Oh Yeah...

Viral Marketing? Have a look at this.

You heard it here first.

Worstall: eat you heart out.

Nano-nonsense

This just in from some dodgy lot of headhunters who refuse, steadfastly, to take me off their mailing list...

Virus fuelled computers
Some clever boffins at MIT have been tinkering with nature. They have engineered (biological) viruses to build miniature long life batteries, which one day will find their way into mobile electronic devices. The heady mix of nano-technology and gene manipulation should be a cause for concern. Can we look forward to a future whereby symptoms of the common cold move from the build up of catarrh to a thin lining of cobalt oxide in the mucous membranes? A give away sign of a cold will no longer be sneezing, but the accumulation of paper clips and other metallic objects drawn to one's electrically polarised nose.

Readers of this blog who have been awarded their LS&GC will know that Lady P-G would not be in the least surprised if I started sneezing paperclips. But it is a diverting thought anyway.

When Gordo Goes to Hell

Not that one (though I very much doubt that he will escape a roasting when his time comes): this one.

Whilst I am not aware that Dante reserved a particular special circle of Hell for chefs, celebrity or otherwise, your well-connected Pedant-General has information that old Beelzebub is a cunning wee chap and appears to have made arrangements for the foul-mouthed ex-footballer and his ilk.

How do I know? Well, not content with being well-connected, your indomitable Pedant-General in Ordinary is also ruthlessly organised, blisteringly efficient and more-than-ordinarily far-sighted. Scarcely have I put away the portmanteaux from our last trip, when I am in the throes of planning our next trip. This time, the family P-G is bound for sunnier climes for a wedding. Getting to sunnier climes from here can be tricky. (There seems to be a congenital aversion on the part of decent airlines to allow Edinburghers to fly direct to anywhere nice at all.)

Those nice chaps at Travelocity are, however, more than a match for our demanding travel needs. They even go so far as to allow us to pre-book a special meal for our eldest from the astonishingly long list of peculiar requirements for which airlines have to cater.

Which brings me back to the topic at hand. Whatever other punishments old nick might have lined up for Mr Ramsay, we do know what he will be forced to eat:

Airline food...

With a special "Bland" option...

... On Lufthansa.

New Toy!

Via DK, a new toy.

All hail the benign dictator of InfinitesUnsplitia! Naturally, DK has swiped the best motto.

Interestingly, on answering the very simple cut-down version of the political compass (to give my nascent state a suitably libertarian outlook), the tax rate comes out at a positively penal 1%. That's right: One Percent. One penny for every pound that you earn. Also encouraging is that the quiz gives the following major outcomes:

Civil Rights: Excellent

Economy: Thriving

Political Freedoms: Very Good

One to watch I suggest.

HM? HB!

Everyone is noting this auspicious occasion, so consider a suitably grovelling doffing of the peacock feather hat and marched bands tossed in Her Majesty's general direction.

Note that I have refrained from a rousing, full-bodied rendition of "Happy Birthday" as I understand that it is still subject to Copyright.

This anomaly is of course newsworthy following this little campaign. I must say that I support this wholeheartedly as, to be honest, anything that:
1) places restrictions on people lawfully signing singing "Living Doll" whilst simultaneously
2) ensuring that Cliff Richard is condemned to do so forever
is an extraordinarily good thing in my book.

Many Happy Returns of the day, Your Majesty.

[Doffs hat, bows to scrape the floor and backs gently out of the double-doors]

UPDATE: If you do not already sit, staring at your RSS reader, waiting for the next nugget of wisdom from Deogolwulf, you are either spectacularly ill-informed or almost inhumanly immune to the finer things in life. He comments here on this topic. RTWT.

Crime, Clarke, Compensation and Cluelessness (Continued)

The inestimably brilliant, public-spirited, noble, fearless, erudite, kind, sensible and generally nice Tom Reynolds, an ambulance-type paramedic who blogs - superbly, with erudition, kindness and nobility - at Random Acts of Reality, illustrates far more graphically than I can hope to expect a point I made yesterday.

Tom has been called to attend to

"Two people in collapsed state".

Turns out they were a couple of smackheads who had overdone it a bit. One was 6' 2" and

built like a brick outhouse apparent weightlifter

As he was being lifted into the ambulance, he came round and smacked Tom around the head, shattering his glasses. A station officer is helpful and tells Tom to buy a new pair and

... that when I got new glasses I should give the receipt to him so that he can do battle with the finances department and then I can claim the money back. Asking him if the patient would be made to pay by the LAS, I was told that this wouldn't be the case, and that the money would come out of our normal funding.

