Incoming!

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The shopkeeper who sounds a WWII air-raid siren when a traffic warden is spotted
When traffic wardens started to blitz a quiet corner of suburban London, one shopkeeper decided it was his duty to fight back. Martin Herdman put up a 1,000-watt public address system outside his shop near Twickenham and recruited a network of "spies" to alert him the instant they spotted a parking attendant in the area.

Ha, ha. That's the way to do it!


Menus and blogrolls

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I'm making a few minor changes. The menu bar at the top of the page is a work in progress. The blogroll has been hidden until I decide what to do with it. I've never been happy with blogrolls possibly because I've never got around to organising them properly.  I sometimes look admiringly at the ones on other blogs and resolve to do something similar but then never do.  A radical rethink is in order. Something to do during the silly season.


Outdated criticism? Yeah, right!

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Duncan slams Lib Dems in gay rights row
Alan Duncan, the first openly gay Conservative MP, has branded the Liberal Democrats "shits" after the party launched an attack on the Conservatives' failure to support gay rights. Lib Dems equality spokesperson Jo Swinson last week released a compilation of members of the shadow Cabinet's voting history since 1998...

Duncan, shadow secretary for business, enterprise and regulatory reform, (said) that the Liberal Democrats’ criticism was out-dated and claimed the Tories were in step with a wider consensus on gay rights issues. He also said it was unwise for the Lib Dems, whose president, Simon Hughes, ran successfully for parliament in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election against Peter Tatchell as "the straight choice", to criticise the Tories over gay rights.   (emphasis mine)



I'll write the theme tune

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 I'm not particularly interested in the Kamm/Hari/Cohen spats or any of the other left/ex-left/decent-left arguments which are mostly reheated rows that have been going on for donkey's years but I did see a link to Oliver Kamm's appearance on The Late Edition with Marcus Brigstocke over at AW.  I'd never seen Kamm on TV so I popped to YouTube to take a look. The diminutive Kamm looked like Little Britain's Dennis Waterman  and I half expected to see his little legs  dangling from the  chair.

He was invited on to discuss the renewal of Trident (played for laughs by Brigstocke, unfortunately) and argued that it was fine for 'us' to have WMDs because we were civilised whereas countries like Iran most certainly were not civilised. After all, as Kamm pointed out,  "Iran has conducted systematic nuclear deception while being a signatory to the Non-proliferation Pact."  Unlike Israel, which has conducted systematic nuclear denial while NOT being a signatory to the NPT.






Sweetness and Light

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Simon Heffer: What society needs to be happy

Guitars?!
Sitting down the other day with the rock star, poet, constitutional reformer, Englishman and patriot Billy Bragg, I learnt a striking fact. The Bard of Barking was en route to a women's prison where he was delivering, as rock stars do, six guitars. As part of the rehabilitative process, these women are being encouraged to make music. It is a brilliant idea.

Some of us may struggle to comprehend popular music, but there is a qualitative difference between having the wireless on as wallpaper and imbibing one song after another, and actually seeking to acquire the skills to make music. To do it anything like properly requires not just skill, but commitment. It is creative, and it stimulates further creativity. And creativity is central to the civilising process. It is easy to become idealistic about such things, but I imagine there might be fewer of those women in prison if, some years ago, they had had their creativity stimulated in a cultural fashion rather than in a criminal one.
Ah, if only these women had spent their youth learning the recorder, their lives could have turned out so very different.



Whitey's tree

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Ezekiel Edwards, DMI BLog: Some Things (like racism in our criminal justice system) Never Change
I am going to tell a brief story. Tell me whether you think it takes place in 1957 or 2007. There is a small town of under 3,000 people. There is a high school in the town. There is a tree at the school known as the "white tree", because only white kids sit under it. A black student asks school officials for permission to sit under the "white tree". The student receives permission. A group of black students then sit under the "white tree". The next day, three nooses, in school colors, are hanging from the "white tree". Three white students are found responsible. The high school principal recommends expulsion. The superintendent of schools, who is white, instead suspends the students for three days, seeing the nooses as no more than a "youthful stunt". "Adolescents play pranks. I don't think it was a threat against anybody", says the superintendent.
 
