Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Greenland Ice - Stop Press

I interrupt this series of, ah... long winded posts to bring you this debunking of the Great Greenland Ice Sheet Scare, from Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Sciences of the University of Western Australia, which came to me by Benny Peiser's excellent email list.

The following is the abstract from a lengthy paper:

Hansen is a modeller, and his scenario for the collapse of the ice sheets is based on a false model. Hansen has a model of an ice sheet sliding along an inclined plane, lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming. The same model is adopted in many copy-cat papers. Hanson’s model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow.

The global warming doomsday writers claim the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting catastrophically, and will cause a sudden rise in sea level of 5 or more metres. This ignores the mechanism of glacier flow which is by creep. Glaciers are not melting from the surface down, nor are they sliding down an inclined plane lubricated by meltwater. The existence of ice over 3 km thick preserving details of past snowfall and atmospheres, used to decipher past temperature and CO2 levels, shows that the ice sheets have accumulated for hundreds of thousands of years without melting. Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.

Monarchy, constitutions and republicanism, Interlude

A quotation. I dipped into W L Warren's book about King John earlier, and came across this:

Men insist perhaps most firmly on the value of custom when instability and change threaten them most closely; and they are apt to insist most tenanciously of all when in fact they allow the tide of change to carry them along. It gives reassurance that they are moving purposefully, and are not merely adrift on an uncharted sea.

UPDATE: The next in this series of posts will not appear before this evening.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Monarchy, constitutions and republicanism, Part 2 - Parliament and the radical tradition

Part 1 - Magna Carta

Parliament assembles in the Painted Chamber of the royal palace of Westminster. The King, the Lords and the Commons all assemble together to hear the King's speech, in which he will lay out the "causes of summons" or the "points of the Parliament". This generally involves taxes that the King wanted to levy. Then the King announces, formally, that he will hear any petitions that anyone wants to present.

Following this opening of Parliament, the Lords assemble in one place, the Commons in another. They consider the business the King has outlined in his speech.

This isn't very different from the way the British Parliament conducts its business today. There is a Queen's speech in which the business of that particular session of Parliament is outlined, then the two chambers meet separately to discuss it. But the Painted Chamber dates my particular description. To when?

1340. In fact, this, Commons and all, was the system of Parliament by 1340. And although it is sometimes thought that the role of the Commons - the representatives of the cities and freemen of the realm - was only to bring petitions, in fact even at this early date they were required to answer the King's points. They were required to deliberate over the taxation the King wished to raise.

So was the structure of English governance set, almost seven hundred years ago. The King ruled, but had to summon Parliament to agree his taxation demands, and by so doing he was placed in a position wherein he had to hear the petitions of the Commons.

Exactly three hundred years after my slightly arbitrary date (slightly, because the first meeting called a Parliament met in 1240 and this was the centennial), in 1640, after a hiatus of a decade, an unpopular monarch who resented any restraint on his power summoned a Parliament to authorise taxes to support his wars against the Scots. Parliamentarians felt that if they were to consider taxes, the monarch should consider their petitions. Charles I disagreed, in fact he felt this was lese majeste, and he dissolved what we now know as the Short Parliament.

By November of that year his financial circumstances compelled Charles to summon Parliament again, and this time Parliament passed a law granting themselves the power to meet every three years even if the monarch didn't summon them. They passed a law forbidding the King to dissolve them, and ever since they have been known as the Long Parliament. This is, of course, the opening of the English Civil War.

What was happening, in a long view? Going back to the build up to Magna Carta, monarchical encroachment on the pockets and liberties of subjects had provoked a reaction. Most importantly, though, the subjects felt they should be consulted about decisions of state. If people are given a concession, it takes a further encroachment on their liberties - the ratchet has to click on a further notch - before they'll feel sufficiently motivated to take action. By the seventeenth century, it was the idea of the divine right of Kings, something that had taken root in the English monarchy in the reign of James I, that clicked the ratchet on this further notch. Charles I wanted money, but he felt no obligation to hear petitions - a part of the medieval contract forged in the thirteenth century.

