Quote of the Day, as voted for by 128% of readers

By Alexander Downer, Australia's Foreign Minister under John Howard, writing on the subject of parliamentary procedure ($) in the Democratic (for a given value of 'democratic') People's Republic of Korea.

I was proudly shown the parliament. They have electronic voting at every MP's desk. You press green if you agree. My guide delicately said that orange is for abstention. And what, I asked, is the red button for? The guide looked at the ground and one of the Australians filled in: "it calls the guards!".

And who knows, perhaps it did. Or maybe none of the buttons did anything at all. It's not like it's ever sounded like they were really needed.

Is this the same Nick Clegg?

Click for linky

On Friday night, François Fillon, the French prime minister, interrupted an official visit to Brazil to call Mr Clegg to "clarify" his recent comments that Britain's credit rating should be reviewed.
The Deputy PM told Mr Fillon that his recent remarks and those by other senior French figures had been "simply unacceptable and that steps should be taken to calm down the rhetoric".

Yeah, I know. Being told off by Nick Clegg. It sounds like being savaged by a kitten that's been quite heavily sedated, doesn't it? But you know, I reckon he meant it. He might even have meant it more than Cameron meant to say 'no' to the Merkozy being last week, and I wouldn't rule out Clegg going for the full diplospeak version of je t'encule in the future.

Because I think Cleggy boy has noticed something. His reluctant BFF next door has suddenly become more popular with the electorate. Undeserved, perhaps, but even if Cameron stood up to the EU for Britain by complete accident he'd have got some political capital out of it, and Cleggy probably fancies a little of it for himself. Hang on, he may be thinking to himself, there's votes in this Euroscepticism thingy. And let's face it, for a man who's only a liberal or a democrat as and when it suits him it's not impossible that he might decide to be a Europhile only when it's worth his while as well.

To paraphrase Marx - Groucho, that is - these are Nick's principles and if you don't like them he has others.

A thought to chill governments

Just ran across this article on 3D printing and a bit near the end caught my attention (my bold):

Hardly a week goes by without headlines about 3D printing, a technology that’s going to change the way you live. Welcome to the next industrial revolution.
[...]
But what has changed is that 3D printers are becoming cheaper, smarter, better and more ubiquitous. One of the more remarkable developments came from Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, with RepRap, which stands for ''replicating rapid-prototyper”, on which I reported for this paper. RepRap had first been honed to print out everyday plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. The machine works like a printer but, rather than squirting ink on to paper, it puts down thin layers of molten biodegradable plastic which solidify to make objects.
Three years ago, however, the machine had succeeded in copying all of its own 3D-printed parts, which could be assembled into a new RepRap machine.
RepRap marked the birth of a domestic machine, a revolution analogous to that which saw the mainframe computer give way to the desktop PC. Recently it became available in kit form and Bowyer has already sold 100. All the while, the software and other ingredients are getting cheaper. There are rival kits, from Bits from Bytes to MakerBot. There are hackers adapting and improving them. As the technology mutates and evolves, the quality of the objects they can make gets better.
... We might get to a point where individuals can make all the things they want (including, of course, the RepRap machine that does the making).”
He likes to think of it as a new kind of home-grown movement, but for goods rather than food. “Your attic room will be your machine kitchen-garden, making everything from door handles to mobile phones. And if you have an actual kitchen garden as well, you can grow the plastic for RepRap - that’s polylactic acid, which is made from starch. You’ll have a self-replicating machine making useful goods from a self-replicating material supply.”
And here’s his revolutionary parting shot: when the day comes when we can all use 3D printing to make our own, we will have less need for money. “Where money doesn’t flow, it’s very hard to levy taxes.” Vive la revolution!

Not only does it hold implications for the levying of taxes but it would end a great deal of the scope for control through IP law. Who's to know if you printed off something that's patented if you just use it quietly around your own property and don't make a scene? And if you can make the 'ink' out of something that can be grown in your own garden and all the component parts of the printer from the printer itself it's not like there's a lot of scope for controlling supply of either the printers or material.

Is it a step closer to post scarcity? I honestly don't know, but if it is bricks will be shat in capitals the world over.

Justice is also a dish best served cold

Over at Max Farquar's blog and one or two others is an horrific story of a very young child, a baby in fact, who has been brutally raped. As yet few details are known - even the baby's gender isn't certain and whether the poor kid is critical or has in fact died from the injuries is also up in the air. Other than that a really nasty assault with some terrible injuries has taken place and that the parents were arrested and then bailed far more is not known than is known.

Max, who I have a lot of time for as I agree with much of what he says, wrote this:

North Kent police have said that a 35-year-old man was subsequently arrested, on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and rape, along with a 33-year-old woman. They were both from the Gravesend area and were detained in a North Kent police station. However, they have now been released on bail.
Released on bail?
WTF! A one month old baby has been raped!
Who is the 35-year-old man, that is walking free after raping a one month old baby? Is he the father or is he the boyfriend of the 33-year-old woman that has also been released on bail? Do we presume she is the mother? Someone, somewhere out there must know who these loathsome, disgusting and unbelievable evil people excuses for human beings are!
It’s time to name and shame.

Here's my problem.

With respect to Max, we don't as yet know that anyone's walking free after raping a baby and so no it's not time to name and shame. It's time to thoroughly investigate, identify the guilty party(s), build an absolutely watertight case with extra attention to detail given to all the human rights - yes, I know, but hear me out - of any initial suspects and the eventual accused. And there are two reasons - first is that we all know the police screw up from time to time and arrest the wrong people, and right this second we can't honesty say that those arrested are guilty of anything. Suspected, yes, sure, but right now they haven't even been charged and in law they are innocent 'til proven guilty, just the same as everyone else. This is not a triviality. This is not showing more concern for the human rights of the perpetrators, who I repeat are not as yet known to be the perpetrators, than it is for the victim. This is absolutely essential for law to work at all. As Bolt's Sir Thomas More put it:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

The second reason is more prosaic. I'm appalled by this crime and I want to know that someone is punished for it. I want to hear that they got the bastard, that he was tried, convicted and locked away like an animal. And if he appeals I want to be confident that he's got no hope at all and the Appeals Court will reject it in very short order because the police and CPS did a thorough job, cutting no corners and respecting the accused's rights at every step of the process. I said they were important, and that's why - it's not just that some accused really are innocent but also that you don't want it to become a get out of jail free card for the guilty ones later on.

