Mea Culpa

Was called into the boss’s office today, where he had my blog open on his PC.  Bit of an ‘oh shit’ moment, to say the least.  As it turned out, one of my previous posts had caused some strife among some colleagues, and it took them all of five minutes to work out I am me.  I don’t think I’ve caused any harm, but I’d used some material without asking the people it belonged to and included some info which was a bit privileged; all of which could’ve had real-world consequences.  Very twatty of me in retrospect.  In my defence, I don’t expect anyone to actually read this stuff.  But there you go; takes all sorts.
Said post has been gladly expunged and is not long for the caches.

So Hi to any bods from work who’re reading and sorry if I made anyone's morning a bit awkward.

On the bright side, I had quite a positive chat with our PR/Communications chap and he was very supportive of my modest science writing efforts – he just asked that I run any work-based stuff by his lot next time; which is fair enough, if only to make sure I’m not talking bollocks.   I do hate it when I do that.
Bit of a rum day, all told.

As you were.

The Daily Mail Song

A song which has been doing the rounds about everyone's favourite reactionary rant-pamphlet; who are so very useful as source material for bloggers who just absolutely have to be angry at something.

 

Produced by Dan and Dan.

More LHC fun –Halfway there

 
From XKCD, where else?

People often express their frustrations at the perceived lack of progress with these big hyped-up projects, seeing as how the next scientific breakthrough is always just over the figurative horizon.  That’s because these endeavours are always phrased in terms of palatable timeframes in order to not lose the attention and interest of a public so increasingly used to instant gratification. If it was explained that all of science is essentially a series of tiny incremental recursive changes, constantly and slowly adding to and revising the work that has gone before in steps barely perceivable to a lay audience,  it would be a lot harder to secure funding –at least as long as the laypeople control the purse strings (which they do overwhelmingly in this line of work, for good or bad)- especially when political terms of office are measured in 4-6 year increments.

So what we end up with is science press releases and the associated reporting pared down to the language of the ‘real’ people (while financial and sporting news is left with all its jargon and specialist language intact for some reason), and every potential discovery is always described as ‘revolutionary’ and is inevitably predicted as being a bearable round figure of months/years away. The reality is often somewhat at odds with this; science is a ruthless, hard-faced bitch who cannot be reasoned with, who laughs at our naive attempts at self-improvement and thinks nothing of wasting entire careers down blind alleys of non-discovery.

All that said, the LHC (upon which I have given my reckon before, here and here) has the potential to actually produce revolutionary results (no, really) –what with it eventually destined to show us why mass has mass and all that. It has broken new records for beam energy recently (previously held by Fermilab’s Tevatron), cranking up each individual proton beam to 3.5TeV apiece, for a combined collision energy of 7TeV.  You might remember that it was originally designed to be run at 14TeV, but they are being a bit cautious with it at the moment, lest they break it again.
So they are going to spend two years running it at half strength before being shutdown for all of 2012.  During that year they’ll be checking -and modifying where necessary- the splices between the superconducting magnets, one of which was responsible for the unpleasantness in 2008. And then in 2013 the energy will be ramped up to its maximum of 14 TeV. Probably.

There are and have been plenty of naysayers criticising the perceived lack of engineering rigour that has resulted in the expensive modifications and protracted operating programme, but the thing to remember here is that there is no previous LHC-building experience to learn from. This is the only one that is or is ever likely to be built, and although the people involved have worked on accelerators all over the rest of the world, they are all very much learning on-the-job. 
Frankly, based on what I’ve seen is involved in the running of our comparatively tiny synchrotron at ISIS, I’m amazed at all the problems they haven’t had.  For all of the handful of issues that the LHC has been seen to have, they’ve had literally thousands of systems and subsystems working just fine.  It’s an awesome feat of engineering.

So on the 30th March they’re going to start the first science cycle using the half-power beams, which should provide plenty of new results to tide them over before the ‘proper’ runs in 2013. During this time they should be able to observe particles indicative of extra dimensions or supersymmetry, as well as the properties of the W and Z bosons and the top quark.  Although finding the much vaunted Higgs particles, although possible, will probably have to wait until we get the full-fat beams, as any evidence will probably be hidden by background signals at these energies.
Remember that part where I said how real-world science has problems gelling with the hype?  Well listen to my hype when I say we’ll get there in the end, but reality is not malleable to the whims of headlines. 

