Thank You For Smoking

In the upside down world of China, the government encourages you to smoke.

Daily Telegraph:

The edict, issued by officials in Hubei province in central China, threatens to fine officials who "fail to meet their targets" or are caught smoking rival brands manufactured in neighbouring provinces.

Even local schools have been issued with a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to purchase 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials, according to the local government's website.

The move, which flies in the face of national anti-smoking policies set in Beijing, is aimed at boosting tax revenues and protecting local manufacturers from outside competition from China's 100 cigarette makers.

In total, officials have been ordered to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-branded cigarettes worth £400,000.

All we need now is a higher booze consumption quota and I might start thinking about a new place to live.

Pirate Bay Sunk

The entertainment industry is hitting back at "illegal" downloading, as Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to jail:

Experts believe the ruling could be the first step towards ending illegal downloading, which has cost music and film companies billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Founders Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, along with two other employees Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström, were sentenced to a year in jail after being found guilty in a Swedish court of making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal downloading on the website Piratebay.org.

(...)

Defence lawyers had argued the men should be acquitted because The Pirate Bay does not host any copyright-protected material. Instead, it provides a forum for its users to download content through so-called torrent files. The technology allows users to transfer parts of a large file from several different users, increasing download speeds.

But the court found the defendants guilty of helping users commit copyright violations "by providing a website with ... sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and through the tracker linked to the website".

It's a shame that the "torrent" defense did not hold up. It seems here that the judge took a leap of faith, and just over-rode the technicality. It didn't help that the men called it Pirate Bay, and took pride at thumbing their noses at the corporate big shots.

We'll see what that means for downloading. Probably just another momentary interruption, before it continues on as before.

Nothing to See Here Folks! Move Along!

A major police shakedown for suspected terrorist activities for an alleged bombing campaign in Manchester, England. The Daily Telegraph:

The bomb squad has been called in at a block of flats being searched in relation to an alleged Easter bombing campaign against shopping centres in Manchester.

Homes were evacuated at lunchtime on Monday around the decrepit block at Highgate Street, in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool.

The Army Bomb Disposal Unit was called in to support officers from the North West Counter Terrorism Unit who have been conducting searches at the address since Wednesday.

So what's the problem? It takes the second last sentence of the article to get a hint.

They had intercepted information leading them to suspect a group of students from Pakistan were close to launching attacks.

Hmmm... What could this be about, that they aren't mentioning? A war by no name, perhaps?

My Fear of Hicks

Here's a creepy article from the Daily Telegraph on how the FBI believe at least 500 women were killed by trucker serial killers: (read)

US truck drivers often criss-cross huge swathes of the entire country, making it easy for homicidal ones to evade detection by police in each state, said the FBI.

"You've got a mobile crime scene. You can pick a girl up on the East Coast, kill her two states away and then dump her three states after that," an investigator told the Los Angeles Times.

To me the rural areas are the places that you need to be frightened about. There's gang warfare in Vancouver but I've never felt scared walking on the streets. The most threatened I've ever felt was at a truck stop in North Dakota. Everybody eyed us city folk when we walked in to use the bathroom and get some food. We were stared down by surly people. There were malicious smiles, and we skipped ordering food, and got the hell out of there. When we sped off we were convinced that they would have killed us if we had have stuck around.

Is Obama a Bore?

Iain Martin in the Telegraph blog, points out the obvious: Barack Obama really does go on a bit

Isn't it time for him to go home yet? It is good, in theory, that the new President of the United States is taking so much time to tour Europe. He arrived in London last Tuesday, has been to Strasbourg, Prague yesterday and now he's off to Turkey. It shows, I suppose, that he cares about the outside world and that is 'A Good Thing'. But his long stay means that we are hearing rather a lot from him, way too much in fact.

(...)

Yet, we are told that he is a great orator and in one way he certainly is. He does have a preternatural calm in the spotlight and a mastery of the cadences we associate with the notable speakers in US history - such as JFK and MLK. But beyond that, am I alone in finding him increasingly to be something of a bore?

