Also on smoking...

... who the fuck is this for?

It's only bad if someone cares.

Philosophers are known to ponder whether a tree falling over in the forest when there's nobody to hear it actually makes a sound. Just shows you that philosophers need to get out more, because then they might fucking hear it falling. The real question is if a tree falls down in the forest when there was nobody around to hear it did anyone actually give a shit? Surely nobody did or there would have been someone there to hear it all along.

Along a similar vein of simulated thought we have our Minister for Climate Whinge and Water, South Australian Senator Penny Wong, who tells us that a camel's farts don't contribute to warble gloaming unless there's someone there to smell it. Or something.

Scientists have found camels to be the third-highest carbon-emitting animal per head on the planet, behind only cattle and buffalo. Culling the one million feral camels that currently roam the outback would be equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road in terms of the reduction to the country's greenhouse gases.

It would also allow us to become at least temporarily the world leader in camel jerky. More importantly camels are a genuine problem for native species. Much of Australia's own wildlife tends to be of the small marsupial variety (and spiders and snakes obviously, but lets ignore them for the purposes of this post). How much food and water do you think a camel uses up compared to some little critter that looks like a bouncing hamster with a pocket? Exactly.

Although their impact on the environment is not as severe as some other pests introduced in Australia, camels feed on more than 80% of the available plant species. Degradation of the environment occurs when densities exceed two animals per km2, which is presently the case throughout much of their range in the Northern Territory where they are confined to two main regions: the Simpson Desert and fringing pastoral properties, and the western desert area comprising the Central Ranges, Great Sandy Desert and Tanami Desert. Some traditional food plants harvested by Aboriginal people in these areas are seriously affected by camel browsing. While having soft-padded feet makes soil erosion less likely, feral camels do have a noticeable impact on salt lake ecosystems, foul waterholes and destabilise dune crests which contributes to erosion.
The current estimated population of about one million feral camels is doubling approximately every nine years and there is evidence that impacts will increase along with the population.

On top of which they bugger up stock fences, pumps, dams and other stuff that some farmer will have to pay for, and even, as British readers may recall, fucking invade towns.

And you think it's just the fucking spiders and snakes?

So okay, the camels are a serious problem, we can all agree on that. If you believe in warble gloaming their farts are going to set fire to the ocean or something, and if you care about real environmental issues they're a worse resource hog than Windows Vista, and if you support the battling Aussie farmers they're a pest. Everyone agrees for a change, so that means we can all tool up, head north and waste the walking doormats, yes? Let me just get my boots and my rifle.

But Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Australian there was little point doing anything about Australia's feral camels as only the CO2 of the domesticated variety is counted under the Kyoto Protocol. That equates to only a small number of the beasts, the sort found lugging tourists around Cable Beach in Broome and at Monarto Zoo, southeast of Adelaide.

Wait, what?

It is one of the many quirks of international carbon accounting standards, but one that has been sufficient to stop the Rudd government from stepping in to address the camel problem.

Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me. I was even going to buy a ute (but not one of the ones the colour of fruit).

Opposition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt reckons the government has "lost its marbles". "It's now reached the absurd situation where a camel in captivity is a threat to the planet but a feral camel in the wild is absolutely fine," Mr Hunt said.

"While culling feral camels may or may not make a minor contribution to reducing our emissions, the real issue is the absurdity of Kevin Rudd's focus on meeting a bogus international accounting system rather than worrying about direct action."

And there's the nub of the problem. It's not about meaningful action so much as compliance and ritual and being seen to be singing from the right hymn sheets. Or to put it another way, just a series of fucking box ticking exercise.

Nor does it end with the camels. We're constantly told that burning anything containing the odd carbon molecule gloams the warble, which is why coal is in fact the dried turds of Satan and the burning of it will send us all to hell. And since a forest is only coal in waiting (just come back in eighty million years, we'll have it ready for you then) it's presumably the freshly passed stools of Beelzebub and burning it is just as bad, especially if a lot of it goes up.

Lucifer curling one out over the state of Victoria in 2003

The answer appears to be that it depends.

The absurdity of the UN carbon accounting systems was also highlighted by Mick Keogh, executive director of research group the Australian Farm Institute.

Mr Keogh noted that while emissions from a deliberately lit bushfire count under Kyoto, they did not if the fire was caused by lightning.

And it also varies depending on whether it razes privately owed land or a national park.

"When it's burning in the park, none of those emissions officially count, but when it spreads back out of the park to private land on the other side, it starts to again contribute to greenhouse emissions as measured by the UN's rules," he said.

So my question to the alarmists, including Penny Wong and our esteemed estimated Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, is what about bush fires for which a cause has not yet been determined? Is there some indeterminate state between causing and not causing warble gloaming? Or is it both at the same time until the results of an investigation are known? Are we talking Schrödinger's Bushfire here, and if a tree burns in the forest does it only warm the planet if there are some dead matches nearby?

You're doing this to yourselves, you do know that? Fuckwits.


H/T Counting Cats where I saw it first.

Alternative vote.

I'm keen to get something out on this since Gordon Clown is babbling on about it in his pathetic desperation but time and other rages are working against me. It looks a lot like he's looked at Australia and thought 'hmm, their version is working well there and that Kevin Dudd person they've got as PM is a good Labour man as well' and decided to suggest something a lot like it for Britain. I need to find time to look into a few things but my feeling is that as a democratic and accountable system it's dead wrong for the UK as a solution to current problems or an end point at which to aim, though paradoxically it's possible that it's a good place to start (advantage Australia perhaps, or perhaps not given how hard it is to make constitutional changes). As a teaser I'll point out that Australia has the same problems with safe seats that the UK has, has had governments that have hung around long enough to go well beyond their use-by date and start to stink the place up, and has had (actually has) governments with a good majority in the lower house of Parliament. Gordon Brown claims that Alternative Voting will solve these problems in the UK, and I'm telling you that the Aussie system hasn't done anything of the kind here. Various posts have languished in bloggie limbo before I've finally taken pity on the poor things and deleted them, but this is one I'm determined to get out in the next day or two.

And another slice of freedom taken away.

One for Mr Puddlecote to get wound up about.

As I've blogged before (see here, here and here) Australia likes to have little bans on consuming alcohol in public here and there, partly due to a perceived problem with out of control drinking and partly because the poor bloody Aborigines are still being patronised and treated like children who can't decide things for themselves. So I suppose it's not much of a surprise that some authoritarian prick would decide to extend the ban on smoking in 'public places' to, er... well, a public place actually.

Frankston City Council is preparing to impose blanket bans along three busy open-air shopping strips, including opposite the train station.

Do you know what really boils my piss about not smoking anymore? It's that I've become happy about it, but the fucking miserablist fuckstains who want to push every smoker who enjoys a ciggie into doing against their will what I chose to do for myself are fucking spoiling it for me.

Fuck off, you jumped up little authoritarian pricks.

Lighting up in the designated exclusion zones during the planned six-month trial could cost defiant smokers fines up to $110.

110 bucks? Fucking hell, that's a bit steep for a bit of smoke that's in the outdoors...

...where it can fucking blow away immediately without harming anybody else except including the self righteous wankers with theatrical coughs who'd actually move towards a smoker so the poor sod can see the tedious cunts waving their hands and pulling faces.

Fuck off!

Frankston Mayor Christine Richards said the bid to banish cigarette smoke from streets would probably upset some people, but the health benefits were worth any flak.

"We want to make people think twice about the way they conduct themselves in the public domain, and who they are affecting," she said.

It's outdoors. It fucking blows away, you fucking cretinous waste of skin. Just have the fucking guts to say it out loud: you don't like looking at it, do you? Because if it was just the smell of fag smoke, which I've been a non-smoker long enough now to come to dislike, you'd be banning farting and people with B.O. Actually I'd argue that minging armpits and a potent air biscuit are worse - on a still day their stench will hang around for a while whereas the smoker conveniently provides a heat source under the allegedly offending smell which lifts it up and away from other people.*

"There are a huge number of deaths from tobacco in Victoria each year, more than from alcohol and traffic accidents and illicit drugs. We want to do something about it."

And driving smokers and the money in their pockets away from a shopping area is it? You idiot! They'll just go shopping elsewhere and spend their money where they can smoke. If I had a shop in one of these streets, especially a newsagents or somewhere that had a fag counter, I'd be going ballistic over this piece of pointless tobacco fascism.

Victorian laws already ban smoking in pubs, cafes, shopping centres, gaming venues and workplaces, on some beaches, on covered train platforms, and in cars carrying children.

Which is obviously not enough for that section of non-smokers which make me feel FUCKING ASHAMED THAT I FUCKING GAVE UP, YOU LOATHSOME, ILLIBERAL, FUCKING FUCKS!!

FUCK!!
OFF!!!!

The council has voted to run an education campaign and consult the community before starting the trial in September.

The consultation exercise gives some hope that the council might be persuaded to drop this on behalf of the afore mentioned hypothetical shop owners, but authoritarian busybodies don't have a good track record anywhere on seeing sense when they're told that they're trampling on freedom in a supposedly free country. And they have been told:

But Alistair Wardle - the only one of nine councillors to vote against the trial - described the move as "a bit extreme".

"My main concern is that it is an infringement of civil liberties," Cr Wardle said.

"It's getting trivial, booking people for smoking on the pavement. It's open space - if people see someone smoking, they can walk around them."

Cr Wardle said he feared the rules would "create aggravation and annoyance" among smokers, would be difficult to police, and would simply shift smokers and their litter elsewhere

Good for Alistair, but since he was the only one this consultation and education shite is in all likelihood the only fucking concession there'll be. I have little doubt the consultation part will be 50% PR and spin to justify it and claim overwhelming support** and 50% pretending to listen to objections while politely explaining that they're going to do it anyway.

As for the education part, there's really only one lesson to learn:

Don't go to fucking Frankston. They're into bansturbation there.

* I concede that someone with minging pits and dropping tear jerker farts whilst smoking is antisocial due to the risk they might explode.
** A poll in the Herald Sun did show slightly over half support the move when I looked at it. Several thousand people are either fools or have yet to come across Niemöller.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

First they came for the smokers, and I did not speak out because I didn't smoke...

Getting an education.

At Dick Puddlecote's I read this:

Last week, the boy Puddlecote's school e-mailed their regular newsletter. At the end of the sterile but cheery message was a plea for parent participation.

"The children are always pleased when parents hear them sing at our assembly shows, so please come along if you can. Remember to bring your CRB checks with you"

Now, I'm CRB checked but was working. However, there are plenty others who would be able to attend but have never required clearance from the CRB in work or voluntary activities. And seeing as the process, in my experience, can take up to three months, anyone without clearance who wished to attend was effectively barred on the remote premise that they might be a paedophile.

Sorry if that appears simplistic, but how else can one view it? Guilty until proven innocent by the state machine.

It beggars belief, it really does. Not only guilty till proven innocent but what does it say about the absolute zero levels of initiative? Have you got your CRB check, Mr Glitter? Thank you, yes, that's all we need to see, please step right this way.

'Kinell. Go read the whole thing, but if you're not British please try not to take the piss out of Britain the way my wife did. We know it's fucking embarrassing, okay?

The latest epidemic, and this is probably real.

One in five Britons is now labouring under the misapprehension that they are suffering from a food allergy.

No shit.

One in five Britons now claims to have a food allergy or intolerance, with most stating wheat as the problem. That is an increase of 400 per cent in the past 20 years.
...
Now research conducted by Portsmouth University has shown that of those people claiming to have an allergy or intolerance, only 2 per cent actually did. That means millions of people wrongly think they have a food allergy.

Could this be a combination of two or three decades of wall to fucking wall media beat ups about food allergies combined with obsessive nanny statism insisting labels are stuck to absolutely fucking everything? Or are people just gullible twats?

So what?

Most of us who've had to make a speech had to because of some event or dinner that by tradition involves a speech or two, and almost all of us prepare in advance rather than try to ad lib and make a tit out of ourselves. In my case it was being best man at a wedding. I'd been to weddings where speakers had struggled through it because they'd only started thinking about it a day or two before so I began writing the speech a good couple of weeks in advance and had the bones of it down on cue cards. Couple of anecdotes, old joke re-worded to make fun of the groom, anecdote, lovely couple, many happy years together, good friends, charge your glasses - that sort of thing. While I have stood up and spoken since without cue cards it's only been on a topic I knew intimately well. Beyond that I think it'd be pretty normal to have cue cards in your pocket. As such I find it hard to understand what the fuss is over Sarah Palin doing something similar.

A close examination of the former vice-presidential candidate speaking at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville at the weekend revealed she had the words "Energy", "Tax," and "Lift Americans Spirits" scrawled in ink on the inside of her left hand.

