Squander Two Blog

Clueless.

2012-01-18T20:50:00.002Z

The BBC costs billions of quid a year. Apparently, one of the advantages of this expense is that we get world-class news reporting and factual programming, which is nice.

Wikipedia, conversely, is famously free.

Today, Wikipedia has blacked itself out (quite ineptly, it has to be said) as a protest against SOPA. The BBC's news division apparently does not see the irony in publishing this headline:

Without Wikipedia, where can you get your facts?

It does rather lead one to wonder: without Wikipedia, where are the BBC getting their facts?

This actually happened.

2011-12-23T18:57:00.001Z

I live for headlines like this:

Man misses mouse and shoots roommate, revealing child rapist

A Utah man who was trying to kill a mouse ended up shooting one roommate and getting another arrested for child rape, while a fourth roommate slept through the whole thing.

There's a lot of it about.

I'm ready to believe in karma now.

2011-12-23T15:51:00.001Z

I note with interest that CNN don't care if you commit libel, don't care if you commit treason, don't care if you clearly demonstrate both brazen mendacity and a total lack of conscience about it — whatever, they'll hire you. But listening to Heather Mills's voicemail? What are you, a monster?

It really does do the heart good to see Piers Morgan being bitten so hard in the arse by his own low character. After being sacked as editor of The Mirror for knowingly publishing fake photos on the front page, committing both libel and treason while he was about it — action that should have made him unemployable in the news media and, come to that, everywhere else — he somehow managed to parlay that into an inexplicably successful media career, eventually getting one of the highest-profile current affairs jobs on the planet, all the while telling anyone who asked that he was sacked for opposing the Iraq War — as if a British newspaper editor could possibly lose their job for that.

Well, CNN have belatedly noticed what the man is actually like. He may yet weasel his way out of his own written confession, but it does look a lot like his career is quite wonderfully screwed. Hey, he might even end up in prison. It's a Christmas miracle!

It says a lot about Bush Derangement Syndrome that the public was happy to forgive this man for libelling British troops to further the cause of the enemy but draw the line at his eavesdropping on one of the most unpopular women in the country. People are odd, but hey, they're finally right.

When all you have is a hammer.

2011-12-14T01:54:00.002Z

This is an amazing and alarming video of a helicopter crash.

The pilot, who walked away with minor injuries, was helping to put up a Christmas tree in Auckland, New Zealand when the chopper’s blades clipped a wire and it spun out of control.

OK, surviving this is amazing, but I do wonder exactly who managed to have this conversation —

"We're going to put up a Christmas tree."
"I'll get the helicopter."

— without anyone saying "Er... hang on."

Give 'em a Chanel suit and they think they're Hitler.

2011-12-14T00:56:00.002Z

Mary Portas:

We need a more sophisticated understanding of what is a good deal for consumers looking beyond price.

Translation:

I want to drive up prices for everyone in the country in order to force them to fund my preferred lifestyle.

It must be lovely to have all that spare time on your hands to wander up and down a street buying all your veg and meat and bread and things in separate shops. I imagine it was very pleasant for women in the days before they had to go to work.

Another letter to Mark Steyn.

2011-10-13T13:09:00.003+01:00

Mark Steyn's latest Happy Warrior column is utter tripe. He appears to be under the impression that no engineering or invention worth mentioning has happened since the 1950s.

Their first car is no different from my first car. Which was no different from my grandfather's first car. To be sure, they've dispensed with the hand crank and rumble seat and installed a GPS and iPod dock, but essentially it runs on the same technology as a century back. Which are the faster-moving times? The age that invents the internal-combustion engine? Or the age that plugs a Justin Bieber download into it?

....

Imagine that Vermont class a century ago, the summer of 1911. The Model T had just gone into production a couple of years earlier, the age of manned flight had gotten off the ground. And they had their version of Justin Bieber downloads, too ... There were so many inventions for singers to sing about, they had no time left to sing about the novelties of their own industry, in which the wax cylinder was about to be superseded by the 78-rpm phonograph record. In the years that that Vermont Class of 1911 had been in college, the Nickelodeon had led to a boom in what we would soon call motion pictures. And yet, what with all the other things going on — with electrification and the internal-combustion engine enabling man to conquer both night and distance, time and space, and other footling stuff — these exciting showbiz novelties were generally regarded as peripheral to progress. Instead of the be-all and end-all of it. In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model. So today, instead of songs for the age of invention, we have inventions for an age of songs.

So I just had to write to him again.

Dear Mr Steyn,

Speaking as someone who generally agrees with you (apart from your reliably wrong film reviews), I was very disappointed to read your laughably inept "Gliding On Empty" piece.

You claim that the first half of the Twentieth Century was the bit where all the invention happened, because that's when inventors concentrated on vehicles Mark Steyn can travel in, while no engineering worth mentioning has happened since around 1950, because cars and civilian planes haven't changed all that much in that time and computer technology doesn't count because it is possible to use computers to listen to Justin Bieber records.

Can anyone play this game? Let me have a go. Just as Ipods are useless because they don't get us from New Hampshire to Mongolia any quicker, the automobile was a crap invention because I can't use it to peel oranges. And just as modern computers are essentially trivial because we can listen to Katy Perry on them, so the aeroplane is an evil invention because it was used by Stalin.

It will be news to every mechanic in the world that modern cars are "no different" to the cars of a century ago. "essentially it runs on the same technology as a century back" you claim. Yet most mechanics under the age of thirty don't even know how to deal with a carburettor, because they've never seen one — because the modern car engine, while still operating essentially on the principle of internal combustion driving pistons, has been continuously refined and improved beyond all recognition. And I like the way you dismissively mention in passing that they've "installed a GPS", as if building and maintaining a network of satellites orbitting the Earth that enables a small handheld device to pinpoint its exact position to within centimetres is a trivial exercise.

Of course, the modern technology you dismiss can be used for some things other than the ones you mention. Mobile phones not only allow us to listen to music but have also enabled billions of people to get connected to the global communications network without the prohibitively expensive building of old-fashioned cable-based networks. Since communication is the key to human progress, that's rather a big thing. Computers can be used not only to listen to records but to control power stations, compose symphonies, maintain life-support systems, and perform some truly astonishing feats for the military — including the control of the modern fighter jets you ignore. "Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to biplanes to flying boats to transatlantic jetliners in its first 50 years, and then for the next 50 it just sat there," you write. But it wasn't air travel that progressed in this way; it was aeroplanes; commuter travel is merely one way of using them. And what happened with planes is that they continued to become more and more advanced, progressing far past the speed and acceleration and comfort that any mere passenger would be willing to put up with while drinking G&T and watching a film, so the latest planes, which are inconceivably amazing compared to planes from the 1950s, aren't used for commuter travel. Mind you, Burt Rutan flew a plane into space a couple of years back, and has now teamed up with Richard Branson to found Virgin Galactic, who have every intention and reasonable expectation of selling tickets for spacerides to us plebs. Of course, they might play music during the flight, so presumably it's not real progress, then.

You say "In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model." Yet the reason computers keep getting smaller is that teams of engineers keep figuring out ways to make subatomic particles do what they're told in increasingly complex and innovative ways. The quantum ratchet is a truly impressive invention, even if you can't ride in it.

I can put an entire university library in my pocket. Or I can put a record label's entire output in my pocket. The fact that you don't much like the latter doesn't make the former unimpressive.

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Kynaston Reeves

OK, that's quite enough writing to Mark Steyn. I'll figure out something else to blog about now.

Still not quite right.

2011-10-08T15:04:00.001+01:00

Kellogg's have angered the God of Nominative Irony.

Protesters, rioters, and nimbys.

2011-08-11T16:47:00.004+01:00

While it's nice to see the BBC and The Guardian outraged by violent criminality for once, a word.

For many years, The Guardian and their pet broadcasters at the Beeb have been unable to report on rioting and thuggery without tripping over their own nuance. As long as the danger was elsewhere — Manchester, Belfast, Liverpool, Tel Aviv, Tony Martin's front room — it was an inevitable part of BBC reporting that we have to understand the thugs' grievances, their sense of frustration, why they feel "forced" to act in this way by [insert this week's pet cause here]... the hallowed root causes. Some observers might even have mistaken this stance for some sort of principle.

We now see that it is not.

Put looting and barbarism somewhere where the journalists of the BBC and The Guardian like to have lunch, put riots in the streets where they live, let the thugs damage that wonderful little Italian bistro that does those simply darling pistacchio biscotti, and suddenly root causes are about as popular as the Tories. They can't blame the bastards quickly enough.

Does anyone think we'd be seeing even remotely similar reporting if the riots were in Northern Ireland? Or would that just be Ian Paisley and Margaret Thatcher's fault?

Conversion.

2011-08-07T23:18:00.002+01:00

I would like to thank everyone who is emailing me in response to my now-famousish letter to Mark Steyn. I'm going to answer some of your points here.

So far only one correspondent, Gerry from Western Australia, has managed not to miss at least some of my point, brilliantly summarising my problem thus:

utility is just not good enough.

Thanks for that, Gerry: that's what I really should have titled the post.

I would like to advise Rich, who summarised my question to Steyn as "Is belief in a revealed religion a necessary basis to a moral society?" that no, that's really not what I said. First of all, I didn't ask Steyn any question at all, beyond the implicit "Would you be so kind as to write a considered reply to this even though you're probably rather busy promoting your new book?" Secondly, I'm talking about society's resilience and lengevity, not its morality. And finally, I didn't ask, I stated that religious societies tend to be stronger and more resilient than secular ones, and I further pointed out that this is not because religion is a necessary basis for a strong society; it is because atheists are too bloody stupid to keep the baby when they chuck out the bathwater. Or vice versa, probably.

Whilst I appreciate the kind and surprisingly personal emails from Christians — unlike most atheists, I do understand that you believe that I am going to suffer horribly if I don't convert and that you are therefore engaged in a quite genuine act of kindness when you try and persuade me that your God exists, so I don't respond rudely, though neither do I pay a whole lot of attention because I really have heard it all before — it is still (a) not going to work unless you perform a miracle, 'cause that's what I'm like, and (b) completely missing my point. Please read the post again, and note that I did not ask whether God exists. And then think about it a bit and try to realise that, in this context, whether God exists doesn't even matter.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that God exists, that it's the Christian God, and that all us atheists are wrong. Well, so what? The Christian God has opted, in recent years, to go down the no-proof-offered path because faith is apparently what matters to him and evidence would spoil all that. Fine, no problem, I get that. But what that means is that the existence of atheism in society isn't going to go away because some Christians talk earnestly to some atheists. We are, as Douglas Adams put it, not convinced, and evidence is what convinces us. In requiring you to convert us without it, your God is giving you an impossible task. You might well make some headway — people do convert, all the time — but, absent proof, this is going to take you, at the very least, a couple of centuries. Tough break.

So secularism is here to stay. And while I understand that our American Christian friends (who are emailing me), with their long history of absolute freedom of religion, might not see the benefits of secularism, I would politely like to remind them that every one of us in Europe lives in a country with a history of brutal religious wars and that secularism is therefore very welcome here. We don't want our governments to be religious. It doesn't end well. Which is part of what I was getting at in my earlier post.

Secularism is here to stay. Arguably, it is weak and prone to take-over and/or defeat by any strong culture. Arguably, that is already happening. Arguably, a strong religious streak through society would make that more difficult and less likely. Even if it's not already happening, it would still be good to take steps to ensure it doesn't happen in the future, as our society is pretty excellent and worth preserving. But, given that many millions of us simply are not religious and are highly unlikely to become so any time soon, just how useful is it to point out that Christianity is an effective solution? I agree that it is.

But utility is just not good enough.

Another effect of the market crash.

2011-08-07T22:47:00.003+01:00

Last night, I dreamt that I was trying to pay for some shopping at the supermarket, but was having trouble because the money in my pocket turned out to be a Kuwaiti 34-riyal note. Yes, I know that Kuwait uses the dinar; in my dream, it was the riyal. And 34? Seriously? That hadn't rung any alarm bells at all when some bastard had managed to palm the thing off onto me?

When I was young, I used to dream I could fly. Now, I dream I'm skint and thick as pigshit.

Pissing on the parade.

2011-08-04T16:11:00.002+01:00

If someone is about to go on holiday and looking forward to it, telling them it's going to be shit is considered rude. Telling children that Father Christmas does not exist — especially in December — is the mark of a true bastard. And telling people how The Sixth Sense ends is enough to get you rejected from polite society and roundly slapped.

Yet for some reason it is not only considered OK but is in fact the norm to tell expectant parents that having a child is going to be utter hell.

What I always say to any expectant first-time parents I know is that no-one ever tells the story of things going right — not just about parenthood, but about everything in life. No-one will ever feel an urge to tell you how they had a plan and it all went smoothly. It's things going wrong that makes for an interesting story.

My niece is eight. She is terrified of having children because it's going to be so unbearably painful. Why are people telling eight-year-olds about the pain of childbirth? Why is this considered a socially acceptable thing to do?

I'm never going to do it myself, obviously, but, talking to various mothers, and reading others' accounts, and talking to doctors and midwives, I have discovered that childbirth varies in painfulness from "Actually not too bad" through to "I would rather be on fire". But the accounts of mothers who have an easy time of it are not the dominant stories in our culture: no-one's interested in hearing about a lack of adversity. It's only the extreme pain that is recounted, and recounted again, and emphasised, until we have the absurd situation that first-time mothers are opting to have major abdominal surgery because they are convinced that natural childbirth must always be more painful than having their bellies sliced open with knives.

We live in a country with a below-replacement birth-rate. This is otherwise known as "dying out". Yet all anyone can tell you about parenthood is that it starts by hurting you so much you'll wish you were dead and continues by "destroying" your "life", by which people seem to mean you won't be able to go out clubbing, take a handful of Es, have sex with anonymous strangers, and wake up two days later in a pool of your own vomit more than once a fortnight.

I'm sick to bloody death of this.

Having kids is fantastic. Daisy and Poppy are the two most amazing and wonderful things that have ever happened — not just to me, but in the whole of history. I hardly ever go out any more; I wait for DVD releases rather than going to the cinema; I don't go to restaurants very much; I rarely get drunk: my life revolves around the looking-after of children. That's not the "end" of my life. It's a new phase. And it could not be more welcome. It's more rewarding than a non-parent could possibly imagine.

Yes, even the bits that involve being covered in vomit.

An open letter to Mark Steyn.

2011-08-04T15:58:00.004+01:00

Dear Mr Steyn,

One topic you've come back to a lot over the last few years is that of Christianity and whether a post-Christian society can survive without it. You raise a lot of good points, but I find it interesting that you have discussed the benefits and advantages of believing in God so thoroughly without ever touching on the matter of whether God exists.

I agree with you that the problem with Islam isn't Islam: it's the fact that Western cultures have abandoned their self-belief, leaving the door open for any strong culture to replace them, because people want to be part of strong self-confident cultures. If Islam hadn't highlighted this problem, something else would have. I agree that Judeo-Christian culture provides an excellent moral underpinning for strong free societies. I don't agree that atheism necessarily doesn't, but the sad fact is that most atheists are so damn stupid that they insist on rejecting everything any religion has ever done, including the foundations of the society that allows them the freedom to be openly atheist in the first place. I agree that a strongly Christian society would avoid a lot of the ills facing European post-Christian societies, especially the endemic self-absorption.

But here's the problem.

As it happens, I'm an atheist. This isn't some political stand; I just don't believe that God exists. Neither do a lot of our leaders (and I don't just mean the politicians).

Now, you certainly could argue — and I think you have — that religion provides the most effective means of ordering a functioning civilisation. You could argue further that our leaders therefore have a duty to promote religion over atheism, to the extent of hiding their own beliefs and going to church and pretending to be religious for the good of the nation. There is a strong case to be made that a civilisation led by people who actively promote Christianity would be a more successful and longer-lasting civilisation than the one we currently have, in which there is no dominant belief system to tie people together and indeed the very idea of common values is considered rather gauche.

Now, if I were an authoritarian, that would be a fine idea. But I'm not. I object — as do you — to having our cultural elites foist their ideas onto the rest of us. Most of the time, they do this with ideas they really believe in, and that's bad enough. I can't see that having them cynically promote what they regard as fairy tales for the masses would be an improvement. What they should be doing is leaving us the hell alone to get on with our lives. I'm not going to promote Christianity for the sake of convenience when I am sure that its key metaphysical claims are false. I suspect Oriana Fallaci faced a similar conundrum: in the end, she may have begun to see the point of Christianity from a strategic point of view, but I very much doubt she suddenly changed her mind about the existence of God.

I suspect that you have had a similar train of thought and that that is why you've never addressed the matter of whether Christianity is actually right, rather than merely good. But there are a lot of us atheists out here who want to see Western civilisation last forever, and we need a better solution than being asked to proselytize something we believe to be false.

I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Kynaston Reeves

I will of course be letting you all know if he replies.

Update:

Mark Steyn has very graciously placed a link to this letter on his very front page, implying, I hope, that he intends to reply at some point, which would be nice.

In the meantime, I have responded to some of your responses here.

Branding and regret.

2011-05-18T18:41:00.001+01:00

You can't call it that and then change the recipe.

Compare and contrast.

2011-05-04T04:07:00.001+01:00

Having just lived through eight years of people who think they're nicer than me eagerly and vocally wishing George W Bush dead, it's interesting to see that the same people have such mixed feelings about the death of Osama bin Laden. The mangled Martin Luther King misquote doing the rounds — "I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy" — is telling when you remember the huge cheer that went up during James's gig at the SECC — that's a lefty band playing a socialist city — for the proposal that George Bush die. That and a thousand other little events just like it.

They celebrated Reagan's death, they condemned Reagan's attempt to kill Gaddafi, they spent most of a decade shouting for the death of Bush, they were awfully pleased about Fortuyn's murder, they mourned Arafat, they never fucking shut up about looking forward to the big party when Thatcher dies, and now they're awfully upset that people might be pleased about the death of bin Laden. What I really don't understand is why they get so angry when we point out they're not on our side. They clearly don't want to be.

Taxi drivers.

2011-03-28T04:50:00.001+01:00

So I'm driving home the other night about three in the morning on pitch-black unlit roads in heavy fog. Real proper fog that stops you using your full-beam headlights 'cause they just bounce off the fog straight back into your eyes and it's like driving into a wall. Fog such that, even though I've done this drive a hundred times and know the road intimately, I regularly have no idea where I am.

And then I overtake this taxi. And the guy immediately starts flashing his headlights at me in a highly irritating way, so much that I begin to wonder if it's not a taxi after all but the police trying to pull me over. He's flashing so much in my mirrors I'm having trouble seeing. And then the guy floors it and overtakes and pointedly flashes his rear foglights at me. The message was clear: "Turn your foglights off, you moron."

In heavy fog.

What the hell is it with taxi drivers?

Don't panic.

2011-03-16T02:26:00.002Z

When you want proper coverage of physics-related news, written by people who actually understand physics and engineering, turn to The Register.

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems.

....

all plants are now well on their way to a cold shutdown. At no time have their operators come even close to running out of options. No core has melted down and come up against the final defensive barriers: the safety systems did not come even close to failing, despite being tested far beyond what they had been designed to take. One person has sustained a small dose of radiation which need cause him no concern.

The whole sequence of events is a ringing endorsement for nuclear power safety. If this – basically nothing – is what happens when decades-old systems are pushed five times and then some beyond their design limits, new plants much safer yet would be able to resist an asteroid strike without problems.

But you wouldn't know that from looking at the mainstream media. Ignorant fools are suggesting on every hand that Japan's problems actually mean fresh obstacles in the way of new nuclear plants here in the UK, Europe and the US.

That can only be true if an unbelievable level of public ignorance of the real facts, born of truly dreadful news reporting over the weekend, is allowed to persist.

Spread the word. And if you doubt us on any of this, please read this excellent early description of the events, or follow the reports from the IAEA and World Nuclear News. Very few other channels of information are much use at the moment.

Fukushima update: No chance cooling fuel can breach vessels

Thus far there are no reports at all of anyone receiving a radiation dose with measurable health consequences as a result of the Fukushima damage. The IAEA previously reported that one plant worker had sustained a dose equivalent to about a month's normal background radiation: the US Navy has also said that personnel returning aboard ship from relief work on the quake-stricken coast had sustained similar doses. The Japanese government has carried out a massive programme of radiation checks among evacuees and WNN has reported that so far nine people have been found to have sustained measurable levels of exposure.

Iodine pills intended to prevent radioisotopic iodine from being taken up by the thyroid gland have been distributed to centres in the area. However the pills have not been administered so far as there is no indication of a need to do so.

....

Damage to the Fukushima reactors and possible health consequences from that certainly appear to be totally insignificant to the other effects of the disaster in Japan. One provincial governor has predicted a death toll of 10,000 in his region alone. The lesson to learn here is that life is not made more dangerous by having nuclear reactors, not even in quake- and tsunami-prone Japan.

Nonetheless the reactor situation in most cases continues to lead the international media coverage, nuclear firms have taken stockmarket hits and it is being widely speculated that nuclear build programmes worldwide could be affected.

A lot of the ridiculous scaremongering is trying to paint this event as nearly as bad as Chernobyl — history's second-worst nuclear disaster, they're saying. It is worth bearing in mind when reading such reports that, contrary to what you may have heard from your friendly local Greenpeace activist, Chernobyl caused fifty-six deaths and zero birth defects. Second-worst after that really ain't so bad.

Like The Register says, spread the word. The last thing the Japanese need right now is the worry of worse to come, based on nowt but ignorant fiction.

Irish road signs, again.

