Quotulatiousness

August 10, 2010

Hey kids, are your parents uptight about you having sex?

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:10

That’s to be expected. They’re even more uptight about their parents having sex:

Over the last few months there have been numerous headlines about the sex lives of the over-50s — almost all negative. The HIV infection rate in this group has doubled, we are told. The numbers of over-50s suffering from chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes and genital warts is growing. One doctor even wrote about his shock at treating the sexual diseases of what he called “cheerfully promiscuous” baby boomers.

It is true there are probably some people at middle age who mistakenly think their sexual partners are above suspicion, and others who did not enter their dating lives using condoms. Safer sex practices may not come so easily for them, yet the prominence and style of these articles underscores the sexual ageism that pervades our society. Where are the positive messages about the sex lives of people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond? Do we ever hear the truth about how sexually vibrant they can be — without an attached warning about physical dangers and moral pitfalls? Sex among elders is surely one of the greatest sexual taboos in western society.

August 7, 2010

Protip for British troops: don’t wear your uniform to the Co-op

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 21:02

Apparently, British soldiers (in uniform) are considered “untouchables” by the Co-op grocery chain:

A soldier who had just arrived home from Afghanistan was refused service at a supermarket and told they didn’t serve people in Army uniform.
Sapper Anthony Walls called into a branch of the Co-op for some beers after a gruelling 34-hour journey from Kandahar.

[. . .]

The manager told Mr Walls he ‘couldn’t do anything about it’ and refused to serve him while he was in uniform. The soldier — who was on his way to his three-year-old nephew Jack’s birthday party — walked out of the shop in New Addington, Croydon, in a daze.
‘I was deeply hurt,’ he said yesterday. ‘All I was thinking about was getting home to Jack in time to wish him a happy birthday.

‘It was great to be home after a difficult journey and I just thought I’d grab a couple of beers — a luxury I hadn’t had in a while.

The good news is that it was all a misunderstanding: the Co-op won’t sell beer to Policemen in uniform, and the cashier and her manager misunderstood that the chap in military-style kit wasn’t actually a police SWAT-team member on a break from bashing EDL protest marchers. They’ve apologized (but there’s no indication that Sapper Walls got his beer before flying back to Af’stan).

August 6, 2010

Tide turning on porn prosecutions in the UK?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

After the US government’s prosecution of a pornography company owner collapsed last month, the British anti-porn campaign has suffered a setback. The Register reports on the case:

A stunning reversal for police and prosecution in North Wales may herald the beginning of the end for controversial legislation on possession of extreme porn.

The case, scheduled to be heard yesterday in Mold Crown Court, was the culmination of a year-long nightmare for Andrew Robert Holland, of Coedpoeth, Wrexham, Clwyd as the CPS declined to offer any evidence, and he left court a free man. The saga began last summer when, following a tip-off, police raided Holland’s home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between adults.

Despite Holland’s protests that he had no interest in the material, and that it had been sent to him unsolicited “as a joke”, he was charged with possessing extreme porn. In a first court appearance in January of this year, the “tiger porn” charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the action heard the tiger turn to camera and say: “That beats doing adverts for a living.”

The laws are seriously skewed when the potential punishment for simple possession of “extreme” pornography approaches the actual punishment for serious violent crime.

July 29, 2010

Replacing one impossible ideal with another

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Colby Cosh linked to this Guardian article, saying “I’m afraid she’s right. ‘Thin’ is something every girl can at least strive for. Only God can make Christina Hendricks.”

When it comes to the ideal female body-shape the pipe cleaner is out, the hourglass is in — or at least it will be if the new equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, manages to chisel out her will on the perfect body image.

“In the autumn the minister will convene the first of a series of roundtable discussions with members of the fashion industry, including magazine editors, models and advertisers, to discuss how to boost body confidence among the young,” the Sunday Times reported yesterday.

