Last month a nice chap called "Slab" Murphy was found to be in possesion on £700,000 in cash and cheques. This gentleman was firmly defended by a certain G Adams Esq., as a "good republican" and "not a criminal". Given that our mate slab appears to have been running an enourmous criminal operation profiting from all sorts of cross-border smuggling as well as other scams and frauds this seems like a curious description unless "good rebublican" means "bigtime crook" and "not a criminal" means doesn't get involved in the day-to-day running of his criinal empire.
[It could be that I'm doing Mr Murphy a disservice and that the 700 grand plus all has a perfectly legal explanation - but since he apparently legged it before the garda could ask him to explain I trust people will forgive me for being just a touch sceptical]
Today we learn that a former colleague of Mr Adams and, allegedly, Mr Murphy has died of "lead poisoning". This unfortunate fellow was a spy against the IRA and was outed last year. Given that the IRA has announced a cease-fire, laid down its arms etc. etc. the fact that this former spy has been terminated with extreme prejudice is clearly nothing to do with their political goals. Given that some "good republicans" have apparently been remarkably lax in terms of ebedience to the law what this reminds me of most are those enterprising Sicilians of the "Cosa Nostra" and their various offshoots. In other words the IRA is no longer pretending to fight for a united Ireland but instead is openly acting like every other large organized criminal gang. Permalink
The BBC linked to this news release from one of the UK low cost airlines (americans think Southwest or Jet Blue) which states in public the opinions we have all been stating over a drink at the pub:
Jet2.com condemns French Strike Action and calls for lazy frogs to get back to work!
Thousands of people throughout the country are today cursing the French Air Traffic Control Strikers for ruining their holiday/business plans.
On behalf of every holiday maker & business person heading overseas today that has been indefinitely delayed due to this strike action, our boss Philip Meeson puts the following questions to the French:
What exactly are you striking about? Or just in case you don’t understand that “pouvez-vous nous expliquer pourquoi exactement êtes-vous en grève...?”
After a token stoppage why can’t you just sort the matter out amicably without bringing thousands of people around the world (who, I would like to add give your country huge economic wealth) in to the argument? You choose to do the job you do and it's appalling that you are taking advantage of your dominant position by neglecting the responsibility you have to your customers…yes that’s right, holidaymakers pay your wages.
Philip also added, "Whilst France is undeniably a beautiful country (with equally good food and beer I hasten to add) we are appalled and quite frankly tired of the Air Traffic Controllers old fashioned attitude to dealing with any issues they may have."
In short we urge the French Air Traffic Controllers to get back to work or get another job.
Oh and there is a great picture... Needless to say the BBC has managed to find all sorts of francophiles with their sense of humour gland removed to complain:
British Euro MPs said the Jet2 boss was damaging Anglo-French relations.
Labour MEP Robert Evans said: "These cheap and derogatory remarks are beneath even a budget airline. We really have got to be more mature in our relationships."
Chris Davies, the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat MEPs, said: "This is a stupid and crass remark, given that we want the French to visit Britain as much as Brits want to travel to France.
Although shockingly for a Lib Dim, Mr Davies then goes on to say something sensible:
"But there is no doubt that the French are cutting their own throats by striking at every opportunity."
The problem is that this is a classic case of Anglo-saxon misunderstanding of the French. The French are striking to ensure that there are no new jobs or investment in France so asking that they go "back to work" is truly a horrible insult. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't riot in protest and issue a FatwaWrit at the European Court of Human Rights against those who repeat such a deadly insult. You might think that this is a trifle peculiar at first sight but closer examination shows that this is a natural consequence of France's rejection of "Anglo-saxon" ways. After all if Anglo-saxon countries have high levels of investment, high levels of employment and fast economic growth then clearly the French are duty bound to want the opposite just to show that they are not influenced by those darstardly yankees and their perfidious british lap-dogs.
Update: The BBC provides further evidence for my hypothesis as well as a description of Vile-Pin which has to be at least partially tongue in cheek although I completely agree with the concluding section:
What may have helped lead to his latest problems today is the cabinet struggle to succeed Mr Chirac - and Mr de Villepin's bitter rivalry with his nemesis and cabinet colleague, the equally ambitious interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Short, saturnine and possessed of a ferocious energy, Mr Sarkozy has outmanoeuvred his elegant rival at every turn.
He has portrayed himself as the man who has the strength to put France on the path to reform.
Standing up to the trade unions may have been Mr de Villepin's way of trying to outmanoeuvre his rival - to prove to voters on the right that he, too, is a politician with the resolve to reform France, a politician worthy of being elected president next year.
Yet so far, he appears to be failing in both aims.
President Chirac announced last Friday that the CPE would come into law - but amended in discussion with the trade unions and others. Not at all the non-negotiable position his prime minister had been demanding, leaving Mr de Villepin's future hanging in the balance.
In a further example of the UKs police state, it seems that the Passport Service (now known as the UK Identity and Passport Service) was attempting to stop people avoiding the ID card thing by renewing their passports early. The Register reports that their website changed the rules before magically changing them back again. The magic bit was a section that was removed that read:
"You do not have to wait until your passport is nearly expired to renew it, but we can add no more than nine months unexpired validity from the old passport to the new one. You can renew your passport whenever you wish, but you must pay the full fee and no refund can be given on the unexpired validity in the old passport."
Obviously the idea was to stop people renewing early by leaving it saying just that you could renew if "it will run out within the next nine months." but not explaining the rest. It seems to me (and the Reg) that this was actually a pretty stupid idea because all you would have to do would be to "accidentally" seriously damage your passport (or report that it was lost) and then apply for a new one. As the reg notes, it ought to be fairly easy to jam the system by having a few million people apply for a renewal a couple of months before ID card biometrics are required and it seems like mass arrests for intentional destruction would just move the block and jam up the court system, making the protest even more successful.
The Anchoress writes apropos her praise of a recent South Park episode:
I’m getting a few emails from people offended that I dare praise South Park: “don’t you know that they made a horrific episode mocking the Virgin Mary?”
Well, yes, I saw that episode and was offended by it and shut it off…but they weren’t mocking the Virgin Mary so much as people who look for supernatural signs and go overboard with them. But yes, I was offended, but I didn’t take it personally. South Park mocks everyone, and to be honest, they want to mock Mary, she’ll get them in the end - she’ll bring ‘em to Jesus; you don’t mess with Mary! After I turned off the The Virgin Mary episode I frankly prayed for the guys (they’d hate that, I know). Too bad. I prayed for ‘em.
And then she notes a key difference between Christians and Muslims
Imagine how different the world would be if Muslims prayed for those who offended them, instead of declaring fatwas on them.
Indeed. And this is not an isolated incident. From the founder and his immediate followers (think St Stephen) to numerous modern day Christians of all denominations from Pope John Paul II down, the reaction to insult of the overwhelming majority (as in all bar a handfull) of Christians, whether clergy or laity, is to pray for those that caused the offence not insist that they recant on pain of painful death. There are undoubtedly Muslims who react the same way, the comments on my Muhammed cartoon page and some of the related blog posts included some from those who reacted in that fashion, but numerous Muslims, including numerous influential Muslims that are the equivalents bishops or higher, do not.
South Park insulted millions of Christians in the USA (and arguably the rest of the world) and while a few people may have written to their TV provider to protest it, no one has suggested boycotting food from (ahh.. umm.. dammit need a copy editor/gopher) Californilorado in protest, let alone offering a bounty on their deaths. Yet both occured in the cartoon row.
It is clear to me that the governments and elites of Europe (and the liberal elite non governtment in the USA) mostly consider Muslims to be a sort of foreign Jehovah's Witness or Mormon kind of thing. I think that this sort of compare and contrast makes the difference rather clear. As if it hasn't been clear to the millions who read Jon Carroll's column from last year and the associated calculators that produce your Unitarian Jihad name.
PS FWIW depending on your Client / Server position my Unitarian Jihan name is: Brother Katana of Warm Humanitarianism. and/or Brother Dagger of Tolerance. I rather like the former but then I've always prefered client-side action....
This is without a shred of a doubt a first. I find myself linking approvingly to a post on the MPAC UK forum and copying (lest the News of the Screws get an injunction on them) the image of Mazher "fake sheikh" Mahmood.
Furthermore (and the image above may change if it turns out I've got the wrong chap but I don't think so) I'm looking on approvingly at Mr George Galloway who has managed to turn the tables on the scumbag concerned.
I disagree with practically everything Mr Galloway has ever said or done, I think he should be shaved, stripped naked and dumped in the middle of Basra with a sign (in Arabic) around his neck stating "I love Saddam Hussein" - hey NBC there's an idea for a sting - but in this case I have to say
'Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.'
The press on both sides of the pond seems to think it can act without fear of the consequences (except apparently when it comes to publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammed (pbuh) ). I see no conflict between my unfeigned joy at the problems of a muckraker like Mahmood and my willingness to piss off Galloway, MPAC and their like by publishing the cartoons myself. I published said cartoons fully aware of any possible consequences and despite being at one point #1 on google for numerous key searches (pictoral proof) I'm not even paid to do it - Google Adsense is not in the same league as a full time job with the News of the Screws. If Mahmood investigated really dangerous situations (a la Jill Carroll, Michael Totten, Miachael Yon...), I'd consider that his anonymity might be a good thing, although most of those people have their images published, but investigating celebs in England is flat out not in the same league and doesn't deserve any level of protection.
The view from my home office window recently. Nothing quite like the play of sunlight on the leaves. As always click on the image to see it enlarged and click here to see the rest of the series... Permalink
L'Escroc's buddy Charles Pasqua has been placed under judicial investigation in France for his part on the Iraq Oil for Palaces scandal. Pasqua blames the entire thing on Bush and his fiendish neocon administration who are, so he claims, out to get him in order to embarrass l'Escroc. As the BBC reports he denies all the charges:
Mr Pasqua has denied the allegations, which he had said were part of a US bid to discredit President Jacques Chirac.
He said his lawyers would immediately contest the accusations.
Mr Pasqua told AFP news agency that he had "never touched a single oil voucher".
This defence sounds remarkably similar to that of his alleged fellow beneficiary George "I have never owned a barrel of oil in my life" Galloway and is probably equally disingenuous in that while it may be correct such a statement does not rule out the possibility of benefitting financially from Iraqi oil.