Of course, reaction was not the sole prerogative of the King. And reaction can be radical. A radical tradition began, most clearly embodied in the Levellers, who issued a manifesto called the Agreement of the People. It's worth emphasising that this was not adopted by the republican government, which instead took the alternative offered by the opposing faction, the Grandees. Levellers were imprisoned by Cromwell. No criticism of the course the revolution took can reasonably be laid at the feet of the Levellers. So, what did they suggest?

* The right to vote for all men over the age of 21 (excepting servants, beggars and Royalists);
* No army officer, treasurer or lawyer could be an MP (to prevent conflict of interest);
* Annual elections to Parliament with MPs serving one term only;
* Equality of all persons before the law;
* Trials should be heard before 12 jurymen, freely chosen by their community.
* No-one could be punished for refusing to testify against themselves in criminal cases;
* The law should proceed in English and cases should not extend longer than six months;
* The death penalty to be applied only in cases of murder;
* Abolition of imprisonment for debt;
* Tithes should be abolished and parishioners have the right to choose their ministers;
* Taxation in proportion to real or personal property;
* Abolition of military conscription, monopolies and excise taxes.

Milton Friedman would have agreed with that. In fact, Friedman campaigned for the abolition of conscription, monopolies and excise taxes. They wished to limit the death penalty, extend the franchise and they emphasised the equality of all people. They sought term limits for MPs (an excellent idea), the prevention of conflicts of interest and the secularisation of the country (the abolition of tithes).

Parliament developed as a mechanism for limiting abuses of power by the monarch, and for involving the peers in the process of government. Even by the fourteenth century, Parliament included the Commons. As the monarch developed ideas of unlimited, divine power, so parliamentarians - not all of them, but some - developed the idea of a free society of free people, equally enfranchised, free from conscription and duress, taxed proportionately and moderately, with legal protections against excessive imprisonment before trial and against self-incrimination.

This radical tradition, which failed within a republican movement that was itself to fail, has been claimed by the left. That's actually reasonable. But it's also a reasonable claim for libertarians to make. At least, it is if those libertarians mistrust power and the people who are attracted to it and so seek term limits, if they hold every person to be equal, if they hold that the state and the law must always be subservient to the liberties of the individual so that, for example, nobody should be held without trial.

It's a radical tradition that we need to claim as libertarians. And it derives, fundamentally, from opposition to the idea of a monarch. After all, if every person is equal there can be no monarch.

UPDATE: I used the word "equal" casually there. It means, of course, things like equality before the law, equality of voting rights and so forth. There's no suggestion that any other form of equality, not least that of outcome (egalitarianism), was in this manifesto.

Monarchy, constitutions and republicanism, Part 1 - Magna Carta







Clause 50 of Magna Carta states:




Or this one:

Taxing trade and resources:
And so on. Ring any bells?

In other words, habeas corpus.





Twenty five years later, they were calling that a Parliament.


Part 2 - Parliament and the radical tradition.

Web application security

What not to do.


Aayan Hirsi Ali security trust



Basic error

Via Worstall, a Guardian leader:

Capitalism's great advantage is supposed to be that it ensures the economy can learn from failure.
Nope. That's the free market, not capitalism. With a free market, lots of people try lots of different things and copy the things other people are doing if they seem to be working. Capitalism can exist in unfree markets, where this advantage doesn't exist.

It's amazing how these terms are conflated.

Quote quoted

John Brignall at NumberWatch writes in defence of that much maligned atom, carbon. He prefaces his piece with a quote from the great H.L. Mencken:


Monday, October 29, 2007


Just thinking... My favourite headline of all time comes from an American newspaper in 1980 - I read it in Rolling Stone's review of the year...

Right to Lifers demand mandatory death penalty

100 million years before the dinosaurs

These smooth skinned amphibians.

Headline of the day

Scientists Find Oldest Living Animal, Then Kill It

From here.

Extreme fun competitions

Updates on the DARPA urban Grand Challenge, for autonomous vehicles in urban environments here, and the X Prize for lunar landers here.

Papal dispensation

There is a problem with this present Pope:

He really doesn't get the separation of church and state idea.

