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Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words. – Richard North responds to a lawyers‘ letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have. January 1st, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The TSA is such a useless organization, they have to ‘beat up on’ bloggers with kids! Is there not some adage about the sort of men who beat their wives? That they do so because they are trying to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by showing off their ‘power’? Why do we not just disband this worthless organization and admit it never has been nor will be of any use whatever? January 1st, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
If religious leaders get the urge to spout off on religious topics to the religiously inclined, well I suppose that is what they are for. But why oh why does the Church of England think it is appropriate for them to have any corporate opinion at all on purely secular matters like advertising? Why should a bunch of clerics think they have any business demanding the state regulate the media? Exactly what biblical basis do they have for supporting the imposition of restrictions on what people do on TV? I must have missed the passage in the New Testament where it says “The Lord says tell Caesar to threaten those who sayth things you don’t approve of”. I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claim to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better. December 30th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a very important sounding letter in tomorrow’s Telegraph from hundreds of photographers who are angry that the government is violating their rights with anti-terrorism powers. Alex Singleton says it’s significant because “the signatories are not a bunch of lippy anarchists, but a roll-call of establishment figures”. The letter writers are demanding a change in the law and the recognition that terrorists don’t need to lug about heavy Nikons and tripods. December 26th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian displays the jarring sensibilities that comes inevitability from holding the sort of fuzzy authoritarian statist views that prevail these days. On the subject of the Swiss ban on new minaret construction…
Actually it is about ‘urban planning’, just not for the sort of reasons the writer approves of. But what makes me laugh is that Ash has no problem whatsoever using the force of the state to make people build in ways he approves of. It is clearly axiomatic to him that the state gets to have planning regulations over what you can build on your own private property, even over mere aesthetic issues (i.e. he likes the fact the political trumps the social completely when it comes to your property). He just wants what people like him thinks is ‘desirable’ to be allowed. Yet somehow when that political process he accepts as axiomatic produces something he does not think is ‘desirable’ to his Guardianista sensibilities, I doubt it occur to him that maybe it is his acceptance of people exerting force backed political power over others in pretty much every aspect of life where the problem lies. Muslims in Switzerland wishing to build minarets on buildings dedicated to praising the words of their mass murdering Dark Ages warlord only have the problem they now face because people like Timothy Garton Ash think it is perfectly alright that the state to be allowed to ‘plan’ what people can do on their own property. December 10th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Are nation states more trustworthy now than in previous times? I am of course asking a rhetorical question. No, they are not more, or less, trustworthy. People, in particular the sort of people who seek political power or to in some way wield the authority of the state, are essentially the same sort of people who have always sought such things. And so, when the Scottish state tells us that the venerable prohibitions against double jeopardy, being put on trial more than once for the same crime, must be abolished due to improvements in methods of forensic science, they are actually saying “we, the state, can be trusted with the power to just shuffle the deck and try again if we do not like the outcome of a criminal trial because of course our motives could never be anything less than a relentless search for truth and justice, right?”… That is in actually what they are saying, because DNA cannot possibly be planted or falsified and our priestly class, sorry, I mean scientific experts are always simply concerned with the dispassionate facts (like say, the good folks at the CRU). What could possibly go wrong with being able to keep retrying people until the “right” result is gained, eh? December 2nd, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go? John Osimek reports for The Register:
November 17th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anyone who doubts Britain is spiralling ever faster into totalitarian madness should consider this case:
This is not a case about whether law-abiding people should be allowed to have weapons (or even, in accordance with the 1689 Bill of Rights, whether Protestant people should be allowed to). It is closer in smallness of spirit to the sort of vindictive prosecution that occurs in petty dictatorships when you have failed to bribe the right people. But here the motive is the much more dangerous one of nominally altruistic bullying. A case where the populist fad of arbitrary fixed sentences for strict liability offences has met its reductio ad absurdum Lest you think you are safe, recall that politicians are still involved in auctions of severity in relation to drugs, immigration, alcohol, offensive speech and writing and pictures – and knives. The sentence for possession of a knife in a public place without an excuse acceptable to the authorities can be 4 years in prison in England. In Scotland, the Labour Party is attempting to make imprisonment mandatory, deeming a severe new Scottish Bill insufficiently savage. Criticism is effectively not permitted. No voices in either parliament are raised for sanity. The moral busybodies are indeed omnipotent. A ‘knife’ for this purpose is any sharp or bladed instrument, except a folded pocket knife with a blade less than 7.62cm (3 inches) long. So most tools are covered. If you spot a potato peeler, chisel, or pair of scissors lying on the pavement, do not pick it up. That would be a crime. And you could be disturbing evidence of crime. Call the police. You cannot be too careful. November 15th, 2009 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Germany is particularly odious when it comes to censorship and allowing legal interference with freedom of expression, but his one takes the biscuit for sheer absurdity…
And just for the record, the people in question who were convicted of murdering Walter Sedlmayr are Wolfgang Wehrle and his half brother Manfred Lauber (just to add yet another place in the google cache where that information can sit). This is wacko enough on its own, but the linked article in turn links to geek.com, quoting the EFF, where they make the much broader point as to why this latest legal excess cannot be tolerated…
As the world networks together, increasingly we cannot tolerate legal attacks anywhere because the repercussions will not stay neatly within national borders, so neither can our hostility to such assaults on our liberty… now let us also do something about Britain’s intolerable defamation laws. November 13th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.  You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying… by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means… and that’s it. There’s a running competition for the best pics. It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public’s attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too. Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night. I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit? November 12th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest power grab by what the news simply calls ‘the experts’ is photoshopped images.
I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings‘. In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved We must ‘do it for the children’ of course. November 9th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I cannot say I am remotely surprised.
It is really hard to know how a satire publication like the Onion or Private Eye can make a living these days. October 27th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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