O L D N O T E S
April 24, 2007
How Australian Authorities Respond to Potential TerroristsFrom the ever-excellent Bruce Schneier:
Watch the video of how the Australian authorities react when someone -- dressed either as an American or Arab tourist -- films the Sydney Harbor Bridge and a nuclear reactor.
The synopsis: The Arab is intercepted within three minutes both times, while the U.S. tourist is given instructions on how to get inside the nuclear facility.
Moral for terrorists: dress like an American.
This is fairly typical of the contributions that regularly issue from this very articulate expert on an area of concern that makes so much difference to our lives today. I recommend that you keep in touch with his website regularly.
>The E-voting Fiasco: some of the forgotten culpritsPosted on Sunday, January 28, 2007 at 12:14PM by Fergus O'Rourke in Cork, Politics, e-voting
Like most fair-minded people, I am in favour of automating the voting process, provided that it can be done without compromising secrecy or security. So far, the Irish attempt has been a monumental fiasco.The buck stops with the Taoiseach, who has been amazingly silly about it, with Martin Cullen rightly getting most of the blame.
It is often forgotten, though, that the disaster really began on 18 December 2003 when an Oireachtas committee which had been doing some good work in evaluating the system, concluded its deliberations prematurely. This was almost certainly done at the behest of Messrs Ahern and Cullen, but there was some enthusiasm demonstrated by John Cregan T.D. in particular.
(29 November 2006)
Today,"The Irish Times" joins the media consensus that the judiciary are failing to implement the legislature's wishes in regard to so-called mandatory sentences.
(Last week, on the other hand, a High Court refusal to extradite someone to the U.S. because conviction there would result in a mandatory sentence, and such sentences were in some way contrary to natural justice, met with tacit media approval.)
Maybe the judiciary do have something to answer for in regard to their response to some of the more vicious aspects of the criminal culure that have accompanied the rise of the "Celtic Tiger".
However, what is being suggested almost daily in the media is that the judiciary are defying the law, which would be outrageous if true. Of course, it is not true: even today's article records that the so-called "mandatory" sentences are not properly so-called at all.
What is really being criticised is the judges' exercise of the discretion given to them by the Oireachtas to allow a discount for e.g. an early guilty plea.
We need stronger media laws.
(15 Nov 2006)New Business Model for Advisors
The latest Doonesbury cartoon (in today's "Irish Times") looks very promising if one is able to charge by the hour.The cartoon to which I am referring is now here.It will be there tomorrow, too, and the next day
(03.11.2006)Why is that B-word so ugly ?
As the other regular reader (are you still there ?) of this Journal knows, the word "blog" does not appeal to me. "Blawg" manages to repel me more.
I have been asking myself why it is so unattractive. The provisional answer is that all words starting with "bl" tend to ugliness.
When I first started to learn French at my mother's knee, our conversation included reference to a character called Monsieur Blois. I never liked him, and it was all "down" (as the youngsters say) to his name. Blois -yuccgh ! (ATYS).
Other ugly "bl" words:
- blood
- blast
- blost (South Dublin version of "blast"
- blended (whiskey)
- blasphemy
- blame
- Blur (Oasis much better)
- blot
- bling (ATYS)
- blather ( there's a lot of that in blogs)
- blert (look it up)
- bled (except in Slovenia, apparently)
- blid (NZ version of blood)
- blare
- Blair
- blithering
- blitz
In the UK, it should have been realised for linguistic reasons that British Leyland was blighted (sorry) from the beginning. BL by itself is now a bad word.
In Ireland, junior counsel only have themselves to blame for their unpopularity: what else can we expect when we call ourselves BL (barrister-at-law) ?
There are exceptions, of course. "Blue" is the favourite colour of human beings, I was told by Prof. Dempsey in Applied Psychology last year (wasn't it ? Limerick won an All Ireland not long after).
Best exception of all is "blonde".
It seems that the blogosphere (ugh !) is not for changing its name, so maybe my best strategy is to try to fool my aesthetic sense into associating "blog" with "blonde". I am not optimistic: a Google search for "blogs and blondes" sent me (eventually) to the Fianna Fail website.
Bleeuch ! (ATYS)
Hubris to the power of "n": The U.S. seeks Lebensraum
The United States has asserted that its law governs outer space. I draw your attention to a remarkable story in The Transnational Law Blog.
(25.10.2006)Worst Value of the Week ?
The cost of a 24 year sentence:$70 million !
From LawyerCoach :
That's about what Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling is paying his lawyer, David
Petrocelli, for legal fees over the last 5 years. According to BusinessWeek,
Skilling put $23 million in a trust for legal fees. Petrocelli then got an
additional $17 million from insurers for liability coverage. And Petrocelli's
law firm, O'Melveny & Myers, is billing an additional $30 million for the rest
of the team of 12 lawyers, 5 paralegals, and at least a dozen temporary
staffers.
A colleague has recently resumed the practice of criminal law after a lapse of
more than a decade. He was obviously paying more attention than I was !