I was linked to this graph earlier today.
Ask yourself why we hear so much about a disease with such a relatively small death-toll.
Ask yourself why we don't hear about all the other much more important diseases.
Ask yourself why we countenance motor vehicles but not war.
Ask yourself why we're so bad at judging risk.
Ask your local pharmacist how much money he's made in the last 300 days on face-masks, hand-wash, Tamiflu and so on.
Making comparisons between modern-day Britain and 1984 or Brave New world is becoming rather trite at this stage, so I won't bother.
BoingBoing posts about Council bans parents from play areas. Watford Borough Council is banning parents from public playgrounds, since they cannot be trusted around other children, perhaps even their own children.
Sadly, in today's climate, you can't have adults walking around unchecked in a children's playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults.
What is "today's climate"?
Is the ambient air temperature particularly conducive to the creation of paedophiles?
IS THIS MAN A PAEDOPHILE/TERRORIST?
An article here from the London Evening Standard:
Father-of-three branded a 'pervert' - for photographing his own children in public park
Yes, it's another story about someone being stopped from taking photos in a public place. There will be more posts on this topic...
When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out.
But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a ‘pervert’.
You can read the article to see the usual moral-panic reactions from the "twitching-curtain biddies" (thanks Hugh!).
The most interesting points raised come from the end of the article and the comments:
Mr Gwinnett, 58, a LibDem councillor in Wolverhampton, said: ‘Our policy is to ask people taking photos whether they have children on the slide. If they do, then that is fine.
Here we see appeasement of the reactionary element, denying simple rights on the basis of perceived threat. I don't see why it shouldn't be legal to photograph any child. The assumption that anyone doing so (only men, of course) must be a paedophile or pervert of some type is sickening. Children provide very subjects for photography, with their innocence of and curiosity towards the world.
Even more worrying is that the more expensive your equipment, the more harassed you are likely to be. Despite 5Mpixel tiny camera phones, and high resolution cheap point and shoots, snapping away everywhere, if you spend over a grand on your equipment, you are suddenly a terrorist/pervert.
This one is rather difficult to explain. Why is a more professional tool seen as a threat? Is it because an SLR (for example) looks more like a camera than a point-and-shoot camera? Perhaps the mere effort of purchasing the right tool for the job is anathema to the undiscriminating prosumer. Or perhaps I have lapsed into flippancy.
We did not have this much fear in the 80s when the IRA were exploding bombs in London. Why is there so much fear today?
Not directly related to the topic at hand, but I digress.
Al-Qaeda and friends pose, in my relatively uninformed estimation, far less of a risk than the Provisional IRA did during the 1980s and 90s when they were bombing on the UK mainland. At that time, people tried not to let the terrorist campaign affect them. Bins were removed from train stations, but not a huge amount changed otherwise. Some attacks were perpetrated, some people died. Life continued.
Look at Britain now, cowering in fear of a few hundred potential terrorists, who might choose to attack at some stage. The attacks on the London transport system were surely horrible, but consider this:
Terrorists aim to force people to change their lives by violence. Since the attacks on New York on the 11th of September 2001, our legal, transport and surveillance systems have changed enormously, perhaps irreversibly. Our cultures and societies have been wholly infected by paranoia and mistrust.
We let the terrorists win.
First, watch this video. Watch the letters. See what he did there?
Yes, that's right, he got it all wrong. Anti-intellectualism disguised as false intellectualism, and spelt wrong to boot. I wish this man was joking.
At the same time, James Murdoch from News Corporation (who proudly own Fox News) has been attacking the BBC for being too "dominant", saying that it threatens journalism.
I know which I'd rather have.
FIT Watch campaigner Emily Apple assaulted by police
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/jun/21/fit-watch-kingsnorth-arrests
You must watch this video.
Another extremely worrying video from The Guardian showing the British police acting like the fascist thugs they are.
The two women are campaigners with FIT Watch, who undertake 'sousveillance' of the British police teams who monitor and record campaigners at marches and other events. The FIT Watch campaigners photograph and catalogue the police who are cataloguing and photographing them. They watch the watchers.
They are assaulted, restrained at the arms and legs, arrested and thrown into the back of police vans and held without bail for 3 days for nothing more than asking a police officer who has removed his badge numbers to identify himself.
This is Britain today.
More and more the regime in Iran seems to ape the reactions of the Shah's regime to the popular uprising. If they continue to ignore the will of the people, and the people remain as united as they seem to be, the days of the ayatollah and the dual political system in Iran could be numbered.
I urge everyone to watch this video and see the increasingly desperate and violent efforts of the Iranian state to put down its people.
Video from Iran of clashes between riot police and protesters
Riot police on motorbikes in Iran
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/jun/17/iran-uprising
The Guardian, one of the last decent newspapers, has an excellent website. Much time I have spent perusing it. Today, I found this link to a live-updating page about the Iran situation.
Two things struck me in particular:
11am:
The man who leaked the real election results from the Interior Ministry - the ones showing Ahmadinejad coming third - was killed in a suspicious car accident, according to unconfirmed reports
11.20am:
A key Iranian figure, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has remained invisible since the election, has called an emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts, according to the US-based Iran expert Reza Aslan.
"If true, this is a bombshell," says Nico Pitney on his excellent live blog of the crisis on the Huffington Post.
There is also a gruesome picture of a young man killed yesterday but I will not re-link that. It is on that page if you care to look. I hope this will not be another Tiananmen, but the senses of hope and danger are the same.
My own relatively uninformed opinion is that the anger initially directed towards Ahmadinejad has now crossed over and that the "other half" of the Iranian dual political system is now feeling the heat.
For a good summary of the co-existing systems of democracy and tyranny in Iran, visit this BBC link: How Iran is ruled
This picture really affected me:
Iran protest yesterday
I made a decision in setting up this blog that all posts about Irish politics or related matters would be made to another blog, the "Jaded Isle" that my friends have heard about for so long.
It is now online at http://jadedisle.ie
The wry meaning behind the name should hopefully be clear (a play on Emerald Isle).
The reasoning behind a separate blog for this material is not quite so obvious.
Essentially, the reasons are three-fold:
