Monthly Archives: October 2007

Safe as milk?

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First T_W, now me. We are becoming Simon Jenkins groupies. Oh blast. But he had a pretty good rant about the pervasiveness of surveillance and the growing spread of government intrusion into private life, in the Times Online today.

The really odd, semi-coherent nutters were out in force though. One comment that is daft enough to repeat said.

We seem to be ruled by the health and safety commission and supernanny combined

I can see that creeping centralisation of data combined with more surveillance and laws to stop us drinking and smoking and so on get tangled together in people’s minds. But the “health and safety” stuff that people tend to tie into this is a different matter altogether.

As far as I know, the Health and Safety Commission has no responsibilities beyond trying to cut down the numbers of people killed or seriously injured at work, and even these responsibilities only apply to specific kinds of work. If you get electrocuted in your office or you are sold bread with glass in it – it has nothing to do with them. They have nothing whatsoever to do with advising the population of Harrogate how much they should drink.

(Apparently, in Harrogate, “26.4% of you had between 12 and 17 “large” glasses of wine” last week, according to Simon Jenkins)

The current hysteria about health and safety has nothing to do with new laws or more intensive health and safety law enforcement – which is becoming close to non-existent. It is the result of the current response to any injury, which is to bang in a “No-win, no-fee” compensation claim.

(I speak as someone who heard the name of the Health and Safety Commission taken in vain yet again by my gym, when the staff threw me out – again – for not bringing an approved form of training shoes, last week This was despite – OK, then, maybe because of – my sarcastically pointing out that I didn’t know that it was possible to get steel-toe-capped trainers …. Oh alright then, maybe it was the (I thought mild, almost sub-vocal) cussing that got to them….

But it’s so much easier to blame imaginary health and safety inspectors, who might take it into their heads to visit my gym, bizarrely exceeding their legal remit, and then decide to enforce the wearing of cloth training shoes over open-toed hiking sandals.

No really, this is going somewhere, I think…. Our “safety” has indeed become an excuse for any number of ludicrous minor annoyances, like getting Marmite confiscated on a plane, as well as major intrusions on civil liberty. Actually examining the detail of whether any of these things really make us “safer” is, to put it mildly, long overdue.

Gun Crime, Family and Confusion

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A while ago (2 Oct 07 to be precise), I wrote a post about how the weird idea people have that being armed is a “good thing” (for whatever reason) had led to the death of a young girl and the destruction of a family – she was killed by her brother, playing with his mother’s illegally owned revolver. (Post was titled “One Bullet Destroys Three Lives.”)

Today I have a comment from someone calling themselves Logic. Although I want to respond to the comment, I can’t really do it justice by simply responding with a comment, so I thought I would repost the comment and address it here. Here we go.

does any one know what a .38 revolver looks like,…. i do, and if you dont then a quick search on the net will show you pictures,

Its ok, I know what a .38 revolver looks like. You may be thinking they all look the same, but they don’t. There are similarities, however if you do not know what you are looking for it is easy to make mistakes.

OTs-38 silent revolver (Russia) Five-shot .38-calibre revolver

the POINT is ,,,.. Kasha Peniston (the brother) must of knew it was loaded as you can SEE the bullets, he should of got more then 2yrs he should of got 5years in time, no less,

You are assuming a few things here. First off, if it was a .38 special style revolver (the one on the right above), then yes it is possible to see the brass ends of the rounds in the cylinder. However, this assumes the person knows enough to look. If the brother was, as claimed, simply playing with this as a toy, then it is unlikely he thought enough to check the cylinder to see if there were bullets in place. Even trained people make mistakes about the state of a weapon, so it is a bit comical to assume a teenager will be thoughtful and thorough enough to carry out normal safety precautions.

Secondly, what difference would the extra 3 years on his sentence have made? I suspect you have picked a completely arbitrary sentence and decided that would be more suitable. His family is destroyed. 5 years or 50 years is not going to change that. If we accept the courts findings that this crime was not malicious, then what are you seeking to punish here?

Sad, and traumatic, that this event might be, the boy still basically had an accident while playing. Because his mother (for whatever reason) had a loaded weapon in the house, the accident didn’t result in something trivial like a cut arm but the death of his sister. Punishing the boy will not deter this from happening again. His life is already destroyed, so why add to the suffering?

he’ll do 1yr and get out on bing the idol inmate, (aka good boy) either way he will be out by age 19,

So what? Are you saying that rewarding inmates who show good behaviour with reduced sentences is a bad thing? What do you think the purpose of prison is? If, as I thought, Prison is there to rehabilitate offenders then rewarding good behaviour is the right thing to do.

Also, why do you have a problem with him getting out by the age of 19? Would you rather he spent longer in jail, became a hardened criminal and then spent what remains of his life damaging society?

and the sotry reads ….the mother went to london for the weekend etc etc, and told the Boy where the gun was,.. he inturn got the gun and MUST of knew it was loaded but still played around with it,

Again, so what? The case reporting never disputed that the boy was playing with the weapon. He admitted to shooting his sister. You are basing all this on the assumption the boy had looked to see if the weapon was loaded.

Now the mother is trying to pin it on the so called bad boy image boy friend,

Once more, this cries out “so what?” In the original post, I was pointing out the flaw in the idea that people being armed / carrying weapons at home made things safer. I highlighted this was a situation which had totally stemmed from the mothers insane idea that having a gun in the house was sensible.

I am, totally, at a loss as to the point you are trying to make here.

this blog is a load of sh!t,.. if your going to tell the story tell it how it is.,,.. not bits a bats,

Well, thanks for taking the time to comment when you have such a low opinion of the blog. What part of the story do you feel was missed out? The post you have commented on was not a “news report,” it was an analysis of how the tragedy had come about, especially in light of recent jingoistic claims by various politicians.

and if you block the comment,. atleast u know ur talkin crap

Great. I didn’t block it. As you can see, I rarely talk crap and this certainly wasn’t one of those times. In a similar vein of human charity, I will point out that I suspect you are simply doing a drive by trolling. If you don’t come back and elaborate, at least you know you are talking crap.