If you want to watch the webcast of the first physics run on Tuesday, you can get the details here. 

Belated Budget Bollocks

BANZAI!
(I don’t know why that is funny or relevant but it amused me writing it anyway.  Possibly an alliteration thing)

So this was the governments last chance to show the voting public that they weren’t talentless morons with a guilty penchant for economy-buggery and that they really could be trusted with the metal scissors like big boys. 
Well that didn’t happen, 'twas a big bag of bollocks (yep, definitely going for the alliterative effect today).  I’ll just pick bits out and rant:

No stamp duty on houses <£250K for first time buyers – first off, I have no idea why the housing market needs bolstering, bearing in mind that hugely inflated house prices were largely responsible for the false economic growth during the Brown years…oh, hang on. 
Even if we’re working on the assumption that they’re trying to re-inflate that particular bubble, I’m not sure that £2k stamp duty is what’s holding back first time buyers from finalizing on that £200k house.  Just saying.

Growth predictions – Darling reckons 3% next year, the most optimistic economists reckon about 2.2%, which in and of itself means his calculations for total debt are already shitcanned. Personally, baring in mind that the existing 0.1% ‘growth’ could just as well be a rounding error, and factoring the cynicism-fuelling nature of recent history – I’d be amazed if it was even that.

Tax rises – in one sneaky way or another, we’ve acquired £19 billion pounds worth. Well, it was going to happen one way or another in order to pay back all that magic money that Gordon has been so generous with over the past 13 years.  All we need to accompany it are some cuts in public spending…*looks down*…fuck.

Public spending – Overall, increased by 2.2%.  Sweet Jesus. They are Labour, they are addicted to spending money and they will just never, ever stop.  They, like their supplicants, either actually believe that this will all just work itself out magically, or they know that it won’t and are lying either to us or themselves - and I’m not sure which is scarier. As I’m writing, BOM’s new’un has just appeared in my RSS reader on the very subject, so off you go to someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’ll wait.

Debt – Amazingly, this was presented as good news: apparently the deficit will only be £167 billion, compared to the original estimate of £178 billion.  Which, to quote a Stuart Sharpe tweet, means “Our guess about the future is lower than we guessed our guesses might be.” Right you are then.
Take a cookie Darling, you random number generating winnet, you.

Finance- And then there was the new quango, which will be able to force banks to make loans to businesses they normally wouldn’t by way of a credit adjucation service.  Apparently their benchmark for such things, rather than being the financial viability and responsibility of the loan, will be 'fairness'. The warning bells, they are a-ringing.
So, on the back of a crisis caused mainly by irresponsible lending, the government is going to force banks to lend irresponsibly -while preaching responsible lending, naturally. 
This government is Kafka and Rand’s crack baby.

Tax- Despite the infamous elimination of the 10% tax band, effectively meaning a 70-90% marginal tax on the very poorest, the personal tax allowance threshold has been frozen. Allowing for fiscal drag and increased duties on fuel (and therefore pretty much everything we buy), alcohol and ciggies; this amounts to a tax raise across the board. A friend to the poor these people are not.
Oh and they’ve put 10% above inflation (including VAT, my maths has that about 15%(?)) onto Cider as well – that’ll stop those pesky teenagers and their binge drinking.  It’s all down to cost and availability you see, that’s why the continentals -with their cheap and easy to buy alcohol- have so much more trouble than we do…oh wait, no the other thing.

The announcement which garnered the most enthusiastic response from the Labour benches -and what to me is most indicative of both this government and modern British politics in general- was Darling’s deal with Belize, whereby that country would share tax details of Non-dom Brits based over there.  Gee, I wonder who they had in mind.

So, while the country languishes in near-certain economic doom, and when presented with an opportunity to mitigate the damage and at least pretend to be steering us toward sanity, they fuck that up and then take the time and effort to secure a frivolous diplomatic arrangement with a foreign power in order to inconvenience the entirely legal behaviour of one fucking man because he is a donor to the main opposition party?  This is what the government is doing with it’s time, with our money?

