DesperateDan posted:

Didn't they already rabble rouse about dropping the minimum wage in the tabloids about it (standard water testing device) a few times before quietly dropping it?

Metrication posted:

LemonDrizzle posted:

I can see no problem whatsoever with privatizing the organization that has the final say over the ownership of all land in the country.

General China posted:

The price of pharmaceuticals and drugs continues to amaze me. Take for example paracetamol. Cheapest are tablets you swallow, next most expensive is intravenous paracetamol ( in a large glass vial with a handy doo-dad you can use to hang it from a drip stand ) and the most expensive form of paracetamol is suppositories.

I cannot see how this works. Surely making a tablet and suppository should be a similar price- the inert base used for both must be a similar price. Unless glycerol is amazingly expensive. Surely manufacturing IV drugs with the glass involved and the more stringent needs for sterility would result in a higher price than something you could literally shove up your arse. But it does not.

General China posted:

The price of pharmaceuticals and drugs continues to amaze me. Take for example paracetamol. Cheapest are tablets you swallow, next most expensive is intravenous paracetamol ( in a large glass vial with a handy doo-dad you can use to hang it from a drip stand ) and the most expensive form of paracetamol is suppositories.

I cannot see how this works. Surely making a tablet and suppository should be a similar price- the inert base used for both must be a similar price. Unless glycerol is amazingly expensive. Surely manufacturing IV drugs with the glass involved and the more stringent needs for sterility would result in a higher price than something you could literally shove up your arse. But it does not.

General China posted:

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.

ThomasPaine posted:

What's that from?

ThomasPaine posted:

What's that from?

(Unless you wrote it, in which case bravo sir)

a pipe smoking dog posted:

God wrote it. (It's paraphrasing the bit in Exodus where God forms the covenant with Moses to return the Holy Land to the Hebrews)

e: ^^That makes sense^^

a pipe smoking dog posted:

God wrote it. (It's paraphrasing the bit in Exodus where God forms the covenant with Moses to return the Holy Land to the Hebrews)

e: ^^That makes sense^^

TinTower posted:

Anyone talking about how Royal Mail aren't allowed to send faeces to UKIP clearly hasn't been watching Love for Sale.

Fluo posted:

Because Postmen clearly don't want to be carrying around boxes of badly sealed poo poo?

Fluo posted:

Because Postmen clearly don't want to be carrying around boxes of badly sealed poo poo?

TinTower posted:

You clearly haven't been watching Love for Sale.

Lord Twisted posted:

Privatising the land registry. Aka one of the few government agencies to make a consistent profit.

LOL.

LOOOOOOOOOL.

Spangly A posted:

"A British court somehow found someone not guilty of Libel for once, but now that they're not in a position to respond because of extraneous legal matters I will make defamatory remarks and insinuate their guilt out of spite"

We all already knew he needed a good solid brick to the face but what a loving wanker.

Zephro posted:

That article does suggest the whole thing was a clusterfuck of rarely-seen proportions, though. Is it even legal for a judge to preside over a case when she's friends with the participants?

Zephro posted:

That article does suggest the whole thing was a clusterfuck of rarely-seen proportions, though. Is it even legal for a judge to preside over a case when she's friends with the participants?

SybilVimes posted:

As I remember it, yes, it's perfectly legal, a judge can recuse him/herself if they feel they have a conflict of interest, and either side could file an appeal based on their feeling that there was a conflict of interest, it would then be up to another judge to decide if there was, or was not, and whether that is sufficient to consider the judge's verdict compromised. But there's no inherent illegality of any bias by the judge.

Zephro posted:

That's interesting. Feels like a much more lax standard than you'd get in many other professional occupations, though I don't know that for sure.

Zephro posted:

That's interesting. Feels like a much more lax standard than you'd get in many other professional occupations, though I don't know that for sure.

quote:

Before 2001, the US did not have a problem with rape and sexual assault inside its prisons. That was not because nobody was raped, of course. It was because there had never been a research study large enough and dependable enough to produce any measure of the nature and size of the problem. Federal and state authorities could, therefore, simply avert their gaze and insist there was no need for action.