So what if she's using notes? This isn't the usual political hypocrisy where the bastards tell us to do one thing while they live by a completely separate and altogether more cushy set of rules. She's not been telling the rest of us we can't speak with the aid of a few notes.

Ah, but...

Sarah Palin mocked President Barack Obama as 'a charismatic guy with a Teleprompter' during a speech only to be photographed with crib notes written on the palm of her hand.

Well? He is a charismatic guy with a teleprompter. She, on the other hand, is an arguably charismatic woman with a little bit of writing on her hand. See the difference? Teleprompter as opposed to six words written on someone's palm, seven if you count the one that had been crossed out. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not a fan. I think she's barking mad and steered way too much by her belief in the 13 billion year old invisible sky fairy for anyone to expect her to be anything other than a social authoritarian, despite her libertarian pretensions with all this small government low tax guff. Why not go after her for that instead of this thinly veiled jibe about keeping crib notes on your palm? Fuck, why not take the piss out of her for being unaware that you can do that with small bits of paper these days? Why not point out the $349-$549 cost of entry to hear Palin speak, and ask questions about that and the $100,000 she was paid and which she says she's donating to 'conservative causes' that aren't being specified? Because she apparently said something unkind about The One perhaps? Well, let's have a look at the quote in context.

“This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any one king or queen of a tea party, and it’s a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter,” she said.

If I was a picky sort, which I am, I'd point out that she doesn't even mention Obama by name there. Almost certainly she's referring to him but it's applicable to hundreds if not thousands of politicians the world over. She seems also to be lumping herself and other Tea Party big names in with the charismatic guys with teleprompters with the bit about 'any king or queen of a tea party'. What she is not saying is that she's better than him because he uses a teleprompter for speeches and she doesn't, and even if she was half a dozen words on her hand doesn't make her a hypocrite.

I know this was the Telegraph but I think the article comes under this heading:

Going to the Big House.

Would it be wrong of me to hope that this corrupt arsehole's guilty verdict is sending the shits up another four or five corrupt arseholes?

The judge said Dizaei had shown a "grave abuse of public trust" and his conduct had persisted for some time.
Dizaei will remain a senior police officer until the bureaucratic formal process of throwing him out of the force can be completed.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which investigated the original complaint, must pass its files to the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) for a decision.
Dizaei will then be sacked for gross misconduct and could face losing all or part of his pension under further measures aimed at punishing corrupt officers.
Nick Hardwick, who leads the IPCC, branded Dizaei a "criminal in uniform" who threatened the reputation of the entire service.

Oh, I don't know about that. Given the 'wholesale abuse of power' couldn't he retrain as a PCSO?

Infamous four.

Woot! But then that's four among how many? Well, to be pedantic since one's a Lord it's only three MPs out of 646. And what's happened to the rest? Oh yeah, fuck all. Okay, a load are standing down at the election for various reasons that no one believes and 381 are having to repay money, but come on! What normally happens to people who are a bit sticky fingered with their employers? They get fucking fired, and more than a few get nicked. And of the remainder we know that there are some who are not being asked to pay money back despite having made some fucking outrageous claims. Yes, Jacqboot, I'm thinking of you, your sister's house second home and that knuckle shuffler husband of yours - a whole other meaning to sticky fingers there. Is three token scalps all we get? Can the CPS really not make anything from all the other claims? And did all the claims of the rest really stand up to scrutiny or is it, as the Mash put it, that the rest lied their way out of paying the money back? Blurring the line between satire and reality again.

Auditor Sir Thomas Legg said around 350 members will return at least some of the money they stole while another 300 had given him a variety of very convincing reasons for not doing so.

He added: "Many have developed a chronic allergy to financial transactions and their throats will close up if they are in the same room as a cheque book, while in recent months a large number of MPs' constituency offices seem to have become Chinese restaurants.

"In the case of four MPs we found that they didn't actually exist and were just the 'shop front' for an off-the-shelf company based in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Still, I'm sure it'll all be fine in future, eh? Who am I kidding, this independent watchdog is highly likely to be parliament's bitch.

'Kinell.

Food for thought.

Holy fuck.

Australian Police - Don't Fuck With Them.

I think I've mentioned a few times that the police and judicial systems in most states here are obsessed with speeding to a degree that makes the British cops look like they just don't give a flying fuck about it. Here in Victoria it's got to the stage where the default speed limit for the whole state is 50 kph (31 mph) unless signposted otherwise, that even freeways that are five lanes across are only 100 kph - unless there are roadworks in which case it may be as low as a comical 40 kph (25 mph) - and it's not until you get well away from the towns and cities that it's finally raised to the dizzying heights of 110 kph*, which is still less than 70 mph. On top of that the fines are extortionately high and rather than the comfortable margin of 10% of the limit + 2 mph you supposedly get in the UK you get a piffling 2 kph leeway here. That's 1 ¹/₄ mph in old money or, in the Exile lexicon, fucking ridiculous. Most egregious of all the law allows - possibly even insists, I'm not sure - that at a certain point above the speed limit the cops impound your car for two days** and possibly more if you were really caning it. As far as I've been able to find out by asking Aussies this applies even when a driver gets tugged and it's not his car, which certainly seems to be the case if this is anything to go by.



To quote Vincent Vega,

What's more chickenshit than fucking with a man's automobile? I mean, don't fuck with another man's vehicle.

Especially when it's pretty bloody obvious that it wasn't even him driving it. Fuck knows what they do if it's a rental, but it's something visitors could bear in mind if the hire company piss them about. All you'd need to do is give it a good thrashing on your way to the airport at the end of your stay, and when the cops stop you and impound it get a taxi the rest of the way and send Avis a fax from the terminal telling them that their hire car is with the police. And I'm only half joking, because it's probably going to take more than one obviously wealthy car owner being fucked up by an unjust and retarded law to get something done about it. Bit of commercial pressure...

Unfortunately, far from being stopped this style of summary justice is actually spreading, and now it's computer owners who may have their property seized without so much as charges being brought. All in the name of thinking of the chiiiiiiiiildren.

Police will be able to destroy computers carrying suspected child pornography even where the material is highly encrypted and impossible to access, under a tightening of federal sex offence laws.

Now I despise kiddy fiddlers as much as anyone else but I'm really fucking concerned when the hysteria reaches Paedogeddon territory and everyone switches their fucking brains off. Do we really want to go down this road? Do we really want state sanctioned private property destroyed on a fucking suspicion?

Hey, what have you got in that safe there?

Sorry but that's nothing to do with you, officer.

No, look, I want to see what's in there because I suspect it of being [insert type of illicit item here].

Sorry but I'm not prepared to let you.

I'll get a warrant.

Oh really? Will it have the combination written on it?

No. But it'll mean you'll have to open it or the court will do you for refusing.

All because you suspect there's something in there.

Yeah, so open it.

Erm... No.

Right, we'll get the warrant.

And out of principle I'd rather do the time than open it for you.

...

Right then, in that case we'll just seize your safe, take it out into a field, get the Army to set some explosives on it and blow the cunt to tiny little bits.

And don't forget that in this country some courts have a pretty extreme idea of what constitutes child pornography. You with the cartoons, stand still and put your hands up slowly, you filthy fucking nonce.


* Ironically, being out of the towns and suburbs means that these 110 kph sections of road are generally two lanes per carriageway, or even single carriageway roads, with entrances and exits joining directly in places. Often they are highways rather than freeways (A roads rather than motorways to Brits). The high capacity sections of freeway (up to five lanes in places) with decent grade separated junctions near built up areas are invariably 100 kph.
** Longer if it's a holiday weekend, natch.

Copywronged - part 2.

Also on the subject of copyright infringment, another Australian court has decided that a few notes from a nursery rhyme unconsciously incorporated into a pop song is copyright infringement.

Men at Work's number one hit Down Under reproduced a "substantial part" of the children's folk tune Kookaburra Sits In the Old Gum Tree, infringing copyright in the song, a Federal Court judge found today.

Oooh, sounds serious. How much of Kookaburra did they pinch? Ah, not that much apparently.

Justice Peter Jacobson handed down his judgment in a Sydney court today and said the famous flute riff from the Aussie band's smash hit Down Under was unmistakably the same as Australian folk tune Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Where to begin? With a /facepalm obviously. Is that it? The fucking flute riff? Is that seriously it? So what's that in musical terms?

Singer/songwriter Hay does not deny that the flautist, Greg Ham, used two bars of Kookaburra...

Two bars? Doesn't sound exactly substantial to me.

...but he says it was a musical accident which ended up on the recording of the song.

Let's come back to that. Two bars is a 'substantial part' is it? Or isn't it (my emphasis)?

After a hearing in the Federal Court last year, Justice Peter Johnson delivered judgment today.

"I have come to the view that the 1979 recording and the 1981 recording of Down Under infringe Larrikin's copyright in Kookaburra because both of those recordings reproduce a substantial part of Kookaburra," he said.

"I am also of the view that Larrikin is entitled to recover damages ... for the infringements.

"Nevertheless, I would emphasise that the findings I have made do not amount to a finding that the flute riff is a substantial part of Down Under or that it is the "hook" of the song.

What the fuck? It is a substantial part but it's not a substantial part? Okay, Kookaburra may be shorter and so two bars is a greater part of the song than it is of Down Under, but it's still just two bars from what was already at that time a pretty old song. One that could easily have earwormed it's way into the head of the Down Under flautist who then used it in all innocence. In his mind it was probably just a bunch of notes that sounded good and suited the song, and he might well have reached that without actual conscious thought. As per the quote above, the song writer feels it was a 'musical accident'.

"It is indeed true, that Greg Ham, (not a writer of the song) unconsciously referenced two bars of Kookaburra on the flute, during live shows after he joined the band in 1979, and it did end up in the Men At Work recording,'' Hay said in a statement today.

"It was inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men At Work recorded the song, it had become unrecognisable."

This seemed somehow familiar, and it didn't take long before I remembered a short story by Spider Robinson called Melancholy Elephants.
Go read it if you haven't before, but since Spider Robinson makes it available under a Creative Commons licence I'll just quote the bit I was thinking of.

"There are eighty-eight notes. One hundred and seventy-six, if your ear is good enough to pick out quarter tones. Add in rests and so forth, different time signatures. Pick a figure for maximum number of notes a melody can contain. I do not know the figure for the maximum possible number of melodies--too many variables - but I am sure it is quite high.

"I am certain that is not infinity.

"For one thing, a great many of those possible arrays of eighty-eight notes will not be perceived as music, as melody, by the human ear. Perhaps more than half. They will not be hummable, whistleable, listenable--some will be actively unpleasant to hear. Another large fraction will be so similar to each other as to be effectively identical: if you change three notes of the Moonlight Sonata, you have not created something new.

...

"My husband wrote a song for me, on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary. It was our love in music, unique and special and intimate, the most beautiful melody I ever heard in my life. It made him so happy to have written it. Of his last ten compositions he had burned five for being derivative, and the others had all failed copyright clearance. But this was fresh, special--he joked that my love for him had inspired him. The next day he submitted it for clearance, and learned that it had been a popular air during his early childhood, and had already been unsuccessfully submitted fourteen times since its original registration. A week later he burned all his manuscripts and working tapes and killed himself."

The very same point: music heard as a child might come back into a musician's head many years later without being accompanied by a memory of the source, besides which there are only a limited number of notes and a limited number of ways they can be combined. As with the proverbial infinite number of monkeys random - and completely innocent - repetition is inevitable given time.

On top of all that can you really claim copyright infringement when two things are so dissimilar? You'd have to be on something pretty fucking evil as well as mind bending to confuse Down Under and Kookaburra, and as I've argued before if there's no danger of confusing two things, whether they're songs, books, paintings, logos, whatever, there's no reason to start screaming for a lawyer.

I'm fine with company logos being sufficiently different for consumers with half a brain to tell them apart, I'm fine with creators of original work being credited for it indefinitely, I'm okay with inventors having a fair chance to get their idea to market and I'm okay with both earning a residual income from their work for a reasonable time. But stifling anything because it's a tiny little bit similar or expecting to be paid a fortune by someone who independently came up with an idea you've sat on and done nothing with for years, or to still be earning residual income 5 fucking decades on is taking the piss. The whole fucking IP thing has got badly out of hand, and the rate things are going I can imagine some cuntweaselly lawyer acting on behalf of a well known California based computer manufacturer sparking off a court case over this.

On top of that it's pretty clear that in spite of both the amount of time it's been since Down Under became a hit and the amount of airplay it's had since then the copyright holder, who only bought the copyright in 1990, needed to have this copyright infringement fucking pointed out by a fucking TV show.

[Larrikin Music] claims it had won a tender for the copyright for Kookaburra from the South Australian Public Trustee in 1990, after [its author Marion Sinclair] died.

Legal action was launched by Larrikin's managing director, Norman Lurie, in 2007 after the television show Spicks And Specks raised the alleged similarities.