WDYB’s top five god-thankers (cockney rhyming slang)

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Bored with dull sanity? Here’s a roundup of blogs that defy parody, with the organising motif of “Thanking God.” I haven’t linked but you can disentangle the crap from the urls if you really want to see them. As far as I can make out they aren’t parody sites although that is your first assumption. I hope I can be corrected on at least one of these.

I was planning a list of sporting events and movie award wins where the contenders credited him upstairs (subtly boasting of being God’s favourite). Sadly, Google is strangely reticent on this topic although I found some good rants on the practice. In fact, most of the “god-thankers” were just expressing a generalised sense of gratitude to the universe for new linux functions, ffs.

But, as a consolation, I found these sites that thanked the big guy for “gifts” that the rational mind might imagine could best be described as “curses”.

First off. How about “Thank god for global warming.” It has basically one article and most of its categories and posts point to this. The argument is that global warming is just a con to make us pay more taxes and to extend the role of government. At least that’s a point of view, albeit one that has never felt the chilling edge of Occam’s Razor. The rest, such as “what if the human race disappeared, the planet would still warm” is just arrant nonsense.

The next one sort of fits in with my original idea, except that it doesn’t have losers so I’m going to leave the link. Godwin’s Fitness Club testimonials page. Godwin’s seems to be a gym with a ministry attached or vice versa. Everyone here thanks God for their improved muscle tone.

The Politics of the Cross gets in just because it explains that it has problems thanking god for Canada, on the grounds that

” our government … is becoming more and more pagan all the time. Moreover, we are to bear in mind that government can as easily be a vehicle of the Antichrist as a blessing (cf. Rev. 13).”

I have to credit Anne Coulter Watch with reporting that the deeply-unpleasant-one believed that God supported the extermination of the native population of America:

“Thank God the white man did win or we would not have the sort of equality and freedom, or life, that we have now.”

Last, but the clear winner on any scale of evil dementedness is, naturally, the Westboro Baptists. On their charmingly-named “God Hates Fags” site, they are kind enough to thank God for the London Tube bombings.

Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today – July 7, 2005 – wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more.
“But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction; truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth.” Jer. 7:28.
England: Island of the Sodomite Damned

Of course, that is probably small beer to you Americans, compared to Hurricane Katrina and the deaths of countless US servicemen, for which they also thank their deeply unpleasant deity.

I notice there is a section on their site called “Love Crusades.” It’s a list of the upcoming funerals of US servicemen that they are going to picket. Now even the most hard-hearted TV fake-childcare expert might think was a step too far in the “tough love” direction.

I truly hope their god loves them with the same fervour that they love servicemen and the population of London or New Orleans.

Dentention with out trial

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It seems the law and order madness which is overwhelming our green and pleasant land knows no boundaries or limits. Previously, Heather has commented on the bare faced idiocy which masked it self as an opinion column in the Times and this is supplemented by the madness spouted by Lord Carlisle – from the now badly named “Liberal Democrat” party.

In a news item titled “Raise detention limit, urges peer” the BBC report :

There is a case for extending the 28-day limit on questioning suspected terrorists, the government’s terror legislation watchdog has said.

Lib Dem peer Lord Carlile of Berriew is due to report to the home secretary on whether the limit should be lengthened.

He told BBC One’s Politics Show he had concluded that in a “small number” of cases, “a 28-day period between arrest and detention may be insufficient”.

Amazing. If there is still anyone out there who thinks we are merely sleepwalking into a police state, please take note. We are jogging and building into a full blown run.

The whole issue of internment detention seems to be locked into an insane circle. It sickens me to my core that I find myself agreeing with the terminally irritating David Cameron on this, but at least his opinion is just weak and pathetic:

But Tory leader David Cameron said “no new evidence” supported an extension.

You see, he is right but he says it like a weasel.

This is not a good policy. The current legislation which allows you to detain an innocent person for 28 days before you even charge them with a crime is shocking. To use the “terrorist” bogeyman is an underhand tactic at best, the threat from terrorism, while real, is insignificant compared to the dangers we face daily. The threat from the lost civil liberty is immense.

It seems that Toutatis has guided this blog over the last few days and our posts are heading in a set direction (rather than the aimlessness which seemed to annoy Al Kafir Akbar). The right wing windbag Lord Rees-Mogg lamented the removal of the requirement of prima facie evidence before some one could be extradited for trial, saying how this was an important right. Over the weekend we saw how a man was detained, despite having an overwhelming amount of correct documentation, as an illegal immigrant (the offence of being black in a public place seems to have returned to haunt us) and today the posts about the madness of stop and search laws. Brazenly risking a slippery slope fallacy (its not a fallacy if the slope is slippery), it strikes me this is all symbolic of the same problem. We are willingly allowing the state to control and intrude into our lives so we can spend our time watching Big Brother (the irony is not missed here…), X Factor, programs were celebrity no-marks cut hair or cook food and so on.

People do not want their inane drivel about the latest celeb to go bonkers to be disturbed by having to worry about burglary, murder or terrorism – that would force them to think about their values and what is important to them. Much easier to just go with the flow…

It is not just the working, common man, who suffers this inability to think but even the “noble” peers who are supposed to have the interests on the nation at their hearts. Going back to Lord Carlisle’s confusing ideas:

Lord Carlile gave Kafeel Ahmed, who died of his injuries after an alleged terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport, as an example of why police might need more time to question a suspect before bringing charges.

The peer said: “Had he survived, it is possible that time for interviewing him would have run out before he regained consciousness.

I will be charitable and assume this made sense, Lord Carlisle is saying that had Kafeel Ahmed not died, but remained in a coma for more than 28 days the police would have been unable to question him. Things like that make sense on the first scan. Let us think about it though…

First off, there is enough evidence to charge him with the crime without questioning him. No need for extra time in detention. It was, broadly, and open and shut case. I can’t imagine he would have had a strong alibi placing him in Majorca at the time. So, why would they need more than 28 days?