2011-03-15T03:04:00.001Z

When you drive over the border from Ireland into Northern Ireland, there's a big sign warning you that speed limits are now in miles per hour. When you drive from Northern Ireland into Ireland, there's a big sign in English, French, and German warning you to drive on the left.

I can't figure out whether this is an incredibly subtle and clever put-down or just the stupidest damn thing on the planet.

Of course, there is the possibility that the road planners of Ireland actually run a competition for Stupidest Road Sign Ever — it would explain a lot — and this is the winner.

Complexity and intention.

2011-02-27T00:58:00.001Z

Damien makes a case against voting "reform" rather succinctly:

I am opposed to the adoption of AV. One of the main reasons I am opposed is that most of the people who will use it (including many of those who support its introduction) don’t understand the system; whereas nearly everyone on Earth understands FPTP. Call me “a conservative Right-winger who hates any form of change”, but I think that it is fundamental to the legitimacy of a democratic system that its voters know what their votes mean.

Predictably, commenters are ridiculing this, on the grounds that how you vote in AV is really very simple. This misses the point.

AV's defenders tend to misunderstand the "complexity" complaint. The problem isn't that it's too complex to understand how to vote. The problem is that the relationship between the vote and the result is complex enough to allow people who've studied the system to make their votes count more than other people's. And that's fundamentally antidemocratic.

Plus there's an instinct problem. Give people a list of candidates and tell them to list them in order of preference, and they'll put a number next to every name. People don't like leaving blanks. This is why Facebook do so well: stick a form on the site for "favourite music" and users will list all their favourite bands, despite the fact that it's a completely pointless thing to do. AV by the nature of its design abuses this fact of human psychology to give large numbers of votes to candidates no-one actually wants. And it is deeply counterintuitive: putting a candidate twelfth out of twelve is understood by everyone to mean "Worst — do not elect", but AV treats it as a positive vote to be counted in that candidate's favour. Which comes back to my first point: the few politics junkies who study the system will know this, enabling them to make their votes more valuable than everyone else's.

That AV's voting instructions are so simple to follow is the very problem: the system is so simple to use that its complexity isn't apparent to users — and, if people don't know the complexity's there, they won't try to find out about it. A system that was more obviously complex would actually be an improvement: it would be honest.

So farewell, then, Hosni.

2011-02-12T01:59:00.002Z

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking. In the West, there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world's Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it.

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.

— George "Dubya" Bush

Interesting that the man was famous for being ineloquent, yet I couldn't put it better myself. I'm not sure anyone ever has.

A man in need of some punctuation.

2011-01-09T21:33:00.001Z

There's an estate agent round my way by the name of Peter Rogers. He puts signs up outside people's houses which say

Peter Rogers
Estate Agents

This pleases me.

Liberty.

2011-01-07T15:26:00.001Z

Voters of Derby, take note. This is what your elected representative thinks of your rights:

Of course, the police can get a court order but what a waste of public money in order to do that.

Yes, Tory MP Heather Wheeler thinks that for the police to obey the law — specifically, law designed to protect us from tyranny — is a waste of public money. If she's consistent in her principles (assuming she has any), then she must think the same about having to get a warrant to search your house. That, or she actually has no idea what she's talking about and is disastrously unqualified for her job. Tough call.

As I may have mentioned before, the problem with the Tories is that they're authoritarian bastards.

More crappy BBC sub-editing.

2010-12-31T03:23:00.002Z

The headline:

Ex-Irish PM Bertie Ahern to stand down at next election

Yes, the BBC appear to be suggesting that Bertie Ahern is still Prime Minister and used to be Irish.

New life.

2010-12-24T03:12:00.003Z

It seems only fair, since Daisy's birth was quite excitingly blogged live from here, that her new sister get a mention.

Poppy Antonia Kynaston Reeves was born on the 25th of November. She is very well, thank you, and looks exactly like Daisy, which is no bad thing. She is also a right wee besom. Already.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember from four years back that Vic suffered major health complications exacerbated by a certain amount of NHS awfulness after Daisy's birth, and might even by interested to know that all is well on that front this time around. We can wholeheartedly recommend the treatment you get in an NHS hospital shortly after you've made an official complaint against them. Works wonders.

I'm knackered.

Two adverts that are really annoying me.

2010-12-24T02:57:00.002Z

Insert useless apology about not blogging for ages here.

OK. Anyway.

First, Dettol. Their Surface Cleanser is being advertised on heavy rotation at the moment, and, apparently, it "kills 99.9% of bacteria, including the flu virus." It's reassuring to see that a company that specialises in disinfectant products is unaware that 100% of bacteria wouldn't include the flu virus, in much the same way that 100% of pigeons doesn't include the Bengal tiger. The correct voiceover should be "Kills 99.9% of bacteria, not including the flu virus, obviously."

And so on to Bailey's. I love Bailey's. It is a quite wonderful drink. But my God, this advert is stupid. These people are having a party and their fridge breaks down or they're too thick to figure out how to use it or something, so they have no ice. So they go outside and break off icicles and use the icicles in their drinks. OK, nice image, very good. But then there's the voiceover: "The time we made our own ice." Well, no. This is in fact the exact opposite of what you've done here. When the fridge works, that's you making your own ice, using the fridge. Unless you've been spending days carefully turning the central heating on and off to jiggle the temperature of your house's roof above and below and above and below freezing in order to get the snow on the roof to repeatedly melt and refreeze at the optimum rate for icicle-creation, no, this is not the time you made your own ice. This ice you're using wasn't made by anyone; it just happened. The correct voiceover would be "The time we didn't make our own ice."

Glad I got that off my chest.

Chinglish from someone who can't spell "China".

2010-10-02T15:57:00.001+01:00

The matter at hand.

2010-09-27T06:00:00.001+01:00

So I was watching an episode of Castle and it starts with a PG-rated yet highly vigorous sex scene, and it's one of those scenes in which they convey the rumbunctious nature of sex via the medium of breakages, so cups are getting kicked off bedside tables and everything's rattling, etcetera etcetera, and right at the end, climactically, a great thump on the floor causes a couple of pictures to fall off the wall and I immediately, unhesitatingly, think "Well, what bloody idiot put them up? Shoddy job."

And it strikes me that this is how you know for sure middle-age is nearly here.

Better brioche.

2010-07-26T03:13:00.002+01:00

I did say I'd keep tinkering, and I have. Here is the new improved bread-machine brioche recipe. I'm very pleased with myself: this stuff is really good.

1 large egg or 2 medium eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
cold milk
1/4 tsp salt
30g diced cold butter
15g brown sugar
35g-40g castor sugar
80g strong white bread flour, sieved
180g plain flour, sieved
for 1 large egg, use 2 3/4 tsp fast-acting yeast
for 2 medium eggs, use 1 tbsp fast-acting yeast

Beat the egg, add the vanilla, then add cold milk to bring the total amount of wet ingredients up to 150ml.

My experiments have shown huge (bad) differences with softened butter, and so I recommend not softening it, but dice it quite small.

I'm using setting 1 on a Morphy Richards machine, which is the setting for a basic small white loaf. To help you tally that with your machine, that is:
Slow knead: 6min
Fast knead: 27min
Rise: 23min
Shape: 20sec
Rise: 64min
Bake: 45min

I'm getting fat here.

It's this sort of thing that makes me wonder whether gods are at work.

2010-07-26T03:10:00.002+01:00

Fans of brand names and the theory of nominative determinism will be amused to hear that Reckitt are taking over Durex.

A brioche recipe for bread machines.

2010-07-16T22:04:00.003+01:00

Anyone who's ever tried looking up bread-machine recipes ont' Web knows that there are thousands of them out there. Except not, for some reason, for brioche. I've done plenty of searching and found only three or four, and, quite frankly, have found none of them to be up to much. So I've been experimenting for the last few days and have wasted quite literally a tenner's worth of ingredients to bring you this, a brioche recipe for bread machines that is not too bad at all. I certainly intend to eat vast amounts of it.

1 large egg
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
cold milk
1/2 tsp salt
30g diced cold butter
15g brown sugar
35g castor sugar
40g strong white bread flour, sieved
210g plain flour, sieved
2 1/4 tsp fast-acting yeast

Beat the egg, add the vanilla, then add cold milk to bring the total amount of wet ingredients up to 150ml.

My experiments have shown huge (bad) differences with softened butter, and so I recommend not softening it, but dice it quite small.

The amount of flour may be slightly out. Keep an eye on it during the kneading and add an extra sprinkling if you think it's necessary. The consistency of the dough should be pretty soft and a bit sticky and should start out rather wet but should still eventually coalesce into one neat ball.

I'm using setting 1 on a Morphy Richards machine, which is the setting for a basic small white loaf. To help you tally that with your machine, that is:
Slow knead: 6min
Fast knead: 27min
Rise: 23min
Shape: 20sec
Rise: 64min
Bake: 45min

The crust is, I think, not quite right, but the overall results are perfectly good enough for dipping into hot chocolate.

I'm going to go on tweaking this and will provide updates if I manage to make any more improvements. Do feel free to email me with any cunning suggestions you may have.

Enjoy.

Update:

I have improved on this now. Here's the better version.

Translation and explanation.

2010-06-28T02:35:00.003+01:00

Yet more world-class journalism from the BBC:

The wives and girlfriends of Spanish players, known as esposas y novias (wives and girlfriends)

Only half a sentence, yet I could write pages about the myriad layers of wrongness within it. But won't.

Unjustified.

2010-06-23T01:09:00.005+01:00

Let's just take Saville's "facts" as read. He is, after all, a judge, and his job is to presume innocence and only declare as fact that which is proven — which puts those who are willing to tell the truth about their actions at some disadvantage. So fair enough: we'll say the facts are as Saville describes them. His reasoning is still bollocks.

Those rules of war so disdained by the Left when considering our enemies are there for a reason. Yes, if you keep chucking paras into crowds of civilians with terrorists hiding amongst them, sooner or later you'll have an atrocity on your hands. Which is precisely why not wearing uniform is a war crime, why hiding amongst civilians is a war crime, and why the traditional (and legal) punishment for being caught by the enemy out of uniform on a battlefield is summary execution. I believe Saville is right that the soldiers who fired had no reason to suspect that the particular individuals they killed were about to attack them. But the cases of Martin McGuinness — who had a Tommy gun but didn't directly use it in a way that justified the soldiers' opening fire — and Gerald Donaghy — who had nail bombs but was not shot because he had nail bombs — show the absurdity of it all.

No. The fact that Donaghy had nail bombs and was dressed as a civilian and was in a crowd of civilians may not be why he was shot at that moment by that particular bullet by that soldier, but it is very much why soldiers were pointing guns at civilians in the first place. Does anyone seriously think Bloody Sunday or anything like it would have happened had the IRA worn uniforms that distinguished them from ordinary members of the public and refrained from mixing with the general public while on duty? That the army, faced with an identifiable enemy on a battlefield and an entirely separate crowd of civilians several miles away, would have chosen to shoot at the civilians? To ask the question is to ridicule it.

Remember this the next time some romantic eejit excuses "asymetrical warfare". Of course fighting out of uniform gives you a huge advantage; of course hiding amongst non-combatants gives you a huge advantage. Such tactics would give anyone — the British, the Israelis, the Americans — the same advantages, yet they don't use them. There's a reason why civilised people disallow such behaviour, and that is that every single time you step into battle disguised as just another member of the public, you make Bloody Sunday more likely.

Just because it's someone else's fault, doesn't mean it's not yours too.

Voting for what you want.

2010-05-08T16:01:00.002+01:00

OK, I don't want to go on about the bloody election, but really, what the hell? I'm seeing all this grass-roots campaigning now from anxious Libdem voters who don't want their party to form a coalition with the Tories. The idea of a Tory-led government, they say, is repulsive to them. It's not, they say, what they voted for.

Look, if you want a Labour-led government, vote Labour. That's how it works. No-one thought in their wildest dreams that the Libdems could get an outright majority or even a minority government, so everyone who voted Libdem was voting for, best-case scenario, a coalition. And everyone who voted Libdem was also voting for a change in the electoral system to some form of PR, because they think that it is unfair that a party's proportion of seats in Parliament doesn't reflect their proportion of the votes nationwide. Only now they suddenly object to their party's leadership choosing to honour that very principle by trying first to do a deal with the party that got the most support rather than propping up the party that the voters unequivocally rejected.

If I could write the British Constitution, one of the clauses in there would state that parties have to declare their coalitions before elections and are not allowed to enter into new ones after they see the results. That's a basic democratic principle: people have a right to know what they're voting for.

But, nice though that would be, it's really not something that was needed this time. All Nick Clegg is doing now is absolutely sticking to his declared principles. Going to Labour first would have involved throwing his principles out, tearing them up, spitting on them, feeding them to livestock, burning the manure, and throwing the ashes into the sea.

Libdems, this is what you voted for. Didn't you know?

When parenthood and telecomms collide.

2010-05-07T16:22:00.002+01:00

I get my bank statements by text message, and hadn't got any since Monday this week — and I always get two on Monday, one for the credit card and one for the current account. Still none by this yesterday, so I was going to call First Direct to ask if there was a problem with the sending device when I realised that I hadn't got any text messages from anyone. And I tried to identify a record using Shazam and they didn't send me a message either, so I knew something was up.

I rebooted my phone, which had no effect. Then I sent myself a test message to see if it would come through. Not only did it arrive, but it also somehow cleared the blockage and all my outstanding messages came through over the next few minutes. Including this one that Vic sent to me when I was at work on Tuesday:

You should buy a new toothbrush ... found it on the floor with the handwash, dettol, and loo roll. Not quite sure what Daisy was up to but I wouldn't risk it.

Two days ago.

A bit of a mess.

2010-05-07T11:37:00.003+01:00

Been very little blogging of late due to my dividing my time between work and sleep and sleeping at work and trying not to sleep while driving to work. Such is life. But, if I had been blogging, I'd've mentioned at some point that I was only ever getting more convinced that my almost-prediction from way back in December '08 —

I've seen all this before, in 1992. No-one in their right minds seriously thought that Major might win that election.

I'm not saying the Tories can't do it. They might well. But I think it's easy to overestimate their popularity when that's being reported through the prism of the media. David Cameron is very media-friendly. There's some evidence that he's less popular with the Tory base than with BBC staff. And he's trying to appeal to the electorate by making the Tories as much like Labour as possible. That's a tricky game, that, and likely to create misleading poll data.

If Cameron persuades a lot of traditional Tories to stay at home, and if a bunch of Labour supporters who've been telling the pollsters that they'll vote Tory go and discover at the last minute that they just can't bring themselves to do it, then the Tories will lose. And are either of those things unlikely? I certainly don't think so.

Like I said, they might do it. But I just wanted to go on record, so that, if they lose, I can say I nearly told you so.

— was going to turn out right. My prediction a year-and-a-half ago was certainly a lot better than David Bloody Cameron's just a few hours ago:

Although there are still many more results to come out, it looks as if the Conservative party is on target to win more seats than we have done at any election for perhaps as long as 80 years.

I'm sure he'll try and spin what he really meant by that, but it's difficult to read it as anything other than a prediction of a bigger landslide than Thatcher. Such a wildly clueless reading of the signs shows the man is not suited to the job.

Reading back over my post now, I see that I even explained — long before knowing such an explanation would be needed — the Libdems' huge pre-election popularity and pathetic actual results. It's not about policies. It's about tribalism. If people don't think of themselves as Liberal Democrats, they won't vote for Liberal Democrats. Sure, a few will, but never enough.

So now I get to say it: I nearly told you so.

As things stand right now, the Tories may still get enough seats to form a minority government without allying with anyone. But, no matter how they spin it, it's a terrible result for them.

But a pretty good result for us, I think.

It does look like Cameron's going to be the PM now, but a weak one. Tory backbenchers are going to be looking at this result in disgust and seriously rethinking whether Cameronism's such a great idea. Its selling point was always "Swallow your principles in return for electoral victory" and that victory's not looking so impressive. We might well have the best of both worlds here: Labour out, but the Tories deciding to become properly right-wing again before the next election, so we can go back to having an actual choice in British politics. That may be today's most important result.

Meanwhile, fantastic results in Northern Ireland. Peter Robinson and Reg Empey both out — amazing and wonderful. Robinson believed that he didn't need to resign when he'd been shown to be — giving him the benefit of all possible doubt here — married to a woman who corruptly abused his position for financial gain, because he had a safe seat. His message to the voters, let's face it, was "Yeah? What you going to do about it?" Well, that seat's not looking so bloody safe now, is it, Pete? Ha.

And it's wonderful to see Reg Empey kicked out after the way his grubby little party treated my MP, Sylvia Hermon — who has just been re-elected as an independent with a majority God must be envious of. Ha.

And now I'm going to go back to working and falling asleep.

Enjoy your new government, whoever it turns out to be. Or, you know, don't get apoplectic over them every single day. That's the best you can really hope for, with governments.

Excuse the mess.

2010-03-11T14:52:00.002Z

I am just about to change Web-hosting providers. Hopefully, things around here won't go completely arse-over-tit, but do please excuse any weirdnesses that do happen.

This has been a boring public-service announcement.

That bang.

2010-02-25T14:28:00.004Z

As you may remember, I was greatly inconvenienced last October by the Real IRA's trial run for Monday's car-bomb in Newry. I was working from home this Monday, so thankfully unaffected. My colleagues who were in the office said that the shockwave was unbelievable: like the storey above them had collapsed, they described it. Our office is pretty close to Newry Courthouse, and the bomb exploded about ten to twenty yards away from where my car would usually be parked. Had I been in Newry at the time, the chances of my getting caught in the blast as I popped out to get food would have been pretty high. One of my colleagues walked past it a couple of minutes before it exploded, apparently. Reassuring.

And the bastards'll be trying again. The intention of this bomb was to get some casualties, as evinced by their giving a thirty-minute warning seventeen minutes before the explosion. Great.

On the subject of Northern Ireland's politics, I do have one observation. The bombing has been condemned by all members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. However, the Northern Ireland Assembly doesn't have straight unfettered democratic representation; it has democracy that's been rigged to enable the peace process. (And there's nowt wrong with that, I should add: I'm all for constraining democracy within awkward undemocratic boundaries, as, for instance, the USA's system does. Imagine how much better British governance could be if the Deputy Prime Minister were always the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister were forced to work with him.) Anyway, the whole point of the Northern Ireland Assembly is that the views of all Northern Ireland's political factions are represented, to encourage them to get involved in democratic politics rather than terrorism. So, by its very definition, the Assembly is supposed to contain at least one member who approves of this bombing. When every member of the Assembly condemns this attack, what that demonstrates is that they've set up the Assembly wrong.

Northern Ireland's problem.

2010-02-09T02:56:00.003Z

There's been much in the news the last few days — as there is every few months — about the stalling, the stalemates, the lack of progress, and the all-round nothinghappeningness of Northern Irish politics, and how awful that is.

Well, I think it's bloody brilliant.

Just imagine how much better Britain would be if our lords & masters couldn't get anything done; how little chance they'd have to fuck up the country if it took Parliament three years merely to do a simple little thing like figure out who runs the police. We'd be living in a utopia.

Yet everyone acts like Northern Irish politics' usual glacial progress is a bad thing. And like their finally agreeing to work together and Get Things Done is a good one. Despite all the evidence of their lives, people still dwell on this fantasy planet where some good can come from an assembly of professional politicians achieving something. I despair.

The dead art of proof-reading.

2010-02-09T02:47:00.002Z

This from The Times, who have standards, apparently:

Gordon Brown announced in the Commons that the South-East Antrim UDA — a splinter group of the Ulster Defence Association, the province’s largest Protestant paramilitary organisation — had decommissioned just completed getting rid of its weapons.

Asked about the murder of Mr Neave, who was Mrs Thatcher’s Northern Ireland spokesman, was killed when a bomb exploded beneath his car in 1979 as he left the House of Commons.

Yesterday Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary, confirmed that the IICD, would cease to function from todaytue. As a result, the possession of terrorist weapons can be prosecuted throught the courts.

Brilliant.

Classy.

2010-01-30T00:30:00.002Z

Some simply lovely news from Canada:

Imagine that you are undergoing a fairly routine surgery — say, removal of uterine fibroids or hysterectomy. During or right after the procedure, while you are still under anesthesia, a group of medical students parades into the operating room and they perform gynecological exams (unrelated to the surgery) without your knowledge.

Do you consider this okay, or an outrageous violation of your rights?

Regardless of your feelings, you should be aware that this is standard procedure in many Canadian teaching hospitals.

Ah, it's those bloody paternalistic doctors again.

The interesting thing about this is that it's not against any laws or even guidelines. In fact, it's not even that there are no rules covering such an event: there are guidelines, which say that this is OK because permission is "implicit". The fact that it's come to light might eventually lead to a change in the law, but not to any prosecution. Under Canadian law, no-one's done anything wrong. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone that there was anything wrong with putting their fingers into the genitals of a woman they don't know without her permission.

The article doesn't mention when the practice first became routine, but it looks to be well established: 72% of medical students polled said they had done it. What is particularly striking is the total lack of basic ethical thinking present in the brains of Canadian doctors. I mean, this is simply not something that needs to be banned. Legalise it in Britain tomorrow and I still wouldn't do it. But doctors are so much more sophisticated than me.

The story goes back to 2007 when Sara Wainberg was a medical student at McMaster University. Her younger brother Daniel, also studying to be a doctor, phoned for advice: As part of his rotation in obstetrics and gynecology, he had been asked to perform a pelvic exam on a woman who was under anesthetic. He refused, saying doing so without consent would be unethical.

"It got me thinking," Sara Wainberg said. "I had done this numerous times in my training and it had never occurred to me that it might be unethical."

