Longrider

I see that the Tower of London’s ravens are to be brought indoors to protect them from bird flu. Indeed, we can’t have them going down with that.

Legend has it the Tower of London will collapse and the kingdom will fall if all the ravens leave.

And we certainly can’t have that happening.

However, something tells me this is an accident waiting to happen… Ark!

Sorry, normal service will be resumed in due course.

I see that David Irving has been sent down for three years by an Austrian court.

Now you would think that the natural reaction in a free country such as ours would be that this is an awful thing to happen, despite the crass views the man voiced 17 years ago. Well, no, actually. I had the misfortune to hear Jeremey Vine’s show this afternoon wherein the great and the good expressed their satisfaction at hearing this verdict. The general consensus seems to be to concentrate on the issue of the holocaust and not the real matter at hand; that of freedom of expression. Irving’s views are so repugnant and offend holocaust survivors and those who discovered the concentration camps, that such speech should not be allowed. Indeed, there is a qualifying statement; “Well, I believe in free speech… But”

Sorry, M’dear, there is no “but”. If there’s a “but”, you don’t believe in free speech - that’s all there is about it. Free speech means that sometimes people say things you disagree with, find offensive or deeply repugnant. Upon hearing them, you are equally free to rebut them - or ignore them, whichever suits. Free speech means allowing everyone to have their say, not just those with whom you agree.

Ah, we are told by those who know (well, those who phoned into Jeremy Vine), Irving is an apologist for the most vile of regimes and young people today, those too young to remember, may be influenced by his words. And locking him up won’t? Making a martyr of him won’t? The natural reaction for people who may be predisposed to Irving’s views will now start to wonder just what it is the Austrian authorities have to hide. That’s how censorship works. That is why it is so dangerous.

It is not the young and impressionable who are guilty of feeble-mindedness here, but those who believe in free speech with a “but”.

Britblog Roundup number 53 is up over at Tim Worstall’s blog.

Oh, ho, here we go again. Gatsos are to go back to being hidden, it seems.

The prominent yellow boxes may be harder to identify from next year
MOTORISTS face the return of hidden speed cameras after rules governing their siting and visibility cease to be enforced from April 2007.
Camera partnerships, which include police and local authorities, will be able to repaint yellow cameras to make them blend into the background.
They will also be able to install cameras where there is a speeding problem but little history of crashes

Now, as I understood it, the idea of the yellow boxes was to encourage drivers to lose speed - that being the desired outcome rather than catching people out. Well, that would be the case if you believed all the “speed is the root of all evil” rhetoric, which I don’t. This has always been about revenue, not safer roads.

Many partnerships believe that the rules are too restrictive. Last autumn, Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales Police, said that many more lives would be saved if there were more flexibility in camera location.

Translation: revenues are being lost because speeding motorists see the yellow boxes and slow down, which is highly unsportsmanlike. You start to get the impression that this is not about reducing accidents but catching people. There’s a nasty underlying malicious streak at work here. Then, of course we get the “because of the children” argument:

He said: “Parents often write to us and ask us to put a camera outside a school because the traffic is so dangerous. It’s very difficult to write back and say, ‘Please let us know when your son is killed and then we can consider putting a camera there.’”

Oh, for crying out loud! What hyperbole designed for the hard of thinking. If you want to reduce the “dangerous traffic” outside schools when the kiddiewinks are coming and going, you might ask the parents to leave their Chelsea tractors at home and encourage their offspring to walk. Walking happens when the child puts one foot before the other and repeats this action until they reach their destination. It has a number of benefits; it’s free, it means less traffic on the roads and it’s good exercise.

Meanwhile, the RAC has this to say on the matter:

Kevin Delaney, the head of road safety at the RAC Foundation, said: “We are concerned that some partnerships will conceal cameras and risk losing the trust of motorists. It makes sense for cameras to be yellow because it slows people down at accident blackspots.”

You don’t say?

This is the new location for Longrider Blog. As CSS isn’t my strong point, it will take me a while to get the look and feel to just where I want it. Wordpress does give me greater flexibility than Blog City but at the expense of having to hard code and find my way around style sheets.

Hopefully, by the time you read this, the domain will be up and working properly too.

For the moment, the look is a variation of the default themes - I’m still having to work out how to get all the other stuff imported; not least, my old blog archives…

There was a news item on yesterday’s Breakfast programme that was guaranteed to send me off to work in an irritable mood. It seems that drivers have too many gadgets in their vehicles and all those GPS recievers, hands free mobile phones and CD players cause them to take their eyes and concentration off the road causing them to crash:

“Almost half of drivers admit they have been distracted by in-car gadgets, sometimes even causing them to crash, according to a survey.