Axis of evil cookbook

This is quite funny:

Review of banned books

At Sp!ked, a review of five books that have been pulped after libel action from a certain Saudi billionaire.

Quote of the day

See here, a campaign (from a Lib Dem constituency) to grant Gurkhas proper entitlements.

Underachieving criminals

I once met a young man who was awaiting trial on a charge of armed robbery. He had taken an air pistol into an off license, and demanded the cash from the till, four cans of super lager and ten cigarettes. That still counts as armed robbery.

The would-be royal blackmailers remind me of that lad. They demanded £50,000 from the unnamed royal who they allegedly had on film taking drugs and engaging in a sex act. They could have got twice that from a newspaper, legally.



Apple's new version of OS X, Leopard, contains an icon for a "generic PC". Heh.

Coyote on climate

Here is a very clear and detailed statement of the climate sceptic case, from Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog and Running time is just under one hour.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Organic health

It is reported that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally produced food. I think that's inaccurate. Instead, the report should say that conventionally (intensively) produced food is less nutritious than other food. My home-grown vegetables aren't organic. I'll bet they have similar levels of nutrients in them, though.

Supermarket tomatoes taste like tap water, the ones from my garden this summer were bursting with flavour. Where's the surprise if nutrient levels match? But this has nothing to do with the High Priests of the Soil Association.

Putney Debates


Thomas Rainsborough, for the Levellers:

And Ireton, for the Grandees:


Attacks against anti-Islamisation demonstrators

In Denmark. The full story can be read here.

The organisation that was attacked, the local branch of SIOE (see previous link), is coming under heavy criticism for links with neo Nazis and white supremacists, something I pointed out has been a problem with their parent organisation, the 910 group.

Nonetheless, the aggression and violence in the Copenhagen attack last Sunday is clear enough. SIOE people were wearing body armour, and cuts to their clothing show they would have been stabbed if they had not been protected.

So this was attempted murder.

UPDATE: Just to clarify this, it seems the attackers were leftists.

Govt to UK Schools - Don't buy Microsoft




When complaints from a neighbour forced an expensive lowering of their new roof, the builder of this house in Utah decided to install some unusual heating vents.

I was reminded of John Gladden, about whom there are disappointingly few pieces of information online. In the 1980s, he caught a very large marlin off the coast of Florida, and decided to celebrate with a life-sized model (IIRC) of the fish on the roof of his house in Norbury, South London. Here he is with another model, in a 2002 photo taken from a piece about a dispute over a heavily-decorated, publicity vehicle he had parked in the grounds of a pub opposite his engineering works.

Gladden, a very strong-minded Englishman who has, I believe, been a candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, got into a serious row with Croydon Council in the 1980s. His plastic fish was some absurdly small measurement too large to have been erected without planning permission - a matter of inches. As the row escalated the police began, in Gladden's eyes, to harass him, so he harrassed them back. At that time his engineering works were on Acre Lane, Brixton, near where I lived, and he bought a large World War II vintage self-propelled gun (a tank, to the uninitiated), painted it pink, installed eight foot high plastic dinosaurs and pigs in police helmets, with truncheons, all over it and parked it in front of his factory. He was also given to driving it slowly through traffic.

When, in 2001, the police started giving the tank endless parking tickets, Gladden drove it to Brixton police station and parked it on their forecourt:

But when Mr Gladden, of St Oswald's Road, Norbury, went to retrieve his tank the next day - in July last year - he found the two pig sculptures and a giant hand giving a finger gesture, had been badly damaged.

The police said the sculptures were a safety hazard and had to be removed. But in doing so, they were damaged. And last week Mr Gladden, who owns a firm called Lightning Fittings, won a legal battle in the Central London County Court for the damage caused. He was awarded £4,400.

It was not the first time Mr Gladden has had problems with a vehicle. A court order was made back in 1994 banning him, or other people working for him, from parking any vehicle on "any public highway in the London Borough of Croydon so as to obstruct". He is also known for putting models of giant fish and jet fighter on top of his home.
Here's another one of Gladden's vehicles:

If you can't quite see what it is, he bought an American police car and decorated it with models of a policeman bending over, and a disembodied hand and arm spanking the police officer's bare bottom.