Secondly, after 29 (or more) days in a coma what would be the point in questioning him? It could take months or years before he was able (let alone willing) to recount events. Are we saying that (as implied by Lord Carlisle) detention should be indefinite?

The BBC continues with:

He added that cases which involved complex forensic analysis, or where alleged terrorists had carefully encrypted computer files, might also require suspects to be detained beyond the present limit.

He said: “My concern is not about the number of days. The number of days is a political decision, there’s no logical answer as to how many days are ideal as a maximum.

I have two issues with this, I will deal with the one I think is less important first. It worries me that he has no basic problem with indefinite detention. There is no sensible way to say how long a police investigation will take if we look at it from the police point of view, which is why he ends up with no logical maximum. That makes sense and I agree. Where we differ is the conclusion that extends from this. There is no logical maximum from the police point of view, so a reasonable length needs to be stipulated from the innocent, yet accused, person’s point of view. If we, as we should, assume the person is innocent, how long would you be willing to spend in jail before the police said “ok, you were right after all” and let you go? 28 days is, actually, much too long. In the case of the gentleman detained 2 days, he was awarded £7500 compensation. How about a scheme where the police have to compensate the person £3500 per day they are detained if they are later found to be innocent of terrorist related offences? Makes sense to me.

That leads me to the bigger issue I have a problem with. What is special about terrorism? Any one born in England after 1969 has lived their entire life under the threat of terrorism on the mainland. As a child I remember the annual round of bombings in Manchester and London, I remember regular train evacuations and almost daily bomb scares in schools and shopping centres. In the very early days of the “troubles,” detention without trial was tried but all the research agrees that this had the sole effect of turning PIRA/INLA from a small-time, thug, organisation into large, popular groups with masses of local support. Is this really what we want to have happen on the mainland? Internment (sorry, detention without trial) has never proven to be successful at combating terrorism. It makes heroes and martyrs of those arrested, and it turns every person who is wrongly arrested against the state which is supposed to protect them. It can not, ever, be a good thing.

As I see it (this is a blog remember, it is just my opinion), this hinges on the basic thing we seem to have lost. We, as a nation, no longer presume innocence. We imply it is OK for the police to detain people under Prevention of Terrorism laws because, basically, we assume they are actually guilty. When some one is released, it is made to look like a criminal is allowed to get off because the system protected them not the victim. It is very rare that the accused is ever treated as being innocent (the McCanns are an odd exception to this).

Islamic terrorists no longer need to do anything to “destroy western civilisation,” we are quite happy doing it ourselves…

Throw fuel on a fire

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Libby Purves, writing in the Times took up the call of Keith Jarrett, the retiring president of the National Black Police Association, for the re-introduction of stop and search to combat rising numbers of youth murders.

If you aren’t British, you won’t know that stop-and-search practices have a long and disastrous history in UK policing. They contributed to terrible relations between police and young black men, in particular, when the criteria for looking “suspicious” enough to get stopped and searched in the street rested almost entirely on whether you were a young black male or not.

Maybe Keith Jarrett is considering that the policy would cut the number of young civilians killed by turning the anger of young black men against police rather than each other. Hmm, that seems a bit mean to his police colleagues. But, otherwise, it’s very hard to understand how alienating young people further from society is going to do anything to cut crime.

I suspect that Keith Jarrett just knows full well what type of soundbite will get picked up by all the British media and he’s thinking of a less arduous and better-paid career in politics or television. Bugger the consequences.

Libby Purves presents Jarrett’s silly argument in a really odd way. It’s a “challenge to political correctness” etc…. So far, so predictable. But she ties it in with a trend for other people saying the supposedly unsayable, as if they are all part of a wave of new anti-PC thinking, thus implying a spurious authority for Jarrett’s nonsense.

For instance, she includes Trevor Phillips – of the soon to be defunct, if it’s not already closed down, Commission for Racial Equality – saying that multiculturalism is a farce. Well, yes, but Trevor Phillips was demanding real integration, not proposing an increase in bigotry.

She includes the Chief Constable of North Wales who called for the legalisation of heroin. A perfectly rational call from someone who can see the social effects of prohibition and suggests a reasonable solution.

Have you spotted the difference yet? These people were not challenging an imaginary “political correctness.” They were making rational arguments about social policies that are producing effects that are exactly opposite to those they are supposed to be aiming to achieve.

Jarrett is not doing this. He is calling for the adoption of a strategy that has clearly failed on any measure. Repeatedly. There is nothing like getting stopped and humiliated in the street when blamelessly going about your business for building a deep and abiding hatred of the police among the generally law-abiding.

With modern technology, the horrors of the old Sus laws would be increased exponentially. Under new proposals, the police are to have laptops on which to record details of “suspects”. Identity documents and DNA databases and all the panapoly of an authoritarian modern state will each feed into the mix. Already the UK DNA database is a world leader (in a shameful league.) The proportion of black males whose DNA is stored is an unspeakably scandalous feature of this.

Libby Purves presents the arguments against this mad policy, albeit sneeringly (OK, it’s not as if I am stranger to the sneer, myself.)

Until now the lazy mantra has been that the police are “institutionally racist”, as the Macpherson report put it, and cannot be trusted. They have to record every instance of searching, and have been threatened with legal action by racial equality watchdogs and accused of poisoning community relations. The riots of 1980, 1981 and 1985 in Bristol, Brixton and Handsworth were triggered by heavy-handed police action against black suspects, mainly in search of drugs or stolen property.

She infers that this may have been all very well in those distant days

But this is 2007, and the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders: often by teenagers, of teenagers

.

She then lists some recent murders. This is clearly to make it seem as if the evidence supports the proposed solution. She presents no evidence for why or how this will work except that Keith Jarrett claims that black parents whom he knows support the idea.

