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As I pointed out two decades ago, the Serious Fraud Office’s primary weapons, common law conspiracy to defraud, and the second limb of false accounting, if construed as the courts appear to understand them and universally applied would make all commerce impossible. It is an early example of the modern trend in antijurisprudence whereby everything is illegal just in case and ‘the proper authorities’ are trusted to pick on Bad People. – Guy Herbert July 5th, 2017 | 8 comments
 Competition between companies is all well and good, but it is important that you seek Permission from the Relevant Authorities before doing anything at all. Anything else would just not be Sustainable. It would be Chaos. Neoliberalism Gone Mad! For example, if there is more than one company renting out bikes, pretty soon careless customers of the new upstart Chinese Infiltrating Globalist Menace company will be Dumping bikes all over the place and interfering with the nice customers of the Official company with the Council Contract who are carefully placing their bikes next to the State Approved Bike Racks. This is the sort of Irresponsible Behaviour that can tarnish the carefully cultivated reputation of Right Thinking bicycle renters and confuse Consumers who might not understand that there are two different companies renting out bicycles with bewilderingly different tarrifs and branding. And it is simply Reckless and Greedy business practice to enter a market without consulting Stakeholders about the Need for two competing businesses. I approve of competition but not Unfettered, Unregulated, Inefficient competition of the sort that can leave a Bad Taste and clutter up the town. It is just not civilised and Something Must Be Done. June 14th, 2017 | 23 comments
Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500 million citizens and ban ‘illegal online hate speech’. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of ‘insult’. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed ‘discrimination’ […] There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesn’t need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else. May 28th, 2017 | 15 comments
Paul Joseph Watson, who sent that tweet, is editor-at-large for Alex Jones’s conspiracy website Infowars. I doubt he and I have much in common. Nonetheless, I urge you to do what he says. Look at the brief film clip to which he links in that tweet and let what you see sink in. Apparently it relates to events reported in the Hackney Citizen as follows: “VIDEO: Anti-fascists clash with lone counter-protester at LD50 Gallery”.
For what it’s worth, I cannot tell what the targets of the protest, the LD50 Gallery, are playing at, but it does seem as if more than just the Antifa might regard them with disquiet:
[..]
Actual neo-Nazis? Artists having one last scrape at the exhausted mine of art designed to épater la bourgeoisie? Who knows, perhaps actual believers in freedom of speech? It does not matter. As D.C. Miller, the man with the sign, said, “the right to openly discuss ideas must be defended.” May 13th, 2017 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Guy Herbert brought my attention to a question in a survey being run by the Biometrics Institute, “a global, independent membership organisation for biometrics users, researchers, and suppliers”. The question begins with, “below are a number of views that have been expressed at various Biometrics Institute meetings” and respondents are asked to indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree with a variety of statements, including:
I think that is what they call a “positive right”. This sort of backwards thinking is quite common. The Guardian reports on the bureaucratic horror show in India that makes it hard for poor people to do certain things (like book train tickets). Rather than tackle the bureaucracy, UNICEF talks about “what remains to be done” to “achieve universal registration”. The right to have all your interactions with others overseen by the state is not much to celebrate. May 12th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
EU mulls legislation in the fight against online hate speech, reports Reuters. Glad we’re leaving. But do not expect our current prime minister to fight for free speech. That would violate her programming. Added later: Posterity, and one or two bewildered humans, demanded that I explain the foregoing. Our revered Foreign Secretary, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in a recent column for the Sun called Jeremy Corbyn “that mutton-headed old mugwump”. The Sun helpfully provided a glossary for its readers, defining the terms “mugwump” and “revanchist”, though not “glossary”. Mind you, it got the Harry Potter reference wrong; it’s International Confederation of Wizards, not Internal. What do they teach them in these schools? Soon the whole country was googling “mugwump”. When all they really had to do was ask Theresa May. She has the answer to all our questions. Added still later, but less late at night: I cannot now remember how I ended up with two links to the same, possibly spliced, audio clip of Theresa May’s definition of a mugwump. Let it be. Never mind her. If you want to know the up-and-coming political candidate whose name you should look out for, take a look at this leaflet. April 27th, 2017 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Justin Trudeau’s Canada, if I mention the Islamist ties of Akbardzhon Dzhalilov, the 22-year-old suspected of carrying out the subway bombing that killed 14 in St. Petersburg, Russia on Monday, am I guilty of Islamophobia? What if I also mention that Khalid Masood, the man who mowed down scores of pedestrians, killing three, and stabbed a police officer to death outside the British Parliament last week, was a convert to Islam? Am I guilty of a crime against Canada’s new politically correct speech codes? I admit, what constitutes a Muslim terror attack is not always black-and-white. Was London’s Masood driven by Islamist fervor or by his long, troubled criminal past? Or maybe a bit of both? Canada has been heading in this direction for a while now, part of a growing list of nation states denying one of the most most fundamental civil liberties: freedom of expression. April 17th, 2017 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
…of backwardness, protectionism and cronyism. Sorry, Italy, I love you in so many ways but this is just Third World: The International Business Times reports, “Italy court bans Uber across the country over unfair competition for traditional taxis”
April 9th, 2017 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
What could possibly go wrong?