One might think that one of the first steps to boost such confidence might be to abolish school weigh-ins and make puppy fat a normal rite of passage rather than the subject of a health warning via the National Child Measurement Programme. (Can any woman think of anything more likely to have produced a fear of being on the chunky side than turning up to school one morning and being plonked on a set of scales?)

While I’m happy to have any excuse to post a photo of the delightful “YoSaffBridge”, this is another example of Nanny State thinking: (some) women have body image issues, therefore we must spring into action and fix it.

Rather than replacing the old impossible images with new impossible images (as the creative director of Harper’s Bazaar pointed out, the fashion industry exists to create the fantasy you’ll never live up to) an equalities minister should throw out all notions of obsessing about feminine beauty and concentrate on helping young girls think about the size of their achievements rather than the flatness of their navels, and the scale of their ambitions rather than — in Joanie’s case — the rather spectacular power of their bosoms.

An end to ASBOs in sight?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

BBC News thinks that the much-maligned ASBO may be going away.

Home Secretary Theresa May has signalled the possible end of Asbos in England and Wales, saying it is “time to move beyond” the orders, first introduced by Labour 11 years ago.

They have been imposed on 10-year-old boys and 80-year-old women, used to sober up persistent drunks and mute noisy neighbours.

Of course, one of the more useful aspects of the ASBO has been to allow the media an easy way to find stories to run in the quiet times, like this one:

A 60-year-old man from Northampton was banned from dressing as a schoolgirl.

Peter Trigger’s Asbo stopped him from wearing skirts or showing bare legs on school days between 0830 and 1000 and 1445 and 1600.

The authorities acted after parents complained he was waiting near a primary school dressed in clothes similar to school uniform. He then breached this in December last year by bending over in front of his neighbours repeatedly.

You see, without the ASBO, reporters would have to dig up gems like that themselves, instead of having the local police blotter highlight the most newsworthy items for them.

I often wondered, when reading some of the weird and whacky things that people were hit with ASBOs over, why existing laws weren’t applied (lots of these violations were clearly against the law before ASBOs were created). The intent may have been to give judges more flexibility in sentencing, but in practice it appears to have created a “market” in unusual sentences and distorted the notion of equality before the law.

July 27, 2010

Photography is legal in Britain . . . unless they catch you at it

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:22

The continuing story of police harassment of peaceful photographers has still not come to a middle:

The Metropolitan Police Force cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law when it comes to allowing the public their right to take photographs.

That was the startling admission made last week by Met Police Commissioner John Stephenson under sharp questioning from Liberal Democrat London Assembly Member Dee Doocey during a Police Authority Meeting on 22 July in City Hall. Video footage of the exchange is available on the Metropolitan Police Authority site, with relevant footage from around the 68 minute mark.

[. . .]

He admitted that he was aware of a recent disturbing incident that took place in Romford, which according to Doocey represented “eight minutes of two of your officers intimidating somebody”.

She continued: “At one stage they say that they don’t need a law to stop them photographing, but much more worrying, they don’t need a law to take them away. It’s not a question in my view of . . . It’s so serious that it don’t think it should be somebody giving them words of advice and I don’t also agree with you that it is a question of officers using their discretion.

“This was very black and white: Two of your officers who, despite the fact that I know you have given them guidelines because I have a copy of it, who totally disregarded them and were either so completely ignorant of the law, or decided to ignore the law — they were just going to say they knew the law better than the person they were talking to — they were very seriously intimidating. I find it quite worrying that I don’t think you are taking this quite as seriously as I think you should be.”

In short, the powers-that-be have grudgingly acknowledged that photographers do indeed have the right to take photos unmolested by PC Plod, but admitted that it’s still not actually been properly communicated to Plod and the other coppers on the beat.

We asked the Met for official comment as to why, despite the numerous efforts made by Assistant Commissioner John Yates and other serving officers to get the message about photography across, such incidents kept occurring. They suggested that these incidents were a very small part of the whole story of London policing, that to expect zero incidents was unrealistic, and that when such incidents occurred, they tended to be blown up out of all proportion by the press.

An alternative explanation, suggested to us by current and recently serving police officers with whom we have spoken, is that such incidents represent a far more disturbing aspect of police culture. They suggest that a small minority of officers see the law as being “what they say it is”, and these officers are quite prepared to take their chances, on the basis that the number of times they will be caught out by being recorded is likely to be few and far between.

It’s almost as if the police are sublimating their frustrations with the out-of-control but politically favoured members of certain religious groups and instead victimizing members of the public who don’t have political favour.

July 24, 2010

QotD: Childhood in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 23:41

On no subject is the British public more fickle and more prone to attacks of intense but shallow emotion than childhood. Not long ago, for example, a pediatrician’s house in South Wales was attacked by a mob unable to distinguish a pediatrician from a pedophile. The attackers, of course, came from precisely the social milieu in which every kind of child abuse and neglect flourishes, in which the age of consent has been de facto abolished, and in which adults are afraid of their own offspring once they reach the age of violence. The upbringing of children in much of Britain is a witches’ brew of sentimentality, brutality, and neglect, in which overindulgence in the latest fashions, toys, or clothes, and a television in the bedroom are regarded as the highest — indeed only — manifestations of tender concern for a child’s welfare.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Who Killed Childhood?”, City Journal, Spring 2004

July 23, 2010

The fully networked infantry comes a step closer

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Strategy Page reports on the US Army’s Rifleman Radio project:

The U.S. Army recently conducted a successful field test of their new Rifleman Radio (RR), a 1.1 kg/2.5 pound voice/data radio for individual infantrymen. By itself, the two watt RR has a range of up to five kilometers. But it can also automatically form a mesh network, where all RRs within range of each other can pass on voice or data information. During the field tests, this was done to a range of up to 50 kilometers. The RR can also make use of an aerostat, UAV or aircraft overhead carrying a RR to act as a communications booster (to other RRs or other networks.) The mesh network enables troops to sometimes eliminate carrying a longer range (and heavier) platoon radio for the platoon leader.

The RR has just gone into production, for use as basic communications for individual troops. But in the next 5-10 years, the mesh and data (pictures, maps, at about ten times the speed of dial up Internet) capability will be phased in. During the recent field test, company commanders were able to take a video feed from a UAV, extract a single frame (basically showing where the enemy was), and transmitting this to troops using RRs.

Somewhat surprisingly, the British were pioneering this kind of kit for the troops in Afghanistan in 2002:

Six years ago, the marines bought a thousand Personal Role Radios (PRR) used by British troops since early 2002. These first saw combat use in Afghanistan later that year. The $670 radio set allows infantry to communicate with each other up to 500 meters (or three floors inside a building). The earpiece and microphone are built to fit comfortably into the combat helmet. The radio set itself, about the size and weight of a portable cassette player, hangs off the webbing gear on the chest. Two AA batteries power the radio for 24 hours. The users have 16 channels to choose from and a form of frequency hopping is used to make it very difficult to listen in on transmissions. A small, wireless, “talk” button is affixed to the soldiers weapon so that operation of the radio is hands free. The British have since adopted an improved, and more expensive, version.

Being able to communicate directly with fellow troops in combat is a huge advantage, but the weight and relative delicate nature of earlier radios meant that only platoon leaders and above were routinely provided with radios in the field (usually carried by someone else, not the commander himself).

July 22, 2010

Theme music retrospective

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:40

I spent too much of my childhood TV watching time hiding behind the couch whenever this program was on. I was too scared to watch, but wouldn’t let my mother turn off the TV:

Listening to all of them now, it’s only the first one that really sets the hair on the back of my neck quivering . . .

H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.

Gay characters on British TV: still (mostly) negatively stereotyped

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

British TV, bastion of high-brow entertainment (at least to foreign audiences, who only see the “good stuff”), still has trouble coming to terms with how gay people are portrayed:

Gay people were portrayed positively and realistically for just 46 minutes in 126 hours of TV programmes, a study by Stonewall has found. They were shown as predatory, promiscuous or comical stereotypes half the time they appeared.