The complacency was shattered with the publication of a detailed report by Human Rights Watch entitled No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons. Built upon hundreds of first-hand interviews, the book-length report explained in gut-wrenching detail the realities of prison rape: from one-on-one night-time cell assaults, to multiple-offender gang rapes, to the inmates who were sold to others as sex slaves. It described younger, weaker, more psychologically vulnerable inmates being coerced into sexual activity, under threat of physical violence. Most damningly, the report alleged that much of this was being tacitly condoned and sometimes apparently approved by prison staff and management, who considered it a routine part of prison life and saw no need to intervene.

No Escape was shocking enough to shake America out of its indifference. Two years later, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act 2003, which became the first stage in a decade-long effort to understand and address the horrors of sexual offending inside US jails – a mission that is still far from complete.

In 2014, Britain does not have a problem with rape and sexual assaults within our prisons. The Ministry of Justice appears determined to keep it that way. How? By seemingly doing everything in its power to block a research programme covering the issue, by the Commission on Sex in Prison. This was set up by the Howard League for Penal Reform in June 2012, at a time when Kenneth Clarke was minister.

Under the notoriously draconian stewardship of Chris Grayling, researchers have now been banned from approaching prison governors or serving prisoners, including those out on licence. This means no prisoner serving a life or indeterminate sentence is permitted to participate in the research and for those on licence, even volunteering to give evidence could be regarded as a breach of conditions, which could be punishable by a recall to prison.

The explanations offered for the obstruction range from the asinine to the bizarre. Grayling, we are told, is in something of a huff with "leftwing pressure groups" such as the Howard League – which has recently coordinated effective campaigns against restrictions on parcels containing such dangerous contraband as clean underwear, children's home-made birthday cards and books. Blocking this important research may be an act of petty retaliation.

Also mooted is the justice secretary's well-established discomfort with the whole issue of sex behind bars, including the provision of condoms on request through prison health dispensaries. The remit of the Commission on Sex in Prison (as the name suggests) goes beyond coercion and violence, and investigates other crucial health and welfare-related issues.

So far, the response from the Ministry of Justice to these allegations, first raised by the website politics.co.uk and fleshed out in the Independent newspaper, has been a strict refusal to comment. Grayling has urgent questions to answer: what cooperation with the commission has been offered, and what has been withdrawn? On what basis? What alternative steps will the government take to quantify and address sexual abuse within prisons?

It is a dreadful indictment of our society and culture that prison rape is considered an inconvenience to politicians, a punchline for comedians or, worst of all, as just deserts for criminals. Whenever a high-profile trial results in a prison sentence, a significant section of the population seems to take sadistic glee in imagining a male offender being raped in prison. Often the comments and jokes seem almost automated and thoughtless, like saying "bless you" after a sneeze. One hopes such remarks are based more on ignorance than malice. That said, it would be harsh to condemn ill-informed members of the public for their ignorance, when it would appear that the ignorance of the government and the secretary of state is entirely avoidable.

quote:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/britain-land-of-impunity-fat-cats-politicians?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

Welcome to Britain, the new land of impunity

Monday 5 May 2014

What do you have to do to fall out of favour with this government? Last month, the security company G4S was quietly rehabilitated. It had been banned in August 2013 from bidding for government contracts after charging the state for tagging 3,000 phantom criminals. Those who had died before it started monitoring them presented a particularly low escape risk. G4S was obliged to pay £109m back to the government.

Eight months later, and before an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office has concluded, back it bounces seeking more government business. Never mind that it almost scuppered the Olympics; never mind Jimmy Mubenga, an asylum seeker who died in 2010 after being "restrained" by G4S guards, or Gareth Myatt, a 15-year-old who died while being held down at a secure training centre in 2004; never mind the scandals at Oakwood, a giant prison it runs. G4S, described by MPs as one of a handful of "privately owned public monopolies", is crucial to the government's attempts to outsource almost everything. So it cannot be allowed to fail.

Was it ever banned at all? Six days after the moratorium was lifted, G4S won a contract to run HMRC services. A fortnight later it was chosen as one of the companies that will run the government's Help to Work scheme. How did it win these contracts if in the preceding months it wasn't allowed to bid?

