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New Have a Go Laws

So, why are we having a new look at the laws on self-defense, citizens arrests and so on?

But Mr Straw is understood to have decided new laws were necessary after he was involved in four "have-a go" incidents, which included chasing and restraining muggers near his south London home.

"I know from personal experience that you have all of a milli-second to make the judgment about whether to intervene," he will say. "In such a situation, the law on self-defence works much better than most people think; but not as well as it could or should.

Ahhh. Because one of the ruling elite has had personal experience of the current mess. That the personal is political we all know but to find that only the personal is political is something of a shock. So, given that we have a series of areas where the law needs changing let\’s set up a series of events that will force said ruling elite to sort out the problematic areas of the law, shall we?

Ben Bradshaw to be prosecuted for the use of cannabis. Ruth Kelly\’s children to be taken by social workers to meet adoption targets: the court, of course, meeting in secret. All Ministers, of course, subjected to tax audits on their perks of office (and, more importantly, the use of Grace and Favour housing when out of office).

Anyone got a few more bright ideas?

Ocean Fertilization

This plan might have merits:

They propose that vertical pipes some 10 metres across be placed in the ocean, such that wave motion would pump up cool water from 100-200 metres depth to the surface, moving nutrient-rich waters in the depths to mix with the relatively barren warm waters at the ocean surface.

This would fertilise algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom, absorbing carbon dioxide greenhouse gas while also releasing a chemical called dimethyl sulphide that is know to seed sunlight reflecting clouds.

"Such an approach may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds", they say, adding that the effects on the acidity of the ocean also have to be factored in.

While the technique is different the actual aim is very similar to the iron fertilization proposed by Planktos. One other difference, this is proposed by James Lovelock and the past head of the British Antarctic Survey, while Planktos are mere money grubbing capitalists. Shouldn\’t matter, of course, a good idea is a good idea, wherever it comes from, but sadly it does matter.

Certainly it\’s something that might be tried. The basic idea is the same as growing forests: more CO2 is going into the atmosphere than current levels of biomass can sequestrate. So let\’s increase the amount of biomass doing the sequestrating.

Whether it will actually work is another thing, but then that\’s what experiments are for, isn\’t it?

Update. As William says, looks like experimentation won\’t be necessary. Crackpot idea (100 million 200 ft long plastic tubes?).

The Miliblog: Uncensored!

This might get a little amusing. The Boy Dave (M) has his new Foreign Secretary\’s blog up here.

The news that the SG\’s rep has made clear his determination to go to the region suggests the world is realising the need to move as fast as events.

Fascinating stuff, eh?

Comments are unmoderated. Yes, unmoderated. Guido is telling everyone so get your comment in fast, before they realise what they\’ve done.

 

Frivolous Flights Tax

This is a policy propsal straight out of the barking mad box:

Middle-class families flying on "frivolous" city breaks should be taxed by Labour, a key aide to Ken Livingstone told a conference fringe meeting yesterday.

1) Define frivolous.

2) How are you going to check?

So, I\’m middle class, and I\’m flying to Athens in a couple of weeks for two days. So that\’s obviously a frivolous city break, correct? Err, no, it\’s a businessman going to see a university about a method of extracting metals. Who, how and where is going to be able to distinguish between those two scenarios and apply the appropriate tax?

Unless, of course, we appoint a system of gauleiters who interrogate us all before we can book our flights. Perhaps they could check that we\’ve paid our taxes and recyvled our rubbish before we fly too?

 

 

Welcome, Welcome.

To the Blogosphere. Legitimate Tangent. *

What I like to do in my piddling little show of defiance is put my hand up at a meeting every single time some half-wit deploys jargon/acromyms/powerpoint as a means of disguising their ineptitute and improving their standing as a hardcharging bureaucratista. I say \’I\’m sorry, I haven\’t the faintest idea what you are talking about. Can you try again in English.\’ I bathe in the glory of the collective sigh of relief to my left and right as I have just said what everybody else still awake was thinking. I maintain a serious expression to disguise the fact I\’m taking the piss. I watch, smugly, as the speaker struggles to reconcile his desire to be taken seriously and engaged with the fact he hasn\’t an arsing clue what \’annualised performance metrics\’ are either.

Also when some bastard sends me an unsolicited 20 mg presentation which clearly isn\’t an amusing YouTube clip of a dog eating itself or something, I like to wait about 20 minutes to create the illusion of havving looked at the thing and respond:

\’Please explain how this can be operationalised in Derby.\’

H/T Stephen.