Soaps and reality shows such as Hollyoaks, I’m a Celebrity . . ., How to Look Good Naked and Emmerdale gave most screen time to gay, lesbian and bisexual characters or issues, but they were almost invisible in talent shows and dramas.

Researchers watched the 20 programmes most popular with young viewers for 16 weeks between last September and January 2010. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people were portrayed for five hours and 43 minutes in total — but 36% of that was negative, according to the report Unseen on Screen, and 31% was realistic but showed them as upset or distressed.

Stonewall monitored shows on BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five including The Bill, The X Factor, EastEnders, Blue Peter, The One Show and Strictly Come Dancing. It found that BBC1 portrayed lesbians for just 29 seconds out of nearly 40 screen hours.

First results from new study around Stonehenge

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:27

A new study of Stonehenge by the University of Birmingham and Vienna’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology has made its first major discovery:

Archaeologists have discovered a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find there in 50 years.

The circular ditch surrounding a smaller circle of deep pits about a metre (3ft) wide has been unearthed at the world-famous site in Wiltshire.

Archaeologists conducting a multi-million pound study believe timber posts were in the pits.

Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the discovery was “exceptional”.

The new “henge” — which means a circular monument dating to Neolithic and Bronze Ages — is situated about 900m (2,950ft) from the giant stones on Salisbury Plain.

I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).

July 21, 2010

Return of the autogyro

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

An interesting piece at The Register about that odd flying object, the autogyro:

Former British Army pilots, drawing on military experience carrying out covert surveillance with secret special-forces units, have decided to revive the autogyro — a long-lost aircraft design of the 1930s, probably most famous for its use in the James Bond movies.

British startup firm Gyrojet is exhibiting its planned designs at the Farnborough airshow this week, and the Reg whirlycraft and spook surveillance desk got the chance to chat with company executives.

Gyrojet’s marketing material makes use of several key phrases which ring bells for those familiar with the history of the secret British Army unit formerly known as “14 Intelligence Company”, aka “the Det(s)” during its time carrying out clandestine surveillance in the hard areas of Northern Ireland during the long troubles there.

The operators of 14 Int were selected from across the armed forces in much the same way as the SAS recruits, but far less well known even today. Unlike the SAS and SBS, 14 Int recruited women — for the simple and practical reason that it’s difficult for an all-male covert ops team not to attract notice among a normal local population.

The autogyro has interesting abilities that neither fixed-wing aircraft nor true helicopters can duplicate — abilities of great interest to those needing to conduct surveillance operations.

July 19, 2010

Germany’s premier boardgaming event

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Gaming, Germany — Nicholas @ 09:56

Tim Harford explains part of the reason for the boardgame market’s health in Germany compared to its weakness in the English speaking world:

In a sprawling convention centre in Essen, western Germany, the busiest day in the German board games calendar – Saturday at “Spiel” – is about to begin. Hall after hall of stands are piled high with board game boxes, most eschewing the garish graphics of the toy shop for evocative paintings of lands far off and times long ago.

A few minutes before the official start time of 10am, the doors are thrown open. There’s a rumble and then a roar as thousands of gamers surge into the hall, breaking and swirling around the stands, sweeping into the ­farthest corners of the halls, seeking out rare second-hand products or the hottest of the 500 new games being launched, or simply a good place to sit and play. The biggest stands resemble pavement cafés whose patrons grab games instead of coffee: they are filled with tables, each just big enough to seat four players and a board. Before long, the spaces in between the tables are colonised, too, with gamers sitting cross-legged around their boards.

Beyond the sheer number of enthusiasts, the striking thing is that they look, well, normal. The convention centre boasts nearly as many mothers with prams as heavy-metal-T-shirted, body-pierced teens. In one of the farthest halls, Dungeons and Dragons merchandise is on sale, and I counted more than one person wearing a sword and a cloak. But for the most part, the convention centre’s population wouldn’t look out of place on any German high street.

