Cuckoo Cuckoo.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic certainly seems to have stirred up the nutters.

The fact that it has taken 13 years to find a man who was living in a major city and writing a magazine column on alternative medicine suggests that he might just have had some assistance from the Serbian government.

Perhaps the alternative medicine will form part of his defence strategy- "No we didn't shoot them all in the head, we were simply applying a form of extreme accupuncture to release their negative chi".

Weighty Matters.

Two amusing posts that are well worth a read:

• Dumbjon on 'fat activists' trying to claim the mantle of victimhood over their depiction in the new Pixar movie 'Wall-E'.
• Alas the starving are also a major problem in Western society, so Tizona helpfully highlights a NPR story of the plight of ordinary Americans unable to afford to buy food for themselves in Bush's America. Helpfully the NPR website includes photos of the emaciated dears.
  

On an unrelated subject could the owner of this cat come forwards.

Not The Reaction He Was Hoping For.

Daniel Kawczynski, a Conservative MP, is annoyed at the Guardian claiming that he claims more expenses for food than he actually does. The reaction of the commentators probably isn't exactly what he hoped for.

BCS BS.

The government have once again been waving around the results of the British Crime Survey to bolster their claims that crime is falling. So I shall, once again, post about why the BCS is not the flawless indicator of crime that the government and its supporters believe it is.

Problems with the BCS:

• It doesn't cover under 16s, who are proportionately more likely to be the victims of crime than adults.
• It doesn't cover crimes that aren't specifically directed at an individual, so for example if a school suffers an arson attack or some shops suffer theft then it doesn't show up on the BCS.
• It doesn't cover crimes against those who aren't permanent residents of the UK, such as tourists or migrant workers.
• It doesn't cover murder.
• The sample is not truly random as there are a large number of people who decline to take part and they are concentrated in high crime neighbourhoods.
• People's recall of what has happened to them over the course of a year is pretty poor.
• It doesn't cover repeat offences against the same victim, or to be precise it caps the number of offences it records.

Of course the fact that the BCS isn't as reliable as is claimed doesn't mean that crime is rising. With technological advances with cars and mobile phones some crimes are harder to commit than they used to be so robbery is probably down for example. However there is an interesting question as to why people believe crime is rising, it isn't simply, as some newspaper columnists assert because of tabloid hysteria, for example in the USA when crime stats began to fall in the 1990s pretty much everyone accepted that they were clearly true and reflected their day to day experience. The American figures were confirmed by a fall in the one statistic governments can't manipulate, the homicide rate, whereas in the UK the homicide rate has increased substantially over the last decade.

Update: Stephen Pollard writes in the Daily Mail about the BCS's shortcomings.

A Copy Of 'Down With Consumerism' Can Be Bought At The Gift Shop.

The Pope isn't keen on consumerism:

Pope Benedict XVI has attacked popular culture and consumerism in a formal address to tens of thousands of young Roman Catholics."

Presumably the purveyors of tacky gifts over at the Vatican don't count as contributers to consumerism.

Quote Of The Day.

The best comment so far on the Obama/ New Yorker cartoon nonsense is in the comments here:

Making a fuss over a cartoon isn't going to help Barack Hussein Obama's efforts to prove he is not a muslim

Noticing What Isn't Supposed To Be Noticed

As soon as I saw this headline on google news "Mother 'invented disabled children to collect £1million in benefits'" I immediately guessed something about the defendant, I was right.

If you can't guess what I'm referring to have a look at these recent fraud cases and see what they have in common. You can almost taste the vibrancy coming off these trials.

Update: Someone else has spotted the pattern too.

Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children!!

The Children's Society purports to represent children, although as far I can tell, actual children are about as numerous as they would be at a Gary Glitter concert, today they are upset over a proposal to allow more child offenders (or to be precise teenage thugs who are old enough to get married or join the army) to be named in the press. Strangely they appear to arguing simultaneously that it's a bad idea because it violates the child's rights and that it would be a badge of honour for them to be so named. Pick one or the other please or at least pretend to respect the public's intelligence enough not to use both arguments together.

On the subject of criminals and justice John East has a couple of very good posts up, as does Laban.

The Gay Mafia.

It seems that the Sicilian Mafia aren't an equal opportunities employer:

"These bosses have to cover their homosexuality; they're afraid because they risk being ridiculed and killed."

Mr Ingroia said that the American Mafia had "a more broad-minded attitude towards gays and so gay bosses can come out."

That is come out as gay, not come out as Mafia bosses, that's still frowned on in most of the USA with the possible exception of New Jersey. It should be pointed out that British gangsters are far more progressive and as far back as the 1960s Ronnie Kray was able to dominate gangland despite being a 'fat poof'. Although this was partly because he murdered people who called him a fat poof.

53% of Britons Are Idiots, Poll Finds.

