Obsolete: 30/03/2008

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Boom boom!

I would have thought that this part of Peter Wright QC's opening statement in the "liquid explosives" trial would have been somewhat important. This is from the Press Association's wire story:

The prosecutor added that there was no evidence to confirm that the defendants had managed to build a "viable device".
But he said it was clear that the would-be bombers would eventually have been able to achieve their ultimate aim.

Those are the two closing sentences in the report, after 901 words. The Guardian too reported this, although slightly differently:

The prosecution said the alleged cell may have had access to 40 litres of hydrogen peroxide, which they allegedly planned to place in soft drinks bottles, and then turn into bombs once on the planes. Wright said the cell had not produced a viable bomb, but said: "The successful construction of a viable device was only a matter of time." The jury were shown a video in which scientists recreated the men's planned bomb construction. The videos showed the bombs exploding.

That was 784 words into the report.

Still, at least PA and the Grauniad bothered to report this reasonably important fact. Despite dedicating three separate articles to coverage of the trial, neither the Times nor the Telegraph deigned to mention it at all. Neither did the Independent, although the PA report is also on their website. Or the Sun. Or the BBC, from what I could tell from news bulletins and their online reports.

Doubtless, I'm sure that our press will pay the same amount of attention to the men's defence as it has to the prosecution so far.

Labels: jihadists, liquid bombs plot, media coverage, media reporting, terror

4/05/2008 09:38:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Friday, April 04, 2008

The tabloids always win part two.

To get into the mindset of why exactly it is that Gordon Brown, despite all the evidence, is determined to reclassify cannabis to "Class B", you only have to read the beginning of this Daily Mail article, written by none other than our old friend James Slack:

You MUST reclassify cannabis: Brown gets message from police chiefs, charities, MPs and victims

Gordon Brown was urged last night to overrule his drugs experts and reclassify cannabis.

Advisers are expected to tell him that the drug should remain in Class C and not be moved to the more serious Class B from which it was downgraded in 2004.

But campaigners, police chiefs and opposition MPs said the Prime Minister must ignore the recommendation when it is delivered later this month.

In the words of the Mail's own Richard Littlejohn, you almost couldn't make it up. The drug experts MUST be overruled and the campaigners, police chiefs and opposition MPs, all of whom know far better just how dangerous cannabis is, HAVE to be listened to.

It's also, as you might expect, complete and utter nonsense that it was just the "one" presentation that made the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs decide that cannabis should remain Class C. While we obviously don't know the reasons for its ruling in full, as it's still at least a month off and all that's happened is that the BBC were leaked the hardly surprising news that nothing in the last two years has changed to make them alter their opinions, we can make an educated guess that a panel of experts is hardly going to be swayed by just the one piece of evidence. As it is, this one presentation is still rather important: if cannabis causes schizophrenia at such a level as the critics claim, then you would expect that doctor's surgeries across the land would have noticed a rise in the number of those seeking treatment. This unpublished data from a confidential paper drawn up for the Home Office, based on surveys from 183 GP practices in fact showed that between 1996 and 2005 there had been significant reductions in the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia. The critics could counter by saying that the "skunk" they so bleat about is a relatively recent development, and that those suffering don't necessarily seek treatment, but it's hardly a ringing endorsement of their continued case for cannabis to be in a higher class.

As Steve R on the Transform blog relates, all the motions of the ACMD were went through properly, perhaps even with a slight frustration that they had to yet again go through the risks and arguments over cannabis, something they've had to do at least twice previously in the last four years, only to reach the exact same decision. All of the myths propagated by the tabloids, the Independent on Sunday and those in favour of a return to Class B also continue to be found to be wrong. "Skunk" is not 20, 25 or 30 times more powerful than the old Moroccan resin: it's instead double the strength it was ten years ago, and only 4% of the "skunk" seized has a THC-content of more than 20%, the highest percentage found being 24%. Skunk might now be the type of cannabis seized 85% (other studies suggest 70% to 80%) of the time, but use of the drug has actually fell since it was reclassified to Class C. The reporting of the most recent study that considered the links between cannabis and psychosis was also predictably sensational and wrong: it found that smoking cannabis increased the risk of developing a "psychotic outcome" by 0.4%, duly reported as increasing the risk by 40% by smoking just one joint.

The reasons for why the Association of Chief Police Officers support reclassification to Class B couldn't be much stupider. Rather than being concerned about more time being wasted by beat officers no longer being able to confiscate and warn when most of the rank and file favour legalisation and view any messing about with cannabis users as about as productive as themselves going around on duty stoned, they instead worry that Vietnamese gangs have taken over the trade and are now mass-growing cannabis in factories concealed in houses. Quite how raising its classification would affect this change in the market as the suppliers have realised that's it far easier to grow it here using hydroponics than to risk importing it from abroad isn't clear, but in their warped logic it must somehow make sense.

Admirably, most of those who support reclassifying the drug as B don't relish the subsequent criminalisation of youth that would go hand in hand with it. It seems to only be the tabloids and the Conservatives that favour that, and even they try and hide their vindictive streak by instead arguing that Labour sent "the wrong message" by down-classing it. That no one who has ever smoked cannabis has ever cared what class it is and instead is only interested in the actual effects doesn't seem to have dawned on the old drug-war warriors yet; it might have given the impression that cannabis was legal, but that ought to be countered by a major education programme, as some of the saner voices have long been calling for, not by penalising those who dare to experiment with it, as most of the current class of politicians have themselves admitted. You mustn't now though, because it's an entirely different drug, as even Boris Johnson tediously said today after his belated statement on his own teenage drug use.