I remember the "giant hand giving a finger gesture" from the quote above. I met Gladden in the mid 1990s, when he was locked in a round of court appearances with jobsworths from Croydon's planning department. The hand was giant - about ten feet high - and had been attached to a hydraulic ram mounted in the middle of a small van, so the hand sat squarely in the middle of the van's roof when the ram was fully retracted. If the ram was extended, the hand was pushed twenty feet into the air.

Gladden had a plan. He was due to appear in court imminently and knew he'd lose that particular skirmish. He built the hydraulic hand so it could be parked outside the court building during the hearing. He knew the courtroom he would appear in would be on the first floor, and that he'd be able to get a parking space immediately beneath one of the windows.

As the magistrates pronounced his doom, Gladden's associates would press the red button, and the hand would rise, middle finger extended, to the courtroom window above.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

The great adventure



Friday, October 26, 2007

What they are fighting in Iraq




Baby madrua.

Ah, fuck. Fuck.




Police Special

Yesterday Leicestershire police confirmed that Ms Pilkington had contacted police repeatedly about youngsters making her and her daughter’s life a misery.

Neighbours claimed that children would bombard Ms Pilkington’s house windows with stones, bang on her front door and shout and call them names.

The pair lived on Bardon Road, an area renowned for children behaving in an antisocial way.
So the mother took her disabled daughter into a car, drove to a layby and set it ablaze, killing them both. Because the police wouldn't do anything effective about the louts in the street.

Did the indifference of the very people she was looking to for help add to the final despair of this poor woman?

Losing the "War on Fire"



And it's no wonder fire hates us. We've been demonizing it ever since the first cinematic Frankenstein monster said "Fire bad!".
*Read the comments too.

Quote of the day

She has a point:


Thursday, October 25, 2007

Public service message

If you have an AOL account, and have emailed me in the past, virus scan your computer. I'm getting a lot of bounces, so someone's getting sending out spams with my address in the From header. But the first Received header in the original mail gives an AOL ip address, and these can't be traced very well. So if this might be you, scan away.

Goat vows to protect the cabbages


Gordon Brown has promised to open a "new chapter" on civil liberty in Britain, signalling both tougher new anti-terrorism laws and stronger protections for individual freedoms.
Cabbage eating and cabbage protection. Good stuff. Also:
Mr Straw also announced a consultation on the case for a new "British Bill of Rights and Duties".

Mr Brown said that could be a move towards a written constitution.

Liberty, the civil rights campaign welcomed "a change in tone" from Mr Brown compared the rhetoric adopted by Tony Blair.

But the group said it was disappointed that the Prime Minister had not dropped plans for longer pre-charge detention and a national identity card scheme.
Memo to Brown: Constitutions limit the powers of government.

Quiz night

Is the most expensive MP Labour or Conservative? How about the least expensive?

Darkness visible







The darkness of superstition seems to be everywhere right now.

Jewish World Controllers

Norm Geras has the latest.

Prescient Persian

It seems that the Persian word "putin" means "boot". So living under Putin means living under the boot. Spooky, huh?

Click through and read an interesting post about Iran's historical relationship with Russia.

UPDATE: Do really click through, it's pretty funny. Sample:


Unforeseen consequences



So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere.

Be cool

Health Secretary Alan Johnstone thinks that obseity is "a potential crisis on the scale of climate change".

I'm sure he's right. So we can all relax.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Tips for would-be criminals

If you steal a printer, say a very specialised one that's used to print driving licences, don't call technical support asking for drivers.


There's a heated debate going on about abortion right now.

I think the answer is pretty simple. Abortion should be freely available on demand without any strings attached up to 13 weeks, and thereafter with the written consent of a doctor who has assessed the case and agrees, among other things, that the foetus isn't viable. That would have two effects. It would tend to displace abortions towards the earlier stage of pregnancy, because that's when it would be hassle free, and it would allow doctors to assess viability on the grounds of current medical science, and keep both the courts and Parliament out of it.

