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Remember Paul Chambers?
Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
….
As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.
This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.
Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown ‘stoning’ tweet
Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.
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The message – now apparently deleted – said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
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Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: “It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.”
You’ve brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.
“You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken.”
She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.
“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately. I don’t think the nasty Tories went away.”
Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness – that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian back in July:
The return from a tiny government investment is probably greater in the cultural industries than any other – every £1 the Arts Council England puts in generates another £2 from commercial sources.
The UK Film Council, quoted in the Independent in August:
“But the UKFC doesn’t waste money, it makes it. For every pound it invests, the country gets £5 back.“
Ivan Lewis in the Guardian yesterday:
The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county [Somerset].
Says it all, really. Her Majesty’s Treasury informs us that
The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) is carrying out a review into all tax reliefs, allowances and exemptions, for businesses and individuals, across all the taxes administered by HM Revenue & Customs. The Chancellor has asked the OTS to identify reliefs that should be simplified or repealed to help achieve a simpler tax system.
As the first step of the review process, on 08 November 2010 the OTS published a complete list of tax reliefs and the approach that will be used for the Review. The list is the first time all tax reliefs administered by HM Revenue and Customs have been compiled and made available in a single document.
And here it is. All 349 kilobytes of it.
All good citizens will be happy to learn that “Expenditure incurred with regard to safety precautions at a sports ground is eligible for capital allowances.” (No. 530), although perhaps approval will be less enthusiastic for No. 603, “International organisations and their staffs are exempt from specified taxes.” It is a burden off my mind to discover in the form of No. 673 that “Suggestion awards made by employees which do not exceed £25 are exempt from income tax.” – although one might suggest that the effort put forth by lawmakers to create and tax inspectors to administer this provision probably exceeds the benefit felt by the average taxpayer. In fact that conclusion might apply to most of No.s 1- 672 and 674 – 1042 as well.
This comment by “Armaros”, made in response to a Guardian piece by Michael Tomasky about the former president’s new book, put the case well:
His whole agenda was thrown out the window on 911.
Not since the war of 1812 was the WH directly targeted by an enemy.
He was going to focus on Mexico, L American trade and education.
He recognized that only by bringing Mexico up to par with the rest of N America, can free trade be fair.
He was also for immigration reform and resisted the xenophobic tendencies of the SW states and tried to educate America about why this problem was occurring.
He can claim credit for No Child left behind, along with the late Teddy Kennedy who ran with the bill in the Senate. One of the most memorable stories of bi-partisan co-operation.
He was also instrumental in helping Africa and dealing with AIDS.
Bono and Geldof praised him for that.
His administration was also the most multiracial in American history.
He even offered the VP spot to Powell who decided against it in the end.
He choose a black S of state, a black NSA, and a Hispanic AG.
His Supreme court choices were centrist and sensible in Alito and Roberts.
He addressed crowds in Texas in Spanish and garnered more Latino votes than any republican before him, both as governor and president.
He will be of course remembered for the war(s).
Those will be judged with time. Iraq can be said to be a success. Saddam is gone as is the mad fascist ideology and tyranny. Iraq has proven that democracy can and should work among Arabs.
Most of the criticism of Iraq (aside from the fact that there was a war) was that Arabs cannot live in a democracy.
There have been 4 elections in Iraq with greater turnouts than most Western ones and one can say that democracy did take some hold there.
Afghanistan is still up in the air. I am not sure whether what was done in Iraq can be done there. However it is no longer a base for international terrorism.
In other words, Afghanistan is no longer a threat to us.
Whether it would revert to being that once Western troops leave is a fair question.
Bush was the first US president to declare the necessity for a Palestinian state. Another one of his forgotten positives which the Left omits on the regular.
What do you think?
Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.
My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:
In Kes, probably Loach’s best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach’s purpose in life – as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.
His “pokes at authority” seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to “do something” about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday’s Guardian:
We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.
It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,
Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.
Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.
I see on Guido Fawkes that arch-Europhile Denis MacShane is to be investigated by the police. He has had the Labour Whip withdrawn.
To give him credit, he did once call Hugo Chavez a “ranting, populist demagogue”. On the other hand he was once Minister of State for Europe.
This article gives a sample of his thought.
Commenters are requested to bear in mind the principle that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yes, even a man who said:
In 2004, a major step forward was taken with the creation of a European arrest warrant
The European Union has paid out vast sums since 2001 to improve Sicily’s infrastructure. What has Sicily to show for it? Nothing. No, less than nothing:
€700 million to improve the water supply? In 2000, the water supply was “stop-and-flow” for 33% of Sicilian households, now 38.7% have water worries. Incentives to entice off-season tourists? Cost €400 million, enough to buy up an airline. And yet the ranks of those thankless tourists haven’t swelled, but petered out: from 1.2% in 2000 to 1.1% in 2007. And as to the €300 million invested in alternative energy projects great and small: it’s true, there isn’t a single hillock without its windmill now, but Sicilian output is stuck at 5% of total consumption, as against an average 9.1% for Southern Italy as a whole.
The quote is from a translation of an article in the Italian daily La Stampa and I found it via Jim Miller On Politics. Jim Miller himself comments:
And we should recognize that the best money of all to waste — from the point of view of a pork-barrel politician — is someone else’s money. There would have been less wasted in Sicily if the money had come from Italy, rather than the whole European Union, and even less wasted if the money had come from the places where it was spent.
The European Union, corrupt as it is, is on average less corrupt than Sicily. Idealistic Sicilians possibly hoped that getting their state largesse via the EU would result in less theft and waste. A vain hope, as Mr Miller or Professor Friedman could have told them.
Today’s Times has the headline:
Allies at odds over death of hostage in bungled rescue
The story is behind a paywall. It does not matter. I am only interested in the headline and whoever wrote it.
Do these people have any idea at all of what life-or-death fighting is actually like? I do not demand that they have actually done any before writing about it; little would ever be reported about war if that were the test. But they could at least have read a few memoirs, or talked to their grandfathers. Reading about the Dieppe Raid might put things in perspective.
Hint: it is not like planning a dinner party. With that sort of thing if you make a careful list of Things To Do and do them all in good time you generally can be reasonably confident that it will work out OK and if it does not work out OK, say the soufflé does not rise or the wine was too sweet, it probably was because someone bungled.
Military small group operations – by which I mean small group killings of people who can also kill you – are not like that. They always hang on a knife edge. The most skilled soldiers in the world frequently die young and frequently fail. A hand is a fraction of a second too slow on the trigger – a human mind is a fraction of a second slower than another, hostile, human mind to make sense of the confusion – and a comrade dies, or a hostage dies, and a lifetime of agonized mental replaying of that moment of failure begins.
Six hours later a headline writer in an office far away expresses his displeasure.
Is this how the EU got a Yes to Lisbon from the Irish? asks Mary Ellen Synon in the Irish Daily Mail, reprinted in the British one.
Ireland and the other eurozone countries might be suffering savage spending cuts, but the EU self-publicity budget thrives: in 2008 the Open Europe think-tank calculated that the EU was spending at least €2 billion a year on ‘information’.
Much of it bent, which is to say, propaganda. The commission actually admits that its information is bent. One of its publications declares: ‘Genuine communication by the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information’.
Perish the thought! Reducing communication to mere provision of information might mean that journalists got a handful of leaflets rather than a stay at the…
Hotel Manos Stephanie (‘the Louis XV furniture, marble lobby and plentiful antiques set a standard of elegance rarely encountered,’ the hotel brags, and so it should since the rate is listed at €295 a night for a single room).
An ex-Marxist deputy head teacher called Katharine Birbalsingh got a standing ovation at the Conservative conference.
Among the things she said were:
“If you keep telling teachers that they’re racist for trying to discipline black boys and if you keep telling heads that they’re racist for trying to exclude black boys, in the end, the schools stop reprimanding these children.”