Let me do the same. Young people have been shot and stabbed in my my neighbourhood. Kids from my old primary school have both murdered and been murdered. I will face magnetic north and say “K’plah” repeatedly at random intervals. That will sort it out then?

Stop and search will prevent murders? How? How on earth?

The comments have some predictable responses. For instance, Liz Scott, Gutersloh, Germany says:

The truth hurst, and no matter how hard these white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men try to cover it up, the crime figures are real, and real solutions must be made to overcome them.

Another cover-up? By mysterious white, “liberal”, fat, rich old men? (Aside, I love the way liberal is capitalised. I love the way fat is even in there.)

Jane, Birmingham, UK

I am all for stop and search – if you have nothing to hide then why should you mind afterall it is done to protect us from the maniacs carrying knives and drugs.

But there are comments that bear repeating.
Donald Ideh, London, UK:

… As a black professional, I have experienced the ugly face of policing, the ordinary prejudice with which they carry out their duties. I have had an innocent family member tortured by the state in the infamous Stoke Newington Police Station. These youths are already over represented in prisons and police data bases. The sad irony is that that they are also most likely to be the victims of violent crime.

JonB, Glasgow, UK:

“the crimes that police have to prevent are not predominantly drugs or burglary, but murders”
What!?!?!? Are you mad?? You’re claiming there are more murders than drugs or burglary offences?

Are Ruandan clergy next in line for the Pope’s blessing?

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The pope has apparently begun ensainting Franco’s clergy (or whatever the word is for declaring them to have been “saints” rather than “active supporters of a dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government by force.” Think Guernica). According to the Times, a fight broke out

outside a church in Rome yesterday after the Pope beatified 498 priests and nuns killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Members of the congregation attacked left-wing protesters carrying a banner that read: “Those who have killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified.”

Franco? The 1930s fascist who clung on to power for decades by the simple expedient of not joining his fascist chums in the Second World War. According to the Times, again,

Bands of Communist and Anarchist irregulars on the Republican side burnt churches and killed thousands of priests and nuns. Falangist death squads executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of harbouring leftist sympathies

So, if we are stacking up bodies to measure levels of atrocity, it looks as if even the Times sees that Franco’s toll was the highest.

This isn’t just a historical point, there are current resonances.

The country’s Socialist Government has clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church. The Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÍguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces, has caused howls of protest from conservatives after introducing a law aimed at redressing the injustices suffered by victims of the regime. Among other measures, the law orders the removal of any symbols of the dictatorship, which arguably include the shrines in many Spanish churches to the dead on Franco’s side. Republican victims still lie in dozens of unmarked mass graves around the country.

Why draw the line in Spain? Why not go the distance and start beatifying the Ruandan clergy involved in promoting genocide.

Doesn’t this act seem like calculated provocation with the Pope intervening to show which side he’s on in the current climate?

No mad quack

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Minette Marrin ranted absurdly against Michael Moore’s new film Sicko, in the Times Online.

Apparently, Michael Moore made the unarguable point that the NHS is free. (Well, almost free, except for prescription and dentistry charges) Free at the point of delivery. Provided according to need, not according to the ability to pay. That’s the principle.

For the benefit of Americans, that means, for example, that you don’t face bankruptcy at the same time as major illness.

Being sick is bad enough in itself, surely. Free access to competent medical treatment isn’t just one of the best candidates for recognition as a universal human right. It even makes perfect common sense socially, given that the healthy aren’t normally mad-keen to catch TB from the untreated poor.

The infinite superiority of free medical care was made eloquently clear by Richard Titmuss decades ago in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy , original updated 1997, LSE Books.* Titmuss showed that the properties of altruism and social responsibility, on which UK blood banks depended, actually produced a product – blood for transfusion – that was of better quality than that available from US blood banks. (People who sold their blood tended to be hungry, diseased, alcoholic and/or drugged. People who willingly gave blood tended to be healthy. Well, d’uh.)

Moore seems to be making a similar, but updated, point that free healthcare is better for the vast majority of consumers, is cheaper and more effective. (We are English. We aren’t supposed to need telling that.)

It’s hard to see how free health care could seem like a bad thing to anyone except the executives of medical insurance companies. (Not even to doctors, given that they do pretty well out of the NHS and can also run unfeasibly profitable private practices.)

In England, we complacently take the National Health Service for granted. We whine constantly about specific local problems. Plenty of people (including us) rant about crazy high-level decisions to spend billions on computerising bits of it. But, we genuinely cannot imagine what it would be like to live without it.

Well not so Minette Marrin. Her piece has the title “Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS“

Quack? So Michael Moore’s film is peddling crystal aromatherapy for cancer then? I assumed from the reviews that it was about the horrors of US healthcare and the merits of alternative ways to provide it. Silly me.

She claims that Moore showed a rosy view of the NHS, apparently by showing a clean and efficient hospital.

You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

Well, I can only assume that her definition of “deep trouble” is subtly different from mine. Even without referring to years of targets- and cost- and privatisation-driven policies that have been imposed on the NHS (spot the misdirection, yes, I did mention them) I would say that the NHS may face a few problems

These tend to be problems talked up out of all proportion by a biased media, but, wait, that’s what she’s accusing Michael Moore of doing.

Nothing undermines the principle that our NHS is so superior to the US health care system that it can look mockingly over its shoulder at US healthcare and say “Call that a health care system?” Then give a sarcastic laugh.

Even Minette has to acknowledge this, after she’s brought up a selection of NHS failings: prevalence of hospital infections; loss-making NHS trusts and GPs who don’t provide out of hours healthcare.

None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore.

I think that is too grudging and it’s way too late to unsay what she’s already said.

The issues she mentioned are all issues of policy. They do not in any way relate to the wider principle of free universal health care. It’s as if Micahel Moore said he liked your house. You say “I hate it”, listing things you hate – like the creaking doors – without considering that this might imply that you believe you would be better off homeless.

