Kenya wants to suspend Mugabe

The Kenyan government thinks Robert Mugabe should be suspended from the African Union:

Kenyan PM Raila Odinga has urged the African Union to suspend Robert Mugabe from the bloc until he allows free and fair elections in Zimbabwe.

I’m in favour of this, but I can’t help thinking it would be better if he was suspended from a rope.

Religion makes genocide OK

If you brainwash people with religion, you can get them to believe that genocide is OK:

In 1966, the Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin presented, to 1,066 schoolchildren ages 8-14, the Biblical story of Joshua’s battle in Jericho:

“Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword…  And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.”

After being presented with the Joshua story, the children were asked:

“Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?”

66% of the children approved, 8% partially disapproved, and 26% totally disapproved of Joshua’s actions.

A control group of 168 children was presented with an isomorphic story about “General Lin” and a “Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago”.  7% of this group approved, 18% partially disapproved, and 75% completely disapproved of General Lin.

Which is why religion is evil and it should be illegal to proseletyze religion to anyone under 16.

Britblog roundup #176

Britblog roundup number 176 is now up at Suz Blog.

I’m doing it next week, and nominations should go to the usual address, britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.

China obsoletes aircraft carriers

China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile:

China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on a variant of the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as a component of its anti-access strategy. The missile has a range in excess of 1,500 km and, when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system, is a key component of China’s anti-access strategy to provide the PLA the capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances.

Work is believed to be ongoing to provide this missile with a sophisticated terminal guidance system. According to some reports the Mod 2 version of the CSS-5 will be comparable to the US Pershing II IRBM, employ advanced radar guidance to achieve extremely high accuracy.

An aircraft carrier is a big target, so it would probably not be too difficult to put sensors on a missile capable of guiding it to the target. And intercepting the missile in its re-entry phase would be quite difficult, because it would be going very fast. Think of it this way: it’s a lot more technologically difficult to hit a small missile doing 3000 m/s than a large ship doing 20 m/s. So assuming China and the USA are roughly technologically matched (which they will be over the next decade or two), it’ll be a lot easier for China to hit America’s carriers than for America’s carriers to defend themselves.

Where does this leave Britain? Britain is currently building 2 65,000 ton aircraft carriers, to be named Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales. These will cost £4 billion between them. But could they fall victim to a missile system much cheaper than themselves? I’m reminded of the fate of the last Royal Navy ships with these names — the last Prince of Wales was sunk in 1941 by Japanese air-launched torpedoes, and 8 days later and halfway around the world, Queen Elizabeth was sunk by Italian frogmen; in both cases the ship was defeated by vastly less expensive weapons.

Openmoko open source mobile phones

Further to the subject of open source mobile phones, you can now buy an Openmoko Neo Freerunner in the UK for £272.

(via Slashdot)

Raped girl wants abortion; religious nutters say no

An 11 year old Romanian girl was raped by her uncle and now wants an abortion. You’d think it’d be a no-brainer that she should have one, right? Well, you’d be wrong, religious groups oppose it:

Twenty pro-life Christian Orthodox groups threatened to press charges if the girl was allowed to have a termination in Romania on exceptional grounds.

Look, I’ve no problem with people having religious beliefs. But I do strongly object to those religious people who want to force their beliefs onto others. If you think abortion is worng, then don’t have one — but don’t try to make others go along with your beliefs.

Fortunately the Romanian government have more sense:

[the girl] can have an abortion in Romania on exceptional grounds, the country’s government ruled today.

New Disney Tax will annoy prospective visitors to USA

The USA is proposing a law, the Travel Promotion Act (see also here, and here) which would oblige visitors to the USA to pay a tax of $25 which would trhen be spent by Disney and other large tourism corporations to promote their attractions.

This is, of course, unlikely to promote tourism. As Henry Farrell puts it:

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result.

What this law will in fact to is harm the US toursit industry while at the same time line the pockets of large players in that industry, such as Disney — which is why it’s been dubbed the Mickey Tax or Disney Tax.

If the USA really wanted to promote tourism, they should cut back on the TSA’s security theatre and make sure that the worst excesses by custom officials resulted in the sacking and possible imprisonment of said officials.

Henley by-election

Looking at the result of the Henley by-election, the Tory share of the vote went up from 53.5% to 56.9%, the Lib Dem share also increased (from 26.0% to 27.8%), and the Labour vote collapsed from 6862 votes (14.7%) to 1066 (3.1%).

I interprete this as the public having an anti-Labour sentiment, but without any great enthusiasdm for the Tories or the Lib Dems. Cameron’s doing well not because of his own strengths but because Brown and Labour are doing badly.

In fact, the BNP got 1243 votes (3.6%), putting Labour into 4th place — Nick Griffin is more popular in Henley than Gordon Brown. It’s not surprising the BNP did well when you have senior Labour ministers like Harriet Harman apparently believing that racial discrimination against white people is OK. You might even conclude that Harman is a secret BNP mole.

Joss Stone favours piracy

Singer Joss Stone is happy for people to get illegal downloads of her work:

Joss Stone, who won a Grammy last year, loves music, but hates the the music industry. In a recent interview she said that – unlike herself – most artists are brainwashed by the industry, and she encouraged people to share her music.

After the show a reporter asked her what she thinks of piracy, and people who download her songs off the Internet. Her response baffled the reporter, as she simply told him: “I think it’s great…” There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, the reporter probably expected to hear something else from her. “Great?,” he said.

“Yeah, I love it. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why,” Stone continued. “Music should be shared. [...] The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share.”

“It’s ok, if one person buys it, it’s totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don’t care. I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show, and have a great time listening to the live show it’s totally cool. I don’t mind. I’m happy that they hear it.”

Stone is obviously a sensible woman who knows that (1) filesharing isn’t going to go away, and (2) it can be used to enhance her career.

Sir Robert Mugabe

From Jamie K:

So Uncle Bob is no longer in possession of the Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. I think it was the Major government that got him the gong, for reasons I can’t quite recall. It would be better propaganda to let him keep the bauble and to refer to him as Sir Bob on all relevant occasions. How d’you like that, Mr anti-imperialist?