So what we have here is that the copyright of a song written in 1932 by someone who died in 1988 was bought in 1990 by a record company. But part of the tune to that song was added as a fragment to a song recorded in 1979, quite possibly unconsciously, which went on to become a huge international hit. Yet in the nine years before the she died Marion Sinclair seemingly did precisely nothing about this supposed infringement of her copyright, as did Larrikin Music from the time it bought the copyright in 1990 right up to the similarity being mentioned on a TV music quiz 17 years or so later.*

Fuck me gently with a busted banjo, copyright law really is in bad need of reform.


* While I was surfing for stuff for this post I came across Kookaburra's Wikipedia entry, which mentions that it's sung to the same tune as a Welsh folk song called Wele ti'n eistedd aderyn du?. Who used the tune first, Marion Sinclair or the Welsh, isn't mentioned but presumably either Larrikin gets to sue Wales or Wales will get to sue Larrikin.

Copywronged - part 1.

Some good news about internet service in Australia. No, Senator Conroy still wants to censor it, but at least some sense has been seen in another area.

The giants of the film industry have lost their case against ISP iiNet in a landmark judgment handed down in the Federal Court today.

Fucking good job too, and not just for iiNet subscribers. This would have set a very nasty precedent: that Internet Service Providers must also police the activities of their customers.

The decision had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.

But after an on-and-off eight-week trial that examined whether iiNet authorised customers to download pirated movies, Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that the ISP was not liable for the downloading habits of its customers.

Frankly I can't for the life of me understand how it took eight weeks to reach that decision. The ISP is simply providing a service, and while it certainly can, probably does, and arguably should include a 'no illegal activity' clause in its terms and conditions that doesn't mean it should be doing the job of the police and courts. In turn that means you can't clobber them for failing to do what it isn't their to be doing.

The suit against iiNet was filed in November 2008 by a group of the biggest Hollywood studios including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Disney, as well as the Seven Network.

They claimed iiNet was liable for ‘‘authorising’’ copyright infringement on its network because it did not warn or disconnect offending customers when repeatedly notified of the infringements by the movie studios.

Okay, for the moment let's take that position and then extend the argument that the ISP was 'authorising' infringement, just to see where it goes. Doesn't it mean all suppliers of goods and services are 'authorising' illegal activity if the end users use them in way that breaches criminal or civil law? I know that various hoplophobic nutcases in America have tried suing companies for the illegal use by third parties of their legally produced and sold products. Similar?

The mayors of Chicago and New Orleans have filed lawsuits on behalf of their cities against the gun industry, and two similar lawsuits filed on behalf of private citizens are already moving through the courts, with a mixed verdict rendered in one of the private suits. The Chicago suit and the private suits contend that (1) guns are a public nuisance and (2) gun manufacturers knowingly flood cities with more guns than they could expect to sell to law-abiding citizens, thus aiding criminals to obtain firearms.

So far none of these suits has got anywhere as far as I've heard, and in fact at least two have already failed. The reason? The courts seems to feel that aside from manufacturing defects or design faults any responsibility lies ultimately with the individual using or misusing a gun, not the manufacturers or suppliers. Apart from being trite the 'flooding cities' thing is bollocks - you'll notice that they're not suing the motor industry for knowingly producing more cars than they can expect to sell to law abiding and competent drivers.

Ah, you might say, but it's asking a bit much of both the gun manufacturers and the car industry - actually just about any industry - to keep track of their products. That doesn't apply to a company providing a service, especially something like an ISP that ought to be able to look at an individual customer's surfing habits, say their upload and download patterns, and draw conclusions that they're file sharing copyrighted material. Well, first off there are legal applications for P2P file sharing so the ISP would really need a little more than just upload and download patterns. However, the movie studios did have something there.

The entertainment companies compiled their evidence by hiring two investigators to subscribe to iiNet and then begin trading files using different BitTorrent networks.

They kept track of what movies and TV shows they were sharing, when they downloaded them, and the ID numbers of the computers they were sharing these files with.

Every week the entertainment companies sent that data to iiNet and asked that iiNet then disconnect the users who had been sharing the files illegally, but they said iiNet failed to act.

The companies claimed iiNet was refusing to enforce its own user agreement, in which users are asked to agree not to download files or anything illegally.

Not that that helped because, as iiNet noted, they don't have the resources to investigate every allegation and, above all else as far as I'm concerned, customers are still supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in court. This means that sending them an email reminding them of the Ts & Cs and telling them to pack it in is about all they can do, and not always that much.

And even if they could track all users effectively, what then? What of the precedent that sets? It wouldn't affect just ISPs but every company who can even potentially put in place a system to monitor all their users. Wouldn't AusPost have to explain why they don't screen each and every piece of mail and insist people posting things provide (with documentary proof) a place of origin as well as the destination? People might be sending copied DVDs through the mail you know. That they'd have to check something in the region of five billion pieces of mail every year is neither here nor there if you accept the movie studios argument that ISPs are responsible for what their customers do. And what about companies whose business actually requires a tracking system and has therefore had one since day one? Someone like Citylink for example - since their toll roads opened nearly twenty years ago they've been tracking vehicles and charging tolls electronically. So if I jumped in the car now and floored it along the nearest bit of toll road is Citylink responsible? Or did they just provide the medium on which I committed an offence? Clearly it would be insane to hold a toll company responsible for individual drivers committing motoring offences, but that is pretty much what the movie companies expected of Australian ISPs. Thank fuck for some common sense, although the word 'appeal' got mentioned pretty quickly so the fight is probably not over yet.

Capitalism - a justification.

A couple of days ago I blogged on the Tele's Jeremy Warner and his article about capitalism and what he sees as its current self-doubt. One point I circled round but never really made was that the alternatives aren't that great, and I can't put it any better than Dan Hannan did around the same time while blogging on the self righteousness of certain lefties:

Capitalism is the most moral economic system yet devised. It lets people become rich to the extent that they provide a service for others. That’s not to say that capitalism is perfect, simply that every alternative system leaves people poorer and less free.

That nails it for me. I'm not a Gordon Gecko type. I'm not a big earner. I'm not even a particular fan of capitalism and don't see it as something to be achieved. It's just a by product of freedom, no more or less than the system you're going to end up with if you recognise that people are naturally free to earn and own to the best of their ability. If there was a communist or socialist economy that was big on protecting individual liberties and property rights I'd happily bang the drum for it, but the reality is, as Dan Hannan says, that the alternatives to capitalism invariably means more poverty and less freedom, albeit incrementally in some cases. I honestly don't care too strongly about capitalism itself but I value freedom as highly as oxygen.