* See, I can reference, though granted it’s not Harvard system. The British Medical Journal has a full reference. There’s a Wikipedia article on Richard Titmuss, if you are interested in post-WWII social policies

How much is liberty worth?

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More than just a philosophical question in this day and age – we seem to have an answer. Reading the BBC online news today, it seems that the recompense for spending two days under wrongful detention is a measly £7,500. In a great example of how the “freedoms” we cherish in western democracies are being thrown away as the government panders to the fear generated by a largely right-wing media we get this news item:

A man accused of being an illegal immigrant while on holiday in Northern Ireland has been paid £7,500 after he was wrongly put in prison.
The Immigration Service wrongly detained the man in Maghaberry jail.
Frank Kakopa who is originally from Zimbabwe, was on a short break with his wife and young children in 2005, when he was stopped at Belfast City Airport.
Despite showing documentation that he lived and worked in England, he was taken to prison.
He was strip-searched and held for two days.
This had happened despite his manager in England confirming both his legal residency and employment position.

So, let me see if I understand this. Mr Kakopa was carrying the proper documentation for his residency status, his employer confirmed his residency and employment status yet the Immigration Service still strip searched him and detained him for two days.

What on Earth is going on here? Are we now so firmly entrenched into the habit of dismantling human rights that this news item is buried in a relative backwater are of the BBC (I only found it by chance – it hasn’t made any of the major news bulletins). Now, I have actually used Belfast City Airport (comically named “George Best Airport”…) and the staff there are, generally, officious, obnoxious and obstinate – however the thought of them deciding to detain me for two days despite being a British Citizen is mind boggling.

The lack of an outcry over this is equally shocking – I am sure if it had been a white businessman people like Lord Rees-Mogg would be the first to complain how we need to reinvigorate our human rights approaches.  As this person seems to meet all the criteria for an outrage – a professional worker (structural engineer) travelling with his family – I can only assume that his detention, and the total lack of news about it, is entirely related to his skin colour. (Not an original assessment, I agree – even the BBC article implies it…)

The article continues:

Mr Kakopa, a structural engineer, said the experience still haunted him. His family were left at the airport and Mr Kakopa said he had no idea what had happened to them.
“They wouldn’t allow me to make phone calls – I was actually detached from the world,” he said.
“I did not know where my kids were taken to.”
“It is still difficult to believe that what was supposed to be a relaxing break for my family turned out to be our worst nightmare.”
“I was locked up with convicted criminals, having committed no crime, while my wife and young children were left abandoned at the airport of a strange country worrying about where I was and how I was being treated.”

In some respects Mr Kakopa is very, very lucky in that he was carrying a lot of proof and documentation – if for whatever reason he had left one of the critical documents at home in England, he may have found himself detained indefinitely until the Immigration Service deported him. Wouldn’t that have been good? I wonder, how much the out of court settlement would have been then…

All my life, I have read about this sort of behaviour in “foreign” countries, and it normally accompanies some diatribe about how this is proof [insert dictatorship] is a bad regime etc. It is the sort of you expect to hear the evil Commies doing, or Mugabe or Korea. But good old Blighty? Shocking. No wonder the home office declined to comment – what could they ever say which would justify detaining someone who was carrying the correct documentation.

In this day an age, a mistake (or malicious act) by the immigration and security personnel is not a trivial thing. These unelected, barely accountable people have the power to detain without trial or deport people without reason. Despite this already shocking state of affairs we seem to be sleepwalking into granting them more and more powers – all while removing what little safeguards remain.

A very sad state of affairs. I wonder who really won the cold war…

God hates Trigonometry

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Got a religion? Feel you missed out on the whole Intelligent Design wave? Don’t despair. There’s no need to start disbelieving in Biology to stay in with the crowd.

Join the Anti-Trigonometry Movement (ATM)* and stay ahead of the pack at Uncommon Descent with their antiquated anti-biology views.

Fighting the pernicious godless mathematics is the real priority.

Is there any mention of trig in the Bible? I think not.

Why God hates Trig

Baffled by trigonometry at school? You aren’t alone. Trigonometry is too complex to have been developed by mere human agency. This proves that it was directly invented by God.

As only God can do trig, human attempts at it are clearly blasphemous. It was your innate anti-blasphemy sense that was telling you not to do it.

See how deeply sin has wormed its way into the demonic practice.

sin(x)

Need I say more?

“Cosine”. Its actually stuffed with sin and it implies at least two people banding together to do it (Compare with co-ed, for example.)

This is a family-friendly blog so I am not even going to mention the hypotenuse or theodolites. (Details in plain wrapper)

Did your mathematics teacher make you recite meaningless things like “Olive has a house of ants” Mnemonics, my a^se. That is a call to Beelzebub and s/he knew it.

Has any of your vaunted science ever managed to disprove that Satan invented trig to test our faith?

* Remember, the ATM is your weapon in the war against godless mathematics. Your donations are always welcome here at ATM. Just send your bank details and pin number. You know you want to.

Lord Rees-Mogg Rightwing Hypocrisy Shock

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But then again, would you expect anything different from Lord Rees-Mogg? For some odd reason, the Times Online blog area subtitles his blog with:

Wisdom online from Lord Rees-Mogg, Times columnist and former editor

Blimey. Do they have a different meaning for the word Wisdom?

Anyway, in an outpouring of idiocy I have only just stumbled upon (it is from May), Lord Rees-Mogg shows that he is no coward when it comes to hypocritically reversing his viewpoint when it his “kind” of person who gets targeted. Titled “Bring Back the Prima Facie Test” it gives an insight into the double standards that rightwing hate-mongers love to live with. This article begins:

After 9/11 Britain signed a Treaty with the United States to make extradition easier. That was a natural response to the threat of terrorism. However, the Treaty has not been used against terrorists, but against a number of businessmen. There is now a fear of American extradition, which has led to the suicide of Neil Coulbeck, an innocent witness in the NatWet case.