Thus would we be able to avoid having to step over the bodies of women who have haemorrhaged to death after a do-it-yourself abortion, while ensuring we didn't kill any children who are capable of living.

This is a purely pragmatic argument, and there's a lot to be said for pragmatism, in practice.

Blue lips?

If they're not on your mouth, you might be in trouble.

From WTF

Proper movies



It's illegal to film the police

"No it isn't."

"Yes, it is. Put that camera down."

"No it isn't. Under what law is it illegal?"



Our dawn will come

I feel too weary and depressed to summarise them in any detail, so will instead point you to the Devil's Kitchen's explanation of the two most recent attempts to stifle and corral free speech in Europe: a proposal that blog writers be forced to register, be certified and pay a tax before being permitted to publish, even if they make no money from their blogging, and the European Union's Racism and Xenophobia Directive, under which European bloggers will be imprisoned for expressing inaccurate or unfashionable opinions - including opinions that are, in my opinion, vile and incorrect.

But nobody should ever be threatened, hurt, killed or imprisoned for expressing an opinion. That is a fundamental of a free society.

The neo-conservative ambition of exporting democracy is noble, even if it is a piece of misguided leftist idealism. I tend to sympathise with it. The idea of importing totalitarianism is less appealing. Yet it is the latter that has gripped European governments. We will soon have joined Egypt (and Austria, for that matter) as a country that imprisons writers.

Meanwhile, a blogger who has been imprisoned already for expressing opinions that are unfashionable in the eyes of the religious and anti-democratic authorities in Egypt, Kareem, has written a letter from prison. In this, he refers to the case of three German anti-fascist campaigners who were tried in 1943 for anonymous pamphleting on campuses - something analogous to modern blogging, strangely enough. He quotes one of them, Sofia Scholl, who told the judge who had sentenced her to death:

The garbage of history will be stuffed with you soon. The coming generations will not have mercy with you. They will do as I am doing now. They will curse you. Please, make sure that no one will shed a tear for your sake, because you do not deserve it. Tomorrow is ours. It does not matter how tyrant you are in your attempts to silence us and confiscate our views. You should be aware for our revival because your days are counting down. Your dark night approached its end. Our dawn will come up very soon. Tomorrow is ours.
I'm sorry, Ms Scholl. You gave your life in vain. We have betrayed you.

Class and sport

The sports columnist at Spiked, Duleep Allirajah, writes about rugby and class. He hates the "class snobbery against football fans" that he finds among rugby supporters. Or, as he puts it (rather unselfconsciously):

I’d rather be at home than in a gastropub surrounded by braying toffs in England rugby shirts. Everyone’s entitled to their fun, even posh boys...
He's right. We all hate class snobbery.

Stealing privacy from the innocent

You might have missed this, because it didn't get a lot of mainstream press attention, but from the start of this month:

The danger here isn't the decryption so much as the requirement that keys be handed over - thereby compromising all data encrypted with them whether or not it falls within the scope of an investigation. No significant business can be expected to bring their keys to the UK, and this has implications for the establishment of UK facilities.

At the same time, anyone with really dubious data to hide will either take the relatively light prison term (compared with a sentence for, say, terrorism), or keep the data location secret by using portable storage, or simply keep the files offshore (the law only applies to data physically stored in the UK). The latter is trivial - I use remote disks mounted into my regular filesystem as a matter of routine, and these disks could as easily be in Moscow as Manchester.

Know your constituency

Interesting speculation from Booker Rising here. Barak Obama is about to start a gospel tour in support of his presidential bid. One of the performers is Donnie McClurkin, a Pentecostal minister who "crusades" against homosexuality and claims to be a "cured" ex-homosexual himself. Shay, the blogger at Booker Rising, does the electoral maths:


A question of torture

Via The Spirit of Man, come this headline from Associated Press:

Myanmar Dissident Dies Under Questioning

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Perfidious footsteps



The wrong kind of evidence






In fact, this happened:



Monday, October 22, 2007

Justice is blind

And the victim is blinded:



Best practice


Algerian landmines

It seems that:

France has given Algeria details of where its forces laid millions of landmines half a century ago. Antipersonnel mines were planted on the borders of the country during the Algerian war of independence to stop troops attacking the French colonial army from bases in Morocco and Tunisia. Algerian newspapers regularly report deaths and injuries, particularly of shepherds and children, from mines laid during the 1954-1962 war.

Let me understand this.

The war ended in 1962.

In 2007, 45 years later - after forty five years of dead and maimed children and other civilians - after nearly half a century, France has given Algeria plans that could help prevent this death and suffering.

What kind of person could allow this suffering and death - preventable suffering and death - to continue for forty five years? What kind of people, because there have been several generations of functionaries and politicians involved in this?

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Cryptography and snake oil




In an interview, the CEO of Wuala had claimed:



David T of Harry's Place has the lowdown on the latest bout of infighting in the rapidly disintegrating RESPECT "coalition". Click through. It's fun - and a real scoop.

Internet censorship again

How do you silence legitimate criticism online? Easy: just send a legal threat to the hosting company, rather than the author or publisher of the criticism. As the law stands, the hosting company is liable, will not be in a position to assess the merits of the disputed passage, and will therefore pull the plug.

It happened to Tim Ireland, Craig Murray and others in the recent Usmanov case. And it's happened again, this time to Andy Lewis, developer of the very excellent Quackometer, and exposer of bad and pseudo science. Lewis wrote a piece criticising the Society of Homeopaths. It began:



Lawyers from the SoH wrote, not to Lewis, but to his hosting provider, Netcetera, who asked him to remove the post. He has done so, and has written an open letter to the SoH's lawyers, asking them what their concerns are. No reply has yet been received.

It's impossible to overstate the seriousness of this. Libel and defamation laws can now be directed at people with the power to force a post or web site to be taken down, but no knowledge of or stake in the controversy. If this is not countered, the bad and the dishonest will have gained unprecedented power to censor legitimate criticism.

Of course, the law needs to be changed. But this isn't going to happen overnight. The best intermediate step is to make this sort of threat entirely counterproductive, as it was in the Usmanov case, when the allegations about Usmanov became far more widely reproduced, and read and known, than they would have been if Mr Usmanov's lawyers had directed their concerns at the author of the allegation, Craig Murray.

It's incumbent on us, I think, to place the Society of Homeopaths in the same position.

The disputed post has been reproduced in full on a server in Russia here, and with interesting comments interspersed by James Randi here. Given that there has been no response from the SoH, I reproduce it myself below, stating clearl;y that if substantive grounds for concern are brought to my attention by the Society of Homeopaths or their lawyers, or any interested party, I will take immediate and appropriate action. I also suggest any reader also look at James Randi's repost of this piece, in which he points out that the language used by the homeopaths mentioned in it is nuanced in such a way that it might, in at least some cases, avoid literal breaches of the SoH code:
The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing




48 • Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.



















Saturday, October 20, 2007





I'm hoping he scores a try and England win.


Thursday, October 18, 2007

Too busy to blog

Until next week. Next post Tuesday.

I will, of course, find time to watch the rugby.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Dillow and pies

I've criticised Chris Dillow more than I've complimented him, which is a testament to his powers of provocation rather than his qualities. If you see what I mean.

But this post about pies is one for the anthologies.

Trains, dentistry and death

The blogger and journalist Neil Clarke has attracted a lot of criticism recently, all of it too restrained. But I'm struck by his description of himself:

I support renationalisation of the railways... the restoration of NHS dentistry... and the restoration of capital punishment.
Neil, you're a cunt.


Now, I think Joanna Lumley is wrong. She prefers not to eat anything that has a face. She has stirred entirely different feelings in a lot of men, over the years.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Theology of Water Management


... studying for a Phd on the theological, social and ecological, implications for water management in the Murray-Darling River Basin
Via Tim Blair. I even stole his title. But hell, some things you just gotta do.

There is no wood

Some people can't see the wood for the trees.