Furthermore his claim about US pressure quite simply rings hollow. This is not some sort of UN or US investigation, it is an investigation by the French authorities - in fact the people who were his underlings when he was Minister of the Interior. It is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that someone else (e.g. a prominent French politician and minister whose name begins with S) is seeking to discredit l'Escroc via Pasqua but it seems far more likely that this is the French judiciary doing this themselves because they have evidence that a crime has been committed. Many observers both within and outside France have criticised the French judiciary for not going after corrupt politicians and while that does seem to be changing - these days practically every week some mayor or other seems to get caught taking bribes - there is still a good deal of room for improvement in the investigation of national figures.
Roger L Simon visitors - there is lots of other bloggy goodness here so do visit the main page Permalink
Vile Pin's reputation as a decisive and effective politician (such as it was) seems to be irretrievably ruined thanks to the CPE. Even people who support its general principle such as my neighbours and the local UMP député who was interviewed on Riviera Radio this morning are utterly unimpresed with the way he has handled the introduction of the law.
No one I have talked to disagrees with the idea behind the CPE. The rigid French labour laws are indeed harming France and are particularly bad for the young and inexperienced. By way of example my neighbours said that France has over thirty different sorts of officially sanctioned employment contracts, all with different defined benefits and requirements, and that keeping track of what employees have what contract (or perhaps should have) requires hiring dedicated HR personnel - something that is not going to be possible in a small company. However the fundamental problem is that Vile Pin rushed the law through the French parliament without any debate - he used certain techniques to cut off debate and force a vote - and utterly failed to make any attempt to explain why it was a good thing before implementing it. Given that the French have a well-founded distrust of their governing elites this is not the sort of thing that helps bring the populace over to your side and seems to be particularly relevant to Vile-Pin, a man who has never won any election anywhere but was appointed by l'Escroc to one top job after another.
The contrast with Sarkozy is striking: Sarko is a communicator - his opponents might even call him a demagogue - who says in detail what he plans to do and why before he does it. Then once he has said it and had feedback he goes ahead and does it. It is, as the BBC reports, noteworthy that Sarko is the guy who has been told to negotiate with the strikers:
France has been ablaze with speculation over the prime minister's future after he was effectively sidelined on this issue by his ambitious cabinet rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, our correspondent says.
As head of the governing UMP party, Mr Sarkozy is helping to lead the negotiations with the trade unions.
The contrast between Sarko - getting on with the job - and Vile Pin - holding press conferences where he asks everyone to "move on" - does not reflect well on the latter. It is well known that Vile Pin admires Napoleon but he seems to have a far worse grasp of strategy and tactics than his hero. Napoleon may have lost at Waterloo but he certainly understood the necessity of splitting ones enemies - at Waterloo this was precisely what he attempted and he lost primarily because the Prussians got there anyway - but this sort of fundamental tactic seems to be beyond Vile Pin. Sarko on the other hand is busy achieving goals while making sure that everyone knows he did so. The UMP website - the UMP is the party of l'Escroc, Vile Pin and Sarko - is a case in point. It is, apparently, hugely successful at recruiting the more moderate National Front supporters to the UMP and thus Sarko, as party president, can fairly claim to be doing his job; but it also mentions the name Sarkozy just about everywhere - including, of course, in the announcements about the CPE. The impression one recieves is that UMP=Sarkozy and that is surely no coincidence. Permalink
Today's the day that all of us lucky EU citizens can start applying for .eu domains as the BBC reports:
Citizens of the European Union can now buy an internet domain bearing the .eu suffix.
The public are getting the chance to buy .eu domains following a four-month period that let firms reserve domains to match their trademarks.
Unfortunately the key EURid websites, such as where you have to go to do a whois or find a registrar, have gone titsup.eu and has been dead in a variety of states all of this morning, so that BBC article appears to be slightly over-optimistic. Given that the persiod from April 7 was called "landrush" by EURid itself and given that, as the BBC quotes a Lycos spokeman saying,
"It's the most important top level domain we have ever seen,"
you might think they'd have got around to building a website that could handle the load...
The authors who attempted to cash in on the success of "The Da Vinci Code" by suing Dan Brown and his publisher (who also publishes their work) have lost and the judge awarded 85% of the defendants costs to them. The BBC reports that Random House was rather profligate in its defense so its costs were "almost £1.3m." so that means the plaintiffs now owe something like £1 Million. Oooops. Furthermore
Mr Justice Smith ordered Mr Leigh and Mr Baigent to make an interim payment of £350,000 by 5 May and refused the authors permission to appeal.
Given that this claim to feel vindicated rings rather hollow:
Mr Leigh told reporters outside the court: "I think by its very nature, this case entailed a conflict between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.
"We lost on the letter of the law, I think we won on the spirit of the law, and to that extent we feel vindicated."
Owing £500,000 is an expensive way to get vindicated in my book....
For my US readers this is, IMO, what is required for US Tort reform - a serious penalty if you bring a frivolous lawsuit and some sort of reward for the defendants for wasting their time and money. Permalink
Reuters has reports of the "Were-Rabbit" of Felton, which, it says, are reminiscent of the Wallace & Grommit adventure. However I think they are wrong. Here is the description:
"They call it the monster. It's very big -- it's nearly the size of a dog," said Joan Smith, whose son Jeff owns one of the plots under attack.
"It's eating everything, all the vegetables," she told Reuters. "They are trying to shoot it. They go along hoping to catch it but I think it's too crafty."
[...]
Those who say they have witnessed Felton's black and brown monster describe it as a cross between a rabbit and a hare with one ear bigger than the other.
[...]
Smith himself has described it as a "brute" which had left huge pawprints.
This description reminds me of something else, hitherto believed to be
Fictional
American
Admittedly there is some room for doubt, there are no reports of knives, nor of horrible deaths of telemarketers, so perhaps it is some close relation, but I reckon this is Bun-bun on vacation. Permalink
One of the problems of widespread broadband access is that we all get cheapo devices that perform tricks that used to be limited to a few high-end users a few years ago. The wireless broadband router that many of us have as our gateway to the internet is a case in point. It performs firewalling, DHCP, DNS proxy, NAT, WiFi and a host of other services just so that we can surf the internet speedily and reasonably securely. Just five or six years ago you needed to buy a fairly high end cisco router to do all this or alternatively you had to be a dedicated hobbyist either using something like smoothwall or for the real experts rolling your own Linx firewall, whereas now you just plunk down around $50 for a little box about 2cm x 10cm x 20cm.
Unfortunately there is a minor issuette with this proliferation of highly funcional boxes. If the code in them is written badly then a lot of people get to use the bad stuff. The classic example of this is Microsofts' various security holes which have affected practically everyone. However one advantage that Microsoft has over the manufacturers of boxes is that Microsoft software is easily upgradable (in theory - ignoring how upgrades break things etc etc). The box manufacturers have to get their customers to download a new version of firmware on to their computer, verify that it is genuine, and then upload it to the box and get the box to burn it on its flash memory. If this process goes wrong you end up with a mindwiped box which is a bit of a bugger because this is typically your only way of accessing the internet. Hence you might hope that the box manufacturers would do their best to make sure that the firmaware in their boxes works properly and won't break things before they ship uncounted gazillions of them.
Needless to say that hope is WRONG. The latest culprit is D-link which appears to be DDoSingmany of the world's most accurate time servers (Stratum 1 NTP servers for techie readers). The original problem was noticed by Poul-Henning Kamp, who discovered that numerous people were apparently sending malformed NTP packets to his time server and thereby annoying both him and his ISP, as well as his real customers - the BGP routers at DIX. Subsequently he and his reseach colleagues have identified that he is not the only NTP service provider to be hit by this and that the cumulative bandwidth cost of this is significant.
Poul-Henning's page explains in detail the costs involved - they aren't huge but aren't miniscule either, especially to a self employed individual - and the fact that D-link appears to have made things worse for themselves by hard-coding the NTP server list into the firmware of the boxes so that there is no way to update the list or check it for sanity or otherwise use it sensibly. Perhaps worse they have egregiously violated an internet covention that Stratum-1 servers (the most accurate) are only queried by Stratum-2 servers and critical internet infrastructre - i.e. BGP core routers not gazillions of DSL routers in homes and offices.
There are, almost certainly, ways to mitigate the problem, but they are costly and the costs fall on the victims rather than D-link which seems unfair. For example the obvious solution is to rename the timeservers so that the hostnames used by D-link's crud are no longer resolvable. Unfortunately this means that all users of these servers (i.e. the administrators of core routers etc.) have to change the configuration of their devices which is not something you do without a lot of care and attention simply because making a mistake potentially causes an Internet outage that affects millions.
I don't know whether any of my readers knows a US (California) based lawyer who would be interested in suing D-link pro bono to get them to stump up for the costs, but I really hope so because I doubt that anything short of a high-powered US lawyer is going to get the attention of D-link management. Permalink
I haven't commented yet on the official death of the CPE, nor on the Italian elections, because I think that sometimes it is a good thing to think before writing, and as a blogger with no deadline to meet I can do precisely that. However the disadvantage is that I get to repeat the excellent commentary made by others such as the NY Sun's Daniel Johnson and fellow bloggers at EURSOC and the EUReferendum, on the other hand I can also be inspired by them and hence I hope this post is more inspiration that mindless repetition.
The NY Sun's article is very good in many ways but yet it seems to be is that of the outsider looking in and judging by his preconceived biases. In particular, while I agree that radical Islam is likely to be a short to medium term beneficiary of these changes I think that radical Islam is no more than a symptom of the malaise in both nations. Where Mr Johnson absolutely nails it though is in this bit:
That trial of strength [about the CPE - ed] was no longer mainly about the hiring and firing of young employees, which the government wanted to make easier and the unions opposed.The conflict was about a much more fundamental question: Who has the right to exercise authority in a democratic society? That question leads directly to another: Who has a monopoly on violence? The French state has now given its answer to both: "Not us."
In other words: Might is right. The authority of the institutions of the French state has been irreparably weakened, just as it was during the 1950s, when it nearly succumbed to a military coup. The political system may not survive its next big test. And Jacques Chirac may yet find his niche in the history books - as the gravedigger of the Fifth Republic.
