Monthly Archives: January 2008

More laws please, we’re British

Posted on by

Once, Britain viewed itself as the cradle of democracy and home of freedom and civil rights. Even then it was probably a false impression, but in recent years it has really become ludicrous.

Today, on the Radio news bulletins there has been a few items about how the police are trying to get online video sharing services (i.e. YouTube) to prohibit people uploading video of themselves driving dangerously or excessively speeding. The articles finished off with an ominous threat that if it wasn’t banned, the government would be pressured into making it illegal.

I am confused.

Driving dangerously is an offence. Driving along the road holding a mobile phone in one hand to record both your speedometer and the road ahead is illegal. Breaking the speed limit is illegal. What difference will making a new law have? What advantage is there in creating a new law in our already burgeoning system?

In our current Orwellian-Britain, it is almost a daily occurrence for the tabloids to scream about how antisocial behaviour is out of control and call for “more, tougher laws” to curb it. Our intellectually lazy public laps this up and as a result our offensively fickle politicians (as well as the politically minded Chief Police Officers) pick up on this and agree we need new laws to make XYZ illegal. No one seems to notice the sheer madness of criminalising more and more behaviour, then complaining about more and more criminals…

Add to this, the weird idea that people seem to have about handing over more of our civil liberties to the police and you can see we are truly on the road to 1984. If you are in doubt about the weirdness then have a look at the BBC “Have your say” from Wednesday, 30 Jan 08. Titled “Will more stop and search powers reduce crime” it carries the following blurb:

The government is to announce an extension of stop and search powers for police to enable them to stop people without grounds for suspicion, the BBC understands. Will this help the police?

The government has been trialling routine stop and search powers for police in so-called gun and knife “hotspots” but the powers could shortly be extended to other parts of the country.

The Conservatives are also promising a major overhaul of police powers to stop and search suspects, with police being allowed to radio in the personal details of who they have stopped.

Rightfully, there is a mix of comments for and against the powers so I wont go into too many of them but this was one typical of the “tabloid-Britain” point of view:

In London it should reduce the number of youngsters carrying knives so it must be a good thing!

Wow. Working on the assumption that something may happen justifies the injustice. Amazing.

The very concept of stop and search without requiring even the farcical “reasonable suspicion” of the past is mind blowing. This legislation, is passed, would allow the police to randomly stop anyone they wanted and search them to see if they are carrying anything illegal or, worryingly, anything the officer feels may assist with a criminal act. This definition is very broad brush – a screwdriver can be considered in all manner of ways… Even more disturbingly, the new legislation seeks to remove the “paperwork” which accompanies current stop and searches. Quite rightly most police officers dislike having to spend time filling in forms explaining who they have stopped and under what grounds the stop was carried out – however, by taking away that paperwork there is no longer any protection of the innocent person who has been subjected to police harassment.

I am sure that 99.9% of police officers are fine, upstanding members of the community and have no goal but the greater good of society. However, there are a lot of police officers so that 0.01% represents a lot of “bad eggs.” When these officers decide to stop people because of their skin colour, or their dress or whatever and continue to stop a minority of people there is (currently) a system in place where the citizen has a record of the stop and evidence of excessive stops can be presented to the authorities. Removing that removes a vital safeguard for both the public and the police officer.

Are the British people so ignorant of our recent history that we wilfully refuse to acknowledge any of its lessons? I could understand it if we were talking about issues which happened 500 years ago, but in my lifetime we have seen the problems caused by internment, lack of police accountability, criminalisation of a segment of society based on nothing but their religion (etc). Over the last 30 years we should have learned that this sort of thing encourages people to turn to violence to make themselves heard or to get “restitution” for police oppression (real or otherwise). Did we learn nothing from Londonderry, Toxteth, Brixton, Belfast…

As an answer we have this bit of madness (comment on the BBC have your say page) which encapsulates the “average British person” and their point of view (if the media is anything to go by):

Stop and search is necessary, whilst crime continues.

What we have in Britain is the lunatics running the assylum.
we have already given in to many of the lunatics request for leniency. and what has improved in the last 30 years ?
Nothing thats what.

Forget all the figures about the crime rate being down.
most crimes now go unreported.
In any society, we need control.
we cannot have unelected voices demanding a change in law.

If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

No, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. Crime will be with us (and every other culture) for as long as humanity survives. Most crimes do not go unreported (prove they do and I will be impressed). The bit about changes to the law really threw me and I gave up on this genius. Sadly, this is a tone which you can find on nearly all the national newspapers and pretty much every Television channel. Will the politicians be swayed by this?

