Draw Breath

If ever people need an incentive to upgrade to firefox (3?) or to Internet Explorer 7, it's the British Banking Code. As LSN news points out (behind LexisNexis's paywall), section 12.11 of the code (here, pdf) tells you, regarding online banking. that "If you act without reasonable care, and this causes losses, you may be responsible for them. (This may apply, for example, if you do not follow section 12.5 or 12.9 or you do not keep to your account’s terms and conditions.)" Amongst other things, section 12.9 says "Keep your PC secure. Use up-to-date anti-virus and spyware software and a personal firewall" and "Treat e-mails you receive from senders claiming to be from your bank or building society with caution."

Apparently this policy has been in the code for a while, although it was updated in April just gone. While no bank seems to have invoked the clauses, you can pretty much bet that they will at some stage. Which will be bad news for the elderly and the ignorant when they discover that, having been pushed out of branches to save the banks money, they are also responsible for the security of the banks' alternative offerings.

While I of course recommend ditching dodgy Windows for altogether better operating systems, and while I find it perplexing that I still get hits from people using IE6 and IE5, I do think we ought to be sympathetic with people who simply don't know how the software on their machines works and who don't read the latest missives on internet security. If fraud does become sufficiently problematic as to make banks consider invoking the responsibility clause, there's an easy solution: publicly acknowledge that the internet, Windows-style, is not an appropriate venue for financial transactions and take steps to encourage people back into branches. In other words: the banks should just swallow whatever is the cheaper alternative.

Well, nobody can say that the Taliban don't indulge in highly symbolic behaviour. When I saw the footage from the latest attempt on Hamid Karzai's life yesterday (not his first narrow escape, although it was, as Channel 4 points out, the first in Kabul), I ws struck by the parallels with the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, down to the use of explosions to disorient the bodyguard.

Obviously, I wasn't the only person with such thoughts. Indeed, as Channel 4 news had it last night, the soldiers in the stadium weren't armed, so it may be that the government doesn't even trust its own army (trained by us of course) to refrain from taking pot-shots at the President.

Still, at least Bush has refrained from declaring victory in Afghanistan for the last few years. Amazingly, he actually hasn't declared victory there since 2004, avoiding the problems associated with his annual declaration of victory in Iraq.

What a mess.

There's an interesting spot of research on Libertas over on Indymedia. I haven't chased down the sources myself yet but if what Checkov Feeney says is even a bit accurate he's revealed some pretty fascinating stuff.

Hat tip to John Carroll who I suspect is even more unlikely than I am to be lurking around the Indymedia site...!

Update: Having read the piece more closely, Feeney could do with distinguishing between someone owning a company and being it's CEO (though he's not the only one to get confused on that matter) (see comments below). I've updated this post because while, on the whole, there does seem to be an interesting allegation here (some of the people behind Libertas have made a mint from the shadier activities of the Bush administration and that their campaign coheres with the neocon perspective on Europe) I'm not sure I want to draw conclusions from it.

Alison Millar's documentary on Father Michael Cleary aired last night on BBC 1 and is a useful bookend to the history of Ireland over the past two decades. Filmed as a student project over the course of several months in 1991, Millar was privy to the banalities of a priest's domestic life. She was also witness to arguably the greatest single accelerant in the destruction of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Yet, due to her age or her naivity, Millar did not sense that anything was amiss in her portrayal of Father Michael Cleary's life with his house-keeper and her son. In the documentary she recalls this time and reflects on how she could have missed the fact that the boy Ross was, in fact, Father Cleary's son. Denying paternity to the end, Fr. Cleary's star was dulled in the early nineteen nineties.

Millar's film is fascinating on a number of levels. Firstly, its depiction of the esteem in which Fr. Cleary was held in Ireland is absolutely
authentic. This was a giant of a man, who was revered by old and young alike, who travelled across the country giving forthright talks, whose evening radio programme was a source of great interest to many. He was a celebrity in his own right but one who inevitably became the conscience of the nation. Secondly, the depiction of the Cleary family life is so intimate, so easy, that it begs the question how could people not have known the truth? A striking presence in the earlier and later footage is his older sister. To coin a Dublin phrase, this lady, and indeed none of the relations depicted, could be accused of coming down the Liffey in a bubble. Was it the case that most people in close proximity to Fr. Cleary had a a very clear idea of the truth but felt unable or unwilling to say anything?

In the hands of an older person the camera in Millar's documentary would have painted a far more provocative picture. In her early footage, she is both childlike in her treatment of the subject and in her role as the storyteller. She is pupil, beneficiary, empty vessel to Fr. Cleary. She shows what she sees but her own overt involvement in the filming process precludes any objective analysis. Contrast Millar's film with the footage of Father Cleary shot nearly fifteen years earlier in the film the Rocky Road to Dublin and one is immediately struck by how much the deft cinematographer can say with very little. Raul Coutard's camera almost caresses its subjects. The closeness is not matched by engagement between film-maker and subject. The camera is all-seeing and says all. The viewer is unsettled by the shots of Father Cleary. Not surprisingly, the film was banned in Ireland.

However, Alison Millar's footage retains its power precisely because it is a void rather than an accurate presentation. That the film-maker has no clue of this makes the footage almost endearing.

The return of Millar and Ross to Father Cleary's old place of residence reveals many good feelings and memories from his former congregation. His son is articulate and forgiving. The Dublin of the early nineteen nineties might well have been on a different planet. Ironically, we have Father Cleary in part to thank for that.

