DNA For Life

Police retain DNA of 'petty crime suspects'
Ben LeapmanLonddon TelegraphSunday November 4, 2007
Suspects accused of trivial "crimes" such as picking wild flowers or defacing coins can have their DNA stored for life on a national database, police guidelines reveal.
A report by police chiefs lists more than 5,000 offences that qualify for lifelong inclusion on the database. Anyone arrested for any of the crimes will have his or her DNA taken and stored, even if charges are later dropped or the suspect is acquitted in court.
The offences show up in employment-vetting checks for years after the event. Campaigners called the guidelines a step on the road to a "surveillance society" and said the inclusion of petty offences was accelerating the growth of the database, which already holds details on four million people.
The 210-page list of crimes, drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), includes such minor offences as "opening an incorrectly delivered packet", an offence under the 2000 Postal Services Act; "wantonly disturbing any inhabitant by any ringing doorbell", an offence under the 1847 Town Police Clauses Act, and picking wild flowers for sale, an offence under the 1968 Theft Act.
Police have categorised the crimes into three grades of severity. If an adult is convicted of a crime in the least-serious category, group C, it will show up in employment checks for the next 10 years. If the offender admits guilt and accepts a police caution, it will show up for five years. After that period, the only potential employers who will see it are those conducting "enhanced checks" on job-seekers applying to work with children.
It also remains visible to detectives during crime investigations until the individual's 100th birthday, when the record is finally deleted.
All the crimes on the list are classed as "recordable offences", in most cases because they can lead to prison.
A row broke out earlier this year after ministers proposed that the database – already the world's biggest – should be extended to include those accused of "non-recordable" offences, which include speeding and dropping litter.
Dr Helen Wallace, of the pressure group Genewatch, said the ACPO list illustrated the "unnecessary" expansion of the database which, she said, "allows the Government to restrict rights on the basis of arrest, rather than of being convicted".
The records are kept for life so that they can be matched to DNA samples. Even suspects who turn out to have been wrongfully arrested normally stay on the database.
Nationwide, one in 15 people are included on it. Police say that keeping the details of those who have never been convicted of an offence has helped to solve serious crimes including rapes and murders.