The whole point of the exercise of asking the ACMD for its view was to get Brown through the election he still thought he was going to call without having to make an actual decision, while being a sop to the Mail he has so assiduously courted. Once he'd won, he could then get away with going with the ACMD's decision even if the tabloids turned on him. It's all rather strange: there are very few votes either way in reclassifying the drug or not; now, if he proposed legalising it, which continues to be the only sane way to deal with the dreaded Vietnamese gangs and to end the lunacy of prosecuting small time possessors of the drug, then that would be something worth getting properly worked up about. Instead, Brown's likely to further try to appease the Sun and Mail by completely ignoring the expert advice that he commissioned in the first place, just as they too regard it with such utter contempt.

This is what should happen instead. Labour should be honest with both themselves and everyone else by coming out and saying the following: cannabis is potentially dangerous, just like all other drugs. There is a risk of developing mental illness through its use, especially if you smoke it constantly and you're already susceptible through genetic links to health problems, while those whose minds are still developing, such as anyone under 18, should certainly not use it for the same reasons. This is why we're going to decriminalise it, regulate it, tax it and age restrict it, and continue to monitor the scientific research carefully as it continues to be accumulated, all things that are already done with alcohol and tobacco, both of which, according to the Lancet's recent attempt to draw up a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs are higher on the risk scale than cannabis is. At the same time, we'll launch an unprecedented education programme aimed at establishing exactly what the risks are to children of all ages, while making completely clear what the change in the law means to everyone.

That, however, would be evidence based policy making; and in this country, the tabloids always win.

Related post:
Mike Power - What IS he smoking?
Transform - ACMD cannabis report update...

Labels: abuses by tabloids, ACMD, Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, cannabis, cannabis potency, drug policies, drug prohibition, drug use, Gordon Brown, legislation

4/04/2008 10:00:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

The tabloids always win part one.

The tabloids have won. They always win:

Tabloid newspapers will be able to carry on using private detectives without fear of jail sentences after a government climb-down was confirmed last night.
Ministers decided to table a last-minute amendment to the current criminal justice bill under which a longstanding promise to impose jail sentences for data theft will be dropped.

The clause will remain in the bill but the threat of jail will be suspended for now. It's another "compromise" which isn't anything like a compromise: the tabloids will just carry on as they have before, laughing at how easy it is to get the government to roll over when they repeatedly break the law and lie about how it would "affect investigative journalism", the kind they haven't practised for decades.

As David Leigh, the Guardian's head of investigations, says on CiF:

Industry lobbyists have claimed that journalists might be in unjustified peril because they often commission inquiries not being certain where they will lead, and therefore might be unable to establish a public interest defence. This is the purest hogwash. If you buy Amy Winehouse's mother's mobile phone records, say, then you know perfectly well there is no public interest involved.

Not to mention how it often doesn't even lead anywhere. Ken Livingstone notes that he's been one of those most targeted by these kind of "investigations" before, getting into his bank details, with Steve Whittamore and his gang being involved also, and still none of them managed to find out until very recently that he had fathered another three children, with him breaking the news to kill the paper's "scoop".

As one Whitehall figure said this week: "These media barons - just how much power do they have?"

Labels: abuses by tabloids, dark arts, databases, David Leigh, liars, private detectives, Stephen Whittamore

4/04/2008 09:41:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Why are we cursed with politicians this stupid?

Sex offenders' e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children

Under government proposals, offenders who do not give police their address - or give a false one - would face up to five years in jail.

Anyone spot any flaws in this plan? Oh, yeah, so we did, over a year ago. Unity said at the time:

The entire proposal is a complete shambles and clearly advanced and put forward by people who haven’t got the first fucking clue how the internet really works.

Back then this plan was put forward by John "Dr Demento" Reid, and it's now being continued by "Wacky" Jacqui Smith, whose advisers seem as ignorant and clueless as Reid's previously. Surely they realise that you can get a new email address within minutes, thereby bypassing any blacklist? Anyone could give their real first email address happily to the fuzz and then use any of however many different accounts to set-up separate profiles on social networking sites.

Hopefully, "they" do actually realise this and are only going ahead with it because the usual suspects on the Scum and Mail are just as ignorant about the internet as they are, providing an "illusion of safety" that'll shut the gibbering paedophile hunters up for a while. Quite apart from its effectiveness, it's also a draconian policy which will make it even more difficult for convicted "sex offenders" to rebuild their lives, and 30,000 of them will be affected by this, no doubt including such notorious perverts as the man who had sex with his bike in his room. Then again, perhaps an excellent punishment would be to restrict sex offenders to "just" MySpace and Bebo: that'd be enough to drive anyone crazy.

I also just couldn't resist this from the Scum's website:

Along with all the others in the pod, no doubt.

Labels: idiots, Jacqui Smith, paedophile hysteria, sex offenders, social networking websites

4/04/2008 09:07:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Thursday, April 03, 2008

"Liquid explosives" trial begins.

The court was told that hydrogen peroxide would be the main ingredient used to bring the planes down.
Although hydrogen peroxide is legal, it would have been combined with organic materials to create an explosive mixture.
Wright said the conspirators planned to use a syringe to insert the explosive liquid into the base of 500ml bottles of Oasis and Lucozade in order to smuggle it on board the aircraft.
They would then top the bottles with a soft drink called Tang.
The mixture would be detonated by another substance concealed within batteries, jurors were told.

This trial is going to be fun, isn't it?

Labels: jihadists, liquid bombs plot, terror

4/03/2008 10:44:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

The liberal defense of murder.

Congratulations must go then to Lenin, or rather as he's otherwise known, Richard Seymour, for joining such luminaries as Belle de Jour and Zoe Margolis in getting his first book published. Lenin and I don't always see eye to eye on everything, but if there's one thing I do enjoy it's Harry's Place and its ilk getting their knickers in a twist, and boy did they when they found out.

It might just ever so slightly be better than Nick Cohen's last effort, too. Amazon have it up for £12.43, released 1st of July.

Labels: Lenin's Tomb, Liberal Defense of Murder, Richard Seymour

4/03/2008 10:17:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

The pompous windbag shows up - again.

It's a hard life having to traipse from one safe-haven to another, all the while knowing that at any moment a predator drone could come along and blow you into a decent number of pieces, but somehow Ayman al-Zawahiri manages it. In fact, not only can he avoid the Crusader-Zionist alliance's laser guided missiles, but he can answer questions from the jihadist forums at the same time, as yesterday saw al-Qaida's media arm, As-Sahab, release the first part of al-Zawahiri's response to over 100 questions posed to him back in December.

That of course doesn't stop him from being a pompous, self-righteous cowardly windbag who likes the sound of his own voice, but you can't expect everything from the second-in-command of a terrorist organisation. Most of the reports have picked up on Zawahiri's denunication of the United Nations, but that's hardly news. Far more interesting is Zawahiri's typical politicians' response to the question of why al-Qaida, or rather its Iraqi linked arm, the Islamic State of Iraq, massacres dozens of their own people in marketplaces, even if they are ostensibly aimed at killing the Shia:

My reply to Mudarris Jughrafiya is that we haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else. And if there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahideen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error, or out of necessity as in cases of al-Tatarrus [taking of human shields by the enemy].

My, that sounds remarkably similar to what politicians and armies say in cases of "collateral damage", doesn't it? Zawahiri elaborates slightly:

Were we insane killers of innocents as the questioner claims, it would be possible for us to kill thousands of them in the crowded markets, but we are confronting the enemies of the Muslim Ummah and targeting them, and it may be the case that during this, an innocent might fall unintentionally or unavoidably, and the Mujahideen have warned repeatedly the Muslims in general that they are in a war with the senior criminals – the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents – and that they must keep away from the places where these enemies gather.

Whoops! Did Zawahiri nearly just "misspeak"? The ISI has killed thousands of "them" in crowded markets, and generally "the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents" don't hang around the bazaars. Al-Qaida's message to Iraqis: keep away from the markets, as you don't know when we might decide that some of the people there are part of the Crusader alliance, who we'll be perfectly justified in killing along with dozens of innocents. Still, I suppose they'll be off to al-Firdaws, right, which means they'll be in a better place. Just dead.

All of which makes the following rather amusing. Both Zawahiri and the supposed leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (widely believed to actually be Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadi, posing as an Iraqi native to gain more widespread support) have increasingly denounced Hamas for making concessions, namely signing the temporary agreement reached with Fatah that ended the in-fighting between the two last year with both going into a sort-of coalition government, not imposing Sharia law and generally not resisting Israel as fiercely as the brave jihadis leading al-Qaida would. In response to this question, which incidentally doesn't even mention Hamas, Zawahiri rants:

3/1: The questioner I’laamiyyah [Informational] says, “1 – Does the doctor have assurance that those who were killed in the Algeria operations were unbelievers? And what is it that makes legitimate the spilling of the blood of even one Muslim?

I think I have responded to the sister I’laamiyyah’s first question previously. But in turn, I ask her: and what is HAMAS’s justification for killing those whose killing is not permitted from the children in the Israeli colonies with the blessed Qassam rockets which don’t differentiate between a child and an adult, and moreover, perhaps [don’t differentiate] between the Jews and the Arabs and Muslims working in those colonies or in the streets and markets of Occupied Palestine, even though the Shari’ah forbids their killing. I request the sister I’laamiyyah to refer to the eight and ninth chapter of the second part of The Exoneration.

Strictly speaking, Zawahiri is quite right: the Qassam rockets are completely indiscriminate, a waste of time, and achieve nothing but the deaths of more innocents on all sides. Coming however from a man in charge of an organisation which indiscriminately slaughtered individuals from over 90 different nationalities on September the 11th, which has condoned the vicious sectarian tactics in Iraq which have killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, and which whose main weapon of intimidation when they took control of towns in Iraq was to behead those who opposed them and leave the remains out in the open as a warning for others, this is just ever so slightly rich.

One thing As-Sahab clearly doesn't want for is a decent translator. This is just the first part of the release, and included is a 46-page PDF document with the entire audio recording transcribed in perfect grammatical English, without an apparent mistake anywhere in sight. The great shame is that whomever produced it is wasted on translating such bile, such hypocrisy and such irrelevance from a man who apparently seeks martyrdom but instead sends his footsoldiers to attain it for him. When that Hellfire missile does eventually reach Zawahiri, it'll be hard to stifle anything other than pleasure, even if he takes yet more innocents with him.

Labels: al-Qaida, al-Zawahiri, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cunts, Hamas, Islamic State of Iraq, terror, war against bullshit

4/03/2008 09:00:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

The dark arts and the real power in the land.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts, the government appears to be backtracking about making the buying and selling of private data an imprisonable offence. This is almost certainly a direct result of lobbying by Associated Newspapers, News International and even apparently the Telegraph group, all under the pretext that it would have a chilling effect on investigative journalism.

That claim and defence is rubbish. Journalism in the clear public interest is already protected, and if the Guardian was duly concerned, then the very journalists that got the story, David Leigh and Rob Evans, would be incredibly worried, as it was they that broke the story over BAE's Saudi slush fund, which would have almost certainly employed some of the methods that the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, wants to crack down on, as did their investigations into Jonathan Aitken in the 1990s.

