In praise of Cuba

I'm a long term Linux and FreeBSD user, haven't owned a Windows computer for years though I still use my old iMac for Photoshop. I was a bit disappointed when I first installed Ubuntu Linux on my workstation and laptop. Everything was picked up and installed correctly, everything works, including the bluetooth on my laptop. There was nothing to fiddle with at all. I had to do some actual work instead.

If you've never experienced the joys of virus, spyware and adware free computing, consider giving the Ubuntu LiveCD a whirl. Just boot from it and see what you think - no need to install it unless you're sold.

And no, this isn't some kind of blogger commercial post, I really mean it. If I couldn't just select a new application from a list of some 16,000 possibilities, set it installing over broadband and then just use it I'd feel crippled. I'd feel hamstrung without virtual desktops, proper networking tools, a meaningful firewall, full development environment and the ability to see beneath the hood when there's an issue - to actually know what's happening with my own computer.

That's why I applaud Cuba's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and convert entirely to Linux.

Other countries have tried similar moves. China, Brazil and Norway have encouraged the development of Linux for a variety of reasons: Microsoft's near-monopoly over operating systems, the high cost of proprietary software and security problems.

Cuban officials, ever focused on U.S. threats, also see it as a matter of national security.
[...]
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described copyright reformers — including people who want to do away with proprietary software — as "some new modern-day sort of communists" — which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.

That was a dumb thing for Gates to say - Linux and the BSDs just extend certain conventions of academia to the outside world. But there are actually very good reasons to hate Microsoft from the viewpoint of a free-marketeer. I'll outline them in a future post.

Warmeniser

Noun - one who scaremongers about global warming.


Just a suggestion.

Coldening and Warmening

EUReferendum enjoys Claudia Rosett's commentators and their pdf downloads of global scaremongering from the 1970s:

Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead
The New York Times, 5/21/75
"Sooner or later a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable…The drop in mean temperatures since 1950 in the Northern Hemisphere has been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain’s growing season for crops by two weeks."
---------
Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age
Science Digest, February 1973
"Baffin Island, located in the Canadian Arctic, now is covered with snowbanks all year after having been snow free for 30 or 40 years prior to the temperature drop. Pack ice around Iceland has now become a serious hindrance to navigation. Warmth loving animals once found in abundance in the northern part of the American Midwest in the early 1900s are settling further south."

While Tim Blair points out a Gore supporter with an inconvenient truth:

For decades, Giegengack was content to be a relatively obscure geologist who taught more than he published. Recently, though, he’s stepped into the swirling tempest surrounding global warming, in part because he says it’s not even one of the top 10 environmental problems we face.
[...]
He has described Al Gore’s documentary as “a political statement timed to present him as a presidential candidate in 2008.” And he added, “The glossy production is replete with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and appeals to public fear as shamelessly as any other political statement that hopes to unite the public behind a particular ideology.” This from a guy who voted for Gore in 2000 and says he’d probably vote for him again.
[...]
Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming [that's how long he's been working in the field - since long before it became fashionable], but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists’ scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We’ve only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. “For most of Earth history,” he says, “the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler.” Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for.
[...]
To determine temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the distant past, scientists rely on what they call the “proxy record.” There weren’t thermometers. So researchers drill deep down into the Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean floor and pull up core samples, whose varying chemical elements let them gauge both the CO2 levels and the temperatures of the distant past.

Gieg clicks a button, and three charts come together. The peaks and valleys of the Milankovi´c cycles for planetary temperature align well with the ocean-floor estimates, and those match closely the records of carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature indications from ice cores. So, the professor maintains, these core samples from the polar ice and ocean floor help show that the Earth’s temperature and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been in lockstep for tens of thousands of years.

Of course, that was long before anybody was burning fossil fuels. So Giegengack tells his students they might want to consider that “natural” climatic temperature cycles control carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around. That’s the crux of his argument with Gore’s view of global warming — he says carbon dioxide doesn’t control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct, linear way.

Gieg has lots more slides to show. He points out that within his lifetime, there was a three-decade period of unusually low temperatures that culminated in the popular consciousness with the awful winter of 1976-77. Back then, scientists started sounding the alarm about a new ice age.