I agree that what we are seeing here could well be the death of the fifth republic and that we may well therefore see turmoil similar to that of the late 1950s before the arrival of the sixth (however I am positive that it will not be the first caliphate), but there is a writing off of France and the (native) French in the article that I flat out do not see. Indeed, despite the large protests, I don't think that many French youths are truly in love with the idea of being a fonctionaire (as Charles Krauthammer claims in Time): The problem is, IMO, more simple - they don't see a rewarding alternative. If I were a Frenchman I'd probably want to be one - how can you argue against all the perks? - especially given that the government effectively punishes anyone who successfully takes a risk and grows his business beyond the level of a couple of shops or so.
Italy is worse - Berlusconi has consistently failed to understand that "what's good for Berlusconi is good for Italy" is flat out untrue. He has spent much legislative effort shoehornig through parliament bills that protect his companies and his person from legal challenge. As a result he has failed to do anything about the real problems facing Italy - long term this is the fertility crisis, shorter term it is the reform of the tax, benefit and pension schemes that make anyone who can do work on the black - and any attempts he has made at reform have made Vile Pin's CPE look like radical reform. As with Vile Pin, but with even less excuse since he won an election on this platform, Berluscono has failed to make the reforms needed for Italy to thrive.
There is however a commonality and it is why I have the heading I do for this post. It is clear to me (for further examples see Germany, Netherlands and many other European states) that tinkering with the European welfare state is not going to work. Both Vile Pin and Berlusconi attempted reform as a series of hesitant steps and the problem is that while it may indeed reduce the pain this trategy also drastically reduces the gain. Hence no one is willing to come out in favour of the reform because the benefits are simply not clear. Many people criticised the shock therapies meted out the former communist Eastern Europe but a decade or more on these states are in rude economic health and generally speaking flourishing, indeed the correlation between how much they are flourishing and how much shock therapy they took is pretty damn close to 1. In Western Europe we have fewer examples of shock therapy but Thatcherite Britain is a fairly outstanding example. Mrs Thatcher radically reformed government and changed the attitude of Britain and the coutnry has been the healthy man of Europe ever since.
The only way to reform a European country is to plan for a big bang change. It also means getting your strategy right. Thatcher made sure the police were on her side, made sure she had at least a large chunk of the media on her side and made sure that she had sorted out alternative supplies before she took on the most obstreporous unions. Once she had defeated them defeat of the rest was more or less certain. One reason why Berlusconi lost my respect was that he was unable to capitalize on his control of most of the Italian media to get his message across.
I sincerely hope that Sarko is working on the strategy to do the Thatcher thing... Permalink
So what we now learn is that basically we have a false accusation. LaShawn seems to have been about the first to call it and her follow up post appears to be right on the money.
I feel sorry for the Lacrosse team who seem to have been outrageously slandered as a group but that is not in fact the people I'm most upset for. No what gets me really mad here is that in future the drug-adicted low-end sex workers, the ones who are frequently raped and beaten up by their pimps, clients, dealers etc., are now going to find that even fewer people believe them when they report abuse - until that is one of their beaters and/or rapists goes a bit far and they end up dead.
By effectively criminalizing sex jobs, as is the case in much of the USA, and by (now) making it likely that any complaint will be ignored the unfortunate women trapped at the bottom of this industry are at the mercy of their crminal pimps and dealers. You might think that the left of the US would be on their side but, on the whole, they may speak up for them but their actions are the opposite. If you think, as most do, that rape is bad, that female exploitation is bad, then you need to think through your response so that you ensure that future reports are treated seriously. I was completely on the feminist's side and utterly outraged at the defense tactics in the Orange County rape case recently - personally I think the entire legal defense team and the defendants should all have been publically sodomized by pool-cues, coke bottles etc so that they could understand the pain and suffering they caused their victim - but I'm not at all happy with rape accusations that don't stand up. The deal here is that if you end up getting people sympathising for some innocents who are accused of rape when it isn't then you end up getting people sympathising with scumbags who actually did rape women and sympathy for the accused when it is undeserved means that they will probably walk free and rape more women.
Note that I'm extremely unhappy with the sex "industry" as a whole but that doesn't mean I want to ban it, apart from anything else no government anywhere in the world has succeeding in doing anything other than driving it underground and making it more of a profitable activity for criminals. Indeed there is an argument that says that if you remove the opportunity for prostitution and other sex jobs you are removing one way that some women manage to survive and potentially get out of some pretty ugly situations. I don't think that argument is enough on its own to swing me but it is not implausible. Certainly similar unexpected consequences have occured from other well-meaning efforts, such as the elimination of child labour leading to an increase in Bombay street kids (according to an NHK program). Permalink
Michelle Malkin reports a bizarre exam question from Bellevue Community College in Washington state. She (and her readers) are unimpressed with the gratuitous use of Condoleezza Rice in the question - with which I can't but agree - but my complaint is more basic. The question is:
Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300 -foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second. The height of the watermelon above the ground t seconds later is given by formula h= -16t2 + 20t + 300
a. How many seconds will it pass her (she's standing at a height of 300 feet) on the way down?
b. When will the watermelon hit ground?
Now I'm not going to get into the metric argument, although I think that 100m etc would be better, because I want to complain about the level of physics and maths involved in this question. When you get past the /grammarpuss English, part A is simply asking
Solve for t in 300 = -16t2 + 20t + 300
and part B is asking
Solve for t in 0 = -16t2 + 20t + 300
I don't have much of an idea of the level of knowledge the students are supposed to have been taught but this ought to be an embarrassment. Not only is Condoleezza Rice irrelevant from this question so are all the basic physics aspects. You could as well ask simply:
Given the formula h= -16t2 + 20t + 300
Solve for t when h = 300 (and t>0)
Solve for t when h = 0 (and t>0)
Required mathematical knowledge to solve this equation is the standard quadratic equation formula and nothing else (actually for part A not even that is required as it is possible to divide by t and hence solve a simple linear equation).
This is, IMO, pretty basic maths of the sort that I was solving at age 14 and which was most definitely expected to be solved by inky English schoolboys (and girls) by age 16 in the mid 1980s. How come it appears on the final exam of a (community) college unless the exam is for a class of (pardon my Political Correctness) mathematically challenged students?
Idly searching around the Interweb thingy to verify my belief that Cicero did not first come up with "Nemo me impune lacessit" I came across this great epigram:
Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it).
It occurs to me that Cicero was some two millennia ahead of his time - especially when I contemplate the idiocies of N Chomsky and others of that stripe. These days though one might modify it slightly and get even more coverage:
Nihil tam absurde conscribi potest, quod non conscribatur ab aliquo bloggerorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some blogger has written it).
One of those things that you relly don't need to see is a newly refurbished driveway sprout water when there is no rain. That's what happened to ours and it hasn't been a huge amount of fun. In the grand scale of things a hole in the driveway is nothing - I can hear a Monty Python yorkshireman saying "You were looky, our driveway was washed away by a Tsumani every day" - but it is the sort of thing than can cause irritation of you don't face it in the right way, especially at this time of year. You see it's Easter which means that zillions of lemmings have arrived here on the Riviera and decided that the have to have the builders round to fix things so locating a builder who has the time to come around and help is a non-trivial task. Fortunately Thierry, the nice chap who just fixed the drive (fiancé of the nice lady who designed our new kitchen), knows a couple of gars (or were they mecs?) who were disponible for a couple of hours of exploratory digging.
A few words of background - we just had the drive repaved and our assumption, shared between the universal indrawn breath whistle of Thierry, was that somehow he had fractured an old water pipe that had was close to the surface where no water pipe should be. Hence Thierry was on the hook for causing this and hence, more to the point, he appreciated that the longer it remained unfixed the worse the eventual driveway repairs would be. Thus his dispatch of some gars ASAP to investigate and, once the problem was found, fix in conjunction with a plumber.
These gentlemen, Patrick & Antoine, accompanied by their dogs, showed up and between puffs on cigarettes and cries of "Vien ici" to the dogs who liked exploring the garden, they dug and discovered a mystery. Lots and lots of water was bubbing up but there was not a pipe to be seen (important language note for visitors to France - the French for a pipe is NOT une pipe it is un tuyau- do NOT, under any circumstances, pop into your local DIY store and say in your best French "Excuzez moi, j'ai besoin d'une pipe"). Anyway as I discussed this lack of TUYAU with Patrick we also discussed the likely origin of the water.
It was clear that it wasn't water I was paying for - I know where that water pipe goes, it goes through my neighour's garden and he created a fountain from it a few years back while planting a tree - so, and this also corresponded with the time the water first appeared, it was probably agricultural water from the Canal de la Siagne which wends its way from somewhere between St Cézaire and Mons to end up in Le Cannet, Cannes and IIRC Antibes. The canal was designed and built about 150 years ago to provide irrigation waters to the olives and other crops of the valley between Grasse and Cannes and it is still used partly for that purpose today. Today, however, in a large number of spots, such as where we live, the olive groves are now residences and the irrigation tanks (bassins), if they still exist are used purely to irrigate the gardens. Perhaps more to the point no one really knows where all the pipes are buried and they quite often move in very mysterious ways. And since they are old, made of lead and/or iron and the water isn't there all year round they also corrode and burst from time to time.
Anyway after the initial dig had been made and it failed to find a pipe close to the surface the plumber was called, but unfortunatey he couldn't come immediately due to other critical leaks that needed his attenion ("il arrivera demaing mating vers 8h30" - Patrick has a strong local accent) because he is also a "sourcier" aka water diviner and could thus advise as to where to go next. When the plumber arrived (15h00 not 8h30 - but he called to warn) he used bent copper divining rods to verify the existance of the pipe, the likely depth (could be 1m down), and the location of the leak. He then hit an impass, something that had failed to occur to either me or Patrick, namely where exactly did he go to switch the water off. In fact he quickly pointed out that this was actually not my responsibility but the responsibility of the water company and we called Lyonnaise des Eaux who are responsible for the Canal. They immediately did the slopey shoulders trick and referred us to the local municipal water company. Fortunately the latter responded promptly with a nice man in a van who confirmed that it really was the responsibiltiy of Lyonnaise des Eaux and we got on the phone to them again, this time with verbal assurances from both plumber and municapal maintenance man Lyonaise promised to send someone around to have a look and, probably, deal with it because it really is their problem not mine.
