Giving prostitutes a bad name

Good news from the homeland, for a change: it looks as if the government may be forced to recant on the madness of privatising the handling of prisoners.

It's telling, I think, that when I was a kid, if someone used the phrase "the prison service", they'd mean "service" as in "to one's country" - like military service, or - no, actually that's the only example I can think of where the meaning of the word is still reasonably close to what it was pre-Thatcher. Nowadays, it means "service" as in "service industry", as in "we may not create any actual output but we're no less commercial for that". Or to put it another way, "our business is modelled on the proud tradition of the world's oldest profession".

I was a firm believer in privatisation in the 80s. Unquestionably it was the right thing to do with manufacturing and mining industries, and with real services (defined as "things that I can be billed for personally, like telecoms or banking or travel"). But some "services" have a fundamentally different character. Policing, prisons, poor relief, public health, justice, fire and medical services, even politicians - these are "public services" that need to be paid for collectively, because any other system lends itself either to gross inequity, or the worst sort of corruption.

Of course corruption happens in non-privatised services too. However, it seems to me that it happens more, since the word "service" got divorced from "public" and shacked up with that slut "industry". That may be just a perception based on reporting/exposure, but if so it's a very widely shared perception.

The difference is that a service that is "public" can, in principle, be cleaned up. Given sufficient political will (read: outrage or scandal), you can appoint a new chief with the skills and determination to root out this sort of abuse. It doesn't happen often, and when it does, it doesn't generally last all that long.

But in a "service industry", the very concept of such "cleaning" makes no sense. When all incentives, both benefits and penalties, are expressed in terms of money, it follows that anything you can do to get more money is, by definition, not wrong. In these cases, moral bankruptcy isn't a failure or a collapse of anything - it's the baseline assumption of the system.

Can we?

I feel for Edward Snowden. I've been stuck in Sheremetyevo Airport too. I remember a sign (in English), on one door, that just about summed the place up: "NO TOILETS. NO REFRESHMENTS. NO INFORMATION. NO FLIGHTS."

What's truly shocking is how, although millions of people hail the man as a hero, the world's governments have closed ranks against him. Several governments in Europe could buy instant re-election right now just by offering him asylum - but none are. Russia said "you'd have to stop leaking". France and Portugal went so far as to deny landing rights to a plane carrying the president of Bolivia, on the basis that Snowden might have been on board. Even Ecuador and Venezuela have said "you'll have to get to our embassy first".

And the chances of that seem slim, since the Russians won't let him out of the airport.

So this is the New American Century, where no half-way civilised country dares stand up to the USA. In the old Soviet Union, at least a dissident could dream they had somewhere to run to. Now that little window of hope is closed. If you offend the USA - not with violence, or sedition, or treason (the indictment against Snowden lists none of these charges), but just with public embarrassment - there is nowhere. This can only be a measure of how much pressure the Americans are putting on - well, everyone.

Anyone remember Barack Obama's 2008 campaign? "Nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change", he said. "Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity." Above all else, he was the candidate who would stand up to entrenched interests in Washington and do what was right.

And this is as simple a test case as it can be. One of the few things that's unambiguously, easily and directly within his personal power - is to grant Snowden a full pardon. He doesn't need congressional ratification, he doesn't need the joint chiefs or the supreme court or even his own legal or intelligence advisors. He doesn't even need to implicate his own party, or anyone who might have ambitions to succeed him. The choice is his, and his alone.

So come on, Barack. Now's the time. You can continue to shield the establishment that has flouted your laws, or you can shield the man who tried to stop it - the man who tried to live up to your rhetoric. Is the US government going to be ruled by laws, or is it just an imperial tyranny?

That's quite a choice for your second-term legacy. Please get it right.

"Don't be evil"? Yeah, about that...

OK, so moderation as a way to deal with spam - has more drawbacks than I'd realised.

First, it means I have to log in regularly to see what's awaiting moderation. But at the same time, I don't get the joy of coming to my blog and seeing the number of comments below a post has increased - so I don't get the same joy of anticipation at visiting my own page, so I don't come here so often, and I actually log in less frequently.

Second, it does nothing to reduce the actual volume of spam that gets posted. All it means is that it doesn't get published. I still have to read the stuff.

That leaves - 'word verification'. Which, thanks to Google's incredibly backward system, I can't even apply selectively - it applies to every commenter, whether logged in or not.

When did Google abandon the fight against spam? And why? - what do they get out of encouraging spam on their own blogs? I've suspected for a while now that they tacitly encourage it in e-mail, as a way of driving more people to use Gmail (with its legendary spam-filtering mojo - basically, it makes life more difficult for their rivals). But on blogs?

Is it a way of increasing activity ("more comments, more views per post")? The Google I used to know - back in 2001, when I emailed them and they actually wrote back - would never have taken such a shortsighted view.