The Guardian breathlessly reports:

Barack Obama is overwhelmingly Britain's choice to be the next US president, five times more popular than his Republican rival, John McCain, a Guardian/ICM poll shows today. Carried out ahead of the Democratic candidate's visit to Britain next week, the poll reveals that 53% feel certain he would make the best president, with only 11% favouring McCain; 36% declined to express an opinion.

With this level of popularity in Britain, perhaps the Guardian could find a way for British voters to encourage Americans to support Obama. Perhaps a small county in a prominent swing state could be found....

Born At The Wrong Time

A new study has found that people born in the later part of the school year are less likely to do well, academically. than those born earlier:

The reason for the summer-birth disadvantage is that those children have to sit important exams up to 11 months earlier than their autumn or winter-born counterparts, the report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says.

It proposes a number of reforms to ensure that summer-born babies are no longer penalised because of an “unlucky birth draw”. Chief among these is the suggestion that all school test scores should be adapted to take account of students' birth month, right up to GCSE level.

This sounds plausible as small differences in age can mean major differences among school age children. The effect isn't limited to academia either, a look at the birth dates of Premiership footballers, professional cricketers and rugby players reveals the same pattern:

An analysis of 348 Premiership footballers playing this season shows that 32pc were born between September and November while only 20pc were born between June and August.

In cricket, 34pc of first-class players in the County Championship this summer were born at the start of the school year, compared with 18pc in the last three months.

In rugby union's Guinness Premiership, 30pc of players this season were born between September and November compared with 18pc at the end of the school year.

In other words being born at the wrong time of the year is a major disadvantage in all sorts of ways right through adulthood, and having to keep pace mentally and physically with older children is not always possible. Given the potential wasting of people's talents that the current system creates, it might be a good idea to consider using 6 month age groups for grouping children in schools rather than 1 year groups.

Fact Of The Day

Fraser Nelson writing at the Spectator's blog reveals this shocking fact:

Male life expectancy for the whole of Glasgow, including its lush suburbs, averages 70.7 years - worse than Gaza’s 71.01 years. In East Glasgow, it goes right down to 53.9 years in the Calton ward

That is genuinely astounding, 53.9 it is the kind of figure you would expect from some impoverished banana republic.

Racist Toddlers.

As we all know, eating Indian food is something that a racist would never do, which is why curry houses are never the scenes of racial abuse, which is why the National Children's Bureau's idea to treat toddlers who dislike spicy food as the little fascists they are makes so much sense.

It's a step in the right direction, but clearly more drastic action is required if we are too eradicate the scourge of racism from our society, which means we have to identify and punish the perpetrators at an earlier age. I propose that we get expectant mothers and play gangsta rap at their wombs, if the foetus indicates that they aren't down with all the vibrant music, perhaps by turning away or by kicking, then they can be marked down as racists before they are even born and turned over to a team of crack diversity counsellors when they are born. It is too late to save them of course but at least they can be identified and monitored throughout their lives.

Accurate But Fake

John Bercow, a man so stupid that he hasn't realised that he is in the wrong party, has come up with a proposal, described here by Simon Chapman at Centre Right:

But his proposed amendment to the HFE Bill is even worse than it was described. It proposes to make it an offence to advertise information about alternatives to abortion (as well as abortion) if the presentation of that information is "likely to deceive the average person...even if the information is factually correct."

Under Bercow's proposal people could be imprisoned for telling the truth. John Bercow used to be on the very right wing of the Conservative Party and was a secretary of the Monday Club, now he is the living embodiment of the idea that when fanatics change tack they don't become reasonable moderate individuals, but instead simply becom fanatics for another cause.

I don't have strong views on abortion and am generally accepting of the description of the two sides of the dispute as pro-life and pro-choice rather than pro and anti abortion, but shouldn't members of the pro choice lobby be condemning Bercow for advocating a position that is designed to restrict pregnant women's ability to make an informed choice? He isn't pro choice he is simply an evangelist for abortion.

Stockholm Syndrome

This could be the next Yvonne Ridley in the making.

Lefties- Not Big On Self Awareness

Snigger

We're Doomed.

Over at Blognor Regis I see this:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

Will pupils sitting biology exams now be rewarded if they choose to draw large pictures of their genitalia on the exam paper, assuming that they are biologically accurate?

I'm Baaaack

I'm back and after a week without internet access I am looking forward to discovering the answer to these questions:

• Is there a helpful list of which MPs voted to block the most basic checks on their burgeoning expense accounts?
• Was Richard Gott's reaction to the Colombian hostage rescue as hilarious and graceless as I imagined it?
• Should we support Labour getting a kicking at the Glasgow East bye-election even if it is at the hands of a rabid Anglophobe?
• Are puppies really too offensive to appear on police posters?