I didn't quite catch that...

In the UK, the state has historically been seen as something that had its uses, but didn’t need to be involved in everything. A persons identity was their own, with the state getting involved only to make a few notes of a few things as and when necessary.

And this would be a good thing, yes?

However, recently that’s been changing. The government is going about its business, and its business is rehashing the role of the state – it will soon be the sole guardian of your identity. Which isn’t, to my mind, a good thing.

That is the French way; l’Etat runs the entire show, and the individual is entirely at the mercy of it.

And how’s that working for them?

A report (pdf) issued last week by CNIL, the French Data Protection Agency, reveals that as many as a million people have lost jobs – or didn’t get them in the first place – because of inaccuracies in the police STIC database (Systeme de Traitement des Infractions constatés, or “criminal record check system”).
…
Overall, CNIL identified an error rate of 83 per cent on STIC records

83 per cent error rate!?!?!

Fucking hell. That’s even less accurate than a News of the World article…

But fear not, the UK will be much better about the quality of its data, won’t it?

Probably not, actually; consider this: an organisation takes its lead from the people at the top. And at the top of Her Majesty’s Government is a paranoid, delusional muppet. And at the top of the Home Office is a delusional half-wit.

God help us…

British unions are apparently institutionally racist.

“You can understand the moral indignation as well as the industrial concern that people are expected to have skills, but be unemployed and watch foreign workers [be employed] who have got more privilege because they’re not barred from these contracts.

Ah yes. British jobs for British workers, and ban all those hairy furriners from even competing for contracts.

Isn’t that, technically, ‘hate speech’? Because I know that’s exactly what would be shouted from the rooftops if someone from the right of the spectrum made exactly those comments.

Ten months ago, UK health policy changed to say something along the lines of NO DRINK FOR PREGNANT WOMEN EVER, and yet the science doesn’t say anything like that. But the government thinks that because some people are too stupid to realise this, all of us should be subjected to some bloody stupid.

Coincidentally, the Chief Medical Officer is also of that opinion.

Children aged under 15 should never be given alcohol, even in small quantities, England’s chief medical officer has advised parents.

Sir Liam Donaldson said childhood should be an “alcohol-free time”, as ministers prepare to publish guidance on the issue for the first time.

He told BBC News children who drink were at risk of “serious harm”.

It is legal for parents to give a child over five alcohol in the home and the guidance is not expected to become law.

Ah. That’s nice of him, isn’t it? Despite the fact that it’s much, much safer and more responsible to be introduced to alcohol under the eyes of your parents and in the safety of you home, Dr Donaldson thinks that people should be kept away from that and be expected to pretend that alcohol doesn’t exist until people turn eighteen.

Evidentially Dr Donaldson isn’t quite au fait with the theory that kids love nothing more than experimenting with things that they’re specifically told not to do…

Unless, of course, it’s all yet one more step on the road towards trying prohibition as happened with smoking. But it’d be paranoid for me to say anything like that, so I’ll refrain from touching that particular live wire…

Don’t ya think?

A police car has been set on fire by vandals as officers attended a public meeting in County Down.

The officers were invited to the meeting in Mayobridge on Wednesday night to discuss how to combat a rise in anti-social behaviour.

A little too ironic?

Things that can make, or have in the past have made, good parents: humans, and – depending up on your level in belief in agent legend – she wolves.

Things that do not made, nor have they ever made, good parents: machines, robots and computers.

Y’see, despite the beliefs of yer man Susan/Sutler, computers aren’t people. And they’re certainly not parents.

And a database is only a tool; certainly not a damn parent.

This database is good mother, not big brother
Our details are all over the web. And a central bank of information will help vulnerable children, not harm secure ones

Alice Miles then goes on to list a few things which ContactPoint most emphatically will not help with.

As I’ve said before, child protection will still depend on one person making a call; using a computer system to make three people make a third of a call each isn’t going to do anything other than muddy the waters even more.

But I think you could take it as read that I wasn’t going to agree with her on this one. However, she does make a couple of interesting points, although maybe not in the way that she intended.

How much detail do you think someone gaining access to your online supermarket account could glean about you or your family? The rough age of your children, their favourite food, your address, when you tend to be in or out… People seem blithely to assume that the private sector is safe, yet only yesterday, about 4.5 million people who were registered with the online jobseekers’ site Monster had their personal details stolen by hackers.

Yes, and it was noticed within a day. When HMRC lost details belonging to literally half the country, none of us found out for months.