One in five of 1,500 drivers quizzed by Privilege Insurance admitted swerving out of their lane while changing CDs or fiddling with the instruments panel.

Some drivers said manufacturers should limit the number of gadgets in cars.”

You see? There we go again. Our dumbed down society has become so incapable of self-determination, personal responsibility and free thought that someone else has to take responsibility. Gadgets do not cause accidents - drivers who are too stupid to use them responsibly do.

I like my gadgets. My GPS with voice prompt makes navigating unfamiliar roads so much simpler. No more trying to pull over and fumble around with a map and subsequently trying to memorise what I’ve just looked at. No more relying on seeing misleading signposts - just listen to the prompts and follow. Yet because some imbeciles who probably shouldn’t have driving licenses anyway can’t cope, the cry goes out that we all should be restricted. Maybe ZANU Labour would like to pass another social control law - after all, it would just be another extension to what they’ve been doing of late. They want to know where we are going, why not control how we go, too?

There is a voice of reason, though:

“But road accident consultant Doug Boulton said the decision to use gadgets should be left to drivers.”

Quite. There is also something else to bear in mind. Our roads are becoming increasingly littered with road furniture; speed humps, traffic calming, irrelevant road signage, bollards and so on. Get rid of that lot, and you will reduce distraction and force drivers to take some personal responsibility. Oh, but of course, personal responsibility is verboten in todays sanitised state-controlled thought-crime-free society…

I ask the question because Daniel Finkleston asked that very same question earlier this week.

“THE POINT IS, I don’t want to seem like a nutter. It’s a very common human emotion, that — not wanting to stand out for thinking something hardly anyone else thinks. Best keep your head down and say nothing. In 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, more than 900 people voluntarily drank strawberry-coloured poison and died, each one following his neighbour, eager not to refuse the drink and have his neighbour think that he was a nutter. Perhaps the worst part of the tragedy is that the rest of us look back at them and think — what a bunch of nutters.

So I’m nervous about admitting that I’ve been having a paranoid nightmare, one that very few other people seem to share. But I have been, so you may as well know about it. “

He goes on to point out what the UK blogosphere has been full of this past few months, culminating in the parliamentary activity this week:

“So I’m nervous about admitting that I’ve been having a paranoid nightmare, one that very few other people seem to share. But I have been, so you may as well know about it.

In my nightmare, Tony Blair finally decides that he is fed-up with putting Bills before Parliament. He has so much to do and so little time. Don’t you realise how busy he is? He’s had enough of close shaves and of having to cut short trips abroad. He decides to put a Bill to End All Bills before the Commons, one that gives him and his ministers power to introduce and amend any legislation in future without going through all those boring stages in Parliament.

That’s not the end of my feverish fantasy. The new law is proposed and hardly anyone notices. John Redwood complains, of course, and a couple of Liberal Democrats, but by and large it is ignored. The Labour rebels are nowhere to be seen. The business lobby announces that it is about time all those politicians streamlined things, cutting out time-wasting debates. In a half empty Commons chamber, a junior minister puts down any objections with a few partisan wisecracks. Then the Bill to End All Bills is nodded through the Houses of Parliament, taking with it a few hundred years of Parliamentary democracy.

I wake up, sweating. “

And it isn’t a dream. And, thankfully, I realise that I’m not the only one. There have been moments when I wonder if I’ve become some sort of tinfoil-hat conspiracist nutter, but, no, those bills going before parliament are real; and didn’t Blair look rather wild-eyed at the dispatch box during PM’s questions this week? Is it me, or is it he who is teetering on the brink?

The lunatics are taking over have taken over the asylum. I can hear door clanging shut with a terrifying crash and the key turning in the lock. Welcome to HMP UK - where the people are controlled for their own good. I’m not going mad, I can’t be. Why does the UK population at large not see it? What will it take to jolt them out of their slumber? Has our society become so dumbed down that what happens on “reality” TV or the sports field is of more importance to the drones than what is happening to our lives and the ability to exert autonomy? More rhetorical questions, I guess.

In a week when ZANU Labour drove a bulldozer through our fragile liberties and dismantled the protections we had from totalitarianism, this image becomes appropriate. And I thought 1984 was fiction…

There was a time when we lived in a free country. Remember it well; for it will soon be the stuff of history.

Hat tip to Talk Politics