Mr Eugenides.

Another great blogger hanging up the keyboard, another addition to the Hibernation Room. As usual I hope it's au revoir rather than goodbye, but farewell all the same.

Telly Tubby Bye Bye!!

I'm not a serious gamer, particularly not when it come's to shoot-'em-ups, but I'm tempted to buy Left4Dead just so I can do this to it.



I've always felt that Tellytubbies deserve everything they get, and with Australia's track record of censoring games and infantilising adult gamers (particularly those interested in the Left4Dead series), it might be the right approach for game developers to take with zombie shooters destined for the Australian market.

Say eh-oh and eat lead, motherfuckers!

I'd be lying if I said I was surprised - UPDATED.

I don't have much time to rant at length about the further selling out of what was once the United Kingdom but is presumably now Europe West Zone Two or something, but it's pretty much what I expected as soon as the worthless prick went back on his campaign promise to hold a referendum on the European Treaty. As I wrote more than a year ago, once it was clear that the Irish and Czechs weren't going to the only thing the UK had left that meant it would remain the UK in any meaningful sense was the thickness of David Cameramong's spine.

... Cameron is going to have to grow a set and actually say what he plans to do before the election. I'm sure he's looking forward to that like a cat looks forward to going to the vet, but since the Consititreaty is expected to become law across the whole EU within weeks I imagine Cameron will simply wring his hands and wail that nothing can now be done and if only the country had not voted the wicked wicked Labour government the UK would not have been sold to the Eurocrats on the cheap, so awfully sorry about it but we're not going to have that referendum. I may be 100% wrong about that - I hope I'm 100% wrong and I'm halfway to praying to a God I don't even believe in that I'm 100% wrong - but I can't help feeling that if Cameron was serious about it he'd simply have said that there would be a referendum no matter what.

And of course we all know what the result was: just as expected he wrung his hands and said it was too late and that nothing could be done. Since then we've seen even further concessions made and it's looking more and more like the choice back in May, at least as far as the EU was concerned, was not whether the UK was for or against more integration but whether more integration was to happen quickly, very quickly or very very quickly. Christ, it's not even been a year and the Cobbleition have already extended the European Arrest Warrant and coughed up more money Britain hasn't got to the EU, with commitments for yet more in the not too distant future. So it comes as no surprise at all that more power is quietly being transferred to the EU on the quiet (see Douglas Carswell's blog here, here and here).

So what the hell was the election for? It didn't decide who governs Britain, did it? And what the hell is the government and Prime Minister for? Because as far as I can see it's not running Britain so much as being the PR department for the Civil Service and the EU bureaucrats who really decide how things go in European West Zone Two these days.


UPDATE - The Grim Reaper has noted a particularly astonishing piece of chutzpah on this from none other than the Labour Party in this report from Auntie Beeb.

The PM spoke to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy among others and argued for the 'lowest possible' increase. His plea came amid fears that a 6% rise would cost the UK another £900m a year. Labour has accused him of failing to stand up for British interests.

Something on which Labour are the world renowned fucking experts, though how they've found the gall to actually come out and say that is quite beyond me.

The times are a-changing.

When I was a child I had more freedoms to look forward to as I grew up. Some were freedoms my parents decided I was ready for, such as crossing the road to the park on my own, riding my bike on the road, going to the local shops, sometimes with a signed note from Mum or Dad asking for a packet or two of Embassy since I was some years off 16 - I doubt many shopkeepers would do that now for fear that it was a local Trading Standards op or even that someone would simply dob them in. For others I was automatically considered ready by the state, such as buying and using my own tobacco, having sex, driving, buying alcohol* and standing for Parliament (which doesn't come with the freedom to do all the rest simultaneously although the behaviour of some MPs may suggest it comes with the misapprehension that it does). It would be a pretty depressing state of affairs if the reality was that you're born free** and then grow up looking forward to your freedom being progressively infringed and eroded, wouldn't it? Nah, surely not... that's just ol' Angry Exile's deeply ingrained cynicism, right?

Wrong, because thanks to a revoltingly authoritarian head teacher there's one neighbourhood here where kids can look forward to losing the freedom of association when they start primary school.