Of course, it’s long been thought that the world would end either in fire or in ice. These days, the scientists are shouting fire. And in all his years around environmental issues, Giegengack has never heard so much shouting.

I know how he feels. Read the whole thing - it's long and detailed.

What I want for Christmas

A Constitution that limits government powers, and a politician who believes in it:

[Ron] Paul [Republican, Texas] isn't a reflexive contrarian--he doesn't oppose just to oppose. Rather, he has a core set of principles that guide him. They happen to be the same principles envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: limited government, federalism, free trade and commerce -- with a premium on peace.

When most members of Congress see a bill for the first time, they immediately judge the bill on its merits, or if you're more cynical, they determine what the political interests that support them will think of it, or how it might benefit their constituents.

For Paul, the vast majority of bills don't get that far. He first asks, "Does the Constitution authorize Congress to pass this law?" Most of the time, the answer to that question is "no." And so Paul votes accordingly.

He's standing for President.

Paul's presence in the race is important because he'll put issues on the table that would otherwise be completely ignored. His presence in the primary debates alone will make them far more substantive and interesting than they've been in a generation. One example is the continuing disaster that is the drug war, which Paul rightly believes to be both immoral and unconstitutional. Paul also opposed the war in Iraq from its inception. Those two issues alone will differentiate him from every other candidate on the stage.

But Paul can then swing to the right of every other candidate on federal spending, regulation, the Nanny State, and the growth of government. On these issues, he can reliably and credibly serve as the party's conscience, and browbeat the sitting senators and congressmen running for president for their votes issues like the prescription drug benefit, the surge in federal spending, and the party's complicity in the corrupt earmarking process.

I don't agree with Paul on everything.

Nor do I, but it's good to see a libertarian in the ring.

Iranian belligerence

Xinhua reports that Iranian Revolutionary Guards launched large scale wargames yesterday, as President Ahmamadbastard refused to stop nuclear enrichment:

Ahmadinejad, who was in Iran's northern province of Gilan, told a large crowd that "we want talks, but they (the West) are imposing preconditions that would bereave our right."

"They said our nuclear plant and the fuel cycle must be closed, this is ok only if those who want dialogue also suspend their own nuclear fuel cycles, and this is the justice," he added.

Zimbabwe

While Saint Norm of Geras connects a report on cholera in Zimbabwe:

Police in Zimbabwe fired teargas and used water cannon to break up an opposition rally yesterday as it was confirmed that three people had died in a cholera outbreak caused by water contamination in the country's increasingly chaotic towns and cities.

and reports of desertions from the Zimbabwe police and military:

'There are Awol notices up in the barracks, our reporter saw them,' said Bill Saidi, editor of the Standard newspaper. 'Discontent is very high up to mid-level officers. They do not earn enough to buy basic groceries. They are suffering the hardships all of us suffer now, yet they are the ones Mugabe depends upon to be ruthless in putting down any opposition. It adds up to trouble for Mugabe.'

Tim Worstall points to a Telegraph piece that informs us:

Zimbabwe may gain the vice-presidency of the World Food Programme (WFP) — despite the collapse of its own agricultural sector.

All seven African countries presently on the WFP's 36-strong executive board are believed to support the bid of Robert Mugabe's regime.

If successful, Zimbabwe will be in line to become the president of the world's largest supplier of humanitarian aid next year.

Presumably, some degree of control over food aid would allow Mugabe to regain his grip on the country's enforcers, the police and armed services. That will lead to more of this:



And why do the African leaders support Mugabe? Because they place post-colonial solidarity above human rights and the rule of law. And as I keep saying, until this changes and a new generation of African leaders emerges, Africa has no hope of salvation.