I was told not to buy any solid gold glasses.

I find this a bit ridiculous – here is a patient who has indulged in something illegal – he has assaulted a number of ambulance and hospital staff (thankfully no-one was seriously injured), he has wasted all our time and broken and essential bit of kit for the running of an ambulance. Because of him there was one less ambulance covering our area that night.

And he's going to get away without losing a penny.

There are a number of illuminating points here:
1. Tom should not have to pay for new glasses. The DSO, it seems, is going to have to have a fight to get this sorted out. Why?
2. Notwithstanding 1 above, it IS right that Tom should go and buy glasses and get his money refunded, rather than someone else go and buy them for him. This way Tom will get the glasses he wants (because he is going to choose them) quicker (because he can go to any shop he chooses and because he won't have to wait for forms to be processed and money released) and cheaper (because there won't be lots of people without access to the relevant information - such as his taste in glasses - in between him and his choice of glasses).
3. Notwithstanding 1 (Tom should not ultimately pay) and 2 (Tom should buy and be refunded) above, the TAXPAYER HAS ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY TO PICK UP THE TAB FOR TOM'S GLASSES, WHETHER SOLID GOLD
OR NOT.

In these times of asymmetric warfare, Sam Johnson's line that

"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier"

is perhaps wide of the mark. It is to people like Tom that this sentiment now refers. One cannot fail to be humbled the sense of duty and true public service that blazes from his writing. Imagine how many blankets we could supply if we were not having to pick up the tab that results from the timidity of our criminal justice system.

UPDATE: I meant to update this post with the classic "afterthought-that-strikes-you-immediately-you-press-the-publish-button"-type afterthought. I have been beaten to it by DK. The afterthought is this:

The only reason that it is futile to attempt to extract compensation from this scrote is that he is supported by the welfare state and has no income or assets of his own. Any extraction therefore comes straight out of the taxpayer anyway. The answer: Abolish the welfare state. If this scrote - and indeed all who are supported by the taxpayer - was dependent upon the generosity of his family or others in his immediate community, he would not be able to get away with this sort of behaviour. The welfare state is not - and can never be - consistent with individual responsibility for your actions. It must be abolished. NOW.

The Reptile Returns

The reptile is on superlative form today - must be the after-effects of all that refreshing mountain air.

Two excellent posts.
1) Clarke - may he rot in hell:

"Charles Clarke has issued a blizzard of ropy initiatives over the last few days that range from the inept to the immoral via the ineffective."

2) The Gurkhas. RTWT.

I recall vividly being given a demonstration on the correct method to deploy for a section attack, by the Gurkha demonstration company at RMAS. The first step is, of course, Preparation. The Gurkha corporal marched along the line of his soldiers to inspect their efforts, checking camouflage, ensuring they had ammunition etc and finally performing the "jump test". Each soldier jumps up and down to check whether he has any loose equipment that make an unwanted noise. One stooge is of course replete with dangling mess tins and loose cutlery. Corporal duly sets about him with vigour and then declares to roars of applause from the watching Officer Cadets:

YOU RAZY SOLDIER!

But as Tim so rightly says: Don't mess....

Crime, Clarke, Compensation and Cluelessness

Tim goes off the deep-end at this latest outpouring of arrant nonsense from the execrable safety elephant.

He points out, pithily, that there might be better sources for the estimated savings of ~£5m per annum:

Do you know what else costs some 5 million a year? Subsidising the snouts in the trough in Parliament. Literally:
parliament's £5.7m annual catering subsidy

Ouch.

I heard this report on the Today programme this morning and thought vaguely to myself:

Cutting the compensation for wrongful convictions in favour of taxpayer payouts to the victims of actions by criminals? This is all the wrong way round surely?

Tim's last line to his post crystallises my unease:

If we as a society get things wrong and imprison the innocent it is our duty, as that very society, to both say sorry and to compensate them as best we can. What we offer can only ever be inadequate but to deny this moral fact, to save the price of MP's pork pies?

You fuck Clarke, for shame.

Cutting the compensation to victims of errors by the state is clearly morally wrong. The state makes a mistake that ruins the lives of those affected: the state should pay up.  Those operating the systems of the state ought also to be held to account for the waste of taxpayers' money, but that is a separate issue.

However, Clarke is proposing to use these savings to pay out to victims of the crimes of others. This is total bollocks. The state does not have the same duty to compensate the victims of crime: that should be the sole responsibility of the criminals who committed the crimes. The role of the state should be simply to effect the swift and smooth transfer of compensation from the criminal to his victim.