This pretty much says it all. Lord Rees-Mogg was one of the pundits clamouring for harsher laws and reduced burdens of proof following the 11 Sep attack, and this increased after the 7 Jul attacks in London. Prior to this extradition treaty, a nation which wanted to extradite a UK citizen for trial had to provide sufficient evidence that a “reasonable person” would find the accused guilty – this is a lower standard of proof than is required during an actual trial and it can get a bit confusing. Even Lord RM writes: (Emphasis mine)

Prima facie is not a very high standard of proof; it only requires that evidence should be produced on which a reasonable man could think the accused was guilty of a crime. Yet it is a very important protection.

Yes, it is a very important protection. The idea that a citizen of this country can be sent abroad to face trial without the requestion nation providing this basic level of evidence is horrific. Any citizen. Remember (and this is important) a terrorist suspect is an innocent person. They are protected by the same rights which protect every one else. It has been stressed time and time again that removing the rights from one group of innocent people removes them from everyone. This seems to have been overlooked by the jingoistic right wingers.

I can only assume that, Lord Rees-Mogg assumed that this change to the treaty (“a natural response to the threat of terrorism“) would only impact those guilty of terrorism. That these people would be extradited without sufficient evidence to pass the basic prima facie test was ignored, because lets be honest here, the people getting extradited were going to be a bit, erm, different, than Rees-Mogg’s circle of people. Who cares if a few swarthy characters from lower income groups get sent to illegal detentions eh?

I can only sympathise with the family of Mr Coulbeck and my heart goes out to them for their loss. I do notice, though, that Lord Rees-Mogg has passed sufficient judgement on him (“an innocent witness“) to make me question why he would kill himself rather than provide evidence at a trial. Is it because he was actually a suspect – placing him in the same “innocent suspect” category as the potential terrorists this legislation was aimed at? Lord RM writes:

British businessmen do not trust American criminal law because of plea bargaining, in which the horrors of some American prisons are used as a threat to impel people to plead guilty in return for an agreed sentence. The difference between a possible fifty years in a violent prison and two years in a country camp can be a very compelling argument.

Well, blimey. If British businessmen – with access to lawyers and political support – do not trust the American criminal justice system what hope is there for some one on terrorist charges? Plea bargaining has no place in any justice system but that is a topic for another day, and can you imagine the amount of bargaining which would be taking place if someone was accused of terrorism. Under duress (i.e. threat of execution, threat of years in a borderline legal detention centre etc) people will say anything they think will help themselves. This means people will lie, will implicate innocent people, anything. If businessmen are scared that other businessmen will burn them to avoid huge fines, imagine what people will do and say to avoid the death penalty or a life in Camp X-Ray’s descendants… With a stunning skill of stating the obvious, Lord RM adds to one of his paragraphs:

… Counter terrorist laws, and laws against organised crime can apply to ordinary businessmen, and frame the judgment of business transactions.

Who would have thought it eh? Laws apply to every one. If you make something illegal for terrorists, it becomes illegal for every one else as well. Wow. This touches on another topic which should wait for a rainy day – should businesses and businessmen be treated differently from “ordinary” citizens in the eyes of the law? Corporate actions can destroy the lives of millions, leave countless numbers bankrupt and in poverty and even result in countless deaths (or does it no longer count when they are in, say, India?). Despite this, there is still the idea it is a bit of a “victimless crime” and not something the government and police should be interested in. In fact (if you read most right wing rhetoric) they should spend more time stopping that poor youth robbing the equally poor little old lady and let the big businesses get on with the job of robbing everyone.

With a final burst of hypocrisy, Lord Rees-Mogg concludes with:

I do not know whether the 2003 Act is compatible with Human Rights law, but I should have thought not. We should bring back the prima facie evidence requirement, which still governs extradition to the vast majority of countries.

For once I agree with the Lord, but for vastly different reasons. It is entertaining to read someone like Lord Rees-Mogg citing Human Rights law to defend his opinion, normally it is a diatribe about how human rights are a farce and how the UK should withdraw from the agreements to uphold the laws.

Still, is anyone really surprised when a hate filled rightwing windbag displays masses of hypocrisy when it comes to their “chums?”

10 Best Blogs on WYDBs Blogroll

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Flattered (not to mention amused at having become one composite blog being) by getting included on the Exterminator’s ten favourite blogs, we thought we’d turn it into a meme. Without all the meme stuff of having to tag x people and name your favourite band or say who’s your most admired atheist celeb.

Our favourites are mainly atheist blogs, although we aren’t very devout atheist bloggers. I mean there’s only so much you can say about not believing in something that doesn’t exist. So, we’ve picked sites that are all-round enjoyable & wise and say more than “I’m an atheist.” Mainly, they are just really funny.

Being human, we’ve tended to pick sites that we usually agree with. Or can at least have enjoyable rational disagreement with and can learn from.

We tried to stick to ten. They are partly randomly selected, on the basis that these are the blogs that we’ve recently remembered to visit regularly. Old favourites that haven’t been brought to mind, because their little names haven’t popped up on the atheist blogroll or planet atheism or planet humanism have just got ignored. By accident. So apologies in advance if we’ve missed off some brilliant blog we just didn’t think of today. When we have come up with ten more favourites there’ll be another post. It was going to be in alphabetic order, but that seemed boring…

No More Hornets did this first, so the Exterminator is getting mentioned first. Great blog. Among his many charms, he has been consistently dryly funny on atheist silliness. Long objecting to the search for an atheist logo, he has still managed to come up with one of his own, which at least has the merit of saying Atheist.

I’M an Atheist. YOU can be one, too!
Send for your free badge NOW.

He recently ran a “student” post in an avowed attempt to match Pharyngula’s prodigious output. A fair percentage of the commenters assumed these were real kids. Some comments managed to sound so much like the atheist blogs he’d parodied a couple of weeks before that it was hard to believe these weren’t parodies too.

