I cannot believe that people fall for these Nigerian email scams. But here’s a true story from the New Yorker which suggests that they do.
James Miller collects all the 419 emails he receives and keeps them in a special folder (no doubt labelled “Greed, Folly and Stupidity”). He also pointed me to Scamorama, a site which realises the comic potential of the 419 racket.
Splendid rant by Charles Moore arguing that Blair’s discovery of the absurdities wrought by his Human Rights Act is analogous to the Black Wednesday when the Major government had to scuttle from the ERM in September 1992.
In popular conversation now, “human rights” in this country is the subject of mockery. It is understood, essentially correctly, to be a system by which judges defend bad people from the consequences of their actions and impose duties upon good people which are unreasonable. Every nasty school pupil knows that his human rights can be invoked if the teacher gets too angry with him; every conscientious teacher knows that 20 years of unblemished conduct will count for nothing in his favour if he can be shown to have breached a child’s human rights.
Every grumpy prisoner, second-rate employee, suspected terrorist, mixed-up trans-sexual, Muslim schoolgirl who wants to wear the most extreme forms of religious outfit – these, and countless others, know that they can get lawyers, attention, legal aid and often, money, out of “human rights”.
Human rights are also understood, also correctly, to be an arrangement by which British citizens derive no advantage from their citizenship and foreigners can ride on their backs. Because the laws of human rights regard most of those rights as being universal, you do not have to qualify for them by becoming a citizen of our country.
All you have to do is get inside the perimeter fence. Then your rights to religious freedom and social security and privacy and founding a family and paid holidays and free health treatment are all there. And so is the delay that so much law involves, the public expense of keeping claimants and their dependants, the fees for people like Mrs Blair, and the virtual breakdown of all administrative systems – policing, immigration, criminal justice, prisons, deportation, extradition – which relate to the problems involved…
He’s right about one thing — the desire to incorporate Human Rights into British law was one of the ruling passions of the incoming New Labour regime in 1997. It’s funny now to see Blair railing against its counter-intuitive absurdities.
Absurdities? Well, it turns out that even companies can have ‘human rights’.
Some years ago, at a Parents’ Evening at my children’s (lavishly funded) secondary school, I listened as the Head boasted about the expansion of their ICT facilities. When he’d finished, I asked if anyone had considered the possibility that the money would be better spent on teachers and books. He looked at me uncomprehendingly — as indeed did most of the audience, who expected better from someone who specialises in ICT.
But my question was — and remains — a valid one. Now comes news of research conducted by one of my academic colleagues at the Open University.
Books are more than twice as effective as computers in raising standards among pupils, says a senior academic who spent 30 years training teachers to use computers. Spending £100 a year on books for each primary school pupil raised test scores by 1.5 per cent while the same amount invested in computer technology was less than half as effective, according to the study by Steve Hurd, a former teacher trainer specialising in computer assisted learning.
Mr Hurd, who now lectures at the Open University, said the results were “significant”. “It is surprising that books matter. Things have gone overboard on ICT (information and communication technology). It is out of kilter. Schools pick up the message that they will be clobbered if their technology is not up to scratch, but no one looks at books.” School inspectors collect data on the provision of computers but have not asked for figures on spending on books since 2003, he said.
Mr Hurd’s research team concluded that the average test scores for English, maths and science would rise by 1.5 per cent in schools spending £100 per pupil on books, a higher than average figure…
Tim O’Shea, a former colleague who has gone on to greater things (he’s now Principal of Edinburgh University) and is a leading expert on computer-assisted learning, used to infuriate conference audiences in the 1980s by saying that “the only piece of educational technology known for sure to work is the school bus”!
The Economist published an amazing analysis of how IKEA uses a Byzantine network of ‘charitable’ trusts to, er, minimise tax.
John Prescott, the sexually-challenged Deputy Prime Minister, took Parliamentary Questions for the first time since news of his carnal adventures broke. Simon Hoggart was there…
He tried hard. He repeatedly told us how much work he was doing in his new job. “The prime minister felt I was able to play a role … ” (Role, roll, get it?) At this the Tories collapsed in heaps of fake laughter. Or, more worryingly, genuine laughter.