Mine's a pint

Last year I bet the Pub Philosopher a pint that Brown would not become Labour leader. I'm not home and dry yet (or should that be wet?) but Iain Dale has cheered me up:

One poll does not a Summer make. But if you're a Conservative you ought to buy The Guardian tomorrow. Their ICM poll gives the Conservatives their best showing for 15 years with 40%, Labour on 31% and the LibDems on 19%. If you're a Labour supporter you will be very worried by the fact that when people were asked how they would vote if it were Cameron v Brown, the Tories rose to 42%, Labour fell to 29% and the LibDems also fell by two points to 17%. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the Labour leadership contest may not be quite the shoo-in that everyone thinks. One or two more polls like this and Labour MPs will be getting very twitchy. However, the Labour Party leadership rules only give MPs one third of the votes, so Brown may be safer than he would have been under a one member one vote system, or if only MPs had the vote.

Nuanced

The Rottweiler Puppy points to the obituary on the BBC's website of Maurice Papon who:

regularly collaborated with Nazi Germany's SS Corps, responsible for the extermination of Jews. Under his command, approximately 1,560 Jewish men, women and children were deported. The majority were sent directly to the camp of Mérignac, from which they rejoined Drancy internment camp, at the outskirts of Paris, and finally Auschwitz or similar concentration camps. From July 1942 to August 1944, twelve trains left Bordeaux for Drancy; approximatively 1,600 Jews, including 130 children of less than thirteen years, were then deported.Few survived. Papon implemented the anti-Semitic laws voted by the Vichy government. In July 1942, a first report by him show that he "dejudaised" 204 companies, sold 64 land-properties owned by Jewish people and 493 others were "in the course of dejudaisation".

By mid-1944, when it was clear that the war was turning against the Germans, Papon began to take care of the future, meeting once Gaston Cusin, a civil servant engaged in the Resistance.

Here's how the BBC puts it:

Papon appeared not to have been motivated by anti-Semitism, but by a willingness to carry out the state's policies regardless of their consequences.

One sub heading reads "Resistance Hero" in reference to Papon's involvement with the Resistance that began in 1943/4 yet, as Rottypup makes clear:

If Hare-Cuming [the author of the obituary] notices anything … um … significant about the November-1943 date on which Papon’s allegiances shifted, she doesn’t let on. No mention, for instance, of the Nazi war-machine’s demolition in Eastern Europe, nor of the British and US forces massing for the liberation of France. And no suggestion at all that if there was ever a time for a cynical opportunist to switch sides, November 1943 would have been it.

See, here’s why this matters: the Holocaust was a manpower-intensive business. Sure, it took a hard-core of racist fanatics to actually get the project off the ground in the first place, but, in order to actually kill six million people while avoiding fascist-overstretch, the project required the help of many thousands more self-serving vermin like Maurice Papon. Whether we’re looking at the concentration camp guard stuffing fistfuls of gold teeth into his pocket at the end of the day, or the French ‘patriot’ who stuffs Jews into cattle-trucks in exchange for promotion within the civil service, the harm done by such people should never be minimized.

By playing-up Papon’s claims of duty and patriotism, and by asking zero critical questions, this is just what Stephanie Hare-Cuming comes close to doing. For her (and, by extension, for the BBC-version of Papon’s place in history), what should have been a straightforward profile of wickedness becomes, in essence, a platform for Papon’s own defence of the indefensible.

He's dead right.

Blair on ID cards

It's not just the road warriors who are getting spammed by Blair. I just received an email from the Glorious Leader himself. It seems to have been an early draft:

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why I'm going to ignore you anyway. the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. You're absolutely right. Not one single act of terrorism has been planned or committed in this country by anyone who would have been refused a card - in fact our biggest problem right now comes from British-born terrorists. Even if this weren't the case, we've been sheltering some of the biggest headbangers in the world for years now, to the exasperation of intelligence services like the French. They even started calling our capital city "Londonistan". Believe me, we'd have given Abu Hamza a card before you could have said "bureaucratic twat". In fact, our open-door immigration policy means we're just going to hand them out like sweets to anyone who wants to pretend to be a one-legged roofer or blind carpenter. So why do we want them? Because we're a bunch of authoritarian bastards - not least our security services, who have been drooling over the prospect for years. Michael Howard tried but failed to introduce them, but I'm going to put even his illiberal record in the shade because I've got the excuse of terrorism. Heh. Suck on that, Howard. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need. Plus, I like listening to the squeals from the IT industry where they fear we're going to make them look bad again by ordering something the technology can't deliver yet, then blaming them for the cock-ups and cost escalations. Screw them, I say. If they wanted to be rich, they should have become lawyers.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life. You remember how your store cards record your fingerprints and retina scans? See, it's just the same, only less. Anyway, I'm sticking to my figure of £30 per card, although the Home Office estimated £93, and other estimates are as high as £300 - ten times my figure here. Or maybe I don't mean £30. Who knows? It's impossible to say from the way I just phrased it. Clever, huh? £3 per card for who? Every living creature in the country iuncluding ants, that's who, sucker.

