Walsingham

Their case was that they were mostly not potato, and so not potato crisps. But the court decided that a) 40% potato was enough b) the Treasury could use the money.

I agree that it's easy to let one or two imams make the rest look bad. It's vital to understand that there's no hierarchy to regulate who gets to be an imam. Usually the most that can happen is that a particular mosque refuses to allow an imam in. Also, in my opinion, our problem with radical Islam in Europe is more to do with long-term socialisation rather than integrating immigrants alone. Look how many terrorist converts are second or third generation.

Point 2, yes. Piont 1, if you're going to lose sleep every time a politician spins information rather than lying then you're going to look very tired.

RAAARGH! This was never meant to resolve the question entirely. I just think it's a powerful piece of supporting data. All it does is support the notion that the death penalty isn't always wrong, not that it is usually right.

"Matthew Rorie PR/Marketing Producer" I guess this would explain why we never see any of those powerful adverts featuring a kid playing an Obsidian game and doing that fist-in-the-air-and-shouting-AWESOME-along-with-his-friends. For shame, sir.

I think teh basic problem with playing as evil is not that you don't get enough benefits, but rather that when you're good people don't conveniently forget.

He got suck after about five seconds between two bubbles. Boo.

I don't have faith in the deterrent argument. Organised criminal syndicates often threaten death to their own. It never succeeds in totally preventing the behaviours they don't like. And they're swift and pretty good at finding out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics...ato-crisps.html I know pringles are tasty, but ever since I found out they were a third grease I refuse to eat them. Note that the manufacturer's appeal to the court was that they shouldn't be considered potato-based. Eurgh.

"My proposal: Increase funding for education." "My advice: Increase funding for education." REFUSE. This is a mid-term goal. We need to get money flowing IN before we start spending it. The peasants can work things out for themselves. Just because they're illiterate doesn't mean they're stupid. Meeting #2: REFUSE PROPOSAL, ACCEPT PROPOSAL or ACCEPT ADVICE "My proposal: Shift credit priority back to the experienced producers of export crops." "My advice: Continue to divide credit resources between food growers and export crop producers." ACCEPT ADVICE. We musn't lose the support of the people. "Will the torturers ever be prosecuted, Presidente? Many have not even been arrested. Can you at least force them to say where they buried our children?" "My proposal: Arrest the members of the defeated Farsante Gurad." ****NUTS. Eugh. Why did we appoint this damn minister anyway? It's going to provoke division, and may lead to a reactionary insurgency. Can I start embezzling national funds? MEETING #4: NO CHOICE; we must AGREE WITH ADVICE "My proposal: Assert the authority of the Presidente to decide what aid Chimerica receives." [ed's note: if we choose this, we get another emergency meeting, with the US Ambassador, and we have no choice.] "My advice: Do not disturb the traditional connections between the US and Chimerican militaries." AGREE WITH ADVICE. (I know we have to, but it makes sense). Incidentally, why not British or French advice? MEETING #5: ACCEPT ADVICE or ACCEPT PROPOSAL "My proposal: Announce plans to give power and wealth to the poor through a land reform program." "My advice: Announce plans to develop a land reform program." REJECT? We can't expect people to build businesses using their new loans if we go stealing their land. I might accept this reform if it were done sensibly. But I'm thinking Zimbabwe. MEETING #6: NO CHOICE; we must ACCEPT ADVICE "My proposal: Direct the police to keep union agitators from corrupting the work force." "My advice: Guarantee unions the right to organize and strike." ACCEPT ADVICE. We're going to need the unions on side if we go pissing off the Army. MEETING #7: NO CHOICE; must REFUSE. "My proposal: Eliminate all controls on food prices." "My advice: Eliminate all controls on food prices." Why no choice? Why refuse? Ah well... I was going to say that refusing makes sense. We can't expect people to cope with food pricehikes until they are farming at least subsistence levels themselves. MEETING #8: AGREE TO PROPOSAL, ACCEPT ADVICE or REFUSE PROPOSAL "My proposal: Allow free-market principles to govern trade relations. "My advice: Establish a voluntary National Marketing Board to aid smaller export producers." ACCEPT ADVICE. Makes very good sense to me. Unless theres some micro-dynamic that would mung things. MEETING #9: REFUSE PROPOSAL, AGREE TO PROPOSAL or ACCEPT ADVICE "My proposal: Turn state farms into cooperatives owned by the workers." "My advice: Continue to gradually give state farm land to the small coffee producers." ACCEPT ADVICE. I'm not giving management control to illiterate peasants festooned (judging by the statistics) with dead babies. Medium sized farms, backed by the price regulation board, make the best sense.

But the point of this case is that sometimes fallibility of justice is not really at issue. Every possible form of evidence convicted this guy from personal accounts, DNA, tertiary supporting evidence like the damage obviously done to the victims... Once again, and let me be painfully clear if possible: this does not mean the death penalty is correct as a system of law. What it does mean to me is that the death penalty is not always wrong. Looking at things from a slightly different perspective, HM government is felt to be quite within its rights to direct me to shoot someone who it feels is a terrorist or enemy soldier. Surely the crimes this man has committed are vastly worse than those that might possibly be committed by any but the most serious terrorist?

I admit I was being a bit ludicrous, I mean pompous, I mean lyrical. I also reiterate that I'm not saying the death penalty is always right. In fact i agree that it's often wrong in places where it's open for use. I just think that sometimes, in extreme cases, it should be an option say on appeal from the prosecution. I mean, death sentences go to appeal anyway.

