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July 2014

New Zealand wants to do fucking what?

Fundamental pillars of the criminal justice system may be eroded whichever party wins the election this year, as both National’s and Labour’s proposals would look into changing the right to silence or the presumption of innocence in rape cases.

Both major parties claim the current system is not upholding justice for victims, and are looking at changes that would effectively make it easier for prosecutors to obtain convictions.

National wants to explore allowing a judge or jury to see an accused’s refusal to give evidence in a negative light, while Labour wants to shift the burden of proof of consent from the alleged victim to the accused.

Auckland University law professor Warren Brookbanks said both policies challenged two fundamental principles: the right to silence, and the presumption of innocence, which are both protected in the Bill of Rights Act.

Reverse the burden of proof? What?

Bit of a stereotype isn’t it?

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people may be more likely to smoke and drink excessively, a major new study has found.

The new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that 1.6% of Americans identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7% identified as bisexual.

‘Significant differences were found in health-related behaviors, health status, health care service utilization, and health care access among U.S. adults aged 18–64 who identified as straight, gay
or lesbian, or bisexual,’ the report found.

One of those times when the old and new meanings of a “gay life” coincide perhaps.

Jimmy Savile visits DisneyWorld from the grave

At least 35 Disney employees in Florida have been arrested for alleged child sex offences in the last eight years, according to an investigation by CNN.

None of the offences involved children or teenagers visiting Walt Disney World in Orlando but were allegedly committed by men who worked there.

The crimes involved offences including trying to meet a minor for sex and possession of child pornography.

Five employees at a Universal Studios theme park in Florida, and two at Sea World in Florida, have also been arrested during that time, CNN reported after examining police and court records.

Of the total 42 arrests 32 men have so far been convicted, eight were found not guilty and two have yet to enter pleas.

Must be Savile as he is the root of all paedo evil, isn’t he?

More seriously, I wonder if that is actually higher than the background rate or not?

Presumably someone reminded them of Yes Minister

Flight records for an island used by the US for transferring terror suspects have ”dried out”, the UK Government said, days after it was revealed logs were ruined by water damage.

The Foreign Office was accused of a cover-up after ministers admitted there were ”limited records” of flights landing and taking off on Diego Garcia in 2002, adding they understood they were ”incomplete due to water damage”

.

Using an excuse that was spoofed 30 years ago did look a little odd, didn’t it?

Dear Murphmonster: A patent and a trademark are different things

Apple has patented the layout of its stores. So now, if you want to open a shop with tables in it where people like at IT products I suspect you can’t.

Why does this matter? First, because that seems, at the very least to be absurd. How can you patent where you put a table?

Second, because you can apparently patent where you put a table you do as a result create an entirely artificial property right that means that Apple can now extract a rent from ownership of that right.

And if you want to know where that leads, listen to this. This is the direction in which capitalism is moving by seeking to control all aspects of our lives, and in the process are seeking to control all we do.

Please do not think we live in a world of benevolent corporations. We most definitely do not.

He actually links to something that gets it right:

Apple has managed to secure a court ruling from the European Court of Justice allowing it to trademark the layout of all Apple retail stores within the European Union.

A trademark is a very different thing from a patent. The confusion comes from the fact that these days trademarks are often called “design patents”.

Apple does not own a patent on having a store in which you look at electronics sitting on tables. It has a trademark on the specific designs that it uses. The effect of which is to stop people passing off as Apple Stores by, say, calling themselves Aple Stores and displaying cheap Android devices in exactly the same manner as Apple does in its own stores.

This is not a new thing in law either. I recall one from decades ago where Selfridges won a judgement against an electrical goods retailer calling itself Sell Fridges. You can’t stick a red triangle on a bottle of beer because that is a Bass trademark (and has been for centuries, it was, I think, the first ever granted trademark).

And a tiny piece of advice for the MonsterMurph. If you’re going to try to comment upon patent and trademark law it would help if you had the first clue about either of them.

Ritchie gets angry

So, the Murphmonster tells us that Amazon is in fact paying tax, is in fact paying more tax than would be due under his favourite system of unitary taxation. I then spread this good news and urge him to tell others, like for example Margaret, Lady Hodge. You know, all those people labouring under the misapprehension that Amazon is somehow tax dodging.