Oil, Profits and Taxes – Who is to blame?

Posted on by

It is a national outrage (depending on which segment of society you hail from) and it is certainly something that impacts all elements of the UK. It is also subject to a strangely twisted world view.

I am talking about oil prices (and petrol prices specifically).

For us poor Brits, the average price of petrol (gasoline for our colonial brethren) is now £1.05 per litre. This is approximately $7.91 a gallon. For some people it makes owning a car financially crippling (to the great joy of some “green” lobbyists), and it also has the knock on effect of making public transport prices increase to the point of stupidity. Given the way modern society works, not having access to affordable transport is fatal. Using plain old me as an example, my “commute” to work leaves me driving at an average of 23 miles per hour which is far from economical with the fuel – however there is no public transport which covers the route, it too far to walk (20 miles) and for various reasons cycling is not an option. I have no choice but to foot the big assed fuel bill each month (best part of a gallon each way…).

As you can imagine, fuel prices annoy me. A few years ago we had all manner of protests over the UK when road haulage firms complained about the high tax rates, but despite this pump prices have been steadily rising every few months. Breaking the £1 per litre mark was once thought to be so outrageous as to never happen. Ha.

The government tax fuel at 65%, pretty high really. I don’t actually have a problem with this in general terms as it provides a phenomenal source of revenue for the country. This is, normally, a GOODTHING™©. However, despite this source of revenue, a tax which is claimed to exist at least partly to encourage people to reduce personal transport usage, is not being used to provide good quality public transport.

Whenever people complain about the monstrous cost of vehicle fuels, the oil companies are always quick to point the finger of blame on the government’s massive fuel tax. And, on the surface, this seems reasonable as 65% tax is high. If you take the oil companies at face value, they are charging the minimum they can get away with to recoup their costs and pay their taxes. Aren’t they all saintly?

Today, one of the headline news items read “Shell sets new UK profits record.”

Wow. How can these two versions of reality be reconciled?

If, as they claim, the high cost of oil is solely dependant on the government imposed tax how is Shell managing to turn £13.9 BILLION in profit? That is in the region of £230 per person in the UK. For that, they could strike off 30p a litre on fuel and still be making a phenomenal profit – not to mention the massive amount of extra sales they would get.

It really makes my head spin to think that Shell (and presumably the other oil companies) are happy to commiserate with the public about the high price of oil while at the same time gouging a monstrous profit. Petrol prices may suffer from high taxes, but the root cause of their bank-balance-busting status is the uncontrolled greed of the oil companies. At least the governments tax makes its way back to the nation…

Comments Platinum Award

Posted on by

I can’t let an Awards ceremony pass unnoticed here. So here is the Exterminator’s Stermy award picture. Why, thanks, Exterminator. This may be the first time I realised a woman can get the horn. And a big “In your face, all you bloggers who didn’t get an award. Ha Ha.”

Stermy award

I have already thanked God, following standard award ceremony etiquette, in a comment on NoMoreHornets. I now feel like starting a full scale Award Season, so that other people can make ludicrous acceptance speeches. And if you get one, you can’t break the writers’ strike so you can’t call in professionals to put a decent acceptance speech together.

I think I’ll make a best commenters award and start bestowing it on – Oh, I don’t know, why not the best commenters? “Best” as in laugh out loud funniest. (Maybe subsidiary awards for the wisest.)

The only rule is going to be that the comment has to be intentionally funny, so no religious trolls will get one, no matter how ludicrous their claims about Rapture. Similarly, people who pick up on any reference to food and send in their amazing magic new diet tips are only mildly amusing, even if they haven’t been  launched at the spam-spotting stage.

It is to the eternal shame of this blog that the comments are almost inevitably much better than the posts. In our defence, it’s not just here. So the Award won’t just go to people who comment here.  Good comments anywhere will count. In fact, there won’t be a schedule or any rules stopping me from giving up to a thousand of them to the same person, up several times  a day.  (“Up to” includes zero obviously.)

But for the planet-shaking first edition of the Comments Platinum Award, I am going to pick Alun. His comments are always better than the posts they are on. I picked Alun because his most recent comment had me laughing out loud. It was a response to a ludicrous comment from “Concerned Christian” that consisted of a made up sob-story so mawkish that it would have raised eyebrows in a victorian drawing room.