But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. ID cards aren't going to change this. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. That's because we have virtually eliminated border checks in Europe. But let's blame something else - after all, there's fuck all we can do about it. It's up to the EU now. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Really. 50. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. Mind you, none of the terrorists we've faced in the past quarter century have been using false identities but hey. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult. Remember, criminals have never managed to forge IDs before, and they can't clone phones, credit cards or any other electronic storage mechanisms. Technology has always managed to stay one step ahead of crime, and that's why we don't have any now, so the police can concentrate on tax collecting and everybody's happy.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder. They'll do it anyway, but it'll be harder. Won't it feel better, when you get ripped off, to know that the criminal really had to work at it?

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. They can't do that at the moment because we're unable to build large scale information technology systems that work well. That's why we need a large scale information technology system like this ID card scheme. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders. How? Haven't the foggiest. Biometric technology isn't a means to move information from one place to another. Oh well... let's move on quickly.

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net. See? It's for the kiddies. And what kind of callous bastard could put the kiddies at risk? Sign another petition like this, and the News of the World will get your home address faster than you can say "violent crowds of chavs throwing bricks at your door".

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK. You might say the consulates should have been checking the identities of visa applicants anyway, but they're so used to getting unofficial "wave them all through" messages from us that they've just stopped bothering. Anyway, this means we'll be able to boast about reducing illegal immigration, and this will take your eye off legal immigration - which is running at higher pro-rata levels than during the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. Hell, it worked with Romania a couple of years ago, until that bloody whistle-blower squealed.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. If the staff don't like it, they can find another job. And if you don't like ID cards you can.. er... France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. Whoops - I didn't mean to let that slip. Yes, it's an EU policy. You've got fuck all choice anyway. Hmmm... Better put a gloss on it. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK. Nice non sequitur, eh? You want to visit Disneyworld without a visa, don't you? That's why you need a domestic ID card. See?

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. But then, the civil liberties merchants have had to swallow the abolition of the right to silence, the erosion of jury trial, government approval of the self-censorship of fear, the removal of the right to demonstrate peacefully in front of Parliament, and we've even tried to slip through a bill making Parliament irrelevant so we can rule by decree. Who gives a toss what they think? Hmmm... But I guess it will look better if I patronise them for a moment. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register, even if any breach of this security will mean an identity theft festival on a completely unprecedented scale, and the right for each individual to check it. I know that's meaningless. Maybe they've got the wrong fingerprints? There's nothing meaningful to check. But it sounds good I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition. Yes, that reads well. Almost as though I am engaging in a debate instead of delivering a fait accompli

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. Big "if". We could start enforcing the laws that do exist properly but that would be dreary and I just can't be bothered. Announcing new initiatives and laws is MUCH more fun. Nobody goes into politics to make sure the drains work. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritarian authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards. And hanging. But we'll ignore that. Polls are only useful if they agree with me. A well phrased poll can generally get the desired result and this is no exception. We didn't ask, for example, "Do you want your ass to be owned by the government and your fingerprints to be made available to the Post Office".

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Of course, we could abolish the absurd anti-money laundering laws that mean I have to prove my identity to a bank I already proved my identity to if I want to open a second account. But we don't abolish laws. We make new ones. Over time, they will also help improve access to services. How? No idea, again. These trailing sentences are great - I can slip almost any unfounded statement at the end of a paragraph and hope nobody will notice.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don't recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate. What's fair is to subtract the cost of biometric passports, even though you'll have to pay for these as well, on top of the cards, then present the difference as the cost of the cards. Watch:

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

There. Clever, huh?

