More than a bit miffed

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I’m rather fond of London, even the bits I don’t like I’m quite fond of – apart from a sojourn out in the depths of Essex for a long decade I’ve lived somewhere within it’s environs for my entire life. This means that I get more than a bit miffed when some miserable hooligans decide to smash the place up, because they want to play the hard man and get a load of shitty consumer products for free. I actually get quite annoyed by such behaviour, and am more than unimpressed by bits of the media describing them as protesters.

An awful lot of people have spoken an awful lot of sense over the last few days and tomorrow I’m going to re-read it and maybe do a round up as much has been said better than I’m going to. Tonight though I shall have a beer, hope that no one I know gets caught up in it and wonder what sort of brain dead thugs are currently running lose in London. If you care for your community and your city if you know people invovled in the rioting turn them in, don’t complain about the politicians impoverishing our communities and cutting services if you’re prepared to tolerate and shelter the thugs currently burning down our neighbourhoods.

Hopefully this will calm down soon and we can take a long hard think about how on earth we’ve got to this state, and I will laugh at the first person who tries to blame it on poverty. I will also point and laugh at anyone making lazy comparisons between the current bunch of wets we have in charge and Thatcher and saying it was due to the cuts (we’re spending more than ever) and that it’s just like the 80’s.

Meanwhile I hope everyone stays safe and good luck to everyone in the Police and Fire brigade currently trying to keep the place safe, and hope you get back to your families soon.

BTW there’s a facebook group for those that want an easy way to express support for the Met against the rioters

P.S. I wonder how many of the rioters fires will turn out to be insurance jobs as buildings “went on fire”

P.P.S Is this the summer of rage just running late due to the wrong kind of summer?

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A flight of fancy

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Polar bear smoking on a block of iceHaving had occasion recently to journey to the fair city of York I picked up a copy of New Scientist to read on the train back home, and came across a few articles that were rather interesting, so in the order in which I encountered them.

The first concerned the ethical problems for anti-addiction drugs – now obviously helping people beat an addiction is a good thing. The drugs described though are vaccines that prevent you getting a high from the drugs, and as the article observes there is the risk that this will just cause addicts to take much larger quantities to get the same high. Nestled within the article between heroin and cocaine and talk of Amy Winehouses death was that they’d also done clinical trials of a nicotine vaccine. Now I’m no scientist* and this is just a flight of fancy but surely vaccines are normally administered before you get ill as a preventative so wouldn’t the more logical use of these drugs be to give them to children to prevent them acquiring the addictions in the first place? Now that’ll be a fun arms race kids Vs the vaccines as they experiment to find out what will still get them high, followed no doubt shortly after by huge law suits when it turns out the vaccines interfere with vital medical drugs.

The next article concerned the use of smart phones to augment CCTV monitoring, the chilling subtitle on the article really says it all:
“These networks will give the government eyes and ears in a thousand places at once”
The general thrust of the article is that with so many sensors on all those smart phones why not get them to report back to the state what’s going on. The two current examples are innocuous automatic detection and reporting of pot holes and GPS jamming signals. But ti rapidly starts talking about making some level of state desired monitoring compulsory by legislation as there are “major public safety issues at stake”. Once that’s done of course requiring additional monitoring devices to be added or getting extra data back will be a terribly easy and seductive idea for most governments. Again a small suggested idea is using bluetooth and such to identify and track stolen handsets, of course an application that’s doing that could very easily also be used to track the movements of phones belonging to “people of interest” (anarchists perhaps), and another suggest again moving from public safety to individual monitoring is that maybe in future your phone could check if you’ve had too much too drink or taken drugs the Government doesn’t like. As it says unless clear principles and checks are in place mission creep will happen, I’d suggest that if we let them even start down this road mission creep will happen regardless – no doubt due to unusual or extreme circumstances as a temporary measure or some such.

The final article I think answers a question that has been puzzling LegIron, why are smoking related diseases increasing as smoking decreases. The answer global warming!

“Air pollutants emitted decades ago are coming back to haunt us. As the Arctic warms, persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, trapped in snow and ice are being re-released. This unwelcome return has been suspected for sometime but is now confirmed by 16 years’ worth of data.

POPs travel around the globe on winds, build up in food and water supplies and accumulate in animal body fat. They have also been linked to serious human health problems, including cancer and can be passed from mother to fetus….”

Now if I’ve understood previous anti-smoking “science” that article surely adds up to dangerous levels of tobacco smoke being trapped in the Arctic and now being released due to man made global warming!!(Is it global warming this week or climate change?). Which can only mean it’s going to get far far worse as we melt back through time to the days when everyone smoked everywhere and all died of cancer before they were 5. At least following LegIrons excellent lead I’ll wager you could convince an awful lot of people that that’s what’s happening.

*Actually not entirely true I’m a few retakes short of being a scientist

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Anarchy in the UK

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Due to having recently acquired a social life, previously lost behind the sofa, I’m rather light on blogging and even further behind the news. Sadly I will catch up and probably go back to a load of things that no one’s interested in any more – however in the mean time it seems the police would like us all to snitch on any anarchist sympathisers we might know though they apparently have already backed down

Captain Ranty as ever has is covered as does The nameless libertarian so there’s really nothing left to say it’s all done and dusted in less than a day – till the next time round.

However if you think I’m going to pass by an opportunity to link to the Sex pistols Anarchy in the UK? You’ve got to be out of your ever loving gourd.

Enjoy….

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