refused to come get the tests and supervisors of the exam districts refused to give the tests, all due to security concerns. No one else was willing to go get the tests, so she took it upon herself to get the exams...

Quote of the day

Perhaps the kids are out of control because we refuse to control them. Instead we seek to manipulate them through dubious means like 'pop star role models' and price fixing of beer.

Brett at Harry's Place.

Faking photos, part 652

They haven't quite got the hang of faking photos yet, over at AFP. The picture below is captioned "An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City". Now look closely. Notice anything strange?



That's right. The bullets haven't been fired.

Via BlackFive, who then go on to show how this woman might be related to the sorely missed DFH's Unluckiest Property Owner in Beirut.

Maybe the American troops have resorted to throwing unfired rounds at the woman above because fired ones don't seem to harm her. Not in this photo shoot:



Nor in this one:

Ken's cleanup

The gateway computer at the Greater London Authority is called gate.london.gov.uk, with the ip address 213.86.122.5. Searching Wikipedia for edits from this address shows results that are generally boring and worthy, but on August 29th 2006 someone using a GLA computer did a big clean-up job on Ken Livingstone's entry. Click through and read it all - there was quite a lot of change. I particularly liked the insertion of what is basically a press release from the Deputy Mayor.

UPDATE: Link corrected.

Gay Gordon

From the same Wikisearch, I see that on Feb 6th 2006, someone using what seems to be the Cabinet Office intranet gateway edited the entry for Gordon Brown, adding the following:

Rumours over Brown's sexuality have continued at a pace, despite his marriage to Macaulay. The heavy handed stage managing of his romance with Macaulay mangaged to sustain interest in some quarters, and hearsay over relationships with male former parliamentary workers (including now minister [[Douglas Alexander]]) and several leading trade unionists continues to lie low in the Westminster Village.

N.B. - the allegation is of no interest and so far as I am concerned it isn't defamatory to allege that someone is gay. What is interesting is the fact that this edit came from the ip address in question.

Wikifun with Cherie

More from the Wikiscanner search on a suspected intranet gateway for the Cabinet Office.

On the 20th March, the Cherie Blair entry was cleaned up. The following was removed:

but it was later revealed that she and Tony Blair had agreed to be godparents to the yet-to-be born child of Foster and his partner Carole Caplin (Caplin later miscarried)

As was:

The most controversial of Booth's New Age practices occurred when on holiday in Mexico she and her husband, wearing only bathing costumes, took part in a rebirthing procedure that involved smearing mud and fruit over each others' bodies while sitting in a steam bath.''How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World'', [[Francis Wheen]], Harper Perennial 2004, ISBN 0007140975

And this was also deleted:

Giving a talk on cancelling African debt in [[2005]], she accepted $30,000 for a 90-minute talk while in the US with her husband.

In [[2005]] during a charity speaking tour of [[Australia]], she was paid a £102,000 fee for after-dinner speaking, although the £82-a-head dinner raised £81,270, according to Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV). But only £6,690, or 8%, of the total funds raised went towards cancer research.[http://politics.guardian.co.uk/cherie/story/0,,1600795,00.html "Charity in trouble over Blair tour"], The Guardian, 26 October 2005

In the following paragraph, the highlighted text was deleted:

Booth attracted some criticism for her handling the case of [[Shabina Begum]], a student at the mainly-Muslim [[Denbigh High School Luton|Denbigh High School]] in [[Luton]], who was refused permission to wear full head-to-toe [[jilbab]], when the school uniform code only permitted students to wear the [[shalwar kameez]]. For her client Booth claimed that it was about prejudice, however she was criticised for her involvement in the case when Shabina was being supported by the controversial Islamist group [[Hizb ut-Tahrir]], of which her brother Shuweb Rahman was a member.[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1507636,00.html "Muslim girl wins battle to wear traditional dress in school"], Times Online, 2 March 2005

UPDATE: entry made suitable for a family audience...

Kill Blair

Yup. On July 18th 2006, someone from the Cabinet Office ip address discussed in my last post went online and deleted the whole of the entry for Tony Blair, and inserted instead the following:

He should be assassinated

Wikipedia scanner

Now this is potentially interesting, though oversubscribed at the moment (so there's some downtime):

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

So I went to the scanner to try a couple of searches. A computer called gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk is interesting, being a candidate for [the|a] gateway for the UK Cabinet Office. It resolves as follows:

~$ dig gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12792
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk. 3600 IN A 195.92.40.49

;; Query time: 41 msec
;; SERVER: x.x.x.x
;; WHEN: Tue Aug 14 18:45:47 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 64

And a search for this at the wikiscanner gives 5134 edits. I've browsed a few of them.