I'd happily ditch capitalism in favour of anything else that came along if it was better at providing prosperity and defending liberty, though since I think that capitalism is just a name to hang on what you end up with when people are free I'm not convinced that such a thing is even possible.

No, it's not perfect. It's just the best there is.

Salami slicing cigarettes.

Factoid of the day: Bhutan has a smoking ban, and they fucking meant it. This is not just a food areas only smoking ban or a public places smoking ban that have been imposed on various allegedly free countries in the West. No, this is your full-on, no smoking anywhere at all, no possession of tobacco, everyone quit smoking right now because it's actually illegal from now on, Marks and Spencer smoking ban. And unlike the UK there wasn't a series of tedious, nannying, finger wagging cunts like Andy Burnham* extending the area covered by the ban in gradual increments. They just went ahead and did it.

Now for a long time, long before I gave up smoking myself and long before the Bhutan ban and long before the British not-really-a-ban, I wondered why the UK didn't do it. Why did someone never say 'right, we know** tobacco is bad so let's stop fucking around and just classify it next to cannabis and Ecstasy and the rest'? Well, there is an obvious reason of course. Lots of reasons in fact - currently around ten billion of them (as opposed to the £2.7 billion it's claimed they cost the Notional Health Service). The government, and this doesn't mean just the current one or just the British one, is far more addicted to the revenue than the smokers are to the weed. So addicted in fact that it really doesn't want to force everyone to give up smoking and slay that wonderful golden goose. Oh, they'll play along with the tobacco hating joyless bastards, bansturbators and killjoys who never fucking smile it case it cracks their complexions, just to keep them onside. But what they won't dare do and frankly can't fucking afford to do is persuade everyone to stop. With only 1%, possibly a little more, of the population being smokers Bhutan could do it, plus, as that article points out, Bhutan is a little crazy ($200 a day tax for the privilege of visiting the place, if they deign to let me in in the first place? I think I'll stay here, thanks). Britain's government is also crazy (and stupid), but not that crazy (and stupid) to want to cut off a major income stream until it's identified a replacement. Until then ASH is in for a disappointment, but that's still bad news for smokers since in practical terms it means the policy of making smoking increasingly inconvenient and unfun - but not so much that smokers start quitting in droves - will continue instead. Even if they haven't got their way yet (and since nothing pleases the cunts more than being displeased they ought to be oddly happy about it) the neo-Puritans are still way ahead, as Jeremy Clarkson explained recently.

In the not too distant past, the notion of not being allowed to smoke in someone’s house would have been as alien as not being allowed to use the loo. Now, most people I know run a fresh-air policy, and those who do allow you to light up always make a huge song and dance about finding something that can be used as an ashtray.

Worse, even when you are allowed to smoke, there’s a sense still that you shouldn’t. That if you do, you’ll be the only one. Lighting up at a drinks party is a bit like standing there masturbating.

...

Mainstream memes.

I had to chuckle at this brief picture gallery explanation of string theory in the Times. The fourth page reads:

Beautiful as the idea sounds, when string theory is applied in the ordinary three spatial dimensions it doesn?t work mathematically, predicting the wrong numbers for constants such as pi and the speed of light. It also predicts that the whole Universe should disappear. And if the strings were vibrating in ordinary space, we should be able to measure the effects. Fail!

I don't think whoever wrote that has quite got the hang of it.

This is a fail.

This is a fail .

This is a fail.

This is a fail.

I don't pretend to be the arbiter of such matters and I doubt there's a rule book, but I'm not sure that the need for seven extra dimensions qualifies as a fail in the same way that idiotic activists, 'Australien' gift shops selling the New Zealand flag, parking for disabled badgers and the world's most precocious toddler do. Sorry, but it's probably a fail of fail, which is another way of saying a fail fail or fail squared. At this point someone will probably divide by zero and the universe will explode.

On the other hand...

... win.

Time to die.

Very interesting piece in the Times about assisted suicide, the right to die and the views of the author and Alzheimer's sufferer Terry Pratchett.

The debate over assisted suicide will be reopened tomorrow when Sir Terry Pratchett uses the annual Dimbleby Lecture to call for a radical overhaul of the law.

The best-selling author, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, will say that the “time is really coming” for assisted death to be legalised.

...

Sir Terry said that if he knew he could end his life at a time of his choosing, without the fear of incriminating a friend or family member, he would enjoy the rest of his life far more.

“If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice,” he will say in the lecture.

“I certainly do not expect or assume that every GP or hospital practitioner would be prepared to assist death by arrangement, even in the face of overwhelming medical evidence. That is their choice. Choice is very important in this matter. But there will be some, probably older, probably wiser, who will understand.”

Couldn't have put it better.

And then, as Penn and Teller say, there's this asshole (via the Ambush Predator).

But what about the sufferers, don't they have a right to escape their pain? No, not if we believe that life is sacred.

So because of your belief that you have a 13 billion year old invisible friend and that all life belongs to him we all have to suffer through whatever diseases life - or your god if you prefer - throw at us. Well, I have to say that if you're right and it's your god doing it then that's pretty fucked up of him. And if you're wrong then our lives don't belong either to ourselves or a non-existent god but to you and your beliefs, and that's pretty fucked up of you. I'll offer you another possibility though: what if God is still choosing when everyone dies but he's directing people's wills so that some off themselves and some do so with help from others? I'd still say that's fucked up and the implied lack of true free will offends me as much as some three way man love during a Sunday service would probably offend you, but you can believe what you want whether it offends me or anyone else. And it's still less fucked up than a 'loving' god who goes round cancering people to death on purpose.

It just keeps on coming.

Turns out the Stern Report was altered after publication, on the QT, natch. Don't these pricks realise the damage they're doing to their own credibility? Clearly not, and that suits me just fine. The more this carries on the more people will start to wonder if the reason some of the warble gloaming proponents have acted like they're hiding something is because they really do have something to hide. And while all this is going on Ed Miliband pops up to tell us all - again - how certain he and the rest of the Big Eco crowd are about everything and how we must obey obey obey the Precautionary Principle like good little Daleks.

