The line will never stop shifting

/
Michael J. Totten interviews Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens: Let's do a brief thought experiment. I tell you the following: On New Year's Eve, a man in his mid-seventies is having his granddaughter over for a sleep-over, his five-year old granddaughter. He is attacked in his own home by an axe-wielding maniac with homicidal intent. Your mammalian reaction, your reaction as a primate, is one of revulsion. I'm trusting you on this. [Laughs.]

MJT: Oh, yes. You are correct.

Hitchens: Then you pick up yesterday's Guardian, one of the most liberal newspapers in the Western world, and there's a long article that says, ah, that picture, that moral picture, that instinct to protect the old and the young doesn't apply in this case. The man asked for it. He drew a cartoon that upset some people. We aren't at all entitled to use our moral instincts in the correct way... These people are saying the grandfather and granddaughter were the authors of their own attempted assassinations. These are some of the same people who say that if I don't believe in God I can't know what morality is. They've just dissolved morality completely into relativism by saying actually, occasionally, carving up grandfathers and granddaughters with an axe on New Year's Eve can be okay if it's done to protect the reputation of a seventh century Arabian man who heard voices.

MJT: It's hard to psychoanalyze other people, but I sometimes suspect that blaming Salman Rushdie and Kurt Westergaard, as many writers have, for bringing down the wrath of these maniacs from Somalia and Iran, may be a way of convincing themselves they'll be safe as long as they don't cross the same line. Any writer or graphic artist must, at least for a second, think oh fuck, they could come for me if I don't watch out. They can say to themselves they'll be fine if they don't cross that line.

Hitchens: But the line will never stop shifting.

MJT: Of course.

I love Steve Jobs

/
13 surprising quotes that prove Steve Jobs can predict the future.
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.” — Fortune, 2008

It's booze, heroin, and low intelligence, stupid.

/
More children at risk as cases of neglect soar, charity warns
"Neglect is a neglected problem," said Diana Sutton, head of policy and public affairs at the NSPCC. "The problem is that neglect cases tend just to drift. There is a need to strike a balance between keeping the family together and taking the children away."
In fact most children placed on the at risk register are there because of neglect. The high profile physical and sexual abuse cases that hit the headlines are actually in the minority. And the major underlying causes of neglect? Drink, hard drugs and cretinism.

It's fine for the NSPCC (which, incidentally, gave up all front line child protection work years ago) to call for swifter action from social workers but it would do better to call for more social workers to start with. Most social services departments are grossly understaffed. And even if there was a full quota of staff what exactly does the NSPCC think they could do with all these children? There is already a desperate shortage of foster parents (especially from ethnic communities) and we abandoned children's homes a long time ago.

Pointing up problems is easy. Solutions are a litte bit more difficult to come up with. And it's a little galling when the comments come from an organisation which removed itself from the difficult job of dealing directly with child abuse and neglect to concentrate on the much more comfortable and safer area of 'therapy'.

Eat with your fingers

/
Myleene Klass warned by police after scaring off intruders with knife
Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear'Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden. The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.
What utter cock. Carrying a knife in your own home is illegal. Fuck me, I've already broken the law this morning - I buttered my toast!

It reminds me of the stupid copper that told me I could be charged with a public order offence in my own home for shouting at him. Needless to say I told him in no uncertain terms what a pathetic idiot he was and sent him on his way. Is it now a requirement of joining the police force that you be a complete fucking dope?

Good for him

/
Daddy knows best, Nick Clegg tells baby guru
Nick Clegg has launched a scathing attack on Britain’s best-known child-rearing guru, likening her methods to “sticking babies in broom cupboards”. The Liberal Democrat leader, a father of three, described Gina Ford’s approach to bringing up babies, which involves encouraging them to stick to strict routines, as “absolute nonsense”.
This unqualified, dopey looking lumbertubs doesn't even have children of her own. Imagine taking advice on dog training from someone who had never had a dog.  The only people more stupid than Ford are the parent's too gormless to work out how to look after a baby themselves. It's not rocket science.

She is popular with some parents because she provides them with a routine which allows them to live their lives as if they didn't actually have an inconvenient, demanding child. Ideal for working mothers who have to be out of the house by 7am sharp and therefore can't be doing with feeding their child when it's hungry but rather at a time that fits in with their busy lives.

We are slowly being castrated

/
Businessman is arrested in front of wife and son... for "anti-gipsy" email that he didn't even write
A wealthy businessman was arrested at home in front of his wife and young son over an email which council officials deemed ‘offensive’ to gipsies – but which he had not even written. The email, concerning a planning appeal by a gipsy, included the phrase: ‘It’s the 'do as you likey' attitude that I am against.’ Council staff believed the email was offensive because ‘likey’ rhymes with the derogatory term ‘pikey’. 

Sussex Police said they had arrested the businessman over ‘suspicion of committing a racial or religious-aggravated offence’.Chief Inspector Heather Keating said: ‘Sussex Police have a legal duty to promote community cohesion and tackle unlawful discrimination. ‘We are satisfied we acted appropriately in identifying the owner of the computer used and through this, the identity of the writer of the offending line. Police said they would hold the innocent men’s DNA indefinitely, which they said was in line with national policy. A council spokesman said: ‘As far as we were concerned it was an offensive comment, so we got in touch with the police.

So just writing a word that rhymes with another word which itself is deemed "offensive" is enough to get you arrested, locked up, fingerprinted and DNA sampled? And all in the name of 'community cohesion'.

Laying a concrete block on a piece of rural land 200 yards from an important historical site in an area of outstanding beauty and then erecting a hideous mobile home on it - all done contrary to the laws of the land and in the face of opposition from the local community doesn't seem to me like like something likely to encourage 'cohesiveness'. Yet it is the complainers who are arrested and harrased while the real law breaker hides behind ludicrous racial discrimination laws.

The Mail should watch out, using the term "gypsy" in its headline. Isn't that 'offensive'? I thought these people had to be referred to as 'travellers' or 'members of the travelling community'. Seems an inappropriate term to me, given that so many controversies surrounding them concern not 'travelling' anywhere but staying put, illegally and cynically wherever they feel like it. Something the rest of us certainly cannot do.

Jeeeezus!

/
Heresy Corner: The God Squad
In a little-noticed press release on Wednesday, the Department for Communities and Local Government announced a group of 13 "inter-faith" advisers to act as its "sounding board" on all things faith. The statement expresses the hope that the lucky thirteen will "will enhance ministerial understanding of, and engagement, with faith communities nationally."

Here's your handy guide to the thirteen people the government thinks represent the cutting-edge of faith-based community engagement in 2010...

Let it snow...or not

/
PM pledge on cold snap gas supply and salt
Gordon Brown has pledged the UK's gas supplies will not run out during the current cold snap, and that road salt will get to "where it is most needed".
It's OK, stocks of salt have been ordered from abroad and they are winging their way to Britain and will arrive in 12 days time on the 21st January - by which time, I suspect, we won't need the bloody stuff. AA spokesman Paul Watters told the BBC that councils had reduced stocks by 250,000 tonnes during the past 10 years. Part of the council's plans for dealing with global warming, I have no doubt. After all, Mr Monbiot thought we might never see another cold winter:
I have spent the last two evenings skating. Last night we laid lanterns out across the ice and swooped and swung and fell flat on our faces on this silent lake in mid-Wales, for hours by moonlight...I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. For the exhilaration of this primal game was shaded with sadness: all of us knew that this time might be our last. It is many winters since most of the lakes in England and Wales have frozen hard enough to support a skating party; with every year the chances of another one recede. The fuss this country has made about the current cold snap reminds us how rare such events have become.
As Mr Eugenides points out, Monbiot said that on 9th January...  last year. 

But not everyone thinks we've seen the end of cold winters:
Can you get it into your thick skulls? If global warming turns out to be true, Britain's weather will go bonkers. It will snow all the time. Weather might be like this more often, not less. Those unseasonably sunny early springs are exactly what there will be fewer of, not more. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
There will be less snow, there will be more snow. Talk about hedging your bets.

Decent man murdered by scum

/
Have-a-go hero fatally stabbed after confronting robbers who stole a woman's bag

Sukhwinder Singh chased the thieves who robbed a 28-year-old woman near Barking station in east London yesterday evening. When he caught up with the pair a fight broke out and the 31-year-old was fatally stabbed. Police are seeking two black men in their 20s or 30s and between 5ft 7in to 6ft.

Detective Inspector John Sandlin said: 'This is a tragic death of a man who was killed for attempting to stop others committing crime, and our thoughts are with Sukhwinder's family. However, I would also to reassure the wider community that tragic events such as these are very rare.
Fatal stabbings pehaps but...
A 36-year-old resident, who asked not to be named, said the roads near the station were well-lit at night but added: 'There are quite a lot of robberies around here because it's quite secluded and there is a bridge by the station so people can run to the other side quickly.