This makes Ritchie very angry:

As for the rest, it’s just straightforwardly untrue and a total misrepresentation of anything I have said both today and previously, all of which I stand by. Forbes really should take care when publishing blatant misrepresentations of the truth, including (but not limited to) the suggestion that I am the UK’s leading tax expert, which I simply do not and never would remotely agree with.

I can assure you that Tim Worstall will never appear anywhere on this blog again. Not only is he a lousy economist he simply cannot tell the truth. In combination that is enough to resolve the issue for good.

The thing is, he really did say that Amazon was paying tax and they really are paying more than they would do under unitary taxation. So he was correct when he said that they were not tax avoiding.

And if they’re not then he really should be telling people that, shouldn’t he?

And this is a particularly twattish statistic

The group’s report highlights European Commission research showing that English 15-year-olds came bottom of a table of 14 countries for competence in the main language taught in schools.

Just 9 per cent of English pupils had a basic mastery of French – the most commonly-taught language – while the average across 14 nations was 42 per cent.

Err, no.

The most commonly taught non-domestic language in England is French. The most commonly taught non-domestic language across Europe is English. 42% of European youths are proficient (to the standard that this survey requires) in English.

Admittedly, that’s still higher than the number of English people who are proficient in English but that’s all part of the long march through the institutions.

Of course the slippery slope argument doesn’t work, does it?

It is not just that we know from the legalisation of abortion how over time ‘two independent doctors’ have been increasingly prepared to rubber-stamp the procedure, unwilling to examine in depth (or, indeed, at all) whether the woman has, for example, come under pressure from a boyfriend to terminate the pregnancy.

It is also that in the case of euthanasia, the great majority of doctors are highly unwilling accomplices. One wrote to me: ‘As one who spends every working day caring for the terminally ill, I am acutely aware of the damage such a change would cause to vulnerable patients.’

But we don’t need a crystal ball to guess at the consequences. Last week, the Mail published comments by a member of one of the Dutch regional committees invigilating euthanasia in that country, where it was legalised in 2002.

Theo Boer now says he had been ‘terribly wrong’ in supporting that legislation, not least because the numbers of those being given lethal injections had soared beyond what he had anticipated.

The House of Lords should not be surprised by this: some years ago it took evidence from Holland and was told by a Dutch GP, Dr van den Muijsenbergh: ‘I see a growing anxiety among patients, not just the terminally ill, that they think it is not decent not to ask for euthanasia sometimes, because they feel they are such a burden.’

The undeniably well-meaning Lord Falconer insists the legislation he proposes is modelled on the more limited measure passed in the U.S. state of Oregon, rather than the Dutch law.

So, here’s what happened in Oregon a few years back: two cancer sufferers, Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup, who were reliant on the social health programme Medicaid for their care, were told the state would not fund any more treatment — but would pay for the drugs to end their lives there and then.

No, there’s no value to the slippery slope argument at all.

Fukushima’s simple solution: dump it in the ocean

Another one of these reports from The Guardian about how difficult and vital and terrible is the Fukushima clean up:

Up to 400 tonnes of groundwater that flows into the basements each day must be pumped out, stored and treated – and on-site storage is edging closer to capacity. Decommissioning the plant will be impossible until its operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] addresses the water crisis.

Last month workers from Tepco and the construction firm Kajima Corp began inserting 1,550 pipes 33 metres vertically into the ground to form a rectangular cordon around the reactors. Coolant set at -30C will be fed into the pipes, eventually freezing the surrounding earth to create an impermeable barrier.

It’s a good illustration of why nuclear power is so damn expensive. Because it’s grossly, grossly, overengineered for safety.

That groundwater flowing out into the ocean after passing under the reactors? It’s simply not important. Nothing needs to be done about it. Let the damn stuff flow into the ocean.

The used an unused fuel assemblies? Sure, they need to be cleaned up. The melted reactor cores? Sure, damn right we don’t want to leave them lying around. The coolant water used on those reactor cores? Sure, run it through the purification circuit. But this groundwater? By the time it actually reaches the mouth of the bay the radioactivity is so diluted that it’s below safe drinking water levels*.

Just leave it be: except, of course, for the hysteria over the tiniest, teensiest bits of radioactivity.

*That might be a slight exaggeration but not by much.