Yes, this woman is the whistle-blower on this barbaric practice, but she still did it perfectly happily herself for years without ever questioning it and would probably still be at it to this day if her brother — who must have missed one or two of his indoctrination sessions — hadn't pointed out the bleeding obvious to her. And did she have a revelation and realise just how awful it was? No, it made her think about it. She even did a survey of patients to find out what they thought of it. And, would you believe it, turns out they're broadly against being raped — which is what the law in the UK and various other jurisdictions would call this. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this would constitute rape or at least sexual assault in Canada if it were done by anyone other than a doctor. But, you know, doctors are special.

That was 2007. It is now coming to light. During the last two years, while Dr Wainberg faffed around before eventually deciding that, hey, turns out it is wrong, and then publicising the matter, lots more women have had this done to them. What strikes me is that she seems to have approached the whole scandal as an interesting question in moral philosophy that needs plenty of cogitation, rather than as an appalling thing that is being done to actual people and that needs to be stopped immediately.

Remember, these are the guys who reckon they should have the legal power to decide to turn off your life-support machine. Because of their excellent judgement. This has been going on for years, and, out of all the medical students to pass through Canada's teaching hospitals in that time, one has noticed that it's immoral.

One.

A poor solution and a good one.

2010-01-25T01:36:00.002Z

Well, further to that last post, two things have happened that make my life easier and might make yours too, if you're one of the hundreds and hundreds of thoroughly pissed-off ex-Haloscan users out there.

Firstly, JS-Kit have noticed just how appalling their self-induced PR was and introduced a free 30-day trial period for their product. You know, like they would have done in the first place if they weren't thick as a mince plank. This could be good, not because I need to try their platform, Echo, out — I've already seen enough to know that it's laughably bad — I mean, for fuck's sake, this is supposedly a commenting system built by people who just smugly and cluelessly announced "the death of Comments" — but because it may be possible to export comments from their Echo platform to other platforms which aren't crap or owned by companies who extort their customers or both.

Secondly, and almost certainly a lot more importantly, a very nice man called Kirk has spotted the gap in the market and just gone and damn well built a replacement for Haloscan, which looks great.

One day, in the currently purely hypothetical universe in which I have any time at all, I might even build my own comment thingy. Yeah, I know: hollow laughter. In the meantime, a giant thank-you to Mr Kirk Tridentscan.

A bit of a problem.

2009-12-18T10:28:00.002Z

This blog uses Haloscan commenting, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the best commenting system on the market. It doesn't support all the irritating crap that makes online bulletin boards so utterly tedious and conversations on them impossible to follow, such as putting a user's favourite quote and a big graphic they've come up with under every single comment. It doesn't force people to create accounts and log in. It simply allows people to comment, and arranges the comments in the form of a conversation. Simple and perfect, and it just works.

Or it did, anyway. Turns out Haloscan has been bought by something called JS-Kit. And, rather than support the new user base they've acquired with anything remotely resembling customer service, JS-Kit are trying to extort us into switching to their software:

Once presented with the upgrade message, Haloscan users will have 2 weeks to make a decision. You will have the following two options.
Upgrade to Echo for $9.95/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically

Export your Haloscan comment data and turn off their service

Users need to respond within the two week period to ensure uninterrupted service.

Translation: "You've got two weeks to pay us or we'll destroy all the comments on your blog." That's two weeks over Christnas, I might add, when some people have one or two other things to be doing than trying to sort out their blog's commenting system.

And what's the new software like? Well, it insists on posting comments in reverse chronological order, because "we have found that this is the best way to present real-time data." As the commenter RT responds, "and I have found that newer comments at the bottom is the best way to carry on a conversation." I've tried posting a comment on JS-Kit's site, and I had to type the whole thing out twice because their crappy software deleted everything I'd typed when I logged in. Ah, yes, logging in: I had to do that, annoyingly. Yet, even after I'd logged in, my comment still got posted under the name "Guest". I can see why JS-Kit are resorting to extortion to try and get people to use Echo: it's a shit bit of software. Every upgrade is a downgrade.

Anyway, comments will be switched off on this blog shortly, and won't be back till I've sorted this mess out. Sorry about that. Blame the morons at JS-Kit.

Rebellion and conformity.

2009-12-17T19:03:00.002Z

So, let me see if I've got this straight.

You're annoyed about "manufactured" pop music. You're sick of Simon Cowell. You don't want the Christmas Number One, yet again, to be the debut single of the X-Factor's winner. You want to make a stand against the domination of our popular culture by cynical corporate interests.

So you put your weight behind a campaign to get everyone to buy Sony record B instead of Sony record A. Yeah, stick it to the man.

I'm half-convinced that the whole campaign was Cowell's idea, in which case he'll be due a big bonus from his bosses at Sony. If it wasn't, maybe he can persuade them it was.

Denialism and scepticism.

2009-12-15T15:25:00.005Z

The question being asked here by Ben Goldacre and lots of his commenters is: why do AGW sceptics believe what they do? Well, I'm an AGW sceptic, so I can at least tell them why in my own case.

First, the non-reasons. Am I in the pocket of Big Oil? I wish. I hear they pay well.

Is it because I'm against the massive societal changes "necessary" to fight AGW? Well, no, because I don't think they're necessary. It is well established by lots of evidence (most notably the brilliant experiment done on Europe from 1945 to 1990, where they tried one political system on half the continent and its antithesis on the other) that Socialism screws the environment and that wealthy people in wealthy societies tend to spend their spare cash on the luxury good of natural-environment-preservation, while poor people are too busy trying to survive to be bothered with saving the trees. My position is that, if AGW were a threat, then the solution would be more wealth-generation, probably via Capitalism. Since I'm all for wealth-generation, I'm not sceptical of AGW in order to avoid its political solution.

Is it because I want to burn lots of oil for some reason? Again, no. I hate driving and I think we should cut down on fossil-fuel consumption because it puts all sorts of nasty crap in the atmosphere which is bad for our lungs and bad for trees. I also support the development of alternative fuel sources on the simple grounds of being pro-progress. I want my solar hydrogen fusion jetpack, like they promised us when we were kids.

However, as a computer programmer, I agree with Feynman's philosophical position that you shouldn't use computer models as a source of new information and I also take the practical position that even the world's best software is buggy. I've not seen any evidence that climatologists' software is orders of magnitude less buggy than, say, Excel. Two weeks ago, I saw evidence that it's buggy as hell.

I object to the fact that the models used do not contain known climate-influencing factors — specifically, existing models cannot contain information about new discoveries. For instance, no model used before 2006 could have contained anything about this discovery — and that includes being developed by a climatologist who has seen the science and refuted it. Of course, it is entirely possible to make accurate predictions based on purely numerical models, but I don't believe that this is one of those cases, for reasons that I won't go into here & now because it'd take hours.

I object to the constant use of the word "denialist", designed as it is to imply a parallel with AIDS denialists and Holocaust denialists. We never refer to Einstein as a "quantum mechanics denialist", even though he didn't accept the theory and the theory has been proven right to as great an extent as science ever is. You're not going to persuade me of your case by insulting me, but you are going to make me wonder why you're conducting a propaganda campaign against anyone who expresses any doubts whatsoever about your views.

The leaked emails were a shock to me — not because of the sniping and back-stabbing, but because I had never realised previously that FOI requests were even necessary to get at the data. This is scientific method 101 here: release your data. Goldacre does good business going through the problems with pharmaceutical studies by analysing their raw data. But at least he can get at it to analyse it in the first place. Regardless of the shenanigans to avoid acceding to the FOI requests, the very fact that they were needed in the first place is disturbing. And the insane quote from Phil Jones, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it" — what the hell? Again, that's the scientific method. As Goldacre has pointed out repeatedly, scientists like it when their results get pulled to pieces, because that's what leads to stronger and stronger science. But not climatologists, apparently.

I object to the way that the science has been inseparably attached to authoritarian politics. Herman Van Rompuy said the other day that "2009 is also the first year of global governance," giving Copenhagen as an example of this. That's an unelected president of an unelected body asserting that he is going to exercise more power over me via policies that I will never be allowed to vote on. And I'm told that the only reason to object to this is because I hate the planet and want all our grandchildren to die. As far as I can see, the climatologists who say that AGW is happening and is a threat are backing the same political solutions and are keenly joining in the political fight. Well, if they want to conflate the science with the politics, they lose the right to complain when people criticise them from one point of view and not the other. They brought that on themselves. And, when they make it clear that they have political as well as scientific motives, I am entitled to question which one would be ascendant if they were to pull in different directions. It's not as if it's unusual for scientists to corrupt their science in the cause of politics.

The concensus thing. My objection to the constant use of the word "concensus" is not that the concensus itself is meaningless; obviously, it's relevant. My objection is the way that the concensus's existence is routinely presented as a scientific argument in its own right. It amounts to "You shouldn't be sceptical because none of us are, and that proves it." Yeah, go science.

I object to the apparent unfalsifiability of the argument. Every perceivedly unusual weather event is presented as evidence of AGW. As someone mentioned in the Bad Science comments, this may be more due to activists than scientists, but where are the climatologists attacking and disowning such claims just as they attack us sceptics? Conspicuously silent.

And yes, I object to the models' failure to predict the recent total lack of warming. AGW's proponents point out the difference between predicting a system's behaviour in micro and in macro, and the point is well taken. But the trouble is that there's no long history of correct predictions here. What the AGW crowd are telling us is not "Ignore our failure to predict the recent climate because we've predicted it successfully so often in the past" but rather "Ignore our failure to predict the recent climate because we will predict it successfully in the future." Hmm.

And I object to what looks suspiciously like Catastrophism, which used to be regarded as inherently unscientific by its very nature.

I am well aware that there are sceptics who are ignorant and motivated by such ridiculous things as a love of cars. But I'm not one of them, and, in my experience, most of us regard those nutters somewhat askance when they turn up.

Now, please, stop slandering me.

Update:

By the way, if anyone from Big Oil is reading this, whilst I did write it for free, I would like you to inform your overlords that I am more than happy to write much the same thing repeatedly in return for untraceable cash, barrels of oil, hot compliant women, etc. If I'm going to get accused of working for you anyway, may as well get the up side to go with it.

On insufficient cynicism.

2009-12-03T02:13:00.003Z

As some of you may know, my motto is "The only problem with being cynical is being right."

Well, in light of recent developments, I'd like to say that I wrote this three-and-a-half years ago:

As you almost certainly know, lots of scientists these days — especially climatologists — draw conclusions about the real world from computer models. I have therefore compiled this handy list. It's a list of the questions you need to ask any scientist who has used a computer model to reach a conclusion — and I'm not just picking on the climate-change crowd here; they may be the most prominent in the news, but there are lots of other guilty parties out there in all sorts of scientific fields. If a scientist doesn't give confident and reasonable answers to these questions, take their conclusions with a handful of salt.

I set out some of the basic problems of programming and debugging as part of a team, in terms designed to make it clear to laymen that computer models may not always be all that reliable. But I admit that I always assumed that the models used by scientists were basically quite well built yet prone to the same inherent problems as every other bit of programming. It simply never occurred to me that prominent climatologists might be unable to replicate their own models' results or would be building models based on data that they had lost. I was just writing about the long-known problem of the blurring of lines between using computer models to examine and test data and using them to generate information. It didn't occur to me that our lords & masters might be considering destroying the global economy on the say-so of a bunch of "scientists" who'd lost sight of the scientific method.

Had I been more cynical, I'd've been more right. That'll learn me.

The best charity ever.

2009-11-28T19:38:00.003Z

Anyone who's heard a thing or two about Hernando de Soto might recognise some of his ideas in Kiva:

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on Kiva, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else.

What Kiva are doing is making it easy for people in the Developing World to borrow money off us rich bastards in the Developed World, while also making it easy for those of us who aren't actually rich at all to lend small, affordable amounts of money and still do some good. Nothing about this encourages dependency. Nothing about it skews the incentives of poor nations' governments. And we the donors can afford to give far more this way, because we can actually get back nearly all of what we put in.

You can probably do more good lending money via Kiva than you can giving it to other charities. Let's just hope the idea catches on.

Form over content.

2009-10-19T02:57:00.002+01:00

Been saying this for years. This is the root of the problem with political correctness:

If you say, "Chairman Mao? Wasn't he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?", you'll be hounded from public life for saying the word "Chinks". But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any schoolroom in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it's so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

I think I like John Mayer now.

2009-10-19T02:43:00.003+01:00

Don't really know a damn thing about him, but you've got to love his answer to this:

What do you think about health care? Would you take the public option?

Have you ever heard me play guitar? I'm really fucking good. You know what I'm bad at? Answering questions about public health care.

Out of practice.

2009-10-19T02:04:00.004+01:00

Should have blogged about this sooner, but I was too busy trying to catch up on all the damn sleep it lost me. I was caught up in this crap:

A SECURITY alert in Newry has caused serious traffic disruption.
Army technical officers worked throughout Wednesday examining a vehicle parked near the city's courthouse.

The alert was raised late on Tuesday evening.

Yeah, the alert was raised late on Tuesday evening and my work was within the cordoned-off zone, so we had to leave as soon as the police realised we were in the building. Not sure why, as they weren't evacuating any of the residential buildings in the area. No public transport at that time of night — a bit after midnight — and our cars were parked inside the cordon too, so we weren't allowed near them. Needless to say, the police do nothing to help you when you're caught up in a situation like that. Break a few shop windows and they'll put you in a nice warm cell for the night and provide you with food, but have the temerity to be a law-abiding citizen and you can go and fuck yourself as far as they're concerned.

Luckily, one of my colleagues was actually staying in Newry and so we didn't have to spend the entire night aimlessly wandering the freezing-cold streets and were able to sleep fitfully on sofas in a freezing-cold living room instead. I occasionally called the police to find out if the cordon had been lifted. They seemed to find these calls annoying, and, after a couple of them, told me that it would definitely be staying till nine at the earliest.

Which was odd. Bomb threats were a regular occurrence everywhere in Northern Ireland a few years ago, and they generally took a couple of hours for the security forces to clear. Yet this one was taking a bare minimum of, what, eleven hours? What the Hell?

And it ended up taking even longer. I eventually had to give up and get the bus and train home, conveniently leaving my car in bloody Newry. The cordon was still up well into Wednesday afternoon. And it wasn't even a real bomb.

The news reports aren't making this clear at all, but, talking to the police at the time and seeing what was going on, what appears to have happened is that the bomb squad didn't even come to look at the bomb until their normal working day started around nine. Not worth getting them out of bed for.

I certainly hope that that's what happened, as at least that would merely imply severe managerial stupidity. The alternative is that British Army bomb disposal experts take nearly twenty hours to make safe a fake bomb containing no explosives. I hope our guys in Iraq are managing to move a bit faster than that.

Anyway, it certainly sent a clear message to the terrorists: You can cripple a major town for an entire day with a car and a phonecall.

So we can probably expect this to become a regular thing. Great.

The bloody BBC, again.

2009-10-19T01:44:00.003+01:00

There's that annoying habit news organisations have got into of putting quotes in headlines. It's basically lying, but if you put the lie in quotes you get to blame it on somebody else.

But the BBC have come up with a new advance on that. Here's the headline:

Anger at US mixed marriage 'ban'

A "ban", eh? Blimey. That sounds pretty bad.

Except that there then follows a report in which the word "ban" does not appear. Not once. The only place it appears is in that headline. Which rather implies that, for all that the word's in quotes, it's not a quote. Surely, if it were, the BBC would be providing the quote. I mean, this is basic journalism: when you publish a quote, you attribute it. Otherwise, you could just be writing any old crap, right?

Oh, hang on: they are. The reason the word "ban" doesn't appear anywhere in the report is that what it's describing is not in any way a ban. It's a personal decision by one person and a complaint about his decision from someone else.

A white US justice of the peace has been criticised for refusing to issue marriage licences to mixed-race couples.

Keith Bardwell, of Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, denied racism but said mixed-race children were not readily accepted by their parents' communities.

A couple he refused to marry are considering filing a complaint about him to the US Justice Department.

Oh deary me. A justice of the peace is refusing to marry this couple. That's awful. What on Earth will they do?

Ms Humphrey, who is white, said that when she phoned Mr Bardwell on 6 October to discuss getting a marriage licence signed his wife told her about his stance.

Mrs Bardwell recommended that the couple see another justice of the peace, who did agree to marry them.

Oh.

That little detail's down in paragraph 12, by the way, where the BBC can be pretty bloody sure it'll be missed.

I can't even see why the BBC are reporting this story, to be honest. I mean, there's a lot of racism in the world, most of it far worse than this. The entire story boils down to "Man expresses fairly racist sentiment, couple experience slight inconvenience arranging marriage." Would the BBC bother with this story if it came out of Poland or France or Italy? I doubt it. But, ah, America... it gives them the perfect opportunity to continue their decades-long propaganda war by blatantly lying in a headline.

I absolutely guarantee that I will meet people over the next few years who will tell me earnestly that interracial marriage is actually illegal in some parts of the US.

What the hell happened to the Left?

2009-10-15T16:11:00.002+01:00

I know this question's been asked a lot, but, really. I used to be able to disagree with them about economic policy while agreeing on many of their pet causes, such as, for instance, the right of women not to be beaten to a pulp by their husbands. How old hat is that? Turns out, in the latest rules of Victimhood Poker, mentally ill trumps female. Like, really, really trumps it. Trumps it so hard it's not going to bloody try that again, the jumped-up bitch. Seriously:

The couple had been married 15 years when [David] Dawson, the former captain of the Canadian Triathlon Team, viciously attacked his wife, seemingly out of the blue.

According to the victim, she was punched in the face several times and struck in the face with a barbell.

At one point, she lost consciousness after Dawson began choking her and, when she came to, found that her hands had been tied behind her back.

Despite repeated pleadings to stop the assault, Judith Dawson said her husband continued the violence, first putting a pillow over her face, then picking her up and carrying her to the kitchen where he once again tried to choke her to a point where, she told the court, she feared for her life.

"I begged and begged him to stop hurting me," Judith Dawson wrote in a victim-impact statement submitted prior to sentencing.

The assault ended when the victim managed to free her hands and escape to a neighbour's house.

Lovely guy, you might be thinking. However, it turns out he's even lovelier than that, because he's a victim too.

The court learned that David Dawson was suffering from mental illness at the time of the attack, diagnosed by one doctor as agitated depression and narcissistic personality disorder and by another as a "mixed personality disorder characterized by an excessive preoccupation with detail."

Poor wee lamb.

Since the assault, Dawson has taken responsibility for the assault, expressing "profound remorse, which seems sincere," according to a psychiatrist who interviewed him earlier this year.

"He appears to be committed to maintaining his current recovery," the psychiatrist further noted.

In pronouncing sentence in the matter, Judge De Walle said Dawson's continued success would be better served by imposing a lengthy order of supervision, rather than jail time.

You'd hope a judge might know what a sentence is for. Apparently not. Judge De Walle thinks that we send violent criminals to jail in order to help them, and that we therefore shouldn't do it if it looks like it might not help them. Judge De Walle knows less about criminal justice than every five-year-old in the world.

I particularly like this detail:

However, Dawson was found fit to stand trial.

In other words, whether he was fit to stand trial was up for discussion in the first place. In other words, he tried to use this convenient mental illness to avoid the prosecution entirely — and in this he failed. The psychiatrists who looked at him may have decided that, yes, he was a bit mentally ill, but they also decided that, no, not to the extent of not being responsible for his actions he wasn't. He was officially deemed to be criminally responsible.

And the judge has still let him off with a slap on the wrist.

I know what some of you may be thinking. Why am I using this to criticise the Left? Who's to say Judge De Walle is a lefty? And the answer is that a mysogynist old socially conservative judge might let a guy off lightly for beating his wife because of some misguided belief that what happens inside a marriage is never the state's business no matter what, but only a lefty would let him off because jail is "counterproductive" to the poor convict's progress at overcoming his difficulties. Those old sexist judges, who used to make some truly appalling decisions (and, really, are there any of them left? Is that still happening?), at least noticed the victim. Sure, they reckoned the beating wasn't that bad and she should put up with it, but they acknowledged her existence. To the modern "progressive" mind, she's just getting in the way at the trial. A criminal trial serves no purpose other than to rehabilitate the offender. None. The idea that a sentence might be a form of punishment is anathema to these bastards.

These days, if you or a friend of yours is violently attacked by a mysogynist bastard, you might be better avoiding the police and just going straight to Jamie Foxx:

"If it had been my daughter who was barely a teenager — my daughter is 15 — Roman Polanski would be missing... period. It wouldn't even get to the court case."

Damn straight.

You may know them by their friends.

2009-10-15T15:57:00.003+01:00

A message for most of Hollywood:

When your actions and words provide perfect evidence for the deluded hateful racist bastards who think that the media is run by the International Jewish Conspiracy, it's a good bet that you're doing something wrong.

As an aside, I must say that, having learnt Whoopie Goldberg's views on raping and abusing teenagers, I'm never going to be able to watch The Colour Purple again.

A rational debate.

2009-10-01T15:15:00.004+01:00

As you probably already know, Natalie Morton dropped dead within hours of being given the new HPV vaccine.

A vaccine to protect against cervical cancer was unlikely to have caused the death of the schoolgirl Natalie Morton, health officials said last night.

Preliminary results from a post-mortem examination suggest that the 14-year-old had a "serious underlying medical condition".

Understandably, the event was a bit worrying for many parents. Which has, predictably, prompted hundreds of self-congratulatory rationalists to start insulting those parents.

Gary links approvingly (for some reason) to Malcolm Coles's object lesson in how not to see the wood for the trees:

Let's be clear. The only reason parents are worried, boycotting the vaccine, and demanding suspensions of the vaccination program is because the media whipped up a storm with no evidence whatsoever.