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair

Dissident roundup

I have blogged before about Abdul Kareem, an Egyptian blogger on trial for... well, blogging. Some updates from The Sandmonkey.

While Kareem's defense team try to exploit a legal loophole, arguing that the servers that hosted the blogs were outside Egyptian jurisdiction, it turns out that the trial judge is a blogger himself. Meanwhile, the poor lad's father has wheeled out four Koran-memorising siblings (carefree days of youth, huh?) to disown his more independent-minded son. According to the father, Human Rights organisations should be called Chimps Rights organisations because... Oh, I can't be bothered to tell you. Read it on the last link.

Meanwhile, in Iran, Azarmehr reports that:

Amad Batebi, the Iranian student who was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment during Khatami's presidency, for having raised a bloody T-shirt of a student colleague at a peaceful student protest, was taken to hospital on Friday after going into a coma.

After Khatami was given an honorary doctorate at St. Andrew's university, the Islamic regime felt more emboldened to further ill treat Batebi...

More on Batebi from The Spirit of Man.

Select privacy

I'm alerted by a comment from the blog author, to Select Privacy. One for the blogroll.

Spam

Anyone who signed the anti-road pricing petition is to suffer a terrible consequence. Tony Blair is going to email them.

There's a word for the sending of a million plus unsolicited emails.

Louise Vidaud

There's just one relevant hit if you google the name Louise Vidaud, and she deserves at least one more. Yale University's 2003 review includes this:

Prof. Peter Carey of Trinity College, Oxford, donated the papers bequeathed by Mme. Louise Vidaud de Plaud, collected in Cambodia and France from the 1960s to the 1990s

Louise died a couple of weeks ago aged 101 and Professor Carey spoke at her funeral, recalling the help she had given him when he had set up a charity to provide artificial limbs for land mine victims in Cambodia. He also spoke of his friendship with her. Louise was a good friend and a bad enemy; I didn't meet her until she was in her early eighties and a couple of years later had the honour of chaperoning her during a visit to the Vietnamese Embassy in London where we were received with immense courtesy by the Defence Attache who gently explained, during a four hour meeting, that his government would not kill Pol Pot, as she was proposing. She had even planned how they might go about it.

That might seem laughable, until you reflect what reserves of goodwill might have led a representative of the Vietnamese government to receive an old lady with such grace, and that as one of the first Europeans to visit Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge she had actually seen the Killing Fields with their mountains of human skulls.

She was born into a family of planters and magistrates in the Dutch East Indies not later than 1905 (various passports and documents showed different birth dates and, flirtatious into her nineties, she preferred to emphasise the later dates). Her ancestors had been exiled from the Netherlands for collaborating with Napoleon and, after a brief marriage to a brain surgeon and former olympic footballer, who had a cigar named after him, which ended by mutual agreement, she moved to Italy for a decade. There, she fell in love with a Spanish Duke who was being trained by Mussolini in Rome to fly fighters in the Spanish Civil War. Unable to follow him to Spain, she ended up in Paris in the salon of the Princess Eulalie, the Red Infanta who had been banished from Spain for her left wing political sympathies. Louise explained her situation, and the Infanta told her that her lover was a barbarian. Sitting behind the Infanta was a quiet Frenchman who followed her into a corridor and whispered "Puisque vous l'aimez, il vous adore". He followed her to the Spanish border and married her a couple of months later. His name was Baron Renee Vidaud de Plaud.

Her heart, passion and even language as old age became crueller were thereafter always French although she developed a great love subsequently for England and the English who, she maintained, had the best sense of humour and the most handsome men in the world. Her hatred for fascism remained undimmed until the day she died.

