Is The US Government Still Lurching Around Like A Drunken Sailor?

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 172013
 

With apologies to all drunken sailors who will no doubt resent – quite reasonably – being compared with a dysfunctional government.

The big news today (and yesterday – different time zones confuse these things) is that the US government has grasped just a bit of sanity and has stepped back from the abyss. Well most of them did, but the lunatic fringe of the Republican party (also known as the Tea Party) still persisted in trying to block the government from doing any work and paying any debts it owes.

But it is only temporary, and unless some more sanity returns to US politicians, we will get to see this mess repeated in January.

Ultimately this is all the fault of a fanatic wing of the Republican party who believe it is their right to undemocratically block the government budget until their favourite hobby horse is taken care of. Obamacare. Whether it is a good or a bad thing, it is a done deal, and it is undemocratic to try to sabotage it without first giving it a chance.

Yes the US has too much public debt, but too much is made of the so-call US ‘debt crisis’. The overall figure is immense to be true – so big that it is impossible to understand; so big that we have clever means to make it understandable, and to understand it in terms of affordability. If you look at the US debt as a proportion of GDP (in other words how affordable it is), you will see that the US is in 35th position (according to CIA figures) with a figure of 73.6% of GDP. Or 9th position (using the IMF figures).

Not a good position certainly, but hardly a basket case.

Now there’s a great deal of sense in reducing US government debt, but not in this way. Simply by stopping US government cheques would cause a catastrophic effect on the US (and world) economies.

Perhaps those with a vote in the US would like to remember this when it comes to voting next time. Your current set of politicians look dangerously dysfunctional; even in comparison to politicians in other countries.

Did Ralph Really Hate Britain?

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 042013
 

Ralph Miliband, Ed Miliband, and the Daily Mail. No prizes for guessing who the villain is; even blue-rinsed Conservative party card carrying reactionaries are beginning to think that the Daily Mail is on a sticky wicket with their latest story. But that part can all be best summed up with :-

The Daily Mail have somehow decided that Ralph was an evil person, hated Britain, and so Ed Miliband is an inappropriate person to lead the country. Which is bizarre on several levels, but rather than concentrating on whether Ed is suitable or not, or looking into the Daily Mail’s deranged reasoning, let’s have a look at poor old Ralph.

After all, Ralph is dead so he is hardly in a position to defend himself, so someone should do it for him. The Mail picked up on something he wrote shortly after arriving in Britain (after encountering anti-semitism: “The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world …”. Whilst it may be a little extreme, it is understandable coming from a Jewish refugee arriving in London in the middle of war fever, and not being aware of the Battle of Cable Street.

And of course Ralph was a prominent Marxist which is the sort of thing that will cause any Daily Mail editor to start frothing at the mouth. As a Marxist, Ralph was probably not too keen on the monarchy, and the British establishment. But hating the way that Britain is governed is not the same as hating Britain.

What the Daily Mail would rather have you overlook is that Ralph fought for this country during the war. And at the end of the war, he chose to stay in this country rather than return to Belgium, or take up any number of opportunities in the USA. Sure he was a Marxist and if he had managed a worker’s revolution and liquidated the whole of the Daily Mail, I would be the first to call him evil.

Let’s be honest, if we have to pick one of the Daily Mail or Ralph to label as “evil”, then the only answer is the Daily Mail.

Who Decides What Public Inquiries Should Take Place?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Sep 292013
 

Who decides whether or not to hold a public inquiry? The government of course, and they usually make their decision on the cost of a public inquiry.

But it is rather convenient when a public inquiry delves into embarrassing subjects such as :-

Never mind the fact there has been no public inquiry into political corruption after the MPs expenses scandal. Which all goes to show that we cannot trust the government to investigate themselves. Or the police: Look at how hard people have had to work at getting at the truth behind the Hillsborough disaster.

Or in other words, we cannot trust the government to determine whether public inquiries should be held, nor the scope of those inquires. Whilst the government usually does reasonable work in setting up public inquiries, and the reason for refusing to establish public inquiries is down to cost, it is not unreasonable to plan for the worst case scenario where a future government may refuse to establish an inquiry to conceal their own bad deeds.

As such the decision of what public inquiries should proceed should be in hands of a third party. An independent third party with no past or present politicians, senior policepersons, etc. Essentially a panel of the powerless.

Are We Living In A Police State?

 Politics  No Responses »
Aug 192013
 

No.

