the fourth place

At least, much of it is. Sean Gabb concludes his list as follows (with my emphasis):

If anyone wants to contest this, I’m open to argument. I really would like nothing more than to believe I’m hopelessly in the wrong and that we are returning to those values which - far beyond any mere expansion of territory or power - set this country apart from all others. But I don’t think I can be accused of having misunderstood the drift of things. Whatever was promised, whatever may now be said, the Thatcher Government has brought into being the full coercive apparatus of a police state. As yet, this has had scarcely more to do than stand in reserve. Prosperity and a lingering habit of obedience have kept us sufficiently governable. But let either of these falter, and then, in their regular, familiar use, we shall see the potential of the new powers made actual.

I posted the list for this Labour Government a while ago.

I guess I must go and fix my dodgey comment processing after posting this one... ho hum.

I've been watching the BBC for about 2 hours looking especially at the footage of kidnapped soldiers and the analysis of the whole incident. And I think Robert over at Samizdata (not to mention the Biased BBC blog and Mr Aitken in the wider context) have a seriously good point. I'll get really specific here: BBC TV does not mention international law in the context of the current Iranian incident - even when talking directly about the scope and scale to which the action is "unacceptable" - despite traditional protection of POWs from display and public curiosity.

The two people who have mentioned international conventions were Liberal Democrat and Conservative spokesmen whose information doesn't appear to have been followed up. The theme instead seems to be that the line between Iraqi and Iranian waters is disputed and that the pictures are not a provocation but have been shown by the Iranians to reassure Britain. The confession of Leading Seaman Turney to obviously being in Iranian waters is qualified but is also repeated often. The specific claim from an "expert" on "maritime borders" that there is no internationally recognised line was followed up on and put to interviewees the next time around. I'll continue to watch and see if the international law angle is followed up on in the next loop.

First, let's look at what comes up under "Geneva Convention" on the BBC News and Sport search page.

News - Q&A: US military tribunals

BBC News explores the military tribunals being set up to try some of the detainees at Guantanamo.

80% relevance | 27 Mar 2007

News - Profile: International Committee of the Red Cross

Key facts, figures and dates

87% relevance | 3 Mar 2007

News - Guantanamo - black hole or vital tool?

The BBC's Paul Reynolds look at the issues surrounding the Guantanamo Bay camp five years after its first prisoners arrived.

78% relevance | 21 Feb 2007

News - Red Crystal gets official status

The Crystal joins the Red Cross and Crescent as a symbol of the world's best-known humanitarian organisation.

79% relevance | 14 Jan 2007

News - Settlements 'violate Israeli law'

A report says that 40% of settlements are built on private Palestinian land, in violation of Israeli law.

78% relevance | 21 Nov 2006

So, articles all mentioning the US and Israel but, despite being sorted by date, no mention of Iran thrice breaking the Geneva Convention as described by Robert:

The Iranians have just committed yet another violation of the Geneva Conventions: publicly displaying the British sailors they captured last week.

This makes the third violation of the Geneva Conventions by Iran: threatening to try soldiers in uniform for espionage, interrogation of captured soldiers, and now public display of captured soldiers.

There is debate about whether the Geneva convention applies, and I am not an expert, but the Iranians are certainly sailing pretty close to it. LibDem and Conservative have mentioned it or other conventions, but when the BBC receive an email from a viewer asking specifically what the Goverment's problem is with the Iranians showing the footage, what do they say?

They prefer "consular access". Huh?

I'm not sure if the Home Office have repeated this lie 1.7bn times, but they are trying hard.

Here's my response to this article from, you guessed it, the BBC.

I wonder if anyone at the BBC has actually looked at the 1.7bn figure. I have and - though I'm not an expert - frankly I think the Home Office are being simply deceitful in publishing this figure and that campaigners have failed to present the level of actual and potential mendacity involved. I can only imagine they are being deliberately conservative in their criticisms.

As for the BBC it is pathetic that the figure is repeated without any qualification and without reference to previous criticisms from experts. I am left believing that BBC employees must simply be partial to the ID scheme and feel compelled to complain to you today on that basis. Certainly, the statistic is worthy of specific scrutiny as an example of Home Office dishonesty.

In the meantime I would expect the article to be amended to include a reference to prior criticisms of the 1.7bn figure and for the BBC to put in place tougher procedures to ensure that examples of factual bias are not presented on the BBC web site again and that no article can be published on bbc.co.uk before it is scrutinised.

I just had an interesting conversation with a guy from Shelter who'd been doorstepping me for a few days and I'd managed to fob off several times.

He did a pretty great job of not showing his real anger when I finally got around to telling him I wan't going to give to Shelter because they lobby Government for hand outs. I told him "I don't want Governments to do things, to build houses", which I don't. I'm simply not persuaded that it would really help, certainly without propping up house prices, or creating bigger issues such as the flooding of homes built on flood plains.