Good to see an interview with Mark Shuttleworth on BBC Online, who is touting the next release of Ubuntu Linux. We've been running Ubuntu for quite a few years now and have upgraded to the beta of the new version in the last couple of weeks. It's lovely - I'm obviously entirely taken with open-source software (including running this site on Drupal).Ubuntu's strength, to a degree appeals to my impatience. It takes my relatively new Windows machine in the office six or so minutes to boot up whereas I can be running a linux machine within a couple of minutes. It's not that I have a hectic day. I'm just a git who hates waiting.  That said, I also really enjoy taking peeks at the various bits of software out there and - though I have no technical nous - seeing how they are put together as best I can. And of course, nothing beats the price...

Isabel, from what I can tell, also seems to enjoy using Linux. She is the perfect example of the sort of people Shuttleworth is interested in, although she's pretty proficient, she does not want to spend her time messing with machines. If it's secure, stable and flexible, she's happy. And with Ubuntu, that I know of anyway, there's no complaints! 

We're just back from seeing The Orphanage in the QFT. Jesus. I don't know why we do that sort of thing.

How bizarre is it that a good Saturday night would include getting totally spooked by this sort of thing. This did not exactly feel like fun. My pants were not just scaredy by the end of it.

Still, I always come out wondering at the way that film has spoiled our capacity for fantasy. Maybe its just me, but I find it relatively easy even in films like this to distance myself from the story by thinking about the whole confection as a manufacturing process. If you get to engrossed just have reassuring thoughts about the cameraman, the bloke with the boom, the people in makeup, the director. Works a charm for the likes of me.

What we miss is I suppose no longer even available from literature. The veracity of the spoken word is probably the only place where someone can become truly immersed. The folklorists may have been doing us a huge favour in allowing us at least to be tourists in story-telling (I personally recommend David Thompson's Creatures of the Sea - don't let the whimsical title put you off). But reading the stories is not the same as actually being told by the very people you relied on for information about the world - neighbours, family and passers-by. We belong to only the third generation in Ireland who were likely to travel more than a few miles from home. Where, for all those who came before, can the boundaries of this world have ended, if anywhere?

The firmer lines between the recognisable world and fantasy are undoubtedly a modern development. By this, modernity is a function as much of medium as anything else. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, it always distances us from the voices of those we trust. In truth, if you really want to cast doubt on the way things are just whisper in somebody's ear.

Companies may be legal fictions but who's to say that they're not capable of love?

Well. Not quite. But sometimes they just don't want to be made look bad in front of the laydees.

I recall being in South Africa a few years ago and seeing the minister for justice rejecting a national High Court ruling on the SA government's bonkers HIV policy on the grounds that, because the court was in Pretoria, it had no jurisdiction beyond the Guateng province. It was a depressing moment, combining a disgraceful political stance with a sneering dismissal of the role of courts in maintaining the principle that society ought to be ruled by laws not people.

Beverly Cooper-Flynn's re-admission into Fíanna Fáil last week, based on a unanimous decision of the Parliamentary Party, was just as dispiriting.

One of those hidden problems was raised in yesterday's Northern Ireland Questions . Paul Goggins, Minister of State in the NIO, revealed that 30% of prisoners in Northern Ireland (or 59% of prisoner receptions according to the Northern Ireland Committee report (pdf, p.6) on the NI Prisons Service) that provoked the questions) are there for fine defaults. As some members pointed out, given the limited number of imprisonment options here, fine defaulters tend to get lumped in with more serious criminals, including in Maghaberry.

One of the most important issues surrounding imprisonment for fine defaults is the strange impact the policy has on women, especially regarding non-payment of television licences. Alistair MacDonald raised this during NI Questions but the Minister of State did not have figures to hand. Of the women in Hydebank Wood in 2006/7 (pdf, p.11), for instance, close on two thirds were there because of default either on fines for motoring offences or because of non-payment of television licences.

This problem created something of a stir in England and Wales in the 1990s. As this article by Christina Pantazis and David Gordon from 1997 points out, the BBC's TV Licensing regime has a deleterious effect on poor people, of whom single mothers and the elderly made up an increasing proportion from the 1980s onwards. Poor people are naturally the least likely to be able to pay a fine, are likely to be already in debt and are unlikely to be able to manage their finances in response to new demands.

What Pantazis and Gordon didn't point to was the shift in the BBC's enforcement regime when it outsourced to Capita . From what I heard at a conference last year, the BBC Capita got a bonus if they brought in a new licence (as did the officers if Wikipedia is to be believed). Since they called during the day they were more likely to find women at home (very likely poor women or single mums) and once they found someone without a licence they would offer to sell one (and procure that bonus). This gets anyone who can afford to pay the agent off out of the equation, leaving the poorest ending up in front of magistrates and then facing fines. And they tend disproportionately to be women.

In fact, in the mid 1990s fully 57% of women in prison in England and Wales were there because of a default on their TV licences.

Something had to and did give (as outlined here (pdf) with the introduction of various payment methods that moderated the doorstepping tactic and closer guidance to magistrates about matching the level of fines with the person's capacity to pay.

Strange thing is, if yesterdays NI Questions this shift doesn't seem to have been extended to Northern Ireland. We still may have a regime that locks up women to a disproportionate and, if the lessons of England and Wales are anything to go by, needless extent. In the words (pdf, p. 9) of Robin Masefield giving oral evidence to the NI committee, "we have tended to adopt the approach in Northern Ireland of the default being a period of custody, we actually have a significantly higher rate of fines being paid than England and Wales."

This, as Masefield says, cannot be right.

What a thoroughly depressing piece on tonight's Channel 4 news about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 45,000 people a being killed each month in the continuing war. Let those mobiles and PCs go obsolete before you change them...