… and …
“When I give them past exam papers to do from 1998, they groan and beg for a 2005 or 6 paper, because they know it’ll be easier. The idea of benchmarking children and letting them know how they compare to their peers is considered so poisonous by us teachers that we don’t ever do it.”
The management at her school were not happy and sent her home to await their judgement. It should be noted that she had only worked at this school for a few weeks, so most of the experiences she related referred to her previous schools.
It turns out that the “executive head” (not sure what that means) who sent Ms Birbalsingh home was quite happy with some other forms of political activity. Dr Irene Bishop allowed St Saviour’s and St Olave’s School, of which she is also head or executive head or whatever, to be used as the backdrop for the launch of Labour’s 2001 election campaign. I remember Matthew Parris describing the occasion in the Times as “breathtakingly, toe-curlingly, hog-whimperingly tasteless”.
Ms Birbalsingh is now back at work. But it also turns out that she is also Miss Snuffleupagus of To Miss With Love, a very fine education blog. I cannot link to it because at some time over the last few days it was taken down.
Laban Tall grabbed a bit of it via Google Cache:
The girls push open some doors at the top of the staircase and draw back quickly.
‘Nah… we can’t go down that way.’
I frown. ‘What do you mean, we can’t go down that way?’ They are visibly frightened.
So I push past them, enter onto the staircase landing and find a bunch of boys half way down the stairs, sitting on chairs, gambling with paper money and cards. We are in the middle of lesson time. The girls are uncomfortable. They have clearly been briefed to make sure they avoid such scenes. And these boys are not happy either to be interrupted.
‘Come on girls!’ I shout. ‘Let’s go!’ And I motion for them to follow me down the stairs towards the boys. The girls follow me, reluctantly.
These boys don’t know me of course. I have no clout in this school. So I know I cannot inspire fear. ‘Sorry boys!’ I sing. ‘Coming through!’
The boys look up at me, almost growling. As we approach, one of them puts his foot up on the chair, on top of the money, and blocks our way. I step over his leg. ‘Thank you boys!’ I smile. The girls follow sheepishly. As we continue now on the other side, moving down the stairs, I call back up, grinning. ‘Boys… I’m sure you’re not meant to be doing that right now! Better watch someone doesn’t catch you!’
And off we go. Phew. I can almost hear the girls’ relief.
A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as.
So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding.
I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque.
I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
He has serious convictions about arts funding – in particular, he believes that the market for orchestral music is so distorted by public funding that innovation is almost impossible. Until the Arts Council’s predecessor began funding orchestras just after the war, serious music depended on ticket sales and the patronage of the wealthy. Before the late 1940s, the LSO (a company owned by its players) paid dividends. Now it receives £2,355,836 (in 2010/11) from the Arts Council alone.
Mr Boyden believes that by keeping the price of tickets artificially low, the gap between an orchestra and its audience has become a gulf. He believes that other orchestras use their Arts Council funding to undercut orchestras such as his, taking up residencies in the provinces that are only made possible by the taxpayer’s largesse. The state does not contemplate pulling the plug on these famous institutions and, as a result, everything in the orchestral world is static. Mr Boyden argues, with some justification, that the last piece of new music to seize the public imagination was Britten’s War Requiem 48 years ago – because the music now written for these orchestras is created to satisfy not the musical public, but the taste of a handful of bureaucrats.
Yesterday, ah yesterday. All was happy anticipation then. Yesterday there was this article in the Guardian. It began,
There will be blood – watch exclusive of 10:10 campaign’s ‘No Pressure’ film
Here’s a highly explosive short film, written by Richard Curtis, from our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign
and continued enthusiastically
Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others.
But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10’s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
However today, the article has this added to it.
Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.
As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website.
We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.
At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.
Onwards and upwards,
Eugenie, Franny, Daniel, Lizzie and the whole 10:10 team
Mr James Delingpole may have had something to do with this sad outcome. You can still see the film if you wish. It has been reposted on YouTube by gleeful anti-greenies. Both his article and the Guardian one I linked to earlier have links.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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