Look, it doesn't do anyone any favours to misrepresent your opponents in a political debate. It just lowers the level of discourse across the board.

Some people are worried about the side effects of the vaccine — which is natural and normal when a girl drops dead shortly after taking it. It's all very well to say that the authorities have looked into it and discovered that she was actually killed by an unrelated underlying medical condition, but people in the UK don't need particularly impressive memories to remember being assured by respected scientists that thalidomide was safe and that BSE couldn't transfer to humans and that any mother with more than one child dead from SIDS was a murderer. That's not to say that if the authorities are wrong once they're wrong every time, but that the self-important clueless whining of scientists that "We are scientists and we do science and so everyone should trust us and anyone who disagrees with us is being irrational" is ignorant and tiresome. Government scientists have a good long history of being wrong in order to promote their pet projects, being wrong in order to support government policy, and just plain being wrong.

Furthermore, I'm sure a lot of people are asking themselves the entirely reasonable and rational questions "Would this unrelated underlying medical condition have caused the girl to drop dead that day anyway, or might she have survived for years with it, maybe got it diagnosed eventually, had it treated successfully? Did the vaccine exacerbate matters?" and "Does my daughter have this medical condition?" In fact, I notice Malcolm Coles is himself asking these questions:

If it's shown that the vaccine did trigger an underlying health issue, then public health officials and parents (like me) will be in the position of having to balance risks.

Yet he insists that it is grossly irresponsible for newspapers to publish the story that causes people to ask these reasonable questions.

Before this health scare, a lot of people made what I think is also an entirely reasonable point. We have discovered that promiscuity can be seriously bad for women's health, to the extent of killing them. We could therefore strongly advise girls not to be promiscuous. But this idea is such anathema to the libertine Baby-boomers running our country that to do so is regarded as impossible. So we'll provide a vaccine instead. It's not the vaccine that's the problem per se; it's the reasoning behind the declared importance of the vaccination program. And it's easy to see this by noticing that there was a period during which scientists and the Government were aware of the risk from the cancer but had yet to develop a vaccine, and during that period there was not a widespread program of discouraging promiscuity. They clearly don't view the vaccine as merely the better or the more effective option; they view it as the only option. Heaven forbid that parents or teachers might be encouraged to tell their daughters that sleeping around at the age of fourteen isn't a great idea.

As for this popular assertion that it's stupid to suggest that giving someone a vaccine against a fatal STD might encourage them to be more promiscuous — so stupid that only the Christian Right would believe such a thing — I observe that the advent of AIDS had a huge effect on the behaviour of gay men, and it seems highly unlikely that the invention of an HIV vaccine wouldn't have roughly the opposite effect.

And, of course, there are some crazy stupid fanatical anti-vaccine people.

But here's the thing. A lot of the people rationally and sanely worried by this news have the same contempt for the crazy anti-vaccine crowd as the rest of us. To lump them all in together is insulting, and insulting people neither reassures or persuades them. Coles even links to a good example — surely one of the few sane things ever to have appeared in The Guardian's Comment Is Free — and says "I have to ask, however, what the hell this is." It's sane, calm, reasonable common sense, Malcolm. Try not to let it give you histrionics.

Coles is under the false impression that it's the job of newspapers to print what they're damn well told and not to publish anything without rock-solid evidence. Sorry, but no. Every instance in history of journalists uncovering a true story that contradicts the official story has involved publishing stuff that they have been reliably and authoritatively told is false. The price for their being allowed to do that when they're right is that they also be allowed to do that when they're wrong. The alternative is that they do neither.

And that's not even what they've done here. What they've done is to accurately report on the true fact that a girl dropped dead after being given the vaccine, and to reasonably ask whether the two events be related. The relevant authorities and scientists have also asked that same question, which is how they've been able to answer it. Coles has yet to explain why it is that reporting the story is scaremongering but putting the entire batch of vaccine into quarantine isn't.

And then there's the kind of obvious point that there is middle ground between having the vaccine right now and never having the vaccine at all ever: my guess is that a lot of parents decided to withdraw consent for their daughters to be vaccinated while this matter was investigated and will allow their daughters to be vaccinated once they're sure it's safe. This is sensible, reasonable behaviour. It's what I'd do. The vaccination program is aimed at twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, and it is to prevent a disease caused by promiscuity. Exactly how urgent does Malcolm Coles think it is?

Don't hesitate — don't contribute to encouraging others hesitating. Not having this vaccine puts your daughter's life at risk.

Got that? Just hesitating will kill your daughter. And this is from a man complaining about others scaremongering. Will waiting a few weeks or months really be the lethal disaster he claims?

For the record, I support the vaccination program. I agree that it's bad that our rulers will push a national mass vaccination program but would never consider promoting abstinence or fidelity in order to achieve the same health results, but that, for me, is a side issue: I still support all safe vaccination programs, and have written before that this is one of those areas that Libertarians tend to get wrong. No, it's not a matter of personal choice about whether to be immunised, because vaccination works not be immunising individuals but by immunising populations. We should be aiming to drive every disease to extinction, no matter how each disease happens to be transmitted.

But the fact that I support the vaccination program doesn't mean that everyone who opposes it is a moron. And calling them morons and misrepresenting their entirely rational views simply makes you look like a condescending bully.

Oh, and anyone who supports the NHS is a Communist who wants to kill you.

You can tell.

2009-09-22T03:40:00.002+01:00

Genuine conversation from the depths of East Anglia, reported to me first-hand:

"CID are here."

"How can you tell? Aren't they plain-clothes?"

"Well, yes, but they've turned up in polished cars with clean shoes and short hair."

On preparedness.

2009-09-11T17:24:00.000+01:00

Mac-sys are the only Apple-authorised Apple repair people in Northern Ireland, apparently. They're probably really good, but, well...

iPhone is coming

Mac-Sys Ltd are the only Apple ASP in the province and we are well-prepared for the imminent introduction of the iPhone in the UK and Europe.

Right on the front-page of their site. It may say "well-prepared", but it doesn't really imply it, does it?

(I've come across thier site because my Macbook is begubbered. Fine for typing this here blog post, but can't handle audio without collapsing in a fit of coughing. How incredibly irritating.)

Branding.

2009-09-11T16:48:00.000+01:00

Yeah, I know, I've not blogged in ages. If you want more updates, pay me.

Anyway.

The release of Apple's Snow Leopard got me thinking... All the versions of OSX (except maybe not the first release, if I recall correctly) have been named after big cats: Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard... wasn't there a Jaguar at one point? I forget. Anyway, what are they going to switch to when they finally release OS11? Dogs? Ducks? Insects? Wasp, Hornet, Mantis could work. Weevil, not so much. Reptiles? Reptiles have got to be in the running, 'cause then they get to use Komodo, which is a frankly shit-hot name for an OS. Fish? Probably not ducks.

My money — all none of it — is on birds of prey. Eagle, Kestrel, Harrier, Sparrowhawk, Mallard.

More shoddy BBC reporting.

2009-07-11T03:54:00.000+01:00

I'm beginning to get more annoyed by the BBC's appalling slapdash sub-tabloid journalism than I am by their bias.

The latest example is their reporting on the Connectivity story. Here's the opening paragraph, which, in proper journalism, is supposed to quickly summarise the story:

A company will begin offering a directory service from next week that allows people to find the mobile phone numbers of people they don't know.

Now, that immediately set alarm-bells ringing with me, because I'd heard Shona Foster explain the service in an interview. And, indeed, here's the key detail, down in paragraph twenty-three:

In neither case is the mobile phone number given over to the person making the request.

Well, that just makes paragraph one an out-and-out lie, now, doesn't it?

Lies, damn lies, and their place in a scientific debate.

2009-07-07T15:12:00.001+01:00

By now, you've probably come across some of the fuss regarding Simon Singh's being sued by the British Chiropractic Association.

I like Simon Singh. And though I regularly get chiropractic treatment for my spine and joints because it works whilst conventional medicine can't even be bothered, that doesn't mean that I'm not at least as suspicious of the BCA as I am of the BMA. Organisations regularly do silly things, because they're run by the sort of people who run organisations. So, when I first read about this case, I suspected that the BCA were abusing the system. And then I went and found the offending paragraph, and decided that no, they're not. They have a case here.

Here's the paragraph that's landed him in trouble:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The scientific community (whatever that is) are up in arms over this. There's been much complaining that Justice Eady, who has made the preliminary decision that Singh's words could indeed mean what the BCA say they mean, has misinterpreted the word "bogus". But Eady didn't actually rest his decision on the one word "bogus" as strongly as some of his detractors claim. Here are the relevant paragraphs of his decision:

12. What the article conveys is that the BCA itself makes claims to the public as to the efficacy of chiropractic treatment for certain ailments even though there is not a jot of evidence to support those claims. That in itself would be an irresponsible way to behave and it is an allegation that is plainly defamatory of anyone identifiable as the culprit. In this case these claims are expressly attributed to the claimant. It goes further. It is said that despite its outward appearance of respectability, it is happy to promote bogus treatments. Everyone knows what bogus treatments are. They are not merely treatments which have proved less effective than they were at first thought to be, or which have been shown by the subsequent acquisition of more detailed scientific knowledge to be ineffective. Bogus treatments equate to quack remedies; that is to say they are dishonestly presented to a trusting and, in some respects perhaps, vulnerable public as having proven efficacy in the treatment of certain conditions or illnesses, when it is known that there is nothing to support such claims.

13. It is alleged that the claimant promotes the bogus treatments "happily". What that means is not that they do it naively or innocently believing in their efficacy, but rather that they are quite content and, so to speak, with their eyes open to present what are known to be bogus treatments as useful and effective. That is in my judgment the plainest allegation of dishonesty and indeed it accuses them of thoroughly disreputable conduct.

It seems clear to me that what Eady is looking at is the whole sentence. And, frankly, though I think he's wrong about the word "bogus" in general, I think he's right about that sentence. For me, what does it is following "This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession" with "and yet ...". That "yet" means that what follows is in opposition to what precedes it. It really can't mean anything other than "If they were respectable people, they wouldn't be doing this." And that is what gives the rest of the sentence the context that makes Eady right about the words "bogus" and "happily".

Even Ben Goldacre concedes:

technically there is a reading of simon’s piece that suggests he thinks the BCA deliberately and knowingly peddle quackery.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that Singh simply isn't a very good writer:

I would have to offer an apology for an article that I still think is reasonable and important according to its intended and obvious meaning.

One might think that, by this point in the proceedings, Singh might have realised that his intended meaning is not as obvious as all that. It is clearly, by definition, debatable.

And there's an interesting point here from a Metafilter commenter called Mutant:

The Woolf reforms of 1999 set forth a structure of early discussion and exchange of information to determine the validity of complaints. This framework and the obligations / responsibilities of all parties is known as the "pre action protocol on defamation proceedings".

Litigation is discouraged and both settlement out of court - "an offer of amends" in response to a "letter of demand" - as well as mediation strongly suggested. Suing now without following this protocol every step of the way will negatively bias the judge and will reflect in his or her instructions to the jury (all libel / slander cases in the UK are heard by a jury).

In short, it will harm the BCA's case not to have made reasonable offers to Singh to settle this out of court. But he has repeatedly publicly stated that he refuses to apologise for the piece.

Now, a lot of people want to keep libel laws out of science, and with good reason. There certainly have been cases, well documented by Ben Goldacre, where organisations have attempted to use libel laws — especially English libel laws, which are crap — to defend their dubious scientific claims by stifling those who point out that they're wrong. But this is not one of those cases. The BCA have not sued Singh for what he said about the evidence for chiropractic; they've sued him for what he said about the personal character of the chiropractors in the BCA.

Which is probably why The Guardian's initial offer to placate them didn't work: it was based on completey the wrong premise:

Initially The Guardian newspaper tried its best to settle the matter out of court by making what seemed to be a very generous offer. There was an opportunity for the BCA to write a 500 word response to my article to be published in The Guardian, allowing the BCA to present its evidence. There was also the offer of a clarification in the "Corrections and Clarifications" column, which would have pointed out: "The British Chiropractic have told us they have substantial evidence supporting the claim they make on their website that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying. (Beware the spinal trap, page 26, April 19)."

It seems clear now that what they needed to be offering was to say in no uncertain terms that members of the BCA are not fraudsters. But it just didn't occur to them, because they were fixated on the idea that this is all about scientific evidence. It's not. Such an offer would not necessarily have been accepted, of course, but it would at least have had a better chance. The BCA have said that they didn't just leap into court over this, but tried to resolve the matter more informally first; they have been forced, they say, to resort to libel proceedings because anything less was being ignored. And, reading Singh's defence today, this is hardly surprising, as he still doesn't seem to understand how it is that he has actually pissed the BCA off.

So yes, by all means, please, someone reform British libel law: it badly needs it. The reforms should make scientific claims a no-go area for libel and should make libel suits considerably less attractive for those who are wrong and know they're wrong but wish to shut their critics up. They should also, as Singh correctly points out, cost a damn sight less money to the defense. But what reform shouldn't do is make this sort of case impossible. When someone very publicly accuses you of fraud or dishonesty, you should be able to sue them — no matter what line of work they're in. It would be a terrible idea to simply make "But I'm a scientist!" a valid defense.

And the other reason that such cases shouldn't be put out of the reach of libel law is that a bunch of concerned scientists should get together and sue Jeni Barnett's arse clean off. Because she didn't just say that MMR vaccine is unnecessary. She didn't just say that it can cause horrible side-effects. She said that it's a conspiracy. She said that it's all about profit. She suggested that information about MMR has been suppressed by the powers that be. Which rather implies that doctors and scientists know that MMR is bad for children but push it on them anyway, for the money. Barnett basically accused large numbers of people of being, essentially, monstrous — and she presented this accusation to millions of listeners. If I were a doctor who'd given the jab to a few hundred kids, I'd rather resent the implication that I'm deliberately harming them for money. If you're in the doctoring line of work, that sort of accusation could be pretty bad for your career. I firmly believe that a few dozen such doctors should pool some money, retain a lawyer, force Barnett to issue a full public apology for such a horrendous slur, and take some of her money off her.

And then move on to the next malicious idiot.

Scientists as a group are wrong about this. They think that all these debates are scientific, which is why they tend to lose — we've got a measles epidemic and some dead kids now to show just how badly scientists lost the MMR fight. Yes, keep science out of the libel courts: it's not the way to present evidence. But recognise that not every claim made about science is a scientific claim. A lot of these claims are simply personal attacks on the character of scientists, and, by letting such claims stand, scientists do plenty to encourage an environment in which such attacks are popular and acceptable.

This is not about science. It's about character. Your character is important; it's what makes the difference between good and bad people. And, if the public think you're bad people, they won't follow your advice. This is getting even more serious now: the anti-vaccine crowd's influence has moved on to swine flu: people are going to "swine-flu parties" to deliberately spread it around, making it more prevalent, making it more virulent, killing people. Letting maniacs portray scientists as evil money-grubbing sadistic experimenters-on-children with impunity has had bad consequences.

Your character is important and incredibly valuable. So defend it.

Result.

2009-07-04T00:56:00.002+01:00

Excellent!

That bloody woman with her bloody kids, who only ever got votes because of her looks anyway, has finally been hounded out of politics by the smear campaign and the personal attacks on her children and the attempt to bankrupt her via frivolous legal complaints. Took her long enough to get the hint. Look, dear, politics isn't for jumped-up wombs like you. Stay in the kitchen. Have some more kids. Don't bother us again with your so-called "ideas". All that thinking was clearly overheating your brain.

At least, that's what all the feminists are saying.

Hiding.

2009-06-28T20:32:00.002+01:00

A milestone, this. I'm going to disagree with Natalie The Wise, because she's made the usual Libertarian case for why the state shouldn't stop people wearing burqas:

If you want to keep your freedom to drink what you please on the public street then fight for the freedom to wear what you please on the public street.

But what about public drunkeness, then, and the fear and misery of those whose nights are blighted by drunks fighting at their windows and pissing in their gardens? And what about the cloth-entombed women, projecting an image of both slavery and Islamic aggression, who may or may not have chosen to wear the black bag?

My answer is substantially the same to both social problems: as a society we have chosen to deny ourselves the very tools of private social action (no, that is not a contradiction in terms) that could make things better.

For decades we have denied ourselves disapproval. For decades we have denied ourselves property rights. For decades we have denied ourselves the right to free association, which necessarily includes the right not to associate.

These tools are the ones we have the right to use. They are also the right tools for the job. They, unlike the tools of coercion, will not turn in our hands and cut us.

The burqa is not a matter of giving Muslim women the same clothing freedoms as the rest of us; it is a matter of making them a specific exception to various laws and regulations which already exist. There are lots of things I am not allowed to do when wearing a mask, and quite rightly, in my opinion: going through airport security, loitering in a bank, walking into a school playground. This is Northern Ireland. Imagine what would happen if I were to walk into a school wearing a balaclava. Anyone going to protect my clothing "rights"? I bloody hope not. Yet a polite request to a Muslim woman to remove her mask while on the premises would land the headteacher in court. She doesn't have equal rights; she has extra ones.

And sure, yes, as I've said before, we need more public disapproval. The word "judgmental" should not be derogatory. But, for that to work, you need to be dealing within a civilised framework. When it comes to the burqa, we are dealing with — in some cases — and, for obvious reasons, we have no way of knowing until it's too late which cases they are — people who will hurt us, even cut us dead in the street. We're not discussing a civilised debate here.

In general, I would say that strong private institutions are a bulwark against the type of creeping Islamification - or capture by other minority groups - that concern many of the commenters to this thread ... Contrast that with the position of state institutions, which includes state laws. These are a much more realistic target for capture by determined minorities. If, say 3% of the population feel really strongly about some issue and 97% are apathetic it is actually quite a realistic proposition for the 3% to get laws passed to steer things their way. Much easier than out-purchasing the other 97%, certainly.

A good point well made, but it's already happened via another method: violence. I don't think anyone really knows what proportion of Muslims in Britain are extremist Islamists willing to perpetrate sometimes lethal violence against infidels and apostates, but it doesn't need to be large: just a small handful of violent lunatics is enough to unleash enough violence to create enough news stories to change all our behaviour. If I'm running a shop and a group of people walk in all wearing burqas and I don't like it, sure, I could express my disapproval. But, of course, I'm going to be asking myself: Just how much do I disapprove? Enough to get a beating? Enough to risk an angry mob storming my shop? Enough to be killed? Enough to risk my family? And chances are I'll hold my tongue — even if the people who've entered my shop are in fact comepletely reasonable sane people who don't even want to wear bloody burqas and whose reaction, had I spoken up, would actually have just been to have a nice chat about it. Most people aren't likely to risk finding that out.

So a small group have changed the behaviour of the majority to accommodate their extremism. And this is exactly the sort of situation that we have a state with a police force for. We need a law to be passed — not necessarily a burqa ban, but some sort of law — in order to get back to the state we should be in: the state where civilised discussion is possible.

The commenter Ian B asks:

How does one define when citizens can cover their faces? Below a certain temperature? When it's snowing? It's not as if you can really define what a burka is.

Those who wear the burqa, even if they actually want to, don't just feel like wearing it on the street quite a lot. They insist on wearing it at all times, often to the extent of taking action against anyone who asks to see their face. When the rest of us cover our faces for whatever reason, the same is not true.

So don't define what a burqa is. Just apply the same rule to everyone: sure, you can hide your face because of the cold or because you're disfigured or even because of your religion, on the condition that you reveal your face when asked. And allow anyone who dislikes face-hiding to refuse entry. Banks can refuse entry to motorcyclists who refuse to remove their helmets. Let them refuse entry to anyone else, whetever their religion, who refuses to remove any kind of mask. At the moment, they can't.

That's one solution, but I'd go a bit further. There are a number of laws which are simply codifications of our society's social norms and conventions. This particular one has never been codified up till now because it hasn't been needed, but wearing a mask in public certainly has been considered for hundreds of years in Britain to be the behaviour of criminals. The big change here is not the proposal to ban the burqa: that'll just be affirming the long-established norms. The big change happened a few years ago, and was the decision to protect the "right" of certain people to wear masks at all times. There is no such right in Britain.

I am reminded of the seatbelt law. I know most libertarians will vigorously defend their "right" to drive without a seatbelt. Personally, I don't think anyone has a right to leap out in front of moving traffic, and I don't accept "But I've just been hurled through my own windscreen" as an excuse. But that's not the point. As anyone who's tried to put on a seatbelt as a passenger in a country without this law will know, the problem isn't one of freedom of choice. The problem is drivers who refuse to allow their passengers to wear seatbelts, because they consider it an insult to their driving skills or masculinity or penis size or whatever. The important effect of the seatbelt law was to allow people who had always wanted to wear seatbelts to do so when being given lifts by wankers. In a typical family car, there's one driver and three passengers, so the number of people whose freedom was increased is greater than the number whose freedom was decreased. Imperfect, sure, but that's humanity for you.

Similarly, the problem with the burqa is coercion. We all know it. Ban masks in public, and all those women being coerced are given freedom without being given the blame for asking for freedom. Great. Meanwhile, a tiny number of people are prevented from doing something that has never ever been socially accepted in this country and are denied a right that they never had. Boo hoo. More people will gain freedom than will lose it.

Ignoramuses.

2009-06-27T01:49:00.003+01:00

This article about upcoming car technology is very interesting and well worth reading, but the writer, Tom Evans, displays a huge glaring splash of ignorance the moment he veers away from the topic of cars:

Another very clever aspect is the harnessing of the 'wisdom of the crowd' -- how the actions of large numbers of people can help others make decisions -- a way of thinking that has grown up in the internet age. Examples abound, with perhaps one of the best examples being Amazon.com's 'people who bought this book also bought that one'.