Naming and shaming now, if the eventual accused is indeed the one who gets named, puts that all that at risk if the defence persuades the court that it's prejudiced the jury and a fair trial is no longer possible. And before we start launching into defence barristers, see above - if you'd been charged and you were innocent you'd be wanting the barrister to do absolutely everything, play every angle at every stage, to get you out of there and back to your life, and if we want that for innocents accidentally put on trial or maliciously fitted up then it's got to be done for the crims too. It's not perfect but that way we know. If there's no trial, no guilt can ever be proven, and I don't trust British mobs to get it right when people have been known to attack the house of a paediatrician.

The disgust I feel over the idea that someone of technically the same species could do this to a tiny baby meant that I struggled to blog anything right away. There is no just punishment for this, none. There can't be. We're not a society that tortures people to death over extended periods anymore, and we're the better for it, but even if we were I'm not even sure Leg-iron's suggestion of hacking their legs off at the knee and standing them in salt is enough. Death certainly isn't, and not just because it'd be sending him off to a hell I don't believe in but because even if I'm wrong and there is one the bastard would get the opportunity of absolution before he got the rope or the needle or whatever. Spending the remainder of his miserable existence hearing the whispers, knowing from the beginning that the first beating - and worse - will come sooner or later, and then over the years learning from the less than gentle ministrations of fellow prisoners that the most frightening sight is an absence of screws and the worst sound is the small metallic click of a door that should remain shut being quietly unlocked, being moved for his safety and living in terror of the moment that who he is and what he's in for will become known in the new prison, that might well be the closest thing a civilised society can do for a just punishment.

We should want as many waking moments of this creature's remaining life as possible to be filled with nervous fear, and as many filled with terror and pain as other guests of Mrs Majesty's prison system are able to supply. The best chance of all that happening is to name no names except to police officers. If folks on the blogosphere or Twitter or Facebook blab enough to screw up a trial, or even any chance of there being a trial, then they'd almost be accessories to the crime. Because the perpetrator of this evil will go free and those who named him will all have helped. Jeez, if he gets a new ID and life somewhere at taxpayers' expense the blogs and twitterers and facebookers might as well have clubbed together and bought the bastard a ticket abroad and a clean docs.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Quite often so is justice.

Taking the Pepsi challenge

Apparently Coke drinkers buying cans with polar bears on, all to promote the believed perilous situation of a species that has gone from 5-10,000 individuals half a century ago to about five times that number now and which must have survived warmer climates in the past, prefer the cans to be red rather than white. It's not said whether they prefer the contents to be completely flat and fizzless so as not to release the few grams of carbon deathoxide that will escape genie like from the tin and rush north to hold the heads of a few bear cubs under water, but I suppose that's less important than the look of the thing.

The cans featured the company's iconic logo in red, set against an all-white background and featuring a picture of three polar bears plodding through the snow, in what the company described as a "bold, attention-grabbing" move to publicise conservation efforts by the World Wildlife Fund.

I think I'll start buying supermarket own brand.

Cain unable

I don't know the truth behind the allegations against Herman Cain, though I suspect there's at least a small element of how dare a black guy be a Republican among some who believe that minorities are supposed to be Democrats. Whatever, enough mud has been thrown that he's dropped out of the contest for the GOP nomination. So, thinking back to that vote matching thing I was playing with last month, who'd get most of Cain's support, Paul or Perry? And will the media there let Gary Johnson get any attention now?

Probably no to the last one but out of interest I went back to that vote matcher and gave the same answers as last time but dropped Cain, and this was what I got.

That's 4% more for Ron Paul and Michelle Bachman, and everyone else remains unchanged. Not what I expected at all.

You know something's in bad shape when...

... when its creators begin to turn against it. Ladies and genitals, I give you former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors, who believes the Euro is fucked.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission, claims that errors made when the euro was created had effectively doomed the single currency to the current debt crisis

Admittedly he doesn't actually say it's fucked and he is saying that it would all have gone swimmingly if it had been done his way, but all the same there's quite a bit he says that a lot of people would agree with.

Mr Delors claims that the current crisis stems from “a fault in execution” by the political leaders who oversaw the euro in its early days. Leaders chose to turn a blind eye to the fundamental weaknesses and imbalances of member states’ economies, he says.
“The finance ministers did not want to see anything disagreeable which they would be forced to deal with,” he says.

Can't argue with that, and nor can I argue with some bits from the interview proper because they sound very similar to what I've said more than once myself.

It is a fault in the execution, not of the architects, which he claimed to have pointed out in 1997 when the plans for introducing the euro finally came together. At the time, he says, the best of the eurosceptic economists, whom he refers to as “the Anglo-Saxons”, raised the simple objection that if you have an independent central bank, you must also have a state.
Mr Delors thinks “they had a point”, but the way round this problem was to insist on the economic bit of the union as much as the monetary. As well as creating a single currency, you also had to create common economic policies “founded on the co-operation of the member states”.
I get the impression from Mr Delors that he thinks Mrs Thatcher would have agreed with this view. She certainly would not have agreed, however, on the Delors version of what that co-operation should produce — the harmonisation of most taxes, plans to deal with youth and long-term unemployment, and that social dimension for which he always called...

And when the Euro finally goes tits up the call will be for exactly that and possibly more. I've said it in comments on several other blogs as well as once or twice here - the former colonies in America formed the United States first and created their single currency later, and there will be Europhiles and Eurocrats who will seize on this as evidence that the EU attempted to put the cart before the horse and call for the full and immediate federalisation of Europe so that Son-of-Euro can be launched as quickly as possible. A United States of Europe wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if it was a federation of competing states, but does anyone think that's even a remote possibility if it's constructed on the foundations of what's now the EU?

Not. A. Prayer.

We make jokes about the EUSSR now, but I reckon it's not half as bad as it could be if formal union were to occur any time soon. It's already been pointed out before that the European Commission and Parliament are not unlike the Politburo and Supreme Soviet, and if all the borrowed money had to be repaid it won't even look as cheery as 1980s Gorky in the winter.

If they fail and the Euro fails with them it might only be the silver lining round a nasty looking cloud. The breakup of the EU is being warned, but if that sounds good to you my advice would be not to get your hopes up. More likely it'll be patched together to save egos and careers as the architects of half a billion people's misfortune say that the death of the single currency is not proof that Europe should remain a continent of independent nations but proof of the need for a federal Europe.

Happy sights, happy thoughts

Click for linky

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not gloating. Well, to be honest actually I am gloating a bit, but not all that much. That partly because it's not happened yet and we should keep the champagne on ice until it does, and partly because I'm not philosophically opposed to the idea of single currencies or federalisation as such. I think living in a federation of competing states (with a small 's') has got a lot to be said for it providing they really are competing to attract citizens, and as far as I'm concerned people can do business in Altairian Dollars, Flanian Pobble Beads or the Triganic Pu, or even a single currency with a stupid name if they want, as long as both parties agree to it. What I find so objectionable about both the Euro and about EU federalism is the attempts to impose both on half a billion people whether they want them or not, and the lack of any real efforts to make either really worth wanting much.