Good Thing The Mogambo Doesn't Watch CNBC

The Tremors of Economic Calamity

By: Richard Daughty
I was thrilled to see that Junior Mogambo Rangers all over the place sent me the AP news article by Anne D'Innocenzio titled "Living Paycheck to Paycheck Gets Harder", which shows how attuned their delicate Mogambo Economic Senses (MES) have become to the tremors of economic calamity (inflation in prices).
Check this out: "Gas prices hit a record nationwide average of $3.23 per gallon in late May before receding a little, though prices are expected to soar again later this year. Food costs have increased 4.5 percent over the past 12 months, partly because of higher fuel costs. Egg prices were 44 percent higher, while milk was up 21.3 percent over the past 12 months to nearly $4 a gallon, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
The result is that when prices go up faster than income, then people start suffering, as is proved by Rev. Melony Samuels, director of The BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, which is "a church-affiliated food pantry in Brooklyn." She says that, "The pantry scrambled to feed 5,000 new families over the past 12 months, up almost 70 percent from 3,000 the year before."
Up 70% in one year! And this is 5,000 new families in dire need, right there in that one place in Brooklyn! Multiply that times the number of all the places in America that are suffering the results of higher consumer prices, which is the inevitable result of the filthy, despicable Federal Reserve creating the money and credit to cause the higher prices, and this is so intolerable that what we ought to do is rise up in open rebellion and install Emperor King Mogambo (EKM) on the throne to rule with an iron fist in one hand and a tasty Taco Supreme in the other, smiting and lashing out in unrestrained fury at Congress, the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve until all the people are horrified and are begging, "Please stop punishing them, Merciful And Handsome Mogambo (MAHM), as they have been cruelly whipped and beaten for their sins, and now they must languish in the infamous Mogambo Dank Dungeon Of Dread And Despair (MDDODAD)!"
Apparently, Ms. Samuels is not particularly fond of putting such awesome power in the hands of a vicious psychopath like me, and as I make a quick note to myself to put her on the Official Mogambo Enemies List (OMEL), she instead says, "I am shocked to see such numbers, and I am really concerned that this is just the beginning of what we are going to see."
And to show how inflation in prices drags down the lowest members of the "middle class", the article says that, "In the past three months, Samuels has seen more clients in higher-paying jobs - the $35,000 range - line up for food."
And to help prove that the problem is universal, "The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which covers 23 counties in New York State, cited a 30 percent rise in visitors in the first nine months of this year, compared with 2006"; and Boston "reported a 30 percent increase from January through August over last year."
And all of this misery about the higher prices is the result of the Federal Reserve, America's horrid central bank, and to show that even The Economist magazine can be idiotic sometimes, their latest issue has the banner headline "Lessons from the credit crunch" with the subhead, "A special report on central banks and the world economy".
"Hmmm!" you think to yourself. "Central banks, eh?" So you look at the cover art showing a bunch of piggy banks standing on barren earth that is cracking apart, giving way beneath their little piggy feet, and the little pink bank in the foreground is actually starting to shatter, too! Exactly!
So you think to yourself, "Hey! These clever Economist guys understand the enormity of what is happening and how the damned central banks of the world are creating the destructive beast of inflation by creating so much money and credit, especially the loathsome Federal Reserve of the United States! So this ought to be good!"
So imagine my dismay when I got to the idiotic essay titled, "Only human", which contains this absolute gem of abject ignorance; "the Great Inflation of the late 1970s gave way to an age of low, steady inflation thanks in large part to the skill with which central banks learnt to steer policy." Hahaha!
What this clueless little putz of a "journalist" doesn't understand is that the central banks are not a success, but are a gigantic failure, and they fooled everyone for a few years with their new calculations ("lying with statistics") of inflation in prices, mostly thanks to the nefarious machinations of the despicable Michael Boskin (who is a professor of economics at Stanford, which apparently has a "hire the amoral and evil" policy as some sort of weird "diversity" program), performed at the behest and assistance of the utterly loathsome Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, who is even more amoral and more evil.
Naturally, this brings up a delicious quote from Michael Barone and immortalized by Investmentrarities.com; "America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society."
To keep from getting into a "personality conflict" thing, I will merely point out that these new ways to calculate inflation in prices were specifically designed to eliminate evidence of price inflation from the official statistics of the government and the Federal Reserve, such as not calculating M3 money supply, because growth in the money supply IS the traditional freaking definition of inflation!
Thanks to JMR Jon R., I can quote Dr. Stephen Leeb of the Complete Investor newsletter as saying that, "The Fed will embrace any inflation indicator, so long as it doesn't indicate the existence of inflation." Hahaha! Exactly! Good one!
And it is even more bizarre that The Economist magazine is so astonishingly ignorant because, despite not having heard of these blatant statistical frauds by the Federal Reserve and all the other central banks of the world, all their writers have to do is turn to the back of their own damned magazine and scan down the column where we can see consumer prices in most of the larger countries in the world!
When you do, you see that in the United States, we have 2.1% "official" inflation. In China, "official" inflation is 6.2%. In the Euro area as a whole, it is 2.1%. In the whole of South America, the best is Mexico, with a deplorable 3.8% rate of price inflation, while Venezuela has a staggering and terrifying 15.3% inflation problem!
Inflation is roaring everywhere! Central banks are a huge, huge, HUGE failure!
If you want to see how well this works when left to fester like a big old zit on the end of my bulbous nose, oozing yellow and green pus until everything is all gangrenous and diseased, then Zimbabwe is the place for you, as we read the latest email report from Cathy Buckle, who lives there.
She writes, "Earlier in the week the official inflation rate was announced to be 7,892%. With virtually no food to buy in the shops, it's impossible to try and understand just exactly how the food part of the inflation calculation is made. However it's done, it is a world away from what's happening on the ground. When you've gone without a basic household product for three months or more, you grab it when you see it and just hope you've got enough money to pay for it. This week it was margarine. The last time this was openly on sale, it had been $100,000. On Monday a friend said she'd seen margarine, but it was $400,000 for a 500g pack. By Tuesday it was gone. On Wednesday it was back, same brand, same size, but the price had gone up to $620,000. By Friday there were only four or five packets left on the shelf, and the price had gone up again - this time to 720 thousand dollars.
As a result, the average lifespan of a man in Zimbabwe has now dropped from 62 to 35 years. How do you like inflation now?

Nicely Said.................

"On the market of a capitalistic society, the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced." -Ludwig von Mises

