I’m not a drug user – I experimented in the seventies, but lost interest in the eighties and I have a certain amount of sympathy with those who believe cannabis use leads to lethargy and psychological problems. In my view, however, there is mounting and undeniable evidence that continued prohibition of narcotics is causing society more problems than it is solving.
The cost of drug prohibition to society is enormous – from policing the supply and use to the cost of property crime associated with drug use, through the cost of NHS treatment for overdoses, AIDS, hepatitis and so on. If you remove prohibition, regulate the supply and quality, allow prices to fall to a market level low enough to remove the need for additional funding from crime, and offer support from the NHS, you will at a stroke remove:
The cost of policing drug use and supply
The cost of crime against the person and their property
The cost to the NHS
The criminalisation of people that need help not condemnation
The opportunity for criminals to control addicts, forcing them into prostitution and other crime
You will also create jobs in a new narcotic supply industry – not just at home, but abroad too – where farmers in poor countries can grow cash crops without fear. We will generate income for the Exchequer through taxation, save lives through quality control, allow the police to focus on “real” crime and disassociate drug use from criminality.
The Six Nations Championship is upon us again. Speaking as a Welshman, the first game is absolutely critical this time. Talk about your whole season hanging on one game. If we win at Twickers – which would be a mighty task given the history of this game – we will be on a roll. History is against us though. Not only will it be our 4th Six Nations win against the English in a row but it includes back to back wins at Twickers . We’ve done it before, but not very often – certainly not in the last thirty years :
1950 & 1952 (4 win streak ‘49-’52)
1970 & 1972 (5 win streak ‘69-’73)
1976 & 1978 (5 win streak ‘75-’79)
In our first golden era we had a 10 game unbeaten run (1899-1909). In our second golden era we had only lost once (1974) to England in the period 1969-1979.
Can this team do what the Golden Era boys did?
We are 8th in the IRB table, only Scotland and Italy are below us, with England, France and Ireland 2, 3 and 4 places above us respectively. We have just come off the back of a pretty dire autumn series, our regional teams are stuttering and our management seems bereft of new ideas.
So far has the stock of our coaches fallen, that the Irish are suggesting that they’re glad they sacked him. Obviously, their Grand Slam is worth both ours. Now, it would be churlish to suggest that they only got theirs courtesy of a missed game winning penalty by Stephen Jones, but no more so than the implication that Gatland is an Irish hater. He probably has a gripe about the IRFU, but who wouldn’t given his treatment? They are lucky they have a great coach in Declan K – who has turned a team of honest plodders into a tenacious fighting unit. He took one season to do that.
1 Carry your opponent’s proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent’s statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow your own propositions remain, the easier they are to defend.
2 Use different meanings of your opponent’s words to refute his argument. Example: Person A says, “You do not understand the mysteries of Kant’s philosophy.” Person B replies, “Oh, if it’s mysteries you’re talking about, I’ll have nothing to do with them.”
3 Ignore your opponent’s proposition, which was intended to refer to some particular thing. Rather, understand it in some quite different sense, and then refute it. Attack something different than what was asserted.
4 Hide your conclusion from your opponent until the end. Mingle your premises here and there in your talk. Get your opponent to agree to them in no definite order. By this circuitous route you conceal your goal until you have reached all the admissions necessary to reach your goal.
5 Use your opponent’s beliefs against him. If your opponent refuses to accept your premises, use his own premises to your advantage. Example, if the opponent is a member of an organization or a religious sect to which you do not belong, you may employ the declared opinions of this group against the opponent.
The Letter from Gordon Brown in which he mis-spells the name of Guardsman Jamie Janes
Gordon Brown has telephoned the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan to apologise after apparently misspelling his name in a letter of sympathy.
Guardsman Jamie Janes, 20, from Brighton, East Sussex, was killed in an explosion in October. His mother Jacqui called the letter a “hastily scrawled insult”, but Mr Brown said he was sorry “for any unintended mistake”, adding that his writing could be “difficult to read”.
On the one hand we have a man who privately and personally expresses his sympathy and condolences to the bereaved parents, on the other hand we have a women who has lost her son and is brimming with indignant anger. I can see no wrong on either side here.
I read an interesting blog – by one of those Libertarians who advocates the kind of “freedom” that rides roughshod over the freedoms of everyone else. In this case, it is the freedom to speed in a car or motorbike.
The cause of this puerile outburst which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/q2b5le – is the new GPS speed governor which is being developed in Australia. “Freedom dies with GPS speed governor” wails Alexander Mark. His argument is that this is another step along the road to a “dictatorship of rules” against which we will all one day rebel.
Now, in a sense, I’m in agreement with Mr Mark about this dictatorship of rules – we are slowly being hemmed in by regulations and contractual requirements. The former have been instigated by governments who have put in place laws that govern our behaviour and require us to behave as good consumers and the latter are the contractual obligations allowed by these laws that require us to pay forever for things we have already bought.
Llandaff is one of those sleepy suburbs you can find in any city of any size. Pebble dashed nineteen-thirty something detached houses, owned by middle class executives, lawyers and senior bank personnel line the avenues and cul de sacs, testifying simultaneously to both the conservatism and wealth of the residents.