A most unusual Biblical presentation. If you have not seen it, think you will enjoy.
Straight to the point. This is so beautiful! John 3:16
A little boy was selling newspapers on the corner, the people were in and out of the cold. The little boy was so cold that he wasn’t trying to sell many papers…. (etc)

I think it’s a two part story. Here’s the follow-up.

A little girl was selling newspapers on the corner, the people were in and out of the cold.
The little girl was so cold that she wasn’t trying to sell many papers.

She walked up to a policeman and said, ‘Mister, you wouldn’t happen to know where a poor girl could find a warm place to sleep tonight would you?

You see, I sleep in a box up around the corner there and down the alley and it’s awful cold in there for tonight. Sure would be nice to have a warm place to stay.’

The policeman looked down at the little girl and said, ‘You go down the street to that big white house and you knock on the door. When they come out the door you just say
Psalms 137:9.” *
Obviously it pays to catch God on a good day.

I have to admit that it’s only laziness that has stopped me from linking to another twenty people who’ve written brilliantly witty comments on this blog, before I even start looking at others.

* I looked it up so you wouldn’t have to:
New American Standard Bible (©1995)
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones Against the rock.

Comments Award So here’s the much-coveted Award, Alun.

Metaphors choking Sam Harris’s thought

Posted on by

* Insert tedious rant* This piece by Sam Harris was brought to my attention as being a hot topic on transhumanist sites. As far as I can make out, Harris is arguing for challenging nature’s limitations through the use of all available technology, including genetic modification.

His conclusion is:

Considering humanity as a whole, there is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design. We are probably not even optimized for the Paleolithic, much less for life in the 21st century. And yet, we are now acquiring the tools that will enable us to attempt our own optimization. Many people think this project is fraught with risk. But is it riskier than doing nothing? There may be current threats to civilization that we cannot even perceive, much less resolve, at our current level of intelligence. Could any rational strategy be more dangerous than following the whims of Nature? This is not to say that our growing capacity to meddle with the human genome couldn’t present some moments of Faustian over-reach. But our fears on this front must be tempered by a sober understanding of how we got here. Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us.

Well yes and no. I am all for progressing humanity through any possible means. However, like some of the commenters (such as Diacanu) , I don’t put very much faith in our capacity to avoid making our existence worse, unless we can manage to evolve whole new ways of thinking and producing and consuming and relating to each other and fitting into our environment.

I was more struck by this piece as an example of how insidious religious ways of thinking can be. Sam Harris has been led by his own use of metaphors into drawing conclusions that depend on forgettiing that metaphors are just that.

Mother Nature is a metaphor. We pretty well all know this. There are currently almost no cults that really worship a female Nature deity, unlike the many cults that seriously worship a male sky-god-of-Abraham.

So, to say that Mother Nature is not our friend is obviously also a metaphor. There is no Mother Nature. So Mother Nature is not our invisible friend. Nor is Mother Nature our invisible enemy. Metaphors are fine for helping to enhance our understanding but they can easily develop a life of their own. That way lies religion …..

We are part of the natural world. We can’t pit a notional human development against a notional nature.

Harris says “there is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design. We are probably not even optimized for the Paleolithic, much less for life in the 21st century.” This is well out of synch with my limited understanding of evolution. Evolution doesn’t optimise things, like some giant Intelligent Designer surely. So why fall into the stupid theist trap of seeing humans as facing external forces?

We aren’t “optimised” for anything or any era.. The Paleolithic era and the 21st century are not objective facts. They are human constructs, created to describe our cultural world at various stages of development.

We survived as species precisely as a result of being best equipped to win in the normal processes of natural selection. This includes the human capacities for communication and thinking that have allowed us to dominate the planet. We could hardly be more “optimised” for successful species survival. Well, unless we were rats or cockroaches.
Species can easily grow too populous for their environment then run out of the necessities for life support and become extinct. We are well past the point at which the earth can easily absorb our crap.

Tiger Woods’ golf swing (as referred to by Harris) is remarkable. Envying any gifted person their capacities to the point at which one feels that lacking their gifts is a disability is the road to madness. By all means, use technology to implant fantastic golf skills in your brain, if you want to, Sam (I would have to start by implanting an interest in golf in mine) but don’t put that enhancement in place of that part of the brain where the capacity for clear thought should be.

It’s not some external Nature that sets bounds on human development. Our development is a part of Nature – it shapes and is shaped by the rest of the natural world. We can only rely on human knowledge and intelligence to find ways to continue to prosper as a species without completely fucking it up.