The only note of caution I'd sound, and this is aside the view of the experts that the whole process is likely to be painful and bloody even for nations not directly connected, is that I suspect the death of the Euro will lay the grounds for the next battle. "We know what went wrong," they'll say. "We should have done it like the Americans did when the USA was born: political union first and monetary union second." Prepare yourselves, Europeans, because this might not be the beginning of the end, but just the end of the beginning.

Inconvenient untruth

Anyone who watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth will remember the claim that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting due to warble gloaming, though people who've done much reading of sceptical blogs and publications will have long been aware that this was complete nonsense. In fact even people who just watch news even from pro-warmist sources like the BBC should already have been aware that that particular claim was constructed on sand, as the reporting of this court case makes clear:

Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

And from Son of Climategate we found that certain others were aware of it too.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”

Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson”
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson 
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil
<>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

WUWT also points out that it's interesting that Dr Lonnie Thompson's opinion, as reported in emails, on the cause for ice loss on Kilimanjaro seems to have been quite different from that given in more public fora, such as a PR right before a big climate meeting in one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

Contrasting receptions

Peter Costello, former Liberal party MP and Federal government Treasurer for the Coalition under John Howard, writes in The Age on an interesting difference in receptions given to US Presidents.

When the American president addressed joint Houses of the Australian Parliament back in 2003, Greens Senator Bob Brown interjected. In fact so worked up was he that the Speaker ordered his removal from the chamber. He was yelling about Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

This time Brown joined a conga line of MPs clamouring to shake hands with the President, Barack Obama. He had to jostle with Greens MP Adam Bandt (who has a PhD on Marxism) to get his chance. Both of them were beaming. It was a good speech. The President declared America's commitment to a military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, including a new proposal to train up to 2500 marines in the Northern Territory. One can only imagine what Bob's reaction would have been had George Bush announced that 2500 US marines would be stationed on Australian soil. They would have had to cart him out of the House of Representatives.

[...]

Bob Brown was all worked up about Guantanamo Bay when George Bush visited Australia, but he does not seem to worry so much now that Obama is in charge. Julia Gillard used to complain that Australia was subservient to America. Now she claims she has made our alliance stronger than ever before.

In opposition, Labor harvested votes on the left. In government it wants to appeal to conservatives....

[...]

Labor MPs may feel happy to see Obama and Gillard standing in front of troops in the Northern Territory - it is a great photo opportunity for their side of politics. But alliances are between countries. They are designed to outlive the political office-holders of the day. In the future it could be Newt Gingrich and Tony Abbott standing there being cheered by US marines in the NT. The principle is either right or it is wrong and it doesn't turn on who happens to be in office.

That is why it is so useful to have the left of Australian politics now locked in to traditional Coalition policies. Bipartisan support has been firmly established. And in the future if there is ever a complaint about marines based in Australia, just pull out the footage of a beaming Bob Brown grasping the hand of the president who announced it.

Some excellent points made there, and while I have no more love for Peter Costello's party than the ALP - in one sense rather less love because the bastardisation of the word 'liberal' to describe a party of paternalists that like telling other people how to live their lives simply infuriates me - I can't argue that Leftists can be pretty inconsistent if not hypocritical when it comes to the US. The bottom line is this: all the things I disliked about George W Bush, the wars, Gitmo, the loss of individual liberties, cosying up to big business and lobbyists, have by and large continued under Obama.

I'm aware some that Rightists care less about what is done than that it's one of their men doing it - witness David Cameron's actions of late and the deafening silence from his supposedly right of centre party - but if anything it seems to be even more true of Leftists. Is something bad done by a right winger made less bad when a left winger takes over and carries on?

New enemies in the war on terror?

From Wikipedia:

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.

'Terror' itself being defined in Wiktionary as:

Noun
terror (countable and uncountable; plural terrors)

1. (uncountable) intense dread, fright, or fear.
2. (countable) specific instances of being intensely terrified
3. (uncountable) the action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction
4. (countable) something or someone that causes such fear.

And coercion as

Noun
coercion (plural coercions)

1. (not countable) Actual or threatened force for the purpose of compelling action by another person; the act of coercing.
2. (law, not countable) Use of physical or moral force to compel a person to do something, or to abstain from doing something, thereby depriving that person of the exercise of free will.
3. (countable) A specific instance of coercing.
4. (computing, countable) Conversion of a value of one data type to a value of another data type.

So ignoring that last definition that relates to computing and thinking about that very first sentence in which Wikipedia suggests terrorism is simply the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion, I find myself wondering how broadly this applies and whether any organisation or organisations that use scare tactics in order to get their way, to see people cowed - terrified, in fact - into submission, would count as being terrorists. Specifically, I'm thinking about whether the BMA, ASH and so on could be seen as terrorists. Ridiculous? Of course it is. Absolutely ridiculous. I mean, most or all of these anti-smoking - and of course the anti-drinking, anti-drugs, anti... er, where are we up to now? Oh yes, anti-salt, anti-soft drinks, anti-red meat and/or junk food (like I even need to bother finding a link for that), anti-caffeine, even anti-muesli - anti fucking muesli for Christ's fucking sake, oh I wish I was making that one up - basically anti-whatever it is you do that you enjoy that might shave even a picosecond off your life according to anything that even passes for a scientific study in a bad light, most of these anti-whatever groups are either run by or partly funded by the government, or at least exist with their tacit approval. And clearly that legitimises them, doesn't it? How can they be terrorists with government approval and even funding, no matter how much they try to coerce people by means of fear?

Ummm, well, I didn't want to mention it, but...

State terrorism may refer to acts of terrorism conducted by a state against a foreign state or people. It can also refer to acts of violence by a state against its own people.

So depending on how broad a definition you want to use maybe they could be after all. Ah, but Angry, old mate, I hear you say, it's not like they're blowing anybody up, is it? They're not using force, are they?

Aren't they?

A former pub landlord yesterday became the first person to be jailed in connection with the smoking ban.
Nick Hogan, 43, was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to pay a fine imposed for flouting the legislation.
Two years ago Hogan, who ran two pubs in Bolton, became the first landlord convicted of breaking the law for allowing his customers to routinely light up in his bars.

Tracey John, 48, from Pontypridd, was fined £350 by local magistrates plus £100 costs after refusing to pay a £75 on the spot penalty.
Ms John said: "They're making me feel like I'm a big criminal... it's not like I've done a massive robbery."
She was spotted smoking on the doorstep of her home in Maesycoed by a passing litter enforcement officer.
She claimed that despite picking up the cigarette she was given a fixed penalty notice.