What if this sort of thing blows the problem out of proportion and makes people deeply suspicious of each other?
No shit. Not to mention every other interaction with any stranger he has while out with his daughter for the next few years under constant fear of suspicion. April 6th, 2017 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
News reaches us from Dundee, of a lady, Carly Mackie, who thought that she could have her cake and eat it, by parking on another’s land and ignoring the notices demanding the payment due in exchange. Having ignored around 200 such notices, she was taken to the Sheriff court and the Pursuer (Plaintiff/Claimant) won a tidy £24,500 (c. USD 30,400). Well Carly, it’s your party and you can cry if you want to, but the Sheriff would be unmoved.
Well, he might have said: “The Defender was a trespasser, the Pursuer offered to let her park there if she agreed a fee, she did so, and so the fee is due.“. However, a Conservative MSP has, we are told, chipped in:
The bully-boy? This was a woman parking on other’s land. Court action is there as the lawful way to prove a claim, and the credit rating? Who (sensibly) would lend money to Miss Mackie now? She clearly seems to think that debts are optional. The Daily Mail has its own view.
Yes, what regulations are there to stop people trespassing? What regulations are there to stop people from breaking contracts, such as an agreement by conduct to pay a fee for parking on land without prior permission? Do tell. Or perhaps let us stick with this private system of offer and acceptance. It’s nice to know that out there, some judges sit, like spiders, waiting for a buzzing fly to land in their web. Can we have a bit more of this please, it might help to rebuild faith in the law? April 4th, 2017 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The YouTuber Techmoan reveiws electronic gadgets and for some time has been doing investigations into old gadgets. I just watched his highly entertaining video about Digital Audio Tape. DAT made it possible to make a perfect recording in the home. This got music industry people into a bit of a panic. In September 1986 Stanley Gortikov, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in Billboard that, “an assassination is in the making. The targeted victim is the world’s music industry.” In what I would call something of a semantic muddle, he went on to say, “your country overtly demonstrates that it has contempt for the copyright owners of foreign recordings”. He is not talking to Sony or Onkyo who developed DAT, but to the country of Japan. Perhaps he was hoping to shame the Japanese government into somehow preventing electronics manufacturers from manufacturing certain electronics. But I do find it very odd. In the end the US government made life difficult for the Japanese electronics manufacturers. Watch the whole video to find out about Serial Copy Management System and the Audio Home Recording Act, the technology and products that were available, and the practicality of using a DAT recorder to destroy the music industry (it is not very practical). Then watch all the videos. March 7th, 2017 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The result of [the ‘sharing economy] is that in many ways, private tech companies have ended subsidising new forms of public services, for the public good. That ought to make them the darlings of the Left. Yet unfortunately, the Left just can’t rid itself of its urge to regulate, legislate and tax. And in their efforts to thwart consumer freedom, they have a useful ally in the shape of a legal framework which was developed for the analogue age. Uber, for example, is the poster child of the sharing economy. Yet 2017 is make or break year for its European ambitions – and at its core is an age-old political battle of Left versus Right. This battle isn’t on the streets of San Francisco or London; Uber has already won over consumers. Instead, the fight is moving to a soulless courtroom in Luxembourg. The question is whether the company is a technology or a transport company; and the answer is incredibly complex. February 18th, 2017 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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