Someday, I hope someone will write a history of Google that can pinpoint the moment, the management decision, where they actively decided that "don't be evil" was a fine motto for a startup, but impractical for a big business. It's a lesson that might tell us something about what kinds of company structure we should encourage, and which we should hunt down with pitchforks and torches.

Spammers. Again.

Six comments! Six comments, at time of writing, on my last post!

And every single one of them was spam.

I can't begin to describe how much I loathe spammers. If you were to catch one, tie it spreadeagled in the sun, spread marmalade all over it and then drop a hornets' nest on its face, I would consider that a good start. These are the scum who wrecked Usenet, who ruined e-mail, who have forced search engines to adopt a war footing, and now have turned their attention to little personal blogs like this one.

But how can I stop them?

Captchas (those stupid wonky letters you have to type in, to prove you're a human) have past their window of usefulness. I often find myself stumbling over them, and I suspect that for particularly tough ones (such as Google's), computers may now be better at reading them than humans.

Moderation? That would require me to log in pretty much every day, to check for new comments. I would consider it pretty rude to leave comments hanging around for longer than necessary. And I'm a busy person, I don't have that kind of time nowadays.

Disable anonymous commenting? That would disqualify some of the people I most like to hear from, including most of my family.

Join Facebook? That would combine the disadvantages of having a non-public blog with the drawback of never hearing from my family again, to say nothing of the downside of having to log in regularly and the nuisance of giving untold insights on my life to one of the world's most evil companies.

The suggestion box is open. Even if you don't know what to do to keep spammers out, I'm always interested in innovative and painful ways of punishing them. Let your imagination go wild.

How many wrongs does it take to make a right?

These Americans are crazy.

President Obama has discovered a new way of fighting wars, at a fraction of the cost (in blood and money) of the usual methods. There's a lot of debate to be had about drone strikes, but of all the possible arguments they could be rehearsing, the huge majority of Americans seem to be locked into the silliest one imaginable: whether it's OK to use them on American citizens.

I went to the lengths of looking up the rights attached to US citizenship. Nowhere does it mention "the right not to be killed by the US military, if it considers it necessary or expedient to do so".

The law that stands between me and anyone who wants to kill me is the law against murder, in whatever country I happen to be in at the time. And in every country I know of, that law says nothing about the citizenship of the victim. Murdering an American is no more, and no less, illegal than murdering a Pakistani, or a Saudi, or a Briton, or even a Frenchman. Obama may be breaking Yemeni law by launching drone strikes into Yemen, but to argue that he's violating US law by aiming them at US citizens is just wrong, on at least two very fundamental levels: by applying US law to what happens in Yemen, and by differentiating between murder victims by citizenship.

Just to put things in perspective: Abraham Lincoln ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of US citizens. On US soil, no less. History does not generally condemn him for that.

Of all the things that Obama is (arguably) doing wrong, this simply isn't one.

Safari

I don't know if you've ever seen a rhino peeing. It's an imposing sight, looking much as if Moses had struck the poor beast amidships with his staff. The stream is as thick as my wrist (estimate made from a respectful distance, you understand) and it goes on for as long as it takes a two-year-old to amble around one side of the beast's enclosure - must have been at least five minutes, I think.

No wonder people treat rhinos with respect. The thing must be made of bladder. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Since it's been two years, now, that Atilla has been learning how to direct our lives, we determined that he should have a birthday treat in the shape of a visit to the zoo.

Negotiations with the in-laws were delicate, when the big day dawned cloudy and drizzling. His aunt and his grandparents actually wanted to transfer the whole celebration to something - indoorsy.

I was having none of this. The forecast said there'd be maybe the occasional light shower, but nothing sustained - and if you can't stand a spot of rain here and there, I maintained, you've no business to be living in New Zealand in the first place. So I insisted we drive to the zoo, and text them when we got there that the weather was fine and if they didn't get their arses out here right now, they'd miss the whole thing.

(I was planning to send pretty much that message whatever the weather we found when we arrived. But as it happened, it was true.)

Of course, this resulted in a certain amount of heel-kicking while we waited for the family to catch up. Fortunately, the zoo features a generous entry plaza where one can hang about and buy tat before going in. Here, Atilla demonstrated the futility of the whole exercise by succumbing to instant fascination with a fledgling sparrow, just learning to fly - exactly the kind of wildlife one might find in any garden, street or playground in the country at this time of year.

I couldn't have been prouder. While kids all around were herding their parents mercilessly towards the 'official' animals, Tilly had spotted the real thing. It was more than ten minutes before the persecuted bird vanished from view, and I was able to guide my son's steps onwards.

Tilly likes animals. All animals, pretty much indiscriminately. As a rule of thumb, however, the larger the animal, the more respect it gets. Birds and cats can claim his attention if they come within a few metres; dogs are worth crossing the street for (although he still demands to be held off the ground in their presence, apparently not trusting these bouncy, waggly creatures); and anything donkey-sized or larger demands a full-length pilgrimage to inspect at length.