Plus, the more that people find out about the insanity than handing over information on all your habits for about 6p per shop, the better I’ll feel. I’m a fairly paranoid man, but it’s not paranoia to be concerned about Tesco or Sainsburys being able to have a picture of everything you do. And what do they give you in return for this mine of information? About 6p per till receipt. Clearly people don’t value their privacy that much…

Another point:

The public sector already holds vast amounts of data, admittedly not always securely. Think how much information a mother claiming tax credits has to give about the hours she works and even her childcare arrangements.

Yes, and then that’s left on a train, or a USB stick that turns up on eBay…

So, Ms Miles looks at exactly the same evidence as the rest of us, and draws exactly the opposite conclusion.

Which side of the argument do you think you’d come down on?

Red Dwarf. Being reingivorated for Dave.

Oh dear.

I am a great fan of the Dwarf. Of the books, of the TV show, of the characters and most of all of the quotes.

I’m also quite a fan of Dave, despite the silly name. It tends to have lots and lots of shows that I quite like, even if they do repeat them to death.

However, I’m not entirely convinced that a few special episodes of Red Dwarf on Dave is what the world needs now. The later seasons of Red Dwarf were the weakest ones, and one of the reasons that they were was because of the departure of Rob Grant. And Grant isn’t going to be on the team for this particular expedition either, so that might be a bad thing.

However, another reason that seasons 7 and 8 were unfortunately less good than the earlier ones was that they seemed to focus more on dodgy and overly showy computer graphics. And that isn’t being brought onto the Dave version, which can only be a good thing.

Bad thing again: all the actors are getting old and have much more baggage. Robert Llewellyn is now better known for running about the scrapheap and making really bad puns; Chris Barrie is the &uumt;ber geek; Danny John Jules is a somewhat low-key film dude and Craig Charles is a soap actor with a dodgy history of drug abuse. Will any new potential fans be able to seen beyond those and see the characters they became famous for?

However, I think that I’ll be tuning in anyway. Partly because I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And partly because I’m going to be hoping for many more quotes to be boring everyone with…

When faced with the choice of who to promote to the head of the biggest paramilitary organisation in the UK, who would you promote to the post?

Would you go for someone new, unsullied by politics and quietly competent? Well, so would I. But there was an absence of such candidates, so they went and appointed someone entirely different.

Sir Paul Stephenson is to become the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, BBC News understands.

Sir Paul, who was deputy to the previous chief Sir Ian Blair, was chosen ahead of Sir Hugh Orde, the Chief Constable for Northern Ireland.

Oh dear. This would be the same Sir Paul that ordered/authorised the raid on Parliament offices without a warrant? Who was fully immersed in the running of the Met while the last lad was fucking up royally?

Charming. Meet the new boss, apprentice to the old boss…

Oh for fucks sake…

We live in a time of challenges; there’s a recession a-happening, many tens of thousands of troops are up to their neck in bad guys trying to shoot them, Gordon Brown is still allowed out without supervision.

So what does the US congress think it should be doing? Oh, protecting us from the menace that is … silent camera phones.

The “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act” would forbid selling of phones which have a means to disable or silence the tone. Should the law ever pass it would be enforced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The noise should be audible within a reasonable distance of the phone.

The bill, was introduced by Congressman Peter King of New York, because: “Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”

Oh dear lord. Even if this was a big enough threat to be worth worrying about (which it isn’t – it happens sufficiently rarely that it still makes headlines), surely camera phones are the threat. It’d be cameras that are smaller and of higher quality than a phone. It’d be the cameras hidden in smoke alarms and the ones placed in the toes of shoes. Both of which would be specially modified to make noise as they were being modified to fit in their container.

But that’s not the low-hanging fruit, is it? That’s not the easy pickings that would get the congress critter in the news, is it?

Half wits, trying to make bad laws based on bad ideas. I’m with Chris on this front:

Yet another example of one idiot… or given the subject matter probably thousands of idiots… saying to another idiot (one with power over us, god help us) “There ought to be a law”; the most dangerous phrase in the English language.

What do you think of when you hear the words ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and ‘stop and search’?

Are you reassured? Do you think that it’s all targeted and intelligence driven, out to halt specific threats in the course of securing democracy?

Or do you think that it’s all a bunch of horseshit, and not a million miles away from Belfast back in the good old days of turnstiles and iron bars at every access point?

If you subscribe to the first point of view, I wish you all the best. If it’s the latter, then you could do worse than read el Reg‘s take on it.

Feeling unsafe in your life? Looking for reassurance? The Metropolitan Police Service can help you with a touchy-feely new innovation. It’s called stop and search.

A new document hints at a shift of emphasis in the Met’s strategic vision for counter terrorism stop and search powers. It’s going to be a public relations tool.

How’s this for a stat: of over thirty thousand supposedly terror related searches between 2003 abd 2007, less than eighty resulted in anyone being charged with a terrorist related offence. Given recent happenings in the courts, that’s probably less than forty being convicted of anything, and less than fifteen being convicted of any terror related charge. Oh, and less than a single device being found or plot being foiled.

So, my question is this: is it worth creating records on thirty thousand innocent people to charge 79 with offences that they’re highly unlikely to be guilty of?

Is it worth making thousands of people victims of state aggression in the name of reassuring the rest of us? Because here’s a little factoid that I think is interesting: if you grant that Red Ken was able to count, and that there are seven million Londoners, then 0.429% of Londoners were stopped and searched, as opposed to 0.248% of those stopped being eventually charged with a terror related offence.

Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled with those odds…

As loath as I am to say it, Sammy Wilson has been saying some half sensible things in the last few months. Nothing earth shattering, but enough to surprise the hell clean out of me more than once.

That trend seems to have reversed itself.

Environment Minister Sammy Wilson has said firms should give jobs to locals ahead of foreign nationals in the current economic downturn.

He said it made sense to give preference to people “with roots here”.

“A lot of people moved in because of opportunities that there were,” said Mr Wilson, who is also a DUP MP.

Sammy, Sammy, Sammy… You seem to have forgotten that hundreds of thousands of people with roots here went to other parts of the world to make money, and then were the targets of policies such as you espouse when times when bad. Have you forgotten how well that turned out in the long run?

Of those hundreds of thousands (catholic and protestant), many stayed where they were and didn’t exactly feel the most welcome. Many also came home and brought tales of how they were treated. And again, it would seem like Mr Wilson didn’t exactly listen to them when they spoke.

‘course, it would appear that recent waves of migration are much less permanent than previous ones. I think that the rise of squeezyJet is being credited with that – it’s now so much cheaper to fly home than it once was. But that doesn’t mean that Mr Wilson is any less fuckwittered than he would have been 20 years ago.

Also, and here’s a little irony for you, discriminating against people with no roots here would me discriminating against lots of English and Scots folk, which would hardly be in keeping with the idea of a United Kingdom, would it?

Ah well. It’s almost good to see young Sammy return to his usual form…

Thought up originally by Nelly, stolen by Hannah and now stolen by me, I present to you the ‘so, what the hell were you up to last year and the day before’ meme.

Last year, I was enjoying the silly escapism of silly movies and entirely unrelated stick man fighting animations on youtube. I was also considering the stupid NI Bill of Rights bad idea. Which thankfully seems to have been disappeared over the last year. I’m sure that it’ll come round again at some point, though. Bad ideas like that never really go away.

However, two years ago, I was busy insulting doctors and women. Jaysus. I really was a pretty stupid guy back then, wasn’t I? Really good at the whole ‘burning of bridges’ approach, eh?

Good job that I’ve grown up as a person since then; I’d never go about insulting bints or butchers these days…

It’s not quite the unequivocal defence of the right to academic selection that I’d like to see, but the latest word from Donal McKeown is considerably better than his earlier ones.

The head of the commission for Catholic education has said he does not blame schools for working on an entrance exam in the absence of a government test.

Bishop Donal McKeown said he could understand why some Catholic schools had decided to support the move.

However, it should be noted once again: Bishop McKeown is a product of the system of academic selection, and ran a bloody good grammar school for a number of years. It’s less than ideal to see him being less than fully supportive of the only system of secondary schooling not to be proven not to work.

Jaysus Horatio Christ. Someone in the Economist office has been asleep at the wheel. Another less than woolly editorial? Only a month after the last one? Something must be wrong in the street of Saint James…

The rule of law is a wonderful thing, as anyone who has visited countries ruled by the whims of the powerful can attest. But you can have too much of a wonderful thing. And America has far too much law, argues Mr Howard in a new book, “Life without Lawyers”. For nearly every problem, lawmakers and bureaucrats imagine that more detailed rules are the answer. But people need to exercise their common sense, too. Alas, the proliferation of rules is making that harder.

Note to the world of government: when faced with a problem largely caused by too many poorly written rules, the cure is not to make more rules. The cure is more likely to be less rules. Or, at the very least, less poorly written and overly specific rules.

And the Economist tells us this in plain language. How about that?

Tell you what, Micklethwait must be on holiday over December and January. Editorials like these are remnants of the good old classically liberal Economist. None of the new and bullshit nonsense that’s been taking over the place since he was given the helm…

Question: what is the point of twitter?

Why are so many people using it?

Twitter, the mobile phone-based micro-blogging service, rocketed nearly 1000% in use in the UK over the past year according to industry analysts HitWise.

For the first time, the site has seen more visits than “social bookmarking” site Digg, which allows users to share links to sites.

Yes, there are strange people who believe that blogs are half useful. Yes, text messages are surprisingly apt for communication. By why mix the two? The nice thing about blogging is that you can type however much horseshit you want and have it out on t’internet. Why would you want to do that but within the limitations of text message size?

Anyone out there who uses twitter feel the need to fix me with an explanation of what it is that I’m missing?

And, while you’re doing that, you could also win £100 for explaining why ID cards are a good idea…

Found at Chris’ place.

Well, that’s nice. Brown has backed down on the bastarding MP secrecy drive.

Ministers have shelved plans to exempt MPs’ expenses details from the Freedom of Information Act, after the Tories and Lib Dems said they would fight it.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government had thought it had cross-party agreement but would now “continue to consult on the matter”.

Of course, the fact that Brown isn’t imposing the whip on his MPs and forcing this throw now doesn’t mean that he won’t try again. Because I’m fairly sure that more than a few MPs would be quite happy; to ask them to vote to get their snouts out of the trough is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.

However, one thing I am impressed with is the behaviour of the Torys and LibDems. Because I’m sure that they deliberately let Brown believe that they would go along with him and then pulled the rug out from under him. Meaning that there’s a certain amount of killer instinct kicking in with them. Which makes me happy…

You might not think it, but flying can be hard work.

Especially if someone puts a fucking set of blinkers on you and then gets you to fly for two and a half hours without being able to look outside.

I fear that I’ll sleep the sleep of the just this evening…

When you woke up this morning, did you feel different? Did you think that the world was maybe a different place, a better place?

I didn’t, anyway. The world isn’t different; the world’s most important country is still run by a politician; the man in charge is still someone that most people wouldn’t trust to babysit their own child, yet they’re trusted to make decisions that send out ripples throughout every country in the world and for decades to come.

They will do some things right, more often by chance than by design.

They will do some things wrong, more often by ineptitude than by malice.

They will ignore some important things, blinded by ideology and seeing things as they would like rather that as they are.

They will do things that I will strongly disagree with, and likely some things that I’ll agree with even if I strongly disagree with their reasoning.

I hope – against hope – that this one is better than I suspect he will be. Everyone gets the benefit of the doubt just the once.

Bloody hell. A free ten points to anyone who can tell me what the fuck is happening in Battlestar.

Anyone?

Ooh, aren’t Sussex Police smart. They must read The Economist. Because over Christmas, said publication published a long and interesting article about Darwinism, which featured the following paragraph.

Conversely, the Darwinian explanation of continued support for socialism—in the teeth of evidence that it results in low economic growth—is that even though making the rich poorer would not make the poor richer in financial terms, it would change the hierarchy in ways that people at the bottom would like. When researchers ask people whether they would rather be relatively richer than their peers even if that means they are absolutely worse off, the answer is yes. (Would you rather earn $100,000 when all your friends earn $50,000, or $150,000 when everybody else earns $300,000?) The reason socialism does not work in practice is that this is not a question that most people ask themselves. What they ask is how to earn $300,000 when all around them people are earning $50,000.

Please note the bit in italics: it says that, at heart, a lot of people get rather miffed by the fact that others get more money than them. And that they’ll be as happy if said others get torn down as they would be if they themselves made more money.

And why do I think that Sussex police have been paying attention to this? Because of this scheme.

A police campaign targeting people living lavish lifestyles on the proceeds of crime and money laundering has begun in Sussex.

Crimestoppers and Sussex Police joined forces for the campaign called “Too Much Bling, Give Us a Ring”.

People are urged to report their suspicions about apparently wealthy people with no legitimate income.

In other words: if you think that people have too much money, tell the police.

Apparently having money is now grounds for suspicion.

Of this, I am not a fan…