It is annoying to read something that is crying out for a blog and then to find that it’s been done so much better by the Exterminator.

The next one here (though the order isn’t going to imply anything) is my This-Week’s-Favourite blog, Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes. Some of Bing’s writing is so good it would make you want to amputate your own hands to stop you trying to communicate with words. I am going to resist the temptation to quote things, as it’s all in the context. All the same, I’m going to quote a use of graphics instead. Railing against Rush Limbaugh, he says:

Let me express myself in stick figure form: Stickman banging head

A bit further on, he says

But you haven’t established the facts yet…I mean you just said so! I now need to express myself in mountain goat form: Goats banging heads

Bah. This post is seemingly going on for ever. I’ll try to be more concise.

Black Sun Journal is intimidatingly authoritative on subjects like climate change. Magisterial, even. It feels like every word has been chosen with a magnifying glass and scalpel. Even his diagrams are brilliant. If Black Sun has written a post on some topic, there’s probably nothing left for unascended mortals to say.

Clioaudio is the same, He posts on “Ancient History, Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy through a Skeptic’s Eyes.” You can find endless surprising and fascinating things here. His writing style is very light. The words just ooze subtly over you, so sometimes you have to think again about what he’s just said.

Archaeology Magazine are running an interesting poll at the moment:
“The tombs of so many of history’s great leaders are lost.
Which other ruler would you most like to see discovered?”
That’s an easy one to answer I know which unseen tomb I’d like to find. It’s more difficult if you specify that the leader should already be dead, but I think I have an answer for that too.

I’m doing really poorly with this whole “being concise” thing. And I’m running out of ways to say “great blog, love it.” The next few are long-term favourites. I think I need a Flickr style trophy logo from now on, so I don’t need to use as many words. Here it is:
trophy
Look at the sites and you’ll see how good they are.

Hell’s Handmaiden’s blog has lots of brief enraged and completely-to-the-point rants, like this one on torture. trophy

Spanish Inquisition doesn’t just have a great top logo – although it does – but it also has some excellent posts, like this one on Things I’m getting tired of hearing.trophy

I’m still not making these fit in. I am going to have to start running them together and put some more detail in future blogs. Picking “ten” favourites was a demented choice. I am so much regretting it.

Skepticum trophy, Evolutionary Middleman, trophy Deep Thoughts trophy are also great.

Having a quick scan for a post to feature here, I just realised that Evo-mid, like many of the blogs on this list, seems to have decided to adopt the No More Hornets Atheist logo. I hope the Exterminator doesn’t start selling atheist breakfast cereal, because that shape just wont translate well to a corn and wheat format.

Sorry, I squashed the last three up to make room for a last word for our atheist (no)godparent Nullifidian. Sadly, he’s not posting as often as he used to, he even disappeared altogether for a good while. But, when he blogs, you can bet that it’s going to be really funny, with either a unique subject or a unique personal take on something.

TV nanny sent to naughty step

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It gives me no pleasure to report that Channel 4 are investigating the qualifications of its TV nanny, according to Guardian.. Well, OK. I lied. Yes it does. It gives me huge pleasure. 🙂

This woman has been on television giving horrific instructions to parents about leaving babies to cry and limiting cuddle time to ten minutes a day. And so on. Fashions change drastically in how to relate to your children. The 1930s “Truby King” style neglect is the most pernicious parenting fashion ever.

New parents are scared and open to any outside influences that claim to have the answer to their difficulties. TV experts that seem to have a simple answer are an obvious resource for people who may not have friends or family who can help. Sadly, these answers are s^ite. It is dog-training for humans.

So. Wahay. It’s great to see yet another spurious telly “expert” on life have the basis of their expertise challenged. (Cf Gillian McKeith, et al.) Let’s see the TV nanny sent to her room, please.

WingNuts, WingNuts, WingNuts

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By Belatu-Cadros, the fools at WingNut WorldNetDaily make it easy for people to ridicule them. It is like the Gods themselves have decided that the things (for want of a better word, they certainly are not people) who write for WND need to publicly humiliate themselves on a regular basis. If it were any other website, I would have assumed good faith and decided it was a massive outpouring of irony and satire. Sadly, this is WND. These raving lunatics actually believe what they write.

Today, I braved the wrath of Ambisagrus and visited the wingnuts (no, I wont link to them, sorry). Blimey, I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

In a post titled “Norris endorses, surge follows : Huckabee sees spike in online donations after column” we get a wonderful example of why people attribute mysterious effects to routine things.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a GOP presidential candidate, is experiencing a surge in campaign cash just days after Chuck Norris wrote a column in WND endorsing him.

Well, isn’t cause and effect a wonderful thing. I prayed over and over to Toutatis that this was just a jokingly ironic post, but I can’t find any evidence of it. Obviously this is why wing nuts in general struggle to appreciate what science and experiment tells them, and from this evidence it seems trying to get them to learn about (for example) evolution is a definite non-starter.

If you look through WingNutDaily, (Sorry, cracked and linked) there are numerous times that good old Chuck has endorsed him and none of these resulted in a sudden upsurge. The fact the upsurge took place a random length of time after the endorsement may be taken to imply the endorsement was irrelevant to it. That would be for normal people though, not our wing nuts.

Obviously the whole article is nothing more than a thinly veiled shill for how great Chuck really is. I suspect he may be in the process of negotiating a pay rise or something (well, its not like he has a film career to fall back on) because there is a whole list of “jokes” such as:

  • “Chuck Norris has already been to Mars; that’s why there are no signs of life there.”
  • “They wanted to put Chuck Norris on Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn’t tough enough for Chuck’s beard.”
  • “Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.”
  • “Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming that ‘Law & Order’ are the names of his left and right legs.”
  • “Chuck Norris sleeps with a night-light because the dark is afraid of him.”
  • “Superman owns a pair of Chuck Norris pajamas.”
  • “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”
  • “When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn’t push himself up. He pushes the Earth down.”
  • “When the boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.”