Alisher Usmanov Speech

Here is a preliminary transcript of a speech given by Tom Wise last night at about 11 pm. Said speech was given under Parliamentary Privilege and thus may be repeated, without fear of the libel or defamation laws, by any media outlet:

 

When the EU talks of a \’Common Foreign Policy\’ on energy, you need to be aware of exactly who you propose to do business with.

 

President Putin is on record as saying "The Commission should be under no illusions, if it wants to buy Russian gas; it has to deal with the Russian state".

 

Gazprom is not a private company; it is a state controlled tool of Russian foreign policy.

 

It is, moreover, in the hands of Putin\’s political henchmen, and allegedly organised crime.

 

Take for example Alisher Usmanov. This gentleman, the son of a Communist apparatchik, is chairman of Gazprom Invest Holdings, the group that handles Gazprom\’s business activities outside Russia. He is the man you will be dealing with. He is the man who cuts off gas supplies if client states dare to question Gazprom\’s demands.

 

Allegedly a gangster and racketeer, he served a 6 year jail sentence in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, his eventual pardon coming at the behest of Uzbek mafia chief and heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov, described as Usmanov\’s "mentor".

 

Usmanov bought the newspaper \’Kommersant\’. 3 months later, the journalist Ivan Safronov, a critic of the Putin regime who just weeks earlier had been "vigorously interrogated" by the FSB, as the KGB is now called, mysteriously fell to his death from his apartment window still clutching a bag of shopping.
According to Craig Murray, former \\nBritish Ambassador to Uzbekistan, it was Usmanov who ordered the \\ncutting off of supplies to Georgia earlier this year.\\u003cspan\\> \\u003c/span\\>Please take note, Mr President, that the \\nKremlin has now refused to sanction the construction of a pipeline to the EU \\nover Georgian territory.\\u003c/p\\>\\n\\u003cp style\\u003d\”margin:0cm 0cm 0pt\”\\> \\u003c/p\\>\\n\\u003cp style\\u003d\”margin:0cm 0cm 0pt\”\\>These are the people you want to \\ndo business with. These are the people you are moulding your 'foreign policy on \\nenergy' around.\\u003c/p\\>\\n\\u003cp style\\u003d\”margin:0cm 0cm 0pt\”\\> \\u003c/p\\>\\n\\u003cp style\\u003d\”margin:0cm 0cm 0pt\”\\>Mr Commissioner, good luck: \\nYou'll need it.

According to Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, it was Usmanov who ordered the cutting off of supplies to Georgia earlier this year. Please take note, Mr President, that the Kremlin has now refused to sanction the construction of a pipeline to the EU over Georgian territory.

 

These are the people you want to do business with. These are the people you are moulding your \’foreign policy on energy\’ around.

 

Mr Commissioner, good luck: You\’ll need it.

 

 

I\’ll link to the official transcript when it\’s up. Link.

 

 

 

 

Dixon of Dock Green It Ain\’t

Aren\’t we lucky to have such a caring, sharing, police force:

Graeme Deacon was on the M67 near Hyde, Manchester, when he saw the accident on the opposite carriageway. He crossed over and helped the driver to safety. Then a second car drove into the back of the first and caught fire. Mr Deacon helped to free the young driver. Police arrived and offered to drive him to his vehicle. But Mr Deacon said: “The carriageway was empty. I could have crawled across on my hands and knees. There was absolutely no risk. A police officer said, ‘You’ll wait as long as it takes, whether it’s five minutes or two hours. You’ll stay there.’ I went to walk off and three of them pushed me face down in the gravel, hit the back of my legs with a baton and handcuffed me. One said, ‘Shut up or I’ll spray you with CS gas’.”

 

Really?

This is interesting news don\’t you think?

The bull runs of the 1980s and 1990s, and the first half of this decade, with their epoch-making transfer of wealth to the richest 1% of the population, have distracted attention from the actual long-term weakening of advanced capitalist economies. Economic performance in the US, western Europe and Japan has, by virtually every standard indicator – output, investment, employment and wages – deteriorated, decade by decade, business cycle by business cycle, since the early 70s.

1) There\’s been no transfer of wealth. There\’s been a differential allocation of the new wealth created, yes, but not an actual transfer.

2) Err, output, investment and wages are all lower than they were in the early 1970s? It is to laugh.

The years since the current cycle began in early 2001 have been the worst of all – in the US, growth of GDP and jobs has been the slowest since the end of the 1940s, and real hourly wages for about 80% of the workforce have languished at about their 1979 level.