If such criminals are not able to pay the compensation that ought to be extracted, tough: let that act as a deterrent.

Knowing that the state can confiscate any and all of your assets and then continue to hound you for the rest of your life until you have paid sufficient compensation to repair the damage you have caused ought to be an additional incentive to stay on the straight and narrow.

The criminal justice system in this country is shot to bits as far as deterrence is concerned. Bystander is always good, but some of the comments to a post of his on this particular topic are extremely illuminating: here is "Katie" on the criminal's view of cautions:

Since I've had a very, very rough life I need have no fear of prison or any meaningful punishment. Just repeated bland admonishments that I'm on my last chance and must not do it again, or I'll be asked not to do it again... again.

Crime might not pay, but it certainly doesn't seem to carry any cost at the moment.

The real problem is that the taxpayer is currently insulating criminals from facing the bill for cleaning up after their actions. Clarke's moronic intervention here is making this problem worse, not better.

From our own correspondent - Russian Politics Revisited

As the snow begins to melt, my Moscow-based spy emerges from hibernation, blinking, smelly and scattering empty vodka bottles and crumpled fag packets, to draw our attention to this marvellous article (paid subscription) in the Moscow Times:

The party in power, "United Russia", is closely related to the Kremlin and bound to win any elections that are likely to take place. Nevertheless, they have decided that they need to develop a platform and policies.... That's right, they became the party in power without any.

To add to the confusion, they are not doing it because they want/need to appeal to voters, but because President Putin's chief of staff "told them it was necessary to come up with an ideology before the elections... [in order to]...preempt criticism from the West".

It is not clear whether he also told them what policies to include, or whether any of the policies will in fact be enacted. Gotta love that way of building a political/civil culture.

All good fun indeed. Yet, perhaps this is not a purely Russian phenomenon:

• Taking office before publishing any policies?
• Not needing to appeal to voters?

Isn't that how the EU Commission operates?

Glasshouse? Meet Stone-Thrower.

Careful readers will have noticed that I have - and regularly make use of - direct hotlines to many persons of great import, the "movers and shakers" if you will allow me a little sashay in the direction of the vernacular.

I must report on a snippet of one such conversation in which I am rebuked thusly:

"... pseudonyms are so yesterday ..."

My correspondent? Mr Seat.

Snigger.

Holiday Reports (2)

Secret Room
Originally uploaded by The Pedant-General.

Here we see the collected Pedants-General at bedtime in the log-cabin-in-Ordinary.

This particular photo was taken in a rather natty little extra secret room in the eaves of said cabin, which was accessible only by a ladder/trapdoor thing.

The boys have already colonised this room as a "secret den". Lady P-G and I are apparently unaware of its existence.




UPDATE: It's not a Secret Den. It's a rocket.

UPDATE: It's not a Rocket. It's a dungeon.

The youngest master Pedant-General has been incarcerated. It is not clear if a ransom is being demanded. Neither is it clear whether or not Lady P-G or I would be minded to pony up. (And if we did, Gordon Brown would probably want to try and tax the capital transfer. Bastard.)

UPDATE: It's not a Dungeon. It's a Hotel.

The youngest master Pedant-General is some kind of bag-carrier and room service waiter. Whether or not this represents a release from his earlier incarceration or merely a further descent into slavery is similarly unclear.

UPDATE: It's not a Hotel. It's a Helicopter.

Although apparently fairly fast (capable of something approaching the speed of light, it seems), this particular helicopter is demonstrably lacking in range and may not make it to the other side of the loch. Lady P-G and I are being requested to take some petrol to an island in the middle where it can refuel. The youngest master Pedant-General seems to have been emancipated so that is at least something.

Holiday Reports (1)

That nice Mr McGuinness gave some excellent advice following my post on the problems of packing to go on holiday.

Do not pack a live squirrel. You probably won't have any call for it.

Whilst I would normally be, shall we say, circumspect regarding the suggestions, even if freely offered, from a man who took the lyrics of 50 cent sufficiently literally to "tickle his bollocks", on this occasion he could not have been closer to the mark. The one thing I did not need was a squirrel: they were in generous abundance.

Red Squirrel CloseUp,
originally uploaded by The Pedant-General.

Holiday Weather

Hmmm.....

The BBC weather forecast for our chosen holiday destination looks like this:


Lady P-G is currently in a flat spin as regards packing arrangements. Suggestions welcome.

Crumbs from the High Table

How exciting!