“If you go to a games convention in the UK, you’re generally surrounded by fat, smelly people with bad social skills,” says Martin Wallace, a British game designer at a boutique games publisher called Warfrog. “That’s not true here.”

Wallace recalls an occasion when a group of his gaming friends were too embarrassed to admit their identities to a pretty waitress back home in the UK. “One of us told her that we were stamp collectors. I thought: great. We’re lower than stamp collectors.” But in Germany, if the leading game designers travel incognito, it is to avoid being surrounded by ­admiring fans.

I once joked with a fellow gamer that it was a good thing that most gaming stores were in “bad” areas of town . . . because if someone recognized you there you could always say you were visiting the strip club or the porno magazine store (so much better than admitting you were a gamer). Protective coloration, so to speak.

Clearly German gamers don’t have anything like the same reputation that English gamers do.

July 13, 2010

Lacrosse team caught in international issue over passports

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

This is a confusing situation, as Aboriginal tribes/nations are sometimes considered separate political entities from the country within which they live and other times are not. The Iroquois nation apparently has been issuing their own passports, but now the British and US governments don’t want to honour them as they have in the recent past:

The Iroquois team, known as the Nationals, represents the six Indian nations that comprise the Iroquois Confederacy, which the Federation of International Lacrosse considers to be a full member nation, just like the United States or Canada. The Nationals enter this year’s tournament ranked fourth in the world.

The Nationals’ 50-person delegation had planned to travel to Manchester, England, on Sunday on their own tribal passports, as they have done for previous international competitions, team officials said.

But on Friday, the British consulate informed the team that it would only issue visas to the team upon receiving written assurance from the United States government that the Iroquois had been granted clearance to travel on their own documents and would be allowed back into the United States. Neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security would offer any such promise.

If the US government has allowed the use of Iroquois travel documents before, why are they now pretending they’ve never encountered them before? Is it a formal change in policy or just a bureaucrat flexing his or her ability to cause inconvenience and delay on a whim?

Update, 14 July: The New York Times reports that the team has been allowed to travel on their Iroquois passports:

The State Department’s blessing ends a five-day standoff between the Iroquois team and the federal government over whether the players could travel on their own documents instead of United States passports, as they have done in past international competitions.

Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, said in a statement that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally intervened in the case on Wednesday morning and that the team would be able to depart on Wednesday afternoon.

“I am extremely grateful to Secretary of State Clinton, who responded to this glitch promptly and efficiently,” Ms. Slaughter said. “Going forward, we must find a way to balance homeland security concerns with some common sense and a border policy that does not create unintended consequences.”

Part of the reason appears to have been technical: “The Iroquois passports are partly hand-written and do not include any of the security features that make United States passports resistant to counterfeiting.”

July 12, 2010

Another ploy to save the British ID card system

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Even though they’re no longer in government, Labour is still trying to save their ID card system:

The latest group lucky enough to enter their sights just happens to be the transgendered. The Identity Documents Bill, which is intended to assert the Coalition’s new position vis-à-vis matters like identity cards is currently at the Committee stage in the House of Commons.

On Tuesday, Labour MP and one-time Identity Minister Meg Hillier was on her feet proposing an amendment, which stated: “Any ID card issued to a transgendered person, which is valid immediately before the day on which this Act is passed, shall continue to be valid until the Secretary of State has laid before both Houses of Parliament a report to the effect that the Secretary of State is satisfied that an identity document in the assigned gender is available for issue to a transgendered person.”

And the down side for transitioning transsexuals?

While the amendment was intended to prevent a particular group being “outed”, the fact that this amendment would make the transgendered the only group of UK citizens in the country still carrying identity cards would be a de facto outing by the government.

He also introduced an intriguing notion and marker for future debate, suggesting that maybe the simplest solution was not more bureaucracy, but the removal of gender identity from any documents unless it was absolutely necessary.

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