The Health Act 2006 came into force in July 2007. The Health Act prohibits smoking in almost all enclosed public places, workplaces and even includes work vehicles.
Mr Minihan, a tanker driver from Liverpool, was seen flicking ash and disposing of a cigarette butt from his cab by council enforcement officers. Mr Minihan fought the charge by claiming he was using an Electronic cigarette.

I think a lot of people would argue that they certainly are using force and violence and the threat of same - the monopoly on force and violence enjoyed by the state whose ear the antis have long had and whispered into, Gríma Wormtongue style. That's about as forceful as it gets and the threat of state sanctioned violence is always in the air. Hangs around much longer than cigarette smoke too, which I very much hope all drinkers, salad dodgers, coffee lovers, Red Bull fans, salters, muesli munchers and anyone I've missed is by now noticing. Terrified? You fucking should be, though not for the same reasons the antis want you to be terrified.

Nor are innocent bystanders unheard of, and not just folks like the e-fag smoker up there:

A non-smoker was stunned to be given a £50 fine for throwing a cigarette butt out of her car window.
Gillian Leah has never had a cigarette and is vehemently anti-litter.
So the 46-year-old, of Hove Edge, Brighouse, thought the matter would soon be sorted after contacting council officials.
But her dispute has left her paying £50 for a crime she claims she didn’t commit.
The alternative was a fight through the courts with no guarantee of winning – and a legal bill running into thousands.

Ah, there's that monopoly on force, you see?

A RETIRED policeman was fined for dropping a cigarette end out of his car window – despite being a non-smoker and not even driving at the time.
Robert Marshall received a £50 fine from Nottingham City Council after a warden reported spotting him littering while driving along Hucknall Road, Nottingham.
But the council has now dropped the fine against the former officer after he told them he does not smoke and his car was in a car park at the time of the alleged offence.
The authority was also unable to confirm to Mr Marshall where in Hucknall Road the offence had taken place.
It has told him that a line has been drawn under the matter, after speaking to the warden involved.

A near miss, but (my bold)...

Mr Marshall, 48, of Moor Road, Bestwood Village, said: "The council have said they had a word with the warden, he said he was mistaken, and that is the end of the matter.
"This sort of thing is just unacceptable. I wonder how many others have been unfortunate enough to get this sort of ticket and have just paid the £50 fine because they cannot prove otherwise?"

So we've got an intention to coerce by scaring away resistance, a willingness to use force and innocent bystanders getting affected too. And now, this very week, the BMA - the British Motherfucking Authoritarians as Wolfers called them - are claiming that smoking must be banned in all cars (there's a poll on that article and you know what to do - vote early, vote often).

There is now strong evidence that smoking in vehicles exposes non-smokers to high levels of second hand smoke which is known to be damaging to heath, the BMA said.
Because of the small enclosed space inside a car, smoking creates 23 times more toxins than found in a smoky bar, it was claimed.

This is, of course, complete arse gravy and has not only been debunked by the likes of Chris Snowdon but, as he pointed out earlier this week, has even been repudiated by a Canadian Medical Journal.

The "23 times" claim is even more fun, because it involves a rare mea culpa from tobacco control. In a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal entitled 'Second-hand smoke in cars: How did the “23 times more toxic” myth turn into fact?', MacKenzie and Freeman showed that the "fact" was entirely without scientific evidence and stemmed from a, obscure quote in a local newspaper in 1998 (as I had revealed on this blog two months earlier).

They concluded with the following unheeded recommendation:

We recommend that researchers and organizations stop using the 23 times more toxic factoid because there appears to be no evidence for it in the scientific literature.

Yet the BMA are still using it and assuming they're not ignorant of its complete lack of any authenticity it's not a huge leap to think that perhaps they're doing it with the intention of achieving their aims through scaring people. More terror. More coercion. More force. Fucking hell, some of them have even got the same kind of three letter initials: BMA, ASH... PLO, IRA.

Okay, I'm kidding - obviously that's not a fair comparison and lots of other organisations are known by TLAs. More importantly ASH, the BMA and so on don't use guns and bombs to scare people, but nonetheless their stock in trade is to try to scare everyone into submission and they're using the most powerful force inside any nation (often more than one nation). Dragging someone into the cells for failing to be an unpaid smoke warden in his own pub seems like violence to me, and not only are innocents already being affected we can all look forward to becoming as guilty as the smokers. And while they don't actually want smokers dead the same can't be said of their supporters, as a look through Dick Puddlecote's smoke psychosis gallery will tell you.

So is it terrorism? I don't know, I really don't. I suppose the day I feel genuinely afraid to do something I've always done and which was done peacefully by millions in past generations then I'll have my answer.


PS If you haven't already seen it there's a good op-ed piece in The Tele titled "All these smoking bans have left me fuming" and which has a particular go at the BMA over their proposed car ban.

And now, the campaigners are back: some people, they’ve noticed, have been smoking in their own cars. And other people might be in the car with them! So we need a new law, and a new set of criminals to prosecute – because, honestly, there’s nothing more important for either the political class or the medical establishment to be thinking about just now, right?
[...]
You might wonder how – were the ban to be introduced – it could be policed. Well, Oxford City Council has the answer to that. It plans to force CCTV into every taxi in the city, in order to record every conversation between driver and passenger. (I pity the official who had to review my conversations: it’s bad enough that the poor cabbie has to listen to me wittering on, without council officers having to listen in as well.)
Why not take it one step further, and insist on CCTV in every vehicle? Indeed, why stop there? (I doubt the BMA will.) Why not put cameras into every house, so that functionaries from the BMA’s Professional Activities Division can monitor our every move? You could even make it two-way, so that Dr Nathanson’s acolytes can bark out instructions every time some foolish little person tries to have a cigarette, or pours a second glass of wine.

Worth a read.

Diversions - UPDATED

Oooh, another one of those how to vote thingies. I'm not sure why it's in The Telegraph since it's for the next year's Republican party primaries in the US and being a British publication most of their readership hasn't got a vote there. As usual with these things depending on your own position on an issue some questions can be a little on the shallow side, and when you don't know the details about a particular program or initiative, e.g. Race To The Top, there's little option but to click the open minded option, but for all that I'd say it's better than the one I did a year and a half ago before the UK general election. Still, just for the sake of it I had a play and ticked the boxes to see who I should hope gets the nomination and, since I know little about many of the candidates, perhaps become a bit better informed. I said I'd be prepared to vote for any of the candidates, though of course the reality is I'm able to vote for exactly none of them, and to my not very great at all surprise these are the results I got.