A flippant note, sent in an unguarded moment, is acknowledged and published.

In other news, your diligent and hard-working Pedant-General is overdue - and therefore taking - a well deserved break.

You will all have to keep your colons un-semi-ed and infinitives reluctantly unsplit until our return.

Light Posting!

From Our Own Correspondent

Your well-informed and even better connected Pedant-General receives news from the Antipodes.

Following cyclone Larry, the swell has made its way round to Sydney and proceeds to have a devasting impact, sartorially speaking at least:

What is an Adult?

Bystander comments, sensibly as always, on this depressing case.

He sums up:

"The punishment freaks will be calling for her to be treated like an adult. But she is in law and in fact a child, and that is how we must deal with her."

Whilst this is true, I suspect it is not the whole truth. Consider what will happen to this girl on her 18th birthday: she will still be entirely unequipped with the necessary moral reasoning capability to determine right from wrong. I submit that this is what differentiates an adult from a child.

To paraphrase Bystander:

In law she is an adult, but in fact is still a child. How then should we deal with her?

House Rules

As the material for these humble pages originates in Scotland, I must ask all Patrons to respect tolerate the latest addition to the House Rules.

I think that, given that this blog is - without doubt - a public institution, it clearly falls within the scope of this new legislation, so please extinguish cigarettes whilst reading. Mr Connell has, curiously, failed to inform me as to your rights, should you be reading this outdoors on your snazzy 3G mobile or somesuch.

As for this piece of abject lunacy at our expense, words fail me. Who is going to pay for these "gold awards"? Precisely how much more than exactly jack-sh*t will they be worth?

All I can say (that bit about words failing me was, perhaps, wide of the mark) is that your sweet-smelling Pedant-General, whose fingertips bear nary a stain, would merit only a silver award. For this I blame Mr Seat: He brought an extremely nice box of cigars to help usher in the New Year. As one might expect from a man as well travelled and even better read, he also brought with them a little anecdote.

He recounted that he had attended a very nice dinner with the departing US Ambassador to HMG, who had previously been someone rather important at the CIA, where a guest remarked on the fine quality of the Cuban cigars then making their way round the table. Cheekily, perhaps impertinently even, the guest enquired whether there was anything we ought to know about the US trade embargo against Cuba. The ambassador took an expansive puff, exhaled and declared to the room:

The first thing I taught my men was: "Gentlemen. Burn your enemy's crops"

Religous Revolutionaries

... But not of the type you might - with your customary dubious generalisations - think.

Vicki Woods is bidden to her local church hall to talk about "Everyday Politics". She discovers something interesting going on in "Middle England":

What amazed me most was the political knowledge. They think about politics every damn day as well, and they aren't bored but desperate.

RTWT. The last line is quite something. Blimey indeed.

Why we need the Lords - Reason 3,472: The Begum Case

They are very obviously, very sensible.

On the Appeal Court judging against the school, not because of the uniform policy, but because of the decision-making process that gave rise to the policy:

Para 30: ... The school's action cannot properly be condemned as disproportionate, with an acknowledgement that on reconsideration the same action could very well be maintained and properly so.

i.e. It is what you do that matters, not how you decide to do it...

The whole of Para 34 is good stuff too:

On the agreed facts, the school was in my opinion fully justified in acting as it did. It had taken immense pains to devise a uniform policy which respected Muslim beliefs but did so in an inclusive, unthreatening and uncompetitive way. The rules laid down were as far from being mindless as uniform rules could ever be. The school had enjoyed a period of harmony and success to which the uniform policy was thought to contribute. On further enquiry it still appeared that the rules were acceptable to mainstream Muslim opinion. It was feared that acceding to the respondent's request would or might have significant adverse repercussions. It would in my opinion be irresponsible of any court, lacking the experience, background and detailed knowledge of the head teacher, staff and governors, to overrule their judgment on a matter as sensitive as this. The power of decision has been given to them for the compelling reason that they are best placed to exercise it, and I see no reason to disturb their decision.

Tim Worstall will like that: devolve decisions to the lowest level possible.

The Noble and Learned Lords did not seem to think that Ms Begum (or her brother) had acted in entirely good faith:

Shabina's discovery that her religion did not allow her to wear the uniform she had been wearing for the past two years created a problem for her. Her family had chosen that school for her with knowledge of its uniform requirements. She could have sought the help of the school and the local education authority in solving the problem. They would no doubt have advised her that if she was firm in her belief, she should change schools. That might not have been entirely convenient for her, particularly when her sister was remaining at Denbigh High, but people sometimes have to suffer some inconvenience for their beliefs. Instead, she and her brother decided that it was the school's problem. They sought a confrontation and claimed that she had a right to attend the school of her own choosing in the clothes she chose to wear.