More UK broadband whines

Posted on by

Complaining about Tiscali (regarding the service formerly known as Pipex) is normally T_W’s realm but I’m wading in, on the basis of an article in the Register.

(I can be detached, as well as moderately smug, here. Despite my initial annoyance when Virgin took over the previous Telewest service, of blessed memory, the worst you can say about Virgin broadband is that it seems to have outsourced its tech support and started charging 25p a minute for it.

I found this out when I made a tech support call about a friend’s broken cable broadband service. It was impossible to understand the woman on the other end, who was reading from a pre-set list of actions and made me go through every one at 25p a minute, despite my telling her repeatedly that I had already tried each one of her suggestions several times. In fairness, she only let this farce run for 15 minutes then she called back. So it stopped running up a pound every 4 minutes but the issue was no nearer resolution.

In contrast, Telewest tech support used to be brilliant. The tech support staff understood what you said, took on board your level of knowledge and responded accordingly with suggestions based on their expertise rather than a list of preset steps that only apply if you use Internet Explorer and Windows ffs – the current 25p a minute support.

Anyway, back to Tiscali…..)

Thousands of ex-Pipex customers have been suffering unexplained interruptions in their broadband service in recent weeks, as their new provider Tiscali stealthily works to cut costs.
People suffering a broadband outage as a result of the work are told by customer services, recently outsourced overseas, that their line is undergoing “essential engineering work”. One Reg reader was initially told the downtime was BT’s fault. (from The Register)

This “essential engineering work” seems to involve cutting speeds and service quality, in pursuit of a first-time ever profit for the noxiously-named Tiscali.

Their activities have previously been reported, by the Register, as involving making hundreds of Pipex staff redundant and outsourcing customer care in a bid to make the newly created company saleable in the near future..

There’s a good range of comments on the Register post. Here’s Luke Wells’s comment.

From Pipex to ….. errr … Tiscali
Now it has been a few years since I was a Pipex customer, but when I was a customer, Pipex were known for its rock solid reliable network and high speeds with no limits or throttling.
Tiscali are pretty much well known as a cheap “cut corners” isp with near zero customer service and poor speeds.
You’d think people would notice the change quite quickly.

I suspect they have.

McAdemy

Posted on by

These soon might be new examination questions, at A level (university entrance) equivalent:

  • How much does it cost to buy 3 Big Macs and 2 milkshakes?
  • Is this cheaper than 3 big Mac meals?
  • What are the main components of a Big Breakfast?
  • Describe the focus of the latest McDonald’s advertising campaign. (Maximum 200 words.)
  • How long is a standard McShift?
  • What is the fast food industry’s role in sourcing beef from former rain-forest land (Sorry scrub that one. It just slipped in)

(Well, yes, I did make them up.)

A new McDonald’s “A Level” equivalent course has just been launched in the UK, fully accredited by the national academic qualifications body.

That’s certainly Egg McMuffin on the faces of us snooty Brits who used to mock the McDonald’s Hamburger University.

In fact, the McDonald’s Shift Supervisor qualification makes the other 2 newly-approved qualifications in rail track management and cabin crew tasks seem almost oppressively academic.

In any case, what about Burger King, who must have different organisational methods? Will there be a new national qualification developed for every brand of fast food? And what about coffee chains, ice cream parlours, noodle bars, supermarkets, convenience stores?

For how much longer will the public have to suffer the indignity of being served food products by people without certification? I don’t know about you, but I would feel so much more confident if I knew that the person who sells me a newspaper has an impressively framed nationally recognised certificate on their wall.

This week’s crazy McCann story

Posted on by

The Mail on Sunday has a picture of a “Portuguese drifter” who is the “spitting image” of the “Madeleine suspect.” The only response to this is “I spit on your image recognition capacities…” Apart from longish dark hair, there are no points of resemblance between the absurd “sketch” and the photograph of a newspaper-delivery man who lives 80 miles away.

And let’s get back to the “witness” who claims this is the same man.

Well, blow me down with a copy of the Mail folded in a fan shape, who is it but “Witness Gail Cooper”

Witness Gail Cooper, who saw a man lurking near children in Praia da Luz just days before Madeleine vanished, said Mr Agostinho was “the spitting image” of the man she saw.

I must mention that Gail Coper’s holiday was OVER before the McCanns stepped off the plane. She can only be a “witness” to there having been a person in that area that she – with her strangely unparallelled knowledge of the secret hearts of men – regarded as looking disreputable. (He walked in the rain and looked a bit Moroccan – prima facie evidence of guilt to Middle England.)