Rather what bill is meant to target is the widespread use, especially by the tabloids, but also increasingly by the broadsheets, to employ private detectives who through their own contacts sell information, often from government or public services databases, direct to journalists. This all stems directly from the case of Steve Whittamore, the private detective who was raided back in 2003. When the police subsequently went through his computer, they found that he had kept exact details of every transaction with each publication, information which the information commissioner subsequently released back in December of 2006. It showed that the Daily Mail alone used his services 952 times, with almost 60 different journalists making separate requests. At Whittamore's trial the prosecution outlined that his associate Paul Marshall had used Scotland Yard's computer databases to access information for newspapers on two actresses from EastEnders, the family of Ricky Tomlinson, and a former Big Brother contestant, alongside information on Ken Livingstone and his partner and Bow Crow, head of the RMT. Despite this, Whittamore and his friend were all given conditional discharges, as a result of a previous ruling in a trial involving Marshall, where the judge accepted that he was seriously ill and about to die. Whittamore was meant to face another case brought by the Information Commission itself, but the cost to the public purse, and the fact that all the men could point to the previous trial and the sentences given there meant that they forced to drop it. They all in effect completely got away with it.

This isn't then out of high principles and making sure that investigative journalism, what little of it remains in the British press, is protected. This is so the tabloids and others like them can continue to stalk and chase celebrities and their families if necessary, and that as soon as a major crime and happens and suspects are named that they can get as much information on them as they possibly can. As Nick Davies outlines in the entire chapter on this in Flat Earth News, these are known as the "dark arts". One ex-Mail journalist told Davies that they used to use the social security computer as if it were an extension of the Daily Mail library, just having to phone their contact who would then supply the information or the persons with the same name in around five minutes time, with their home address, phone numbers and maybe their workplace. Another said that if the Mail comes after you, they'll get all your information, phone numbers, schoolmates, what's on your credit card and every call from your phone. This was probably how the Mail recently turned up at the home of Fiona MacKeown, breaking in and taking photographs of her murdered daughter Scarlett's "bedroom".

Some of this isn't of course high-tech or even strictly breaking the law. Clive Goodman, jailed after he was caught "hacking" into the mobile phone of Prince William, just used the well-known trick of phoning his voicemail and then seeing if the password was unchanged, as most are, enabling him to "intercept" his messages. Goodman went down because the charges were brought under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, not the Data Protection Act, which deals with the "blagging" offences and those involving the breaching of databases. This measure was really about bring the punishments into line, and upping the costs of getting caught so that there's far more of a deterrent. Getting a conditional discharge or an "unlimited" fine won't stop private detectives that have been raking in hundreds of thousands of pounds through such work, but a prison sentence will.

It's little wonder then that the Mail and Sun groups are so opposed to this measure. It threatens their incredibly lucrative phishing expeditions which so contribute to their celebrity exposes and who's shagging who nonsense which arrives on Sunday mornings. One of Gordon Brown's dearest friends just happens to be Paul Dacre, so much so that Brown has even given him a review to overlook. As for the Conservatives, the editor of the News of the Screws at the time of Goodman's offences, for which he too had resign was none other than Andy Coulson, now their chief spin doctor. Aside from protecting the privacy of celebrities and those caught up in events beyond their control, this is another reason to oppose the continuing obsession with databases across government and public services sphere. The amount of information that'll be on the ID card database has journalists and private dicks drooling already, as will the Spine, the NHS database that'll have the records of every patient on, not to mention ContactPoint, the children's database, which might have celebrities' children omitted from it, directly because of the fear of that information being sold on to the highest bidder. It just does go to continue to show that those who have the most power in Britain are not the politicians themselves, but the media barons and their editors who have obsessions with crime and criminals, except when themselves commit it in the pursuit of a good story. The information commissioner had little chance when coming up against them.

Related post:
Chicken Yoghurt - Newspapers and personal data: a level playing field at last

Labels: abuses by tabloids, Associated Newspapers, celebrities, dark arts, databases, Flat Earth News, journalism, News International, Paul Dacre, Richard Thomas, Stephen Whittamore, the fourth estate

4/02/2008 11:53:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Up all night with Nick Clegg.

Being not the most frequent user of pubs, the closest I get to the bar room bores are their equivalent on public transport. Of the three most annoying things and behaviour which goes on while aboard them, third is the increasing tendency for people to not just listen to their music at a volume that the entire bus can hear on their headphones, but to actually broadcast it to everyone through their mobile phone itself, music which is always the least likely stuff you would ever listen to, let alone share with the rest of the class. Second is those who take it upon themselves to talk as loud as they possibly can about their sex life, in intimate detail, which has previously involved someone's predilection for being fisted. First though is taking it into the physical dimension, when couples just can't leave each other alone for ten seconds and spend their entire time with their faces wrapped around each others, or going further and indulging in heavy petting. That this means you haven't got the slightest idea where to look and that they tend to embarrass everyone around them doesn't seem to matter.

As you can tell, I'm a miserable fucking bastard. I'm sure I'm not alone though in finding just how many different sex partners someone has had as about as interesting and essential as being err, fisted on public transport. Hence why I couldn't be less fascinated in learning that Nick Clegg has apparently had between 20 and 30 different partners. Hey ho, congrats old man. What exactly I'm supposed to do with this information or whether it's more likely to make me vote Liberal Democrat or not I'm not sure, but it was obviously important enough for Clegg to not shrug off the question when asked by Piers Moron in his GQ interview. We could debate exactly why he answered the question instead of telling Moron to mind his own business until the cows come home, but nonetheless he answered it.