In the discussion pages for the emtry about Jean Charles de Menezes we get the following:

The policy of shooting at the head instead of the body has nothing to do with the risk of setting off explosives. Such ideas have been invented by armchair experts and the usual source of rubbish found on this site: British journalists. You cannot detonate an explosive device by firing a bullet into it, and there is only a theoretical possibility that a shot hitting the detonation mechanism will detonate the main charge. The policy of aiming at the head has to do with rendering the individual incapable of acting further: i.e. pulling a trigger, pressing a button, dialling a phone etc in order to detonate a device. 195.92.40.49 12:39, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Fortunately for us, you are not shaping armed police policies. The explosives (acetone peroxide) used by the bombers in London is more volatile than regular high explosive and can be detonated by rounds from a 9mm. There was a unit which did research on this with different types of explosive and different types of bullets. Please see the recent BBC articles on this subject [4]. --Tom1234 15:52, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes of course, I am sorry. If the BBC says so it must be right. We should rename this site www.bbc.com. 195.92.40.49 18:00, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

For the entry covering Totnes, the changes were fun. This:

The town attracts people with [[alternative]] beliefs and has one of the largest [[New Age]] communities in a small British town.

Became this:

The town attracts people with [[alternative]] beliefs and inflated opinions of themselves and has one of the largest communities of [[New Age]] hypocrites in the whole of the United Kingdom.

Perhaps more interestingly, on the subject of the IRA, this:

At the beginning of [[February 2005]], the IRA declared that it was withdrawing from the disarmament process.

Became this:

At the beginning of [[February 2005]], the IRA declared that it was withdrawing from the disarmament process, but in [[July 2005]] it declared thast its campaign of violence was over, and that transparent mechanisms would be used, under the de Chastelain process, to satisfy the Ulster communities that it was disarming totally

This particular edit dates from July 28th 2005, immediately after the events it describes but it's still interesting to see the UK Cabinet Office, perhaps, helping out with the IRA's public relations.

Also in July 2005, an edit with the associated comment "This is fair and accurate comment - and no different to many other entries elsewhere on this site" was added to the entry for Tony Benn. The following was inserted:

+
==Criticism==
+
To many, Benn is an obsolete, anachronistic and somewhat vain and egotistical individual, with an overly romantic and rose-tinted view of certain things of the past, completely detached from modern reality and the realities of human nature, and whose misguided [[Socialist]] politics died when the [[Berlin Wall]] came down. He is often accused of opportunistically jumping on the bandwagons of dissent and anti-government causes in order to attack "the Establishment", even though - as a former Minister of the Crown and member of the ruling political party - he himself is a long-time member of "the Establishment".

I hope nobody from the diplomatic corps was responsible for altering the entry about the Showa Period from this:

{{History of Japan}} The '''Shōwa period''' (昭和時代, lit.: enlightened peace period) was the time in [[History of Japan|Japanese history]] when Emperor [[Hirohito]] reigned over the country, from [[December 25]], [[1926]] to [[January 7]], [[1989]]. It was the longest reign of all [[Japanese emperor]]s.

To this:

{{History of Japan}} The '''Shōwa period''' (昭和時代) ironically means "enlightened peace" period) was the time in [[History of Japan|Japanese history]] when cowardly war criminal [[Hirohito]] reigned over the country, from [[December 25]], [[1926]] to [[January 7]], [[1989]]. It was the longest reign of all [[Japanese emperor]]s.

Presumable the same person made an addition to the entry on War Crime, as follows:

Many people around the world feel taht the [[Emperor]] [[Hirohito]] of Japan should have joined the ranks of this parade of villains.

One conscientious soul undid a piece of vandalism in the entry for the Jesus Army, reverting the word "penis" to its original, "Jesus".

Some strong PR is inserted into the entry for the Central Office of Information. This:

The Strategic Consultancy unit of COI offers advice across a range of strategic marketing and communications disciplines, providing solutions for clients across Government.

Becomes this:

The Strategic Consultancy unit of COI provides creative, innovative, practical and effective marketing strategies and solutions for public sector clients.

Services include communications and marketing consultancy, internal communications strategy and culture change, stakeholder communications, strategic development and brand development.

Here's an interesting aside from the Coast to Coast Walk entry. This:

In 2004 Ordnance Survey decided to cease publishing dedicated maps of the route as uneconomic suggesting its popularity is on the wane.

Became this:

In 2004 Ordnance Survey decided to cease publishing dedicated maps of the route as uneconomic - this could mean that the maps always were uneconomic (and their publication cannot be sustained in the modern target-driven UK civil service), or that walkers are increasingly (and unwisely) relying exclusively on guide books rather than real maps, or that the popularity of the walk is on the wane (not supported by the fact that there are now TWO companies making a living from booking accommodation for CtoC walkers and carrying their excess luggage between overnight stops).