I might agree even more with Ron Paul than this suggests since of the five questions on which I apparently disagree with him I said I was open minded on two simply through unfamiliarity with the program (Race To The Top) and the use of Executive Orders (repealing ObamaCare question), and a couple more depend a little on how it's interpreted.However, it has informed me a little and defied my expectations since I'd expected Bachmann to come a very distant last and for Herman Cain to be a solid second and much closer to Paul.

But I'm curious - I'm sure that clip of the debate that Trooper Thompson had up the other day had 8 candidates and there are others around. I know that some of them are felt to be no-hopers but I'm surprised that it doesn't include at least all those who took part in the debates.

UPDATE - Noticed that it can be embedded. Have fun.

Getting around Australia's plain tobacco packaging law #4

Part 1       Part 2       Part 3               Part 5

Learn to knit... yes, seriously.

Obviously that's not a real example. There'd be no need to knit little woollen matches and woollen cigarettes as well - that'd be as silly as, oh, I don't know, a law saying that cigarettes could only be sold in a boring green box with the obligatory death cancer horror picture on. But here's what I'm thinking, right. To protect it in my pocket with change and keys and so on I keep my mobile phone in a little pouch like the one below (but plain - I'm not yet barracking for Carlton).

Looking at it there doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't knit a similar slip on cover with whatever design you like and make it large enough to fit a 20, 25, 30 or 40 cigarette pack snugly. They're hardly going to ban wool in a country with a hundred million sheep, are they?

/ Waits for inevitable sheep sex jokes in the comments.

Part 1       Part 2       Part 3               Part 5

Occupy everywhere - UPDATED

Via Simon Cooke, an interesting little fact that should make a lot of the Occupy mob, many of whom seem to be middle class and uni educated, reconsider their claim to represent the 99%.

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests (and their Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne cousins) have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge....
[...]
In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. In Australia, the top 3% of households earn more than $250,000 per week, according to the ABS. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?
$34,000.
That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it’s $5,000 per year.[...]
It means Australians we consider poor are among some of the world’s most well-off. As Milanovic notes, “the poorest [5%] of Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population.” Furthermore, “only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile.”
In short, most of those protesting in the Occupy Wall Street movement would be considered wealthy — perhaps extraordinarily wealthy — by much of the world. Many of those protesting the 1% are, ironically, the 1%.

So to any Occupy folks, in the unlikely event any happen to be be reading this, perhaps you should pack up the tent and go re-erect it in your own gardens.* Not only will you be more representative by protesting against yourselves but no one will mind if you don't stay in the tent all night or use the bird bath as a lavatory.

UPDATE - Very belated recognition of a comment from a few weeks ago, this. Rational Anarchist made a very similar point on In Masho veritas? and referenced Tim Worstall writing for Forbes. Unfortunately RA's comment got sucked into the ID spam trap and I only just noticed today. Sorry, RA.


* 99% of people probably do not have 3G for a poor protestor's internet capable smartphone or a handy Starbucks providing a free wifi signal for their ≈$2,000 MacBook Pro and so could not be reading this from local equivalent of Wall Street, or the steps of St Paul's, or City Square, or Martin Place etc etc. Just a thought, that's all.

Failing at internet

Click for linky

Under the hashtag #mencallmethings, female bloggers, columnists and Twitter regulars have started reprinting some of the threats they say they receive daily from anonymous emailers, posters and other trolls.
While milder insults such as feminazi and ugly bitch are common, so, also were threats of rape and other violence. New Yorker Shelby Knox was told to "die in a fire". Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore said she "can't put here some stuff men write to me. It involves dismemberment, blood and excrement".
Prominent feminist blogger Jessica Valenti welcomed the #mencallmethings hashtag as a way of fighting back.

Anna Raccoon has already gone into this in depth and if you haven't already read it I do recommend nipping over and seeing what she had to say on it. All I'll say is firstly that those threats that clearly can't be followed through on are empty threats and therefore, while no doubt unpleasant, actually no real threat at all; secondly that I'm not sure this really is trolling (see Dizzy); and thirdly if it is trolling then it's worth remembering that the internet has a fairly long established procedure for dealing with trolls:

Now, hands up everyone who thinks repeating their spittle flecked ramblings on line under a slightly plaintive sounding hashtag like #mencallmethings instead of, say, #whatabunchofsoftcocks or #hahahayouwontrapeanyonewiththatlittlething, qualifies as not feeding the trolls.

Someone? Anyone? Anyone at all? No?

Fireworks - next in the banners' sights? - UPDATED

Despite the distance from Westminster Australia used to celebrate Guy Fawkes night as well but these days it's fallen by the wayside, and I suspect the reason is simple: you can't buy fireworks anymore in most parts of Oz. I'd assumed that this was mostly because of the bushfire risk but I've since been told that it was also to do with idiot behaviour involving fireworks, and we all know that governments unable to deal effectively with idiots will often try instead to ban whatever it is the idiots want to play with and never mind the responsible users.

And of course firework idiocy is far from unknown in Britain. Every November for as long as I can remember there have been ad campaigns warning of the risks of handling or throwing lit fireworks, and every November there's a handful of idiots who take no notice and end up being able to count up only to nine in future. Even if you could somehow eliminate firework idiocy there are still risks involved, even at professional displays. What goes up must come down, and all those rockets exploding up there are showering the ground beneath with bits. It's inevitable that now and then some land on people or property. Mostly harmlessly, sure, but I once got up the day after Guy Fawkes night and found the stick from a large rocket a few feet from my car. Had it hit the car I expect I'd have had some bodywork damage, and had it hit a person I'm sure it would have been a nasty injury.

But such things are rare, incredibly rare given the amount of fireworks set off around Guy Fawkes night, and since most people enjoy the celebration and the fireworks and the bonfires they're prepared to accept the risks, doubtless to the dismay of the nannies and banners. To get fireworks banned there needs to be a sea change in public attitudes, and that's most likely to be achievable if something really nasty, some incident that harms a lot of people, involves fireworks.

With that in mind let's turn to the tragic multi-vehicle crash on the M5 and the speculation that a fireworks display at a nearby rugby club may have had something to do with it.

The rugby club’s “spectacular” fireworks display is being investigated to see if thick smoke drifted on to the motorway.
[...]
The cause of the crash was being investigated last night but police confirmed they were looking at the possibility that a pall of black smoke from a firework display at Taunton Rugby Club, 300 yards from the scene of the crash, may have drifted on to the motorway.
Mr Bangham said: “We are aware there was a fireworks display nearby happening at a similar time and we will also be looking closely at that and at what kind of planning was looked at ahead of that event.”
A member of the public who attended the display said: “The fireworks display was massive and caused a huge amount of thick black smoke that drifted towards the motorway less than 10 minutes before the crash. Before the display I could see right across the pitch and see the headlights of traffic on the motorway. After the display the visibility dropped to less than 30ft, I couldn’t even see the huge floodlights positioned around the pitch.”
Sam Kotvics, who was at the display, said: “I think the fireworks had a contributory effect. It was a spectacular display. Anything could have happened to cause the accident though.”
Weather forecasters said that smoke from bonfires encourages fog, especially in damp conditions.