Students at [Osbourne Primary School in Mount Martha] on the Mornington Peninsula have been banned from congregating in groups of more than three in a bid to stop gangs of children teasing and upsetting their classmates.

...

In the latest edition of the school's newsletter, principal Liz Klein wrote that the rule was introduced to stop "gangs of students wandering around the schoolyard teasing and upsetting others for their entertainment".

The newsletter states that students are not permitted to walk around the school in groups larger than three.

What a stroke of fucking genius! Why bother teaching children right from wrong? Why go to the trouble of actually dealing with teasing and bullying as it happens? No, far easier just to ban groups larger than an arbitrarily chosen number in the knowledge belief hope that the problem will just magically go away. Oh, for fuck's sake, where do I begin with this kind of utter fucktardary?

Well, for starters there's the point that some of the parents have made:

The controversial rule ... has been criticised by some parents for punishing the whole school rather than just those students doing the wrong thing.

Quite, and doing so is not simply unjust but fucking lazy, which would be the second point. I can't imagine how the principal can even begin to justify it unless she was to suggest that it's a valuable lesson about what to expect when they're older since governments at every level will take the same lazy route of punishing largely innocent groups of people, and incidentally taking a huge, diarrheic shit all over their liberties - which is the third point - in order to get at a small number of trouble makers. Could this be the idea?

Yeah, I doubt it too. So what does the principal - and am I just being a pedantic pom approaching middle aged fartihood or does anyone else prefer 'head teacher'? - have to say for herself?

Ms Klein told 3AW today that certain students had made a habit of walking around the school in a pack aggravating others.

Certain students, yet Liz's response is a measure targeting all students.

Despite being spoken to by teachers, the students had persisted with their behaviour.

Well stack me, who'd have fucking seen that coming? And now those self same little shits can congratulate themselves for continuing to make their fellow pupils' lives at school just that little bit more miserable than they need be, all thanks to Liz Klein and her policy of don't-know-what-to-do-now-so-punishment-for-all. Fucking hell, Liz, whose side are you actually on here? The poor bloody kids who were on the receiving end are now being bullied by you and the fucking school instead of, or more likely as well as, the original bullies.

Because that's the fourth and final problem, Liz. As well as being lazy, unjust, and authoritarian your policy is going to fail as soon as the bullies work out that they only need to split into pairs and target lone kids, which I suspect they might be able to do faster than you did. You're assuming that in a group of three bullying can no longer take place, and simple mathematics - do you teach that at Osbourne? - should be enough to work out that in such a group two children can still gang up on the third. Fucking hell, woman, that's more or less how democracies function. Another lesson, perhaps?

Yeah, right.


* Yes, I realise this means that they are not really freedoms as such, but I'm in a bit of a rush and a discussion on freedoms, liberties and negative and positive rights wasn't the point of this post.
** If you have now got Matt Munro singing in your heads, I have an idea how old you are.*** And if you think beauty surrounds you as well then I also have an idea that you may be on drugs. Or just bloody lucky.
*** If you also have a cat it knows. Trust me, it just does. And its contempt for you has just doubled.

Unforeseen circumstances.

Blogging will be light to non-existent for a week or two. Comments are also unlikely to get much attention so apologies in advance if anything goes in the mod queue and stays there for days and days on end. In the meantime I'll leave you with this interesting and, for The Age, perhaps slightly unexpected article from titled "Helicopter governments promote an illusion of safety", quoted en bloc and with my emphasis on one particular paragraph.

Here's a way to make driving safer: make it riskier.

A German safety expert recommends we raise speed limits on our roads, not lower them.

Ulrich Mellinghoff, head of safety at Mercedes-Benz, argues that raising the top speed on long stretches of Australia's roads to 130 or 140km/h could help combat driver fatigue.

Mellinghoff's argument is counter-intuitive. It will definitely make driving feel less safe, but it could result in fewer accidents. And it fits in with an increasing body of knowledge that suggests government attempts to protect us are have the opposite effect - making us less safe and, crucially, less able to manage risk.

We've had widely owned, personal transport for more than a century now. And we've learnt a lot about safety in that time. The University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman famously studied the results of the American 1966 Motor Safety Act that mandated new car safety standards. Instead of making driving safer, Peltzman found, the new standards prompted drivers to be more reckless on the roads, and endangered the lives of pedestrians. Other risk analysts have found the same occurred when seatbelt laws were introduced around the world.