Others can't see the wood because they have a theory that there is no wood:

... the real world has become increasingly sceptical in recent years about the power of leadership, political parties have become more obsessed with it.
Go out onto the high street with a clipboard. Ask people to name the party leaders. Then ask them to name other MPs from the different parties.

Then come back and tell me again that "the real world has become increasingly sceptical in recent years about the power of leadership".

Monday, October 15, 2007

Posting lull

I've been unwell, and now have a backlog of things to deal with, so posting is unlikely to resume properly before midweek.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Save the planet - eat kangaroo

Greenpeace Australia has urged people to eat kangaroo meat because, they say, it'll help combat global warming. Whatever, I second the motion. Kangaroo is one of the finest red meats I've ever eaten - tender, with a wonderful almost smoked flavour.

Belay there, me hearties

One of the things I miss about not living in London is the West Indian influence. Minicabbing around South London, twenty years ago, when it went quiet in the small hours I'd pull by a Jamaican food joint in East Dulwich and buy Mannish soup (cow's foot), red beans and rice, and proper patties, made with "mutton" (goat).

A strange collision with my childhood came in the form of ginger beer made by a small company in Clapham. It was just like the home-made stuff I'd drunk in the '60s; none of your sickly, green sugar solution, this was glorious, throat burning stuff that made your scalp prickle with sweat.

And New Year's Eve was always enlivened by car loads of partygoing black Londoners full of laughter, jokes and the occasional shared spliffs. Maybe best of all, once or twice, was an offer of a swig from a bottle of proper, smuggled, unlabelled Jamaican rum. If anyone cares to mail me with a suggestion of where I can get a bottle up here in the wilds of Cambridgeshire, I'd be glad to receive the information in confidence.

Right now, I'm sitting here with a temperature and a racking cough. The medication, of course, is hot peppers, garlic and toddies, made with local honey, lemon juice and the best rum the local stores can offer, but that isn't great.

My head's a bit foggy, so anything that seems less coherent than normal can be attributed to that.

But, at the risk of being repetitive, if there are any bottles of the right stuff around, I'd be glad to hear about it.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Your rulers

Meet them (via Guido): the new establishment.

Access to Services



Peter Grant Peterkin
Serjeant at Arms

Sue Harrison
Director of Catering Services

Venal union practices

The Post Office has released a list of some of the Spanish practices currently in force in postal sorting offices. Read them and weep:


And so on. And on. And on...

These aren't working practices, they're fraud.

Oh please... please...

BBC staff are threatening to go on strike. Great.

Berkeley lectures online

This is an excellent initiative. UCB has put more than 3000 hours of lectures, in a range of subjects, online at YouTube.




Betraying Iraqis

It's what our government does best.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has just released a statement about help for Iraqis who have worked with British troops and who are therefore at risk. It says:

The assistance announced by the Prime Minister yesterday will allow Iraqi staff, including but not limited to interpreters, currently working1 for HMG in Iraq, who have attained 12 months’ or more continuous service, to apply for a one-off package of financial assistance of between 6 and 12 months’ salary, depending on length of service, to meet the costs of relocation for themselves and their dependants in Iraq or the region, if they are made redundant or have to resign from their job because of what we judge to be exceptional circumstances. Alternatively, these staff will be able to apply for exceptional leave to enter the UK, or to avail themselves of the opportunity for resettlement in the UK through the UK’s Gateway refugee resettlement programme, provided that they meet the criteria for the programme, including that they satisfy UNHCR that they meet the criteria of the 1951 Convention and need resettlement.
Iraqis who have worked for less than 12 months will not be helped, though they are at risk just as much as those with longer terms of employment.

There's no excuse for this. The Iraqis have helped our troops and we have a duty to help them. But the ugly reality of politics is such that this will draw the sting from protests. The government will be able to say they have helped.

Please let your MP know this isn't good enough.

UPDATE: Tim points out that this may be no more than a statement of the existing entitlements of the Iraqis. The references to "Gateway" above refer to a programme for the resettlement of asylum seekers, so at least in part this translates as "those eligible for asylum already are eligible for asylum".