No, this way of thinking didn't grow up in the Internet age. It's been around, and very successful, for thousands of years. And that Amazon example is not a good one, really. There are far better examples from the Net, but why bother with any of them when by far the best example is also the oldest and therefore the one people will be most familiar with: pricing.

Honestly, some people.

What is race, anyway?

2009-06-27T01:36:00.002+01:00

Well, it ain't this:

The school, in Brent, northwest London, rejected the 12-year-old child because his mother converted to Judaism at a Progressive rather than Orthodox synagogue. M’s father is Jewish, but custom dictates that the faith line passes through the mother.

The judges said that “the requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act”.

In. Sane.

In case you missed the implications of that, what England's distinguished legal scholars have decided is that it's possible to change your ethnicity by conversion.

Force of habit.

2009-06-27T01:27:00.002+01:00

As we all know, news broadcasters in America use helicopters. It's a perfectly good idea: you can get superb footage of car-chases and gunfights and fires and floods and things behind police cordons. But, at some point, it seems to have become more automatic than considered: they just send their helicopters to whatever the biggest story is right now.

I noticed this at the start of the Michael Jackson coverage yesterday — the very start, when no-one was sure whether he was dead or not and the crowd outside the hospital was still small.

"Michael Jackson's been rushed to hospital and reported dead? He's in the hospital now, either being treated or prepared for the morgue? We have to find out what's going on in there. Quick! Send the chopper to get some footage of the hospital's roof."

And then, having got that footage, they broadcast it. For ages.

Odd.

Accident?

2009-06-27T01:18:00.004+01:00

Either this is a brilliant and lucky accident, or someone called KateX has carefully analysed the way entries in The Telegraph's online dating service are summarised in the ads that appear on the main site, and has written her spiel accordingly:

No, I couldn't help myself: I clicked and went and looked. The next word is "book." Must be a lot of disappointed single male Telegraph-readers out there.

Damning with faint praise.

2009-06-22T17:11:00.000+01:00

I have to admit that I felt a spot of pride when the Evil Totalitarian Bastards Of Iran named Britain as Enemy Number One. Yes, not America; us. We are now a greater Satan than The Great Satan. Yay! Gordon Brown must be doing something right.

Fans of Barack "Bloody" Obama, take note: when the tyrant sends armed thugs out onto the streets to shoot dead any jumped-up slaves with the temerity to ask for freedom, saying "That's not very nice" is the bare minimum that a democratic world leader ought to be able to manage. Not "Oh, what an incredibly vigorous debate they're having." Your guy is so deficient that Gordon Brown — that's Gordon Brown, weak leader of a dying government, with no democratic mandate as such, famous for being a bit of a nonentity, frankly — Gordon Brown has managed to be significantly more important and powerful and morally right than him on the world stage, by merely saying the bare minimum that any half-way civilised person would say. He didn't even follow up his words with a threat of action. Yet he still upset the evil child-murdering bastards more than Obama did.

Quit while you're behind.

Aye, right.

2009-06-20T15:26:00.003+01:00

Funnily enough, I got another tattoo yesterday, a few hours before reading this story:

Rouslan Toumaniantz said today that Kimberley Vlaminck 'absolutely' agreed she wanted 56 stars tattooed on the left side of her face.

But now the 18-year-old is suing Toumaniantz, claiming she had asked him for only three stars - and had fallen asleep during the procedure, waking up to a nightmare in her Belgian hometown of Courtrai.

So it is very fresh in my mind that... ah, how can I put this? It hurts like buggery. Sure, some people have higher pain thresholds than others. But no-one just drifts off and has a nap while having their chin tattooed. There's not much flesh on the chin; the needle would be practically scraping bone. It's not a bloody massage.

Toumaniantz claimed Kimberley was happy with the work when she left his shop in Coutrai but changed her mind when her father saw the stars.

His version just sounds so much more plausible than hers.

As an aside, I have to say that the guy's done a beautiful job and Kimberley looks gorgeous. Just a shame she's... well, you know.... She's already demonstrated her propensity to sue people, so I'll not publish my thoughts on her personality.

Not sure I could be bothered travelling all the way to Belgium for my next tattoo — especially since I live next door to an excellent tattooist, which is a tad more convenient — but, if you're in the Courtrai area, it might be worth popping in.

'I maintain that she absolutely agreed that I tattoo those 56 stars on the left side of her face,' he told newspaper La Derniere Heure.

'A witness, a woman who was present, has already been questioned by police, and she confirms it.

'But be that as it may: Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client. There is a way to remove the tattoos with the help of a laser. I accept to pay for half the cost.'

That's £4250 he's offering, just as a goodwill gesture, compared to the original cost of the tattoo of £55. That may be the best customer service I've ever seen. What a thoroughly decent guy.

Fantastic.

2009-06-19T03:52:00.003+01:00

Nothing to do with Iran, this:

Carlos Owens had handled all kinds of machines as an army mechanic, but he always dreamed of using those skills for one project: his own "mecha,” a giant metal robot that could mirror the movements of its human pilot.

Owens, 31, began building an 18-foot-tall, one-ton prototype at his home in Wasilla, Alaska, in 2004.

He didn't half. Go see the photo.

He foresees mechas having uses in the military and the construction industry but acknowledges that right now they’re best suited to entertainment. The first application he has in mind: mecha-vs.-mecha battles, demolition-derby style.

OK, I love this guy.

The nature of democracy. Again.

2009-06-18T03:52:00.002+01:00

Here, in passing, I mentioned one of the greatest but often overlooked advantages of democracy:

Even if it's true that Bush is only doing what he's doing as part of a secret plot by Big Oil to take over the world, or by a sinister cabal to establish a New World Order, so what? That only actually matters in a tyranny. In a democracy, whatever our would-be leaders' true motivation, they have to get our support to get their way. And it doesn't matter whether they're lying about their motivations, because, when we vote, we're not. So, even if Bush didn't really give a damn about the Iraqi people, it didn't matter, because, for him to do what he was trying to do, he needed the votes of tens of millions of Americans. What matters is whether those Americans cared about the Iraqi people.

And now look what's happening:

Lots of folks argue — including President Obama — that Mousavi isn't that different from Ahmadinejad on issues like Israel and Iran's nuclear program and so why make such a fuss? I think this is an awfully static analysis of the situation. Sure, if the election had gone swimmingly and Mousavi had won, he might have been the dutiful Egon Krenz of the Mullahcracy, with some window dressing reforms to placate the masses. Or he might have done better than that. Who knows? But all of that is academic now.

Moreover, that debate is a little annoying because it tends to support the idea that this was a legitimate election in the first place. Mousavi was a handpicked hack. His leadership of the reform forces is by default or as Michael Ledeen put it, "He is a leader who has been made into a revolutionary by a movement that grew up around him." At this point the question is, do the people of Iran succeed or does the clerical politburo and its henchmen succeed. If the people succeed, the regime is in real trouble. It's amazing how so many observers doubt something the regime itself manifestly knows. If these protests weren't a threat to the regime and the established theocratic order the regime wouldn't be shooting people.

Mousavi didn't intend to be a reformer. But now he's been turned into one by his supporters. Democracy has this power, not just to choose its leaders, but to shape them.

I was one of those people who tended to disagree with Bush over the value of democracy. I thought that you needed freedom and a stable society first, then true democracy could take root. While he called for democracy, I called for liberty. And Iran was always a good example of why mere voting by itself isn't enough.

Or so I thought. We're seeing an evil and brutal regime under serious threat from the results of the sham elections that took place inside its rigged system. The dictatorship rejected hundreds of would-be presidential candidates, allowing only those whose unequivocal loyalty it could rely upon to stand. And it doesn't matter: the people are forcing their views into the system and into the candidate. Mousavi no longer has much choice in the matter: he's a reformer whether he likes it or not.

Looks like Bush was right after all: democracy can lead to liberty.

Reporters still not reporting.

2009-06-15T14:48:00.002+01:00

I couldn't help but be amused by the news reports that there are allegations of election-rigging in iran. This is news? Obviously the election's rigged: that's built into the Iranian system.

What our news reporters would have reported, if they could still be bothered with thought or honesty or both, is that there are allegations of extra unauthorised election-rigging that isn't of an approved type.

Talking of good writing...

2009-06-09T04:06:00.001+01:00

Probably the best writer in the English language today is Michael Marshall Smith. And now he has a blog. This is a Good Thing.

He writes great stories, but the blog is a stark reminder of the fact that his excellent plots are just icing on the cake. It's just his prose that is inherently good, no matter what he's writing about.

For instance, thousands of people have complained about what's happened to British rubbish collection over the last few years. But none have done it like this:

When I was a kid, bin men had an aura, a mystique, something of the night about them: fierce, semi-mythical beings who came with the dawn and hefted sacks of household trash into the grinding back-ends of their trucks, before rumbling ominously away. Their speech was a sequence of impenetrable grunts and howls; their clothes looked as though they had been worn for decades, or secreted like outer skins. The only contact normal citizens had with these creatures was the ‘Christmas box’: a seasonal cash offering given to the member of the tribe that walked most convincingly on hind legs — this ritual having (to my childhood mind, at least) the flavour of a bribe to ensure that the bin men not sneak back in the night to wreak havoc upon the houses they serviced, stealing one of the occupants (or their children) and dragging them away to a dread kingdom given over to the very hungriest of ogres and trolls.

....

So what were we supposed to do? Call the council, we were told. And do what — ask for them to send some men instead? Or command them to use the big rusted key to open the shed at the back of the depot, where lurks a last remnant of old skool bin men, chained to a post in darkness, fed with scraps of carrion, kept for the occasions when a profligate household needed a slightly-heavier-than-usual bag carried a few feet from curb to cart?

Buying the man's books is not something you're likely to regret.

Uninventing the wheel.

2009-06-08T16:43:00.001+01:00

I don't want Iran or North Korea to have nuclear weapons. It's just a bad, bad idea. But the thing about atomic bombs is that they are now sixty-year-old technology. As you'd expect, after sixty years, they're not particularly high technology either. Not like they used to be. Schoolkids can tell you how to make them. It's only getting hold of the materials that makes building them a bit tricky. And how long is that going to last?

Imagine if we decided to stop, say, the Mongolians from developing mobile phones, or microchips, or solar panels, or satellites, or lasers or holograms or any of a whole bunch of things which may have been around a while but are still far younger than atom bombs. Could we have done it? Indefinitely? Does that sound like a realistic project?

Even if we do stop today's psycho nutters from getting hold of the things (which would rather require Barack bloody Obama wanting to stop them), we're just putting off the inevitable. Soon enough, an extremist maniac will have a fission bomb, if we're lucky, or a fusion bomb if we're not.

So, for me, all this talk of whether the Ayatollahs and Kim Jong-Il ought to have nuclear weapons rather misses the point. Let's assume they will have them. What then?

All I can see are three options.

One, try Mutually Assured Destruction again. To be fair, it totally worked in the Cold War, and seems to have kept Pakistan and India merely at each other's throats rather than dancing around in showers of blood. But it requires two things to work. It requires both parties to be basically rational and want their people to survive. The Iranians used their own children to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq War and are rather fond of martyrdom. Kim Jong-Il is batshit crazy. And it also requires a lack of deniability. As the Sudanese are all too aware, the world's powers have become so legalistic that all you need is the faintest hint that you might not be lying when you say "It weren't me!" and they'll refuse to act. Everyone knows how you destroy London: you put the nuke in a car and deny everything. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are traceable, and therefore passe.

Two, you can ensure that any countries that do get hold of nuclear weapons find their leadership class suddenly lacking in insanity. This can only really be achieved by getting rid of the insane ones. This is my favoured option, I don't mind saying, but just look at the fuss over the last few years over the US overthrowing a man who weaponised aflatoxin — aflatoxin, for crying out loud — and replacing his brutal murderous regime with the region's second-freest society. Fair to say, it wouldn't go down well.

And then there's option three: die.

Great.

Again with the Steyn. Enough, already.

2009-06-08T16:27:00.000+01:00

The thing about Mark Steyn is that he's a great writer. I find it puzzling that so many people who disagree with him feel obliged to slag off his writing. One of my favourite writers is Julie Birchill, and when she's wrong, she's really bloody Wrong — but still worth reading, 'cause she writes the wrongness so well. Steyn is as good as Birchill, if not better.

Anyway, all that's a mere preamble to this:

The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch.

Respect.

2009-06-08T00:44:00.002+01:00

Typical. No sooner does David Cameron do the impossible and persuade me to vote Tory than the Ulster Unionists screw it all up.

My MP is Lady Sylvia Hermon, a thoroughly decent person who is likely to get my vote by dint of that decency. Since the last Northern-Irish election, she has been the Ulster Unionist Party's only MP. Any party with half a brain between them would realise that this makes her the most important person in the party — or, at the very least, up there in the top three or four. Not the UUP. Every time you hear anything on the news about the UUP, it's a bunch of old men discussing important things, with the only member of their party able to wield any actual power in the UK's Parliament conspicuous by her absence. It's been very difficult not to get the impression that they view her as a bit of an embarassment, really.

And it turns out that that impression has been correct. The UUP have made an alliance with the Conservative Party — which is probably a good move in all sorts of ways, except that it turns out they've done it without consulting Hermon.

Let's just recap that, for those who missed the significance. The UUP have agreed to merge with the Conservatives. This means that all UUP MPs will from now on be Conservative MPs, voting with the Conservatives. All UUP MPs is Lady Hermon; there are no others. She wasn't consulted. The UUP leadership are all rather huffy about it and have clearly been caught off guard by some jumped-up little woman not doing what she's told, but a Conservative spokesman seemed quite happy to just call it as he saw it and accused the UUP of screwing up their people-management. Mind you...

It is understood that [her] feeling the Conservatives have little understanding of Ulster politics, compounded by discussions with one senior Tory who repeatedly referred to “Irish MPs” and Mr Cameron’s decision to wear a green tie to a unionist event, has not lessened over time.

And, now she's been told to vote with the Conservatives, she's refused, announced she'll be leaving the party, and decided to stand as an independent at the next election. And, for that, she's got my vote. Who cares if she supports Gordon Brown? He can't rely on her support; he has to talk her into it. She's a good person, and she's now shown that she'll refuse to be pushed around by anyone.

At the present time, I can't see myself standing under a Conservative banner. If my party chooses to move to call themselves by a different name, I'm terribly sorry and terribly disappointed by that but I remain an Ulster Unionist. That was certainly my mandate and I've loved serving the people of North Down. They have stood by me through the most difficult of times and if they choose and wish me to serve them I would do my very best to do that.

Lady Hermon, consider the box ticked.

Cognitive dissonance.

2009-06-08T00:28:00.003+01:00

OK, two things.

Whenever anyone mentions the European Elections, I point out that, no, they're the EU Elections. People's response to this tends to be dismissive — one person even said to me, ah, it is Europe really. Now, the EU is to Europe what the UK is to the British Isles.

So my first question is: why is it that these same people, who insist that the EU is Europe, would not simply shrug it off if I were to say that Dublin is in Britain?

As you may have seen in the news, the BNP have won a seat in the EU Elections and are probably going to win at least one more. A lot of people are very upset about this. Thing is, though, that the EU "Parliament" is not actually a parliament, as it has no legislative power. And, what with its having no legislative power, it wouldn't actually matter if the ghost of Adolf Hitler got elected on a Stalinist ticket. MEPs can't do a damned thing except talk for money. Power over the EU resides in the Commission, to which no BNP members have been or are ever likely to be admitted.

So my second question is: why is it that the people who are most upset by the BNP's winning a seat tend to be made more angry, not less, if you remind them that said seat isn't in a real parliament?

He's only been and gone and bloody done it.

2009-05-14T02:35:00.003+01:00

Up till yesterday, I'd been second to no-one in my contempt for the politics of David Cameron, a man whose shallow principle-less opinion-poll-based gimicky leadership has done a hell of a lot to diminish the chances of the British public having an actual choice in an election.

Well, yesterday, he got my vote.

(And a fat lot of bloody good it'll do him, since I live in Northern Ireland. But hey.)

It was interesting to note, looking at the expenses that grabbed the headlines and the respective MP's defenses of them, just how obvious it was which MPs had simply made ordinary mistakes and had put them right, which MPs had made reasonable claims which only looked a bit dodgy, and which MPs were blatantly bloody at it: the ones who haven't been taking the piss out of the system and us all are the ones who don't make their primary defence the fact that their claims were within Parliamentary rules.

Brown:

No 10 said the two shared a cleaner who worked in both their flats. Andrew Brown paid her and was reimbursed for his share of the cost.

Sounds reasonable.

Straw:

He spotted the mistaken council tax claim himself and repaid the money himself. ... "It is an error, which obviously I wish hadn't happened, but in circumstances in which I was incredibly busy during that period - that is not an excuse, it is just an explanation."

Fair enough.

Mandelson:

"The fact is that these allowances would not have been paid if they weren't within the rules"

At it.

Darling:

"The claims were made within House of Commons rules"

At it.

Prescott:

"Every expense was within the rules of the House of Commons on claiming expenses at the time."

At it.

(I have to admit to a spot of sympathy for Prescott. He's a big man, and yes, loo seats will break. That sort of wear and tear is at least arguably a legitimate claim, and it's a shame that it affords the public such a perfect opportunity to take the piss. Or, rather, it would be a shame if it weren't for the fact that the corrupt bastard also claimed for that vital living expense of having mock-Tudor beams stuck onto the front of his house. So he's going to Hell for his corruption and his taste.)

Blears:

Ms Blears said she had complied with both Commons and Revenue and Customs rules

At it.

(Incidentally, Blears has decided to cement her reputation as an idiot by attempting to make voters feel better about her by drawing their attention to the fact that Capital Gains Tax, for her, is optional. It's compulsory for the rest of us, Hazel. Oh, and tax is a percentage. Have you not noticed the way your colleagues are paying back 100% of their dodgy claims? Do you really think you can come out looking good by making a big grand public gesture — waving the cheque on camera, no less — of doing conspicuously less than everyone else? You're really not doing yourself any favours. Stop digging.)

Follett:

"I claimed it, it's within the rules and I have no comment to make."

At it and obnoxious with it.

Woodward:

"If I try to make almost any defence of our collective position - or my position - it looks terrible."

Nice try, but actually no. Plenty of your colleagues have made perfectly reasonable defences which aren't pissing us off, because they appear to be honest. Since you're part of the organisation trying to force this damnable database onto us, I'm sure you'll appreciate that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

And all this is why I am so impressed with Cameron's very simple statement of the truth:

"I don’t care if they were within the rules," he said of the expenses claims, "they were wrong."

Damn right.

And he's decided to bypass (and, let's face it, politically completely out-maneouvre) the rest of Parliament by not waiting to see whether their self-absorbed and self-interested faffing ever comes up with a decent solution, and instead has announced new — and incredibly strict — rules especially for Tory MPs. He's actually not going to let them claim for food any more. Food! Now, that is a legitimate expense.

Now, yes, he should have done it sooner. The charitable view is that he really was naive enough to trust his fellow MPs to be as honourable as they like to call themselves. More likely, this is more of that opportunism that's got him where he is today and has previously earned him my contempt. But the fact is that, this time, it's worked. It had to, eventually, I suppose. His unprincipled vote-chasing has run him smack into a bloody great principle. And he's stuck with it now.

I am reminded of one of the more interesting responses to Bush Derangement Syndrome — it was a defense of democracy, in fact, and I wish I could remember who wrote it. Might have been Jonah Goldberg. Anyway, the point is this. Even if it's true that Bush is only doing what he's doing as part of a secret plot by Big Oil to take over the world, or by a sinister cabal to establish a New World Order, so what? That only actually matters in a tyranny. In a democracy, whatever our would-be leaders' true motivation, they have to get our support to get their way. And it doesn't matter whether they're lying about their motivations, because, when we vote, we're not. So, even if Bush didn't really give a damn about the Iraqi people, it didn't matter, because, for him to do what he was trying to do, he needed the votes of tens of millions of Americans. What matters is whether those Americans cared about the Iraqi people. And there was a lot of evidence that they did. It only matters whether our leaders lie about facts.

So I don't even care why Cameron has said what he's said and done what he's done in the last couple of days. He's right, and he's doing what's right. Sure, you've got to worry about how consistently a man with no principles can be right, but this thing's big enough for the rest not to matter so much. And it's also big enough to significantly shape the behaviour of the party. Overnight, the Tories have become the most principled party, and clearly not because they wanted to, but because they've been forced into it by Cameron. Well, OK, then. I'll take him as Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, Stephen Fry, in the course of one interview, lost pretty much all the respect I had for him. Fry's logic is very simple and very stupid. Journalists are corrupt. This story of corruption has been brought to light by journalists. Therefore it's a non-story. Presumably, he took the same attitude to the news of Robert Maxwell's corruption. Yeah, thought so.

In answer to your accusation, Stephen, that you so carelessly hurled at the whole damn world, no, I don't fiddle my expenses. I'm quite scrupulous about them, and have previously done, with no fear of opprobrium to motivate me, what MPs have only done when dragged through the media kicking and screaming: suggested to my employer that they not pay certain items if there's any doubt about them. And in answer to your astonishingly profound cluelessness, the reason people are pissed off about this — and yes, they are pissed off; it's not just a load of invented hype by the media — is that (a) the money the MPs are fiddling is ours, so obviously we give more of a damn than when some journalist claims for a crate of champagne they never really drank, (b) MPs get to write their own rules about what they may claim, and (c) MPs have passed legislation that stops us the plebian bloody public from doing exactly what they've been doing and written specific exclusions to that legislation for themselves. And then they try to exclude themselves from the Freedom of Information Act, too, to stop us finding out. It stinks. I might add that Stephen Fry usually works for the BBC, so most of the money that he so happily tells us he's stealing is also coming from us taxpayers. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that he's so staunchly supporting politicians just now.