We waited until 5pm before we all decided that the Lyonaise clearly weren't coming today. This was depressing but I almost feel I was repaid because while the plumber, the maintenance man, Patrick and Antoine were waiting they chatted about other leaks and the like. Not only did I get lots of work at local dialects I got local history and local geography lessons as well as potted bios of local characters and the science of divining, al of which, especialy the latter, was fascinating. The rational part of my soul says that there is no way that two bent bits of wire can possibly locate a pipe, but the empirical engineer sees that it works, at least for some people. I witnessed the plumber locate half a dozen water and sewerage pipes. He was able to not just identify the location but also to state what direction the flow was and there is no way he could possibly have known in advance. At least if he did he must have an encaclopaedic memory because the local maintenance man, who does know the layout outside my gate, was able to confirm every find and the word tangle really doesn't do justice to what is there.
Unfortunately when the Lyonnaise show up the will undoubtedly go for the cheapest option - cutting the water off permenantly - which is a bit of a blow because the free irrigation water was a boon to my neighbour and his bassin. A little bit of history will die along with it too, but I'm grateful for an afternoon learning about it first. Permalink
Today I was going to do pictures of the little sprouts that are about to become olive flowers and then (hopefully) olives. But last night our neighbours told us about the olive tree that some of our other neighbours have in their garden. So we went and took a few pictures - two of which are below: It is hard to get the scale of the tree portrayed because it is so big but figure on a good 3m (10 foot) diameter. Feel free to estimate the age in centuries (rounded to the nearest 5) - one neighbour says between 20 & 30 - and to wonder how many kingdoms, empires etc. have been and gone while this guy has been growing.
A couple of days ago I talked about the hole in our driveway. Well not much has happened on the fixing front but I have done something in the draining front: After a period of staring at the damp hole and wondering what I could do to drain it I recalled the idea of the syphon and after a certain amount of experimentation I managed to get two syphons working using garden hoses which drained the hole quite nicely. Unfortunately I discovered that they drained the hole so dry that the syphon effect stopped so is quickly filled up again. But, after sorting out a bit of gravel blockage, I managed to position one hose such that it remained syphoning continuously and the road outside our house was filled with a stream of water descending the hill - logically you would expect it to drain into the nearest storm drain but our street doesn't have any of those new-fangled things so it has to go all the way down the hill to the (choked) ditch at the bottom...
I admit I had an addtional motive for doing this, namely that I wanted to make it clear to any Lyonnaise des Eaux inspector where the leak was as I didn't have the greatest confidence in their ability to read house numbers and the like. Well it worked a treat, sort of, in that it certainly drew attention to the leak. But despite phone calls from me, the plumber, all the neighbours who live downhill, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and a host of others Lyonnaise des Eaux are unwilling to proceed with any great speed.
A nice young man showed up yesterday excavated the putative hydrant in the road that might have been the place to switch off the water and discovered that it wasn't and went away saying something about returning on Monday. This seemed surprising given that Monday is a public holiday as well as irritating given that you'd think they would want to stop the road from flooding but that was all. The same young man showed up this evening too to have another poke around - I think he was hoping to find evidence that it wasn't "his" problem - but he was willing to accept that the evidence unanimously points to it being "his" problem and that its what a mathematicial would classify as non trivial. You see we have, by process of elimination removed all known sources of the water and - as I noted last time - also we have not actually located the pipe that is leaking. Lots of metal detectors and digging (through concrete and/or tarmac) will be required to locate the pipe and stop it. Meanwhile the hedge is getting a LOT of water in suitably downslope locations. I hope it enjoys it ...
Sometimes I wonder whether Vile Pin and l'Escroc have been taking stupid pills. Either that or they are related to the House of Bourbon - the royal family that famously never learned anything and never forgot anything. The CPE sank in part on the fact that there was no debate about it and no attempt to analyse or explain the reasoning behind it. So having killed the CPE on Monday, the Fench parliament approved "son of CPE" under the same conditions of no-debate.
PARIS (AFP) - The French parliament has approved a bill replacing a contested youth contract, after President Jacques Chirac's government buckled to months of pressure in which millions took to the streets.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's contested First Employment Contract (CPE), which would have made it easier to fire young people, is to be replaced with state subsidies to encourage companies to take on unqualified young staff.
The bill was passed Wednesday by 151 votes to 93, in a lower house National Assembly dominated by the ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), and is expected to be rubber-stamped by the Senate on Thursday.
Astoundingly the students and unions think that the new approach - in which the government bribes employers to employ the otherwise unemployable - is a good thing. Ignoring the fact that government attempts to rig markets have almost always been failures and the question of where exactly the money to pay for this is going to come from, if this measure is successful it seems likely that what will happen is that employers will simply exchange marginally educated but subsidized workers for unsubsidized but slightly better educated ones - i.e. the bottom ranks of students (and union members) - precisely the ones who just protested the CPE.
So congratulations morons. You have either forced the government to waste a lot of money that it doesn't have - and which it is unlikely to retrieve from higher tax revenues - or ensured that you don't even get a McJob when you finish your studies, or both. Fortunately for the morons, but not so for the unemployed of the banlieues, I'm going to bet that few employers take up the offer of dosh for hiring Ahmed or Diadou. You see the employers aren't stupid and realize that getting that government subsidy is bound to take about 500 pages of bureaucratic form-filling and responses to questions from fonctionnaires who don't understand that time spent pushing paper is time that is not spent making money.
My neighbouring blogger, Provence from Fayence, points to this piece in Fableweak about tourism by Peter Mayle, the man many hate for making Provence "too popular":
From their vantage points in London or Brussels or Boston, they deplore what they say has happened to Provence. They know, from investigations carried out during their brief annual vacations, that Provence has changed. The markets are more crowded, the prices have gone up, the restaurants are full, the sunniest café tables are taken, bakers run out of bread, waiters run out of patience, there is nowhere to park and nobody—but nobody—can be found to fix a leaking pool.
In it Peter Mayle defends the average tourist:
After many years of on-the-spot observation, I would like to put in a good word for this much-maligned species. Among them, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Vaucluse and Bouches-du-Rhone account for between 70 million and 80 million "tourist nights" per year. The overwhelming majority of these visitors are amiable and considerate people who want nothing more than quiet enjoyment. They have come to Provence for sunshine and spectacular scenery, for the food and the wine, for a pleasant break from real life. Of course there are crowds, particularly in July and August, but these tend to be confined to the towns and postcard villages. For those who want solitude, beautiful and empty countryside is only a short drive away.
Personally, I have never found the tourist season intolerable; indeed, there is reason to be grateful for some of its effects. If it weren't for the money that tourism brings, many of the châteaux and gardens open to the public would become derelict; monuments would be left to crumble; many restaurants could never survive on local custom alone; it wouldn't be worth putting on concerts or village fetes. Rural life would be the poorer.
I can only agree. We went on a drive today via Paymeinade to Fayence and Seillans then up to Mons and the Route Napoleon and back through Grasse. Even the latter, a city that I consider to be the smelly armpit of the Riviera, has spent money to try and make things look nice, and the smaller villages looked very pleasing in their Easter finery. There is no doubt in my mind that, along with the various events put on for the amusement of the visitors, we residents benefit in all sorts of minor ways to the tourist influx. Shops are open to sell essentials even on Easter, roads are (generally) well maintained, restaurants thrive, the countryside is maintained with well marked paths and so on. It is true that sometimes it is a bit irritating to hear others making loud comments in English, but on the other hand you also get numerous foreign artistic sorts to illustrate the place (hey any Japanese readers - my wife is having a photo exhibition in Kobe real soon) and in fact we met one in Mons. A certain Gunnar Zatestam, who charmed my wife and numerous local children, as he painted. Oh and while I am sure that the holidaymakers who decide to settle and buy a house cause troublesome price rises in the property fron in some locations, in much of the south east of France property is cheap and would be basically abandoned were it not. Moreover they (we) certainly help the local economy by buying furnishings and plants, doing DIY, getting people to build swimming pools etc etc, not to mention the direct cash infusion that results from using foreign capital to purchase property in France. So I'd like to echo Mr Mayle - come on down here and enjoy Provence.
[On the other hand there are some visitors who make little contribution - I'm thinking of those scummy Dutch and Italians with their caravans and campervans. There ought to be rewards given for removing them from the roads in the most explosive manner] Permalink
I realise this isn’t an original observation, but the blogosphere is like a trestle table at the global village fete, creaking under the weight of fruitcakes.
This is in re: the Euston Manifesto, something that seems to upset a lot of lefties. Harry's Place has the cut and paste guide to criticising it, and Stephen Pollard has a Maida Vale manifesto. As Tim W noted it irritates those of us who aren't statists so while I'm sympathetic to the aims I, personally, will not be signing it.
Across the pond in La-la land a certain hack called Hiltzik has been following the rules of bad scientists everywhere by selecting two data points to draw a conclusion from. Patterico had been trying to point out the error of his ways without much success so I decided to see what a neutral 3rd party could do. My first comment was successful, my second - an attempt to post precisely the same link that Patterico was trying to post - failed miserably. It seems that Hiltzik is not just a bad scientist but a bad journalist who is unable to tolerate objective criticism.
One bigger story doing the rounds in the blogosphere is the Duke Rape case. LaShawn has numerous updates and comments and is - in general - on the side of the Lacrosse team, whereas feministe is on the side of the alleged victim. My comment posted at both sites and - I believe - still valid possibly with some minor changes to the timing in the light of the abc photo analysis was:
I’m beginning to see how the initially differing accounts of what happened could be reconciled. This is pure hypothesis from 1000s of miles away so it has as much value as you are paying for it - i.e. 0
Firstly it seems pretty clear now that the victim was assaulted and probably raped by somebody that night. The question is who, when and where. The problem I had was that the timetable of events didn’t seme to match up and the statements from the frat boys which stated that the victim was unable to perform as expected and seemed intoxicated and in bad shape when the first saw her. This seemed to indicate that she was raped before going on this call - which seemed ummm implausible - but which seemed to be strengthened by the lack of DNA evidence. So how to square the circle?
I think what happened is that the two dancers showed up and were almost immediately separated into two chnageing rooms/closets/bathrooms. The victim discovered that two or three of the frat boys - who probably guided her to her "changing room" - wanted a bit more than a dance, which she refused, was then possibly drugged, and was then assaulted in some closet - probably using convenient brushes for penetration because she was insulting about the rapists' "equipment". The rapists then left her and went back to the party and she was left to finish changing. Not surprisingly any performance she made after that was poor.