I would love to see where that wages number comes from, really, I would. I have a sneaking suspicion that he\’s looking at "real hourly wages of all employees". Which, given that there\’s been a huge structural change in the workfoce since thn, with part-timers and women flooding into it, is really not a very enlightening number.

The rest of it reads rather like the coming of the Marxist Gotterdamerung. Falling profitability…corporations oppressing the workers….wouldn\’t be surprised to see the reserve army of the unemployed turn up along with the progessive immiseration of the working classes.

Sigh, I thought we\’d rather given up on that failed analysis?

 

The European Union Military

Ooooh, Yes!

Defence is a vital driver of European integration today. The EU must become a true defence community: only then can it become a fully developed international actor.

What an excellent idea!

The EU faces new threats: not only transnational terrorism, but the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and failed states.

Failed states….

Yes, like Transdnestria perhaps? Invade the place and sort it out. Great idea, don\’t you think? Why we could divide the world up into spheres of influence as well. You know, Russia deals with this bit, China that, the US we\’ll tell to stay home as they are the global hegemon and the EU deals with our bit.

It\’s not like we\’ve ever tried anything so gorgeously progressive before now is it? Russia taking care of Slavic interests in the Balkans, talks about who gets to influence Morrocco, what to do with the failing state of the Ottoman Empire, should the ethnic groupings of the Finns, the Letts, be semi-independent or directly ruled…

Actually, we have tried this before and it brought us World War One. What an excellent path for us to go down!

One Difference Between Men and Women

I thought everyone knew this?

The profs measured the intelligence of 2,500 brothers and sisters and pronounced that males show a greater propensity for being both geniuses and morons than their female siblings.

Agreed, saying it is what got Larry Summers into so much trouble at Harvard but then it being something which the Harvard faculty insists it is impermissible to say bolsters rather than reduces the likelihood of its being true.

The distribution of attributes (whether it be height, intelligence, speed, strength, whatever) in males is wider than it is in females. Longer tails to the distribution if you like.

The most interesting (entirely unproven I might add) explanation for this came from a female biologist back when Summers was in all that trouble. It\’s exactly to do with the XX and XY. Y is such a truncated little thing that if there\’s a problem (read mutation?) with the sole X then there\’s no other copy of a gene to cover for it. Women, having two X\’s, are more likely (for a lack of a functioning gene in both X\’s is less likely than in just one) to have another copy of a gene that can take over. Thus, women are more likely to be "average", men more likely to be at the extremes of a distribution.*

Summers\’ problem was that he then mused that perhaps (and it very much was a perhaps) this explained the gender imbalance amongst Ivy League professors, especially in the hard sciences, where the people are drawn from the third and fouth standard deviations from the mean. Because there are more men in that pool. I don\’t think he would have got into so much trouble if he\’d pointed to the other end of the distribution, the population of those in homes for the feeble minded.

* Please note, I\’m absolutely certain that this will read wrongly to anyone who actually knows about this area of biology but the general gist should be clear.

 

Warren Jeffs Rape Conviction

I\’m really not sure here, really not sure:

Warren Jeffs, the polygamous sect leader, faces the prospect of life imprisonment after he was found guilty of rape charges stemming from his role in the arranged marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her older cousin.

That he\’s a manipulative scumbag I am sure of, that he\’s no more a prophet than I am similarly. However:

Prosecutors accused Jeffs of forcing Elissa Wall, then 14, to marry and have sex with her first cousin, Allen Steed, 19. Lawyers for the sect leader had argued that Jeffs would not have known that rape would be committed after the marriage…..Under Utah law, a 14-year-old can consent to sex. But sex is not considered consensual if a person under 18 is enticed by someone at least three years older.

A personal opinion is that the prosecutors were looking for something, anything, to get him on. As has been noted elsewhere, Steed hasn\’t been charged with anything, so we\’ve got someone possibly getting life in prison for "enticement to rape" while the actual rapist (because if there was enticement which someone was guilty of means there was someone doing the actual raping, surely?) isn\’t charged.

Alisher Usmanov and Parliamentary Privilege

It woud appear that something interesting is in the air.

Our Man in the Eurocracy tells us that Tom Wise will repeat the Alisher Usmanov allegations under Parliamentary Privilege tonight..

That means that all and any media outlets will then be at liberty to repeat them without fear of any libel or defamation laws.

That\’ll be interesting, won\’t it?

Alert me when there\’s a transcript will you folks?