Feeding The Fish

Whilst this tone is slightly broken by the flaming car driven into Glasgow Airport a few hours ago, this clip is an interesting watch, in it ex-cia intelligence expert Larry Johnson concludes that if the car bombs found in London yesterday had gone off, they would have made a big boom, but unless you happened to standing literally right next to it, they wouldn’t have been that dangerous.

In some ways the climate of fear even ineffectual bombs create makes them just as potent as the real thing (with the advantage that no one gets hurt). Hopefully this won’t be jumped on as another reason to push through more ‘anti-terror’ measures like ID cards. I’ll accept that there may be times where a trade off between liberty and security can be acceptable, but in those rare eventualities not only should we err on the side of liberties (because once given away, they’re hard to take back), we need to see evidence that they do actually make people more secure, something notably lacking (or in some cases evidence actively points the other way) in many measures introduced so far and those planned for the future.

This is perhaps the most moving thing I’ve ever seen made from plasticine.

From Blair’s last Prime Minister’s questions:

Richard Younger-Ross: What advice would the Prime Minister give his successor on the relationship between faith and state, in particular with regard to his successor’s reported views on the disestablishment of the Church of England?

The Prime Minister: I am really not bothered about that one.

Now, I could go off and say that it’s pretty obvious that Blair didn’t give a monkey about any separation of Church and State but I’m going to excuse him for trying to be funny, the question wouldn’t have been expected and answering any questions related to Brown would have been a no-no.

What’s less encouraging though is the general reaction in blogs about it, It’s generally considered to a deserving put down to an obscure Lib Dem. Finkelstein over at Comment Central described it as a “long, boring, pointless and complicated question”; long and complicated perhaps, but boring and pointless? Tell that to the students of The King’s Academy, Emmanuel City Technology College and Trinity Academy, who thanks to Blair’s willingness to hand schools over to anyone with money, are now being taught creationism alongside evolution in Biology lesson as well as the historical truth of Noah’s ark. Tell that to the Church of England officials that are desperately trying to get Intelligent Design into science classrooms. Whist American Secularists may be fighting a constant rear-guard action, at least the constitution is technically on their side; here we have no such help and nutjobs like Vardy get to present their beliefs as facts to impressionable young children in publicly funded schools.

The question is an important one: How will Brown handle faith groups? We’ve already seen signs that he wants to hand back appointments of Bishops, an interesting contrast to Blair who used his veto to turn down candidates for the diocese of Liverpool. Even if this leads to the disestablishment of the Church of England, it’s unlikely to bring about the end of faith schools. Brown differs in important regards here, but there’s little cause to rejoice yet.

The Joshua Project is a group dedicated to systematically finding the groups least exposed to Christianity and spreading the good word, and what a good word it is! Take this report on the Chiang:

Ties between Chiang men and women are weak. Romantic love is considered important, and sexual freedom is prevalent. The Chiang men need to move into their God-ordained roles as heads of the families.

Because what the world really needs is people seeking out and destroying the few remaining places where automatic patriarchy doesn’t exist. Why is it the groups with the most stupid, oppressive beliefs are always the ones most keen to inflict them on others?

(Hat tip to the Reclusive Leftist)

BBC NEWS - Two-tiered net could be coming

…This is net neutrality! I didn’t think this was an issue in the UK. Worth keeping an eye on.

I know I’m coming a little late to the game here, but I feel the need to weigh in.

It’s ugly and it’s here to stay. I’m starting to get used to it and  we’ll doubtless come to if not like it, tolerate eventually, but that doesn’t change what an amazing bungle the commission have made of this.

Aside the fact it’s just not that nice to look at, I’m a little bit insulted is this constant statement that it was aimed at young people. It’s both patronising for those who aren’t the youth (who are essentially being told that it’s not their Olympics), and to the young people to whom it tells ‘we don’t respect your sense of taste and think you will fall for any brightly coloured pattern’. You almost wonder if this is how it survived the process, whenever anyone felt any self-doubt over if it looked good they just reminded themselves that ‘It’s not for me…it’s for the youth! They’ll love it’. It’s alright everyone, the Emperor’s not naked, he’s just wearing a very fine fabric.

