Mike Meredith

Rampant EU Phobia at the Sun/EU Legislation on Horse Meat

Jun 282009

Of course anyone who has ever kept up with the Sun (a UK newspaper famous for thinking that topless woman is news, and for being keen on the “frothing at the mouth” school of journalism) will not be surprised in the least that they are jumping up and down and screaming at the thought that the EU is daring to interfere with our right to chomp through Rebecca’s pony after it has eaten it’s last bit of grass.

The news article is here (at least for now … newspapers are notorious for moving things around). But I dare say it is more of a waste of your time than reading this blog entry.

What has gotten the Sun so excited is that the EU is proposing European-wide legislation requiring the owners of working horses (which includes “pets”, riding horses, and racing horses) to sign a declaration that they will not allow the deceased horse to enter the human food chain.

What has gotten everyone involved so excited about being asked to promise something they would not do anyway ?

Well … perhaps. It turns out the British are not quite as horrified by the idea of eating horse meat as might appear. Seems that we will quite happily tuck into Rebecca’s dead horse if there isn’t any other kind of meat available. During WWII, horse meat was regularly supplied and eaten, and quite a few people have fond memories of certain dishes.

Before judging this latest EU proposed legislation, it is worth looking into why it is proposed. The idea behind it, is to stop the carcasses of horses that have been treated during their lifetimes with drugs inappropriate for food animals from entering the food chain. In other words if we do not stop such animals entering the food chain, there are many medicines that cannot be used.

So the people protesting at this EU legislation being imposed are essentially saying that they’re happy for horses across Europe to receive less than ideal health care because they do not want to make a declaration that they won’t eat their favourite horse. Ridiculous isn’t it ?

Of course there are those who say that this is all an indication of how useless the EU is that a law that is required for mainland Europe (where horse meat is widely eaten) has to be applied in the UK where allegedly it isn’t needed. But are we sure that it isn’t needed in the UK now ? Or in the future ?

It is essentially a sensible law, and the EU is being condemned for applying it over here! Anyone would suspect that in fact all this fuss was brought about by a newspaper proprietor with an axe to grind. The thing to remember about newspapers like the Sun is that they lie … they have been caught lying many times in the past, and they are not above trying to slant news to suit their own agenda. In this case a hatred of the European Union.

Inappropriate Use Of The “Paedophile” Word

General No Responses »

Jun 252009

One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of the word paedophile. If you look up the proper definition of the word it is someone who is sexually interested in children specifically prepubescent children. That means children who have not been through puberty.

Is that the same as someone who is sexually interested in post-puberty “children” ? No it is not. Yet people assume that anyone who has sex with someone under the age of consent is a paedophile. However wrong it is to have sex with someone under the age of consent, it is a different order of magnitude with a child under the age of puberty.

Even more ridiculously, people have even used paedophile to refer to anyone who expresses an interest in anyone a great deal younger than themselves. The “victims” of such “paedophiles” are well over the age of consent.

By misusing the word paedophile, we trivialise the ofense. Sex with an “adult” under the age of consent may be bad, but it is ridiculous to compare it to abusing a 2 year old.

Iranian Islamic Republic In Crisis

Politics No Responses »

Jun 232009

The BBC today is saying that that the Iranian Islamic republic is in crisis, although that probably has been the case for days now (or even years if you are interested in human rights as I am). The thing is that nobody seems to have picked up on what seems obvious to me – just how stupid the current leadership of Iran is.

If you are going to ignore the results of an election, don’t have one. Come up with some sort of fake crisis that makes one impossible. If people feel they have a say in their government and it is ignored they get a bit more annoyed than if they don’t feel they have a say.

If you are going to rig an election to come out the way you want, you should at least try to make it look honest. Doing such daft things as causing 150% (or whatever) of the electorate vote for you is not going to keep the electorate on your side. Give the electorate at least some choice in believing the results.

If people are rioting in the streets because of your rigged election, don’t say that you’ll review some suspicious bits but the result still stands. That will just make them riot harder.