And...

Click for linky

Police fear the M5 disaster that claimed the lives of at least seven people may have been caused by heavy smoke drifting on to the motorway from a nearby fireworks display.
[...]
Senior officers investigating the cause of the crash, on the northbound carriageway near Junction 25, said they were focusing ‘very closely’ on a fireworks event at Taunton Rugby Club, located near the carriageway.
Forensics teams arrived at the club yesterday afternoon and sealed off several pitches.
The display at the club finished at about 8.15pm on Friday, minutes before the crash. Experts believe a lack of wind allowed intense black smoke from the finale, when the largest and most spectacular rockets were fired, to hang in the air and render visibility poor. There had already been reports of wet conditions and patchy fog.
Last night no one from Firestorm Pyrotechnics, the Somerset firm that organised the display, was available for comment.
But another fireworks company boss told The Mail on Sunday that he turned down the opportunity to stage a display at the rugby club two years ago because of concerns about safety.
‘It is a very difficult site. My concern straight away was the distance from the motorway,’ he said. ‘It makes it a very difficult site to fire from. You would look closely at the flight line [of the rockets]. Are they going to make drivers look up?’
Taunton Rugby Club secretary Oli Massingham said the organisers had liaised fully with police.
[...]
Meanwhile witnesses spoke of bonfires in other areas nearby also spreading black smoke, including one in particular at a smallholding.
As well as the smoke itself blinding drivers, one expert said it could have caused further visibility problems by encouraging fog to form.

I'm not saying the fireworks display did or did not have anything to do with it. For all I know right now it might have, but that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that almost certainly someone somewhere is secretly hoping that the investigation does end up blaming the crash largely on the display, and parts of the reporting already make it sound like some of the media is sold on the idea. "Firework fun as displays turn deadly for drivers" - it's a headline writer's wet dream, isn't it? And of course for the banners and nannies the first step to restrictions and prohibition is a scary headline or two.

As I said, I'm not trying to claim that the fireworks display is blameless as I have no idea whether it is or isn't, and I'm not going to form an opinion either way while it's still being investigated or second guess the people doing the investigating. This post isn't about trying to blame or shield from blame anything in particular. It's just making a prediction: that whatever else was involved if the fireworks display is determined to have contributed even in a small way there will be calls to restrict or even ban fireworks, and even if the club's display is exonerated there will still be calls for at least tougher regulations.

And I haven't even looked at The Daily Mail comments section yet.

UPDATED - five minutes after finishing the post I've just looked at the comments at the Mail, and while they're in the minority just as I predicted...

With all the controversy about cutting pollution from things like industry and car emissions we should now be banning bonfires . If fireworks are going to be allowed then it should only be in a properly managed display and away from any major road or built up area...

Are there any regulations covering bonfire and firework displays near motorways and main roads? I was travelling on the M61 near Bolton a couple of years ago on bonfire night and suddenly drove into thick black smoke, which meant I couldn't see 10 yards in front of me and when this happens to you whilst travelling at 70-80 mph it is incredibly disorientating and frightening. Once through the smoke (I thought it was better to carry on rather than just stop) I pulled over onto the hard shoulder. I realised that the smoke was coming from a bonfire in a field less than 100 yards from the carriageway, at a pub adjacent to the motorway. I rang 999 to report it, it was incredibly dangerous. The organisers of that bonfire were incredibly irresponsible and should never have been allowed to set a bonfire that close to the motorway. If there aren't any regulations then there need to be before this happens all over again next year.

Time all fireworks were banned, they cause untold harm.

Completely possible. Bonfire night/fireworks are the worst offenders of filling the atmosphere full of smoke. I remember driving this time last year and I could not see a thing, it was like driving with a fogged up window. Especially with the fireworks display being so close to the motorway, it would explain why the 'fog' had cleared up by the time emergency services arrived. It doesn't help with the wet floor and speeds of a motorway, even if all of the vehicles were obeying the speed limit. The fog probably came out of nowhere/was unexpected.

And over at the Tele:

I have listened to the radio media and I hope there is a law against holding a firework display next to a motorway. Clearly the reason for the crash may never be known. However a distraction on a wet dark motorway by a firework for less than five seconds is enough to cause this course of tragic events...

It might have been better if health and safety jobsworths spent less time stopping kids playing conkers and more time giving serious consideration to issues like a firework display next to a motorway...

Obviously the fireworks were a distraction and the smoke reduced visibility. It was a bad idea to have a display like that at the side of a motorway. I noted on the way home, there was strange dense patches of fog around Mid Devon.

Again, a minority (most commenters there seemed to be into the Afghanistan comparison), but you can expect the same things are being said by people with the ear of those with the clout to do something. Don't be surprised if the question of a fireworks ban or tougher regulation pops up in Parliament over the coming weeks.

Fantasy drugs policy

On this blog I've occasionally quoted from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books since it's always been less a fantasy series and more a series of parodies, often of parts of the world we actually live in, and there are often bits here and there which align pretty neatly with libertarian positions. I've no idea if Terry Pratchett would describe himself as a libertarian but some of his characters certainly are, at least on some issues, and they tend to be the protagonists or people on the same side as the protagonists. So when Mrs Exile bought me the latest one I wasn't surprised to find in the first few pages almost exactly the kind of drugs policy I'd support for real, implemented by Lord Vetinari, probably the most libertarian tyrant ever, real or imagined.

... Incidentally, sir, we have received a missive from Diamond King of Trolls, thanking us for our firm stance on the drugs issue. Well done, sir.’
‘Hardly a concession,’ Vetinari observed, waving it away. ‘You know my position, Drumknott. I have no particular objection to people taking substances that make them feel better or more contented, or, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies – or even their god if it comes to that. It’s their brain, after all, and society can have no claim on it, providing they’re not operating heavy machinery at the time. However, to sell drugs to trolls that actually make their heads explode is simply murder, the capital crime.'