The key fact should be is that it doesn't make any difference. Would someone reading this blog think less of me if I'd slept with over 100 or if I hadn't slept with any? I would hope not. It's as irrelevant as what I look like, whether I've done drugs in the past or what colour my skin is. What matters is what they believe, what they think and in Clegg's case, how he intends to lead his party and potentially change their policies. Strangely, as Paul Linford points out, to Clegg it seems his sex life is more easily discussed and a legitimate question than being asked about his previous drug use is, a question to which he said he had the right to having a private past, something I'd readily agree with. The point is though that if politicians had nothing they thought they ought to hide, they'd answer it. Again, it shouldn't matter whether someone's used drugs in the past or not: what matters is their views on it now. This however seems to pale into insignificance when the right-wing especially continues to see drug use as a matter of both morals and mental strength, hence why Cameron never owned up to his own previous drug use, nor has his shadow chancellor, George Osbourne. Having smoked a joint, and even more threatening, having enjoyed it, is still seen as either setting a bad example or even condoning its use now. That no politician that doesn't want to bring the remaining rump of the moral majority down on their head means that any admission of previous use must be condemned as youthful exuberance or as completely different now that said drug is 20,000 times more dangerous.

This can't possibly be expanded to youthful overuse of the loins though, surely? According to Amanda Platell, oh yes it can:

But that's precisely my point. It's all very well for Mr Clegg, by all accounts a devoted and loyal family man, to dismiss his early excesses as the indiscretions of youth.
But that is the same defence used again and again by politicians about drugs. "Yeah I did it, but I got over it."

Alas, many young people in our most broken communities don't "get over it".
For many of them, lacking Mr Clegg's privileged background and supportive family, casual sex becomes a way of life, just as casual cannabis use slides into lifelong drug dependency.
And the dangers for society are only too obvious to behold.

Ah yes, it's all right for Clegg and his highly sexed liberal university chums to bang each other in cyclical, but introduce such behaviour to the lower classes and it all gets out of hand. Before you know it you've moved from casual sex use into the use of harder sex, such as fisting, rampant rabbits and domination, just as casual cannabis use slides into the inevitability of shooting up and err, sucking dick for crack. That this comes from Platell, who in the past has written an extra chapter of Sex in the City, where the continuing joke is that Samantha has an affair with a different man each week, and also wrote the thinly-veiled attack on some of those she encountered in the newsroom in Scandal, which she herself freely admits was a "bonkbuster", satirised at the time by Private Eye as "Scanties" with Platell trying to seduce William Hague, is maybe ever so slightly rich.

The unspoken fact here is that like walking in on your parents having sex, or even hearing the noises through the wall, politicians discussing sex is about the most likely thing to turn everyone else off it that you could possibly imagine. The entire nation reached for its collective sick bag when back in 2005 Blair boasted in the Sun's pages of having Cherie five times a night, and the thought of Brown going at it hammer and tongs is possibly even worse. Jonathan Ross was vehemently attacked when he asked Cameron whether he'd masturbated to the thought of Thatcher, which Cameron refused to answer, but it is hard to imagine exactly what the average red-blooded young male in the 80s did see in the prime minister; perhaps it was that everlasting aphrodisiac, power itself. That power is something that Clegg is highly unlikely to ever yield, yet at the same time he's displayed that quality we supposedly want most from our politicians: honesty, or at least answering a straight question with a straight answer. He should now discuss his past drug use if any, but let's not attack him for his conquests themselves, even if they are as tedious as the Liberal Democrat party itself is.

Labels: Amanda Platell, bullshit, drug use, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, politics, sex

4/02/2008 10:17:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Millions of girls using Facebook, Bebo and Myspace 'at risk' from paedophiles and bullies - and the Daily Mail.

Parents are alarmingly ignorant of the danger posed to millions of girls by social networking websites, a report reveals.

A study of sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace shows children using them can be at great risk from paedophiles and bullies.

As you might expect, this being the lead super-splash in today's Daily Mail, the Ofcom report (PDF) the article is based on says absolutely nothing of the sort. The closest it comes to anything near that is where its research finds that two-thirds of parents say they set the rules on the their children's use of social-networking sites, while only 53% of children say that their parents set those self-same rules. The executive summary on privacy and safety doesn't so much as mention either paedophiles or bullies. In fact, the entire part of the report on privacy and safety doesn't mention paedophiles or bullies. It's only where we get to the "Literature review of harm and offence in social networking" that we finally get any reference to bullying, but still there is no direct mention of paedophiles.

The only possible justification that the Mail could have for leading with such a headline and opening couple of paragraphs is this section from the literature review of the current research:

Smith used the Pew Internet and American Life Project (as did Lenhart and Madden above) to look at the contacts made by subjects who create profiles on social networking sites (Smith, 2007). Smith found that seven per cent of this American sample said they had been contacted ‘by a stranger who made them feel scared or uncomfortable’. Teenage girls (the sample was aged 12-17) are more likely than boys to say this (11% and 4% respectively).

Only a very slight more percentage then than 1 in 10 had been contacted by someone who made them feel scared or uncomfortable, and we're talking in this instance about research done in the US.

It's quite obvious however why the Mail has decided to go with "GIRLS AT RISK" angle: it enables them to scaremonger recklessly about what YOUR KIDS might be up to online; means they can moralise about our debauched youth that are clearly asking for it, as we shall see; and lets them then publish those self-same profiles with the girls flaunting their assets at the same time as crowing about paedophiles.

I'm not going to reproduce them here in full for obvious reasons, but here's the Daily Mail doing some own personal research on the reckless and feckless youth:

Last night the Daily Mail discovered some of the shocking content youngsters are putting up on these sites.

This includes a 14-year-old girl whose profile picture, which can be viewed by anyone, focuses on her breasts.

Another 15-year- old is smirking at the camera as she grabs her breasts.
She has listed her date of birth, her home town and name of school.

One has also innocently posted pictures of her ten-year-old sister half-clothed alongside lots of personal information, including full name and home town.
Another 16-year-old is seen posing in her underwear in dozens of photographs.