Anyone who thinks so needs to read a bit of history on what life was like in real police states.

But on a day when news of an incident where a journalist was detained for 9 hours and his electronic media confiscated, we do have to ask ourselves whether we are headed in that direction. And whether we really want to go in that direction.

David Miranda was held under anti-terrorist legislation – specifically schedule 7 – in what was clearly an attempt at harassment for publishing stories embarrassing the UK and US governments. Now the victim here is clearly a journalist, and whilst it is possible for a journalist to be involved in terrorism, I really rather doubt this one has time to be particularly active at this time. This is a high profile case, but how many of the 61,145 other suspects detained under schedule 7 last year were detained for non-terrorism purposes?

Anti-terrorism legislation is very powerful, and whilst it may be justified to tackle terrorism, it certainly must not be used for other purposes. And in this case it was.

And undoubtedly we will have some sort of review of the case, a lot of noise, and very little action. It’s almost certain that the police who detained David Miranda will escape scot free, or with a notional slap on the wrist, and not with a prison sentence that they deserve.

Cameron’s Confused Plans for a “Cleaner Internet”

 Computing, Politics, Security  No Responses »
Jul 232013
 

Sign me up for the perv’s list … I won’t trust a politician to come up with a sensible method of censorship, and neither should you.

Ignoring the civil liberties thing: That politicians with a censorship weapon will tend to over use it, to the eventual detriment of legitimate debate.

How is Cameron’s censorship thing supposed to work? It appears nobody has a clear idea. Probably not even Cameron himself.

It seems to be two separate measures :-

  1. Completely block “extreme” porn: child abuse images, and “rape porn”. Oddly enough, he also claimed that “50 Shades of Grey” would not be banned although there are those who categorise it as rape porn. Interestingly this is nothing new as child abuse images have been blocked for years ineffectively.
  2. An “optional” mechanism for blocking some other mysterious category of porn – the “family filter” mechanism.

Now it all sounds quite reasonable, but firstly let’s take a look at the first measure. Blocking child abuse images sounds like a great idea … and indeed it is something that is already done by the Internet Watch Foundation. Whilst their work is undoubtedly valuable – at the very least it prevents accidental exposure to child abuse images – it probably doesn’t stop anyone who is serious about obtaining access to such porn. There are just too many ways around even a country-wide block.

Onto the second measure.

This means that anyone with an Internet connection has to decide when signing up whether they want to be “family friendly” or if they want to be added to the government’s list of perverts … or possibly the ISP’s list of perverts. Of course, how quickly do you think that list will be extracted and leaked? I’m sure the gutter press is salivating at the thought of getting hold of those lists to see what famous people opt to get all the porn; the same gutter press that won’t be blocked despite publishing pictures that some might say meet the criteria for being classified as porn (see Page 3).

And who decides what gets onto the “naughty list” of stuff that you have to sign up as a perv to see? What is the betting that there will be lots of mistakes?

As we already block access by default to “adult sites” on mobile networks, I have already encountered this problem. Not as you might imagine, but whilst away on a course I used an “app” to locate hostelries around my location. On clicking on the link to take me to a local pub’s web site to see a few more details, I was blocked. The interesting thing here is that the app had no problems telling me where the pub was, but the pub’s web site was blocked. Two standards for some reason?

And there are plenty of other examples of misclassification such as Facebook’s long running problem with blocking access to breast feeding information, hospitals having to remove censorship products so that surgeons could get to breast cancer information sites, etc. I happen to work in a field where sales critters are desperate to sell censorship products, and I’m aware that many places that do install such products have the endless fun of re-classifying sites.

And finally, given this is all for the sake of the children, who thinks that children will come up with ways to get around the “family filter” anyway? It is almost impossible to completely censor Internet access without extreme measures such as pulling the entire country off the Internet – even China with it’s Great Firewall is unable to completely censor Internet activity. Solutions such as proxies, VPN access, and Tor all make censorship impossible to make totally effective. If you are thinking that this is all too technical for children, you are sorely mistaken … for a start it does not take many children able to figure this stuff out as they will distribute their knowledge.

This not to say that a censorship mechanism that you control is not a sensible idea. You can select what to censor – prevent the children getting access to information about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but block access to other religious sites, etc. And such a product has to be network-wide, to prevent someone plugging in an uncensored device; such as using the OpenDNS FamilyShield (although I have never used it, I believe it to be a good product from independent reports). Of course even DNS blocking can be worked around, but it’s a reasonable effort.

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