Abuse of law

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Following my usual practice of getting round to the news a while after it was news, I’d like to draw your attention to two current abuse of law* affecting bloggers that may be known to you.

Firstly Anna Raccoon bring us news of a European Arrest warrant issued for the arrest of Graham Mitchell for muder in Portugal. No evidence was supplied as European arrest warrents don’t require evidence nor even to tell you particularly why you’ve been arrested, you know minor details like who you’ve allegedly murdered that sort of thing. Which may be rather relevant as it seems that under a European arrest warrant you can likely be deported for the presumed murder of someone who’s blissfully unaware of their own demise.

The second case is far closer to home (well for me at least) an involves the ever politely spoken blogger Olly Cromwell. It would seem that certain powers would like him to be subject to a restraining order preventing him from mentioning any of a certain list of cunts that may or may not work for Bexley council, regardless of if he’s found innocent of harassing them. The particularly scary bits of the order are as follows:

“Please find attached a copy of a draft Restraining order which the Crown intend to apply for at the conclusion of these proceedings be it a not guilty or a guilty finding”

and

” For the purposes ofprotecting the persons listed in the Schedule attached to this order from HARASSMENT *********** is prohibited from:

1. Causing any statement to appear on the internet which relates to any person listed in the said attached schedule. For the avoidance of doubt this includes continuing to allow a statement made to remain on the internet.

2. Approaching, contacting or attempting to contact any person listed in the attached Schedule.”

So unless the order is a tad more limited than that he’s now arguably responsible for anyone anywhere calling the various cunts in Bexley council the miserable cunts that they are. As it does say allowing such statements to remain on the internet, not on his blog(s), not on sites he runs or anything like that but “on the internet”.

I do recommend going to both Anna’s and Olly’s blogs to get the full sorry stories of both these cases.

Oh and normal non-sweary blogging will resume, just it seemed terribly wrong to report on Olly’s predicament without using his favoured term of endearment for our glorious council members.

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Market forces at work

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It would seem that given the right information markets will take action to correct themselves as Goldman Sachs may be learning.
Yesterday a employee of Goldman Sachs left quite publicly listing a whole bunch of problems they had with the current culture and how the firm treated it’s clients and put the needs of the clients secondary to the firms own profits.

Today the markets react to the new information deciding the firm is probably worth $2.15 billion less now that they know the firm isn’t looking after it’s customers.

Of course it’s quite likely the value will bounce back, but it’s nice to see market forces at work.

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Logic fail

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Now some people who know me might possibly, just once or twice, accused me of being a bit of a pedant. With that in mind I can’t help but be amused by the blurb for the upcoming:
Budget Day Protest: Not one more cut*
This is a protest, apparently on budget day, organised by the “Coalition of Resistance” aided and abetted by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union and Stop the War Coalition.

Now the important thing I must make sure you’ve noticed is the title of this demo “Not one more cut”, this is very important as they state:
“Our messages will be ‘Not one more cut to public spending’, ‘Welfare not Warfare’ and ‘Scrap Trident’.”

Notice that last one? Just in case the logic fail needs to be bent in neon they go on to ask people to dress up in public service uniforms or:
“any other outfit that represents what this government wants to cut, privatise or scrap!”

I know I’m being picky, but erm aren’t they campaigning for trident to be scrapped, which would be a cut, under the banner of no cuts? Obviously there are subtleties I’m missing and it’s not really incoherent, right?

* Not going to link to it, it’s on facebook, you can find it if you care.

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