I’m sure there was loud music playing, there was clearly much alcohol, I see no reason why any of the other (drunk) frat boys should have noticed that two or three of their number were missing for 5-10 minutes, hence their statements and their willingness to stick together and defend a rapist.
The key point, it seems to me, is that the evidence strongly suggests she was raped - the question is where, when and by whom? if it wasn't the Duke students who have been arrested then who was it? Nasty though it is I find myself hoping that she was in fact raped by the Duke students because if not the case is going to do a lot of harm to the chances of future sex workers who are rape victims getting a fair hearing.
Underwood also kept a wish list on Amazon, which has now disappeared, but is reported to have contained The [Mark Steyn] Monologues; he read Manga comics; he sold some things on eBay, as well as buying items for an online game called Kingdom of Loathing (including "hell ramen") . He read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.
Astonishingly Scott gets a response to his email to the Grauniad/Mr Brown asking "WTF?" which is explained in better detail at Mr Brown's blog
Ah; I was hoping no one would notice. The Guardian has some pretty ferocious spam filters, which for some reason seem to screw with my copy when I am writing about these things. I had problem with one about a ghastly net forum, too. So if they don't get through, I rewrite them with euphemisms in square brackets for all the words that might excite a bayesian filter. so [self-pleasuring] for masturbation, and so on.
The sub got all of them except [Mark Steyn], which I had thought was perfectly obvious.
This could make for a classic apology, of course.
One might have thought there were other ways to get the critical words across - "vag!na" in good old spammer style for example but apparently not. Fortunately, despite being a bunch of left wing [Mark Steyn]s, the Grauniad does not yet consider [Mark Steyn] to be an obscenity....
There is a famous cartoon dating from the early days of the internet with the tag "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog". This is true but total anonymity is rather harder than people think and will, I believe get much harder. Perhaps more to the point the anonymity of a particular nickname becomes much harder the more you comment, post etc. using it. Likewise once your name and contact details are exposed anywhere on the internet people will abuse them - usually to send you messages about "v!@gr@" - but sometimes to send you hate mail, and privacy is like virginity, once you've lost it you can't get it back.
For example many lefties have reacted in variousdegrees of outrage at Michelle Malkin's publication of the contact details of some clueless UCSC students who put out a press-release of particular imbecility and then wondered why they got hatemail. Now I don't think people should send hatemail, but I am afraid that it seems to be a demonstrable fact that there are idiots of all political stripes who like sending nasty emails to people who take positions they disagree with and if they have other personal details they may also use them too. Now it seems the lefties have exposed Michelle's home address etc. Unlike some who react to that withcondemnation, I react more with resignation.
In all such cases, if you know someone's real name and some basic facts about them it is ridiculously easy to find out the rest so if you publish your real name then you can expect someone to figure out the rest even if you try to obscure it. Publicizing that information without their permission is, arguably, crass and rude, but it isn't an invasion of privacy or anything else. Although I am a little bit embarrassed to mention this I frequently use a variety of tricks to send email to people that I think might be interested in the company I work for or something similar, but who don't publish their email addresses obviously. It is not difficult to do and while, it isn't foolproof, I reckon I have a hit rate of 90%+ for a technique that involves about three google queries. In the 10% or so where that is not sufficient a few more queries and possibly one or two phone calls are all that is required and I don't think I have yet failed to get the email address eventually.
This also means, to get back to my original point, that coming up with anonymous/pseudonymous alter egos that you wish to keep separate from your "official" on-line (or offline) identity requires a certain amount of care and attention if you wish to keep them separate. The critical thing to remember is that when you post a comment, your IP address, email address (and sometimes some other details) are generally stored along with whatever comment you made and the pseudonym you used. For example if you post at the same blog (or related blogs) with different pseudonyms but the same underlying IP address(es) then, if the blog owner cares he can identify that you are one and the same person, and may decide to publicise this.
Personally I am all in favour of this. To me anonymity is generally speaking bad, which is why I'm not at all in favour of anonymous leaks, and why I was able to approve Mr Galloway's exposure of Mazher "fake sheikh" Mahmood. I think that except in cases where lives or livelihoods are in clear danger from retaliation we do better not having anonymity. I believe that the one thing the Internet is doing is helping people to make their own decisions about the credibility of others and that credibility is significantly helped if you can identify the person behind the remark. This BTW also means that I agree with Jeff Jarvis's comments about journalistic (and blogger) disclosure.
Slightly off topic: On this general subject, but more for blog-owners than commenters, I do think that this advice at RightWingNews is good and needs greater prominence.
Disclosure: At various places I use the nickname "Dirty Dingus" for reasons of primarily historical interest. I probably could change Dirty Dingus to my own name but why bother? I don't care and I can't see that it hurts anyone to do the necessary back tracking to figure out that Dirty Dingus is me.
Update: Mr Hiltzik makes a lame defence. All I can suggest after reading that defence is that Mr Hiltzik head here Permalink
Some "intellectually challenged" person at Indymedia has the following post:
Malkin needs to be stopped. Michele Malkin is the filthy right-wing fascist who posted the addresses, photos and pictures of anti-war activitsts that she happened to disagree with. This is fascism, clear and simple.
Gee publishing names and addresses is fascism? well I guess all my history books which describe it as somethng rather more sinister must be wrong. Well I guess you learn something new every day, but I thought that even the least evil fascists had organized gangs of thugs who went around beating people up.
Now she is getting support from the right-wing. We need action now! Here is a list of addresses of other right-wingers. Please do your best to be "nice" to all of these reichwingers:
And this list of names and addresses is somehow not "fascist" in the way that Malkin's was? Actually I guess the answer why is quiet simple - its comically inaccurate. Hugh Hewitt that well known California broadcaster and professor at Chapman University Law Scool, Anaheim, Ca is listed as being in Minnesota, Stephen Green and Jeff Goldstein, a pair of Colorado bloggers are listed as living in California and Montana respectively and so on.
[ Just to explain a bit. The lost comes from a search of WHOIS records - that is to say the listed owners of the various blog domains in question. Unfortunately for our limited lefty, the WHOIS records for a domain need not have an accurate - or even a public - address, quite often they do, but even then frequently it is the address of the hosting provider or some other similar entity rather than the address of the blogger. ]
The tip of a new shoot that should turn into a flower in the next few days and hopefully into an olive to be picked in 7-8 months time. As always click on the photo to see it enlarged and don't forget to see the rest of the series at flickr. Permalink
I, along with many many other subjects of Her Majesty, am extremely distressed at the prospect of being forced to carry an ID card. I am unhappy with the basic concept, but even if I were happy with the ZANU Labour idea of an ID card (and I can see some circumstances where something like an ID card could be useful), I'd be objecting to the damn things on practical grounds.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the problem of ID cards from the angle of identity theft and noted that the proposed UK ID card helpfully gathered together about 99% of all the information needed to steal someone's idenity. But even if that issue were addressed (and it seems not to be something the government cares about), I would still have reservations about implementation because the government nailed its trousers to the mast as reported the FT recently (via Samizdata):
Labour plans to race forward with the contentious identity cards scheme to ensure the multi-billion pound infrastructure is up and running before the next election, neutering a Tory pledge to scrap it.
Those reservations have now been significantly strengthened by this article in the Register because rushed IT contracts are practically guaranteed to be a disaster. The article ends with:
It is one of the most ambitious projects, with the most alarming social consequences, ever undertaken. Biometric technology is unproven [even] on armies of co-operative corporate drones. It may not be easy to get it working on a population of 60m people, many of whom will resist its imposition. That's another significant reason for the failure of major IT projects - what they call "user acceptance"; or as government ministers would have it nowadays, "customer satisfaction".
And I think that is being kind. For politcal reasons this project has to be up and "working" by 2009, unfortunately they haven't even got the procurement process up and running. The home office might just possibly have the procurement part of the project decided on by the end of the year. This gives the IT contractors two years to get it working. Given the Home Office's track record with IT projects - think of the Passport office mess, think of the Libra IT project for magistrates courts which showed up two or more years late at more than double the initial cost - the idea that the Home Office can co-ordinate a project which starts in Jan 2007 and is fully working by Dec 2008 is frankly ludicrous even assuming it was nothing more than the limited roll out of COTS (Common Off The Shelf) equipment. The fact that his project is going to be one of the biggest ever, breaking all sorts of new ground, and requiring specially designed new equipment just makes it even more implausible.
Indeed the Register article makes it clear that even companies like Microsoft, who are the likely beneficiaries of the government's money are worried, because they can all see the looming disaster and, not surpisingly, don't want to have to take the blame.
The Home Office says it has been conducting a "market sounding" with hundreds of suppliers since last summer and it will publish the findings shortly.
Yet [Microsoft's] Fishenden said: "Most of the consultation appears to be about the procurement process rather than the system...there's not a diversity of opinion to cover off angles we've not even thought about."
There are better ways to make decisions, he said. It is a serious allegation as the ID scheme is at its most crucial early stages. IT projects are guaranteed to fail or go massively over budget if they are not thought out properly and specified thoroughly from the outset. It is a common failing of projects driven by a narrow, political agenda.
Fishenden reckoned the government's plans to date look immature and is concerned that they will end up imposing a mismatched, potholed plan on an ungrateful public.
Hence, since it seems that the government is determined to rush ahead despite the worries of the people it will be asking to implement the system, the only sure thing seems to be that this will be one of the biggest IT fuck ups ever, and that makes me very glad that
I renewed my passport last year
I live in France and hence won't have to pay for the inevitable cost overuns
I strongly recommend that any UK passport holder get their arse into gear and renew ASAP! Permalink
My previous post about the UK ID card scheme is nothing compared to the sensorchip and monitoring project that the People's Republic of China is inflicting upon its netizens. Rebecca MacKinnon is upset at Ckype's tame following of the rest of American IT from Microsoft and Cisco to Google and Yahoo in kowtowing to the Sommunist Shinese government and agreeing to sensor sertain words in its chat client. Rebecca asks some harsh questions and states that she is unwilling to trust Ckype as much as she used to as a result, which is quite a reasonable position to take.
I don't intend to argue directly that she is wrong, however, unlike some of the others, I think Ckype has some mitigating factors in its favour - assuming of course that it isn't lying. Firstly the explanation given at the Ckype blog leaves enough loopholes to drive a truck through:
TOM operates a text filter in TOM-Skype. The filter operates solely on text chats. The filter has a list of words which will not be displayed in Skype chats.