Snuff, Terry Pratchett

Seems fair enough to me. What you choose to put into your body should be entirely up to you, though of course you would still responsible for your actions when you're under the influence of whatever it is you've taken, but selling you something that's certain to kill you on the spot is not on. In reality nobody making a quid either illegally or legally from recreational drugs - and as usual I include alcohol and tobacco, and I suppose possibly caffeine as well - has any interest in killing customers since dead people have a tendency to stop buying the produce. Some of these things are dangerous and may kill some users eventually, though often that's as much a result of the adulteration that's commonplace with illegal drugs as a result of the drug itself, but if any drug was both rapidly and universally lethal it would have no market. People want to get high, but very few want to get high so badly they'll take something from which they will definitely never come down. In fact the only time I've heard of a drug being deliberately made toxic it was on the orders of a government who did have a particular objection to people taking a substance that made them feel better and more contented, and, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies fall over more often.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
[...]
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

Even now one foreseeable side effect of so many recreational drugs being illegal that they will end up being both more expensive and less safe through being adulterated with Christ knows what, and another is that people will turn to alternative drugs when their preferred choice is either too expensive or too hard to find. Because of this desire of certain people to make everyone else live to their standards rather than live as each chooses* we have almost the polar opposite of Vetinari's stance on the drug's issue - the belief is that user's brains are not their own and society does have a claim on them, and official policy has had the inevitable effect of making drugs more dangerous, sometimes deliberately.

Why does sanity have to come from the pen of a man who writes about trolls and dwarves and magic, and, sadly, who is also suffering from early onset Alzheimer's? And what does that say about the people who really are responsible for drugs policy?


* As a libertarian I have no desire to force other people to be libertarians as well. I'll try to persuade them it's a good idea but if they want to be neo-puritans Tories or socialists dumbly obedient to the state or whatever then that's up to them. That's their drug of choice and if they can do it without harming me I have no objection, just as I have no objection to people smoking, drinking or getting stoned around me if I'm not affected by it. The annoying reality is that neo-puritans and statists of all stripes have done me far more harm than drug users have, and much of the little harm I've suffered that was probably drug related (losses from a car break in and higher insurance, if you must know) may not have happened if drugs policies hadn't made the damn things cost more than they need to.

Here we go again?

What would take the place of Gaddafi's semi-muslim, semi-socialist regime if he fell? That's what a lot of people were wondering six or seven months ago when the Arab Spring uprisings reached Libya. Some, bloggers and journos mostly but I think maybe some politicians too, saw parallels with Iran in the late 70s and wondered if it could lead to Libya becoming another Islamic theocracy. Some wondered if Gaddafi's exit would leave the door open for Alky Ada to move in and start flicking middle fingers across the Med at Europe. Such thoughts might have given governments pause before choosing to support and even fight on the side of the rebels but it seems that for the most part those presidents and prime ministers expected something else. Because there's a tendency among western governments to equate freedom with western democracy I think they assumed that repressed people fighting against a dictator are freedom fighters, ergo they're fighting for regular elections contested by depressingly similar parties, crippling national debt and a Starbucks on every other corner. The thought that freedom necessarily means people making choices they might not like seems not to have occurred to them, which I imagine means that Libya's recent moves towards a more Islamic state is probably coming as an unpleasant shock to some. Take, for example, the reaction to Libya's pro tem leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil's remarks on sharia law and polygamous marriages.

In his speech, Mr Jalil declared a Gaddafi-era law that placed restrictions on multiple marriages, a tenet of Islamic law, or sharia, would be done away with. The law, which stated that a first wife had to give permission before others were added, had kept polygamy rare.
''This law is contrary to sharia and must be stopped,'' Mr Jalil said, vowing the new government would adhere more faithfully to sharia. The next day he reiterated the point: ''Sharia allows polygamy,'' he said.
[...]
The reaction was one of dismay among allies whose military firepower ensured Gaddafi's fall. The French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, said: ''This is a problem for us, especially in regard to respect for the dignity of women.''

Sorry to break it to you, Alain, but the Libyans weren't fighting for women any more than they were fighting for Vive la République or Mom's apple pie or warm beer and football or any other facet of life in any western nation you care to pick. The Libyans just wanted rid of a weapons grade fucking madman who sent aircraft out to strafe them when they got uppity, and a lot of them probably hadn't thought much beyond fighting until someone had slotted the bastard. It's a certainty that among them were a few guys fighting for having a wife at the sink and another putting the hoover round while they nail the youngest and prettiest in the bedroom, and I reckon only people arrogant enough to assume the whole world would embrace western democracy if given the chance (which is right up there with the worst tyrant's assumption that his people love him) would think otherwise.

Freedom doesn't mean western democracy - it means people making their own minds up. And since western nations aren't actually a hell of a lot keener on people making their own minds up than Islamic theocracies, banana republics or despotic communist states they wouldn't be free even if western democracy was what they were aiming for. Tyranny of the majority will almost always be more genteel than tyranny of a single maniac, but at the end of the day it's still tyranny. Libyans might well understand that now better than many of us.

Some Libyan women see the remarks of the chairman of the Transitional National Council as a menacing sign that the new Libya will mean new repression.

And regrettably part of that is our fault, or at least the fault of our "leaders". Whatever the goals of the Libyans who were on the ground shooting, the goal of the various government leaders thousands of miles away who sent planes to drop bombs was simple: get rid of Gaddafi. They thought that the existing regime was repressive, which clearly it was, so just as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan they helped knock it down and expected that the result would automatically be better. They thought that the regime itself and the loonies at the top of it were the only obstacles to "freedom" - not actual freedom you understand, but the democracy that is so often mistaken for freedom. They thought that freedom democracy would take hold, perhaps because unlike Iraq and Afghanistan the move to overthrow the existing regime came from within, but instead the new country began with a summary execution without trial and is continuing to worry people with talk of adopting a repressive legal system, or rather the wrong kind of repressive legal system.* And the reason is because our politicians are just as incapable of learning as they are of understanding what freedom actually means.

Those who don't remember the lessons of history are going to repeat the mistakes, and I'm sure this is doubly true when it's extremely recent history and the end of lesson bell hasn't even rung yet. Don't be too surprised if your kids are either dropping bombs on Tripoli or paying someone else to in twenty-five years' time.


* I'm sure a lot of people would have been just fine with the idea of Libya adopting a legal system which bans burqas and similar items of clothing, won't allow you to defend yourself, demands payment for state TV and levies swingeing fines for non-compliance, covers the places with largely useless CCTV, locks people up for getting high even if doing so didn't affect anyone else, and won't allow you to do a thousand different things because of Health and Safety regulation. Not being allowed to do things because the legal system thinks it's bad for you is not the same as not being allowed to do things because the legal system thinks a god doesn't want you to. Look, it's different, okay? It just is.

Chinese whispers

Click for linky

Ouch.

