Trumptown

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The Trumptown saga continues.

What bothers me the most about the whole affair is the speed with which the Scottish government involved itself. The “call in” happened just a bit too fast to be due process. Surely some pressure was placed on them.

Having been in the US for a couple of years now, I think I can safely accuse the Americans of the bad practice of wanting everything done yesterday. Everything has to happen as fast as possible. Delays are always the fault of someone else slowing the process down. If the job is not done at superhuman speed, then someone must be deliberately sabotaging the process so the competitors can get ahead. Corners can be cut willy nilly to get the job done fast. And that’s in academia – historically one of the slowest fields. Imagine the speed of things in the heady world of property development. The Trump team will probably be a prime example of doing whatever it takes to close the deal asap. That’s not a surprise.

What is surprising is that the Scottish government feels the need to circumvent the usual appeals process and deal with the rejected plan so soon. It is surprising that they feel the need to accommodate the Trump team to the extent of not following procedure. The council must have rejected the property plan for good reasons. While I’ve not had a chance to find out what those are yet, if I were the Scottish government, I’d look into that first and ignore outside lobbying until they’ve had some impartial advice. In particular, the hurrying by the Trump team should not be heeded; Donald Trump’s spokesperson was quoted as saying:

“These attacks are more than misguided; they are malicious, inaccurate and potentially destructive and they threaten to once again endanger a £1 billion project which has the overwhelming backing of the North-east of Scotland.”

A cynic would read between the lines and translate their statement as a threat: “If you keep interfering with our deal, we’re taking it off the table and screw you silly Scots for not wanting our easy money.”

I say: ignore them. We expect our politicians to make their decisions:

“steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly”

Straw Poll 1

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Q: When you go on a trip away from your family, do you:

  1. call when you get to your destination;
  2. run to the nearest phone box and pick up some local “business” cards;
  3. switch the phone off at the airport and leave it off for the duration of the trip; or
  4. hire a canoe and lay low for 5 years.

Rumours

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that the Doctor is leaving.

B..bb..b..but I’ve only just watched The Runaway Bride!

Attempts to pace ourselves at one episode a week to eke the third series DVDs out failed miserably and we succumbed to watching Freema Ageyaman’s first episode.

Opening the book for bets on how many episodes I end up watching while Mr P is away home for 3 weeks while I’m stuck here doing crapass experiments. Starting bids?

Update: I see they were only having a laugh. Ha bloody ha.

Just wait till I get out my inkjet

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What they said.

As a researcher, albeit of a different speciality, if I put out crap that hung on a tenuous piece of evidence, I’d be jobless. Granted, I have a modicum of control over my experimental settings. But if the result is not what I predicted or does not fit my hypothesis, I don’t go searching for ways to make it fit. That would be unethical.

Again, like most of the recent political hoohahs, what is most scandalous about the Policy Exchange receipt affair isn’t the bigotry, poor research or jumping to conclusions; it’s the possibility that some of the evidence was artificial. Storm in a teacup1? We’ll have to wait and see.


I would like to link to Policy Exchange’s comments about the Newsnight program, but there are no permalinks to their press releases dated 12th and 13th of December. Newsnight, on the other hand, has these for our reading pleasure.

1 You have to admit, such scandals make more interesting watching.

Water torture

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It’s not exactly a surprise to read that an ex-CIA agent has admitted that water-boarding was used to extract information from al-Qaeda suspects. But the following quote left me slightly stunned:

“Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the water-boarding technique. And I struggle with it.”

I think water-boarding IS torture. And a very quick internet search to find the details of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 located the following paragraph:

Article 3

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) taking of hostages;

(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

I feel for that ex-CIA agent. His head is stuck so far up his own arse that he doesn’t realise that what they are doing, whatever euphemism they apply, is inhumane and against the accord that his country ratified many years ago. It IS torture. It IS inhumane. It goes AGAINST a ratified treaty. There is no justification for torture.

Chocolate and Wine

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Do I ever talk about anything else these days?

The mega-lab party was not quite as mega as I’d expected it to be. I guess the undergrads all have finals next week and weren’t in the partying mood. Ach well, more chocolate cake for everyone else. The “fixed” with ganache piss-easy-and-yet-I-duffed-it cakes went down very well. Not many comments on the muffins, but as the “healthy” option, that’s ok. But the surprise of the night was the chocolate mousse. You know, the one that seized on addition of egg yolks, which was then “saved” with some cream? Yeah… I forgot to mention that once I’d covered the mini-cakes-wot-I-duffed, I was left with a bowl of ganache I couldn’t justify eating while watching Firefly. A quick whip-up of some egg whites, patient folding to lighten the whole thing up and served in plastic champagne bowls, they were the clear winner of the night. Amazing how failures can still be such successes when chocolate is involved.

On the alcohol front, the 2001 Zinfandel we brought back from the Russian River Valley Korbel champagne house went down a treat. Another good one for the festive season: it went well with baked ham and chocolate. Sluurrp…