Gail Cooper’s shady-looking Moroccan doesn’t quite constitute a

latest e-fit of a possible kidnapper.

A “possible kidnapper”,? This must be only in the sense that anyone spotted in Praia da Luz who wasn’t an English holiday-maker somehow fits this role? (Set aside such niceties as how you define kidnapping. Doesn’t that mean capturing someone for ransom?) There is still no evidence of a kidnap.

No matter how many self-serving detectives earn their fees by keeping these unproven theories on the front pages of the tabloids, there is NO EVIDENCE that Madeleine was kidnapped or abducted. There appears to be no convincing evidence of what happened.

Hence, I favour an alien abduction theory. If the press or the McCann machine will pay me, I will willingly go into space and search for the alien abductors. The truth is surely out there.

The Mail on Sunday article suggests that the correct British holiday-maker response to seeing any unkempt Portuguese person speaking is to panic.

Moments later a woman raced out of a nearby villa, shouting and calling to the children, and then scooped them up and took them away from the man.

Harsh as this may sound, Mail readers – if you are frightened of anyone who’s not English, take your vacations in the West Country or the Lake District. Then, you can run to the local police if you accidentally spot anyone who looks vaguely North African….

Just to see how far the hysteria has spread:

Meanwhile a potential sighting of Madeleine in Chile with a man who looked like the Mrs Cooper sketch was ruled out by police.
Detectives were called to the Gabriel Mistral museum in Vicuna after a man spotted a girl who resembled Madeleine, but the girl was revealed to be American Haylee Dreyer, six, who was on holiday in Vicuna with her Chilean grandparents.

Urgent advice to anyone who looks a bit Iberian or Moroccan

Never go to a tourist spot with any young blonde female relatives.

Wire Series 5 on FX (UK) in July

Posted on by

Charlie Brooker and some of the cast try to express why the Wire is the “best tv show since the invention of radio,” in the Guardian’s guide section today.

I can’t argue with that.

Brooker is otherwise not quite as feeble as I am at expressing just how and why the Wire is the best thing ever aired although he does his own fair share of gushing like a teenage fan. The Wire actors are pretty good at expressing why the Wire is the best tv show ever.

Argh, July! FX, I would hate you for making me wait till July, except for the fact that running through the preceding series first has shown me so much that I didn’t appreciate the first couple of times. I thought the first few episodes of series 2 were a bit poor – by Wire standards. Seeing it again, I realise that it’s got enough of its own brilliance. And the acting… Omar just blows away whole scenes with a few subtle expressions.

Charlie Brooker says that he’s jealous of people who haven’t seen it yet, because they still have that pleasure to come. Maybe that thought will encourage me to wait till July but, hey, I live in a developed country in the 21st century – deferred gratification was never going to be one of my favourite ideas.

More TV Diet gurus

Posted on by

Dear Great Spirit, if you refuse to make me an employee of a major banking institution with a slapdash attitude to its assets, please make me a diet guru.

Someone with a cruel sense of humour prompted me to watch The Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses on the previously-unknown-to-me UK Style.

I’m sorry, I can’t do this sort of thing the justice it deserves. It’s almost off the scale of exploitative nonsense. The programme’s subjects expose their ailments, then (at best) get to drink wheatgrass, defer to wind spirits and throw their negativity away by dropping stones in a brook.

According to the website preview:

Run by leading British nutritionist Amanda Hamilton, the Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses aims to detoxify, rejuvenate and deal with the root cause of these afflictions, rather than simply mask them with quick and easy remedies.

If there are quick and easy remedies, wtf aren’t these people taking them?

Detox. Whenever I hear the detox word in combination with diet, I grind my teeth. These will soon be stubs, if the sort of poo that passes for a lifestyle programme on UK tv is anything to go by.

I used the “poo” word because I also saw another TV diet programme on Thursday, in which the “poo doctor” Gillian McKeith plays a minor role.  No she’s definitely not a doctor – see Ben Goldacre’s BadScience )- nor even a medically qualified nutritionist, but she is well known for scrabbling through people’s shit on national tv.

This show had a 20-odd stone woman and a 6-stone woman teaching each other how to eat. They swap diets for a week and supposedly learn some lessons that will lead both of them to a more normal weight. What! Swap one disordered way of eating for another? This is a good idea?