Jin Liqun, chairman of China Investment Corporation (CIC), the nation's sovereign wealth fund, warned that Europeans should "work a bit harder" if they want to pull the eurozone out of recession.

Ouch.

He said people in the West are too reliant on welfare payments and the benefits system, looking for external solutions to the debt crisis rather than tackling the problem from within.

Ouch.

Mr Jin also said the long-term economic slide could only be solved by amending the restrictive labour laws that mean Western workers are unable to compete in global markets.
[...]
"The root cause of the trouble is the over-burdened welfare system, built up since the Second World War in Europe - the sloth-inducing, indolence-inducing labour laws.

Double ouch, but I can't see where he's wrong. It might be hard to hear it from someone representing a country where freedom can be a pretty notional concept and the state tries to oversee practically everything, but the guy's got a point. In the west the governments don't try to oversee as much - or at least most of them don't yet - but they have encouraged the raising of a couple of generations who rely on the state to wipe their arseholes for them because they couldn't find them by themselves bent over a mirror with a greased stick. Money no? Economy bad? Is wrong. Government fix. Government fix now. Also done poo-poo and now smell bad. Government fix that now too please.

And it brings to mind something I said back in January when I came across a US site advocating protectionism and other anti free trade measures: I think that the Chinese might turn out to be better at capitalism than we in the west. Well, as long as they don't make a habit of producing seven foot long slippers by mistake.

But... but... but women just don't do that

No, this isn't another incidence of crying rape when nothing happened and to hell with the consequences on any man unfortunate enough to be picked up for it. This is sexual assault by a female. For the benefit of any PC types and GROLIES who may have stumbled across this by accident and haven't found the exit, yes you did read that sentence correctly. Having ovaries is not some magical condition that renders someone saintly and incapable of crime or any kind of deviancy, and there are enough well known examples of sick bitches doing some pretty disgusting stuff that the point shouldn't need to be made. Even without bringing up the Myra Hindley's of this world there are regular examples of low level female sex offenders to drive away any idea that sex offences are male thing and women just don't do that. It may be a less frequent type of a relatively infrequent offence, but oh yes they do.

A young woman got a teenage acquaintance and three of his friends drunk and had sex with some of them after a party, a court has heard.

Laura O'Donnell, 20, was today released with a suspended jail term and a community-based order after a County Court judge found that her troubled background had been responsible for her offending.

So there's no chance she just wanted a toy boy shag and was a bit young herself to play Mrs Robinson, then? Troubled background? Even from ten thousand miles away I reckon I'll hear the Ambush Predator's teeth grinding when she reads that - I know these stock pleas of mitigation can be a hot button issue with Julia.

In sentencing, Judge Sue Pullen described the offences as "very serious and disturbing" and said the woman's behaviour was "quite unacceptable".
The boys, aged 12, 15, 14 and 14, were plied with alcohol on three separate occasions. The first two incidents involved one of the victims and the third, all four.
[...]
[O'Donnell] pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and five counts of committing an indecent act with a child under 16.

And here we have an example of law being written with assumption that the perpetrator will necessarily be male. 'Sexual penetration of a child under 16.' Not with a child, of a child, and if Laura O'Donnell's offences involved plain old vanilla sex, as I suspect they probably did, then she would in fact have been the penetratee.* Yes, of course penetration of various sorts can be done by a female, but I suspect this wording originally had intromission by adult males in mind, and in case there's any doubt that garden variety sex between an adult female and a male below the age of consent counts as her penetrating him there's this case (coincidentally heard by the same judge).

The court heard [Kimberly] Gale met the boy and his mother through their involvement in a suburban football club.
Prosecutor Susan Borg said Gale had become friends with the mother at the club and after overhearing her say she was having trouble getting him to school, Gale offered to drive him there.
For three or four weeks in March and April, Gale drove the boy to school every morning, and on at least one occasion put her hand on his leg and told him he was "hot", Ms Borg said.
On one occasion Gale, then 23, asked the boy if he wanted to spend more time with her, and he replied "yes". She drove him to her family's home. The pair had sex then she drove him to school.
Two weeks later, they went to Gale's home again on the way to school and had sex.
[...]
Gale pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual penetration of a child under 16.

That was only last November, by the way, less than a year before the O'Donnell trial and further knocking the idea that women are saintly beings and above such things just because they're women.

There's no question that both women committed offences in strict legal terms, and it certainly seems like they took advantage of people who might not have been boys but probably weren't quite men either. I'm not going into a discussion of consent laws here, I'm just interested in the female offending aspect and how the law and society think about it - or, as the case may be, prefer not to think about it all that much. Despite what these two women were charged with it doesn't sound like they did the actual penetrating, and if they had you'd expect them to have received rather heavier sentences than the two years and five months, all suspended, that O'Donnell got and the two years and two months, 16 months suspended, that Gale got. It's not like Judge Pullen is afraid of handing down some serious time as the minimum 16 years served of a 19 year sentence she gave one knife wielding, recidivist rapist shows.** That being so I reckon we can rule out any nastier ideas that either of these women were using strap ons or anything along those lines, which as far as I can tell would make it a rape charge anyway. No, this is almost certainly vanilla sex between adult females and males under the legal age of consent, but while this would be called something else in other places - statutory rape, perhaps, or simple underage sex - the charge here sounds like it suggests male offenders as the norm rather than just a majority. And since even the Graun these days concedes that the proportion of female sex offenders could be as 20% or more and you don't have to look far to find it suggested that it could be twice that. The fairer sex probably is fairer generally, but you wouldn't want a cop to look at a suspect and go: 'Sarge, I'm pretty sure those are breasts - we've got the wrong man!'

Oh, and just for amusement let's briefly revisit the case of Kimberley Gale just one more time.

Her lawyer, Amy Wood, told Judge Sue Pullen her client had had a difficult childhood...

That bang you just heard was an Ambush Predator going through her roof.


* Out of curiosity I looked up the actual law, which seems to be Section 45 of Victoria's 1958 Crimes Act. Interestingly, though the offence is 'Sexual penetration of a child under 16' the very first subsection reads: 'A person who takes part in an act of sexual penetration with a child under the age of 16 is guilty of an indictable offence.' It seems almost as if it was expected to be mostly men but even a half century ago someone recognised that the wording of the law needed to allow for the possibility of female offenders as well.
** No, I wouldn't have been at all sorry either if she'd locked him up for far longer, though it was only 6 years short of the maximum for rape in Victoria, but because he's 55 already that minimum 16 year term means he'll be at least 71 before he can be released, and since his own behaviour made him ineligible for parole during his previous prison term he might still end up doing the full stretch and not getting out until 74. Either way, there's a fair chance the bastard will cark it while he's still inside even if he does genuinely reform this time.