When the Germans occupied northern France, de Plaud's regiment disbanded and the couple moved just south of the demarcation line to the family home in the village of Celles sur Cher. From there, she became involved in the underground railroads, helping fugitives escape from the north. The Jewish painter Marc Chagall was one, passed on to her care by mutual friends in the Parisian art scene of the time, though she remembered best an English soldier who knew no French at all and had walked south for two weeks pretending to be deaf and dumb. He had told her the hardest thing had been not flinching when a car drove up fast behind him, honking its horn furiously.

As the German occupation spread, Louise, though seven months pregnant, was determined to join De Gaulle in London and she persuaded her husband to flee from Marseilles to North Africa. They found passage on a fishing boat to Gibralter and thence to Tangier where my friend Patrick was born in 1941. They then managed to secure passage on a British convoy heading for Liverpool during the height of the U Boat campaign - the previous convoy had been virtually destroyed.

Once in England, she moved to London to join De Gaulle. The marriage didn't survive the pressures of the war, and Louise had an affair with a French admiral while Patrick received a certificate testifying that he was the youngest volunteer of the Free French, which he still possesses.

When the War ended, Louise worked as a journalist for a southern French newspaper; on one occasion believing herself to be hot on the trail of Martin Bormann she travelled to Dublin. Following a lead to the docks, she encountered a heavy in a long coat and wide brimmed hat, who informed her that if she continued to follow her leads, her son would be an orphan.

In the late 1940s, following a terrible mine explosion in France during which a score or more men suffered terrible burns, she realised that British expertise in burns treatments was the best available and organised the transport of British surgeons to France to help tend the injured.

The 1950s saw her try to establish an import export business between England and France, with little success. For the rest of her life, she was never financially comfortable but a long term lease from St John's College on a flat in central Oxford gave her the stability she needed while humanitarian work came to dominate her life.

A sense of vicarious guilt on behalf of her adopted France brought her focus onto Vietnam. She knew an Australian communist called Wilfred Burchett who had close connections to the Vietnamese government, and his introductions allowed Louise to travel to Vietnam with a photographer from Oxfam to record the effects of Agent Orange; she played an important role in bringing this to the attention of the West and earned the lifelong friendship of the Vietnamese regime. It is worth remembering that by now she was in her sixties.

By the 1970s she was taking up the cause of the Palestinians, and her Oxford flat saw visitors like Hanan Ashrawi. Oxfam held drinks parties there as well and, when contacts in France - the nascent Medecins sans Frontieres - told her what they had been seeing in Cambodia after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge, she alerted Oxfam and, with the help of the television programme Blue Peter, an appeal was mounted that saved many thousands of lives.

As the 1980s began, she became increasingly concerned about the possibility that there were American servicemen still held by the Vietnamese in prison camps. This concern lasted the rest of her life; in 1992, I was sitting in her flat one afternoon when Ross Perot, then a candidate for the US presidency, telephoned to discuss her work with what was for him too a major preoccupation. In her nineties, she was argumentative, forceful, persuasive and coquettish. Her flat was piled high with papers, books; her mind was filled with the urgency of her work. This still included commercial schemes, such as a plan to renovate a Glasgow-built steamboat she had learned was sitting derelict on the Nile, and operate it as a pleasure boat. Travelling to London for a meeting with a potential financier, she stepped off the train wearing black crepe, a pill box hat and a veil, looking like a character from an Agatha Christie novel, and the sound of a steam whistle seemed again to blast through the air of Paddington Station.

Ave, Louise Vidaud, Madame de Plaud.

UPDATE - Welcome to the readers from Cambodia. You have lost a good friend.

Thrice no

I suppose I need to declare an interest, when it comes to the question of illegal drugs. I have been cautioned, in the 1980s, for cannabis possession and in 1992 was arrested and imprisoned in France for the same. This certainly improved my French, and I quickly started helping translate conversations, informally in the prison yard and formally in interviews between other British inmates and the authorities. I computerised the library and was able to produce my own letterheads, featuring dancing girls, top hats and champagne bottles, on a printer I found there.

The impressively humane prison governor set time aside for me to teach literacy to other British inmates and I couldn't help wondering why, if I could take someone from an incomplete knowledge of the alphabet to completion of his first (abridged) novel in a month, it hadn't happened for him at school.