Economists call that ''moral hazard'' - when people feel they are insulated from the consequences of their actions and behave differently as a result.

In 2007, a researcher in Bath, England, attached proximity sensors to his bicycle to see how car drivers responded to his bike helmet use. On average, cars came nearly 10 centimetres closer when he wore a helmet than without. Drivers acted much more dangerously because they assumed the rider was safe. These problems aren't limited to road safety.

The insurance industry is acutely aware that some customers fail to protect their property when it's insured. Bushwalkers venture further away from civilisation if they believe search and rescue will be there to help them.

Researchers have even found the introduction of improved ripcords on parachutes did not lower the incidence of skydiving accidents. Instead, they just encouraged skydivers to pull their cords later.

We saw the moral hazard dynamic play out most dramatically in 2008, as the global financial crisis looked set to sweep away the entire world economy. Wall Street made riskier and riskier financial trades and employed ever more complex and precarious financial instruments because of an assumption, cultivated over decades, that if they got in too much trouble the government would bail them out. It would be bad if they lost their financial gambles. But they wouldn't lose the business over it. They were too big to fail.

Calling a company "too big to fail" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The marketplace starts to imagine the company is unsinkable and relies on it.

Having bailed out other firms, the market really went into free fall when the US government declined to bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008, dramatically reversing that assumption.

It wasn't the government's failure to bail out Lehman Brothers that caused the panic. It was implying they would do so, and at the last minute whipping the protective blanket away.

The long-term cause of the financial crisis was the suggestion the government would do anything to protect bankers. The short-term cause was that it didn't.

This isn't an argument against seatbelts or bike helmets. Seatbelts combined with drink-driving laws, education and cultural change have reduced Australia's road toll significantly. But it should be a warning: many of the well-meaning attempts to make us safer are counterproductive, making us more likely to take risks, and less likely to think about the consequences.

There are solutions. In a revolution in traffic management across Europe, a number of towns are removing traffic lights, stop signs, and other road markings. Once eliminated, drivers enter intersections more slowly and more attentively. Instead of focusing their attention on signs, they make eye contact with other drivers. They negotiate. Accidents in these towns have dramatically declined.

The Dutch have been experimenting with "shared streets", where the barriers between pedestrian walkways and roads are eliminated. Again, this sounds abominably dangerous. But when guard railings between the footpath and the road were removed from London's Kensington High Street, accidents fell by 47 per cent.

A spontaneous order emerges when people feel they are fully responsible for their own driving. And it's a safer one than in a traffic management system that tries to push drivers along pre-determined paths, barking orders along the way.

It's like the spontaneous order that emerges in society and markets when people are responsible for their actions. So let's hope risk and reward can be rejoined in the financial sector too.

We talk a lot about helicopter parents who over-parent and insulate their children from the world. The obvious downside of this kind of parenting is that children learn nothing about managing danger.

Perhaps it's time to talk about helicopter governments as well: always hovering above their citizens, ready to swoop in the moment they stray off the safest path.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. Follow him at twitter.com/chrisberg

Quote of the Week.

Via Jim Fryar, the Real World Libertarian, comes this gem uttered by the CEO of mining company Rio Tinto Iron Ore, Sam Walsh, who is feeling a bit put out that the government now want to wriggle out of the deal on the mining rent tax that it made with his industry before the election.

“If you can’t trust the government, who can you trust?”

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha.

Ahahahahahahahahaha.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

It'll probably polish out.

I'm sure The Daily Mash will be very grateful.

Nadine comes clean?

How the Christ this became newsworthy here I've no idea since I can't imagine that many Australians know or care who Nadine Dorries is, but all the same this appeared in The Aussie.

A BRITISH MP enraged her constituents and her party after letting slip that her blog, which tells people how hard she works, is "70 per cent fiction".

Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire in southern England, made the admission to investigators during a sleaze inquiry that cleared her of abusing the Government’s expenses system but found that she misled voters.