Entries can be banal: from the entry for Chav, we get:

Seems that this article has missed one of the great identifiers of being a Chav - certainly in the South East of England. Not every Chav has a dog, but where they do, it is ALWAYS a Staffy.

And entries can be more thought provoking. Who, from the Cabinet Office intranet, would add this to the entry for Michael Stone?

* [http://www.ismichaelstoneguilty.org/ Website dedicated to showing that Stone was wrongly convicted]

But the best may be yet to come. More soon...

Moriarty reborn

Via JF Beck, I bring you a tale of criminal ingenuity:

During one call, Ismail used Pig Latin as code to organise "shanks and bats" as weapons.

"Ring up a few boys - bring 'ankshays' and 'atbays'," he is recorded as saying.

He was arrested.

Syria bans anonymous posting and comments

Slightly old news, but I haven't noticed this picked up on elsewhere:

In its circular, the Telecommunications Ministry says: "We ask the owners of the Syrian websites to exercise accuracy and objectivity (…) [ellipsis as published] and to post the name of the writer of an article and the one who comments on it in a clear and detailed manner. The failure to do so would result in warning the website owner and rendering his website temporarily inaccessible. In case the violation is repeated, the website will become permanently inaccessible."

Promoting homosexuality

Here's an unpleasant echo:

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986:

a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship"

A Guardian report:

Authorities in Iran closed down the country's leading reformist newspaper yesterday in the latest stage of an offensive against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opponents in the media.

Shargh, which has been critical of Mr Ahmadinejad, was ordered to shut after running an interview with an anti-regime poet last Saturday. The poet, Saghi Qahraman, has been accused by the country's Islamic rulers of promoting homosexuality.

Undercover Mosque

Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadham Foundation wrote to the Guardian, complaining about the recent Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque.

We totally condemn Channel 4 for its arrogance in defending this programme, when it was clear to us that the makers had taken contributions out of context and edited speeches.

It has been pointed out widely that it's hard to think of a context that would detoxify the poison shown in the programme.

Was the programme biased? Why not watch it at YouTube and judge for yourself?

Legislative science

Having noticed that Australian Legislators Reject Theory of Global Warming", I'm now waiting breathlessly for their thoughts on quantum gravity.

I think they're probably right, mind. Just doubtful that this is the right forum for the assessment of scientific ideas.

Headline of the day

Nose Jobs Turn Female Mice Into Sex Machines

Or is it just that randy mice are more likely to want cosmetic surgery?

Er...

Apparently:

Angelina Jolie has canned kinky sex and given up girls for good.

For her husband, Brad Pitt.

Brad must be pleased.

The aubergine of God

Felicia found this miraculous egg plant comforting.

Ah...

... perhaps this explains that:

Huge profits made by London-based brokers who arrange emissions-cutting projects in developing countries contrast with little benefit for the world's poorest nations, company and United Nations data shows.

The Kyoto Treaty has turned into a gravy train. No great surprise there.

Unintended consequences

Reuters reports:

The current carbon market actually encourages cutting down some of the world's biggest forests, which would unleash tonnes of climate-warming carbon into the atmosphere, a new study reported on Monday.
[...]
"The countries that haven't really been the target of deforestation have nothing to sell because they haven't deforested anything," said Gustavo Fonseca, one of the study's authors.

"So that creates a perverse incentive for them to actually start deforesting, so that in the future, they might be allowed to actually cap-and-trade, as they call it: you put a cap on your deforestation and you trade that piece that hasn't been deforested."

Sorry - credit omitted in first post. Via Benny Peiser.

Road trains

It's slightly old news, but this caught my eye:




It's Darpa's Grand Challenge, part 2: autonomous urban vehicles.

Johnny Cash got it

One of the least well known candidates for the US presidential nominations is Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter. In his statement of principles, he includes the following:

The Founding Fathers developed these [First Amendment] clauses to guarantee the right of all citizens to worship and to protect the church from the state, not to strip religion from the everyday lives of Americans.

While that might be true, it isn't the whole story. The state also needs protection from churches, and this is a more pressing concern right now.

Congressman Hunter would:

amend the U.S. Constitution and provide blanket protection to all unborn children from the moment of conception by prohibiting any state or federal law that denies the personhood of the unborn. Likewise, I have also introduced the Right to Life Act, which would legally define “personhood” as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment.

And supported:

an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that marriage in the United States shall consist solely of the union of a man and a woman. I firmly believe that children need the unique influence offered by both a father and a mother.

I don't share the Congressman's views, but he's entitled to campaign for them. But note that he is advocating amendments to the US constitution that plainly derive from a religious perspective, and citing in support of this an amendment that prohibits the sorts of amendments he is supporting.

American Christian conservatives have this difficulty with the constitution: it's neither Christian nor conservative, but they'd like to think it is. It's radically, amazingly, libertarian, with a small 'L'. Johnny Cash understood it better than the Congressman.