Rob Wilton pushed them towards hysteria when he asked: “What steps will you be taking to ensure that staff working under you are not subject to sexual harassment?” “Yeah!” they cried, like Texans at a rodeo. “Keep the door closed next time!” a familiar voice shouted. It turned out to be my old chum Michael Fabricant, who has clearly put his attempt to become a serious, highly regarded statesman on hold.
Labour MPs had been told to provide relief. Anne Snelgrove said the party and the country felt “pride” at the role Mr Prescott was playing. This is not, perhaps, the first response when you ask the public about him. Your average punter does not look you in the eye and say: “I’ll tell you what I feel about John Prescott. Pride! Like any right-thinking Briton!”
Mr Prescott thanked Ms Snelgrove for her supportive remarks. “Any more would be very welcome,” he said with a grin that was not just rueful but rue-sodden. But he seemed to be clawing his way to safety. His language began to disintegrate. Doctors would take this as a sign of recovery. Then it all went horribly, terribly wrong.
Dari Taylor, a Welsh Labour MP who – tragically – was only trying to help, praised his work renewing neighbourhoods. “Is he still going to have a hands-on in these areas?” she piped, and as the Tories began to collapse and wheeze, and hug themselves as if being attacked by anacondas, his smile became grimmer. The Speaker had to shut them all up….
Well, actually it’s Google Dilberted. See, for example, this and the succeeding strips.
At last, some really good news…
The catering company that brought the infamous Turkey Twizzler into Britain’s school kitchens yesterday admitted that Jamie Oliver’s campaign against sub-standard school dinners had taken a healthy bite out of its earnings, wiping £10m off sales in six months.
The celebrity chef’s Channel 4 television series School Dinners has shaken the contact catering industry to the core, leaving steadily retreating revenues and a number of multimillion pound contracts that have failed to attract bidders – despite the promise of more money from the government.
According to the Guardian‘s report of a survey of what people think of various brands, the winners and losers are:
Top six best loved brands (percentage of vote):
1 Google (31.6)
2 Tesco (28.6)
3 Nokia (21.9)
4 eBay (19.2)
5 Persil (18)
6 Dell (17.4)Top six most hated brands (percentage of vote):
1 Pot Noodle (20.6)
2 QVC (19.2)
3 Novon washing powder (15.2)
4 McDonald’s (14.8)
5 Tiny (14.7)
6 Fiat (13.6)
Just thought you’d like to know. Er, I’d never heard of Novon. And what, pray, is Tiny?
The survey measured “consumers’ emotional attachment to brands rather than their buying habits”.
Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees—so that rivals know where it is.
From an engagingly critical Economist review of Google’s current state.
Deliciously icy comment by the Guardian’s resident Ice Queen, Marina Hyde, on New Labour’s latest fatuous idea. Sample:
In TS Eliot’s poetry, “the moment in the rose garden” came to symbolise a sublimely rare instant of visionary experience, that fleeting moment in which the eternal and the temporal meet, and the universe and one’s place in it seem to make intensely profound, intuitive sense.
Tony Blair had a moment in the rose garden the other day. Or rather what is tactfully known, in the parlance of our times, as a “moment”.
According to Downing Street insiders, it was in the No 10 rose garden that the PM chose to break the news to Charles Clarke that his desk was in the lift. Not only were Blair’s eyes said to be “red and tearful” as he escorted the former home secretary back to the house, but at one point – according to these curtain-twitching insiders – he was forced to break away from Clarke and go into a corner of the garden with his “head in his hands”.
Now, I do not dispute the import of this moment. But if I found my lachrymose self taking refuge in the shrubbery to hide my anguish at having to lose an overpromoted, incompetent bully like Charles Clarke, I feel sure I would suddenly, in a moment quite blinding in its profundity, be struck with the sense that it would not be long before my political (and probably psychological) number was up, and I would be shunted off to the great borrowed villa in the sky. …
As things stand, however, one suspects the prime minister understood his moment in the rose garden rather less fully than Eliot did his. Yesterday, he launched a new initiative that is designed to seize back control of the domestic policy agenda, with a new pledge to rescue public services, notably the criminal justice system. The name of this drive? Let’s Talk.
Let’s Not and Say We Did.
It is difficult to conceive of another name that would reflect so totally the lack of ideas left in the Blairite locker. In fact, Let’s Talk sounds like nothing so much as the ITV2 spin-off show to that earlier triumph of public badinage, The Big Conversation (which anyway nicked its name off a management-consultant-inspired BBC away-day)…