And only in France would the following have happened. One British inmate thought the food undercooked. It wasn't, but he liked vegetables boiled until he could force them through the gaps between his teeth, and meat burned until it was like a piece of carpet. I relayed this request to the governor, and he passed it on to the kitchen. A couple of hours later, a delegation came to the cell: the chef, two assistant cooks and three prison guards. "Tell him he can't eat food like that," they urged. One guard gestured elaborately at the sole of his shoe. "Tell him it will taste like this."

Perhaps it was churlish of me to put my, in parts somewhat pithy, newly expanded command of French to use by publishing a small monograph on my return, How to Insult the French in their own language - sold out now, I'm afraid.

One particularly disruptive and violent inmate was put into my cell in the hope I might stabilise him a bit. I think I did, and he began to write a swords and sorcery novel mixing Shakespearean English and modern slang to wonderful effect "Hast thou bringest me the Sword of Xarkon, or what?" He was also expert at malapropisms - "Is the candle distinguished?" He soaked his paintbrushes in oil overnight to keep them subtle.

He had a daughter in London but had lost contact with her - I suppose he was a "baby father". But he decided he was going to turn his life around and do what he could for her. He started to spend evenings planning this, even thinking about trying to get a prison job that might enable him to send some money out to help support her. Then he received a letter. She had been run over and killed. Facing serious charges in France, unable to request leave to travel to a foreign country for the funeral, he knew it might be years before he could even visit her grave.

Perhaps he deserved it. Perhaps I deserved it when a few months later I received a letter telling me that a woman who had been writing to me sometimes two or three times a day had been killed, and I had to sit in a room I could not open, with the peephole swinging open and an eye peering in every half hour. Many people are unable to cope. Every morning, the previous night's self-mutilations were lined up in a holding cell. Most commonly, people scarred their wrists without much serious intention of killing themselves, but the occasional throat was cut - rarely fatal because it's quite hard to cut your own throat - and on one occasion someone cut off their own penis. The only available blade was very blunt, so this took some time.

Even more people spent their days drugged to the eyeballs, corpse-white zombies shuffling around the exercise yard, perfectly legally - this was "medication". To point out the irony that they were there for handling much less damaging drugs would be redundant.

And of course, there are regular suicides. When people call for "tougher" conditions in prisons, I find myself wondering what level of self-harm and death they would find satisfactory. Which brings me again to the Unacceptable Face of Toryism, Simon Heffer. In the same column as the below quotes came from, he goes on:

Dave [Cameron] has got to stop hiding behind his "right to a private life" mantra when asked about drugs, for it is inhibiting his authority in leading his party's policy on an issue that causes most of our crime, feeds poverty and underachievement and blights scores of thousands of families.

If he can't be a bit more categorical about the wickedness of drug use, some people will wonder whether he has any more secrets.

Is that a threat? Fall in, or more skeletons will be exposed? We will have to wait and see, because Cameron and heffer are unlikely to start planning joint family holidays any time soon.

Prohibitive laws are a recent, and failed, experiment. Cannabis was not outlawed until 1925, and though there were drug problems previously, they pale into insignificance beside the corrosive effects of prohibition. These are as follows:

1. The criminal law is a serious thing, as are the sanctions such as prison that it employs. It is in principle wrong to apply it to any of the activities consenting adults engage in. Any imprisonments or fines that result are absolute wrongs.

2. Prohibiting widespread adult activities simply transfers large parts of the economy into the hands of professional criminals. Organised crime did not exist prior to the fashion for prohibition that began in the 1920s; it has been legislated into existence.

3. Professional criminals adulterate their merchandise, and no quality control or labelling can operate. Almost all drug overdoses result from the consumption of narcotics of unknown strength and are the direct result of the law.

4. Criminalisation drives up prices on a straightforward risk/reward ration. This creates secondary criminal activity to finance the consumption of exorbitantly priced illegal drugs, alcohol or activities.

5. Otherwise law abiding people start dealing routinely with professional criminals. This has had a corrosive effect on society and has sanitised and even romanticised crime, violence, thuggishness and all the values of the criminal world - including the vendettas that are killing so many children and young men in our cities today.