The text filter operates on the chat message content before it is encrypted for transmission, or after it has been decrypted on the receiver side. If the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.
It is important to underline:
The text filter does not affect in any way the security and encryption mechanisms of Skype.
Full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people’s privacy.
Calls, chats and all other forms of communication on Skype continue to be encrypted and secure.
There is absolutely no filtering on voice communications.
The first hole is that, unlike Google and Yahoo Ckype makes no attempt to track or report "bad words", it just drops the message. If this is true, and it should be a doddle to verify for anyone who can download a version of Ethereal and the TOM-Ckype client, then Ckype users who accidentally mention Falun Gong r whatever won't be getting a visit from a Shinese policeman to ask probing questions. This is a major improvement over - to take an example totally not at random - what is likely to happen to somone who TXTs the same thing on their cellphone or Yahoo IM client.
The second hole is the fact that Ckype also has a perfectly good non-TOM version which has Shinese language files and can trivially be distributed within Shina by anyone who happens to have access to the outside world. I don't know quite what the policy is with regard to interoperability, but given that Ckype has been around for a while in Shina I suspect that there are enough legitimate non TOM-Ckype users around that there is no easy way to identify a potential dissident simply by his use of a non TOM-Ckype client.
The third hole is that Ckype publishes its API. Depending on how the first hole pans out - and, like I say, I believe this should be easy to verify without causing unscheduled visits from the Shinese authorities - there are a bunch of possible approaches to creating some sort filter that modifies forbidden words into permitted ones (and possibly back again) so that users don't have to worry about forbidden words. I know that in Shinese you can't to a simple letter substitution, but, since Hanzi are represented in totally bog standard UTF-8 it ought not to be beyond the capabilities of Shinese dissidents to come up with a "VERDI" scheme* where some series of otherwise harmless words are appropriated for use.
The fourth hole is that, unless the implementers of the sensorchip scheme have deliberately obfuscated the forbidden words in a particularly obscure fashion, it should be easy to locate them and patch the appropriate file so that they don't work any more. Given that Shina has a lot of hackers it seems likely that the necessary expertise to identify and remove the sensochip is readily available, as indeed is the liklihood that these patches could be spread via viruses, trojans and the like so that it would affect all users not just the dissidents.
All in all, unless Ckype have been massively more devious than they appear to have been, this particular sensorchip is the bare minimum required to make the Shinese authorities happy and utterly insufficient to be more than a speedbump in the path of the dissemination of government disapproved messages. Given the heritage (as former Soviet Union inhabitants) of much of Ckype's founding team I suspect they have carefully judged the required adherence to the official standards and done just enough to pass muster.
*VERDI Scheme. In the nineteenth century Italians campaigning for the Risorgimento used the famous composer's name as a way to express their desire for Vittorio Emanuele to become king of all Italy. In fact opera as a whole was seen as a way to get around sensors and plot without discovery. Permalink
Patterico - clearly bored on a Friday night - has identified another pseudonymous LA Times journalist. Like he says pseudonymity per se is not a crime. In fact it can be a good idea and so, likewise, is the fact that the journalist posted with a not completely accurate email address; anyone with any sense is cautious about posting their real email address in a place where it might get harvested by Mrs Abacha and her friends.
So, while it is indeed interesting that the LA Times employs a person who thinks Bush and his admirers are "fascist" that isn't a firing offence and I feel a little bad wondering who it is but its not going to stop me posting the following though. Masha is a common Russian (and environs) diminutive of Maria (or sometimes Mary) so the likelihood is that its a lady with one of those two names who has some connection with the former Soviet Union. I failed to find any obvious Maria or Mary amongst the LA Times journalists that seem to have stuff on the LATimes.com website today and I don't really care enough to dig deeper.
In what I see as related news, another would be anonymous lady called Mary was today fired from the CIA for being a leaker. Unlike the pseudonymous Masha who merely voiced opinions that her employer might be embarrased about, Mary McCarthy apparently leaked information about a government program that she disapproved of. Given that
This is a violtion of her employment contract
This appears to have significantly harmed the US's relations with some allies
There seems to be no good justification for her acts which appear to me to be the height of irresponsibility. Part of the reason why I am so happy that the Libby trial is going on is that I think that journalists and their sources need to balance the desire for a scoop against some negative consequences. Since it is clear that these people are uniformly selfish, attempts to reason based on concepts of "national interest", "patriotism" and the like are doomed to failure, so the only obvious deterrent is to impose some harsh negative effects on those who get caught. If I were Porter Goss I think I would revise all contracts to make it clear that any CIA employee caught leaking anything to the press would forfeit any security clearance in perpetuity, forfeit any earned pension or severence pay, and be placed on a public leakers list rather like the sex offenders lists so that any future employer would be able to decide whether they wanted such a person working for them. I would also ensure that agree that they may not benefit financially from any subsequent book/documentary etc. that relates to their CIA employment and that if they co-operate in any way with such a project then the copyright of the entire project is to be owned by the CIA, not just their part.
If there really is a story that they feel they really need to tell then they'll still tell it, and they can make that decision entirely disinterestedly because they won't have any financial incentive to accidentally sway them.
Update: The LA Times's Tim Rutten has the same tie between tales that I do, but funnily enough he takes a rather different view
The incident has provoked a kind of cybernetic thunderstorm, and one of the most revealing claps came from talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who used his popular blog to argue against what The Times had done.
In his view, "The paper should admit that their journalists are just polemicists who carry their opinions with them into battles they care deeply about. They are as biased as the day is long and getting longer. They aren't objective, and never have been�. Hiltzik may be the most honest guy at the Times."
Here, as in Bennett's and Johnson's attack on the three prize-winning reports, we confront an attempt to win through bluster and intimidation what cannot be gained through politics or persuasion.
It seems to me that Rutten is wilfully missing the point here and clearly - if unwittingly - demonstrates my point about large swathes of the MSM have no concept of ideas like "national interest". I tend to agree with Tim that, in an ideal world, we would not be seeking punishment under statutes like treason, but that would be because, rather than see the secret program details splashed across the news we would have a whistleblower reporting her or his reservations internally. Of course it is also noticable that Mr Rutten fails to explain to his readers why Mr Hiltzik's behaviour was unacceptable - it wasn't the use of pseudonyms, but rather the way the pseudonyms were used to make it appear like one person agreeing with another.
Permalink
On my most recent ID card post there is an interesting comment (reproduced below) from Nigel Sedgwick who appears to be knowledgable about the scheme. Herewith his comment:
My recollection of the Bill is that you will not be forced to carry the ID card. If you return to the UK to live, you will be forced to register (eventually) and to provide rather more details than perhaps really necessary, intrusive on your privacy, for registration. Furthermore, an audit trail will be kept of accesses to the register (in perpetuity, it seems), which somewhat track your private life.
I see you live in France. There, are you not required to register and be issued with an ID card. I believe you do not have to carry the ID card at all times. However, I understand many ordinary transactions, eg with some sorts of shopping, will be much more difficult if you cannot produce it. On these point, am I correct? [Please excuse me if I'm not.]
What is your view of the system in France?
Answering from the bottom to the top. The French ID card is an effectively pointless piece of lamminated plastic, it contains about as much information as is on your driving license other than whether you can drive. It can be used in some places where a passport may be used (e.g. presenting ID to board flights or writing a cheque) but has very little purpose other than that - I think it probably should examined by employers to verifiy that you are entitled to be employed and perhaps the welfare offices look at it to decide whether you are eligable for benefits but that is about it. I believe that, in theory, one is supposed to have it on one's person when outside one's residence but I have never ever had to show it to anyone or use it for anything, although I believe that one of the gripes of the banlieue rioters last year was that the French police tended to ask them for their ID and not anyone else. The French ID cars is not exactly protected with anti-forgery safeguards either. I'm sure that it would take more than a colour photocopier/laser printer to fake it but I doubt it would take much more effort. In other words while it might be beyond the capabilities of a single individual it would be pretty straightforward for a criminal gang (or similar) to get the necessary bits together to make as many fakes as they felt like. However, as I say, no one uses it so there is little incentive unless you live in some banlieue and have a criminal record.
The UK scheme is rather more involved. It is true that as a non UK resident, I seem to be spared the neccessity of having such a tag, as long as I remain a non UK resident and it has to be said though that this combines with the weather to make the UK an unattractive place to live. As Nigel writes during registration one be required "to provide rather more details than perhaps really necessary". A large part of my concern is with precisely this since, as I noted in my post at the end of last month, it seems like all of these details will in fact be stored in some register that can then be queried by appropriately authorized persons, including, as I understand it, the card owner as verified by his possession of the card. This, as I said then, is an invitation to identity theft and the fact that there is an audit trail really doesn't help except to identify how the stable door was left ajar.
Nigle in fact wrote a very good piece about some of the technical challenges, and that will be part of my anticipated next diatriabe against these damn things - effectively we are trying too many untested (or only slightly tested) things at once. As I say, I am not in principle against the idea of an ID card, I am however against the ID card as currently implemented because it seems to me they don't help. The French card (which I believe is similar to ID cards in must of the rest of Europe) is a pre-computer document and seems to provide very little benefit, albeit at fairly little cost. The UK card is intended to be a far more advanced product and it concerns me very greatly that this seems to be being rushed into implementation without thinking through its technical feasibility. Permalink
The President and Prime-minister of the French Republic, l'Escroc and Vile Pin, are record-breakers. That is to say they are record-breakingly unpopular as AFP reports (in French) that a mere 29% of the French voters that l'Escroc is satisfactory and that even fewer, 24%, approve of Vile Pin. These are dops od 10% and 13% repsectively compared to a month ago. Apparently, although AFP doesn't say this in the article I have linked to, these levels of popularity are the lowest since the either opinion polls began or the fifth republic was formed - I heard this on the radio and didn't pick up exactly what the measurement was. Anyway it puts President Bush's "dire approval ratings" in some sort of context. Needless to say this is entirely due to their "decisive" handling of the CPE where they managed to hold out long enough to make the unions look like they had a fight on their hands before living up to the stereotype of "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys" and giving in to the protestors.
