Usefully Useless

Hard-line extremism seems to be everywhere. Stop them talking about who’s god is bigger than who else’s, and you’ll find the BNP and Iran have a lot to agree on. Far-right extremist parties are popping up all over the place, typically playing on the hyped-up “Islamisation” card to convince people that doing as the Muslims do is a good thing, sacrificing your own freedom for some “greater good”. It doesn’t make much sense when put like that, does it?

The latest band of gullible idiots comes to you from Switzerland. Newcomers to the extremist brigade, the Swiss have recently decided that they’re going to ban minarets. Yes, you read me right, minarets. So much for the Swiss’ muchly bragged about “direct democracy” protecting the rights of the people, how can it protect the minorities from the tyranny of the majority?

The Swiss apparently agree with Iran that banning the construction of religious buildings they don’t like is the way forward. As Iran doesn’t permit the construction of Christian churches, the Swiss believe the Muslims are worth copying, so have pretty much banned the construction of Mosques.

Here’s a hint, you idiots, if you want to fight something you don’t generally accept and copy their beliefs!

So while Europe seems to be busy converting to extremism, is there really any need for external threats like the Taleban anymore? We’re quite capable of destroying ourselves, thankyou very much.

It’s just before dawn and you’re getting out of bed, ready to shower, make breakfast and go to work.

Just then, government forces with submachine guns break down your door and forcibly bundle you into a vehicle with blacked out windows. You’re taken to jail on suspicion of a crime – They think you’re a subversive, you might believe things the government says you’re not allowed to, but you’re not allowed to know what.

You’re denied bail and you still don’t know what it is you’re supposed to have done. The government considers the evidence to be secret, such that you can’t see it. Your access to a lawyer is only a few minutes a week, even if he was able to prepare a defence for you, which he’s not allowed to do.

Which country are you in? Iran? Zimbabwe? Maybe Orwell’s fictional 1984 dystopia?

No, you’re in Britain. Manchester, to be specific.

It took senior judges to point out the clear injustice and absurdity of what happened when, to two men from Manchester, this ostensibly western government turned on them.

Let’s hope this abortion never, ever becomes law. This is the Government’s beleagured response to entertainment industry lobbying. I’ll go through it point by point.

Without any evidence, without any trial, without any proof, you can be disconnected from the Internet if anyone from the entertainment industry complains.
All it takes is an accusation and it only applies to music or movies. Not photographs, not paintings, not poetry, not opera, dance, novels, etc. If you manage to accumulate three of these special accusations, you’re cut off from the Internet pretty much forever – Without any form of trial or proof. Oh, did I say “you”? I meant “anyone in your household”.

Your Internet Service Provider is legally mandated to spy on you.
Any “evidence” the movie or music industries can use to sue you, or anyone in your household, your ISP is legally obliged to collect it. This basically means they have to monitor everything and anything you do online, or they’ll be fined £250,000 per instance. Then you’ll be fined £50,000, as well as being cut off for life.

The Business Secretary gets arbitrary power to do whatever the hell he likes
This includes making up new offences, setting new penalties including jail time…and better yet, the Business Secretary (one Peter Mandelson) has stated that he’ll use private enforcers provided by the entertainment industry who will have the legal right to hack into your computer(s).

Video games will get a strict new censorship regime
This means that many titles will not be able to be sold in the UK. Rather than use the popular (it’s used across Europe) and successful PEGI system or even renovating the existing BBFC standard, they’re inventing a completely new system which appears to be among the harshest in the world.

Digital Economy?
There’s no mention of anything remotely to do with the “digital economy” other than a mandate for Ofcom to review infrastructure every two years and a 50p/month stealth tax on telephone line rental. That’s really it. No addressing of our decidedly mediocre broadband performance. No dealing with astronomically high mobile data charges.

So will it pass? Very, very unlikely. The Tories have already opposed it and the Liberal Democrats are very likely to reject it.

After a lunatic who should never have been given a licence in the first place shot up a school (Hamilton, Dunblane), the knee-jerk political reaction was to ban handguns and further tighten firearm laws.

It’s resulted in this. A former soldier is now faced with 5 years in jail for handing a shotgun, which he found laying around outside, handing it in to the police.

The police immediately arrested him for possessing an unlicenced firearm and the judge has no option: The law is very clear that ANYONE, regardless of intent, holding a firearm is guilty with a minimum sentence of five years.

This man served his country as a soldier, then tried to serve his country again as a good citizen. Then they locked him up for no good reason. The Government wants to get firearms off the streets, so why is it that if you hand one in to the police, you’re guilty of a crime carrying a minimum term of five years?

We need a Government able to make laws which do not carry harsh, knee-jerk sentences in emotionally charged times. We do not have one. It’s time for democracy to work for the people rather than against them.

About time!

In the UK, the House of Lords has traditionally been our highest court of appeal (apellate court) where the Law Lords, former judges given peerage for exemplary service, would hear appeals. This separated judicial power from legislative power but did not separate legislative power from judicial power, the disjoin was only one way.

This made many wonder whether the House of Lords was fair under the European Convention on Human Rights. It became a very real danger that the House of Lords couldn’t provide a fair trial under that convention. Our archaic legal system was (and remains) a badly suited mess, Blair wanted to reduce the power of the House of Lords to further the cause of democracy; The House of Commons is elected, the House of Lords is not.

Detractors have claimed that the Supreme Court’s justices could use their power to elevate themselves above the House of Lords committee they’re succeeding, which Lord Phillips said was possible but unlikely.

I suspect the next step will be to a codified constitution, which may well be a dangerous step to take. Constitutions have a habit of becoming obsolete and dated, reflecting the views of their time and being very hard to alter.

For example, a clause (Second Amendment) in the United States Constitution came before the establishment of professional police forces, so provides for a peacekeeping militia, who did this job before police. Nowadays the Second Amendment has been corrupted into a "right to bear arms", a purpose it was never intended for and merely a byproduct – The militia being an amateur "police force", the amateurs would need weapons. The firearms debate goes on (I’m personally on the pro-gun side) but it’s not what the Second Amendment intended to do.

The Irish Constitution identifies the woman’s place as in the home and has numerous references to the Catholic religion, both guaranteeing freedom of faith in one sentence and outlawing it in another. Then again, it WAS written by a crazed bunch of religious terrorists in Fianna Fail who, back then, WERE little short of jihadists in all but name.

In both cases, the highest apellate courts have the power to strike down a law as unconstitutional, that is, running contrary to the protections afforded by the respective constitutions. Without a constitution and with merely codified law and case law, our highest appellate court has traditionally been somewhat underpowered. The best a Supreme Court can do is call a law "illegal" or "inconsistent" with other laws, but then it’s up to Parliament to change it or to change what it’s inconsistent with.

Some of the more authoritarian laws Blair enacted, such as warrantless searching ("Stop and Search") as well as the incredible and widely abused powers given to police and local councils by the Terrorism Act could use this kind of oversight as they are an abomination in the face of liberty.

I’d be quite pleased if the Supreme Court were to elevate itself above the puny committee of the House of Lords it replaced.

News: The US Senate has cancelled the F22 “Raptor” project.

My thoughts: About flippin’ time. The F22 was a disaster to begin with, an extremely temperamental superiority fighter (i.e. a Cold War relic) with an utter dislike of anything moist (the radar absorbing paint was ruined by rain, mist, fog, clouds!) and needing upwards of one day’s maintenance for each flying hour.

The only reason it got to production was the contractors spreading the work piecemeal out to almost every state in the US to maximise their lobbying opportunities! This, of course, increased expense and maximised the economic impact of the contract being cancelled. Used to sucking from the government teat for so long, shielded from the realities of a free market, military contractors are reportedly in disarray.

News: Ireland outlaws blasphemy

My thoughts: This will not end well. Ireland’s constitution is a legislative nightmare, guaranteeing free speech with one sentence and outlawing it with the next. The constitution itself both guarantees the right of free speech, but at the same time criminalises blasphemy.

Until last week, Ireland had quietly brushed it under the rug. If they were to define blasphemy by Catholicism, they’d have a whole bunch of very angry Protestants, Jews and Muslims who were outlawed. Define it by any one faith and you’ve just outlawed all the others. So the Irish legislation, mandated by its idiotic constitution, plain criminalises free speech, anything that causes “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents”. Now I don’t know about you guys, but there’s not a lot out there that DOESN’T cause outrage among a substantial number of adherents of ANY religion. The Northern Irish lot have been at it for GENERATIONS!

So who wanted this law? Crazed Catholics? Postal Protestants? Mad Mullahs? Rabid Rabbis? Violent Vicars? Well, no. The Irish politicians realised that their constitution demanded it and so put it into law. This is the danger of having a constitution in the first place, changing it is much more difficult than changing a ruling party, especially when it’s holding your nation to ransom. Worse still, a “paper dictator” always reflects the views and ideals of the time it was created, regardless of how outdated they may be today.

The Irish constitution is fundamentally incompatible with a free society and must either be discarded or amended. The Irish constitution weighs in with the following: The preamble says that all state authority is derived from the “Most Holy Trinity” and that public homage is due to “Almighty God” and that blasphemy is an offence that shall be punishable by law.

In more detail, the constitution is actually incompatible with itself.

Article 40.1 guarantees equality under law, protecting one group by oppressing another is not equality under law. Article 44.2 states the state shall not make any discrimination on the grounds of religious profession, belief or status which is clearly going on here. Article 44.2 further states that the people have the right to freedom of conscience and religion. The law moves the burden of proof to the defendant (who must prove he did not intend to cause outrage), a violation of the Irish constitution’s Article 38 and of the European Convention on Human Rights (Schedule 1, Article 6).

So as mandated by the Irish constitution, Ireland must violate the Irish constitution!

As many of you know, I’ve followed the War on Child Welfare closely in this blog. Nothing, however, could prepare me for the stunning revelation I got from my mother this morning.

She’s the “Child Protection Officer” for a local kids football team, at least one of the bigger ones. Her duty is basically to ensure that none of the parents who turn up to watch their children play sports are allowed to take photos. I am not lying and this is a legal obligation for all children’s sports if they want to compete in an officially sancioned league – And there are no other leagues.

What it essentially results in is these football teams disbanding since they’re grassroots organisations in small local leagues and they just don’t have the money to send someone on a legally mandated training course every year. They’re all self-funded, the government offers absolutely no help at all, other than legislation demanding that they spend money. That’s why only the bigger ones survive, the others are forced to close. There’s a close correlation between juvenile sports and reductions in juvenile crime, as well as the obvious health benefits.

To make matters better, club officials all need Criminal Records Bureau checks (CRB check), this is nothing new. However, a few years ago the law was changed so that a CRB check is non-transferrable. When I had an Enhanced CRB check done (“enhanced” means it shows even spent convictions) because I was working with children and vulnerable adults, it was valid no matter what I was doing or who for over its twelve month validity period.

That’s all changed, each different position needs its own CRB check, all identical, for the same person. In my mother’s case, she needs a CRB check to be a governor of the local primary school and an ECRB for her volunteer work with the football team. The ECRB for the football team cannot be transferred to the school. Even if they were both ECRB or both CRB, they could not be transferred, organisations have to pay the £70 even if the employee or volunteer already has a valid CRB certificate.

It all amounts to a war on child welfare and child health. By forcing these unnecessary expenses on children’s activity, sports and health groups, the government hopes to shut them all down.

Closely related is my kid sister’s dancing. She regularly goes to dancing competitions and, guess what? For “child protection reasons” photography is banned at competitions. Except by the official photographers… Who then put every photo online and try to sell them. (Link goes to one of her competitions). Exactly how is banning parents from taking photos of their children and then putting the “official” photos online for anyone to see and buy any form of “child protection”?

What does this government have against kids?

After a 21 year old died from a reaction to the stimulant GBL, her mother is leading a holy war to get it banned.

Excuse me? Mrs. Stewart? Making it illegal will make party-goers want it all the more, haven’t you seen how common and popular heroin, cocaine, ecstacy, cannabis, amphetamines and other controlled drugs are? Are you perhaps thinking that if your daughter died, you’re wanting more to join her out of some perverse lust for revenge? Maybe trying to shift the blame? The coroner’s toxicology report even states that her alcohol level was excessive. This wasn’t some young woman out for a good time, it was an irresponsible kid with a death wish.

Britain has the most oppressive drug laws in Europe and, spookily enough the highest rate of adult drug consumption. The Netherlands has the loosest drug laws in Europe and it has the lowest rate of consumption. If we go through Europe plotting how tight drug laws are and how high consumption is, it’s a direct relationship: Tighter laws correlate very closely with higher consumption.

Is it too far a stretch to speculate that the tighter laws are causing the problem in the first place, perhaps? Nobody goes for legal drugs (like GBL, it’s very rare on the street) because they’re legal. They’re not the good stuff. If they were the good stuff, they’d be illegal by now.

Yet again we see knee-jerk headless chicken reactions which will only make the problem worse. We should expect it by now.

Update: Alright, it is The Sun and normally as reliable as a ten year old Apple Mac, but it does reference a genuine UN report. Britain is Europe’s drugs capital for cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. Obviously the very harsh laws we have need to be tightened further, right? When something doesn’t work, the obvious thing is to keep doing it all the more. If you’re in government, that is.

Between the European Parliament and the local elections taking place on Thursday, we learned quite a few things. The first and most obvious is that the people have completely lost their support for New Labour.

This turn of events is not at all surprising as people look for someone to blame for the financial crisis, it’s easy to blame the government. This isn’t all, however. Tony Blair oversaw a fundamental shift in Labour’s political stance. Prior to about 1997 or so, Labour were a leftist party which championed the rights of the common man in contrast to the Conservatives, who sought to undermine those rights in the interest of security.

Now the roles are reversed. Blair’s revolution shifted Labour to becoming a conservative party, politically almost identical to the US Republicans, they removed a great many rights from the people. Firearm ownership was banned (and gun crime went up), police gained the power to search anyone on the street without any form of warrant (and concealed weapon crime like knives went up) while economic regulation was abolished (and we entered the worst economic crisis anyone can remember); These are all very reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s rule.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has become what Labour once were. Now they champion economic regulation and seek to restore the rights of the people, which is exactly what Labour used to be.

Not only that, but Labour fostered a culture of fear. We’re told to be scared of terrorists and that the police need all these new powers to help combat terrorists, it’s blanket coverage all across the media. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s when the IRA was bombing the shit out of city centres nationwide, the police didn’t need these powers.

The plan was that a scared populace was an obedient one, first noted by Julius Caesar and again stated by Herman Goering at the post-WW2 Nazi trials and by Donald Rumsfeld in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. As people naturally do not want war, the government simply states there is a danger to the people, denounce the pacifists for exposing their country to danger, and the populace will support whatever they’re told to – it worked in the US, Bush gaining his second term – but has not worked for Labour.

It has worked, however. People are scared of foreigners, usually Muslims but anyone who looks a bit tanned is suspect. They do not, however, support Labour, they’ve gone to support the British National Party, a hilariously named bunch of neo-Nazis who share ideology with banned German extremists: They are not British and the core values we hold dear as British values are hated by the BNP. They hate Britain and all it is, wishing to transform it into a dystopian hellhole.

Proof? The BNP gained tremendously in the European Parlimentary Election, even gaining a seat. If they continue their advance, we are all screwed. Nationalism can only work on fear, it always has to be attacking someone who’s different to the majority, so long as it retains the veneer of protecting the majority, it’ll remain in power. The BNP in the past have attacked blacks, Jews and Muslims, blaming all kinds of maladies on them. Their entire political viability is based on the politics of fear.

So let’s say they kick every Muslim out of the country and all the “foreigners” (basically, non-whites) – the BNP have stated they will do this, first by “voluntary repatriation” of non-white Brits, then by forced expulsion. Who do the masses fear then? Probably Jews, Nick Griffin is on record stating his belief they’re everything wrong with the world. So we perform a second holocaust, set up concentration camps and gas chambers (oh yes, part of their manifesto is to bring back the death penalty). Then who do we fear? Likely homosexuals. We imprison them all or just execute them. Then who do we fear? Probably Catholics, so we ban its practise and raze its churches, outlawing public protests. Then who do we fear? The Irish, so we invade and annex them. Then who do we fear? Dissidents who obviously want to weaken our nation, so we outlaw elections and imprison the dissenters. Then who do we fear? Intellectuals, the educated, the “elitists”, so we imprison or exile them. Then who do we fear? Well, there’ll likely be not many people left.

In the process we’ll have lost our ability to get these idiots out of government when they banned elections. We’ll have lost our ability to protest against the government, that’s banned too. All the foreign professors, scientists and engineers we attracted will have fled to other countries during the repression of the elitist intellectuals, crippling our economy and innovation.

Britain would be destroyed and we’d be its destructors, the British values we stupidly thought they’d protect would be obliterated. That is why we cannot continue playing the politics of fear. That is why Labour has lost its support to the BNP.

This wonderful statement of the bloody obvious comes to you from the House of Lords. Yep, it’s another oh my god won’t someone think of the kiddies issue. They found that, given a pre-paid credit card, kids could buy age-restricted stuff online.

First off, it’s illegal for under 18s to buy pre-paid credit cards – They’ve already broken the law! Secondly this was a supervised test. Now how many kids out there can get a bunch of booze delivered without their parents noticing, even after they’ve managed to somehow get a pre-paid card (which aren’t common)?

Now how exactly can someone prove they’re over 18 (or whatever age restriction) when involved with online transactions? Go on, think of a few ways. Still thinking? Everyone else is too. What are we going to do, disallow the use of pre-paid cards? Yeah, that’d go down well with the industry.

The Government caused these problems by being an oppressive bunch of idiots. Now it’s somehow the problem of business to solve?