“Too-thin” girl stuffs herself with fish fingers and snacks and “too-fat” woman lives for most of the day on a slice of lettuce. The thin girl suffers from the impossibility of taking in gargantuan amounts of food and the fat woman is constantly starving. At the end of the week, they’ve lost or gained weight… Well, duh.

Surely this unedifying story can’t teach anything about eating – unless the lesson is “you can lose weight if you stop eating and gain weight if you eat more”, in which case, how stupid are you, if you don’t already suspect that?

These programmes make spectacles out of the subjects, who are either completely naive or so desperate for their 5 minutes that they will happily bare their bodies and reveal their most embarassing problems to the whole nation. It’s not even as if they get rational solutions in return. They just become adverts for the peddlers of new age woo.

Which brings me to my This-Week’s-Favourite-Silly-Diet. I’ve heard of this froma few people recently. I even know of someone who spent £130 on a blood group diet profile. It’s based on your blood group. A review in Weight loss resources website describes the diet and its scientific basis quite succintly:

Follow a diet that’s designed specifically for your blood group and you’ll lose weight, feel healthier and lower your risk of many diseases. At least, that’s what Dr Peter D’Adamo, naturopath and creator of the Blood Type Diet claims in his book Eat Right For Your Blood Type. No wonder then, that it’s been a hit with Hollywood stars like Liz Hurley and Courtney Cox-Arquette, as well as closer-to-home celebrities, like Martine McCutcheon……
But while Martine might be a fan of the Blood Type Diet, most medical and nutrition experts aren’t…….
Medical experts universally agree that the theory is nonsense, and say there is absolutely no link between our blood group and the diet we eat.

Well celebs are so well known for their grasp of scientific nutrition, aren’t they? Speaking, personally, I wouldn’t dream of taking health advice from anyone who didn’t have at least a minor part in a UK soap. Or was at leastgoing out with a Premiere League footballer.

In a medical emergency, when no soap stars are available, I would accept the assistance of a tv “nutritionist.” But they would have to have their own line of high-cost novelty foods, as a bare minimum, and I would naturally prefer a televised record of dissecting human secretions.

Big money

Posted on by

Somebody PLEASE tell me how you can get a job where your employers don’t miss 4.9 billion Euros. ($7,156,009,000 according to http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic)

The Times story is headlined

Jerome Kerviel named in €5bn bank trading fraud
….
The French bank Société Générale stunned financial markets today by revealing that it had been the victim of a near-€5 billion (£3.7 billion) rogue trading fraud,

In the UK, Northern Rock also managed to lose a good few billion pounds without apparently noticing anything amiss. Now the tax payer is making up the shortfall, although for some mysterious financial logic it seems that benefiting Virgin is the appropriate way to sort this out….

Thefts of that order beggar belief. The CIA factbook puts the UK GDP per person at 318,000 US Dollar i.e 217,760 Euros, according to Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, this isn’t a University paper, ok?) That means, if I am interpreting a billion Euros correctly that the French bank lost the annual income of about 22,502 UK citizens. Or, alternatively, an amount that the average UK citizen would expect to pass through their hands if they lived 22,502 years.

US citizens are better off than UK citizens. The lost/stolen sum would only cover the annual income of 155,565 US citizens. According to Wikipedia, the world’s richest country, is Luxembourg. It would only cover the annual income of 88,564 Luxembourg residents. But then again, it would cover the annual income of 11,926,682 Malawi citizens….

So tell me again, please, how do I get a job where I can make off with this sort of money..

Good news, Bad news

Posted on by

Every day there is a fresh news story in the UK, involving yet another distribution of government-held personal data. It’s getting to be too banal to even merit anyone’s attention any more.

Here’s a good comment by “Anonymous Coward” on one of the many Register posts about the UK government’s apparent capacity to randomly distribute its citizens’ personal information like so many drops of water from a lawn sprinkler.

“why they can’t spend some money on a centralised database to which their users can gain access from anywhere, like we in the real world do, is beyond me.”
Prime your irony glands.
Having spent a number of years around central government IT, I imagine it’s because any IT project which involves accessing sensitive data from the big, scary internet (regardless of VPNs etc) becomes so tied up in security accreditation and arse-covering that it never gets anywhere.
So people work around the bureaucracy by copying data to laptops.

The ring of truth there, I suspect.

On the bright side, these incidents are making even the generally gullible UK public pay a bit more attention to the security issues of a national ID database. (Ironically, the whole data vacuuming-up scheme is supposed to be there to improve national security. ROTFL, LOL, 😀 🙂 – insert irritating net smileys here, at will.) If public concern for civil liberties hasn’t raised much successful opposition, even the Daily mail readers’ sense of self-preservation might work.

