This is pretty horrific. Not just judges taking bribes, but judges taking bribes
from private prisons
to give children jail sentences there. In other words, people were being locked up as a
side-effect
of a scheme for prisons to drum up more business:
Hillary Transue, 17, who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 and spent a month in a wilderness camp for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal, was elated that her record would be expunged.
….
Youths were routinely brought before Ciavarella without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent to detention for offenses as minor as stealing change from cars and writing prank notes.
Rare thing – a [sensible comment](http://www.libdemvoice.org/porn-on-expenses-jacqui-smith-nothing-to-hide-12986.html) on the Jacqui Smith porn storm-in-teacup:
And why, you might ask, am I, um, handwringing over this in quite so prurient a fashion?
Simple. This is just the kind of happy little vignette that it’s apparently just fine for three hundred thousand civil servants and ministers to know about the rest of us. Every internet transaction, every site visit, every email. So what if outrage, mortification and a publicly damaged relationship results? At least the government have been able to verify to their own satisfaction that you’re not doing anything wrong.
Come to think of it, if adult-rated content were to show up in anybody’s records, Jacqui would probably be the first to advocate just nipping in to people’s private purchases and checking them for, say, consensual violent content.
Last year, your brother ran for president. He lost. Do you:
a) get over it
b) run for office yourself
c) Lock yourself in a cell, watched 24/7 by TV cameras. From here, host a daily talk show. Refuse to leave until the president steps down. [No, really]
Superficially hilarious, but deeply dispiriting. 60 Westminster CCTV cameras have to be turned off during the G20 summit – not on any kind of civil liberties grounds, but
because their pictures aren’t high-enough resolution:
Under the legislation, traffic cameras must be capable of recording at 720 x 576 pixels, an analogue broadcast standard.
Westminster’s wireless network of road cameras, introduced last year, is the only fully digital traffic enforcement system operating in the UK, and is regarded as one of the most advanced in the world. But its picture quality is only 704 x 576 pixels. The DfT’s enforcement branch, the Vehicle Certification Agency, has ruled it does not comply with the law.
Not much of a comeuppance, though – 60 cameras out of perhaps [5 million](http://www.newstatesman.com/200610020022) in the UK
This is pretty horrific. Not just judges taking bribes, but judges taking bribes
from private prisons
to give children jail sentences there. In other words, people were being locked up as a
side-effect
of a scheme for prisons to drum up more business:
Hillary Transue, 17, who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 and spent a month in a wilderness camp for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal, was elated that her record would be expunged.
….
Youths were routinely brought before Ciavarella without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent to detention for offenses as minor as stealing change from cars and writing prank notes.
Is [water as a cause of war](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7236/full/458282a.html) overrated? Wendy Barnaby argues that, because it is possible to import ‘embedded water’ in the form of food, it’s usually better to trade food than to fight over water. I’m unconvinced (you could equally call industrial products ‘embedded oil’ and deny the likelihood of energy wars). Nice to have an anti-cassandra, though.
The Guardian is asking readers to suggest songs about class.
This may seem odd, given the amount of punk I listen to, but the one that consistently catches me is from Simon & Garfunkel:
Their starting-point is a not-particularly brilliant poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
Paul Simon takes this twee “it’s tough being rich” piece of sap, and turn it upside down. It only works because of the last repetition of the chorus:
He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."
But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be (x3)
Richard Cory.
Class warfare it ain’t. Still, it got throughly under my skin when I was a teenager ashamed of my own cowardice in not killing myself, and has stuck there ever since.
The great End of Newspapers debate is all around me again (still?). Everybody has presumably already seen ([Clay Shirky’s latest piece](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/) (in brief: newspapers are doomed. Nobody knows what replaces them. That’s what revolutions are like – live with it). I was more interested in the angle brought out by Nick Clayton, in comments to [Pat Kane’s post on the topic](http://www.theplayethic.com/2009/03/futureofjournalism2.html), and particularly the comments by Nick Clayton. He’s interested by the psychological shock to old-fashioned journalists, and whether they’ll cope without the newsroom:
the journalists who are losing their jobs are used to working as a team with a common goal, the next edition. It’s not easy to move to setting your own deadlines.
…
The reason, I believe, that [a triumph of individual journos working from home] hasn’t happened on a large scale so far is because of the isolation that appears built into the model and the accompanying lack of somebody to kick you up the backside when your copy’s late.
…
What’s missing at the moment is a framework which doesn’t assume that one person can be writer, reporter, editor, promoter, ad sales person, designer, photographer, book-keeper and search engine optimiser. Instead there’s a need for an infrastructure which brings together people with those skills quite possibly on a part-time or temporary basis.
The Kremlin has given Gazprom, a private company, the unusual right to recruit and operate its own military forces to protect its overseas pipelines[p.221]
‘overseas pipelines’ includes Nord Stream, the planned baltic pipeline bringing Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. [Lucas has much analysis of this pipeline: its expense, its unpopularity with the Baltic states, how it will enable Russia to deny gas to Eastern Europe while feeding it through to Germany. All best taken with a pinch of salt, though, given the book’s unremittingly anti-Russian tone]
Lucas’s source is [The Times](http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article2029023.ece), July 2007. There are plenty of other articles about it online, but they mostly seem to be regurgitating the same few facts.
You know how we all like to imagine ancient traditions, only to find that they started in the Nineteenth Century, or that they are inventions of an enthusiastic civil servant. In the same way I’d imagined that pseudonym Luther Blissett, freely used by all kinds of artistic and political groups, had been around for ever (or at least since the 60s, the political road-bump beyond which the laws of generational blindness prevent us looking). I was mildly disappointed to find that it only dates back to 1994, when a bunch of Italian anarchists stole the name of an unsuccessful footballer.
On the bright side, that means that the [book](http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/downloads.shtml), the [writings](http://www.altx.com/manifestos/blisset.html) the [identities](http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/s.php?ref=search&init=q&q=luther blissett), the entire culture have sprung up in the last 15 years.