…and another

The Radio 4 news at 0800 had an item about the internet. The Culture, Media and Sport select committee is demanding more regulation, because very large sites like YouTube, Bebo and Facebook (mentioned specifically on the radio) do not remove potentially offensive material ‘proactively’; i.e. they take stuff down only if someone complains about it, [...]

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Unsatisfactory morning

Went to the doctor’s. Described symptoms. Doctor alarmed. Took blood pressure, believing it at the 3rd attempt. Wrote out forms for ECG, blood tests, etc., ticking boxes marked ‘within 3 days’. Told to call ambulance ‘if anything happens’. Told to carry cellphone for this purpose.
Doctor: Is there any history of this sort of thing [...]

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How terrorist groups end

Via Boing Boing, an article from the RAND Corporation about ‘how terrorist groups end’.
It concludes:
Al Qa’ida’s resilience should trigger a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy…Key to this strategy is replacing the war-on-terrorism orientation with the kind of counterterrorism approach that is employed by most governments facing significant terrorist threats today. Calling the efforts a war [...]

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Green or, er, magenta?

At Samizdata Jonathan Pearce considers whether it is becoming cool to mock the Greens.
With respect I would suggest that this is a somewhat broad-brush approach. There is more to the so-called ‘green agenda’ than the discredited dogma of global warming.
Recycling, for instance, is not a bad idea, and has been practised in industry for [...]

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Intellectual property rights

At the LPUK unofficial blog, Patrick Vessey remarks upon the government’s arse-about-face method of dealing with the concept of ‘illegal P2P filesharing’.
He says:
The current stated policy of the Libertarian Party is one of support for ‘intellectual property rights’. This isn’t a policy that I personally agree with, and I will try to make the time [...]

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Psychoprisons

Guthrum, at the LPUK unofficial blog, comments on cases of people being put into Soviet-style psychoprisons for wholly unsatisfactory reasons.
Once I worked in a town where I knew a couple of people who ran the only Army-surplus shop in the whole place. An occasional visitor to the shop was a friend of theirs, who lived [...]

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Prove anything with statistics

The statistical thing on WordPress reveals that the daily total of readers of this blog is highly variable, with a minimum of 11 and a maximum of 91. It also says that the weekly total rose to a plateau of about 250, then increased to 325 last week. Over months, it suggests an inexorable rise [...]

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1588 and all that

Tomorrow, the 29th of July, is the 420th anniversary of the Battle of Gravelines, which is usually thought to represent the final defeat of the Invincible Armada sent by King Philip II of Spain to defeat Queen Elizabeth I of England.
The Armada had for the previous week, as it sailed up the Channel, been [...]

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Nanny’s secret fear

The excellent Nanny Knows Best, which I always read, reports that the education commissars in Co. Durham have banned children from taking part in sack races or three-legged races, in case they hurt themselves.
The almost frighteningly productive Ken Frost, one of whose many blogs this is, says:
What is the matter with these knobheads?
Why do they [...]

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A dangerous precedent

BBC Radio 3, in a recent news broadcast, mentioned that the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has seen fit to get involved in the business about Max Mosley, condemning the judgement in Mosley’s favour as “a dangerous precedent”.
He says:
Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this [...]

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