The EU wants To help Mugabe Destroy More People And Economies

Few events are more depressing than meetings about Zimbabwe
Except, perhaps, reading about the EU's total spinelessness with regards to its own supposed rules of political engagement. It is now official: after all the humming and ha-ing and even harrumphing, the EU under its Portuguese presidency is inviting President Mugabe, the man who destroyed one of the most successful countries in Africa and either murdered, tortured or driven out large sections of her population, is to be invited to the EU-Africa Summit in December.Why is it impossible to keep at least Mugabe out, given that the common position of the EU, that bedrock of the planned common foreign policy is that the man, his friends and relations as well as various henchmen should not be allowed anywhere in the European Union?Because other African leaders have said that unless their chum Robert is invited they will not come. Of course, this says something about other African leaders, something that many African journalists and analysts have been saying for some time but, as we have already pointed out, the EU could have used that childish nonsense to get out of the whole plan.No EU-Africa Summit? Well, what a shame. A lot of money will be saved, of course, and the people of Africa will see that we, in Europe, take their problems seriously. But then, of course, we do not. We care more about having Summits and being nice to bloodthirsty and kleptocratic dictators.One waits to see whether Gordon Brown will do as he threatened and keep to that common position by refusing to attend the Summit and whether all those human-rights-loving Scandinavians will support him by not attending either.As it happens, I attended a lunch at IPN on Tuesday that was supposed to discuss the post-Mugabe future of Zimbabwe. The speakers were Judith Todd, who was involved in Rhodesian and Zimbabwean politics for all her life and the journalist and editor Geoffrey Nyarota who has had to leave and now resides in Massachusetts from where he keeps in close touch with developments in his native country.Mr Nyarota is a remarkably courageous man as can be seen from the briefest biography. Sadly, he did not do himself justice in his inability to convey any ideas to the audience as to what might happen in Zimbabwe, what should happen and what well-meaning outsiders can do.On the one hand, he was annoyed with President Bush because the latter made it clear that, in his view, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is the “point man” for the international community on Zimbabwe. On the other hand, he thought former Prime Minister Blair made a big mistake when he said that yes, the British government was involved in trying to sort out the mess and was working with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).This statement, he implied, gave President Mugabe the excuse to destroy the MDC. When pressed on the subject, however, Mr Nyaroto described the collapse of the MDC as brought about by a split, possibly engineered by Zanu-PF agents.Nor was Mr Nyaroto too pleased by the attack on Mr Mugabe by Peter Tatchell. This, he assured us, brought all Zimbabweans together as it was seen an attack on them all. In this rather odd statement he was contradicted by several people who have dealt with Zimbabweans through economic discussions or by broadcasting to them.There were messages and letters from that country that sounded very pleased that somebody, somewhere is taking their problems seriously and attacking the country’s tyrant.Mr Nyaroto also said that, understandably, the people of Zimbabwe do not want to be "liberated" by the South Africans but will want to think that they had achieved their freedom themselves. To this end, it is necessary to mobilize them for the forthcoming elections.The trouble is, as he genially explained himself, when not getting lost in extraneous matters, being a journalist, the media is completely under Mugabe’s control. The people are beyond poor – they are at the end of their tether. It is, let us face it, questionable whether most of them can think beyond day to day survival and, while some extremely courageous people do get mobilized for demonstrations and political meetings, the fact that they are almost inevitably beaten up and the elections are conducted in a fraudulent fashion would rather discourage people from getting involved.So, that got us nowhere. Judith Todd was more focused in her presentation and discussions. In the first place, she explained, Robert Mugabe has not changed. He was never anything but a Communist-trained thug.She talks about this in her book, "Through the Darkness: a Life in Zimbabwe" and gives a summary in this article in the Times, which is very well worth reading.
The book blows sky-high the usual picture of Zimbabwe as having been run more or less reasonably by Mugabe, until his defeat in the constitutional referendum of 2000 caused him to pull down the pillars of the temple. As becomes all too clear, the worm was in the apple from the start, with the new regime adopting a totali-tarian and often violent attitude towards opposition.Torture, corruption and disregard for the rule of law were the norm right away – indeed, the real question is how on earth Lord Soames, Britain’s proconsul in charge of the transition to majority rule, could have permitted the 1980 election. Mugabe broke all the rules – his guerrillas roamed the villages when they should have been at assembly camps, there was widespread intimidation and open violence against many opposition candidates: one such candidate was last seen pinned to the ground having red hot coals rammed down his throat.What fooled many people was that once Mugabe had forcibly incorporated Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu into his ruling Zanu-PF the country was so close to a one-party state that Mugabe simply didn’t need to show the iron fist, but it was always there. “As I try to show, there were a few people, like the guerrilla veteran, Aaron Mutiti, who understood Mugabe from the start. Aaron said in 1980, 'Family life, religious life and economic life as we know it will progressively disappear if Mugabe gets to power'.Better not ask too many questions about Lord Soames and some of the other British politicians who were so anxious to be rid of the problem they wilfully ignored what was fairly obvious to anyone who had even the slightest interest in the country.It is, of course, true that, ultimately, it will have to be the people of Zimbabwe who will have to sort their country out. But when a country and its people have been reduced to the state that country and those people have, it is essential that the outside world give them support.First and foremost the support should be coming from South Africa, a country that is taking much of the brunt of the refugee crisis. So far Thabo Mbeki has gone along with the ludicrous notion that Robert Mugabe is somehow a hero of the anti-colonial fight. It is hard to tell what motivates him as he must know what is really going on in South Africa’s northern neighbour. Would Mr Mbeki be waiting for Mr Mugabe’s death and the country descending into a Somalia-like chaos?It is worth noting a couple more things that Ms Todd mentioned. In the first place, she told us about the Zimbabwe Institute, which produces interesting papers about what could be done in Zimbabwe in the future, though as she emphasised, it is essential that Robert Mugabe be disposed of first. (I suppose he must die some time.)Secondly, she, unlike her co-speaker, thought that pressure from the outside world would actually have an effect. Mugabe, his friends, relations and henchmen, do not like not being allowed to other countries for fruitless political discussions, medical treatment, shopping and many other purposes. She must be somewhat disappointed, to put it mildly, by the EU's decision to ignore the tragedy of the people of Zimbabwe.