So it was no surprise when, on entering the premises, I found myself gravitating rapidly towards the 'Plainswalk' experience, which takes one past zebras, giraffes and ostriches.

"Bezra". "Rahsh". "Ostrish". He was delighted with these elegant creatures, until he noticed the chickens that, for some reason, Auckland Zoo houses with them. I'm not sure why chickens can trump larger animals, but he insisted on keeping a large black-and-white cockerel in view until we were past the first enclosure, and on to the rhinos and springboks.

Downstream of the incontinent rhino, we found flamingos. But these beautiful creatures claimed our attention for only minutes. As I was holding Tilly up to view them, he happened to glance ahead.

"El", he breathed, awestruck.

"Elli", he gasped.

"Elfi", he insisted breathlessly.

He'd seen Burma.

Auckland Zoo's sole remaining elephant is actually quite a small specimen - I think, if I stood beside her, I could put my hand on her back without even standing on tiptoes. But I didn't get to test that theory on this trip. And Tilly was captivated.

Here at last was a chance to pin him down in one spot while the family caught up. From that point on, I was happy for the in-laws to take their turn at guiding his experience. We'll gloss over the rest of the visit (apparently the seals were also a big hit, but I wasn't with him at that point). But the day was a success.

"Should we buy a season ticket?" Susan asked as we left. It's a discussion we had last time we went. Season tickets to the zoo are apparently quite the thing, for parents of young children.

"Only if it's transferrable between adults."

Too long in the dark

Polly Churchill is worried. She's stuck in London in 1940, and the handy time-travel doohickeys that are supposed to take her back to the mid-21st century aren't working. She's afraid she, or her friends, may have changed the space-time continuum and caused the Allies to lose World War Two.

(I am indebted to TV Tropes for giving me a piece of terminology to understand this phenomenon: Godwin's Law of Time Travel - "As the amount of time-traveling you do increases, the probability of Hitler winning World War II approaches one." [1])

Polly is, of course, being silly. As she would have known if she'd read To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book: historians can't change the past like that, even if they try. The past remains the past, even when you're in it. Changes can be propagated forward, only if they're so insignificant that nobody from your own time would have noticed them - you can, for instance, place some newspaper ads in the 1940s, which may then be spotted by your colleagues 120 years later. But you can't change the course of known history.

Polly may be excused for not knowing this - she's only a postgrad student. For James Dunworthy, however - the head of time travel research in Oxford throughout the 2060s - there's no excuse. Why, after two full-length novels and several short stories, he should still be propounding this nonsense about "the continuum breaking down" is beyond me.

This train of thought somewhat mars my enjoyment of Connie Willis's marathon opus, Blackout/All Clear. Which is a shame, because there's a really good book in here somewhere. (Only one, mind you. The 'two volumes' thing is quite unnecessary.)

Connie Willis does her usual stellar job of establishing sympathetic central characters, a strong supporting cast, and the fretful, fatigued atmosphere of wartime Britain. She's done a lot of research, and it shows. She has, however, left some irritating holes in her blanket of authenticity. For instance, her British characters consistently give dates in the modern American format (e.g. "May fourth", rather than "the fourth of May" or even "May the fourth", either of which would be more natural).

Willis wanted to write a book about the everyday heroism of ordinary people that won the war:

about Dunkirk and ration books and D-Day and V-1 rockets, about tube shelters and Bletchley Park and gas masks and stirrup pumps and Christmas pantomimes and cows and crossword puzzles and the deception campaign. And mostly the book's about all the people who "did their bit" to save the world from Hitler...

And at that, she's done well. Her account of wartime Britain is detailed, sympathetic and absorbing. If viewed as a collection of narratives about people who experienced evacuation, blackouts, shelters, rationing, Dunkirk, the Blitz, the V1s, and the daily expectation of loss and grief - it's a masterpiece. Where it falls down is in the time-travel narrative that ties these little human-interest stories into a coherent tale. While that story has its high points (mostly centred around St Paul's Cathedral), it's much, much too drawn-out to be sustained by its basic premises.

The result is that, when I'd finished reading, not only were my withers (quite sincerely) wrung by the prolonged hardship endured by my forebears, but I felt I'd accomplished no mean feat of endurance of my own. Which feels like an unworthy thought, but that's the price of honesty.

Overall rating: B-. Good, but should have been better.

[1] Incidentally, if anyone with a TV Tropes login is reading this: the above-linked page, at the time of writing, incorrectly states that events in To Say Nothing of the Dog cause the Nazis to win the war. This is completely untrue - that fear is raised at one point, but the whole point of the book is to demonstrate just how resilient history is - the ridiculous lengths it can go to, if necessary, to make sure it turns out right.