The Mail has kindly pixellated the faces of those it's decided to "sexpose", but it naturally hasn't done the same to their bodies, because that obviously would mean that the Herbert Gussets out there wouldn't be able to get their rocks off. This is the sort of classy, by no means sensational copy placed alongside the images:

Doubtless, I'm sure these teens were asked permission for their profiles, whether public or not, to be reprinted in a national newspaper. That they'll be easily identified by their friends and schoolmates themselves and therefore likely to be um, bullied or mocked as a result is obviously neither here nor there. That it also means that some individuals might now attempt to find the profiles themselves in full is also obviously not a problem - after all, the Daily Mail doesn't seem to mind being the newspaper of choice for men like Mark Dixie, who recorded himself masturbating to pictures of his young model victim in the paper.

This is absolutely classic Daily Mail, having its cake and eating it, tut-tutting at the state of youth while condemning parents for having no boundaries, all the while engaging in the very strongest form of voyeurism that its readers will let it get away with, and distorting a report in order to do so in the first place. This just happens to be the same newspaper objecting to a tightening of the rules over the buying and selling of stolen information, citing "investigative journalism" concerns. Investigative journalism such as going on the social networking websites for the most "shocking" profiles they can find to titillate and outrage, presumably.

Labels: abuses by tabloids, bullshit, Daily Mail-watch, distortion, Mail-watch, paedophilia hysteria, scaremongering, social networking websites

4/02/2008 08:16:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Immigration and where to go from here.

To read the front page of the Daily Mail, and some of the coverage given to the Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs report on immigration, you'd imagine that some huge revelation and expose had been published. As always, the truth is rather greyer.

Its findings are in general not anything particularly new or especially revelatory. The main major criticism is that the government, surprise surprise, can't get its figures right, or the ones that it does present and claim show its case are simply a smokescreen: hence the oft-mentioned £6bn figure doesn't refer to the crucial capita per head, which the Lords report concludes has in fact been close to zero. That's the actual main conclusion of the report in general: that the current levels of immigration have despite all the arguments made on all sides, resulted in a roughly neutral overall effect for the majority. Those that have most prospered have been the immigrants themselves (duh) and the already wealthy; those that have suffered the most have been the already low-paid and manual workers, who have had their pay even further undercut, although like much of the evidence presented to the committee, it tends to be contradictory and weak on exactly to what extent this has taken place.

The report is not against immigration per se, rather its key concern is the high overall population increase, which is immigrants minus emigrants, currently predicted to remain at around 190,000 a year. It needs to be pointed out that these figures, despite the corrected predictions and doom-mongering reports which they influenced last year, are unlikely to stay static. The immigration rates of the last few years, largely down to the accession of the A8 eastern European nations, or down to immigration which we either can't directly control or haven't got the inclination to directly control, are likely to be exceptional, with the indications being that the immigration wave from Poland etc has already peaked, and that there might even now be more returning than are now coming. The question is whether the emigration rate, which is also at an incredibly high level, with 380,000 leaving in 2005, is also going to peak and decline. If it doesn't, then in a few years we might well be having the exact opposite of the current debate, especially if the birthrate doesn't also subsequently rise, concerned about our falling population and all that entails.

Reading this blog, some, and even I rereading some of my posts, might have got the impression that I'm overwhelmingly in favour of the current level of immigration. To clarify slightly, what I do object to is scaremongering, lousy journalism and fiddling of the figures which goes on in the tabloids about immigration, and this report does nothing whatsoever to change that. The mid-market tabloid opposition to immigration is not out of concern for those that it disenfranchises and hurts, but rather part of the Little Englander mentality, with the Daily Mail/Express demographic being those most likely to have benefited from immigration, and most of their readers won't be complaining about immigration possibly resulting in house prices going up by 10%, as the report suggests. As the report itself makes clear, the middle and upper classes have gained the most: consumers have benefited through lower prices, and taxpayers have benefited through lower costs of public services, not to mention the increase in services with the infamous Polish plumber and his brethren. When the Federation of Poles recently complained about the coverage the Mail had given to them, they countered with a series of articles it had published extolling the virtues of the Polish working man and woman, while, predictably, assailing the lazy work-shy British who wouldn't do the jobs they were filling.

Reading some of the comments on the articles and posts that have followed the Lords report, this is where the extreme sides of the argument seem to fluctuate between: attacking the "chavs" and the underclass for sponging off the state for not having the work ethic of the immigrants, and going after Labour for imposing the current situation on us. It is undoubtedly Labour that has instituted the current position, but it's one which the Conservatives are certainly not about to change, their rhetoric on putting a limit on immigration and putting the case for a cap or not, which would be a sticking plaster only affecting 25% of the actual current total. All the main parties in fact are not for changing the orthodoxy behind immigration, which is neoliberalism itself. Let's be clear here: if it had been politically expedient for Labour to have limited immigration, it would have done so. Not because it would be popular, as it certainly would be, but rather because immigration, and with it the free-for-all of the most extreme elements of globalisation are the current drivers behind the only people that increasingly matter to this government: the City of London and the CBI, both of which depend upon immigration and defend it to the death. This could not be more borne out by two of the major points of Lord Wakeham and the report itself, that the mass immigration we have seen would not be necessary if wages were higher and if the minimum wage was higher or a living wage. Hence it makes perfect sense to pay a skilled eastern European a wage below what many here would deem acceptable or liveable on, but not to pay an unskilled British worker a wage that he could live on to do the same job. This is why the government has been fighting tooth and nail to oppose the backbench proposal to give agency workers the same rights immediately as full-time workers, which would help to level the playing field. Brown's alternative is another laughable commission. The Conservatives are hardly going to deviate from the exact same policy should they get back in power.

