England their England

In which the estimable Mr Henry Porter witnesses the Metropolitan Police stopping and questioning innocent people, in the British Library, next to an exhibition about civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Britain has become Europe's most unequal country, as the estimable Ms Polly Toynbee points out.

Elsewhere, the estimable Mr Peter Cresswell has compiled an admirable list of punk videos. Unaccountably, however, he has omitted The Adverts:

Great moments in Dutch rock 'n' roll, #1

Shocking Blue, Venus, with primate and invisible keyboards player. Bet you didn't know they were Dutch.

Antisocial networking

In which Ryanair, the budget airline, shows that good manners are not part of its web strategy.

One minor drawback

While U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching fruitlessly for Osama bin Laden, UCLA geographers say they have a good idea of where the terrorist leader was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since.

In a new study published online today by the MIT International Review, the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanista

The seven-member team of Geographers used distance-decay theory and island biogeographic theory to determine the town in which Bin Laden must be hiding. Having found the town, they then looked for the building:

Faced with the prospect of picking from more than 1,000 structures clearly portrayed in the satellite imagery of Parachinar, the team decided to come up with a short list of the criteria that bin Laden would need for housing, based on well-known information about him, including his height (between 6'4" and 6'6", depending on the source), his medical condition (apparently in need of regular dialysis and, therefore, electricity to run the machine) and several basic assumptions, such as a need for security, protection, privacy and overhead cover to shield him from being spotted by planes, helicopters and satellites.

They found three structures that met their criteria. So they published their findings, concluding that US forces must examine (but not bomb) these buildings.

Then Scienceblog publishes the story. And then 3 Quarks Daily picks it up. And then the first comment on the Scienceblog posting points out one small problem with this theory: Bin Laden is a Sunni, who is responsible for the deaths of many Shiites; Parachinar is a Shiite town.

I believe this is known as a Kryten moment.

Wrod of the day: redundent

Further proof, if proof were needed, that New Zealand leads where others follow comes from the Guardian: it seems that newspapers in the Old Country still employ Subeditors, on the premises. How quaint.

Here in thrusting, forward-thinking New Zealand, both halves of our media duopoly have centralised subbing for their many titles in vast facilities somewhere south of Bombay, or possibly north of Mumbai. Such rationalisation ensures efficient throughput and omptimaised media content generation, or some such guff.

So, come on Britain! Do what we have done: sack your subs and say goodbye to the misery of pedantry! Grammar, punctuation, facts and spelling are all so 20th Century.

Go away

I really, really wanted to blackout this blog, like all the cool kids are doing today. But I could not figure out how to do it, at least not without deleting this blog for good.

So, can we all pretend that this blog is blacked out? Just shut your eyes. No, don't; that's silly. Instead, don't read anything today. Come back tomorrow. Go on; it's for creative freedom.

Power corrupts; money corrupts absolutely

A Right-wing religious group called the Maxim Institute ran the campaign in New Zealand to deny equal treatment before the law for gay couples. Maxim was explicitly anti-free market and attacked Milton Friedman when he died. Maxim said Friedman was "simplistic" and said he ignored the "social good". They say that "the individualist view, espoused by Friedman" is just as wrong as the collectivist view mainly because it ignores the desire of theocrats like Maxim to impose Christian morality by the force of law. They couch their theocracy with left-wing phrases like "the interconnectedness of community and the relational nature of human society." Apparently this interconnectedness means they gain the right to use state imposed violence to make people obey their moral agenda.

Maxim has run campaigns exclusively on socially conservative issues. It has never taken an explicitly libertarian position on anything. Maxim spent most their budget in two years to combat the legalization of brothels and the civil unions legislation.

These campaigns were funded, in part, with money that Atlas Foundation gave them. In fact this money was just Templeton money channeled through Atlas. In 2005 alone Maxim received three “awards” from Atlas for their anti-libertarian positions.

The true history of the Atlas Foundation, sponsor of the Maxim Institute.

The burial of the dead

As Dr Johnson might have observed: Sir, a Fundamentalist Christian's talking about Aesthetics is like a dog's preaching. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. Here it is done on the subject of George Dickie's Aesthetics: an Introduction; to cut to the chase, the reviewer concludes that a hatrack cannot be a work of art and that Dickie is of "the dead who bury their dead," whatever that means. Oh well, at least she tried.

The Inmates, from 1980:

Black is the new black

Black Flag:

The new pornographers

It's not easy beeing teen: Newsweek reports on the phenomenon of sexting and its enemies. The solution to the problem of children making nude photographs of themselves is to make those children child sex offenders.

Meanwhile, in another part of Pennsylvania, a teenage girl is sent down for three months, for setting up a fake Myspace page. Why? Because the judge was getting a kickback from the correctional facility.

Back home, the Sensible Sentencing Trust contrives to strain the quality of mercy to within an inch of its life: one the once hand, the trust accuses those civil liberties types of causing panic and alarm with their talk of invasions of privacy, breaches of human rights and a police state. Says Garth McVicar, in bold type: "If some thug steals or trashes our property, rapes or maims – or worse still murders someone – they should have the book thrown at them" adding that he doesn't "give a toss if getting tough on criminals and crime upsets civil libertarians." But then Garth reveals his kinder, gentler side when it comes to someone like himself: teen-killer Bruce Emery.

Kids: can't live with them, can't kill them. No wonder the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.