70 per cent fiction? Fancy that.*

According to documents published by the Standards and Privileges Committee, Ms Dorries said: "My blog is 70 per cent fiction and 30 perc ent fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire.”

Oh, Nadine, you are a dear. If they knew you better they might not have voted you back in, don't you think? And if your blog is 70% fiction then perhaps that's why. Or is because you know that there's more than enough tribal Tory voters in your constituency who would vote for a compost heap with a blue rosette on the top without too much doubt, so they wouldn't think twice about voting for you, fictional blog and fictional second home expense claims notwithstanding.

Baaaaaaaa. Baaaaaaaaaa.

But Ms Dorries later told the BBC that she had been told by police to disguise her movements on her blog, adding that "actually, I think I meant to say it's 30 percent fiction".

And I'd like to think that more than 70% of us should be less than 30% convinced by that.


* No, in every sense.

The Mash takes over The Telegraph?

Quelle fucking surprise.

Pop over to Counting Cats and read this.

Okay, done that? Good.

I have only one thing to add to what NickM wrote there. If you were one of the 26 million or so who voted for one of the three wings of the main political party, the Conlabial Servocrats, and especially either of the two wings who actually ended up running the place in May, then you were either complicit or suckered. Now can you see that they really are so similar that the powers that one lot grant themselves are irresistible to the shites that eventually replace them? The choice is not between what were once distinct parties. It's between statists and personal freedom.

Do please try to remember it in 2015.

One pilot gets it.

If you're my age, give or take, then you might remember when flying was fun. Even into my early teens arriving at the airport felt like the beginning of the holiday. Not any more. These days, thanks largely to a fuckwit in a cave and the spinelessness and paranoia of various governments, it doesn't feel like you're on holiday until you're finally released from the destination airport. Going to your departure airport isn't the beginning of the trip but just the beginning of all the checks and questions and scans you have to go through before they let you squeeze into a space that would make a veal calf claustrophobic. Travelling light is no answer since even with no luggage at all you're increasingly likely to be ordered to take your shoes off. I'd made the mistake of wearing hiking boots the last time this happened to me, and since then I've vowed if I've got the choice I won't fly anywhere again as long as they insist on treating me like a suspect even though in this country it can take a day or more to drive between major cities and well over a week to go from one side to the other.

But of all the insane security theatre in airports now the most window lickingly pointless is putting the bloody aircrew through it. I mean, think about it. You don't need to check to see if pilots have tucked away something they intend to use to gain access to the cockpit for a very obvious reason: it's where the airlines pay them to fucking be anyway. If one of them goes off his head and wants to kamikaze the plane I doubt there's much to stop him. So how many other people are being scanned pointlessly? Well, if the Israeli experience is any guide the answer is virtually everyone. Now one pilot has decided he's had enough of being treated as a suspect as well.

A Tennessee pilot is waiting to find out if he has lost his job because he refused to go through a full body scanner at a Memphis airport.
ExpressJet Airlines first officer Michael Roberts turned up for work on Monday but says he's tired of being manhandled by security agents and went home after deciding he didn't want to be patted down.
Roberts was chosen to go through the X-ray scanning machine at Memphis International airport before getting into the pilot seat to fly a commercial aircraft.
The Houston-based pilot walked off his job after declining to go through the security screening but has said he wants to go back to work.
The 35-year-old says he has an issue with the security procedure because he doesn't want to be 'harassed or molested without cause'.

And good for him. Now if all of us self loading freight can just follow his lead and refuse to accept our unjustified treatment as terrorist suspects by most airports then maybe, just maybe, flying anywhere might stop being the miserable and tedious experience it's become. Vote with your feet and your wallets - it's all they'll understand.

The coming catastrophist mantra.

Warble gloaming could, according to James Delingpole, be circling the drain, and we should get ready for what he calls the next Big Lie: biodiversity. Personally this seems like something I can get right behind for a change. I'm all for more diversity so let's get cracking. I suggest we start by genetically modifying absolutely anything that moves and then anything that doesn't until it begins to move, and we keep going until the bio is so amazingly diverse that people are having to shoot down their breakfast cereal in the mornings after it's smashed its way out of the packet and is flying round the room chasing the cat.

They're grrrrrrrrrrreat.

Do you think Greenpeace will have me?