Without the state

Upcoming Fairs and Shows

Saturday Aug 3rd	Bath - Craft in the Crypt - St Michael’s Church, Broad Street, Bath BA1 5LJ	9.00 am – 4.00 pm
Saturday Aug 9th Sunday Aug 10th	Wiltshire Game and Country Fair – Bowood, Wiltshire	10.00 am – 6.00pm
Saturday Aug 16th	Chipping Norton – Town Hall	10.00 am – 4.00 pm
Sunday Aug 24th	Alton Art Market – High Street CANCELLED	9.00 am – 2.00 pm

Public Health and Private Choice - revisited

Some time ago I posted on this issue, referring as part of that to Mary Mallon, otherwise known as 'Typhoid Mary'. At the time, I thought that her case was unique, but sadly it seems I was wrong.

...a BBC investigation has revealed that nearly 50 women were locked in an isolation ward in a mental asylum in Surrey - not because they had a mental illness - but because they carried typhoid and were deemed a public health risk.

They were held at Long Grove Hospital - a mental asylum in Surrey - which started admitting carriers of typhoid as early as 1907 and continued through the 1940s and 1950s. Once admitted, those women never left.

One former nurse says that many of those women - admitted sane - deteriorated mentally, driven mad by the conditions they lived in. Others remained in full possession of their senses, despite enduring conditions such as solitary isolation.

Appalling as this was of course, the horrific treatment of child migrants to Australia was probably even worse, involving perhaps thousands of innocent children, sometimes forcibly removed from their parents, and sent to Australia 'for a new start'', only to be physically and sexually abused.

Australia's Roman Catholic Church publicly apologised on Thursday [2001] to British and Maltese child migrants who suffered abuse including rape, whippings and slave labour in religious institutions.

The apology was delivered at a parliamentary inquiry into child migration.

Two church bodies said the programme, in which more than 1,000 British and 310 Maltese children were sent to Australian Catholic schools between the late 1930s and 1960s, resulted in "suffering and dislocation".

Many children were raped, whipped, stripped of their names and forced to scramble for food thrown on the floor. Some children were also made to do hard labour, including construction work, at some schools.

Abuse wasn't limited to the Roman Catholic Church of course. More than 130,000 children were 'exported', over a period of more than 100 years and the practice was only stopped in 1967.

The child migration programme left thousands of people with no knowledge of their background and family history. Many children left in homes, due to broken marriages or family pressures, were shipped overseas.

The reasons behind the scheme were practical. It helped populate the Commonwealth with white children and it relieved Britain of the burden of looking after them. At the time the organisations involved also thought that the children were likely to have a better life abroad.

Classified as orphans, although the majority were not, many children were often sent away without the knowledge of parents or relatives, and were denied details of their family. Brothers and sisters were separated and some children faced appalling conditions in large institutions or were forced to work for long hours and little pay.

Nanny, most emphatically, does not know best.

links for 2008-07-29

• Shorpy :: History in HD | Hi-Res Historical Photos
  (tags: archive art blog photography history photos vintage photo blogging)

links for 2008-07-25

• SimpleViewer Download
  SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewing application.
  (tags: design flash photography free software photo gallery webdesign blog blogging blogs)

No saggy pants in Chicago!

It's the law: No sagging pants in Chicago suburb.

Be careful if you have saggy pants in the south Chicago suburb of Lynwood. Village leaders have passed an ordinance that would levy $25 fines against anyone showing three inches or more of their underwear in public.

links for 2008-07-23

• Digital Artists' Handbook
  (tags: art artists arts design digital community opensource handbook reference tools technology digitalart)
• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
  (tags: art arts visualization cloud design generator typography tools)

The pernicious growth of the state

Why a Critique of the Totalitarian Humanist State is Essential to a Genuine Radicalism

As all of this supposed liberation and breakdown of oppressive social structures has occurred, the state has become increasingly ruthless and pernicious in its expression. For instance, the US Constitution allows for the prosecution of only three federal crimes-treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are over 3,000 federal crimes and forty percent of these have been created since 1970.  Prior to the mid-1980s, drugs were illegal, with drug crimes being treated in a manner comparable to serious property offenses like burglarly or grand larceny. Today, even the most minor players in drug offenses are frequently sentenced to greater periods of incarceration than even some who commit violent crimes. Asset forfeiture laws were originally used to go after the holdings of members of drug trafficking cartels. Today, such laws apply to 140 other types of “crimes”. The US prison population has increased a dozen times over since the 1960s. Paramilitary policing was a new phenomenom in the 1970s, and originally intended as a means of dealing with either civil unrest or particularly difficult matters of law enforcement like hostage situations. Today, paramilitary policing is normal, even for routine police work, like execution of a search warrant. Even at the height of the Nixon era, the idea that a president would claim the right to unilaterally suspend habeus corpus and imprison suspects indefinitely in secret prisons without trial would have been considered absurd.

Upcoming Fairs and Shows

Sunday Jul 20th	Lacock, Wiltshire - Village Hall	11.00 am onwards
Sunday Jul 27th	Alton Art Market – High Street, Alton, Hampshire	9.00 am – 2.00 pm
Saturday Aug 3rd	Bath - Craft in the Crypt - St Michael’s Church, Broad Street, Bath BA1 5LJ	9.00 am – 4.00 pm
Saturday Aug 9th Sunday Aug 10th	Wiltshire Game and Country Fair – Bowood, Wiltshire	10.00 am – 6.00pm
Saturday Aug 16th	Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire – Town Hall	10.00 am – 4.00 pm

Big Brother - privatised

I've never come across the idea of a Software Kill Switch before and I hope I never do again - it really is appalling:

One vendor I deal with daily did exactly that to me this week. I had a fully legitimate copy of their software with all my dues paid and ducks in a row. But because I chose not to pay extra to get the newer version, which had been out for several months, they pulled the plug on me this week and won't let me use my legally purchased software unless I upgrade to the newest version. They say this is because the copy I'm using "is not the latest version."

Unicorns in the Garden

An elegant and viciously polite smack down of an whining, whingeing and ignorant proponent of so-called 'Intelligent Design' (Not much intelligence in its proponents from this exchange...)

An example of the brilliance that is Professor Lenski:

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then - as some of your acolytes have suggested - you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren't very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it's not that we claim to have glimpsed "a unicorn in the garden" - we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

Another, slightly less entertaining, but equally stupid example here, in which the particular lawyer (that explains a lot) failed to understand a particular scientific paper because, apparently, "he thought ‘eponymous’ was the name of a particular class of bones."

[Via Crooked Timber and the comments]