The blight is in fact not drugs, but drug laws. The sooner we are rid of them the better.

Hefferlump

Simon Heffer mentioned in passing:

the laughable claim that all partnerships bringing up children are equal, whether married, unmarried, homosexual or lesbian

What on earth does the word "equal" mean in this context? I don't have the strength to google "equally valid" again, but this phrase has also been used to suggest that homosexual relationships are less... what? I was googling to try to find out what they mean but, beyond the facts that homosexuality is not procreative, and is banned by many religions, I am none the wiser. By these criteria, two house-sharing celibate priests eating oysters are "less valid" than a married couple enjoying a quick knee-trembler in a side alley followed by a kebab.

What people normally mean by this formulation is "I hate poofs". As it happens, I share the gut-reaction that says a man and a woman are better as parents than two people of the same sex, but am pretty sure that's prejudice. Certainly, I can't stand it up intellectually. A lack of role models of both sexes? Rubbish - children have influences from outside the family and not all of us have parents who provide good role models.

But in any event, in the context of adoption this is all beside the point. Nobody is suggesting that children be wrenched from their heterosexual parents and handed to homosexual couples. The choice, in a world where there are more children in need of adoption than there are prospective adoptive parents, is between state institutional care and adoption by gays or lesbians, as well as by hetero couples.

The profound need children do have above all is for stable, life-long (at least, childhood-long) caring relationships with protective, loving, parental adults. This waffle about "equal" relationships boils down to the proposition that hatred of queers takes precedence over the interests of children, it leads directly to children living unnecessarily in institutional care, to the damage, hurt and loneliness that this leads to, and is deeply contemptible.

The nervousness of the lambs

For reasons that might become evident in a future post (given my blogging record recently I feel I need to hedge this), I was looking up the religious attitude that heterosexual and homosexual relationships are not "equally valid".

From Christian Answers, I learned:

The Greek word arsenokoitai used in 1 Timothy 1:10 literally means 'men who sleep with men'.

Hardly needs translation, really.

Catholic Education makes the modest claim that:

The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible... It ensured that sex no longer dominated society

As you will no doubt have noticed.

I then encountered Mikail Juma Tariq's sobering essay Islam and Homosexuality, which informs us, among other things, that:

Everywhere sheep or goats are kept, they are used for sex

Corrupting

Simon Heffer asks:

Dr Matthew Waites, a sociology lecturer at Glasgow University, says an age of consent for sexual activity set at 16 is no longer appropriate, and should be cut to 14 [...] where those aged 14 and 15 could have sexual relations only with those not more than a year or two older than them [...] Is it any better, or rather less disastrous, for a girl of 14 to be impregnated by a youth of 15, rather than by a man in his twenties? Is it less corrupting for a 15-year-old boy to seduce a 14-year-old one than if a 25-year-old man were to do it?

Obviously, it's a bad thing if a 14 year old girl becomes pregnant; the age of the impregnator isn't the main point here and to phrase the question like this is deliberate distortion of the issue. Note also, in passing, the idea that for a 14 year old girl to have sex is "disastrous" whereas for a similarly aged boy to have homosexual sex is "corrupting".

Mr Heffer might perhaps have asked whether it is better for a 14 year old to have sex with a boy or girlfriend two years older than to be seduced by a much older person.

To which the answer would have been "yes". Age of consent laws only really have validity as mechanisms to protect the young from exploitation. There is never any useful purpose to be served by the involvement of the criminal justice system in the lives of two sexually active teenagers.

No kidding?

If you don't change the default password on your broadband router, your security can be compromised.

Minnesota slim

This is not funny:

A Lyle High School student allegedly laced brownies with laxatives and served them to several students and school staff last week.

[...]

18-year-old Collin Wayne Orth is now facing two felony charges.

Destroying Persia

The Spirit of Man draws attention to the imminent destruction of pre-Islamic Persian remains in Fars province, Iran:

It's necessary to say that Sivand dam will submerge many important historical sites of the ancient Persian empire and this act by the Iranian regime is similar to what Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan couple of years ago.

More here and here.