When I first worked in Brazil in the late 1980s, the country was widely described as o pais da impunidade – the land of impunity. What this meant was that there were no political consequences. Politicians, officials and contractors could be exposed for the most flagrant corruption, but they remained in post. The worst that happened was early retirement with a fat pension and the proceeds of their villainy safely stashed offshore. It is beginning to look a bit like that here. This is not to suggest that the people or companies I name in this article are crooked or corrupt; it is to suggest that the political class no longer seems to care about failure.

The failure works both ways, of course. As Polly Toynbee has shown, the Help to Work pilot projects, which G4S will run, reveal that it is a complete waste of time and money. Yet the government has decided to go ahead anyway, subjecting the jobless to yet more humiliation and pointlessness. Contrast the boundless forgiveness of G4S to the endless castigation for being unemployed.

A record of failure reflects the environment in which such companies are hired: one in which ministers launch improbable schemes then look the other way when they go wrong. G4S had to pay back so much money for the phantom criminals it wasn't monitoring because it had been doing it for eight years, and no one in government had bothered to check. There is no such thing as failure any more, just lessons to be learnt.

Accountability has always been weak in the UK, but under this government you must make spectacular efforts to lose your post. At the Leveson inquiry in May 2012, the relationship between the then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and the Murdoch empire that he was supposed to be regulating was exposed in gory detail. He was meant to be deciding impartially whether to allow the empire to take over the broadcaster BSkyB, but was secretly exchanging gleeful messages with James Murdoch and his staff.

We all knew what it meant. The emails, the Guardian observed, were likely to "sever the slim thread connecting Hunt to his cabinet job". "After this he's toast … it's over for Hunt," wrote Tom Watson MP. Ed Miliband said: "He cannot stay in his post. And if he refuses to resign, the prime minister must show some leadership and fire him." We waited. Hunt remained culture secretary for another four months, then he was promoted to secretary of state for health.

On 2 September 2012, the Guardian revealed that the housing minister, Grant Shapps, had founded a business that "creates web pages by spinning and scraping content from other sites to attract advertising" – a process that looks to me like automated plagiarism. He had been promoting it under the false name of Michael Green, who claimed to be an internet marketing guru. Again it looked fatal. Two days later, in the same reshuffle that elevated Hunt, he was upgraded to Conservative party chairman.

A real Mr Green – Stephen, this time – was ennobled by David Cameron and appointed, democratically of course, as minister for trade and investment. In July 2012, a US Senate committee reported that while Lord Green was chief executive and chairman of HSBC, the bank's compliance culture was "pervasively polluted". Its branches had "actively circumvented US safeguards … designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords and rogue regimes".

Billions of dollars from Mexican drug barons, from Iran and from "obviously suspicious" travellers' cheques "benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business" sluiced through its tills. Out went dollars and financial services to banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh linked to the financing of terrorists. The Guardian reported that HSBC "continued to operate hundreds of accounts with suspected links to Mexican drug cartels, even after Green and fellow executives were told by regulators that HSBC was one of the worst banks for money laundering."

Green refused to answer questions and sat tight. He remained in post for another 17 months, until he gracefully retired in December 2013.

After it had become obvious to almost everyone that it was impossible for them to remain in the cabinet, Cameron refused to sack either Liam Fox or Maria Miller. Forgiveness and redemption by all means, but they are not unconditional: without contrition or even acknowledgement that wrong has been done, there is no difference between giving people a second chance and engaging in an almighty cover-up.

There has seldom, in the democratic era, been a better time to thrive by appeasing wealth and power, or to fail by sticking to your principles. Politicians who twist and turn on behalf of business are immune to attack. Those who resist are excoriated.

Here's where a culture of impossible schemes and feeble accountability leads: to cases like that of Mark Wood, a highly vulnerable man who had his benefits cut after being wrongly assessed by the outsourcing company Atos Healthcare as fit for work, and starved to death – while those who run such companies retire with millions. Impunity for the rich; misery for the poor.

The Donut posted:

So...when does the revolution start?

The Donut posted:

So...when does the revolution start?

quote:

"We don't want to make inroads into the core of the estate," he said.

"And we don't want to have to evict tenanted farmers and other tenants and what have you from their houses so we can sell them."