Sunday in Llandaff is church, lunch, wash the car and mow the lawn, while housewives busy themselves with being beautiful and peripheral. Monday is suit, briefcase, peck on the cheek and off to do some hard-nosed business. Tuesday is the day after Monday, but it’s just the same. There’s something eternal about places like Llandaff, nothing changes and nothing ruffles the cushioned surface of life in suburbia… nothing much anyway. And that nothing much would have been me.
It’s 1977 and me, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman are on the picket line at Grunwicks. Harriet is the legal advisor to the strikers’ committee and Jack… well Jack is Jack. He is a bluff, charming man with a quick mind, a loud voice and strong, well argued opinions. I am this skinny, long-haired teenager with acne, a smelly Afghan coat, and for most of my time on the picket line, a large lump on my forehead – testimony to the firmness of SPG standard issue truncheons in those days. It’s no wonder Harriet noticed the loquacious Jack rather than me.
Wind forward five years and Jack marries Harriet and they now have two children, both boys, both bearing the surname “Harman”. Given a choice of that or Dromey, they’ve probably both regretted not picking a partner called Smith or Booth or whatever…
To tell the truth, she wasn’t a raving beauty or anything, in fact she looked like a Blue Peter presenter without the sex, but that’s not what turned my head in those days. Instead, I favoured cerebral, left-leaning older women, with strong opinions and attitude. I still do, but I can do without the attitude and the older bit. Anyway, Harriet was something of a fantasy girl for the young UKHamlet in the seventies – I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear it – but it wasn’t in a prurient way. Well, not often anyway.
No, I put Ms Harman on a mental pedestal. This is because I worked hard at not regarding women as sex objects in those days, and it would have been a betrayal of my principles to actually fancy getting jiggy with Harriet.
A man walks out to the street and catches a taxi just going by. He gets into the taxi, and the cabbie says, “Perfect timing. You’re just like Frank.”
Passenger: ‘Who?’
Cabbie: “Frank Feldman. He’s a guy who did everything right all the time. Like my coming along when you needed a cab, things happened like that to Frank Feldman every single time.”
Passenger: “There are always a few clouds over everybody.”
Cabbie: “Not Frank Feldman He was a terrific athlete. He could have won the Grand-Slam at tennis. He could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star and you should have heard him play the piano. He was an amazing guy.”
Passenger: “Sounds like he was something really special.”
Cabbie: “There’s more… He had a memory like a computer. He remembered everybody’s birthday. He knew all about wine, which foods to order and which fork to eat them with. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse, and the whole street blacks out. But Frank Feldman, he could do everything right.”
Passenger: “Wow, some guy then.”
Cabbie: “He always knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams.. Not like me, I always seem to get stuck in them. But Frank, he never made a mistake, and he really knew how to treat a woman and make her feel good. He would never answer her back even if she was in the wrong; and his clothing was always immaculate, shoes highly polished too. He was the perfect man! He never made a mistake. No one could ever measure up to Frank Feldman.”
Passenger: “An amazing fellow. How did you meet him?”
Cabbie: “Well, I never actually met Frank. He died. I’m married to his fucking widow!”
Your rights are under attack. Apple have filed a twenty seven page statement to the U.S. Copyright office arguing that the modification of an iPhone’s software is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ruling as to this issue is expected this autumn. If they are successful it will mean that when you buy an iPhone, not only can they dictate which service provider you use, but also what you can do with the phone. It will erode the basic concept of ownership still further.
Things used to be simple – you bought something, it became your property and you could do what you wanted with it. Isn’t this simple? Isn’t it a good thing? Well, that depends on your view of property, but in essence, in a capitalist society, where ownership is a lynchpin of the economic method, you’d expect the simple elegance of this proposition to hold sway.
You buy it, you own it, you do what you want with it.
This is no longer the case. Microsoft et al saw to that with software, which they licensed it to you without ceding ownership. Then it became: You buy, we still own, you do what you want within certain limitations detailed in this twenty page document. Now Apple are seeking to take it still further – it’s about to become:
You buy, we own it, we tell you what you can do with it.
The Digital Switchover for TV appears to be in full swing and generally it appears to the consensus that this is a good thing. That’s another debate, but more concerning to me is the momentum being gained by the Radio Switchover proposed for 2015. It seems a long way off, but it is only five and half years away. If government has its way then at some point in 2015 all car radios, analogue hifi radios, the radio you have in your kitchen, your clock radio and so on, will become scrap.
Let’s just take the car radios. There are more than 35 million cars in the UK, with slightly smaller numbers in most European countries and slightly more in Germany. There’s about 200 million in the USA. In 99.9% of these cars there are analogue radios and for the foreseeable future car manufacturers will continue to pump out cars, vans and trucks with analogue radios.
Sunday in Llandaff is church, lunch, wash the car and mow the lawn, while housewives busy themselves with being beautiful and peripheral. Monday is suit, briefcase, peck on the cheek and off to do some hard-nosed business. Tuesday is the day after Monday, but it’s just the same. There’s something eternal about places like Llandaff, nothing changes and nothing ruffles the cushioned surface of life in suburbia… nothing much anyway. And that nothing much would have been me.