The particular thing they want from the Government was more housing and better lawyers and legal support for people in danger of loosing their homes. At the same time though, he was able to tell me that Shelter do provide their own lawyers in these situations and that this makes a lot of difference. If I was able to support that - only - I'd have been sold. We also agreed that buildings are frequently wasted. I can think of at least three buildings just on the highstreet that are empty and this is, in the least, a shameful waste of great architecture.

We had a conversation about how this could be addressed by charities. He advocated state action to confiscate property and I demanded statistics on how many approaches to buy property from landlords had been unsucessful.

I guess this boils down to a philosophical point. The use of force to acheive moral aims being wrong, or not. Do we use veiled threats to force taxpayers to pay for homes or give them up, or do we ask those able to pay or provide properties to do so vountarily? Is charity action a replacement for the use of force or an excuse for the Government to avoid unpopular taxes? I've listened to the arguments for voluntarism and the only half decent argument I've heard against it is that the scale of the problem is too large, with which I counter that the ambitions of charities involved in direct action are deficient.

I feel rubbish for dragging this poor guy out in the cold only to be turned away. I also feel rubbish walking by homeless people knowing thatits best not to give to them directly but not bothering to find someone better to give to. That's why I want to hear about openly right-wing charities that agree with me philosophically and which refuse to act as mere proxies for the begging that goes on in the streets.

This charity would need to work on preventing homelessness, providing cheaper housing to people without a home, or both.

Mr Bird of the Big Issue seems like a good starting point based on his assertion that:

A lot of homeless organisations never give people the opportunity of growing up and looking after themselves.

My big beef is that I think homeless people are kept homeless by the generosity of the public. That generosity gives people hope, we don't give them opportunity.

Someone at some stage has to put some big bucks into prevention, because the bath is filling up faster than it is being emptied

At first glance Emmaus look like a good active charity. Crisis let themselves down by showing off thier policy and research unit and (again at first glance) Centrepoint seem to fall into Mr Bird's category of mollycoddlers with an emphasis on short term acommodation and policy and research.

So, lots of reading, but I hope to solicit a recommendation through this post. In the meantime, I need to look after number one and find myself a meal.

Though everyone in comercial premises and vehicles in the country (from some date to be announced) will be forbidden to smoke, and might be expected therefore to be aware of that fact (painfully aware, if an addicted smoker), Lambeth Council wishes me to know it will be a criminal offence not to display a no-smoking sign at the entrance to our office.

I almost wish I smoked. Cigars, preferably.

Guy Herbert

No. He gives the false impression that he's breaking the story at some personal risk Simon admits to falling for it at first:

if the Attorney General does want to serve an injunction, you know where to find Guido

The truth appears to be that he's merely providing the bluer unedited version of speech originally paraphrased by the BBC and appearing thusly at Order Order:

Oh ****, Levy Has Asked Me To Lie For Him

It's not clear he's even seen the document, but I choose to trust he has, since he tends to get stuff from time to time. He's just also prone to exaggerate in his own way.

Anyway, the BBC broke the story having got their day in court:

the BBC was granted permission to report the reasons an injunction was served

Guido and the rest of the world can take this as a signal that they won't be getting in any trouble for reporting the same facts.

[Or "HOWTO tune your Matsui set top box to get all the Freeview channels"]

In order to get the best from a poor digital TV signal I find I need to type the UHF channel numbers for each set of multiplexed channels (each MUX) into the set top box and have it detect TV channels (in the conventinal business sense) within each specific Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band containing the MUX.

A quick restatement.

1. Some UHF channel numbers contain a multiplex (MUX)
2. Each multiplex contains many individual TV signals.
3. Each signal is a channel that you'd recognise from the TV guide.

Enough jargon.

Essentially I looked up the numbers assigned to each of the UHF channels transmitted from Croydon and the channels transmitted from Crystal Palace in London. These are:

UHF 23 (487.25 MHz) - ITV1 (backup to Crystal Palace)
UHF 30 (543.25 MHz) - Channel 4 (backup to Crystal Palace)
UHF 37 (599.25 MHz) - Five

And:

UHF 22 (482 MHz) - Multiplex 2 Digital 3 and 4
UHF 25 (506 MHz) - Multiplex 1 BBC
UHF 27 (522 MHz) - ITV, Channel 4 and Five HD Trial Multiplex
UHF 28 (530 MHz) - Multiplex B BBC
UHF 29 (538 MHz) - Multiplex D National Grid Wireless
UHF 31 (554 MHz) - BBC HD Trial Multiplex
UHF 32 (562 MHz) - Multiplex A SDN
UHF 34 (578 MHz) - Multiplex C National Grid Wireless

Typing in each channel number showed the signal strength for the MUX and I was then able to twiddle the ariel to pick it up better and get the box to try and pull out all the channels from the multiplex. Once the box knew where to go for that channel, I can put the ariel back down and move onto the next one. I won't get the same high signal next time, but that's another matter.