Black students organize a sit-in under the "white tree" in protest, believing that the students who hung nooses as race-based intimidation were given indifferent slaps on the wrists. The white District Attorney comes to the school. He brings police officers with him. At the school assembly, the District Attorney threatens the black students who had protested. He tells them he can be their best friend or worst enemy. He says that if they continue agitating about an innocent prank, he could "take away (their) lives with a stroke of (his) pen."

A few months later, a black student shows up at a white party. He is beaten. One white person is arrested and charged with simple battery. The next day, at a convenience store, a young white man pulls out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men, including the youth beaten up at the party. The black youths wrestle the shotgun away from the white man. The black youths are arrested. No charges are filed against the white man...

And so it goes on... read the whole thing

Via Tom Watson


Avoid the grass

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Maria Grasso - Sp!ked: Beware the ‘Campus Stasi’ at British universities
By urging academics to spy on their students, to counter what still remains a fairly minor threat of violent radicalism, government departments, university authorities and commentators are damaging, in the here and now, academic culture. They are encouraging lecturers to be suspicious of students, which will lead students to be wary of lecturers: this will undercut the relationships of trust that allow rigorous and honest debate to flourish on campus. Yet again, we can see that the real problem lies with the ‘war on terror’. Radical Islamists may have made speeches and distributed leaflets at various universities, but they are not powerful enough to undermine the traditional university system of sharing and deepening knowledge. Instead, it is the authorities’ own exaggerated fears and concerns that might end up doing that.


I will (not) be moved

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Harry's Place: Nick Cohen v Johann Hari

Johann Hari has threatened David T at Harry's Place with legal action over a defamatory post which appeared recently. Will at Drink Soaked Popinjays for War wonders:
Would Hari have a case against HP Sauce? To win -- I think Hari would have to prove that the post was designed to "damage reputation with your peers" - can't see him doing that. It's already common knowledge that he's a self-righteous, two-faced weasel anyway -- neither interesting nor trustworthy. When all's said and done David T has made Hari look like a proper twat -- so win win situation I reckon.
All rather irrelevant really given that the offending article was pulled faster than you could say Sue, Grabbit and Run. David T at HP had this to say:
Sadly Johann Hari is threatening me with defamation proceedings. He takes the view that this piece, and the comments which follow it, contain defamatory material. Practically speaking, I am neither able, nor prepared, to hand edit articles and comments in order to meet threats of legal action. Therefore I have chosen to take the article down and have removed all comments...I am not proposing to discuss this issue further.
I bet you're not.

But what does he mean by 'I am neither able, nor prepared, to hand edit articles and comments in order to meet threats of legal action'? Hand edit?! What the fuck does that mean? Of course you can 'edit' your writing so that you don't defame people. I think he's saying that he intends to write whatever he wants and sod the legal consequences, but he's rather spoilt the effect by pissing his pants and pulling the original piece the moment the word 'lawyer' was mentioned. What he should have said is 'I am neither able, nor prepared, to hand edit articles and comments in order to meet threats of legal action unless I am actually threatened with legal action when my edit will then consist of completely removing the post in its entirety, permanently.'

Say what you mean, mean what you say, then see it through. Or shut the fuck up.






It's raining pork

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Muslims protest over pet food factory
A group of Muslims have opposed plans for a pet food factory to be built as possible pork emissions will violate their religious rights. Butchers Pet Care could shelve plans for a factory in Coton Park, near Rugby, because angry Asian families have complained to their residents' association about pork smells drifting into their garden. Muslim residents in the area also claim the pork will effectively "rain down" on their homes and gardens after the factory's 100ft chimney has pumped the meat extracts into the atmosphere.


Now he's gone and spoiled it...

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Iraq soccer captain: ‘I want America to go out.’
Yesterday’s win of the Asian Cup for Iraq’s national soccer team was an “inspirational triumph for a team whose players straddle bitter and violent ethnic divides.” After the game yesterday, team captain Younis Mahmoud called for the United States to withdraw its troops: “I want America to go out,” he said. “Today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but out. I wish the American people didn’t invade Iraq and, hopefully, it will be over soon.” Mahmoud also said he will not return to Iraq to celebrate. “I don’t want the Iraqi people to be angry with me,” he said. “If I go back with the team, anybody could kill me or try to hurt me.”