ChristopherWhite.info

The online version of a piece by Martin Rees for the Guardian’s science course series:

“We are each made up of between 1028 and 1029 atoms. […] More than 1078 atoms lie within range of our telescope.”

So there’s only about 1.05 people in the visible universe, and bugger all else.

(In a recent post, which I’ve since misplaced, I criticised Madeleine Bunting for writing C02 rather than CO2, and took some flak myself for not being entirely accurate either, and not writing CO₂. In that case the lack of a subscript doesn’t obscure understading — not much anyway; it’s reasonably obvious we’re talking about a molecule made of one carbon atom and two oxygen. But in Rees’s article, having lost the superscript on 10²⁸ and so on makes it a complete nonsense.)

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The Guardian reports, under the hysterical headline “Tesco nears complete conquest of UK”, that the supermarket chain’s purchases of stores on a couple Scottish islands leaves the Harrogate postal-code area as the only part of the UK without a store.

They write:

The retailer has faced accusations that it has a near monopoly of the UK grocery market, with protest groups forming across the country.

But such accusations are mainly nonsense.

Yes, there’s a Tesco in my postal-code area. However the nearest one is 5.63 miles away from me. In the same radius there are, among others:

• 9 Co-ops
• 5 Sainsburys
• 2 ASDAs
• 1 each of Morrisons, Somerfield and Iceland.

And that’s clearly not a monopoly.

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This has just made me very happy.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris in two hours of discussion on religion.

Video available here. DVD out on monday, with proceeds going to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust.

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Detectives estimated that the pet, which was shot dead by a police marksman after the attack, weighed up to 63kg (10st).

I can’t imagine any British copper going, “Yeah, I reckon he weighed about 63 kilos.”

It’s not just because it’s metric: it’s just too damn precise.

More likely that he guessed the weight of the latest killer dog at 10st, which the Guardian has converted into kilograms for the benefit of, er, nobody, and then back again.

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Yesterday evening I picked up a copy of the current New Statesman to read on the train home from London, and found a great example of something that’s been annoying me for a while.

Page 42 of the magazine is home to this piece by Richard Dawkins (pbuh). Its standfirst contains the expression “son of God”, complete with those distancing quote marks that are entirely appropriate to a contentious and not universally accepted claim.

Shame, then, that just four pages earlier the same treatment wasn’t given to a reference to Mohammed as a “Prophet”, which is presented as uncontested fact.

Sure, a “proliferation” of quote marks can become (as my old tutor put it) “very tedious” (or just ridiculous, like “this”), but isn’t presenting a point of view as fact something that journalism is never supposed to do?

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All it took was 90 days and a threat of legal action.

Freelancing is great.

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In Tom Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six, some environmentalists (with the emphasis very much on “mentalists”) try to wipe out half the Earth’s population for the benefit of the planet.

It’s probably only a short step to that from this.

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Oh dear. As if pillocks like Loose Change director Tim Sparke weren’t bad enough, take a look at this:

I have spent over 13 years trying to show the scientific community what I have found, but they refuse to listen. During this same time, everyone who has no emotional or financial ties to the idea that Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, have all turned into healthy skeptics after being exposed to what I have discovered. This film’s goal is to do the same on a global scale.

But wait:

Are you interested in becoming Executive Producer of a documentary film that already has two distributors with Oscar-winning documentaries interested in a rough cut? Then go to our investment wepage for details.

Ah. It’s that kind of scam.

(Via.)

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Blimey. You go away for two weeks and the internet gets shat on (one more time).

To recap for anyone (else) who has been living under a rock: Uzbek billionaire and owner of a fat slice of the Arsenal pie Alisher Usmanov announces that he wants to increase his stake to 25%. Craig Murray, the UK’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan — who knows a thing or two about Usmanov — suggests on his blog that he’s a horrific, violent criminal. Usmanov takes exception to this, and has his lawyers Shillings send various threatening letters to Murray’s web host, Fasthosts, who duly pull down Murray’s site, Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads site, which had repeated Murray’s allegations, and caused collateral damage to others sub-letting server space, notably Boris Johnson.

The blogosphere, unprecedentedly united, rightly agreed that this wasn’t on.

Probably nobody is entirely shocked at the actions of Usmanov or of Schillings. It is, after all, a fairly natural thing for both the oligarch and a firm of libel lawyers to do. Fasthosts on the other hand have capitulated far too easily — and yet who can blame them when the mainstream media act in exactly the same way?