Here's the thing. If I were to cheat on my expenses, I would be cheating my employers, who are the same people who make the rules governing my expenses and who check my expenses — in other words, the people who are potentially being cheated get to take measures to ensure that they're not. Furthermore, my employers will go under if they don't make a profit, and so they take reasonable measures to control the expense claims and keep them reasonable. If expenses start to hit their profits, they'll make fewer things allowable and cut back on our salaries. And if one of their customers refuses to pay for the cost of our expenses, well... they lose a customer. Big deal.

When MPs cheat on their expenses, they are cheating the taxpaying public, who do not get any say in the expense-claiming process — the people being cheated cannot do anything to stop it happening. The rules governing the expenses are written by MPs themselves, and their expense claims are checked by a wing of their own organisation, comprised of people who face no prospect of any sort of loss if the expense claims are too large and who therefore have no interest in keeping them under control. If MPs' expenses get so big that they start to cost far too much money, well, hell, there's plenty more tax where that came from, eh? And if any of use refuse to pay the cost of their expenses, they send us to jail.

It's sad to see how an intelligent man such as Stephen Fry can be reduced by his own blind loyalty to the Labour Party to such utter fucking stupidity that he can't even see, far less understand, such simple and obvious distinctions as these.

And there goes my chance of ever appearing on QI. Another ambition bites the dust.

Kate Hoey gets it, bless 'er. Maybe she'll make a decent Leader of the Opposition.

Bad Bad Science.

2009-04-23T04:39:00.002+01:00

Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site is excellent in a great many ways. His columns are undoubtedly the best thing in The Guardian, possibly ever. He does a brilliant job of ripping apart the dodgy and often dangerous pseudoscientific claims of charlatans. He, like, totally analyses the heck out of those guys. And most of the commenters on his blog are quite astoundingly knowledgable about a whole bunch of scientific fields. It's probably the only blog on the Web where it is always worth reading the whole comment thread of every post. Go science!

And yet, there's a problem.

Firstly, Ben sounds like the kind of man I'd like to have as a GP myself. He happily admits to being a geek who trawls through as much medical literature as he can get his hands on, analyses the results of studies, etc. This is evidence-based medicine, and he understands it. And he devotes a lot of time to trying to understand why it is that patients go to see quack doctors instead of proper scientific ones, and his answer is never "Because they're thick!" But the point I have never seen him address is that a major contributing factor to people losing faith in conventional medicine is that most GPs are not like him. As practised by your average GP, conventional medicine is based on assuming all your patients are morons and hypochondriacs, failing to read their notes, and not bothering to keep up with scientific discoveries when there are perfectly good baseless prejudices to use instead.

After all the crap that happened to Vic two years ago, our local surgery made her one of their highest-priority patients and told her that she should always call if she had any chest pains. Two of the GPs have since retired and one of the new ones clearly can't be arsed reading her notes, has misdiagnosed her, has given her a test which the hospital later told us was pointless, and told her when she had serious breathing problems that she was just trying to avoid going to work. There's a big heap of evidence in his office — Vic's notes — and his medicine is not based on it.

I'm a migraine sufferer. Long after the invention of Sumatriptan-based drugs, doctors would still tell me to avoid eating cheese and chocolate (an old wive's tale) and stop wasting precious NHS resources when they had real patients to see.

In short, there is, in practice, a big difference between conventional medicine and evidence-based medicine.

The other problem with Bad Science is caused by Ben's writing for The Guardian. For all their scientific knowledge, his commenters are mostly Guardian-readers, and they tend to be a tad intolerant of dissenting political opinions.

For instance, if you can be bothered reading it, here is an excellent example: in a piece about screening for Down's Syndrome, Ben wrote that it's wrong to speak out against aborting babies because they've got Down's because that makes the decision all the more harrowing for the parents. Now, Ben's main criticism of the stories circulating at the time was that their statistics were wrong and the claims they were making were therefore false. But he concluded with this:

If I terminate a Down syndrome pregnancy, is that proof that society is not a warm caring place, and that I am not a warm caring person? For many parents the decision to terminate will be a difficult and upsetting one, especially later in life, and stories like this make a pretty challenging backdrop for making it. This would have been true even if their figures had been correct

While I have plenty of sympathy for parents in that situation, this isn't science; it's an attempt to stop a debate via emotional blackmail. Even if the claims are true, we shouldn't make them because... well, because they make it more difficult to support the Left's pro-abortion agenda. Quite what that's got to do with science is never explained; it is assumed.

Then some genuine disabled people turned up in the comments and proceeded to argue that they had a teensy bit of a problem with the prevailing attitude that having a child like them was some sort of disaster to be avoided if at all possible. This seems to me like such an obvious point that it's quite amazing how many evidence-obsessed scientists simply couldn't get their damned heads around it. Brainduck — a blogger previously praise by Goldacre for her excellent science work — put it best:

I find this pretty ironic in the light of what Ben’s previously written about me ...
It is not a Bad Thing that I was born. The birth of more people like me should not be something that society tries to prevent.

... I never want to be in a position where I’m told I’m irresponsible for having children like me / my brother.

Genetic *testing* is NOT treatment. Killing people isn’t the same thing as treating them, and I don’t understand how the two can so often be confused. Genetic screening is looking at two embryos, and deciding that the one more like me deserves less of a chance at life than the one less like me. Why the hell should people NOT be made to feel guilty about that? Systematically wiping out everyone who thinks like me is wrong, and I should be free to say it’s wrong.

... If you choose to have a baby at all, you don’t get a guarantee that they will be ‘perfect’. They could have the greatest genotype ever, and be affected by birth hypoxia or a car crash or whatever and need 24-hour care for the rest of their lives because of that, and you’d just have to deal with it. If you can’t, don’t have children at all. Deciding that loving your child is conditional on it having the right chromosomes is wrong.

My brother is affected to the point that he’s not managed several attempts to live independently, get a degree or job. I’ll probably have to look after him when our parents aren’t able. So what? This isn’t a ‘tragedy’, it’s just life.

....

This isn’t being discussed, it’s just being allowed to happen under a banner of ‘individual choice’ without any thought for the wider social impacts, and often as not without much if any input from the people most directly affected by it. Yep, selective abortion / embryo destruction is an uncomfortable topic, and people don’t like you discussing it. Ben has managed to call the mother of someone with Down syndrome ’scumbaggy’ for saying that her child is as worthy of life as anyone else. If you say that selectively wiping out people with disabilities is wrong, you’ll be told you are being ‘judgemental’ and shouldn’t make people feel ‘guilty’. But this effectively shuts down a wider discussion of the issues. I’m not about to start waving placards outside clinics. That’s not what the DSA were doing. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to say that actually, life with Down syndrome can be good?

It is instructive to read the way that comments thread went. I turned up and made the apparently controversial points that killing your disabled adult child makes you a bad person and that telling your kids that parents who kill their kids aren't necessarily bad falls short of ideal parenting. For this, I was accused of all sorts of things, including, inevitably, finally, trolling. The commenter who calls himself The Nameless was quite thoroughly obnoxious, behaving in a way that would get him banned from quite a lot of sites out there, but it never occurred to anyone to accuse him of trolling because he clearly believed in the standard Guardian-readers' orthodoxy. Me, I stayed civil, and was pretty much screamed at for my trouble. I invite anyone who can be arsed to read the comments there and let me know if you think I've mischaracterised the conversation.

What was interesting about it for me was that I entered the debate without a particularly strong opinion on the subject of pre-natal screening, and those who absolutely unequivocally support it persuaded me very quickly and effectively that it's wrong.

And we have another example today. This week, Ben Goldacre has written about the story that The Daily Mail has a different editorial stance to The Irish Daily Mail. Apparently, this is shocking and amazing for some reason. The shocking amazing story was noticed by a guy called Martin who blogs over at The Lay Scientist. He's another Guardian-reader, and clearly under the impression that he's a scientist who believes in evidence and rationality.

Now, Bad Science people have been shocked by this type of story before. Despite the fact that an hour spent browsing The Guardian's website will reveal so much disagreement that you'll start to think that every left-winger forms their own separate faction of one, its readers express amazement whenever exactly the same phenomenon can be observed in any other media organisation. I don't get it. And so I made this point at Martin's blog:

People only find this sort of thing suprising because of their insistence on thinking of [insert organisation here] as monolithic. The Daily Mail is made up of a large number of journalists, and, like any other group of people, they disagree with each other about all sorts of things. Ben Goldacre has now linked here, and seems to be similarly baffled by the phenomenon, despite the fact that he himself has had a big fight with his own paper, taking them to task at great length for the crap they put on their front page. The Mail are no more baffling than The Guardian in this respect — less so, in fact, as we're talking about The Irish Mail and The British Mail, two different papers. Why on Earth wouldn't some Irish journalists disagree with some British journalists, just because they're working under the same brand name?

This prompted what I mistakenly thought was a debate. It certainly looked like one: each side raised further points to try and back up their side of the argument. But I was wrong. Should have remembered that, when arguing with a left-winger, you either convert to their cause as quickly as possible or You Are A Bad Person. Here's Martin's eventual response:

"This story is uninteresting! It should be banned! I'm going to come back every few days to repeat again how uninteresting I find this story!111!!! You're all stupid!!!11!"

*yawn*

To which, here's mine:

OK.

I just commented earlier that I find this interesting.

I don't know what you think I think should be banned.

I haven't shouted at you.

And I thought I was just debating an issue with you here. Do you get upset when people who agree with you visit your blog every few days? I think I just got the wrong end of the stick when you responded to my points as if you were actually interested in discussing the issue or something, and so I stupidly responded in kind. If you really just want anyone who disagrees with you to fuck off, you could save yourself a lot of time by stating that in your blog's header. You know, "Comments from non-sycophants unwelcome." Something like that.

Far too much of this amongst the Bad Science crowd, to be honest. For all that everyone likes to claim that it's evidence that's important, anyone who fails to toe the Guardian's political line on that site tends to just get invective hurled at them. Which is a great shame, as you're driving away a lot of people who agree with you on the scientific points.

Finally, at least I'm civil.

Go on, say "*yawn*" again. That'll prove that you're right and I'm wrong, using evidence. Yay science.

'Course, most people, unlike me, wouldn't bother. Most people would get shouted at by the site's owner and sod off, never to return. Not necessarily a problem if you're just running a fun club for your friends, but the science blogs are supposed to be persuasive. You know, like science.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people? They all claim that they want to advance the public understanding of science. That's a noble goal, and one I back to the hilt. But aren't they aware that some members of the public are interested in science yet don't agree with their politics, and some even read [gasp!] papers that The Guardian looks down upon? Doesn't it occur to them that routinely shouting at all such people that they're idiots won't persuade them to join the cause?

Or is the cause really just an excuse to run yet another self-congratulatory clique?

Update:

Brainduck has pointed out two mistakes in this post. Firstly, she's a woman of the female persuasion. Something about her chosen alias made me think "male" — quite wrongly, as it turns out. And secondly, I implied that Ben Goldacre was a GP himself, because I was once informed — I forget by whom, but, again, wrongly — that he was. I have amended a small handful of words in this post to reflect reality.

The exception to the rule.

2009-04-22T22:57:00.002+01:00

One of the things that made Google successful in the first place was that they're just so damn fast.

Well, looking at this series of Streetview photos —

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22

— it turns out that getting stuck behind a Google car is Worse Than Tractors.

Tyranny.

2009-04-21T20:50:00.001+01:00

Here's another good piece by Gary. But he's wrong.

The idea that Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act makes photographing the police illegal is pure fantasy. It doesn't mention photos at all. Rather, it says that it's illegal to gather or publish information about the police or armed forces that is "likely to be useful" to a mad bomber, foreign spy or Osama Bin Laden.

... it's easy to see how that phrase can be misinterpreted

But it's not being misinterpreted. If you're planning to kill policemen, then photos of policemen on duty contain information that is useful to you. So the Act clearly outlaws the taking of such photos, whether it explicitly mentions photographs or not.

There's no problem with the law being misinterpreted here. The problem is allowing a law with a phrase as vague as "likely to be useful" in it onto the books in the first place. It can be used for anything.

Shahid Malik, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, on 1 April 2009: "... the taking of photographs in a public place is not subject to any rule or statute. There are no legal restrictions on photography in a public place ..."

From this, we can conclude that Shahid Malik hasn't read the Act. Or didn't understand it.

As Malik told Parliament: "Our counter-terrorism laws are not designed or intended to stop people taking photographs.

Oh, great. I eagerly await HMRC giving me back all my income tax, since the law establishing that was never designed or intended to do anyting other than fund the Napoleonic Wars.

It doesn't matter what a law is designed or intended for; it matters what it actually says — and I'd expect an Under-Secretary of State to know that. A whole bunch of people raised this problem back when the law was being written and debated, and were caricatured as paranoid extremist lunatics who didn't care if terrorists killed all our children. The fact is, Parliament had the opportunity, having been warned of precisely this outcome, to design a law intended to stop the police doing this — and to stop the myriad other abuses of RIPA. And they chose not to. The Home Office's protestations of innocence now should be seen as nothing more than, at best, admissions of gross incompetence.

I say "at best" because, of course, no incompetence has occurred. The Government itself demonstrated just a few months ago that it was perfectly willing to use anti-terrorist legislation against non-terrorists and non-criminals for something it was never designed or intended for, when it froze Icelandic assets. The Government, it seems, were quite happy to have such a usefully vague law on the books. Which is hardly surprising, since they put it there.

So I think it's safe to conclude that we're allowed to take photos of the police and bus-stops and bakeries and so on unless someone in the Cabinet decides it's inconvenient, at which point it will immediately be reclassified as terrorist activity. Just like moving money from a branch of your bank to its headquarters, or sending your child to a good school that's a little bit too far away from your home, or dropping litter.

What you need.

2009-04-17T04:39:00.007+01:00

I've been meaning to write this for ages, but the very reason I know what to write is the same reason I haven't got round to it. That's right: it's a list of stuff that's useful if you have a baby on the way. Half the stuff the baby magazines tell you is Absolutely Vital is in fact a big fat waste of money. Best thing to do if you're expecting is to ask any recent parents you know for their tips. But be careful of the mummy-fascists: if your "friends" start telling you that theirs is The Only Way To Raise A Baby and if you don't do what they did You Are Doing It All Wrong, politely make your excuses and never talk to them again for as long as you live. Even better, kill them and steal their child.

On that note (the ignore-the-pushy-parents note, not the murder-and-kidnapping note), the Dr Spock book really is good. So many baby books tell you the one ideal way to do it. For every topic, Spock tells you the handful of different good ways to do it, and leaves you to decide which to go for.

Anyway, here are my top tips. Take them with a pinch of salt. I know what was best by our criteria, but yours will be different.

For what it's worth, we got a Quinny Buzz pram, and I thoroughly recommend it. On the other hand, it's the only pram we ever had, so it's always possible that all the others are even better. But it certainly has one feature which the others don't (or didn't at the time): it uses hydraulics to unfold itself. This is not a gimmick; it is incredibly useful. You take the pram out of the car, you've got a baby in one arm, a bag to carry — once you have a baby, you always have a bag to carry... tapping the pram so that it unfolds itself instead of having to pull levers or whatever suddenly becomes the most important thing in your life. It also has easily detachable and reattachable wheels, so could be stowed in a very small space: we could get it and enough luggage for a holiday into the boot of an A-Class. Doesn't come cheap, though, but was definitely the single best value expensive thing we bought — or persuaded a relative to buy for us, I should say. We were also lucky enough to be buying them just as Quinny changed their range and so got a huge discount just by picking a discontinued colour — worth keeping an eye out for that sort of opportunity, as I imagine it happens a lot. Also, I would recommend (assuming you drive) going for a pram to which a car-seat can attach. When the baby's asleep, you want to leave them be, so taking the car-seat out of the car and putting it onto a wheel base — or vice versa — is good. The Maxi-Cosi car seat is dead good (it has a built-in sun-shade, which is highly useful, especially since clip-on parasols are universally crap), and attaches to loads of different makes of pram.

It's probably not worth caring about whether the pram will double as a buggy. Apart from anything else, when your toddler's ready for a buggy, it's because they're getting independent and have Views on things like how far they should be from the ground and whether they should be travelling in some conveyance that's for bloody babies. The Quinny's buggy attachment did get used a lot, but not as much as the labelling claims: in theory, Daisy could use it another year or so yet, but try telling her that. Our buggy attachment got used a lot, and we're dead glad we had it, but a simple buggy probably would have been fine. Dedicated buggies are cheaper and lighter and fold up smaller than prams. If you're looking to save some money and don't have an in-law willing to buy the thing for you, this is a good place to economise a bit. When your baby's ready for a buggy, just get one and put the pram in the attic.

The Moses basket pram attachments, though... well, it depends on your situation. And we weren't typical, of course. But Vic was in hospital for months after the birth. The basket attachment for the pram was fantastic: it meant I could bring Daisy into hospital to visit her mum and she could sleep in a proper bed there. If you find yourself in any situation like that (not necessarily ending up in hospital, but you might, for instance, be regularly visiting someone who doesn't have a basket you can use — leaving the baby with grandparents two days a week, say), then it might be worth having. And Moses baskets are insanely overpriced anyway. If you are going to splash out on one, it might be better to spend about the same money on one that attaches to your pram, just for the adaptability. Definitely not worth having one of each, unless one of you ends up so ill she can't carry the pram attachment upstairs to the bedroom. We borrowed one.

Once you do switch to a buggy, the little sleeping-bags designed to attach to buggies are overpriced but fantastic.

An electric steam steriliser is an excellent thing. And cheap. Sterilising things by boiling them on the hob or cold-sterilising using Milton's fluid are both major pains in the arse in comparison to bunging the stuff in the steriliser, turning it on, and waiting a few minutes.

If you're using formula, electric sterilisers can also be used for terminal sterilisation, which can save you loads of time. What you do is you mix the formula using cold water straight from the tap, then put the disk and teat on the bottle but don't tighten it fully, then put the bottle in the steriliser. Not screwing the top on fully tightly stops the bottle exploding. Then, as it cools, the disk gets sucked tight onto the top of the bottle, sealing it. Take the bottle out of the steriliser, tighten the top fully, and put it in the fridge. You now have sterilised milk that'll keep for twenty-four hours. And you can use this method to do a whole day's milk in one batch. Incredibly convenient.

Mothercare sell packs of plain muslin cloths, which are about the most useful thing you can get after nappies. Chuck them over your shoulder when burping, put them on your lap when feeding, tie them round the baby's neck as Mafia-napkin-type bibs, put two or three of them down as an impromptu changing mat, throw them over your kid's head to play peek-a-boo.... We're still using them for everything, including cleaning Daisy's new blackboard now.

And baths. The standard baths are OK unless your baby has hair. And Daisy had loads. Washing a baby's hair while supporting them properly in a bath takes three hands, minimum. We eventually solved this by getting an inflatable bath: designed for travelling, but has the added advantage that the baby cannot hurt their head if they hit the side. A friend of ours has a huge sponge with a baby-shaped indent, which leaves both your hands free and can also be used to take your baby into the shower. And another friend has just got a big plastic bath with a sort of baby-shaped moulded platform built into it. They haven't actually got a baby yet, so I can't report on how well it works, but it looks good to me.

The same friend has also got a cot where the top half detaches, turning it into a bed. We would definitely have got one of these had we known they existed. Saves you buying a bed when the child grows out of cots.

Sudocreme is good (and a friend of my mum's says it's also the best stuff available for rubbing onto horses when they've been bitten by horse-flies, so it has a handy dual purpose), but there's some even better stuff for bad nappy rash called Weleda. We buy ours when we're in Germany, but you can order it off the Web. However, sometimes what nappy rash needs is to be dried out, and none of these moisturising-type lotions are any good at that, obviously. So also get some Metanium, which is. Oh, and Kamillosan's great, too. Sudocreme, incidentally, does not come out of carpets. Not even with a Vax. So you'll want to avoid your toddler covering herself head to foot in Sudocreme and then throwing a tantrum when you try to take it off her, hurling herself to the floor and beating her Sudocreme-covered fists against the carpet. Which still isn't as bad as The Lip-Balm Incident.

Oo, a Vax or some other variety of carpet-washing device is well worth having, by the way. Or wooden floors, but carpet is obviously safer for toddlers to fall over on. Or you could always just get a tarpaulin, though it's not the most decorative accessory.

Should you need bottles, they all seem good, but Nuk bottles have one big advantage over the competition: they make non-spill teats. As soon as Daisy figured out how to hold a bottle for herself, she refused to let anyone else touch it. And, when she'd finished with it, she'd just throw it to one side. It rarely landed the right way up. Non-spill teats were what prevented her from living in a pool of fermenting milk. Again, I've not seen them in shops in the UK, but you can order them from Germany off the Web.

If you're going to travel, don't get a traditional travel cot. They're only marginally more portable than a cot made of stone with an anvil in it tied to a mammoth with no legs. Go for one of the snazzy new tent-like ones, which fold up properly small and are really light.

Don't believe the stuff in nappy adverts about some makes being better fits than others. What actually happens is that, as your baby grows, she changes shape, and will require different fits. We found that Tesco nappies would be the best fit on Daisy and then, suddenly, we'd get three disgusting leaks in a day and have to switch to Pampers. When you have a baby, you will receive loads of vouchers for free stuff, including nappies. Keep them all. Don't throw out the Huggies vouchers just because Huggies don't fit. In a couple of months, Huggies might be the best fit. When it looks like the nappies aren't fitting as well as they did just the other day, switch brands.

