Send an email to the Taliban

If email correspondence with nutters is your thing, this post at the Jawa report has the contact details for the Taliban.

Alan Johnson

The news of Alan Johnson's release from captivity is obviously very welcome. However the BBC's blanket coverage, while understandable, was horrible and made my toes curl. The BBC rather revealed their discomfort at their own excesses by the embarrassed mention of the five British hostages in Iraq at the end of the Johnson piece. This was probably the first that most people had heard of them since the day they were seized.

When you think about it, isn't it just wrong that Alan Johnson got a slot on the BBC news and on the front of the website, pretty much every day for the last four months, while the other hostages were all but forgotten? It rather nicely encapsulates the problem with the BBC, or even the public sector as a whole.

It's run for the benefit of its staff, rather than for the public who pay for it. 

Harrassment of bloggers

Lurch, the author of a blog called Gun Culture has been visited by the police as part of the renewal for his firearms licence. During the visit they raised the subject of his blog:

It seems that my crappy little corner of the blogosphere has come to the attention of the police, and they don’t like it.  Specifically mentioned was the piece regarding the British Association of Women in Policing, where the woman wanted smaller guns for women officers, this didn’t go down well apparently despite my admission in the piece that my comments were flippant.

[...] 

The officers (who were very polite) were quick to point out that they couldn’t force me to remove posts or dictate my freedom of speech but the fact is that I am being watched. 

It's worth taking a look at the original post which must rank as one of the most innocuous imaginable.

It's hard to comprehend just how daft this makes the police look. I've no idea which force Lurch has the misfortune to be harrassed by, but it is absolutely staggering that they have time to monitor postings on obscure blogs for people making fun of them. The Chief Constable wants to have his priorities pointed out to him in no uncertain terms by someone in power. This kind of threat must be illegal, surely.

It just looks like another example of the police taking the easy option of harrassing the innocent rather than dealing with criminals. 

Via The England Project 

Lonely Libdem voice of sanity

Today's must-read post is by Tom Papworth of Liberal Polemic.

Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool we created to promote freedom. 

A fact that is now largely forgotten. 

Climate cuttings 3

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I noted that NOAA was trying to stop the Surfacestations project by hiding the names of the volunteer station managers in the reference database. They now appear foolish as well as disingenuous as it's been revealed that they already publish photos and names of many volunteers, thus ruling out any claim that the data was hidden on privacy grounds.

Over at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt is all in favour of Surfacestations and documenting how well the stations are sited. He just thinks that people are jumping to conclusions (who? where?). We also learn that the models don't need to square with the temperature record because they've got physics in, and that even if the stations are sited next to AC exhaust outlets, it won't materially affect the temperature record. Roger Pielke Sr shoots back.

Al Gore was in town to deliver a gentle reminder, just in case we'd forgotten that we're all about to burn. Nobody believes him though. 

Henrik Svensmark, a bad man who reckons that climate change is all caused by cosmic rays, is interviewed in Discover.   

Environmentalists damaging environment again

Via the ASI, Michael Munger's excellent summary of why recycling is, in general, damaging to the environment.

There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it's a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage.

Bill of Rights

Gordon; about the Bill of Rights you want to introduce. Don't worry yourself about it - I've done it for you.

(Comments on this thread please) 

There is no data

One of the criticisms often levelled at the bureaucracy is their inability to measure success and failure properly. They might set targets, but these are usually later found to be unsatisfactory measures or susceptible to corruption.

According to this article on the Nature Newsblog, a similar problem exists in the development world. Reporting on an (unidentified) conference, Emma Marris tells us

[Ghanaian conservationist, Yaa] Ntiamoa-Baidu looked at 50 random World Wildlife Fund programs in Africa. While 92% of project managers felt that their projects were helping develop the community, very few of these projects had built in any way to measure or show this. There is no data. And, according to Ntiamoa-Baidu, to convince politicians, donors and local people, you need the data.

Of course people find others measuring their success or failure a profoundly uncomfortable experience. The absence of data is therefore probably more by design than by accident. Which is why the free trade route to development is far more likely to be successful than hand outs or development projects run by well-meaning westerners.

Protecting our delicate sensibilities

In this YouTube clip of a TV report about the recent bombings, the address where one of the Mercedes cars was found - Cockspur Street - has been tweaked so that it comes out as "----spur Street"! (It's near the end, about 2 mins in).

Is this deliberate? Was it excised by whoever posted it to YouTube or was it on the original report? We need to know.

And given the state of that doctor chap, wouldn't Cockburn Street have been more suitable?

Sodden summers, sodding weather forecasts

So, the weather is crap. It's been crap for two months, and now the Met Office is forecasting that there may well be no summer at all this year.

Great. Just great. Exactly what I need in a summer when we're not going away.

But are they right though? The Met Office publishes a forecast for the summer months, and updates it through the months of April, May and June. Let's take a look and see just how reliable they are.

When they started out back in April, this is what they were saying:

The latest seasonal forecast from the Met Office issued today, reveals that this summer is, yet again, likely to be warmer than normal. Following the trend set throughout 2006 and the first part of 2007, seasonal forecasters say there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C. They also suggest the chances of temperatures similar to those experienced in 2003 and 2006 are around 1 in 8. The forecast for rainfall is less certain, and currently there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.

In other words it looks very much as if they got it 100 percent wrong. They essentially repeated this forecast in May. By the start of June they were standing by their temperature forecast, but said of the rainfall:

Current rainfall indications suggest that over the summer as a whole southern parts of the UK are more likely to experience average or below-average rainfall, while the north is more likely to see average or above-average rainfall.

Given the fact that June was pretty average, temperature-wise (78th hottest on CETR), and that the rainfall has been rather different to what they forecasted too (the numbers are not published yet, but I think it's fair to say that anything in the ballpark of "average" just didn't happen) it seems reasonable to conclude that they haven't the faintest idea what is going to happen.

RTWT

Doesn't matter what your view of the war in Iraq is, you should still read this - Michael Yon's latest dispatch. (Warning: graphic photos)