His performance at the first press conference in London with Gordon Brown featured moments in which he sparkled - his riff on loving the Queen was a high-point. But most of the serious answers that I listened to were interminable, windy and not very impressive. At points there were pauses so long that it appeared he had simply lost his train of thought.

Read the whole thing, it'll make you laugh. It takes a sarcastic Brit to wake people up. It is very true, he relies on the cadence and tone but really does not say anything substantial. I know I'm tired of it. To me there is almost nothing worse than a bore.

"The Greatest Lie Ever Told"

The cracks in the "climate change" theory are becoming more pronounced. A Swedish sea level expert takes contention with the rising sea level scare. The Daily Telegraph reports:

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly hairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

Looks like Al Gore took Waterworld with Kevin Costner a tad too seriously and based his climate theory on it.

Las Vegas Not Attracting as Many Suckers because of the Recession

The Daily Telegraph reports that tourism is way down in Sin City:

With the delights of the casinos themselves, the draw of a variety of big name shows from Cirque de Soleil and Cher, not to mention the nearby Grand Canyon, Vegas has long been a big draw for banks and other major companies looking to reward staff by all-expenses paid excursions.

Not anymore. Spurred by a new focus on cost in light of multi-billion dollar capital injections from the US Treasury and a general desire to reduce spending on extra-curricular activities, lavish Vegas conferences are no longer all the rage.

Statistics show that some 50,000 hotel room nights have been cancelled in the last six weeks alone, at an estimated cost to the city and its surrounds of approximately $30m.

Personally, I can't stand Las Vegas. It's the most cynical place in the world. If you aren't gambling, they don't want you there. Try getting a casual drink at a nice bar. Can't be done. Drinking at a bar means you aren't at the gaming tables. Some Casinos have a few bar stools for people wanting to take a break. Even then, it's hard to lay your drink down, because there's a video poker screen there. The bartender will become surly if you stay too long. (Too long being more than one drink.) This isn't one or two places, this is every place we tried.

The hotel we stayed at had a pool. There was no shade in the whole deck area. The day we were out there it was 106F, the most intense heat I've ever experienced. You were not able to lounge by the pool, and read, like people like to do on holidays. The pool itself gives temporary relief only. The air is so dry, you can feel the water evaporate off your skin as you get out of the water. Within a minute you are bone dry, even your hair. There's no breeze, the air you breath is like an oven. It works for the hotel, because they don't want you lounging there. Ten minutes and you're done and back inside gambling.

I talk to people who regularly go there. They always say the same thing. "Oh, I just count $500 dollars as lost at the beginning, so I can just enjoy the gambling and not worry about it." I don't know how they managed to get suckers to happily expect money to vanish into thin air without getting anything for it. Suckers. Maybe people are finally wising up.

Coming to Britain: The Food Police

At first I thought this was some kind of prank, but it's not April Fools day today, and it looks like it checks out. From the Daily Telegraph:

Home cooks will also be told what size portions to prepare, taught to understand "best before" dates and urged to make more use of their freezers.

The door-to-door campaign, which starts tomorrow, will be funded by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a Government agency charged with reducing household waste. The officials will be called "food champions". However, they were dismissed last night as "food police" by critics who called the scheme an example of "excessive government nannying".

In an initial seven-week trial, eight officials will call at 24,500 homes, dishing out advice and recipes. The officials, each of whom has received a day's training, will paid up to £8.49 an hour, with a bonus for working on Saturdays.

The pilot scheme, which will cost £30,000, could be extended nationwide if it is seen as a success. If all 25 million households in the UK were visited in the same way, 8,000 officials would be required at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.

The main reason behind it is for environmental considerations. This must be what they mean by "green collar" jobs.

The project is part of WRAP's "Love Food Hate Waste" campaign, which has so far cost £4 million. The organisation says food waste has a significant environmental impact, in terms of the carbon generated to grow, transport and package items and the cost of having to dispose of them. It has calculated that stopping food waste could reduce the annual emission of carbon dioxide by 18 million tonnes - the same effect as taking one in five cars off the roads.

This is beyond satire. These are the same people who toughed out the Nazi Blitz? Another sign that Western Civilization is circling down the eco-friendly toilet.