At a certain level of violence in the streets, it is no longer sensible to send the thugs in. It is time to start thinking of a sensible solution.

If all this were to occur some place other than Iran, it might be more understandable – still stupid. But when the leadership of Iran acquired power in almost exactly the same circumstances ? You could almost believe that they want to destroy the Islamic republic – the protesters were not originally calling for the end of the republic, but the actions of the leadership have pushed them towards it.

Domestic Routers – Do They All Suck ?

Computing No Responses »

May 252009

Since upgrading my ADSL limk to the Internet, I have been hunting for a decent router to do the job. And have failed completely.

Personally I don’t think my requirements are that extreme :-

Dual WAN links – ADSL and Ethernet (not to be used simultaneously; just allowing users to switch between different providers).
8 port gigabit switch
802.11n wireless
Reasonably robust construction including an integrated power unit.
Reliability; capable of running 24×7
A decent command line interface connected to via ssh with the ability to upload an ssh key.
The ability to save and load the configuration over tftp so the configuration can be kept in a subversion repository.
A simple web interface.
A decent on/off switch on the front. Actually I don’t need this myself, but I can think of a few people who would very much like them.

Anyone know of something like this ?

Probably not.

Oh, and it should be open source to allow third-parties to “fix” the firmware along the lines of what DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato all do for certain routers. In fact the manufacturers could do a lot worse than to contract someone to add their routers to the list of routers these alternative firmwares support and ship their produce with that firmware.

Just as long as certain people in the alternative firmware world get over the weird notion that “routers” does not include anything that allows connection to an ADSL WAN link. Routers are not limited to just shuffling packets between different Ethernet segments. In fact if you look at a list of interface modules for a Cisco 7600 router (definitely not “domestic”), the Ethernet modules are outnumbered by other network interfaces.

MPs Second Homes Allowance – Part 2

Uncategorized No Responses »

May 152009

So we have had a week since the Daily Telegraph stretched out the entrails of the mother of Parliaments for the public to pick over, and what has happened ? Not a lot.

A few MPs have paid some money back as though they had been caught sneaking biscuits out of the jar from their mother’s kitchen. A tiny number have lost their second job.

Has anyone been fired ? Has anyone been suspended pending an investigation ? Are the allegedly corrupt MPs still able to vote in Parliament ?

The majority of MPs who previously sat idly by whilst a few were riding the gravy train as hard as they could are now just standing around whinging about how the public is assuming that all MPs are corrupt. They are not actually doing anything constructive like refusing to cooperate with the Parliamentary process until the “corrupt” ones are excluded.

The key here is quick action … not waiting for some careful review to come up with something in a few months, but action now. It does not have to be permanent action – simply exclude those “corrupt” MPs and appoint a bunch of real vicious individuals as a review board, and make the “corrupt” MPs explain their mistakes in front of the board and explain why they should be allowed to continue as an MP. Sure that is harsh on the border-line cases, but being harsh in these circumstances is good.

And if at the end of the review process everyone is still an MP, the political system may never recover.

More ridiculously, the Tories seem to have decided that what really gets up the nose of the public is the cost of the political system. It is really rather amusing to watch the Tory leadership run off down the wrong road as fast as they can for political advantage because it is not the cost that is annoying the public, it is the tendency for some MPs to milk the expenses system for as much as they can get.

One of their suggestions to reduce the cost of the political system is to reduce the number of MPs … this sounds to me like an attempt at reducing the amount of democracy we have in this country. With our ‘first past the post’ system, the more people an MP represents, the less representative he (or she) is of their constituents. If you compare (using some very rough figures) the number of people each MP represented in 1800 and today, you get one MP for every 15,000 people in 1800 and one MP for every 100,000 people today.

That sounds to me like a gradual erosion of how democratic Parliament is supposed to be (and yes I know that the 1800 MPs were probably more corrupt and less representative than today’s). We need more MPs not less.

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