The current Private Eye — a periodical all too familiar with libel writs — has two stories on Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz. Two months ago Cambridge University Press pulped the book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, which repeats claims by the US treasury that his charity funded terrorism. Mahfouz insists this is a defamatory statement on the grounds that he wasn’t involved in running the charity.

The Eye reports that over the summer the Spectator was to run a piece about Mahfouz by Brendan O’Neill, which

‘…listed all the pulped titles and concluded that this Saudi billionaire is “almost single-handedly determining what we Brits may read and hear about contemporary terrorism”. One thing Brits may not read, alas, is O’Neill’s piece: it too was spiked at the last moment!’

And that two weeks ago Nick Cohen wrote his Observer column about Mahfouz, only to have it spiked after “a fit of legal collywobbles”.

It’s an editor’s job to report on people like Mahfouz — or like Usmanov. If they’re not defending their right to publish journalism in the public interest, it’s too much to expect Fasthosts to do so. (Though given the nature of the allegations it’s not a massive conceptual leap to imagine that the Observer and Spectator were more concerned about getting Jihaded in the face than being sued.)

The judges aren’t helping either. The other story in the Eye tells how Mahfouz has brought a defamation claim against Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld over her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How To Stop It. Now, in British libel law, to bring an action in the UK there has to be a publication in the UK (this unfortunately includes websites hosted on US servers but viewable here). Funding Evil was published by an American house, with no British edition or promotion in this country, yet Mr Justice Eady ruled that the matter can be dealt with in London’s courts because 23 people imported the book via Amazon, and, because Ehrenfeld refused to acknowledge UK jurisdiction, then ruled in favour of Mahfouz by default. (It’s a shame that Ehrenfeld is trying to get this dealt with in an American court: on appeal in the UK it seems likely either that she’d get the case thrown out or probably win.)

The other questionable case law is one which is directly relevant to this business with Usmanov. Godfrey v Demon, in which it was established that web hosts are liable for defamatory material on their servers, is detailed by the Ministry of Truth. This is now used as a basis for most libel claims on the internet, even though it’s a very specific type of case and entirely different circumstances to Murray and Usmanov.

The defamatory material was an anonymous comment on a discussion board. The claimant had little choice but to go to Demon, as he couldn’t possibly have approached the individual responsible for the post directly. In this instance — and, arguably, where a blogger is using a service such as Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger — the ISP can reasonably be described as the “publisher”. But this manifestly isn’t the case with Murray, or with most bloggers (myself included), running a site that they are almost exclusively responsible for and in their own name — if not directly then easily available by sticking the domain name in WhoIs. In cases such as this, web hosts play a role more like that fulfilled by printers in traditional media, and while printers can be sued (along with the writer, editor, publisher, distributor and distributor’s cat) they almost never are. Ideally in such instances — where a writer is running his own site under his own name — the web hosts would be immune.

Among the other issues is that Schillings were simply using the threat of legal action to shut down debate without ever intending to use it. Many other bloggers pointed out that exactly the same allegations were made in Murray’s book, Murder in Samarkand, and its publishers have gone curiously unchallenged. And then:

Laura Tyler, of Schillings, said they did not intend to sue Murray directly because they did not want to give him a platform to express his views.

This is tantamount to admitting that they don’t really intend to sue anyone about Murray’s allegations at all, given that any attempt to prove them true would necessarily involve Murray testifying. By using threats in the way that they have, they’re forcing non-publication where a court wouldn’t — rulings against “prior restraint” mean that judges are extremely unlikely to grant an injunction preventing publication of defamatory material. (Interestingly, had it ever gone to court Murray might not have been ordered to take down his posts entirely either. After Loutchansky v Times Newspapers in 2001, newspapers were advised to attach a notice to potentially defamatory archive material on the internet, warning against treating it as the truth.) It might be an idea to prevent law firms contacting publishers, writers etc directly, making them go through a court instead, so that if they threaten to sue they have to go through with it — preventing the likes of Usmanov and Schillings using their power and money to scare people into not publishing.

The final major difference between blogs and the traditional media — largely even online — is that it’s the simplest thing in the world to make a correction to a defamatory blog post: via the comments. Since any false statements are so easily remedied, there may be a case for having material published on blogs dealt with as slander rather than libel. Libel suits automatically assume damage to the reputation of the claimant, whereas slander isn’t actionable per se and damage to reputation must be proven. (Hence we have a thoroughly stupid discord between published and spoken defamatory statements even in private communications. If I say to you in person that, for example, George Bush had sex with a goat, he would have to prove damage to his reputation. If I write it to you in a letter — or an email — damage is assumed.) Given the ease with which corrections can be made, it seems entirely reasonable that someone who feels he has been defamed should only be able to bring an action if he can show that he’s suffered damage to his reputation.

Probably unlike many of the other bloggers who have written about this, and certainly unlike Dr Ehrenfeld, I reckon English libel law — in print – strikes a good balance between press freedom and protection of reputation. Via the Reynolds Public Interest Defence, provided that the press practice practice “responsible journalism” and the story is the public interest, a newspaper will win a libel case even if the allegations prove to be untrue. Last year’s Jameel v Wall Street Journal (another Saudi accused of funding terrorism) case in the House of Lords liberalised this even further, so newspapers aren’t hamstrung by libel laws and can make honest mistakes without fear of being sued.

But on the net they’re a complete mess, a mass of made-up-on-the-spot rulings and bad case law, and need reforming badly. (Boris? Private Members’ Bill?) That’s likely to be at best a long time coming, and would be relying on others rather than helping ourselves. Perhaps the best thing that bloggers could do is institute some sort of Libel Insurance.

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I’ve been trying my utmost not to swear on this blog — at least not regularly. But it’s taking every iota of restraint not to resort to likening Neil Clark to a moist part of the female anatomy.

This vicious piece he’s written for Comment Is Free can be summed up as: “We should let Iraqis who have worked with the British Army be killed when we leave, because they deserve it.”

Scumbag.

CIF perhaps unsurprisingly turned off comments on that post after three hours rather than the usual three days, but it was still enough time for some great responses, like this from Daniel Davies:

Every bone in my body wants to bluntly invite Neil to consider the implications of his implied policy - that the most violent and nationalistic element of society should be given free reign to dish out rough justice to people they regard as traitors - for the long term survival of his own political party. But I think that would probably be crossing a line in terms of the talk policy so I’ll just note that there is an inconsistency here.

Let’s be clear here, expanding on Conor’s point above. There is a clear duty of any occupying power to ensure security for the population under occupation. It’s in the Geneva Convention. To intentionally abandon people who you expect to be killed by deaths squads is by that token a war crime. That’s why the official policy of the UK government is not to commit this war crime but to instead offer silly and insufficiently generous asylum slots. That’s bad enough.

Neil Clark, on the other hand, is actually saying that the war crime is the correct thing to do. That’s crazy. How can it possibly be part of any sensible anti-war position to say that an occupying force has no obligation to stop people being murdered? And why would anyone, even if they did regard the Iraqi insurgency as “true heroes”, think that this true heroism was best expressed by murdering whole families? Translators, cooks and mechanics simply aren’t “quislings” and no sane resistance movement has ever acted as if they were.

And this from the ever-wise Conor Foley:

Since Clark rests part of his incitement to murder on international law (and clearly the terms in which he has described these civilian staff as ‘legitimate targets’ does constitute such an incitment), it is worth explaining one point here.

There is an overwelming consensus that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. However, the notion that people ‘collaborating with the occupation’ are war criminals is rubbish. On the contrary, the statute of the International Criminal Court, which is largely based on the Geneva Conventions, specifically states that what Clark is advocating is a war crime. You can find the link here:
http://www.icc-cpi.int/about.html

It is worth reading Article 8 on war crimes. Amongst the crimes that it lists are:

‘Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities’.

The second half of that sentence was specifically written to protect those whom Clark calls ‘collaborators’. He goes on to argue against a basic principle of human rights law (enshrined in the UN Convention against Torture, the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights) that people fleeing persecution should be denied sanctuary in Britain, so we can assume that his commitment to international law is fairly selective.

What is more interesting is whether or not this article, through its clear incitment to people to commit war crimes (his repeated refusal to distinguish between military combatants and civilians), would actually make Clark himself liable to criminal prosecution. The Rwanda radio case springs to mind and war crimes have universal jurisdiction. I think that the police and attorney general might want to have a word here.

I hope that you have a sleepless night Clark. This article brought back some very painful memories for me.

( And I really hope — though doubt — that the “SimonJ” who had a comment deleted by the moderators is the Guardian’s own Mr Jenkins.)

Yet it’s heartening, particularly given my previous post, that the best part of 200 commenters all agree that Clark is a complete twat. Damn. Knew I wouldn’t be able to keep that up.

Dan Hardie has the lastest update on MPs’ responses here, and there is a rather clever video by Tim Ireland here.

UPDATE 12/8/07

To clarify, I do not myself think Neil Clark should go to prison. I do however think he’s a world-class turd.

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