Toblog

A quick, but important, post. First a quote from Barack Obama, today:

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Whilst this was said, our MPs here in the UK are pushing to hide the details of their expenses (that is: the money that we let them spend) from us, eroding even more the trust between the government and its owners and continuing the chipping away of democracy in the UK.

If you are a member of facebook then please join this group. Either way have a read of this and follow their helpful three step plan.

I’ve written to my MP. Have you?

UPDATE 2009-01-21 13:20: Good news from The Open Rights Group: the amendments have been killed.

Today is Open Rights Group’s third birthday. Most of you who read this will know that I care greatly (often to the point of apoplexy) about digital rights and personal privacy. ORG can somehow take all my pent up rage and manages to channel it into civil discourse and lobbying. This is important, both for my stress levels and for the nation as a whole.

As part of the celebrations they have published their 2008 Annual Report and for a slightly more casual approach this blog entry. Please have a read and if you aren’t already a member and have even the vaguest unease at the way our government is encroaching into ownership (and ongoing losses) of our personal data and online lives then give them your support.

Happy Third Birthday ORG!

According to The Register :

Identity checks will normally rely on the biometric data held on cards and passports rather than the National Identity Register

HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Noooo, that’s not going to be open to huge abuse. Not at all.

I predict a FAIL.

Can we please stop wasting much needed cash on this mess now?

The editor of CityA.M., Allister Heath, is right on the money this morning in his editorial. They need to fix their site so with a bit of googling it can be found. I recommend you all read it in its entirety but here is the most important part of it:

The role of US politicians in creating this crisis has been scandalously under-reported: well-meaning, progressive policies to increase home ownership rates, especially among the poor, were the second most important reason for the credit crunch (the first was excessively loose monetary policy by central banks).

As Russell Roberts of George Mason University has shown, the rot started in 1992. Congress convinced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government agencies that underpin the US mortgage market, to boost their purchases of mortgages going to low income Americans.

I would add that Gordon Brown is complicit in our economic downfall as well with his constant bolstering of the property market in the UK. His initiatives such as key worker loans and buy-to-let mortgages are market manipulation. Whether he introduced these misguided policies out of the goodness of his heart or with an eye on political endorsements from the Daily Mail “house prices are everything” crowd I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader…

UPDATE: 16:40 Eric Falkenstein makes a similar point.

UPDATE: 2008-10-20 15:00 The Washington Post agrees.

...please stop trying to shore up the property market. Don’t you realise that your previous form on this is one of the reasons that we’re here in the first place?

It would be much appreciated by all of us with an eye on the long term.

Thank you.

I’ve been quiet recently; many apologies to my few readers. Something which I feel is worth passing on has made me temporarily break cover. Via Sackerson (his followup is worth reading too) comes this entry which I can’t add to as Sackerson has covered it all. It just makes me feel very very sad about the state of politics in this country.

David Miliband, Yesterday in Parliament:

I point out to Conservative Members that every previous amending treaty, Labour or Tory, has been presented to and passed by Parliament. That is our job and we should get on with it.

Interesting this. Is David implying that the job of Parliament is to pass every amendment to the European Treaty? Now, I may be missing the point here, but isn’t the job of parliament to debate and then decide to pass the amendments or not? Isn’t this democracy?

...on recent events on the Internet, Chicken Yoghurt has an excellent jumping off point.

The interesting thing, of course, is that due to Schillings’ actions there are now significantly more people who know about Craig’s book Murder in Samarkand (paperback here) and who will have read his allegations against Usmanov.

Whoops… I don’t think that Schillings will be putting this in their online case history.

I do wonder why fasthosts apparently pulled the whole server account. Did they know it would get this reaction?

[11:29] Ouch. It’s just hit Boing Boing.

[2007-09-26] Double ouch. It’s hit Slashdot now. Yes, Schillings have excelled themselves this time…

I’m sure that comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam were, at one point, considered bad by the Republicans.

Wasn’t the war president buzzword bingo that Bush regaled us with yesterday odd, then?

The Boston Globe mentions this oddity too.

...plus ça change.

A quote found whilst reading the excellent Language Log. Charles Babbage, referring to his conversations with MPs:

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Our current government clearly still thinks that technology has all the answers no matter the quality of information introduced to it. It is our duty as technologists to inform and educate those that we pay to rule us. Whether they listen or not is another matter.

[09:18] Updated to fix some grammar issues.