Two problems there, Ed. First is that you're telling us that the Precautionary Principle means we must assume the worst case scenario, but as I've said before man made warble gloaming ain't it. You and the other Big Eco mouthpieces keep telling us that warble gloaming is something we can reverse, that climate is something we can control. Okay, but that doesn't sound so bad. It might cost so much money we all end up living a more Medieval lifestyle (but without the Medieval Warm Period presumably) but it's technically possible according to Big Eco's AGW proponents. But is something we can fix really the worst case scenario, or would it really be something we can't fix? Something like, ooooh, I don't know, maybe natural climate change? See, if you want to talk about the worst case scenario let's talk about the possibility that the effect of our activities is so small it's lost in the noise and what we see going on would be pretty much what would have happened in our absence. Climate change we can't control, or even dream of one day possibly being able to control, that's a far worse case than climate we think we can control if we're prepared to accept the astronomical cost. In short, Milibrain, far from saying we should act to control CO₂ the Precautionary Principle suggests assuming it's almost entirely natural and completely unstoppable, and all we can do is adapt to it. The Precautionary principle says invest in air conditioning and central heating, not in greenwash and shite lightbulbs and wind turbines. The second problem is that there is a cost, and that it's not likely to be cheap. As the Devil points out there's an assumption that the cost of following the Precautionary Principle is a lot less than not doing so. That's likely to be the case if you read it that the worst case scenario is nature fucking with us, but we already know that it's not the case if you choose to believe that the Precautionary Principle means acting as if the worst case maybe second or third worst, possibly fourth but definitely not more than fifth worst, okay at the outside sixth worst case scenario is true.

What a complete twat.

H/T Burning Our Money.

Australia wants you (dead).

Cracked on Australia.

1. Australia is the largest island nation in the world, straddling the border of the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
2. It has a rich and exotic ecosystem supporting fantastic flora and fauna...all of which were unfortunately eaten by the monsters that live there.
3. Its primary spoken language is screaming.

It's a good read but actually they missed a few things out. I'd make a list but I really don't want to spend the rest of the week wondering why I'm not dead yet.

Things in Australia that Will Kill You.

Everything. No, seriously: Everything.

Almost. There's even an Aussie version of stinging nettles, but of course it's the size of a tree. Frankly I think we should count ourselves lucky the damn things don't uproot themselves and follow people home to kill them. Yet.

Things in Australia that Will Not Kill You.
....

Hugh Jackman seems nice.

I'm not sure what that says about Kylie Minogue.

A new take on an old socialist favourite.

Medals for all. That's the clichéd view many opponents of British style socialism have held for, oooh, decades. Medals for all whether they were deserved or not. And it turns out we were wrong. It's really medals for all except, after a certain number has been reached, those who really fucking do deserve a medal.

A WHITEHALL quota system that restricts the number of medals given to soldiers in wartime has resulted in more than half the recommendations for awards for bravery in Afghanistan being turned down.

Fucking hell fire, how dribblingly stupid can you get? This is the flip side of the target culture, and just as repugnant. How the cunting fuck can there be a quota for acts of bravery?

Many senior serving and retired officers claim the system is outdated, fails to recognise the intensive fighting seen by British troops in Helmand and has resulted in hundreds of servicemen and women being denied recognition for their courage.

The Ministry of Defence places limits on the numbers of medals that can be awarded for each six-month tour of duty, meaning only about one in 100 soldiers deployed can be rewarded for bravery.

It's a recruiter's fucking dream, eh?

Join the Army. Get sent to some shithole where you'll be taught how to be shot at. Live in substandard accomodation and on shit wages. Possibly come home from deployments horizontally (breathing optional). But you will get the recognition you deserve... unless you're one of the majority who don't.

“The way the quota is used at the moment is very strict, the rules are very inflexible,” said Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

“Commanding officers are lucky to get a 50% strike rate for their medal recommendations due to the conservative nature of senior officers who sit in London and decide these things.”

Well at least the squaddies know that the regimental commanders or whoever sends the medal recommendation to London recognises their efforts. Maybe among soldiers that's enough, I don't know. But wouldn't official recognition be better still?

Service chiefs have expressed fears that if they did not place limits on the numbers issued, this would “undermine” the value of those given for valour such as the Victoria Cross and the Military Cross.

Look, nobody's suggesting everybody gets a VC just for showing up, but you can't be niggardly either. Nor does any kind of quota make sense. Acts of heroism and bravery aren't like a fucking bus timetable you know. If we accept, as probably everyone does, that there may be no VC-worthy acts of valour for years and then there might be two within a couple of years it follows that the same applies with other medals and commendations. Maybe in six months not one soldier among 10,000 deployed to a certain place will do something to merit a particular gong, but maybe it'll happen five times a week throughout the whole tour. And if the latter you can't just reward the first half a dozen and tell the rest 'too bad, boys and girls, the quota's been used up'. Doesn't that undermine the medal system as well, you fucking tools?

Kiss of death. Again.

It slipped my mind to make a prediction for the Australian Open Men's Final but I had meant to say that I expected a solid win for Roger Federer simply on the basis that Gordon Brown had applied his usual reverse Midas touch to Andy Murray. So Murray going down in straight sets didn't really come as too much of a shock to be honest.

Why can't the jinxed prick send a message of support to the opponents of British sports people? Or, because he'd be doing it to to secretly help the Brits, would it still work against them? Probably best for everyone if he just shuts the fuck up and gets back in the bunker until it's time for him to be dragged back out for the election.

Disabled Princesses.

No, I'm not talking about one of British Leyland's cars. This is about the latest bit of equality obsessed bollocks to come from the British politically correct left.

Disney has been praised for breaking down barriers by featuring its first black princess in the film The Princess and The Frog. Oona King, who was Gordon Brown's senior policy adviser on equalities and diversity, is not satisfied, however.
"You never see disabled people," the former Labour MP complained to Mandrake at a screening at the Mayfair Hotel in London. "When are you going to see a Disney film with a disabled character in the lead role? Tell me that."

The Little Mermaid didn't have any legs. Now fuck off.

UPDATE: Also at Leg-iron's.

She'd just watched a film in which one of the two main characters had been turned into a frog. You just can't get much more disabled than that, unless you set the story in a French restaurant.

UPDATE 2: Mrs Exile points out that Pinocchio was made entirely of prostheses and probably makes up enough righteousness to cover all the other Disney output for the twentieth century.

Warble gloaming caused by student politics.

Okay, not quite but not a million miles off.

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
...
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

To resort to a fairly over used phrase, you couldn't make it up. A fucking magazine? Really? Jesus Christ. And while I wouldn't want to belittle this geography student - for all I know he turned in his work plastered with caveats which were then ignored by the professional warmistas - it's still based on the subjective opinions and recollections of third parties. Science? Isn't someone supposed to be out in the field with a fucking theodolite and a tape measure? Where is the observation data?

This isn't just the ranting of a sceptical layman either:

Professor Richard Tol, one of the [AR4] report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."

This is where sceptics and those AGW proponents who haven't abandoned the scientific method and are honest about uncertainty and 'sloppy work' can agree, but there's one point I'd dispute in there. There may have been few or no policy decision made on the basis of this alone but policy decisions fucking well are being made on the basis of the Summary For Policy Makers at the end of IPCC reports, and one of the three major sections of those reports that are being summarised for policy makers is being done, to use Professor Tol's own term, sloppily.

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.

See, Professor? Now how do you think these policy decisions can be unaffected if the summaries on which they're based are in turn based on a report written by three working groups, one of which you yourself say is sloppy? This is costing us all a fucking shitload of money, you do realise that, don't you?

Now let's look at the sources themselves (my emphasis).

The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.

As opposed to a failed politician and author of a couple of books on climate change? Still, the point here is that this guy doesn't hold a neutral view, is not a scientist and was not writing for a scientific. It was a fucking magazine article. Now he's perfectly entitled to say what he likes and to bang out an article full of cherry picked half remembered anecdotes along the lines of 'we don't get t' winters we 'ad when I were a lad' that are completely unverifiable if that's what he wants. Fair enough, and he doesn't sound like he's trying to hide the anecdotal nature of it, but it's NOT FUCKING SCIENCE, okay?

Mr Bowen said: "I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes."

Actually, Mark, yes there is reason. Did these guys to climb up things or did they go to measure them? Did they make any observations and take equipment to do so? Or is it like someone coming back from the footie and telling his wife that it rained a bit more than last time he went? Anecdotal evidence is subjective, subject to faulty recollection and vulnerable to little tricks such as leading questions when collecting it. Plus...

Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

Which also applies to this:

The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.

Oh gosh, another less than neutral writer.* I'd say how astonished I am but it'd be a lie even without the recent revelation that a lot of IPCC reports are based on stuff churned out by WWF and Greenpeace. And remember that for years we've been told that it's all solid, all robust, all reliable and especially all peer reviewed. In fact plenty of AGW proponents are openly dismissive, scornful even, of anything that is not peer reviewed. It's their gold standard, and by extension that of Big Eco as a whole, but in turns out that non-peer reviewed work is just fine when they're using it, even if colleagues from related disciplines contributing to other sections of IPCC reports say it's sloppy.

Do as they say, not as they do. Bastards.


UPDATE: Not that it changes much one way or the other but I notice at Wattsupwiththat that the IPCC's Rajenda Pachauri has written a work of fiction (or another one as the case may be ;-) ) of the 'romance with rumpy-pumpy' genre. I wonder if he knows Alastair Campbell.

* True, I'm less than neutral myself but that's only because of all the shit we've been fed on this over the past three decades. When they come up with a convincing theory - one that accounts for the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age etc rather than tries to pretend they didn't fucking happen - I'll look at it neutrally, though still with a bit of scepticism since that's actually the way it's supposed to work and, as I said, there's a bit of history.

Here's the science bit.

Numbers can be dull as shite, and when they get too big they can start to become unwieldy and difficult to wrap your head around. National debt? Well, it's turned into a number between one and ten with a lot of zeroes behind it, isn't it?* One of the things I've admired on other blogs is the imaginative way in which some bloggers have tackled the numbers to make them more user friendly, and so we have things expressed in terms of things like how many tons of £50 notes or how many years would be needed to burn a certain amount of money every day to reach the same sum. Still mind boggling but you can at least picture it. But even so there are some things where even this approach hits the buffers. Homeopathy, for example.

I have just purchased a packet of Boots-brand 84 arnica homeopathic 30C Pills for £5.09, which Boots proudly claim is only 6.1p per pill. Their in-store advice tells me that arnica is good for treating “bruising and injuries”, which gives the impression that this is a very cost-effective health-care option.

Unlike most medication, it didn’t list the actual dose of the active ingredient that each pill contains, so I checked the British Homeopathic Association website. On their website it nonchalantly states that to make a homeopathic remedy, they start with the active ingredient and then proceed to dilute it to 1 per cent concentration. Then they dilute that new solution again, so there is now only 0.01 per cent of the original ingredients. For my 30C pills this diluting is repeated thirty times, which means that the arnica is one part in a million billion billion billion billion billion billion.

The arnica is diluted so much that there is only one molecule of it per 7 million billion billion billion billion pills.

It’s hard to comprehend numbers that large.

You're not kidding. How about making it easier on the brain then?

If you were to buy that many pills from Boots, it would cost more than the gross domestic product of the UK.

Okay, we've reached meaningless pretty early and we're only able to get it down to GDP of a major economy?

It’s more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.

Ah. Fuck.

Since the dawn of civilisation. If every human being since the beginning of time had saved every last penny, denarius and sea-shell, we would still have not saved-up enough to purchase a single arnica molecule from Boots.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

Then the process of consuming enough pills to get that one molecule also boggles the mind.

Oooooh, I'm not sure, but you can try me.

You can try imagining Wembley Stadium completely filled with people, all drinking pints of medicine at the rate of two an hour. For just one of these people to eventually consume one molecule, you would need a million Wembley Stadiums all at full capacity with people who have drinking pints constantly since the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Number too big again.

Oh, and you’d need 737 million such Earths.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill.

Fuuuuuuuck. See what I mean? Normally when someone wants to talk about massive quantities or sizes of things they reach for London buses or jumbo jets or Eiffel Towers. This guy's using fucking galaxies and the universe... and it's not enough. Holy shit!

Homeopathy is actually based on 18th century wishful thinking that water will somehow remember substances that it had previous contact with (but will forget the countless effluent that it has passed through). That a 10 billion year old water molecule will remember everything it has touched flies in the face of all known science and is an insult to any thinking person.

... at least snake-oil has the decency to contain some snake.

Mate, why didn't you just start with that? Alternatively, here's Dara O'Briain on the subject.




* And there are a lot of zeroes behind it in more ways than one, buduhm tish.

Prats In Power.

Hey, where'd he go? He's been a bit quiet lately and now the blog seems to have gone private. This isn't the Scottish blogger thing again is it?


UPDATE: Somehow I missed Shibby's farewell message before the shutters went down on Prats In Power and barring a contact from Shibby I'd be none the wiser were it not for Google cache. So now I know that it's gone. Pity.