Government Taxing Future Generations - But With An Idiotic Answer

I love how a group of idiots get together and tell everyone the deficit is a bad thing and that we have to "Wake Up." Their answer? Deal with additional taxes now. What fucking morons. Don't they realize if taxes are raised, the government will just spend more? Additional taxes would have the negative effect of increasing the deficit. What we need is to wean gov't off of their drunken spending excesses and hold them to so tight a budget they'll be begging for pens and pencils. the blank check American's seemingly hand the US Government needs to be bounced to teach them some fiscal responsibility.

A Washington official dares to tell the truth
Washington is bankrupting future generations. The longer we wait to address the $9 trillion national debt and ongoing annual budget deficits, the more taxes our children and grandchildren will have to pay, says David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, head of the General Accountability Office and just about the only public official in Washington these days telling the truth about the country's fiscal situation. We're basically taxing future generations without representation (because they can't vote or haven't been born), which he says is immoral.
Walker was at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County yesterday in Catonsville on the road show he calls the "Fiscal Wake Up Tour" to shake America out of denial about where we are going. He was accompanied by people from different parts of the political spectrum: the deficit-hating Concord Coalition, the moderate Brookings Institution, the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. Walker himself, according to a New York Times profile, was once a conservative Democrat, then a moderate Republican and now is an independent.
This is the 24th state that the Wake Up Tour has called on. Walker has been on 60 Minutes and gotten lots of press. His audience at UMBC yesterday was largely made up of the people who most need to hear the message: young people whose standard of living will be hurt and whose taxes will rise because of the profligacy of the baby-boom generation. Some highlights from the session:
Walker: "If you want low taxes [in the future], then all the more reason that we have to act sooner rather than later." The longer we wait to address the problem either by raising taxes now or cutting benefits for Medicare and Social Security, he says, the higher taxes will have to rise for our children.
Walker: The present value of future unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Social Security and other plans is $53 trillion.
Walker: "You're supposed to leave the country not just the way you found it, but better prepared for the future. The baby boom generation is failing on that."
Walker: President Bush's Medicare drug plan and the way it was sold to Congress and the public was "unconscionable." The true, $8 trillion pricetag "was never calculated, disclosed or debated."
Walker: The $9 trillion national debt is much more important than the budget deficit. Through the miracle of compound interest on the debt, he says, it will eat up more and more of the country's resources.
Walker: Bush's commission to address Social Security was "a total waste of time" because it refused to rule out personal accounts, which was a deal breaker from the start.
Walker: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are "going to cost $2 trillion by the time we're done." [They're up to around half a trillion now.]
Walker: The biggest deficit in this country right now is "leadership."
Walker: If private corporations published balance sheets the way the federal government does, their leaders would go to jail.
All four panelsts gave impassioned calls for maturity and leadership from Washington. The country has to start paying for new programs without borrowing more money. There must be spending caps on new programs. Once programs reach a certain size there should be "mandatory reconsideration triggers" to make sure they don't swallow the budget. True cost estimates must be published. The budget process has to start looking forward more than five years or ten years at the most. The federal government needs to make full disclosure of liabilities the way industry and state governments do. We desperately need an independent, blue-ribbon commission to make hard budget choices the way the realignment commission makes tough choices on closing military bases. That would allow the chickenhearted Congress to avoid making the hard choices and merely vote up or down on the plan.
Why doesn't a White House that has injected politics even into the process of choosing federal prosecutors fire Walker tomorrow? It can't. He was appointed in the Clinton administration and has a 15-year term, which means he has great independence. Listen to him. People under the age of 30, especially, should be raising hell.

Nicely Said................

"Battle doesn't determine who is right. Only who is left." -Peter Bowman

The Politics of Parsing

Hillary is no dummy. She's basically published her socialist intents, she won't use a public forum for her infamous,"We're going to have to take things away from you for the common good," leninist rants.
She scares me way more than GW does, because she's a better liar and very crafty.