I can't find the video you're talking about.

There you and I agree, at least. The fact that the intelligence was wrong is plain unremarkable. The fact that the reconstruction contracts were parcelled out to cronies of the Bush administration who bungled the reconstruction and thereby made the insurgency ten times stronger... THAT's a problem.

The death penalty issue is not about individual cases, this much should be obvious. So, you've found a monster, so what. I, on the other hand, feel that to avoid individual cases is to indulge in intellectual decadence. Typically the debate is over whether the death penalty can ever be justified. This is the proverbial black swan, which I feel proves that it can be. Indeed, I think that to look on this account without feeling the compelling need to exact ferocious retribution is to deny one's own humanity. Some things need to be punished, not as a deterrent to others because they are probably beyond deterrent, but as proof that we are distinct from them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_y...ire/8058533.stm Like Fritzl except this guy was so terrifying he didn't need a basement. Bang to rights. Certainly did it. What earthly use is it to lock him up?

I forgot to say: My mother appears to have an aggressive tumour that is encroaching on her airway. We shall have to see whether it is as serious as it looks, and as aggressive (it came on in less than a week). I know your thoughts will be with us, but save the commiserations for when we know more.

are you sure that's the title? while i know the subject of IQ is... hmmm, controversial, at best, i recall you linking to a book once on the subject and i recall reading the reviews (not the book itself). as i recall, if the reviews were true, the author committed some egregious errors, both with the use of dubious facts and improper statistical analyses. not that his errors provide a confirmation of the concept of IQ/intelligence, but that book certainly couldn't be used as a refutation, either. i don't remember the details, so i'm only pointing out what i remember in general. ^meshugger: an MS is, in general, much more difficult to achieve than an MA (master of arts). in any event, who cares what your grades were... all that matters is that you get to do what you like to do and, hopefully, get paid to do it. taks I'm pleased to be challenged, because I'm flattered you bothered to look! The book may be out of date, but at the time it came out my university's psychology department thought it good enough. I got the highest mark of my year on the topic, and was able to debate reasonably successfully with the professors. However, since that's hardly justification, my principle objection beyond the mutability of so-called intelligence, is expertise. People we call intelligent are generally at the top of one field or another. Yet when tested we find that their excellence hardly communicates outside very narrow boundaries. Anyway, I'm a bit distracted just now, but it would definitely be interesting to break this open for thorough discussion in a couple of weeks.

Well, I think Australia does it right. You set limits, boundaries, and frameworks. We significantly lowered our intake of sub-Saharans at one point because they were simply not integrating well. It's completely reasonable to expect your immigrants to obey your laws, learn your language (but not lose their own), arrive with savings, and find a job (hence why skilled workers are given priority). I believe part of the problem in Europe, and I've done a little research on the Netherlands and France, is that in the 1970's or so (from memory), the governments of the time pitched these massive immigration pushes to places like Turkey and the Middle East for cheap labour at the height of the baby boom. Unfortunately they didn't bother to screen those arrivals, didn't bother to plan for what would would happen 10 years later (perhaps they expected them to simply go home?), didn't bother to ensure the arrivals had saved to pay for their stay, and didn't bother to integrate them from the start. Economic migrants are surely different to refugees? You can't expect someone who flees for their life to turn up in the same state as someone who plans it? I agree that there seems an unsavoury capitalist urge to import brown coloured slaves, I mean workers, in to Europe. I don't think it's a good idea for the vast majority of Europeans, or for the immigrants, or their native countries. Incidentally someone asked me who I thought would pick up the litter if there were no migrants. I replied that things wuold be better all round if we learned to not drop the bloody stuff in the first place and didn't oblige a perfectly capable human being to behave like a grazing animal.

I spit on the notion of a general quality of intellectual ability, that is what most people would call 'intelligence'. It's nonsense, like 'breeding'. I haven't time to go over the argument again now. but there is a book on the subject called Intelligence in Question that is educational and occasionally funny. I do, however, know dumb when I see it. Dumb in this case is a person who thinks they know what the answer is before they've heard the question. To paraphrase Chris Rock.

He may have been an ant. Or possibly a number of armadilloes standing on each other's shoulders.

I have a friend who works for a charity which provides mental health care and integration assistance for immigrants, and his view is that there is a problem. You simply cannot pull people from a life of brutalisation and fear and pat them on the head and expect them to be fine. It is neither kind nor sensible to do so, it is simply easy. All of the most terrifying acts of gang violence I've read about in the last few years have involved people who have fled African civil wars. I don't think this is pure coincidence. I would go further and point out that many immigrants come from backgrounds without a (western) formal education or any respect for law, because where they come from the law isn't worth respect. This causes issues. In turn they find out attitudes to social mores like honesty and modesty disgusting. I'm not always sure they're wrong. The former means we don't mix with them because we can't think of anything to say. The latter means they don't mix with us because they are afraid of what we might say if we could think of something. I believe entirely in immigration, from as many diverse places as possible. But I also believe in doing it right, and that means a proper framework for acceptance, and support. Unfortunately, like most things I believe in, no-one seems to be willing to pay the up front price, and are quite happy to accept the far larger secondary costs.

Not meant to be...

Slug? I actually quite like the name Bug Henry.

For sake of my sanity I'm going to pretend that said 'lobster'.