Observing the response to this little caper, at the mooing horde on Labour’s side of the room, and that shit-eating rictus stretched across the face of their lumpen troll leader,  I felt a sick mixture of amusement and disgust.  Amusement because the choice is laugh or cry at this pathetic theatre of governance, and disgust because that is the only just reaction to our lives being toyed with in such a contemptuous and indifferent fashion.

Maybe they all realised that it didn’t matter, that either the Tories will get in (which is looking increasingly doubtful) or the IMF will be called in in a few months and they’ll force their hand on cuts and taxes and can be therefore blamed.  I don’t know, I’m starting to not care.

Right now I’m inclined to find a good vantage point, grab hold of something and watch the whole lot collapse.

Nail in the coffin

Whatever DINGs faults -and they are plentiful- he has always been a better spokesperson and frontman than Gordon.  At least that has always been my assessment of the man. So, in my case via Mark Reckons, we see what happens when you take him out of his comfort zone, take his script away and make him, you know, have an opinion:

Once again, I’m astounded; I do believe Gordon could have done better than that.

Get thee gone you meritless fucksplatter.

Home Office in ‘talking bollocks’ shocker

A Home Office advertising campaign to publicise a key policing pledge is to be banned by the advertising industry regulator, it has emerged.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the television advert promoting the Government's promise that neighbourhood officers can now be expected to spend 80% of their time on the beat breaches its "legal, decent, honest, truthful" code, The Guardian reported.

In a ruling due to be published next week, the ASA said the ad was misleading on at least three counts.

This is delicious, or at least it would be if it were not us paying both for the advert and for the services that they’re lying to us about.

It also said the film did not spell out that the pledge does not apply to all 140,000 police officers in England and Wales, only to 13,500 neighbourhood constables and 16,000 community support officers in neighbourhood policing teams.

Oh, so a minor point then. Just nit-picking really. Either that or it was out-and-out bollocks; vapid propaganda to paint a veneer of competence on a failing service and an utter waste of time, money and effort.  One or the other.

Game Over

Just fuck off you useless cunt – seriously, what fucking use are you? 

It’s probably time to reconcile ourselves to the fact that our feculent parliamentary incumbents are likely to remain there.  Not because they’ve managed to win people over, mind you.  No, it’s because iDave has managed to somehow look like the poorer option.  The poorer option against the least competent prime minister ever. 
How do you do that? How?
Obo’s says how here.

It could have been so easy as well.  All he needed to do was make some noises about ratcheting back the endless surveillance, some allusions toward a smaller state, a mumble about reduced spending and an under-the-breath hint of lower taxes.  You know, be a Tory. 
But no, he chose to be the second coming of Blair, because he thought that’s what we want. Seriously. That’s right Dave, having watched the country be nannied, taxed and bullied into penury, what we want is more of the same.  You utter, utter seafaring throbber.
They had an open goal; they chose their target, aimed their kick, swung, missed and fucked themselves right in the mouth.

Oh and if you’re not depressed enough, here’s a conversation from Facebook I found among some people I used to go to school with:

This is what staying in Wales does to you.

Gordon’s getting back in, the country is facing ruin, and it’s everything that we deserve.

Erm, guys

I can see more trees over *there*:

“Bollocks to Gaia: people are fucking in cars, for Christ’s sake.  Tear it all down, it’s dirty dirty dirty!!"

Jean Rigby, a local councillor, said: "The area will be replanted with native species that, in 20 years, people will see the benefit of.

This statement is so stupifyingly stupid I can’t believe she didn’t say it on purpose and that she is in fact a master of satire.

A spokesman for United Utilities said: "They were old and at risk of falling into the road causing an accident. Following a health and safety survey, a license was applied for and granted through the Forestry Commission to fell them.

6000 trees were at risk of falling over?  Does this happen often?
This is some kind of puritanical make-work scheme surely?

We’re rubbish at insults…

…compared to the Bard. 

Thou surly plume-plucked death-token!

Thou mangled fat-kidneyed miscreant!

Thou churlish shard-borne flap-dragon!

[Thou] appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

and I may need a hand with this one from any passing literature/history scholars:

Be put in a cauldron of lead and usurer's grease, amongst a whole million of cutpurses, and there boil like a gammon of bacon that will never be enough.

I have to ask: what is usurer's grease?
What does an usurer have that needs literally lubricating?

(Link H/T to Furor Teutonicus)

JOSS ACKLANDS SPUNKY BACKPACK

I’m a bit slow on the uptake but apparently we’re making things illegal again. I was beginning to think it had been too many days since last time…

So there’s this new drug and it needs banning because someone, somewhere is having better weekends than me.  I’m talking of course about Methadrone (also known by a street name straight out of Brasseye: Meow meow).  It’s a relatively new recreational drug which is chemically similar to MDMA, and all of the MSM news outlets are reporting that two kids died after supposedly taking it – and take it they did…along with methadone and alcohol.  In case you don’t know, mixing alcohol and methadone is a really bad idea.  From here:

As in heroin cases, the threshold for fatal methadone
overdose would also appear to be lowered by alcohol,
especially in females. Female methadone maintenance clients
who use alcohol may therefore be at elevated risk of fatal
overdose.
• Treatment agencies and policymakers should consider alcohol
use to be a principal risk factor – alongside reductions in
tolerance and quantities of opioids consumed – in developing
their opioid overdose prevention strategies.

You’ll notice that neither Auntie Beeb not the (inevitable) Mail piece saw fit to mention the rest of the messed-up cocktail they were on. I mean, if you’re taking a combination of things known to be fatal and a silly sounding new drug; it’s obviously the new drug which has killed them, right?  But let’s not let troublesome facts get in the way of a good prohibitionist scare-story; we’ve got children to think about here.

It always comes down to this: We make drugs illegal, people take them anyway but at much larger risk to themselves because the quality/ingredients/contaminates become completely unknown and we as society acquire considerable associated crime. Nothing is solved apart from the completely superficial removal of blatant drug use from the street.  When people then choose to find entertainment elsewhere via legal alternative means of reality-bending, the tabloids jump on it, create disproportionate hysteria, and promptly campaign to make it illegal so that that can generate some criminal records and fuzzy feelings of self-righteousness too.

There’s no rationality behind it; tobacco and alcohol have far worse health implications than many illegal substances, they were just around long enough before the prohibition of everything else in the 60s in order to be acceptable.  And we won’t drastically change policy toward decriminalisation of drugs for fear of upsetting the handwringers (who Mark reckons are almost certainly in the minority) and -on the global political stage- the Americans, whose own (entirely puritanical) laws force the hand of anyone else who wants to stay on speaking terms.  It’s a war, you see, and we must stand united until all those beastly drugs give up and go away.  They’re speaking from previous successes, obviously.  

This kind of thing is Mr Civil Libertarian’s forté - so go read his stuff.

And, because I’m making him my cult’s leader, here’s Doug Stanhope on the subject:

Oh and there’s an informative article in New Scientist on M-Cat here, and a doctor chum tells me it’s not very nice.
Shame they can’t put that on a label then really, isn’t it?

Some manner of milestone, I suppose

It appears that today we shall bust this blog’s 50,000 hit cherry.  Going by the statpr0n, this would have happened quite a lot sooner if I were not the least consistent blogger going. Seriously, the graphs look Gaussian. 
But I’m nothing if not utterly contemptuous toward my readers.

With that in mind, first visitor to punch past 50k and comment will receive a shuddering faceful of sluggy slime.  I won’t respect you in the morning, though.

Sign of the times

Right, I’m going to stop apologising for the lack of posts because it’s becoming more the norm than not.  Life is inconvenient like that.  That said, I had high hopes of writing something going into the weekend, but they were dashed by being dragged off to a cottage in Sussex to be frightfully middle class with some friends. 

While we were sat around the table eating dinner, it occurred to me that of the nine of us: 

• 2 of us worked in some capacity for the BIS (i.e. for Mandy *shudder*) – Me for a research council and another directly for a university
• 2 of us worked for the NHS - One as a doctor, the other as an occupational therapist
• 1 of us (Mrs Slug) worked for local government
• 1 of us was a full-time Academic
• 1 of us worked for English Heritage

Leaving just 2 taxpayers – One freelance cameraman and one bloke who worked as a recruitment consultant.  It paints a bit of a stark picture.

I think it was a post on Samidata last year that suggested that public sector employees shouldn’t pay tax; not that they should be paid any more than they already are, just that they should keep their Net pay and do away with the theatre of generating tax revenue.  If you work -like I do- for the public sector, someone else who isn’t is paying for it and you are in all likelihood contributing no money at all.  The pantomime in your payslip is merely moving someone else’s money from one government pot to another.

Which is to say, it isn’t that all public sector jobs are without merit, or that public employees don’t earn their wages – although if your job title involves the words ‘outreach’ or ‘facilitator’ you are most likely on Gordon’s Special Dole – but people need to be aware that unless the private sector grows, money is not made, and it is this money that pays for everything else.

But as long as Labour or (whichever flavour of social democrat is in power) continues to pour private money into the gaping public sector maw, we will travel further down the Greek path of national oblivion.

As for me, if my outrageous gold-plated civil service pension still exists in the next thirty years I’ll be stunned.  So I’m sat on my high horse in the meantime, assuming otherwise. 
Besides, I’m going to wait for the lights to start going out in the next couple of years and get back into the lovely business of nuke station building in order to make my fortune; at least then the public money will’ve been laundered a bit.

19th Century Manly slang

Via a friend I’ve been alerted to this fresh seam of brilliance:

The Art of Manliness Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular

Some examples:

Anointing: A good beating. A case for the application of salve.

Perpendicular. A lunch taken standing-up at a tavern bar. It is usual to call it lunch, often as the Perpendicular may take the place of dinner.

Sneeze-lurker. A thief who throws snuff in a person’s face, and then robs him.

and bizarrely:

Hogmagundy. The process by which the population is increased.

The lot should be committed to memory and re-introduced to the common vernacular forthwith.

Immoral Earnings - Redux

Preface
Right, this may look a bit familiar because it’s a rewrite of the post I put up this morning.  Mrs Slug thought the legal stuff needed some attention, and so thought she’d collaborate and throw in her tuppence worth.  It’s worth reading for the conclusion; I didn’t see it coming.

Yesterday, Mrs Slug phoned me up to tell me about this story, and I knew I’d find it already up over at JuliaM’s place, and there it was.  Basically, a maths teacher sexually abused a four year-old boy and when his parents found out about it they accepted £18,000 from the man rather than telling the police.  Four years later, the child told someone else about what had happened and all this came out, causing bafflement and outrage from everyone.  In fact, it’s probably safe to say that observers are more critical of the parents than they are of the offender, seeing as they have seemingly cashed in on the abuse of their child to get on the property ladder.

I generally avoid the Daily Mail dogwhistle childcare stories as you only ever get their inflammatory version of one side, as the local authorities have to abide by confidentiality rules; but this is a bit unique.  Most commenters are asking why the parents haven’t been arrested themselves and are otherwise questioning whether the child should still be in the parent's’ care. So, while taking dictation from Mrs Slug, I’m going to go through some of the details, as these cases are never as simple as they first appear.

I’ll run through some of possible crimes suggested that the parents be charged with in the comments over at Julia’s blog and on the Mail article:

Blackmail/Extortion – The definition includes the phrase unwarranted demands with menaces.  For all we know this was his idea.

As an aside the maximum penalty for blackmail is 14 years in imprisonment. The crime in this case is reported to be causing or inciting a child under the age of 13 to engage in sexual activity. A crime with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or 14 years if the activity did not involve penetration.  Apparently he got a three-year community sex offenders' treatment programme, placed on the sex offenders' register for ten years and banned from ever working with children. You can decide for yourselves whether this would have been a greater punishment (or indeed deterrent) than forking out £18,000. 
Yeah, thought so.

Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – As far as we know they haven’t fabricated or disposed of evidence and they haven’t intimidated or threatened any police, jurors or judges.   And they’re not interfering with a witness because there wasn’t a case in the first place.

Child Cruelty/Neglect – are part of the same offence in criminal law, (the police would have to prove that  the parents had wilfully assaulted, ill-treated, neglected, abandoned, or exposed him or caused or procured him to be assaulted, ill-treated, neglected, abandoned, or exposed, in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, or limb, or organ of the body, and any mental derangement). 
However unsavoury we find their behaviour, they didn’t commit the offense itself, and there is no legal compulsion to report the fact that someone else did, unlike with crimes like terrorism. 

Having said all that, it is unlikely that the CPS would bring charges anyway because it is very definitely not cut-and-dried and relies upon the proof of a deliberate or reckless inaction causing this child harm beyond reasonable doubt.  They would also have to consider whether it was in the public interest to drag this already troubled child through the ordeal of a criminal trial –of his own parents no less- which is frankly, dubious.

What we are therefore left with to make sense of the situation are social services- who will never win in the eyes of the tabloids or blogs because it’s always either too much or too little.  Several commentators were quick to demand that social services act against these parents, which means the social workers would have to consider if there are child protection concerns.  The threshold for this is that “a child has suffered or is likely to suffer significant harm as a result of the care afforded to him not being what it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to him/her”. 
So have the parents’ actions/inaction caused harm to the child?

First, did they fail to adequately protect their child from this man? Probably not, particularly as this person was a teacher, and they couldn’t have known beforehand. 
Second, this case has arisen because the child has told someone and it is therefore suggested to still be traumatised by it some 4 years later: were the parents neglectful by not reporting the case and getting him the support that he needed sooner?  Because of the lack of action and pretending that it all never happened, it is entirely possible that they have caused more psychological harm than the initial act of abuse itself.  
Third, whatever happened, they didn’t report it and so the child did not receive medical attention if he needed any.
Fourth, what kind of messages does this send to the child in terms of right and wrong and their ability to protect him?
Finally, in criminal proceedings consideration is given to compensation.  The guidelines say that compensation should benefit, not inflict further harm on, the victim.  Any financial recompense from the offender for a sexual offence may cause the victim additional humiliation, degradation and distress. The parents certainly don’t appear to have thought about the impact on the child of accepting this payment.
Harm in this situation could be physical or emotional abuse and neglect, and social workers will have to consider whether this child has suffered emotional abuse and neglect as a result of the parents’ inaction.  The existing body of research and experience suggests that the best way to assist children like this is professional assistance at the earliest opportunity. A nice house isn’t going to magic away four years of this child trying to cope with this on his own.

So, after all that above and comments from all corners describing these parents as “disgusting”or “reprehensible” the one thing I’m going to write which is most likely to offend everyone is that these events in and of themselves do not make them automatically bad parents, as hard as that is to believe, and indeed, type.

What is critical to this case is the motivation and rationale of the parents in making these –to most people- morally abhorrent decisions. What we could have, for example, is a rough parallel to the Shannon Matthews case, where the parents have cynically and selfishly used the abuse of their child for personal monetary gain. That would certainly make the question of removing the child a lot easier.

But what if they came to this decision based on a pragmatic –as they saw it- evaluation of the situation and chose the path they thought was best for their child?  Maybe they believed the remorseful pleadings of this teacher, were convinced he wouldn’t do it again and didn’t want to put their boy through a criminal trial.  Maybe they realised that the £18,000 offered was markedly better than the sub-£2,000 they’d get from Criminal Injuries Compensation, and that they could turn this horrid situation into a better future for themselves.  Maybe they underestimated the effects of the abuse on their son, because he was so young.  Maybe they thought that this was punishment enough.  Maybe they have had experience of the criminal justice system, and that they think this is all all the ‘justice’ they were likely to get. Maybe they feared the intrusion of social services, and recent headlines wouldn’t have helped. Maybe they’re just not that bright. 
I don’t know and neither do you and neither does the Daily Mail. If we play make believe for a moment and convince ourselves that this man did not pose an ongoing risk for children and that the question was: go to the police or get £18,000, I wonder how many of us would not opt for the latter

The case is unusual and it does raise questions from a libertarian perspective: Almost all of us would’ve handed this guy in for his crimes and for the protection of the community as a whole, but as the law requires you to do no such thing –should it?  It wouldn’t be surprising to hear of tedious kneejerk legislation springboarded off this case to compel exactly that, indeed I’m surprised there isn’t already a law commanding that we inform on all crimes we witness.
As it stands the rarity of this kind of thing would suggest to me that such a legal requirement would be a solution in search of a problem. 

So it’ll no doubt be on the books by Friday.

Addendum
The advice of Mrs Slug with 20/20 hindsight: they should have acted on impulse when they found out, the Mother should have picked up the nearest innocuous item like the doggy doorstop and killed him. They would have probably been let off after a bit of a show trial, the child would have got the necessary support from professionals and the parents would have been branded as heroes and given £50k from Daily Hate for selling their story. Result. 

These are her words….fucking hell, I’ve married Littlejohn.

Cause and effect

Brief comment on this one:

Sports players and fans are being targeted in a campaign to get more sperm donors to help couples struggling to conceive.

My first thoughts are whether we should be encouraging people to breed anyway, as I’ve really been swayed by the calls for zero population growth. Cue Stanhope:

But if we really must submit to the biological imperative, and would like to help these couples who cannot conceive on their own, the culprit for the shortfall is in the article:

The number of new sperm donors dipped in the UK in 2004 to 224. The law changed in 2005, meaning egg and sperm donors did not have the right to anonymity.

For fucks sake, why?
First off, why the toss would a guy donate sperm for this cause if he runs the risk of (potentially several) full-grown kids rocking up at his house in eighteen years time?
And secondly, why the hell do the kids need to know who this person is?  He is a ‘parent’ only by virtue of his genetics; he is both a stranger and an irrelevance to them.  They don’t gain anything other the chance to meet someone with perhaps some physical similarities or maybe an organ donor.  And having some kids come a-huntin’ for your kidney at some unknown point in the future is not something which adds to a persuasive argument for donating.

So if they want more donors, do away with yet another fucking ‘right’ that we’ve somehow acquired –ostensibly to assuage the curiosity of some teens with identity issues.  Then blokes can fire away without the risk of their future lives getting really awkward.

Scoobied

Urgh. 

Spent four days being daringly unafraid of stereotype by boozing it up with some chums in Benidorm for a stag do.  In case you haven’t had the pleasure of going there off-season; Benidorm is a retirement village full of Spanish pensioners on state-funded holidays for the rest of the year.  Chippy fuckers with an entitlement complex they are as well.  And it was cold.
Anyway, I got back yesterday about midnight, had four hours sleep, dragged myself through a day of semi-productivity, clocked out an hour ago and then fell asleep at my desk.  Got a while before the missus picks me up, so we’ll see how bloggingly productive I can be.

Stand by.

Stop...Carry on

Right, I’ve got those blogging wheels aturnin’ and I’ve got some more ideas of things you desperately need my opinion on.  Thing is, I’m off to Benidorm for a few days tomorrow (stag do – I keep trying to convince my snobby self that we’re going in a twatty ‘ironic’ way, but we’re totally not.  You’ll no doubt see me on some hateful late night Channel Five program about problem Brits abroad) so I’m going to have to try and keep them in the air lest the inspiration leave me again.

So in case I forget, I need to do the following:

• Follow up the half-arsed climate change post from December – that ought to lose me some friends.
  
• Obligatory LHC update, for those who’re into that kind of thing..
  
• Since I’ve been doing the globetrotting thing, write about the bolt-hole viability of Oz (drafted November 09) and The States (drafted Dec 08(!))
  
• Comment on teh evil Social workers/childsnatchers we’re so fond of.  That one will be in concert with the missus, who can’t write this shit herself because she has people for that kind of thing.
  
• Oh and I’ve got something on the merits of national databases round here somewhere.  I only do it for the argument really.  Consensus is for pussies.

This is for my benefit more than yours. I’m so fundamentally lazy and distractible I need to generate some stress or it won’t happen. If I comment before Tuesday, please allow for irresponsible drunkenness.

As you were.

Lets boycott the nasty man

Shhh! Don’t listen, maybe he’ll go away… 

The more fucked Labour become, the more off-message Tom Harris gets, and the more we all like him.  There is a world of difference between socialist leaning people who actually believe what they’re doing is right for the country (regardless of how wrong they are), and the cynical, grasping cockends who say lefty things in order to ride the red team to the trough.  I like Tom.  Today, we are all violently agreeing with his comments on the proposed boycott of Total Politics by some Lefty types, because Iain Dale had the temerity to interview Nick Griffin.  I encourage you to go and read his post, because if I quote anything, I’ll have to quote all of it. I’ll paraphrase:

1. The BNP have democratically elected bods, even if they are knuckle-dragging throbbers.
2. We should be encouraging political discussion in this age of apathy.
3. The Left (or anyone) boycotting a contentious issue removes their voice from the discussion.
4. The ‘no platform’ approach is seen as an avoidance of the issue, which drives people to the BNP even further as they’ll be seen as the only ones taking it seriously.
5. Why the blithering fuck are the left always calling for boycotts and bans?  (Although I’d add they are hardly alone in this; have you read the ‘Mail recently?)

Good points all, and I’d remind you of the farce which was Griffin’s appearance on Question Time (see CF’s majestic commentary of the event here), where somehow the Griffin was made to look a victim of the mob.  Thing is, despite my preconceptions of him as a bit of a showman, he came across particularly poorly when he was actually allowed to speak.  And if he had been allowed to spout his superficial, economically illiterate, ‘Old-Labour-with-added-racism-minus-any-intellect’ routine he would’ve buried himself with his own inadequacy in short order.

So don’t silence him: let him say his bit, laugh, shake your head and file under ‘idiot’. 

Ersatz high street

Satire has just eaten itself:

Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside.

The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required.

I mean it’s not real as such, but it looks it and that’s almost as good, right comrade?

Fuck me.

LPUK manifesto - Independent Nukes

A twittery conversation with Dave Chiverton (who I’ve neglected to blogroll - rectified) yesterday highlighted to me this point of our (LPUK’s) manifesto which I’d never really given much thought:

Nuclear deterrent to be made truly independent, retained, maintained and eventually replaced for the foreseeable future.

Leaving aside the issue of the desirability and motivation for maintaining our own stock of A-Wasters, I thought I’d jot down my fleeting, semi-informed thoughts on the feasibility of such a plan.

Well for a start there are several areas of technical development we in the UK have no experience of, namely solid fuel propulsion of a missile that size and stellar guidance.  In theory the airframe is simple, but we could easily screw that right up; the huge cost overrun on Nimrod MR4 is related to airframe work and that is a 60 year old airliner design.

The big advantage we have is that Trident 2 is so damn good.  It can throw 10 warheads 5500 miles. We only load 3 warheads per missile on average, so we could live with 3/10 of the throw weight. Also, between 1966 and 1999 we had Polaris A4, which has only a 1800 mile range. If we were happy in 1999 with the capacity to only strike targets in European Russia without weeks of advance notice and with toss accuracy - what's changed? 

The current warhead design we could reuse.  The cost of testing replacements for obsolete parts would fall entirely on us and may need extra facilities (the parts need to function as the rest of the squadron detonate around them, and thus must be seriously hardened against neutron pulses – if only we had a pulsed neutron source….*whistles nonchalantly* ).

So I think, all being well, we could come up with a less good replacement. If the contract went to BAe it would be unaffordable,  no doubt,  in very careful hands it'll still cost billions and take 10 years work.  We've just never built ballistic missiles before. Closest we've ever done was Black Knight in the '60s. That was liquid fuelled, and so not directly transferable. 
Anyone who knows defence procurement will tell you that this plan has all the ingredients of what we refer to in the trade as an utter gangfuck. 

In case anyone’s wondering, the current plan is to carry out an obsolescence management upgrade of Trident, which will keep a slightly updated version in service until 2046.  In all honesty, if we are to maintain a nuke deterrent, this to me is the way forward.

I invite passing rocket scientists (or anyone else who cares) to pitch in their tuppence worth.

Procrastination

Go here while I think about blogging.  Maybe.

Amused.

Oh and look over here too. (via Obo)

Update.  Re. that last link:  The amusing Aussie in question seems to have been taken down by The Man.  See AJ for details. 
This is why I’ve been staying quiet; as soon as I press buttons, things get borked.