It ought to be remembered that the government itself was taken by surprise by the numbers coming from the A8 countries, as their predictions were influenced by the belief that the other European nations would too open their doors without any quotas on the numbers that could come. In the event, only Sweden, Ireland and ourselves did that, something we then changed by imposing a cap on the numbers when Romania and Bulgaria joined last year, a measure that was effective in keeping the numbers down. They could have changed the policy, but the impression that it kept costs down and kept the economy turning over, helped along by the support of the CBI etc meant that it hasn't been, and there are no indications that the Conservatives either would shut the door on eastern Europe, something they could do despite some of the reporting that it's not possible because of EU rules.

The obvious point of all this is that for far too long we've left the working class of all colours, not just the white section which the BBC recently focused on, to stew in its own juices without enough help or care for them and their own struggles. The metropolitan classes took a rare glimpse into some of the sink estates recently with the Shannon Matthews case, and they sure as hell didn't like what they saw, and said so volubly. As others identified however, that community came together at the moment when it most needed to; maybe because of the disappearance of a child, maybe because it was like that anyway. Any government of the day needs to work with that spirit and turn it into higher-waged employment, but it's been far easier to depend on the migrant than on the necessary training and funding needed to turn around the defeatism that sometimes prevails. Labour does seem finally to have got the message, with the introduction in schools of the diploma that will hopefully encourage increasingly vocational qualifications that mean something. What will not solve the problem is the posturing of Caroline Flint over evicting those who don't work, nor will the wholesale privatisation of the jobcentre and the contracting out to the private sector of the task of finding work.

The right balance therefore needs to be struck between the above while decreasing the dependence on migration without shutting the door entirely or imposing an arbitrary cap. The government's chief mistake in all this has not been its current policy, but to have never properly articulated exactly what that policy is, or even to know what the policy is meant to be. Like with so much else that New Labour has done, it's been ad hoc and written on the back of a fag packet. The only real surprise is that it's taken this long for it to be seriously challenged by a source which doesn't seem to have any vested interests in either the current position or an alternative one, and that's perhaps an indictment of how little evidence-based policy continues to play in the daily life of Westminster. The Lords report has therefore hardly proved the case of MigrationWatch, while also showing that the see no evil approach hasn't worked fantastically either. The chance of any real change though as a result remains depressingly slight, and the cry that you're all the same from the doorsteps will continue to ring as true as before.

Labels: class, economics, immigrants, immigration, immigration policy, Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, migrant workers, politics

4/01/2008 09:32:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Scum-watch: Harassing the evil Islamic terrorist Abdul Muneem Patel.

Behold the evil Islamic terrorist eating the jihadists' favourite snack - Doritos!

As Sun journalists obviously don't have anything better to do, they've taken to stalking one of the men released in January a whole 18 days early from his sentence for having in his possession a manual on explosives.

FURY erupted last night after The Sun tracked down an Islamic terrorist released early because of jail overcrowding.
Neighbours were not told evil Abdul Muneem Patel, 18, had plotted a jet terror attack.

Err, could that possibly be because he hadn't? Patel was arrested along with the men accused of plotting the "liquid explosives" attacks on transatlantic flights, and even had his assets, one would assume temporarily, frozen by the Bank of England. Seeing however though as Patel hasn't been tried along with his presumed co-accused, it seems highly unlikely in consequence that he was anything to do with that plot.

The judge commented on what Patel had in his possession:

"You were looking after that book for someone older than you who you did not know well other than he had been an associate of your father," said the judge.

"It may be because of that man's association with your father that you naively agreed to look after that manual."

He said Patel had sealed the box but would have known that the title of the explosives manual was clear in large letters.

"It was clearly of current utility, even though it was published in 1991," said Judge Rook.

"It was dangerous if it had fallen into the wrong hands. I'm not prepared to say that you are a radicalised or politicised Islamist."

It was reported that Patel might have had in his possession the wills of those who were planning to take part in the attacks. It instead seems that these were letters from those fighting in Bosnia. I can see how that mistake was made.

The Sun isn't finished:

He was banged up in October for just six months – but was freed on licence in January.
Patel lives with his parents in Clapton, East London, where he goes shopping and drives where he wants without being watched.
One angry neighbour said: “It’s incredible. In America, he’d be in Guantanamo Bay or a high-security jail.”
Retired Thomas Willis added: “Neighbours should definitely have been informed.”
And Cilla Unwin, 58, said: “Knowing this about the man makes me terrified.”
The Justice Department claim Patel is being supervised.

The Sun has then smeared a man as a terrorist and evil when the judge in the case stated that he was not a "radicalised and politicised Islamist", told blatant lies to his neighbours about him being involved in a "jet terror attack" when the lack of prosecution for that "involvement" more than suggests that he wasn't, and scared at least one woman senseless in the process. Oh, and the "justice department" doesn't exist; presumably the Sun means the justice ministry. Still, got to keep the fear factor up, haven't we? Which the Sun is also doing, reporting as an exclusive that the police apparently foiled an attack on the London Eye and MI6 headquarters. Or rather, they found abandoned bags filled with weights at both locations, which might have been terrorist reconnaissance. Considering how covered with CCTV both are, those who left them were presumably well-camouflaged.

Labels: Abdul Muneem Patel, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, terror, terror suspects, war against bullshit

4/01/2008 08:52:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, March 31, 2008

The final curtain.

Seeing as Scott Baker has finally commenced his summing up, it should now be safe to end the boycott of mentioning the Diana inquest.