The government’s accursed ID card project seems to be getting deferred ever further into the future and, with luck, let’s hope it will get quietly dropped.

Pattern recognition

Posted on by

I’ve just stolen borrowed this image from the list universe.

Rorschach image from list universe site
I bet you can see a figure in it. This proves that tiny one-dimensional imps live on paper……

The press, tv and BBC are presenting a ludicrous Rorschach-style interpretation of a rock shape on Mars as a creature from an alien race. I suppose it’s equally as convincing as the Biblical characters who crop up on tortillas.

(At least it doesn’t carry some extra miracle baggage, unless someone has already seen it as a superhuman being.)

Divided by a common language, again

Posted on by

There is confusing post on HJHOP about evil midwives. What? What? I’ve never before met anyone with a bad word to say about midwives. (They would be the Mother Teresas of the health services, if you just count the public admiration and ignore all the actually unplesant things about Mother Teresa)

I assume it’s a spoof. I realise it isn’t. I read it to try to understand what anyone could have against midwives. He’s even turned off comments, hence this post. Then I see it’s another of those transatlantic definition issues.

Obviously US and UK midwives are so different that we are referring to completely different jobs when we think of “midwives”. UK midwives are the experts in childbirth. Some work in hospitals or ante-natal units, some provide home care. They can basically do pretty well anything at a birth except the really surgical stuff. They are much more skilled and qualified at delivering babies than most doctors.

There are both male and female midwives. It’s not a “girl power” thing, ffs, HJ. (That’d be like the obstetric equivalent of dental nurses having to be tooth-fairy worshippers.)

It’s a medical specialty. For the benefit of you former-tea-tax dodgers 🙂 Americans, English midwives must spend years in professional and practical training. In fact I think (possibly wrongly) that they can’t even start to train in their specialty until they’ve trained and practised as nurses. They don’t operate out of the backs of trailers.

Yes, a fair number of midwives actively favour minimising unnecessary medical intervention (the complete lack of success of which perspective is shown by the ever-rising numbers of caesarian births) but any of them would be in pretty deep dogdoo if they failed to get a dangerous case properly treated.

And, blow me down with a gas and air canister, they do have access to heart monitors, anaesthesia, scanners, medicines and the full range of hi-tech birth requisites.

It looks as if midwives are completely different in the USA. HJHop talks about them offering “empowering experiences” and “bringing woolly hats”. The sort of people HJHop is talking about sound like alternative health practitioners – at best, birth coaches, at worst charlatans.

But then, there is no mileage in amateurs charging people for inexpert birth-help in a country where you can get the real thing free from teams that always consist of doctors AND midwives. *smug smirk of person who has access to free healthcare*

Fun stuff, with spurious attribution

Posted on by

This blog is getting too po-faced for my taste, so here’s some entertainment:

  • It is claimed that scientology sacred documents were hacked by the /i/nsurgency, a splinter group of anonymous.
  • I have no idea how legit this is. (OK, not at all, I suspect) I am pretty sure it is parody but that’s probably because I have some residual faith in human intelligence.
  • There is fantastic new bit of tech called the “VIRTUSPHERE- a new locomotion technology for immersing in virtual reality”
    It looks like this:
    Virtusphere device
    Please Hera, let it not just be vapourware or Photoshop parody….
  • The Islamicists is an incredibly funny blog about being a member of an extremist Islamist group.A few caveats:
    I think you have to be a UK national to understand most of the references. Abu- Tesco-bin-Bakery, al- Tizer and refences to Irn Bru and kilts will be over your head otherwise. You also need to know a fair bit about either or both of non-centre political movements and Islamic rules. Even then, you have to set out a couple of hours to read the WHOLE blog, because it’s set out in a deliberately Dickensian-style installment format. Though it gets a bit weaker towards the very end.You might suspect it’s not really written by a Muslim because of the blatant piss-taking, but it convinced me.

McCann sketch

Posted on by

The newspaper shop displayed dozens of front pages showing what seemed to be a huge sketch of more malevolent George Harrison (ca 1970) . No, I finally realised it looked like an IRA hunger striker (same era.).

I looked more closely. My bad. The sketch clearly doesn’t show Posh & Becks, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. It’s a UK tabloid. Ergo, it must have to do with the Madeleine McCann story. What a surprise! So it does.