Monday, October 08, 2007

Pigs in space

Interesting piece here from ColonyWorlds about the prospects of taking pigs when planets start to be colonised. Sounds very sensible; waste disposal, fertiliser generation, experiment subjects and, of course, bacon providers.

Meanwhile, I read that:



Except, perhaps, being a rational human being.

No, I don't believe that. It's just the impression these stories give. The idea of people seriously planning how best to keep your ass in the air in zero gravity is inherently funny, as is the wonderfully meaningless process of calculating how to face Mecca when in space.

If I had been born into a Muslim culture, I'd be furious with these superstitious loonies, and busy planning how to get my pigs into space - mollified by the knowledge that the mere fact that I was considering this would infuriate the atavistic morons.

Che chic

The BBC has been celebrating the memory of mass murderer Che Guevara on the anniversay of his birth. Or is it his death? The details have been lost in the soft grunt of sudden exertion I've been making as I dive for the off switch before being made nauseous once again.

I won't link, out of distaste, but if you want an antidote, try Mike's evisceration of their coverage.

Helping our helpers

Dan Hardie, who has been leading the campaign to help Iraqis who've been of service to UK troops, writes:


In fact, Brown did make a mealy-mouthed statement this afternoon:
I'm afraid this is bullshit, but it's bullshit designed to act as a "spoiler" for tomorrow's meeting - which has had to be relocated to Portcullis House.

And this is the most contemptible form of bullshit imaginable - playing weak-as-piss games with people's lives for no good reason. The numbers of people involved are insignificant either in terms of Britains Iraq spend, the savings they've helped us make, or the immigration rate into the UK.

Read Dan's latest and a p[articularly good rant by the now back online Tim Ireland.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this, but Dan is not a doctor. This is why that matters.

Democracy in action

So the voters of Costa Rica have approved a free trade agreement with the US, in the teeth of strong trade union opposition, and the sort of campus intimidation we're seeing more and more, from the political left:

CAFTA's opponents have routinely threatened its supporters with violence, and supporters have often had to be escorted by police during community debates. In public universities, students who favor the agreement have been physically prevented from distributing literature. In one widely publicized case, a student was attacked.
I can't find the link again, but I believe up to 100,000 people marched against the agreement, but to no avail:
With 96.3 percent of the vote counted, 51.6 percent of voters backed the agreement while 48.4 percent voted against it, Costa Rica's electoral tribunal said on its Web site.
It just goes to show. Large left wing street demonstrations mean very little. But why is it that the right and centre have so much less success in turning out demonstrators. In one of his books, P J O'Rourke reported a theory that had been suggested to him: "We have jobs".


The Express newspapers (I won't link) have been publishing constant conspiracy stories about the death of Princess Diana. It's been going on for years. In many ways, it's a puzzle. In the year 2000, the proprietor of Express Newspapers, Richard Desmond, bought the titles from under the nose of Mohammed Fayed, the main advocate of these same conspiracy theories. Fayed can't have been pleased; his battles with Tiny Rowland after another takeover battle became legendary. Yet within a few years, Desmond and Fayed seem to have become close associates, even friends.

So the question remains unanswered: what could have reconciled alleged erotomaniac Fayed and pornographer Richard Desmond?

Quote of the Day

And politicians, ever lusting for office, are only too happy to conjure the ridiculous illusion that A will get top-flight service from B when C is forced by G to pay the bills.
Don Boudreaux

Do you know this man?

Public Service Announcement

Interpol has issued an alert, after the face of a persistent, serial child rapist was unscrambled from images he has himself uploaded to the web. From The Times:

"For years images of this man sexually abusing children have been circulating on the internet," Interpol's Secretary-General, Ronald K. Noble, said.

"We have tried all other means to identify and to bring him to justice, but we are now convinced that without the public’s help, this sexual predator could continue to rape and sexually abuse young children."

Mr Noble said Interpol had "very good reason" to believe that the man "travels the world in order to sexually abuse and exploit vulnerable chilren."

Anyone with information should contact Interpol at this link.

The mainstream media have all carried this photograph. Why not leverage the power of the blogs as well?

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Leftist errors


My comment:


