adultery is a two way street...so

so why in primative cultures (dare I say religions)
are women stoned for adultery?

most of these cultures (dare i say religions)
women are regarded as goods and chattels

so how can they be responsible?

surely, the men who commit adultery
are the only ones who could
be responsible
as they are the one
who have strayed

and, if the women are as cattle
have not the men committed a worse sin
than merely stealing another man's goods?

It'd be nice to here
a cleric's response
even if only
to laugh instead of cry

dismal letter

20 "eminent" economists tell the government to do something about deficit asap or else.

why do we listen to economists?
why have we let them out of purgatory?

they got us in this mess with their advice on free markets...

until they have a root and branch clearout,
I'm putting them in a box with blair's cabinet for iraq/bush support,
and with thatcher for destroying a generation of lives in mining communities,
and that's a pretty bad place to be

frankly, the CRU guys incompetence at keeping data and analysis and personal comments sqeeky clean is a blip on the radar compared to these bozos and bastards.

beyond belief

post chilton the blair apoligist supremo is pursuasive that his leader didn't mislead (so to speak).


Come on - you cannot have it both ways - if he didn't, then he sure was incompetent taking such poor intelligence advice.

once again:- either blair and his gang are guilty of gross negligence in not taking more care over such important decisions, OR they were unethical in extreme.

That is the reason people are slack-jawed in amazement once again at the parade of
war-apoligists.

afghanistan - sure - necessary - almost as clear cut a case as the falklands.
iraq - unnecessary, disastrously planned in any case for the aftermath, and
an appaling waste of lives and opportunities, now leading to a less safe world.

there's no point flogging a dead horse over this any more tho - basically
you are either pro-blair or you are with us. you are either wrong or right.
you're preaching to the deaf or the converted...

UK gov trains us to think the unthinkable, daily

One of the reasons that the Chilton enquiry is getting some press, I think, is the whole "45 minutes to launch WMD" story - the problem with the story in the first place is that it was written by politicians and civil servants from a generation of people bought up under the threat of armageddon - but this was the first generation to experience this chilling thought, that a finger on a button in Moscow or DC could end the world.

Now, people are routinely hearing about "horrifying" or "terrifying" things on the news (natural, like Tsunami or Haiti quake, or human, like Bhopal or Beslan)- far from becoming completely numb to these things, rather, the population that bothers to think can now think in terms of plausible risks and limits to damage. This means that the general, critical thinking part of the population doesn't just freeze, when some bogey-man alleged threat is invoked - they stop to consider it compared to other threats (e.g. did saddam hussein have missiles that could reach beyond the middle east? nope.) and rank it in their thinking - as Martin Amis said on TV in the 30th anniversary shindig for Newsnight, "more americans drowned in bathtubs last year than in all the terrorist attacks on the USA" (I'm not sure he's right, but he's certainly in the ballpark).

No, fact is: governments better get used to the fact that anyone under 50 can consider a spectrum of armageddons, ranging from the War with the Machines from T2, down to a couple of pre-teen kids torturing a couple of other kids nearly to death, and seperate out reality from fantasy, and rank the risks.

We don't stop thinking anymore when we hear "armageddon"
This isn't the Cold War, and this isn't the Middle Ages.

redistribution of wealth in the UK under labour

appears to mean
take money and jobs from the people
and give the money to the banks and the jobs to other countries.


when asked (e.g. on QUestiontime on TV this week) why does the government let
Royal Bank of Scotland (80% state owned) lend money to Kraft to buy cadbury
government ministers (and of course tories) say
"oh, but if we intereed in what the banks did, it would mess up the free market and financial service industry which is so succesful at creating wealth and blah blah blahh


well
1. they messed up the free market by borrowing 150billion pounds from china and putting it into failing businesses (those banks)
2. those banks were not sucesful at creating national wealth, only wealth for a small number of people. other countries that didnt do this had JUST AS MUCH wealth increase
and had a better distribution of that increase over the population.

this is proof positive that the government are unfit to govern since they don't represent the people, not even as shareholders in the banks they bought "on our behalf".

anyhow, if i was (say) a rich bastard who owned a steel mill and a bank, would I let the bank invest money in a competitor steel mill and have it buy my steel mill at a knock down pice, asset strip it, and move on? no i wouldn't. so why did Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling let RBS do this?

The answer is they are too scared to do ANYTHING - they even looked like frighted rabbits in the headlights nowadays.

maybe they will copy Obama, now he's moved on from healthcare to wealthcare reform ....but i'm not optimistic.

billy bragg is right - the government and RBS are irresponsible, imoral, unethical, lying, short term thinkers behaving like robber barons.

Billy Bragg protest about RBS bonus is absolutely justified

value chain:-

sell of Cadbury to foreigners (just for 1 example) - make more people unemployed - sell of their houses - some of them to foreeign investors - some of them probably to MPs who use them as second houses and claim them as expensies.

profits (abroad) made by bankers, go to their bonuses so they have more money to buy more assets from the more unemployed layed off b the richer government in cuts in public services - banks bailed out by public momey

look, RBS is about to announce 1.5 billion in bonuses - this is the amount the government is cutting higher education&research this year. How short term, bone headedly stupid is that.

UK PLC - bollocks - we aren't a PLC - the government is not taking any liability, and is selling off our assets as if they belong to a private sector and rich minority, a sector that proved itself incompetent and corrupt many times over

now we see RBS is asset stripping British companies, selling them off to the US, and then making a fast buck to pay its bonuses - how stupid is this - an 80% UK taxpayer owned company is helping make UK taxpayers redundent (i.e Cadbury's workers), so they can't pay tax and the other ta payers will be supporting them on social security
so the bastards at RBS can get bigger bonuses.

billy is right to be angry. so am i. i predict a riot.

HR, worse than cockroaches

worse than lawyers and estate agents (realtors, for US reader), HR people makework
and they make pointless work

a friend of mine is applying for lots of jobs in charities - they seem to be completely infested with HR - Bullshit - basically, all the "job specifications" are 99% boilerplate and only 1% actually talk about the actual work - i.e. what is involved in terms of day to day activities and what is required in terms of specific skills - the rest of it, stuff that anyone who could actually carry out the activities and had the requisite skills and knowledge would, by definition, be able to do in their sleep, makes up 9% plus of any form, and is all boilerplate (i.e. required zero effort by the HR person responsible, zero thought, zero knowledge of the actual domain, zero skill, probably even involved copyright theft since a lot of them look the same so are probably nicked form other companies or other sites on the net) - its shocking - I've seen this creeping madness in staff appraisal schemes in academia and industry, but now it pervades the whle lifecycle.

It must be stamped out - these folks don't even deserve a berth on the B-Ark.

HR = Hateful Reflux

taxing patience, taxing bankers...nowhere to run

boris johnson (erstwhile mayor of london) claims 9000 bankers will leave london because of a) 50% tax, b) tax on bonuses.
So where will they go? certainly not china or india, who wouldn;t have them, and probably not america now that Barack Obama is thinking of introducing the same thing
(see NY Times today) or gernany or france where merckl and sarkozy both think Brown's tax is not such a bad idea at all

I like this - the banks thought they could get away from national regulation by being global - they forgot the G7/8/30/blah are global too - we can follow you, anywhere, even through solid air.

taxes on stupidity really need to be made more coherent too, though - we need to tax people who run large miliatry budgets, and tax exports from regions running (real) piracy
I can see a whole new emergence of control by the "outland revenue service" (ORS:)
tracking down miscreants (a bit like Al Capone, jailed in the end for tax evasion rather than just being a gangster

after all, what is the difference between organized crime and merchant banking?
(that's a rhetorical question, btw, but if you want me to answer it, the answer is
"absolutely zero").

holding on to longevity by fingernails?

so its generally acknowledged that all mammals have the rough same number of heartbeats in a lifetime - seems to be a result of the physics of scale Iguess

but what about the number of times you shed/replace skin, or grow new claws/ fingernails?
is that an invariant too?

I think we should be told...

US healthcare update

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/healthscatter2.png

seems pretty simple to me..

why don't birds freeze?

given their altitude and wind chill, I'd expect them to fall out of the sky and land on someone's head...but they don't do that very often - they have very little mass and therefore little heat capacity - how do they not just turn into a lump of ice eh?

Pere Ubu (well, the singer, David Thomas) said "I think the birds are a good idea" and he wasn't talking about the band either, but are they? I think they are as innumberable as bees and as indecipherable as
cryptozomes.

how to make flying safe and pleasant again

I think we just need to remove the USA as a flight destination, and everything will be fine - or else route ALL USA flights via Israel...

you could have a fleet of giant aircraft carriers 12 miles off shore (with gambling, prostitutuin and other legal off shore activities) and fast connecting boats to the shore in LA, NY, Boston etc....then a network of TGV/Bullet trains across the US - after all, the fear is the plane as weapons - so make the flyover country a no-fly country and problem solved - or alternatively franchise the israel hub idea as an economic regeneration for Gaza - the Gaza landing strip....


some sense from schneier on the topic

ethics - half way between Essex and Airfix

sounds like it anyhow - having just submitted my first application for an experimental protocol, for approval by an Ethics Committee, I am feelin like I glued it together with Airfix cement, and drove through the lowlands of Essex to get it there.

Now we await with a bated breath...

climategate - how to tell what is science?

so the discourse of scientists in public and private is different - just like anyones.
So when you see a bunch of leaked emails of discussions between people about writing, presenting and reporting results and about reviewers and editors, necessarily, you see a very different side to people than when they are finally reporting things in a formal publication - this is because scientists like to suppot the myhtology aboiut how science is done...

how can you then tell (as a lay person in a given subject) what stuff on the net that you find is sensible or not?
well, I don;t have a perfect answer - crowdsourced wisdom (what used to be called Delphi)
is nt necessarily sense (c.f. the fear of MMR vaccine in uk( - on the other hand, when you see the invective in an article like
this one, then it does make you think

If the CRU were like the Chiropractors or Homeopaths they could sue these folks for libel:)

let he bankers go

there seems to be an inordinate fear of taxing people that earn silly money based in the theory that when you have a higher tax bracket for bigger earners, they will go elsewhere and take their money and skills with them.

Firstly, there isn't a lot of evidence for this - we've had different tax rates in different countries at different times - I dont see any correlation between GDP or quality of life of a nation and whether it has high tax for high earners - people choose to stay or go based on many factors. secondly, there's plenty of evidence that countries like Ireland and the UK (and probably the US) that give huge tax breaks to the ultra rich, actually end up in a state of hopeless corruptin in the financial services area with government implicated alongside it (see Fintan O'Toole's excellent "Ship of Fools" recent book about the Celtic Tiger trainwreck).

Of course, there's a risk of losing businesses, if you tax an industry significantly more than elsewhere, if the industry isn't just geo-politically tied to an area (i.e. isn't goods, services, housing, transport, energy, food, for the local people). Of course things like financial services are about as virtualised and non-local as you can get - so in this global economy, we want the services here, but do we care who runs them? do we really believe that if we tax bankers (see
bbc report) then all the "talent" will leave the sector?
1/ what talent?
2/ where are they going to go if the services stay "here"?
3/ lets try it and see :-)

falconer on question time....

last nite on bbc 1 on questiontime, falcolner defended tony blair about the decision to invade iraq


why doesn't anyone actually ask the question
"Since invading Iraq, we've had 7/7/ and we've had shoe bombers and liquid bomber plots in the UK and this has been caused by this deciison - aren't the people who made the decision going to admit they are not only probably guilty of a crime by starting an illegal, and certainly unjustified war - they also are guilty of causing otherwise loyal British citizens to become terrorists in their own country and therefore cause the death, harm and misery for many people" - i.e. even if tone wont atone for the deaths in Iraq, why can't he say sorry for screwing things up for his own people?

iraquriy wont help one bit, of course.

withouthoppair

so we can't all save as much carbon emission as we'd like - maybe we have gas guzzling cars and planes - so how could we reduce our feetprint?

one way would be to turn off lights - this would obviously be quite dangerous, but it would certainly save fuel - but (a bit like going round plugging in lots of plugs to stop electricity leaks, but then unplugging all the phone chargers to stop wasting electricity) it is "in the noise" (as david mackay's excellent book explains so clearly)

A better solution (as outlined in aforementioned book) would be to stop using brakes - lots of stopping and starting is what messes up your engine efficiency (and requires you to push all that air out the way, especially when doing take offs, or pullin away with both turbos on the 5.8 liter engine spinin on max) - so we just need to drive (or fly) at crusin speed all the time

what about intersections? No problemo - all that happens is after a few days of mayhem, darwin will eliminate all the drivers and pilots with poor timeing, and then the total number of vehicles on the road (or in the air) will be far less anyhow, so then we will have succeeded globally and locally in optimising the greenicity of the world's car and air transport networks....

simple, doncha see?

john barleycorn - subversion NOT cautionary tale

I'm definitely very slow - after 11 zillion listenings to the old standard folk tune
John Barleycord, I finally figured out it is an
instruction manual on how to make booze, NOT a warning about its risks...viz

There were three men come from the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow:
"John Barleycorn must die."

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
'Til these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead.

They let him lie for a very long time,
'Til the rains from heaven did fall,
When little Sir John raised up his head
And so amazed them all.

They let him stand 'til Mid-Summer's Day
When he looked both pale and wan;
Then little Sir John grew a long, long beard
And so became a man.

They hired men with their scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee;
They rolled him and tied him around the waist,
And served him barbarously.

They hired men with their sharp pitchforks
To pierce him to the heart,
But the loader did serve him worse than that,
For he bound him to the cart.

They wheeled him 'round and around the field
'Til they came unto a barn,
And there they took a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn.

They hired men with their crab-tree sticks
To split him skin from bone,
But the miller did serve him worse than that,
For he ground him between two stones.

There's little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And there's brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman cannot hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker cannot mend his pots
Without John Barleycorn.

jobs and houses - how to take up slack?

1st capital connect didn't run any trains this sunday- reason? no drivers wanted to work overtime!

note there are a million able bodied people looking for work in the uk

similar - there are a million empty houses and a million people looking for somewhere to live

what government intervention would fix this without "distorting the market" too much?
in these times, I am not a fan of pure Adam Smith.....gimme some new deals, and some homeless bankers

what's not to like if you are the army?

"A US major is under guard at a Texas military base as officials investigate what prompted him to shoot dead 13 people."

spunds like he was doing his job, just a bit early - he was about to be shipped to the "eastern front"....