Secular States

At Drunken Blogging, Jonz has assembled a list of quotes about religion, including some from the Founding Fathers of the USA:

Abraham Lincoln, American president (1809-1865).

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies... Lighthouses are more helpful then churches


Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father, author, and inventor


At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

Family history

Gene at Harry's Place has a story to be proud of, from his immediate family history, as he commemorates the life of a brave woman:

On the July morning in 1944 when she boarded a Greyhound bus in Gloucester [Virginia] bound for Baltimore, Mrs. Kirkaldy was not thinking about tackling racial segregation...

Bookbinding matters

It's good to take part in consultation exercises, like the drug questionnaire in my last post, or the online petitions system at the Prime Minister's website. There were only 800 odd signatures on the EU NotAConstitution Treaty Referendum petition, and the government has just issued a PFO*:

The agreed basis for the new Reform Treaty states "The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called 'Constitution', is abandoned." The Reform Treaty will be clearly based upon the existing EU Treaties, and will be a traditional 'amending Treaty', along the lines of previous EU Treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice. The UK has never held referendums on amending treaties in the past.

(emphasis added)

So there we are - it's not a constitution. It's pretty clear from the two highlighted passages that the effect of the Treaty is intended to be identical to that of the Constitution, but instead of repealing existing treaties and immediately re-incorporating them in a single binding labelled 'Constitution', the new arrangement is to tack the extra bits from the Constitution onto the existing treaties. a + b + c = abc So there's no attempt even to hide the fact that this is the same as the Constitution.

But that's actually an improvement. It's not quite a barefaced lie. The binding will be different.

* Polite "Fuck Off"

Tim Worstall on drugs

Here at the ASI.

Tim points to a government-sponsored questionnaire.

My responses:

1. What role do you think schools could play in better educating our young people about drugs? Have you heard of FRANK? Take a look at www.talktofrank.co.uk and tell us, do you think the messages about the highs and lows of drug use are right?
FRANK seems better than the resources available twenty odd years ago when I was at school, but honesty is the most important thing. Dangers of drugs were exaggerated and this brought even legitimate warnings into disrepute.
2. We also know that drugs are major source of concern for parents – what more can we do to help parents, guardians and carers talk to their children and families about drugs? And what support should be available if family members get caught up in drugs?
Nothing, and none. It's not such a bad problem as to warrant interference with families.
3. Did you know that the police have the power to confiscate drug dealers’ houses, cash, cars and valuable possessions? Did you also know that the police can close drug dens within 24 hours? The police rely on communities for intelligence, what more can be done to help communities and their local police service work together? Do the police and local communities have all the legal powers they need to tackle drugs?
Yes, yes and yes. Local communities often disagree with the drug prohibition. Drug use is sometimes very widespread. The problem comes from having laws that lack social consensus. The drug laws should be repealed.
4. The Government is committed to helping drug users build drug-free lives. Treatment, housing, employment and education are all vital. What more do you think Government, local services, the voluntary sector, private business and others can do to help people stay drug free?
Repeal the prohibitive legislation. Drug use drops, and is always less harmful, when the laws tend towards legalisation.
5. What information and action would reassure you that drug dealing and other drug-related nuisances were being tackled where you live?
This isn't an issue for me - drug users do not interfere in any way with my life, except insofar as the prohibition has driven up prices such that we all have to endure artificial levels of crime. I want to see the drug laws repealed, and police resources devoted to preventing the much smaller residue of crime that would be left. Drug prohibition, not drug use, makes my person and my property unsafe.
6. The Government remains concerned that drugs can look glamorous to young people. What more can we do to challenge this? Do you think we could do more through role models, including those from peer groups? How can we get more young people involved in challenging the drugs culture?
The glamour of drug use and - worse - the glamour of crime that is transmitted by osmosis now that drug dealing is so dangerous that mainly professional criminals do it, are both created by the law. Repeal the drug prohibitions, and stop wasting tax payers' money.
7. The Government is concerned about skunk and stronger strains of cannabis, because of the reported serious mental health effects they can have. The Government is therefore consulting on whether to make cannabis a Class B drug (it is currently Class C) which could mean tougher penalties. What are your views? Do you think this will help?
It's eye-wateringly stupid and oppressive. Even the most extreme estimates reckon the alleged risk to mental health applies to 800 people, out of the 5 million or so who smoke cannabis. Further criminalising millions of people who are good citizens and neighbours to protect a few hundred against an unproven risk of harm would be simple tyranny.

Palestinian Kids' programme

Complete with cat torturing.



There's a sickness there.

Dyson and climate change

Freeman Dyson has a piece at Edge:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

Splinted

It's hard to type with a splint on one hand, so I've been restricting it to the essential. But it's improving, so some blogging can resume.