Lord Scott doesn't like the original approach either:

Para 80: The quite unnecessarily confrontational character of the arrival at the school on 3 September 2002 of Shabina and the two men is evident. Shabina was a girl of 13, some two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday.
...
The confrontational nature of the peremptory manner in which the jilbab issue was raised with the school, a manner which is very unlikely to have been chosen by Shabina, not yet 14 years of age, set the tone for how the issue then developed.

And in Para 83:

In my opinion, therefore, the direction to Shabina to attend school wearing the proper school uniform can only be attacked as an unlawful direction under domestic law if the school uniform rules that she was being required to obey were themselves so unreasonable as to be unlawful, or if the decision to insist upon Shabina observing the school uniform rules was similarly unreasonable. I regard both contentions as being virtually unarguable.

This is useful:

The cases demonstrate the principle that a rule of a particular public institution that requires, or prohibits, certain behaviour on the part of those who avail themselves of its services does not constitute an infringement of the right of an individual to manifest his or her religion merely because the rule in question does not conform to the religious beliefs of that individual. And in particular this is so where the individual has a choice whether or not to avail himself or herself of the services of that institution, and where other public institutions offering similar services, and whose rules do not include the objectionable rule in question, are available.

Baroness Hale waffles a little bit, but delivers a cracker:

If a woman freely chooses to adopt a way of life for herself, it is not for others, including other women who have chosen differently, to criticise or prevent her. Judge Tulkens, in Sahin v Turkey, at p 46, draws the analogy with freedom of speech. The European Court of Human Rights has never accepted that interference with the right of freedom of expression is justified by the fact that the ideas expressed may offend someone.

To the chaps from HuT backing this nonsense, that particular quote must really sting.

The Noble Baroness continues:

Likewise, the sight of a woman in full purdah may offend some people, and especially those western feminists who believe that it is a symbol of her oppression, but that could not be a good reason for prohibiting her from wearing it.

Quite so, but that is not what the school was arguing. It was arguing that other pupils objected to the jilbab because it would make it harder for them to stand up for themselves in the face of pressure from extremists:

A mandatory policy that rejects veiling in state educational institutions may provide a crucial opportunity for girls to choose the feminist freedom of state education over the patriarchal dominance of their families. Also, for the families, such a policy may send a clear message that the benefits of state education are tied to the obligation to respect women's and girls' rights to equality and freedom

this was a specific concern at the school in question:

This is demonstrated by the fact that girls have subsequently expressed their concern that if the jilbab were to be allowed they would face pressure to adopt it even though they do not wish to do so.

Not to worry though: ever the news manager, TB has ensured that the BBC will have other things to do tonight than to poke fun at the wrong-headedness of his wife...

Peerages, Party Funding and Perfidy

One of the side effects of blogging is that one becomes ever vigilant for signs of news management.

So, notwithstanding my undoubtedly stout yeomanliness, you could have knocked me down with a feather when old two jags himself fights off accusations of monumental corruption on the part of his dear leader by suggesting that this charade clearly demonstrates the need for state funding of political parties.

I shall leave aside the free marketeer's objection (that this will insulate the incumbent big 3 or so from the undeniable signals of market forces: unappetising policies, no grassroots supporters, no money) and consider for a moment some of the unsavoury thoughts...

The meme of state funding crops up once in a while and is knocked down fairly sharply as we all know that, in much the same way that

"democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time",

political parties are a very real restriction on the democratic ideal, but are at least partially necessary to make the whole thing manageable. Oddly enough, I would suggest that blogging and the internet in general are undermining the conditions that made political parties necessary - lack of easy access to information, difficulty of getting one's voice heard - in much the same way - and for much the same reasons - that participation in the party political scene is declining.

Equally, TB knows that he's on the way out and that, given his (semi-demi-hemi) desertions of the cause of the international proletariat on the one hand and his positively Stalinist disregard for both the ancient liberties and institutions of this once great country, he is going to be shafted by the unions (on the one hand) and the sentient part of the electorate (on the other).

I think that some of the top bods at ZaNu-Labour have put two and three together and made forty-seven: they need to get state funding if the party is to survive. The question then becomes how to secure state funding.

And if one is as self-serving and venal as the current Prime Minister, that is child's play: just make sure that the current voluntary donation scheme appears as corrupt as possible...