Asda make the best wipes, in our opinion: not too wet and not too dry and they come in an unscented version. Scented wipes, of any brand, smell Bad. Johnson's are so wet you need to dry your baby afterwards. Oh, and baby wipes can be used to clean anything. Anything. There simply is nothing they won't clean. Except Sudocreme out of carpets, obviously.

When you've got a new baby on the way, don't buy any clothes in blue or pink. This is because everyone you know and a whole bunch of people you didn't even think you did know will buy you baby clothes, and everything they buy will be blue or pink, depending on which flavour of baby you've had. If you want a bit of variety in your child's wardrobe, make sure the stuff you buy is some other colour. In fact, when buying baby clothes, don't even buy much new-born stuff, as, again, that's what everyone else will buy for you. Seriously, people are so generous and babies grow so fast that you'll end up with outfits that only get worn once, if at all. So buy some stuff for three months and up. Or ask people to get you stuff for older babies. Otherwise, your baby grows a bit and suddenly goes from having a wardrobe that makes Whitney Houston's look a bit stingy to one pair of shorts, two string vests, and a sock.

If you don't have a spare CD player for the nursery, get a cheap one from a supermarket. Music is amazing stuff. Former Lover by Saint Etienne was a guaranteed way to get Daisy to settle and to sleep for over a year. (Not to sleep for over a year. You know what I mean.) She was also a big Madeleine Peyroux fan. Don't know what she's into these days.

Places like Mothercare have their set prices (which are often quite good), but, if your town's anything like ours, it contains an independent baby-stuff emporium. And, if it's anything like ours — the quite fantastic McCullough's of Bangor — they're open to a bit of bartering and they like to reward good customers to keep them out of Mothercare. If you can afford to buy a lot of your baby stuff in one go, go to one of these places and see if you can get some money off.

This sounds like a huge list, but, really, it's not. Magazines and mummy-fascists will tell you you need hundreds and hundreds of things just to get by. You really don't. Being a parent is not as expensive as some would have you believe. You're going to need a pram and a car-seat and a bath and, pretty soon, a cot. They're big one-off expenses, but, once they're out of the way, it settles down to nappies and wipes, nappies and wipes, more nappies, more wipes, and then jars of baby-food. It's all pretty cheap. And think of all the money you'll save by never going out ever again.

Above all, don't fall into the trap of believing you need a truck-full of gear just to leave the house. You don't. You need a little bag with a changing mat, some nappies, some wipes, and a spare baby-grow in it, plus a sterile bottle if you're using bottles and a carton or two of ready-mixed formula if you're using formula. And scissors to open the carton. Keep such a bag ready at all times, and it'll only take you a couple more minutes to go out than it would without a child.

Oh, one last thing: caffeine. Vital.

Update:

Some helpful additions are appearing in the comments to this post, including something from Cleanthes that I can't believe I forgot to mention: Spoons! The effect of a teaspoon on a baby — preferably a metal one — is a thing of wonder. They just absolutely love the things to bits. Just handing the kid a spoon does an unbelievable job of calming them down and keeping them entranced for a good long time. Best baby-toy ever.

The only downside is that you get home to discover you have inadvertently stolen from cafes.

And another update:

Can't believe I forgot to mention this. It's very important. Poppers versus buttons.

You will see a lot of baby clothes that look dead nice but are in fact hell. The reason they are hell is that they have buttons instead of poppers. A lot of little girls' clothes go even further and have cutesy flower-shaped or heart-shaped buttons. No matter how nice the garment may seem, avoid these like the plague. When the time comes to either put them on or take them off, especially in a hurry, even more especially when your baby gets a bit older and starts struggling, you will rue the day you bought them. Poppers can be undone quickly with one hand. As a general rule, once you're a parent, you always want the fewest-hands-using option in everything you do.

On a similar note, bibs with nice laces for tying behind your baby's neck are pure stupid. Bibs should fasten with a popper, ideally at the side of the head, not behind it. Even better, some bibs don't fasten at all and simply have an elasticated hole to pop over your baby's head. If you see them, get them: they're ace.

If you're about to become a parent, you'll be amazed at the number of things that you could have sworn were two-handed jobs — or even two-person jobs — which you can in fact manage perfectly well with one hand while using your other arm to fight a struggling toddler.

Breasts and idiots.

2009-04-15T17:00:00.004+01:00

Here's a good post from my friend Gary about the way that the promotion of breastfeeding has turned into a rather distasteful moral crusade in which those who do not comply are given a good solid kicking. Much like every other aspect of modern life, then. Gary gives this example of, amazingly, one of the more reasonable and less OTT objections, by Morgan Gallagher:

But when I see a media image of a baby bottle...

...I see death.

I see all the the real maggots crawling in all the real bottles.

I see the tiny white bundles being put in the shallow shallow graves.

I see corporate greed and profiteering, being put before baby’s lives.

Of this, Gary, says:

It’s a bit dramatic for my taste, but she does have a point.

And I find this puzzling, because, as far as I can see, it's very much the sort of crap Gary is quite rightly complaining about. Thing is, Morgan also says this:

Fighting for informed, equal choices in infant feeding.

....

Inevitably, many comment that it's an attack on mothers who formula feed, and use bottles to do so. And every time this is raised the hoary old spectre of The Women Who Can't Breastfeed is also thrown into the mix.

....

The biggest misunderstanding about all this, is that when we object to images of bottle feeding, we are objecting to women's choices to formula feed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

OK, so imagine you're a woman with a new baby and you're discovering that, for whatever reason, you can't breastfeed. It happens. My own daughter, Daisy, just refused to do it (and is absolutely fine, by the way). Now imagine you come across Morgan Gallagher's description of bottle-feeding:

when I see a media image of a baby bottle...

...I see death.

I see all the the real maggots crawling in all the real bottles.

I see the tiny white bundles being put in the shallow shallow graves.

You further see that your own situation is dismissed as a "hoary old spectre" with what certainly looks like a clear implication that Ms Gallagher doesn't really believe you. I know exactly what you'd be thinking: "Now, there's a woman who'll fight for informed, equal choices in infant feeding, has absolutely no objection to my using formula, and is in no way attacking me."

And this from a post the entire point of which is that the implications of the words and images we put out there are important. Absolutely clueless.

Obviously, having had a child, Vic & I have been exposed to a fair amount of this crap ourselves. What annoys me about all the people who insist that everything should be done naturally — no formula, no caesarians, no painkillers — is not so much that they're pushy intolerant unsympathetic self-important overbearing bastards (if only that could be avoided merely by not having kids) but that they're so profoundly and unimaginatively pig-ignorant.

Take formula. By concentrating exclusively on whether formula is better or worse than breast milk, they miss rather a huge bloody great point. In many cases, the alternative to formula isn't breast milk; it's nothing. For every other species on Earth, the baby either suckles or dies. Thanks to technology, we humans do not have that problem. It's all very well discovering that there's a slightly increased risk of SIDS among formula-fed babies compared to breast-fed, but you know what? Without even needing to do the research, I can exclusively reveal that, in the group of babies who can't or won't breastfeed, there is a massively decreased incidence of cot death among those who are fed with formula compared to those who are given fuck all.

And then there's one of my pet hates: people who reckon they believe in evolution but haven't taken in any of the implications of Darwinism. We've been saving babies who won't breastfeed for millenia now, feeding them on goat's milk or cow's milk or formula or whatever. Any baby that lacks the genetic urge to breastfeed gets to pass that lack of inheritance on, instead of dying like it's supposed to. If a few of your ancestors did this — and they might well have — chances are your kid just might not breastfeed. This is not something to be ashamed of. On the contrary, using technology to overcome certain death should be something to be proud of.

And then there's the fact that breastfeeding in primates is learned behaviour, not instinctive, so every single person, including midwives, who tells you that babies and mothers just "naturally" know how to do it actually has no idea what they're talking about. It's not true of chimps, and it's not true of us.

Back to Gary:

Most women who don’t breastfeed are ill-informed, the argument goes. Which may be true, but most is not the same as all. Not all women who choose bottle feeding are doing it because they’re uninformed ...

In this country, I'd go further and say that not a single one is. You don't give birth in the UK without going somewhere near the maternity ward of a hospital, every wall of which is plastered with posters telling you that breast is best in fifteen languages. Every single member of staff in that maternity ward will go out of their way to tell you the same thing. And there is no such thing in the UK as a carton of formula that doesn't have a label on its side telling you that it's not as good as breast-milk. This is like the anti-smoking lobby: "Some people are still smoking! They must not know that it's bad for them! It's the only explanation! Make the text bigger!"

Now, I'm not an idiot. I am aware that, as well as the mothers whose babies won't breastfeed, the adoptive mothers, the gay adoptive parents, and the widowers with small babies but no breasts, there are people who could breastfeed but don't for often entirely stupid reasons. I happen to think they've made the wrong decision. But there is simply no way that they've made that wrong decision because they genuinely hadn't heard the news that breastfeeding is better than formula. The message is ubiquitous.

There are even adverts now aimed at the stupid people who don't care what's good for their baby but might respond to some other line of reasoning. "Breastfeed and you'll get your figure back more quickly so that young men will fancy you!" Seriously.

Should formula companies be ashamed of themselves for the way they’ve marketed their products? Sure.

Well, since what's prompted Gary's post is affluent Western women slagging off other affluent Western women, no, I don't think so. What those firms' marketing may be like in the Third World is immaterial here. (As an aside, I will say that the outrage against that tends to be based on the assumption that poor foreigners don't have free will or intelligence.) In the UK, there simply isn't a problem with their marketing. And neither are people as susceptible to advertising as some would have you believe. In the hospital, we were provided with free SMA for Daisy when we needed it. And I believe I may have seen a handful of SMA adverts in my time, but certainly not enough to remember. Daisy, once out of the hospital, was brought up on Aptamil, a product for which I have never seen an advert in my entire life. SMA's marketing appears not to be working too well on me. Course, I could conclude from that — as so many seem to — that this is because I'm some sort of superhuman and mere mortal plebs don't have my amazing powers of marketing-resistance. But I don't.

And, let's remember, this is a life-saving product they're making. Why the hell shouldn't they advertise it? I'll advertise it for them, right here and now.

My daughter wouldn't breastfeed. She's alive and healthy today thanks to Aptamil powdered infant milk formula stuff.

Should more effort be devoted to encouraging mums to breastfeed? Absolutely.

Again, I don't think so. As mentioned above, it's hard to see how much more effort could go into this. And, while our experience of midwives was in most respects very good, on this one issue they fall down: when it comes to breastfeeding, they are overbearingly pushy — the importance of their moral crusade overrides any thoughts of common decency. Seriously, just try having a baby in a British maternity ward and telling them you're not going to breastfeed. You'd get less hassle if you just stuck used syringes in the kid three times a day.

Furthermore, in case you're wondering who'd be doing all this encouraging, what Gary's talking about there is "the issue of whether governments should promote breastfeeding". And I don't think anyone will be particularly suprised to hear that no, I don't think they should, and they can stop promoting any other kind of feeding while they're at it. This is not what governments are for.

Should mums who can’t or won’t breastfeed be made to feel like Hitler? I’d like to think not.

Well, OK, I agree with that. What an anticlimax.

Update:

For some reason, I omitted to mention our own situation. As I said, Daisy wouldn't breastfeed. But this was only relevant for the first week of her life. After that, as long-time readers of this blog may remember, Vic was diagnosed with multiple pulmonory embolisms and put on Warfarin in order to keep her alive. Warfarin not only thins your blood but also turns your breast-milk into poison. Once you're on it, you must on no account attempt to breastfeed your baby. In this situation, formula saves the baby's life and also, by giving her the option of not breastfeeding her baby and therefore making it possible for her to take life-saving drugs, the mother's.

Blood clots are apparently quite common after births, especially caesarians, so there are quite a few new mums out there on Warfarin. I imagine there are also other conditions which necessitate other drugs which make breastfeeding impossible. I struggle to see the advantage in telling all these parents, who surely have enough on their plates as it is what with nearly dying and all, that bottles equals maggots equals shallow graves equals death.

Update to the update:

Vic has reminded me of something I'd clean forgotten: there was disagreement between doctors over this. The doctor officially responsible for her care at the time believed that Warfarin made breast-milk poisonous and said on no account should she breastfeed. The obstetricians and the haemotologist — i.e., the ones who knew what they were talking about — said this was nonsense and that Vic could breastfeed all she liked.

All of which became moot shortly afterwards, when Vic was given a CT scan. When they give you a CT scan, they inject dye into your blood. The dye gets into your breast-milk and is poison. And then, of course, Vic got put into a medical ward so full of highly infectious diseases that you can't possibly take a newborn into it.

That's the thing about that period of our lives: just considering one aspect of it inevitably leads to more and more memories of disaster. Tsk.

Hypocrisy.

2009-04-10T03:45:00.002+01:00

This story by one Nicki Defago is just brimming with smugness, stupidity, arrogance, and self-absorption, but I think I need only quote it twice:

In the past I have snarled at self-important mothers and their oversized buggies on the Tube.

I ... am thinking of beginning a campaign to make all cafes, restaurants and cinemas dog-friendly.

There.

Organised crime.

2009-04-10T02:35:00.002+01:00

In the comments to my post about Google Streetview, Tim Almond points out how stupid the residents of Broughton are:

Rather than images of their houses appearing on Street View (where the odds of a burglar stumbling across them was close to zero), they've instead had their village plastered across the pages of various newspapers about how they're all very affluent and scared of getting their rich houses burgled.

Well done, idiots.

In case you have no idea what we're talking about, here it is:

Village mob thwarts Google Street View car

A spate of burglaries in a Buckinghamshire village had already put residents on the alert for any suspicious vehicles. So when the Google Street View car trundled towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof, villagers sprang into action.

What? Just read that crap again and see what the journalist's trying to imply here. Because of burglaries, the residents were looking out for suspicious vehicles — perhaps vans with "SWAG" written on the side. And then they spotted a car with a huge bloody great camera mounted on a tripod on top of it and "Google" written on the side — just like a burglar would drive!

Forming a human chain to stop it, they harangued the driver about the “invasion of privacy”, adding that the images that Google planned to put online could be used by burglars.

Then, for good measure, to make absolutely sure they got no more unwanted attention from outsiders, they talked to the national press about it.

As police made their way to the stand-off, the Google car yielded to the villagers. For now, Broughton remains off the internet search engine’s mapping service.

It was Paul Jacobs who provided the first line of resistance. “I was upstairs when I spotted the camera car driving down the lane,” he said. “My immediate reaction was anger; how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent? I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime.”

He then ran round the village knocking on doors to rouse fellow residents.

Notice the missing bit there, at the start of that last paragraph? The detail that has to be there for it to follow on sensibly from the previous sentence? "Because the driver ignored him for some reason..."

While the police were called, the villagers stood in the road, not allowing the car to pass. The driver eventually did a U-turn and left.

I like that "eventually". I've seen a few reports of this incident, and reckon that, much as the media would like to portray it as some sort of grand stand-off, perhaps with Google's driver aggressively revving his engine and trying to force his way through the crowd, he probably turned round after about twenty seconds. I just doubt, somehow, that his Googlebosses ordered him "Get Broughton! We've got to get Broughton. That village is key to our plans! Key!" I suspect that photos of whatever the next village down the road is were just fine.

Mr Jacobs said: “This is an affluent area.

Because he's stupid.

We’ve already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks.

What? Without being on Google Streetview? How on Earth could that even be possible?

I love the way that Mr Jacobs clearly thinks that telling the world about burglaries that were demonstrably not in any way caused by Google in some way backs up his case.

If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.

Because that's what burglars do. Your typical burglar isn't sure where to find actual houses and has no idea where wealthy people live, often mistakenly breaking into hovels full of shit and making off with hauls consisting of little more than toenails and cheese, so will travel thousands of miles if he sees evidence of that Holy Grail, a house with some decent stuff in it. Burglars are very rarely local.

I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.”

And I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank the police, who are so reluctant these days to deal with minor crimes such as gunmen killing innocent people in cold blood, for turning up to the scene of this particular atrocity so promptly.

Tim has now been proven even more spectacularly right than he already was:

But not only has the village now become the focus of national attention, it has raised the ire of Internet users, who are now campaigning for Street View enthusiasts from across the UK to descend on the village to snap their own perfectly legal photographs.

....

They have already begun posting pictures of the village online and used the photographs to post tongue-in-cheek 'masterplans' on how to plot robberies, by climbing on red phoneboxes and swinging off tree branches.

Ah, you've got to love the Web.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say before I went on a bit was this. Burglars, broadly, come in two varieties: the everyday, petty-crime, semi-inept ones the police know all about, and the ones who plan meticulously and commit perfect crimes and very rarely get caught. And I've been trying to work out what use Streetview might be to either.

Firstly, you've got the amateurish ones. These are your common-or-garden local crims who get caught when the webcam on top of the PC they're nicking automatically uploads their photos to the Web while they're at it. They don't generally stake out their targets all that thoroughly. They're opportunists, as a rule.

And then there are the Danny Ocean types. Just imagine one of these highly organised gangs. They're planning a big burglary. Every detail has to be just right. The boss tells one of his men to go photograph the target property thoroughly — every angle, every detail. The minion comes back a couple of hours later, saying, "Hey, look, I didn't need to go out with the camera in the end — got these photos off of Google. And they're only eight months old!" Do you think this minion would still be a member of the gang the next morning?

A nice bit of ambiguity.

2009-04-10T02:19:00.003+01:00

That being said, I have to go and buy a hat and then take it off to the BBC for this bit of headline genius:

PM challenges Pakistan on terror

There are so many ways to sum up that story, and some genius of a sub-editor has chosen probably the only one that could be misinterpreted as Gordon Brown saying to Pakistan, "Call those terrorists? Ha! You couldn't blow up an orange! Once again, Britain leads the world. You want carnage of innocents, you come to us."

Which, under the circumstances —

"Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented."

— would be rather apt.

Between the lines.

2009-04-10T01:51:00.002+01:00

The BBC have reported this exciting story — or, at least, it would be exciting if the BBC's reporters weren't so bloody boring. Honestly, what's wrong with journalists these days? They seem to think it's their job to believe people's versions of events or something.

Look, journalist people, you're supposed to report The Truth. Not "facts" — whatever they are. The Truth.

Here's the BBC's version, in all it's gloriously workmanlike nonentitiness:

Runaway scooter carries off woman

An 87-year-old Cornish woman was rescued by police five miles from home when her mobility scooter sped off out of control.

Eileen Bishop, from Perranporth, and her husband Anthony were on their way to church when, he said, she "disappeared off the radar".

Officers later found her heading along the A3075 towards Newquay.

A police community support officer (PCSO) rode the scooter back and said it appeared to be working correctly.

'Full tilt'

Mr Bishop said the incident began when he and his wife set off for St Michael's church.

He said the scooter, which "hadn't been going that well", was set to three-quarters speed.

"Suddenly she passed me at full tilt," Mr Bishop said.

"I shouted after her but she is a bit deaf. I couldn't chase her as I've had a triple heart bypass.

"She just disappeared off the radar."

Mr Bishop said he and a neighbour searched for his wife and then went to the police station to report her missing.

"I was just about in tears," he said.

Officers found Mrs Bishop after a motorist reported a mobility scooter "swerving" across the road near Pendown Cross, five miles away.

Mrs Bishop said she was not sure how she got separated from her husband.

"I just lost him. I was half asleep to tell you the truth," she explained.

It took PCSO Michael Ginnelly an hour to drive the scooter back to Perranporth.

"I think Mrs Bishop just gripped the controls and went too fast and held on for dear life," he told BBC News.

Now, what a proper reporter would do with this is to spot the vital keyword: "Cornish". They're all crazy down there, you know. In a nice way. Understand that, and The Truth just appears, like a snake in a loo:

Runaway pensioner makes off on scooter

An 87-year-old Cornish woman was captured by police five miles from home after she sped off on her mobility scooter like a gin-crazed polecat.

Eileen Bishop, from Perranporth, and her husband Anthony were on their way to church when, he said, she "disappeared off the radar". Mr Bishop had purchased the small portable radar "after last time."

Officers later found her heading along the A3075 towards the Mecca Bingo in Newquay.

A fake policeman (PCSO) rode the scooter back and said it appeared to be working correctly, as if he were some kind of scooter expert.

'Full tilt'

Mr Bishop said the incident began when he and his wife set off for St Michael's church.

He said the scooter, which "frankly, I should never have bought her", was set to three-quarters speed "after last time."

"Suddenly she passed me at full tilt," Mr Bishop said. "She must have figured out how to turn the speed-limiter off."

"I shouted after her but she was in one of her moods and pretended to be deaf. I couldn't chase her as I've had a triple heart bypass, after last time.

"She just disappeared off the radar."

Mr Bishop said he and a neighbour hunted his wife with dogs and then went to the police station to report her escaped.

"I was just about in tears," he said. "And so were the police."

Officers found Mrs Bishop after a motorist reported a mobility scooter "swerving exuberantly" across the road near Pendown Cross, five miles away.

Mrs Bishop fooled no-one when she said she was not sure how she got separated from her husband.

"I just lost him. I was half asleep to tell you the truth," she claimed, unconvincingly.

It took PCSO Michael Ginnelly an hour to drive the scooter back to Perranporth, as Mrs Bishop had turned its limiter back on again.

"I think Mrs Bishop is just bored of church," he told BBC News.

There.

Can I work for The Sun now?

A message for Lexmark.

2009-03-24T18:02:00.001Z

Dear Lexmark people,

Nice printer. Really. It, you know, prints. And scans. Great. But I would just like to mention this one little issue with your software — which, apparently, the printer can't do without.