The brand’s crime isn’t that it’s ugly (or that it causes seizures) but the attitude of the commission to the public backlash. Given that everyone hated it, they had two choices: Go back to the drawing board or just stick with it. Given the fact they’d spent £400,000 on the branding, their decision to carry forth with it can be defended but the attitude presented is quite revealing: “No, we don’t care what you think, we’re going to run these Olympics our way”- It shows a complete lack of understand on how to run the Olympics as a populist movement, which it really needs to become if it’s to have any lasting benefit. They managed to put themselves of the wrong side of the population on one of the most trivial matters possible, this is NOT a good sign for things to come.

What should they have done? It may sound corny but a public competition should have been held to find a logo. Joe Trippi said something very true about public involvement in projects like this: ‘Build it and they will come, but ask them and they will help build it‘. It would have been nice if they’d cottoned onto this in the first place but their failure to recognise the opportunity in doing this after the announcement of the previous logo shows they really don’t get how to make this a populist Olympics. For the commission to say ‘We’re sorry, we failed to find a logo that captured the imagination of the nation, so now we’re turning it over to you’ would not just guarantee a decent logo, it would involve people in the decision-process and give them a feeling of ownership over the Olympics. The turnaround would have demonstrated that they find our opinions important and trust our judgements and as a result of that, we’d be more willing to have some faith in what the commission is doing rather than constantly holding our breath and waiting to see what they screw up next.

• Giant, armour-planted flying fish
  These really are terrifying.
  (tags: telegraph fish bizarre)
• The ReDistricting Game
  Ever wanted to rig a district to suppress opposition voters? This is your chance!
  (tags: elections politics games education)

• Immigration is bad for society, but only until a new solidarity is forged | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited
  (tags: guardian immigration Integration)
• The size of objects in space
  (tags: video science space)
• Amazing Stereo Pictures! You Must See!
  (tags: graphics art visualization Photography)
• Church ‘poised to cut ties to state’ | Uk News | News | Telegraph
  “But traditionalists will nevertheless warn that going too far down such a route could lead to the unravelling of all the Church’s ties with the state, including the right of bishops to sit in the Lords.”…Oh..no..
  (tags: religion telegraph CoE Brown)

Having just finished the book version of Taking Liberties (which made me so angry I think I have to go see the film), this part of an NYTimes article leaped out at me:

Part of the problem is that, in response to the shameful abuses at Abu Ghraib, the American military instituted vastly excessive civil rights protections for detainees. In our experience, it has worked this way: After an arrest, two soldiers must file affidavits, together with physical evidence and digital pictures, and then an American lawyer decides if the package is strong enough to withstand further review. About half of all detainees are released within 18 hours; the others are sent from battalion level to brigade level, where the evidence is re-examined, resulting in more releases.

Those detainees remaining are sent to a detention center where a combined board reviews the evidence again, and releases still more. After that, every six months a United States board must re-review the evidence in each case. Lastly, the detainee appears before an Iraqi judge, who in turn dismisses about half of the cases.

I agree, needing evidence in order to lock people up is dangerously excessive. Next they’ll be asking for a jury of peers or other claptrap. Just because it didn’t look like the evidence was going to hold up is no reason to release them! Chances are they were an insurgent anyway and if they weren’t, well, they might have become insurgents at some point in the future. It’s best to be safe than sorry.

I’ve been having a look at different election systems and they all seem to try to find though simple or complex means a way of turning thousands of votes into the single vote an electee wields. Is there a way to for the millions of votes expressed at the national level to be channelled into a smaller representative assembly without too much dumbing down or extra steps? Working from the principle of popular sovereignty upwards, I’ve tried to find a simple way to express this and I’ve come up with EVC (Every Vote Counted) for lack of a more imaginative name. I’ve looked for similar systems on the web and can’t find any, which either makes it a completely new idea (unlikely) or just too stupid to be worth discussing. Let’s find out.

The two main features of EVC are:

• A representatives voting power in Parliament is directly tied to the number of votes they receive at elections.
• Multi-member constituencies.

The basic idea is that instead of an MP’s vote having a value of 1, it’s value is equal to Read the rest of this entry »