Not surprisingly much of the news and commentry seems to be about how the 2007 presidential campaign has already started and how the battle between Sarko and Royal is shaping up. Sarko seems to be getting rather less positive headlines at Yahoo compared to Ms Royal but IMO the anti-Sarko headlines may be actually help him amongst the (large and growing) proportion of French voters who seem to dislike the way the press handles issues such as immigration. For eample these are a sample of the relevant headlines at Yahoo France earlier today (with my translations and [explanations]):
Ségolène Royal accentue son avance sur Nicolas Sarkozy ( Reuters, dimanche 23 avril 2006, 20h12) Ségolène Royal increases her lead on Sakozy [but if you read the article its a miniscule increase of 1% from 52:48 last month to 53:47 this]
Nicolas Sarkozy accusé de copier Philippe de Villiers ( Reuters, dimanche 23 avril 2006, 20h08) Sakozy accused of copying Philippe de Villiers [another rightwing pol, more nationalist than the UMP but not extreme like le Pen]
A large part of Sarko's appeal to the electorate is that he is seen to be an outsider (to an extent anyway) and a voter reading these headlines sees that Sarko is indeed being treated as an outsider by the politicians and "main stream" journalists in France. To some extent Royal is also seen as different because she is the first female candidate, and I think this may explain part of her success. She is also binning large chunks of traditional socialist rhetoric on a number of issues as well, which I think explains why many traditional socialist politicians, such as her husband and potential rival François Hollande, are less than happy to see her so popular.
It is almost certain that next year's election is going to concentrate on "right wing" issues such as crime and immigration hence the manoevering by both Sarko and Royal, manoevering captured perfectly in this Delize cartoon today with Le Pen fishing in the river, Sarko fishing in Le Pen's catchbowl and Royal doing the same to Sarko. Permalink
Got this great spam today. It is indeed compelling, in a surreal drug trip sense:
When you see a pork chop, it means that a non-chalantly annoying briar patch hides. Any abstraction can cook cheese grits for the pompous fairy, but it takes a real mastadon to greedily ignore the cocker spaniel. A gentle bartender is non-chalantly psychotic. For example, an orbiting cab driver indicates that an Alaskan spider eats a corporation. When the insurance agent around the photon is somewhat magnificent, the freight train over a football team barely assimilates a bullfrog.
When a briar patch behind a scooby snack is knowingly Alaskan, the rattlesnake over some particle accelerator is a big fan of an optimal cloud formation. The fairy inside the industrial complex greedily befriends a tape recorder around a pork chop. Furthermore, a wisely snooty paycheck sweeps the floor, and the salad dressing from a carpet tack secretly throws a movie theater at a cab driver. When a cyprus mulch is radioactive, the polka-dotted demon pours freezing cold water on the feline cargo bay. Another greedily overpriced pig pen accurately recognizes a hole puncher inside an abstraction. recumbent.
A satellite, an earring, and a dust bunny are what made America great! The deficit makes love to the oil filter. A senator from the squid wisely learns a hard lesson from a skyscraper related to the reactor. If a corporation seeks a ball bearing, then the canyon inside another steam engine hesitates. Indeed, a revered sandwich figures out the polygon.
For example, the grizzly bear indicates that the knowingly fat demon plans an escape from a recliner toward a pork chop the magnificent football team. When a scythe wakes up, a dirt-encrusted wheelbarrow panics. Indeed, a fundraiser behind a scythe teaches a CEO inside a jersey cow. Any fairy can usually pee on the lover, but it takes a real paycheck to operate a small fruit stand with the bowling ball. The light bulb recognizes a short order cook beyond a spider, or a crank case eats a stoic vacuum cleaner.
The molten bartender falls in love with a greasy scythe. The squid behind a tomato carelessly gives lectures on morality to some eggplant defined by a scythe, and a fairy finds subtle faults with the carpet tack. Now and then, a linguistic food stamp gives secret financial aid to a stoic turkey. The cyprus mulch near the polygon is nuclear.
I am one of the many who think that Japan's claim to these islands is weak. However, having said that, it is clear to me that, despite what the Koreans insist, that claim does indeed stretch back before the Meiji restoration and Japan's imperial expansion at the end of the 19th century.
There has been considerable speculation, in part aided by that nice Japanese Foreign Ministry memo, that Japan has been attempting a bit of diplomatic sumo on its neighbour. Or to use a different metaphor Japan has been playing matador to the Korean bull. If that is the case, and it could well be so, then the Korean government's apparent over-reaction to Japan's recent manoevers means that it is succeeding. Looked at in this light, President Roh's address to the nation (via Marmot) plays directly into the Japanese hands and, since it got considerable coverage on the BBC at least, if Japan has a strategy of making the S Korean government look like a bunch of nationalistic goons with no sense of restraint then they seem to have succeeded.
The address really needs to be read in full because it completely and utterly nails Roh to the belief that Dokdo was Korean before the Russo-Japanese war and makes a lot of bellicose statements basedon that initial premise, which look a little silly if the evidence shows that Japan actually claimed the islands during the Edo era. Now it is true that the Edo era claim is relatively weak; the fact that there is documentary proof that the Shogun in 1618 (and 1661) assigned Takeshima to one of his vassels doesn't mean that the Korean kingdom at the same time did not also think that they were in control, but it does kind of undermine Roh's claim that:
Dokdo is our territory that was first to be annexed to Japan in the course of its usurpation of the Korean Peninsula.
The Russo-Japanese War was a war of aggression that Imperial Japan initiated to secure control over the Korean Peninsula.
Under the pretext of carrying out the Russo-Japanese War, Japan sent its troops to Korea and occupied the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese forces staged a siege around Korean royal palaces, terrorized the royal office and the Government of Korea to force them into signing the Korea-Japan Protocol, expropriated the land and people of Korea as it pleased, and established military facilities. Japan unilaterally proclaimed military rule over part of the Korean territory and eventually trampled on Korea’s sovereignty by taking away our fiscal and diplomatic rights.
As part of this process, Japan forcefully merged Dokdo into its territory, installed an observation tower and electric cables, and utilized them in their war efforts. While continuing the military occupation of the Korean Peninsula, Japan deprived Korea of sovereignty and secured colonial control over the Peninsula.
I think that in Japan, at least, this speech will be regarded by practically everyone as a sign that Roh is a nationalistic idiot who can't be relied on to do anything for Japan. The Japanese may possibly at some point make some concession to Korea in regard to the Dokdo issue but, as a result of this tirade, it will seen as the adult indulging the tantrum-throwing child and clearly will expect that the rest of the world will give it credit.
Indeed going on the latest Koizumi comments I would say that that is precisely what Japan is doing. I agree with people like Plunge (and apparently over 50% of the Japanese electorate) that Koizumi really shouldn't be visiting Yasukuni and that it is clearly intended for (internal) political purposes no matter what he may say publicly, however, the fact remains that to outsiders (i.e. anyone not in/closely associated with either the 2 Koreas or the PRC) it looks like these countries are making a mountain out of a molehill. Indeed the (unspoken/whsipered) subtext of all this is that until recently Japan felt constrained by its early 20th century behaviour to grovel to its former victims, but that it feels that 60 years is quite enough time for such behaviour to last and that it is time for the 2nd largest global economy to be recognised as such and take its rightful place as a world power rather than just being the world's aid chequebook. Indeed the Japanese commentary on this affair, that Dokdo is being used by Roh purely for internal Korean politics (and for that matter the same goes for Yasukuni, textbooks etc.), has enough truth in it that it helpfully diverts world attention away from that fact that Koizumi and Abe, and probably others, are using their responses to these complaints for internal Japanese political advantage.
To put it bluntly I reckon both sides are blustering primarily for internal political advantage, and, in the case of Japan, also to make their case to the wider international community. Witness this (via foreign dispatches):
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters Tuesday, "I'd like everyone to deal with the situation in a calm manner, based on the premise of establishing a friendly relationship between Japan and South Korea.
"It will be better off to think about the matter in a systematic, comprehensive and future-oriented manner."
Koizumi also urged the media to refrain from fueling the confrontation.
How will it end? I have no idea, I suspect it will simply be quietly dropped when something more interesting shows up. Neither side wants a real war, but on the other hand, one suspects that neither side wants an internationally mediated solution because the danger is that the international medeiator will rule against them and thus their internal political enemies can blame them for losing. Hence I expect this issue to disappear from view again for a while before resurfacing next time some Japanese or Korean politician wants to wrap himself in the flag (i.e. no more that a year from now) when precisely the same inconclusive shoving match will take place. Permalink
Insulting a Princess in her own country is bad for you when the country is Monaco. AFP reports (bizarre google translation) that last Saturday some idiot decided to insult Princess Stephanie of Monaco while she was eating in Cap d'Ail with her children and ex-husband. Cap d'Ail is literally adjacent to the border with Monaco and so her party beat a swift retreat across the (completely unmarked) border. The insulter followed, apparently even throwing punches at Mr Ducruet, the ex-husband, with whom it seems he had some disagreement and then discovered that the law is rather different in the principality. He was promptly arrested and, on Tuesday ,was sentenced to three months in jail.
Personally I salute Prince Albert and his family for
your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.
so please don't arrest me next time I visit the principality Permalink
The Beerbelly brings Freedom to the Beverage! Now you can drink WHAT you want, WHEN you want, WHERE you want, with no hassles and for less money! What more could you ask for—now you can drink your favorite beverage at the movies, the ballgame, on the plane, you decide.
The Beerbelly: Is made up of a neoprene “sling” and a polyurethane “bladder” with a tube for dispensing. The bladder is held in an insulated pouch in the sling which is worn under your clothing for concealment. When worn, it looks just like a beerbelly.
It holds 80 fl oz which, by my calculations is 4 pints, or plenty to while away a tedious sleazyjet flight. Permalink
So these are the people who are going to oversee the UK's ID cards? Not only can they manage to permit the prison service to release over 1000 foreign crimminals back into the UK's general population, they even manage to fail to stop them after they have learned about the problem.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke is due to explain to MPs how 1,023 foreign prisoners came to be released without being considered for deportation.
New figures show 288 of those were freed after the government became aware of the problem last summer.
The words "organize" "pissup" "brewery" "could" "not" seem to be coming into my mind and while he's a bit more diplomatic they clearly came into Stephen Pollard's mind too. Michelle Malkin and others have called similar policies in the US "catch and release", they may be happy to see that the US is not alone in its inability to handle criminal immigrants, but I doubt it.