I hope this little explanation helps, I was extremely annoyed by the apparent reluctance of anyone but Wikipedia to list this data. It's not hard to work out what it all means and its frankly essential data to operate the Matsui box I bought from Dixons.

This post is offered under a GNU Free Documentation Licence. The tables are based on the linked Wikipedia sources as at the date of this post. The links will take you to up-to-date information.

political and scientific skepticism

I'm listening to Hamster interview Tony Blair, making a very good go at him on privacy.

Ha! The Prime Minister does seem to admit that "most people" are motorists. Interesting. That makes motorists a majority, doesn't it?

He's missing a trick saying that the information is useless so why record it? Well he also says that double glazing salesmen might call, knowing that your going to be in, but he missed the point that they might know you're in - right then - since they watched you driving home and waited, so close there. Yet this information is not useless - burglars would love to know where your car is either to steal that, or to steal from your home.

It's interesting to hear that this is the source of the "Kamakaze politics" quote since it mentions the 1.8m figure. When the BBC covered this quote on BBC News 24 they used a figure of "over 1.7m" neatly disenfranchising 100,000 people.

This man really didn't enjoy the fuel protests. Good, the Government should fear the people.

Random thought, our mileage is recorded already on our dashboards. There is a box on the tax form for this value and this is used to maintain the DVLA database, that indispensible rock of our society. If you want to charge by the mile, use that.

If you want to charge for certain bits of road, use toll booths.

You can't only tax road mileage as Hamster and Tony discuss, the environmental lobby - rightly - won't let you. I'm not sure the Government morally possesses this role but there is, I think, a need to tax fuel to stop pollution and arguably global warming. That's an open question for me.

They talk about letting mothers off the school run, odd that since it puts so many cars on the road. Also, it requires much more detailed profiling taking into account of the purpose of your journey or examining your route in great detail. It could also drag scamsters into the areas around schools.

Hamster makes a good point about the market and sheer practicality creating a self-righting mechanism. Tony responds with a point about public transport, seeming to justify road pricing as a source of money for that, and saying that because public transport takes so long to put in place that congestion can't self-right quickly enough.

What about the private sector?

In Peru (I'm going to Peru, so I've been reading up on the place) they have "colectivos" like taxis but actually mini busses that pick up a bunch of random people. This works in the countryside on Saturday nights (at least it worked for me on a cold Winter night in Lampeter), but I haven't seen them in London where you'd think they'd work better. What's so different about Lima?

Wow, Tony also compared road pricing to Poll Tax. I don't remember the BBC mentioning that!

All round uber-geek Chris Lightfoot has died.

I don't think I knew him, but I'm sure he'd raise a smile when I thank him with great sincerity for getting my parallel invention and proposal the nigglebase sorted under the name of Neighbourhood Fix-It before he departed this Earth.

Rest in peace. Your contributions will outlive you.

The most worring aspect [...] is the one they call the "audit trail". Essentially this is a record of every single time you present your card and its checked against the register or someone just checks you out to find out who you are.

That audit trail - over time - will build up an unprecedented picture of a population. No country in the world including places like, you know, The Republic of China, or former Soviet states - no one - has tried to surveil the whole population to this extent in the whole of human history.

Phil Booth, watch the whole interview.

I've made some changes to the comment processing code of this web site to address some classes of comment spam that I am seeing a great deal of. We're talking about hundreds of comments a day which, though quickly removed, are getting through onto the site and which can be distasteful.

My standard error message format is to conclude the message "- are you a comment spammer?", so if you see this you know that you've been caught by these changes.

In particular .info domains are all banned due to the apparent failure of one particular company to stop machines registering .info domains in bulk. I can only ask you to link to them indirectly, via your own blog or someone elses. Thanks.

The people of the UK deserve a reactive government

Someone called James Milnes, found online.

Such a good idea.

There is something special that comes of being in a long term relationship, it gives you a solid basis to provide value, not just to children, but to extended families and local communities. Single people can be active in civil society, but couples more so because to a greater extent, they have their affairs sorted - no pun intended.

If you tax this uniquely stable and capable section of the population less, then they will have more money available to do good with. It's about targeting the tax burden in the most effective fashion and a public declaration of commitment is a simple objective means of reallocating this burden.

Despite his ludicrous selection of an example, Ming Campbell was right on Question Time tonight that financial incentives for staying married are less likely to work than, say, in encouraging economic productivity directly. I'm not sure what he might of meant when he said that on the whole men don't behave as they should.