Yeah, I cant see what is funny about them either – other than how pathetic they are for an adult to be proud that 12 year olds are saying things like this about them… (When I was a lad it was similar things about people like Mr T… We grew up though).

The next post which caught my eye was a priceless (as in of no value) gem entitled “Now, God banished from Washington Monument.” This bit of idiotic nonsense begins:

The National Park Service has banished God from a key display of America’s Christian heritage in Washington, and a California pastor who regularly leads teams of visitors to see markers of the nation’s religious history wants Him restored.

First off, all I can say to this is BRILLIANT! Now we know how to banish God from places we don’t want him, we can go about getting rid of all the earthquakes, floods, droughts etc that he is supposed to be sending us. Who would have thought it would have been so trivial to banish an omnipotent, omniscient deity – all you need to do is remove an engraving. Amazing.

On further reading it seems even more trivial to get rid of the sulky, grumpy, attention seeking deity that so many nutters Christians fall down on their knees before. Some all powerful being this is, Anextiomarus would kick his ass any day of the week – and beat old Chucky baby for good measure.

It seems that all you need to do to Banish God is to move a monument with the words LAUS DEO on slightly so it is harder to read.

That is it.

It really is that simple.

What are you waiting for! With a few hours effort we can force the Christian god into a small cave somewhere and Nerull can finish him off for good. Great eh?

If you doubt me about how trivial this is:

“I could barely make out some etching looking down from that bird’s eye view, but there was simply no way I would have known what it said unless I already knew the saying was there – ‘Laus Deo,'” [Pastor Tood] DuBord [of the Lake Almanor Community Church] said.

From this pathetic start, WND continues to whine on for what seems like an eternity. They interview national parks staff to find out why this monument has been moved (pretty inconclusive but they dont let that stop them) and eventually finish with this tear jerker from Pastor Todd:

“Because there is no longer any way for the public to learn about ‘Laus Deo’ at the Washington Monument, and so as to preserve its history for future generations, I am respectfully requesting the National Park Service to do either 1, 2, or 3,…(1) Pull out the replica from the wall far enough for it to be seen on all sides; (2) Place the replica on a pole that turns, so that the public can spin it and see each side, within its glass container; (3) Place a mirror behind the replica and lean it so that people can be encouraged to see the 4th side inscription which is now hid. AND… please add some wording back on the descriptive display at its base or on the wall behind it that interprets and explains ‘Laus Deo’ so the public can both see it and understand what it means,” he wrote.

You see, failing to teach people Latin is the real reason God is banished – obviously we wont go into the centuries in which Latin was a language spoken by pagans who had never even heard of this particular god. Would Pastor Todd be so obsessive about an inscription which read Praise Saturn? (And this doesn’t even begin to open the can of worms which is the arbitrary dates the Christians have chosen for their festivals…)

I doubt it. Send Chuck round to the National Parks and he can kill everyone until they move the stone back…

By the way – if you are interested Pastor Todd is a proper nutter.

For conspiracy nutters

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cowboy clown image The prime suspect. (Image from 4Halloween costumes.) (Messed about with a bit. Please don’t complain it’s free advertising)

From the Diana inquest – which Marina Hyde so memorably described as being about “a conspiracy so fiendishly clever it could have been foiled by the wearing of a seatbelt” – comes a bizarre “revelation”

Spies apparently bent on murder do not just specifically pick a time and place for their skullduggery when the world’s paparazzi is on the spot and primed for some momentous event. They also make themselves inconspicuous by dressing in a style that would raise an eyebrow at a fancy dress parade.

… in the Alma tunnel Jacques Morel trod on the foot of a man wearing pointy western boots. He says he spoke to Mohammed Al Fayed hours after the crash and when he told him this, the Harrods owner said: “I knew they were there. They’re the bastards that did it, the secret service.”
For many in the court it was the first time they had learnt you could tell a spy by his boots, though Mr Al Fayed was supplied with other descriptive details.
The suspected agent with sore toes was muscular and had a moustache like Salvador Dali’s, or a beer drinker in Ireland. (from the BBC website)

I was going to be uncharitable about Mohammed Al Fayed’s grasp on reality but the BBC report says that he himself has ‘no memory’ of this telephone conversation.

This bizarre nonsense comes straight from a Mr Morel. Surprisingly, ahem, he has written a book about the deaths…. (This book is reportedly ‘based in part on a secret “explosive” dossier,’ according to the BBC again.)

Oh yes, and…

He fears for his family’s safety because of what he knows. He wants to move to a Caribbean island

Well, don’t we all? I myself can provide the real answer to the entire Diana death “mystery” so easily. I am, naturally, waiting for the Caribbean hideaway to materialise before I divulge the whole cunning plot.

But , just to whet the appetite of the big publishers – Basically, a secret cabal of evil clowns were in one of those circus cars that dozens of people can fit in. They jumped out in the tunnel, sprayed alcohol into the face of the driver from their comedy flowers then pulled off the steering wheel and the car turned into incoming traffic. The assassin clowns all got back in their circus car and disappeared in a puff of red smoke.

One was too slow, because his comedy boots got stood on by Mr Morel (isn’t that a mushroom?) so he got spotted but he managed to grab a trapeze that had been rigged in the tunnel roof for the getaway and swung out of the tunnel just before the flashbulbs popped.

Pretty convincing hey? Beats the crap out of any of the popular conspiracy theories anyway.

Sky High Chimpanzee

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Sky High Chimpanzee

Sky High Chimpanzee,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Just keeping to my word, previously, and trying to lighten up the blog with pictures.

I know this is also in the photostream to the right here, but I don’t think many people click on those images.

Generally, I have quite mixed opinions about Zoos. I agree they can provide a wonderful service and maintain populations of animals which may otherwise go extinct, and more importantly they open access to the wonders of the animal kingdom to people who would, otherwise, never get to see them.

However, I often think the animals in the zoo never seem really happy. (I am aware this is a massive anthropomorphication, but so what.)