This week’s McCann coverage has risen slightly above even its normal Alpine level. (IMAO. I have no statistics.) There have been stories about a planned film about the McCanns, denial of said film, suggestions that Madeleine has had eye surgery or got contact lenses to disguise her unusual eye. And so on.

However, the crime sketch-artist story is just pushing the envelope of preposterousness (No, I don’t know what “pushing the envelope” means either. I’m just using it to annoy, really.)

In the News of the World version, the most repellent themes of the media extravaganza are so perfectly expressed that the story deserves its own personalised kicking rant.

Some quotes from the NOW article:

A British woman who came face to face with the suspected Maddie McCann kidnapper revealed last night: “He made my blood run cold and gave me the creeps.”…
She said: “He was wandering about on the beach alone even though it was pouring down with rain. There wasn’t another soul about. …..
She added: “This man was very unpleasant and creepy. I’d put his age at 38 to 45. He was very scruffy and had a 70s-style black Mexican moustache. He wasn’t Portuguese—I think he was North African, either Tunisian or Moroccan.” (Source: News of the World)

Let’s temporarily ignore the fact that these “creepy man” sightings took place before the McCanns were even in the resort. And that it’s really hard to see why a sketch of something observed ten months ago can constitute new evidence.

Instead, consider some of the assumptions inside this guff.

  • A woman from the UK can see into the souls of complete strangers on a brief sighting. (I also tend to act as if I can do this. I have even run out of local market on the grounds people looked so horrible. I put this down to projection and prejudice.)
  • She can memorise individual details so well that a man seen in the rain can be instantly recognised days later, months later. She even claims that she can recall them today. (I stand shamed. I can barely remember enough details about people I’ve known all my life to give a sketch artist a decent start.)
  • An attempted doorstep fraud instantly implies that the perpetrator is a kidnapper.(I usually just say “No, I definitely haven’t had a recent accident at work” or “No, I definitely haven’t welcomed Jesus Christ into my life.” I will now start saying “I believe you kidnapped Madeleine McCann and I claim my £500”)
  • A sketch based on the memory of a nine-months-ago glimpse of said doorstep beggar constitutes evidence that would be seriously investigated were it not for the Clouseau-style incompetence of Johnny Foreigner’s police. (I plan to go to my local police station and inform them that the sketch chap is the missing Lord Lucan. As they are British rather than Euro Police, I assume they will cancel all overtime and set up a task force to follow up my lead.)

I could go on for pages. What really offends me is the innate prejudices that just ooze through this piece. It says: A North African is, by definition, creepy.

Mrs Cooper, a community healthcare co-ordinator from Newark, Notts, added: “In my job I have to assess people and make a judgement. My judgement is that this man was very suspicious and could have been the kidnapper everyone is searching for.

So, we might accept her character assessment expertise as valid, if this man was applying for a home careworker. However, I would even dispute this. Given that looking a bit unkempt and walking in the rain – Arrgh, that would often describe me – make her so instantly suspicious that I fear for her clients. If her employer provides “diversity awareness training,” maybe they should consider whether a refresher course is not overdue.

But what she is basiically saying, echoed by the McCann industry, the News of the World and uncritically reported even on the BBC site – “There was a potential Muslim there. A poor and probably criminal Muslim. You need look no further.”

The preposterous detective investigations, carried out on behalf of the McCanns, are determined to put the focus on Morocco and Algeria. You can’t really blame them for not wanting to pass up on the opportunity for exotic holidays on expenses.

Whenever a tourist spots a blonde Berber child (far from rare) anywhere in North Africa, they are identified as Madeleine.

Oddly, the idea that hair colour iis immutable seems to have penetrated the discourse. The People talks about disguising the child’s eye feature. But none of the media has thought for a moment how insanely simple it is to change blonde hair in a certain style to brown, black or red hair in a different style…. Dying, perms, hair cutting.. The UK now has many times more hairdressers than independent greengrocers. Surely someone has made the connection.

The iconic newspaper-selling power of the McCann story rests partly on the stereotypical “little blonde girl” image? This image is increasingly contrasted with alien enemies: the non-English speaking Portuguese police force and menacing exotic North Africans.

The coverage expresses the inherent xenophobia and outright racism of sections of the UK population much more blatantly than a dozen Big-Brother-spats.

If you can read Portuguese, Spanish and/or French – or at least use Babelfish – the continental European press has a much wider and more sceptical coverage of aspects of the story, including many points about the financing of the McCann campaign that would never get on to UK websites or into UK papers.