400MB? Four hundred meg? Four! Hundred! Meg! Are you completely deranged? I've got operating systems smaller than that. Just how bloody egotistical must your programmers be to assume that I'm willing to give up that much of my hard drive just so's I can print the occasional document? You utter, utter bastards.

Love & kisses,

Squander Two

In which I continue to resist the Iphone.

2009-03-20T13:31:00.002Z

I would just like to say that I have got one of these Nokia N810 Internet Tablets. And it is a superb piece of kit. One of my colleagues immediately spotted the potential for a good portmanteau word: "Wablet". And so that's what I've been calling it.

I also got a collapsible Bluetooth keyboard to go with it. It is also excellent.

While the whole world heads in the direction of convergence — putting everything into the same device — Nokia, bless 'em, have spotted that there is a market for divergence. So the Wablet isn't a phone, but can seamlessly use your phone's connection when it needs it. In fact, the Wablet connects to the Net through your phone with even less effort than it takes to connect a Nokia phone to the Net directly. Go figure. Anyway, the idea is that now, instead of a huge bloody great clunky phone like what I used to have, I have a lovely sleek little phone (which is also impressivley superb, by the way) and the Wablet. This means that I have choice: I can take the Wablet when I want the computing power, or I can just take the phone by itself when I don't need all that extra stuff and am short of pockets. Having spent a few years with big phones, I'm really appreciating this.

I can't be bothered writing a full review — it would be a waste of time anyway, as there are loads to be found on the Web, and they're all pretty-much right. But I'll just say a couple of things about it.

Firstly, if you're thinking of getting a netbook because you want a really portable computer, then, if you're happy using a version of Linux instead of Windows, this thing is far far smaller and more portable than any netbook. I can put it in one pocket and the keyboard in another.

Secondly, if you have no patience for geeky tinkering, it might be an idea not to get one. If all you want to do is browse the Web and check email and listen to music and look at photos, then it works absolutely perfectly out of the box (well, after you update the firmware, anyway, which really was very easy). If you want to install other apps, well.... They all supposedly install very easily with just a couple of clicks. Some of them, however, do silly Linuxy things like telling you that they need a different library and expecting you to know what the hell to do about it.

On the other hand, because its browser is so good, any app that can run from a browser can run on the N810.

Apparently, it's possible to install the full version of Debian Linux on it and then you can run any app Linux will run, including Openoffice — which would give you a full word-processor in an incredibly small package. I might just have to give that a try.

Technical details aside, just for sheer fun, this is one of the best gadgets ever. I tried an Iphone once, and was surprised to discover, being an Apple fan, that I didn't like it. Just didn't get on with the interface for some reason. Took to the N810 like a duck to water. Some of the third-party apps for it may be a bit buggy, but the operating system itself is just lovely.

Misdirection.

2009-03-20T12:54:00.002Z

One of the many things that I can't stand about modern politics is the attitude of civil rights and privacy campaigners. While they are right on many issues, they always manage to kick up the biggest stink and get the most publicity when they are completely wrong, which makes them look like weirdo lunatics, which in turn means that no-one listens to them when they're right. This is one of the many reason why we're getting that bloody ID database in the UK.

They're at it again with Google Streetview:

Privacy campaigners are to launch a legal challenge against Google's new Street View service which shows 360-degree photographs of public roads.

... campaigners claim it violates the right to privacy and could be used to plan crimes.

Yes, obviously it could be used to plan crimes. So can cars. And cameras. And telephones. And maps. And pencils. And a decent education. Let's ban them all.

As for the right to privacy, I have to say this is news to me. I always thought that I had a right to privacy when I was in, you know, private, but not so much when in public. Try masturbating in the street outside your local primary school and see whether the police will respect your right to privacy.

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said: "These images are being captured without people's permission for commercial use, and we believe that it is not legally acceptable.

"They are also putting into place a system for updating these images in the future, and for storing the images digitally where they could be misused."

Yes, the images are being captured without people's permission. But no permission is needed, as they are photos of public places. If the outside of your house was private, you wouldn't need planning permission to have it cladded in aluminium and covered in red floodlights. (I'm still fighting my council over that one.)

I wonder if Simon Davies has ever taken a photo of a building, such as the Eiffel Tower, for instance. I wonder if he's ever taken a photo, perhaps while on holiday, in which passers-by appear. I wonder if he asked permission first.

Simon Davies, Privacy International, you are idiots, and you are helping to make the world a worse place. Sod off.

Sal Brinton, Liberal Democrat and would-be MP, is also an idiot:

She said: “I was astonished when I saw the detail of the photographs held in Google's database.

“The detail is very clear.

Yes, it is. It's almost exactly as clear as a photograph. What, exactly, was Ms Brinton expecting to find when she first logged on? Charcoal sketches?

“The example that was drawn to my attention was that of one of our candidates who 'googled' her home address to find a picture of her car sat outside her home.”

Oh. My. God. I take it all back. That is shameful. I am shocked, shocked, I say....

And in a recession, too.

2009-03-20T12:37:00.002Z

It is utterly irresponsible of Google to have released Streetview. It is entirely possible that no-one with a computer will ever do any actual work ever again.

Apart from the people working on the Streetview team, of course.

Five books for the price of one.

2009-02-12T02:27:00.002Z

Like Web design? Hate bushfires? Well, then, have a gander at this:

Choose any 5 books (in PDF format) and pay for just 1.

That’s $149.75 worth of SitePoint books for just $29.95.

100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to victims of the recent Australian bushfires.

And you can't say fairer than that.

I've bought my five, and already started reading one, and I have to say: charity or no charity, it's the best damn teaching-you-to-program book I've ever read.

Car hits roof.

2009-01-26T23:20:00.002Z

The headline says it all: a car has hit a roof. With, it has to be said, quite a bit of style. Go see the photos.

Police say the car, a Skoda Octavia, flew some 30 meters (98 feet) before landing in the roof seven meters (23 feet) off the ground.

How the hell, you might well ask, does something like this happen? Well...

The man was apparently speeding, missed a turn, hit an embankment and took off.

Oh, he hit an embankment. Well, no mystery there, then. Explains everything.

You know how roadworkers in films just casually leave a pile of rubble and a couple of planks lying around in such a way that any car that happens to crash into it all will in fact not crash but will fly through the air instead? I'd always thought that was strictly Hollywood-only; that, if I ever drove into some roadworks in, say, Ballynahinch, my car would not fly through the air at all but would instead stop very suddenly and hurt me. Well, apparently not. Turns out there's at least one group of roadworkers, somewhere in Germany, who build roadside embankments in that special Hollywood way. I wonder how many crashes we'll see over the coming weeks as drivers rush to check whether any of the other local roads have this special quality?

Well, either that or it's some very clever viral marketing by Skoda.

So, farewell, then.

2009-01-23T23:22:00.003Z

Maligned and abandoned though he may have been, I never stopped liking George Dubya Bush. There are several reasons for this.

I liked his sense of humour. Despite eight years of never-ending piss-takes, I don't think any comedian managed to attack him with as good a line as he himself used to describe a collection of his quotations:

It's like the thoughts of Chairman Mao, only with laughs, and not in Chinese.

And surely the single greatest embarassment for our own Prime Minister was when Bush demonstrated to the world that the dour git can't even improvise a simple handshake.

More importantly, there was The Bush Doctrine, a foreign-policy strategy that combines idealism, pragmatism, and humanity while utterly rejecting the cynicism and low expectations of realpolitik. Whenever you argue with a lefty about American foreign policy, it rarely takes them more than about a minute to bring up Pinochet. I always let them say their piece and then say that, yes, I agree, and so does Bush:

Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.

Or as Steyn paraphrased it:

To the old CIA line that he may be a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch, the best response is that he may be our sonofabitch but in the end he’s a sonofabitch

And there was his honesty — far more of it than is usual in politicians of any stripe. People often told me that they didn't trust Bush. I would respond that, whenever he said he'd do something, he would then do it. What could be more trustworthy? Steyn again:

Conservatives can’t complain they were misled, although many do. Governor Bush campaigned in 2000 as the GOP’s first open, out-of-the-closet federalizer of the school system and as a big softie pushover for the ever swelling ranks of the Undocumented-American community. ... Most of us were suspicious ... But we were demoralized by the impeachment flop, and watching a touchy-feely sob-sister campaigning in Spanish for increased education spending it seemed reasonable to conclude that the guy couldn’t possibly mean it. He was surely indulging in the GOP equivalent of those feints that doctrinaire Democrats feel obliged to do every other November when they suddenly discover they’re “personally” opposed to abortion or start scheduling improbable hunting expeditions.

....

But it turned out the compassionate conservative did mean it — on immigration, education and much else. And, whatever one feels about those policies, we cannot say that we were betrayed — for few candidates have ever been so admirably upfront. Indeed, it is a peculiar injustice that the 43rd presidency’s most obvious contender for a Bartlett’s entry should be “Bush lied, people died”. The activists who most assiduously promoted the line are now having to adjust to the news that their own beloved “anti-war” candidate’s commitment to bring home every last soldier within 16 months has now been “revised” into a plan for some 30,000-70,000 troops to remain in Iraq after 2011. On Fox News the other night, I found myself talking to a nice lady from Code Pink trying to grapple with the fact that Henry Kissinger and Karl Rove are more enthusiastic about Obama’s national security team than she is. Many other Obama policies now turn out to be inoperative, and we haven’t even had the coronation. I don’t know about my Code Pink friend, but I already miss Bush’s straightforwardness. He spoke a language all but extinct in the upper echelons of electoral politics.

It's important to realise that Steyn isn't trying to get at Obama here: he's not saying that Obama is particularly dishonest, but that this sort of opportunistic lying is normal behaviour for politicians of any party — so normal that Bush probably wouldn't even have got the Republican nomination in the first place if it hadn't been for the fact that pretty much the entire Republican Party assumed that he was lying through his teeth and so voted for him on the basis of his support for policies he never claimed to support and his opposition to policies he enthusiastically espoused.

I remember the 2000 election. At the time, the two candidates seemed equally bad. In retrospect, thank God the right man won. Bush was, contrary to his opponents' crazed fantasies, yet another government-expanding socialist, not only the most left-wing Republican president ever but also more left-wing than most of the Democratic ones, but, really, who cares? I'm with Christopher Hitchens on this: defend civilisation first, then argue about fiscal policy and state education and prescription drug entitlements and all the other crap. If you've got a candidate who won't defend civilisation, none of his other policies really matter. And if you've got a candidate who will defend civilisation, none of his other policies really matter.

To finish, here's a perfect example of what was right with Dubya and wrong with his opponents:

Here's Slate's latest Bushism of the Day:

I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.

Here's the full context — note that Slate persists in refusing to even link to the full statements:

I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein. I'm with six other Iraqi citizens, as well, who suffered the same fate. They are examples of the brutality of the tyrant.

I am also here with Marvin Zindler, of Houston, Texas. I appreciate Joe Agris, the doctor who helped put these hands on these men; Don North, the documentary producer who made a film of this brutality, which brought the plight of these gentlemen to the attention of Marvin and his foundation. These men had hands restored because of the generosity and love of an American citizen. And I am so proud to welcome them to the Oval Office. ...

It's going to take a while, but history's going to be kind to Dubya. The man has honour — and the stuff's so rare most of the world couldn't recognise it. I'm going to miss it.

Brave new world.

2009-01-23T21:24:00.002Z

If I were in charge of The White House's website, one of the things I would do would be to start a project to get transcriptions of all the past presidents' speeches up there. A lot of work, but, I think, worth it.

Obama, apparently the most Net-savvy president ever, appears to be taking the opposite approach: Whitehouse.gov's archives seem to have been purged of Dubya's speeches. For example, Google has this speech in its cache and says that the original should be at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031119-1.html, but that link is now being redirected to www.whitehouse.gov/briefing_room. Searching using Whitehouse.gov's own search engine, it really does look as if Bush's speeches have been not just moved but wiped.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I really don't think this bodes well.

Charity and dishonesty.

2009-01-23T20:37:00.002Z

The Devil's Kitchen has set up a Good New Thing: fakecharities.org:

Welcome to fakecharities.org, a directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments.

These charities are usually brought to our attention through interviews in the mainstream media (MSM) in which they support the position of the government that funds them.

For those of you who don't already know, these charities are used by the state as a smokescreen. To say to the public "This proposed legislation of ours must be brilliant, 'cause we support it" would, of course, be transparently silly. So what you do (if you're in government) is you fund a "charity" and you say "This proposed legislation of ours must be brilliant, 'cause this charity supports it." In other words, the state uses taxpayers' money to bribe organisations to tell it to do bad things to taxpayers. For some reason, this pathetically childish ploy actually is good enough to fool most of the people most of the time.

fakecharities.org will keep a register of these "charities" which are in fact just arms of the state. I for one won't give a penny to any of them. For all the difference that'll make.

It has been specials designed.

2009-01-23T19:15:00.002Z

Thanks to the ever-excellent Idea 15 for discovering that comparethemeerkat.com really exists.

Kendokat wields big stick and wears specials designed armour. He look scary but actually is very nice. When not engaging in extreme combat, Kendokat likes picnicking and pedalling boats shaped like swan.

This meerkat goes to Weston Super Mare to play slot machine and snog stranger outside closed beach bar or stand in middle of gigantic empty car park when feeling sickness of home in Kalahari.

Artistic genius.

2009-01-20T15:10:00.003Z

A big thanks to the Czech artist David Cerny for providing me with a good solid laugh:

a new art project commissioned by Prague in honor of its six-month stint at the head of the 27-member bloc has caused the Czechs to blush with embarrassment. Called "Entropa," the piece is a €373,000 over-sized mosaic map of Europe that relies on stereotypes to depict each country. And a number of countries are furious about it.

"It is preposterous, a disgrace," Betina Joteva, press officer for Bulgaria's permanent representation in Brussels told the euobserver Web site. "It is a humiliation for the Bulgarian nation and an offence to national dignity."

Joteva has, perhaps, reason to be upset. Her country is depicted in the eight-ton sculpture as a Turkish toilet.

Nice. Here it is in all its glory. It's bloody huge.

Germany is shown as being criss-crossed by autobahns — and some thought they recognized a slightly deformed swastika in the resulting design.

Cerny was categorical in his denial. "It has nothing to do with the swastika," he said. It is about highways and Germany's obsession with cars. Nothing else."

Hmm. Here's a photo. Cerny has made it just enough unlike a Swastika to get away with his denial. Probably.

Romania is shown as a Dracula theme park; Spain is merely a slab of concrete, in reference to its recently burst real-estate bubble; Holland is shown as being flooded over with only a few minarets poking out above the waves; Luxembourg is a gold nugget with a huge "For Sale" sign sticking out of it; and France is covered with a large sign reading "strike," an allusion to that country's frequent labor battles.

And Denmark's bit is a depiction in Lego of one of the Mohammed cartoons, so Cerny could be facing not only the pompous outrage of EU diplomats but also an actual bloody great fatwa over this. Good for him.

As if the sculpture itself wasn't brilliant enough, he didn't stop there. His original application to the Czech Government stated that the work

would be completed by artists from the 27 EU member-states. ... Instead, Cerny made up the names of the European artists supposedly participating in the project and put it together with a couple of friends.

And he didn't just make up their names. He invented imaginary portfolios and histories for them, and wrote a blurb by each of these artists describing their part in the project.

The UK's bit is described by its creator, the acclaimed yet fictional British artist Khalid Asadi, thus:

If art and associated attitudes are not to become pleasing-appearance ready-made goods, but a living, albeit perhaps fleeting, organism, art should be able to improve exactness of its message in the time allotted to it and thus, paradoxically, define itself in history... These screen points are spatial holograms of historical memory, experience, and therefore each such new overlap becomes another non-linear tangle to the naked eye.

Particularly excellent, I think, since the UK bit doesn't actually exist. But, you see, they didn't leave it out: they put it in, but it's non-existent. Genius.

Quoth Mark Steyn (yeah, yeah, I know):

I also like the list of previous exhibitions Mr Cerny has provided for each artist. You may recall "Sabrina Unterberger's" solo show in Vienna, "Ernst Logar is cooking a soup of his childhood."

"We were hoping that it wouldn't be taken with the kind of seriousness that it has been and that it would be fun," Cerny said. "It wasn't about insulting anyone. I am shocked that certain states don't have a sense of humor."

Yes, shocked, shocked, I say. Sure you are, David.

Best piece of modern art since that giant rabbit, in my opinion.

Er, really?

2009-01-20T14:13:00.002Z

I appreciate that the BBC are a tad fond of Barack Hussein Obama, but, honestly. This from their front page right now:

Once today's celebrations have concluded, Barack Obama will be faced with the stiffest challenges facing a new American president for a generation.

What? Some banks and a couple of car manufacturers being in trouble are stiffer challenges than September the 11th? On what planet?

Sounds like a Bond villain.

2009-01-20T13:06:00.002Z

OK, frivolity in the face of horror, I know, but I can't be the only person who sees headlines like

DR Congo cancels timber contracts

and wonders for a fleeting moment who Doctor Congo is.

Happy New Year.

2008-12-31T01:07:00.005Z

Can't say as I'm surprised by this:

DAD-of-two Stewart Fleming grips his head in pain as he waits to be seen in A&E — but he died after being ignored for SIX hours.

Clearly suffering, Stewart was clutching a note from his doctor saying he must be seen IMMEDIATELY.

But the railway signalman, 37, was left to die as a deadly virus ravaged his body and one by one his organs collapsed.

He was not admitted until six hours after arriving at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, by which time it was too late.

....

Heartbroken Sarah, from Rainham, Kent, added: "There are so many questions. Why wait three hours for triage when his doctor had already done it and put it in writing?

"We should not have had to queue. He should have been dealt with immediately. I was with Stewart when the GP called the hospital.

"He typed us a letter and told us to go to A&E and hand this letter over. He said Stewart would be given a bed and treated immediately.

"But when we got to A&E it was full to bursting. I walked to the front with the letter and told them what the GP had said but I was just told to go to the back of the queue. ... I was told we had to go through the normal process, even with the letter from the doctor. We got to A&E before 5.30pm. He was finally called through to be examined at 11pm. ..."

Been there, done that — though thankfully without the death. It used to be the case that GPs could write letters to hospitals telling them to admit a patient. This appears to be one of those things that has been quietly got rid of in the name of reform. But no-one seems to have told the doctors, which is why they're still writing the letters. The last time this happened to us, we learnt our lesson: if there's anything wrong with you, don't go see your doctor, as that's just time wasted. Get straight to A&E and into the queue.

I might add that six hours is pretty quick these days. Vic once waited twelve.

Anyway, firstly, I'd like to say that, even by modern bureaucratic standards, this statement is a lesson in crass callous nastiness:

A spokesman for the Medway NHS Foundation Trust said it was "saddened to hear of the death of Stewart Fleming".

The spokesman added: "Mr Fleming came to Medway Maritime Hospital's Emergency Department on a day when it was experiencing long waits due to a high number of admissions.

"The situation was not unique to Medway — hospitals across the country were all experiencing a rise in demand for their services at the time."

Wow.

Secondly, this is being reported all over the place, of course, and every report I've seen mentions the six-hour wait, what with it being the whole point of the story. Except the BBC's:

An inquiry is under way into the death of a man after a two-hour delay in him being seen by an A&E unit in Kent.

I'll print the rest, what with the BBC's well-established reputation for stealthily editing their reports after criticism without changing the "Page last updated" bit — for lying, in other words.

The Medway NHS Foundation Trust said it was saddened by the death of Stewart Fleming, 37, of Rainham, who attended with a suspected viral infection.

It said he attended the Medway Maritime Hospital on 15 December at 1816 GMT and was seen by a triage nurse at 2020 GMT.

It said the unit had been experiencing long waits due to the high numbers of admissions.

Mr Fleming's family has expressed concern at the way in which his case was handled, saying he had a note from his GP requesting immediate admission.

The trust said it was currently investigating the case internally and it urged the Fleming family to make contact so discussions with them could take place.

In a statement, the trust added: "The situation was not unique to Medway — hospitals across the country were all experiencing a rise in demand for their services at this time."

There are two explanations for the BBC's reporting a six-hour wait as a two-hour delay. First, there are the times given in their report: they could be measuring the time from arrival to triage and ignoring the four-hour wait after triage. Or they could be looking at the official N"HS" target for A&E waiting times, which I think is four hours (though I admit I haven't checked it recently) and implicitly accepting the Government's line that that is acceptable: so a six-hour wait is only a two-hour delay, because a four-hour wait wouldn't be a delay at all. But, when I say there are two explanations, I really mean that there are two excuses the BBC can offer if they get questioned over it. There's only one explanation for their fundamental dishonesty: they see part of their mission as being to promote the NHS.

Even when it kills people.

Evil consumption.

2008-12-31T00:58:00.002Z

OK, OK, it's more bloody Mark Steyn, but the man just keeps making good points.

"Retail Sales Plummet," read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street Journal. "Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending."

Hey, that's great news, isn't it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You just go ahead, we'll be fine.'"

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. ... Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then-Sen. Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? ... The message from the European political class couldn't be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don't ramp up the demand, we're kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

Fighting to make the world better.

2008-12-31T00:53:00.002Z

I would like to sincerely thank the American armed forces for giving to the English-speaking world this figure of speech:

There was no running water, no electricity but what a portable generator provided. The toilets were Turkish-style — position your feet and squat over the hole — and equipped with what they call "John Wayne toilet paper" because it's rough and tough and don't take shit off nobody.

Verbing weirds language.

2008-12-31T00:51:00.000Z

Came across a great new word at work the other day: "front-ending". Even in context, I have no idea what it means.

Merry Christmas, by the way.