It would be nice to think that this inglorious, ignoble waste of time, effort and money, all for the purpose of flattering the ego and demands of a very rich and very deluded individual, has served its ultimate aim: to let Fayed get his ridiculous theories fully out in the open, where they can be suitably mocked, and then debunked, as they undoubtedly have been. The reality though is the opposite, as Lord Baker himself has said as much, noting that there will always be individuals who believe that she was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip, or alternatively by the Reptilians in league with al-Qaida who are in turn in association with international freemasonry, the Flat Earth Society and the Greys. Nothing you can say to such individuals will ever convince them they're wrong; the most you can hope for is that they betray at least a moment's doubt and think for a second, before returning to the comfort of their original belief.

Does anyone honestly believe then that this is the last of it, that whatever verdict the jury reaches will end the cult of Diana, alter Fayed's mind one iota, or change the view of the guy who's turned up every day with Diana and Dodi painted on his face? While Scott Baker was certainly right, both legally and intellectually to not allow the jury to even consider returning a verdict that the death was connected to a conspiracy, this will almost certainly be where Fayed and the others will home in on; they'll say that the jury didn't have a chance to rule on the possibility, despite it being laughed out of court, through either judicial arrogance or yet again, a conspiracy.

The verdicts offered to the jury itself show the futility of the entire exercise. I'll go out on a limb and predict that the jury won't be able to find a majority on it being the fault of the paparazzi or Henri Paul or the involvement of both, and instead return that it was an accidental death, as we have known for oh, closing on 11 years. You can blame Paul or the paparazzi and say both were culpable, but can't say with any sort of certainty that either directly caused Diana's death. In any case, as we've also known for a while, if she or Dodi had been wearing their seatbelts, they likely would have survived, but that doesn't seem to have come into it at any real point.

All of this was established, if not within hours of the crash, then in the next few months that followed. The inquest hasn't really told us anything about the night that we didn't already: we already knew how the paparazzi had behaved, if not quite in as much detail, and knew that Paul had drank alcohol in combination with medication with which it should not strictly be mixed. We didn't perhaps knew that one of the drinks he consumed was a Ricard, but even that was probably in the more verbose accounts of that night. Everything else was a sideshow, from the essential revelation that Diana's mother had called her a whore for sleeping with an "effin Muslim man", right down to her menstrual pattern, whether Dodi had bought her a ring or not, to Paul Burrell's sensitive secret information not being sensitive secret information at all. This was wonderful entertainment for the tabloids, who delighted in the whole thing, but did nothing whatsoever for the memory of Diana herself. Perhaps even that was epitomised by the ramshackle inquiry: a woman and a press that were as schizophrenic in their attitudes towards each other as the "evidence" at times seemed.

To the end, there's been a continuation of this almost knockabout aspect of some of the evidence given. Scott Baker has identified three as directly lying - James Andanson, Paul Burrell and John Macnamara, to whom he could have added the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, who hilariously said that during his time in the service MI6 had never assassinated anyone. As a Steve Bell cartoon featuring a conversation between the current head and the Duke of Edinburgh retorted, what on earth are we paying you for?

Some will doubtless argue that the whole debacle has, in the horrible cod-psychological neologism, provided some sort of closure. Perhaps it will to some extent mean the end of the incessant, niggling media coverage of the past 10 years, although it was finally starting to abate in any case, only reignited by the inquest itself. For those at the centre of it however, the tragedy of that night will never leave them. Fayed's undoubted anguish at the death of his only son in such circumstances is all too real; what has never been real is his theories for how it occurred, and how he has used it as an excuse to take on and blame the establishment itself for all his subsequent woes. Subconsciously, maybe, this is his way of dealing with the pain that it was in the company of his employees that his son and the princess died, something he seemingly has never faced up to. Fayed has to face up to his own demons, and the state should never have let itself be used as a replacement for him doing so.

Labels: Diana inquest, Mohamed Fayed, Princess Diana, Richard Dearlove

3/31/2008 09:12:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Unacceptably poor governing experience.

I continue to not give the slightest fuck about the problems at Heathrow, but the government's intervention is truly something to behold:

The government berated British Airways over the Terminal 5 fiasco today, slamming the airline for subjecting passengers to an "unacceptably poor travel experience".
Aviation minister Jim Fitzpatrick said Heathrow airport's flagship building had "fallen well short of expectations" and the airline needed to place a "much greater emphasis" on the needs of passengers. Fitzpatrick added that Department for Transport officials had been in contact with BA and Heathrow owner BAA "at a senior level" throughout the debacle.
In a statement to MPs, the minister said BA was clearing a backlog of 28,000 bags - nearly double initial estimates. Shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers said customers had been let down badly, adding: "Yet again the state of Heathrow is a national embarrassment."

Ah yes, because we all know politicians or the government could most certainly have done a better job. The moment the government contracts anything out, be it the Criminal Records Bureau, the numerous IT projects that have gone tits up, even going all the way back to the Tories' privatising in-house NHS cleaning, almost every single one has had a monumental cock-up at some point, or been such a disaster that the resultant backlog has taken months to clear. Then there's been the problems with the Home Office, the losing of the data discs within the Treasury, or the collapse of the payment system involving EU subsidies to farmers by Defra, to list but a few. You could include Railtrack, or the entire privatisation of British Rail, both of which have been embarrassments that rank high above anything that's happened at Heathrow. The private sector and the public sector can be equally incompetent and greedy, but what's going on at Terminal 5 isn't going to cost us anything in the long run, while all the others have and will.

Labels: bullshit, Heathrow, idiocy, media coverage, patronising politicians

3/31/2008 08:56:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Obsolete

Inexorable leftist gibbering from someone somewhere. || "Our press, which you appear to regard as being free ... is the most enslaved and the vilest thing." -- William Cobbett. || “Tridents (sic) are not weapons of mass destruction.” -- Nadine Dorries MP