It doesn't surprise me that Charles "safety elephant" Clarke insists he won't quit, and is instead passing the buck, concepts like responsibility seem foreign to him, as apparently does "accountability" and accepting the idea that people might disagree with his ideas. The Telegraph (link above) really lays into him for good reason:
As usual, Charles Clarke has found someone else to blame. But this time the scapegoats are close to home, indeed directly responsible to him: his officials in the Prison Service and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). Between them, over the past six years, these services failed to deport more than 1,000 foreign nationals on their release from prison in Britain, of whom three were murderers, five were paedophiles and nine were rapists - not to mention dozens of burglars and violent offenders.
...
This tale of incompetence has come to light only because of the assiduity of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, one of the few agents of public accountability we have left in our neutered democracy. Mr Clarke, professing himself keen to "acknowledge and admit it and deal with it", is busy distancing himself from the scandal. Yet a man so happy to pass orders down the chain of command cannot avoid the buck of responsibility passing up it.
The ZANU labour people ask why people don't trust the government. This is why. And it isn't helped by the endless stories of waste and accidental overpayments. The latter link shows precisely why I reckon the ID card scheme is a loser. As the BBC reports:
"An element of overpayment to claimants was an inherent part of the design of the tax credits system," said the committee's chairman Edward Leigh.
"What came out of the blue for the government was that overpayment would routinely occur on such a gigantic scale - an estimated £2.2bn for 2003-04 and probably again for 2004-05.
"Doubts about HMRC's controls over fraud were certainly not lessened when evidence emerged late last year of a serious assault on the system by organised criminals."
Suzy Grell, from Tadworth in Surrey, contacted the BBC with details of the problems she's encountered.
"I received a letter about an overpayment for 2004 for over £500.
"I've been trying to sort it out but recently received another letter for the same period stating that I have been overpaid by over £5,000.
"Their systems are obviously struggling and making mistakes and we have to suffer the stress of not knowing how much we owe them or even if we owe them at all," Ms Grell wrote.
It isn't just the sums it is the anecodotal evidence that they don't in fact know how much they are overpaying and can't get their computers to give them a consistent answer. And we expect these idiots to be able to give everyone a secure ID card without cockups security breaches etc.?
Finally the fact that, as Tim W noted last week, the UK grabs tax (and then overpays you back) if you work more than 20 hours a week at the offiical UK minimum wage is outrageous and, of course these unfortunates on part-time minumum wage jobs are precisely the ones who get given the £5000 refund bill (when they probably only earn £10,000 a year). Lovely isn't it?
LONDON (Reuters) - A "performance artist" sparked a major security alert in London on Wednesday when she left five packages, one with nails sticking out of it, across a busy area of the city during the morning rush-hour, police said.
The woman, who has not been named, told officers she had strategically planted the "devices" around the Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith Grove areas of west London, a major traffic and transport hub crammed with commuters on their way to work.
There are definitely times when the UK police oevrreact but this is one where I reckon they are justified in doing whatever they want. I hope that at the least they send her the bill for all the police time and effort. What an idiot!
Some Stanford researchers have reported that the US consumption of French wine seems to have fallen by over 25% in 2003 thanks to l'Escroc and Vile Pin's efforts to derail the Iraq invasion. As the paper's abstract explains (PDF)
The French Opposition to the war in Iraq in early 2003, prompted calls for a boycott of French wine in the US. We measure the magnitude of consumers’ participation in the boycott, and look at basic evidence of who participates. Conservative estimates indicate that the boycott resulted in 26% lower weekly sales at its peak, and 13% lower sales over the six month period that we estimate the boycott lasted for. These findings suggest that business should be concerned that their actions may provoke a boycott which hurts their profits. We also find that neither political preferences or media attention are important determinants of boycott participation.
I wonder if one reason why this boycott worked is that there are plenty of alternatives at similar prices. Permalink
I thought it might be fun to do a little compare and contrast. Or - if you want to put it another way - first two could be saying "this ".
Young olive tree saplings, recently unearthed in our garden.
Age 3-5 years
They make good presents and they do persist in sprouting in places where they shouldn't so I do a lot of uprooting.
Olive tree near Le Broc, Alpes Maritimes, France. This olive tree is almost certainly more than 100 times older than the saplings in the adjacent image.
As always click on the photos to enlarge and do look at the whole series if you have missed them. It occurs to me that the old tree might itself be saying "this is what I want to be when I grow up" with regards to my image of two weeks ago. Permalink
Over the last year or two there has been a scandal brewing in Paris and it looks like it is about to ready to boil over (if that isn't mixing metaphors too badly). It all started in 2004 when someone sent some documents to a judge that indicated that Sarko and some other senior politicians and businessmen were using the Luxembourg based bank Clearstream to stash various ill-gotten gains etc. Had these dcouments been genuine they would undoubtedly have caused servere, probably fatal, harm to Sarko's career, but fortunately for him (and the others accused) and unfortunately for the anonymous sender, they appear to have been fakes. Needless to say a number of people have been wondering just why these documents might have have been created and sent and who is to blame.
Finally, after nearly two years of speculation and investigation, it looks like the answer to these questions is going to be revealed and, quelle surprise, it seems that l'Escroc and Vile Pin are almost certainly deeply involved. Probably the best English-language report of the story, which sounds like a spy novel is this one from the Deutsche Press Agentur.
The judicial inquiry into the smear campaign was initiated after an investigation revealed that Sarkozy and the others were not guilty of the allegations. However, that raised the question of who sent the list and why.
Several French newspapers and the author of a controversial book about Clearstream, Denis Roberts, have suggested that the man who compiled the list and sent it to the magistrate was a 40-year-old Franco-Lebanese computer whiz named Imad Lahoud.
Lahoud is related to the pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and, through his father-in-law, reportedly has close ties to French President Jacques Chirac.
More significantly, he once worked for the French intelligence service DSGC and also collaborated with one of France's most successful spies, General Philippe Rondot.
As with Watergate it seems like the crime may be less damaging that the spin and coverup. Just about the day the original accusations first broke there were guesses that this was an attempt by Vile Pin and l'Escroc to discredit their rivals and as the investigation has progressed the evidence mounts that Vile Pin, and possibly l'Escroc, were indeed involved. In the last couple of days Vile Pin has managed to do the ultimate faux pas and make public statements that were proven to be "economical with the actualité" almost immediately afterwards:
In an interview published Friday in the daily Le Figaro, Villepin said he was 'deeply shocked, as prime minister, by certain associations and allegations concerning the state and its services.' [...]
He told the newspaper that on January 9, 2004, he asked Rondot to look into rumours that French politicians and businessmen had received large payoffs in the sale of six Lafayette-type frigates to Taiwan by the French state-owned concern Thomson.
Nothing came of that investigation, Villepin said, and declared that he knew nothing about Sarkozy's name on any list.
However, the ink was scarcely dry on the Le Figaro interview when Villepin's version of the facts was contradicted in the daily Le Monde (which is published several hours after Le Figaro) by Rondot himself.
The newspaper divulged what it described as extracts from Rondot's testimony on March 28 to the magistrates investigating the libel case.
[...] Rondot said he was summoned by Villepin to a meeting on January 9 at which Gergorin was also present.
Rondot said that at this meeting Villepin, then foreign minister, 'informed me of instructions he had received on the subject of the Clearstream list from Jacques Chirac.'
Villepin then told him to go beyond the original instructions and investigate the politicians on the list.
'Mr Sarkozy's name was mentioned,' Rondot was reported to have told the magistrates, clearly contradicting Villepin's public statements.
More than that, notes Rondot made during the meeting suggested that Villepin was obsessed with Sarkozy.
'Political stakes,' Rondot's notes read. 'N Sarkozy. Fixation on N Sarkozy /re J Chirac/N Sarkozy feud.'
On Friday, both Chirac and Villepin categorically denied having asked for an investigation of Sarkozy.
Needless to say all sorts of people are rather unimpressed with subsequent Vile Pin excuses (google translation) - such as Jean-Louis Bourlanges who calls Vile Pin's defense "abysmal idiocy" (google translation). He also notes the problem for l'Escroc, if he has to dump Vile Pin after less than a year on the job who can he replace him with? Since l'Escroc hates Sarko (and vice versa) he clearly won't choose him but the governing party is rather short on competant people who are also loyal to l'Escroc - about the only choice I can think of is the defense minister Michele Alliot-Marie but she may well also be involved in the Clearstream affair. Ségolène Royal, the most likely socialist candidate for next year's presidential election, also pulls no punches:
L'affaire Clearstream est "une confirmation de plus de la décomposition du régime chiraquien. La fin d'un règne sans éthique, l'explosion d'un système qui fait la part belle aux méthodes occultes, aux coups bas et aux manoeuvres de déstabilisation. Il est temps d'en finir", a-t-elle déclaré.
The Clearstream affair is "a further confirmation of the decomposition of the Chirac regime. The end of a reign without ethids, the explosion of a of a system that works for the most part in occult ways with low blows and destabilizing maneovers. It is time to end it" she said.
Sarko himself, has made it very clear, that he intends to both get to the bottom of the scandal and destroy those who attempted to frame him, as the Torygraph reports:
Mr Sarkozy is said to have told Mr Chirac that his accuser, once exposed, would "end up on a meat hook" and promised an ally this week: "When I shoot, I shoot to kill, not to wound. The end to this is close."
I'm fairly sure that Vile Pin will be dumped in the near future as l'Escroc attempts to do the slopey shoulders trick and blame his underlings for what happened. Vile Pin, it always seemed to me, was a man promoted beyond his level of competance solely because of his ability to suck up to l'Escroc, and when threatened l'Escroc has thrown far better men to the wolves so, unless Vile Pin has some sort of a hold on l'Escroc - which I doubt - the question is not whether he is fired but when. L'Escroc deliberately kept his predecessor on until after the EU referendum to give himself a scapegoat and I'm fairly sure that he is running a similar calculation this time.
But I doubt it will be enough. L'Escroc has avoided prosecution for other scandals because of presidential immunity, but in this case I think his immunity could well be waived. I'm not at all clear about how a president can be impeached in France, but I'm fairly sure that Sarko and many others are very clear on the steps and will be following them once the case against l'Escroc is reasonably watertight. Even if l'Escroc manages to hang on until next year's elections I suspect that he will be the first French president to be arrested as he departs from office. It could well be that the only reason he does in fact remain in office as the lamest of lame ducks will be because Sarko, who is after all in charge of the judiciary, may think that he will gain greater political advantage from not rushing down the impeachment trail.