cloudsoup

Stephen Hammond, Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, denies that he supported the recent Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill. That isn’t our view.

A comment on his website says,

Disappointed to see that you voted for the amendment to the FOI bill, which would exempt Parliament…It was a sad day for parliament and I am sad that you are our MP

To which Stephen Hammond replies:

As the voting record clearly shows, I absolutely did NOT vote for the Bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. I am afraid that in this case you are simply wrong

This isn’t a full disclosure.

The Bill is a Private Members’ Bill. Only a small proportion of Private Members Bills make it through to enactment because they are rarely given enough time and can be ‘talked out’, or ‘filibustered’.

In this case, many MPs tried to talk out the Bill; at the end of the 18^th May, two votes were held in quick succession.

The first vote was on a closure motion, which would have prevented the Bill from being talked out. Any MP supporting this closure motion was supporting the passage of the Bill. Stephen Hammond supported the closure motion.

The second vote, taken just 16 minutes later was the vote on the Third Reading of the Bill. Stephen Hammond didn’t vote in the Third Reading.

It seems clear that Stephen Hammond supported the Bill by voting for the closure motion but then avoided the second vote on the 18^th so that his name didn’t appear on the record as a supporter.

This is a list of all MPs who did the same:

• Christopher Chope, Christchurch (Con)
• Jonathan Djanogly, Huntingdon (Con)
• Stephen Hammond, Wimbledon (Con)
• Nick Hurd, Ruislip – Northwood (Con)
• Eleanor Laing, Epping Forest (Con)
• Shailesh Vara, North West Cambridgeshire (Con)
• Edward Balls, Normanton (Lab, minister)
• Ian Cawsey, Brigg & Goole (Lab, minister)
• Paul Clark, Gillingham (Lab (PPS))
• Vernon Coaker, Gedling (Lab, minister)
• Barry Gardiner, Brent North (Lab, minister)
• Roger Godsiff, Birmingham, Sparkbrook & Small Heath (Lab)
• Mike O’Brien, North Warwickshire (Lab, minister)
• Bridget Prentice, Lewisham East (Lab, minister)
• Joan Ruddock, Lewisham, Deptford (Lab)
• Barry Sheerman, Huddersfield (Lab)
• Jacqui Smith, Redditch (Lab, minister)
• Gerry Sutcliffe, Bradford South (Lab, minister)

if one of these is your MP why not write to them and ask them for an explanation?

A British computer consultant and his four bodyguards have been kidnapped in Iraq today. The response of UK’s Channel 4 has included an interview with someone described an insurgent who said that the bodyguards were only in Iraq for large salaries and to aid the ‘American and Jewish Pigs’ (sic).

The insurgent – or, as I prefer, bigotted terrorist – wasn’t challenged by the Channel 4 reporter. His remarks were presented as just another opinion.

During World War II the Germans used William Joyce to broadcast Nazi propaganda, in English, into the UK. After the war he was hanged.

The BBC, of course, didn’t bother to interview Joyce, or his fascist employers, for their views on the progress of the war.

A Mondegreen is an accidental mishearing of a phrase. There’s a word for it. Helen’s childhood version of ‘Tis a gift to be simple was good – and the Candice Bergen / Jack Nicholson / Art Garfunkel filmCarnal Knowledge might have had the best ever.

The original Mondegreen was a mishearing of:

        Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
        Oh, where hae ye been?
        They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
        And laid him on the green.

where the last line became And Lady Mondegreen.

Helen’s Mondegreen comes from the bastardised version of ‘Tis a Gift, the execrable Lord of the Dance, which contains the line:

Dance, then, wherever you may be
For I am the Lord of the Dance, said he

which Helen innocently converted to,

Dance, then, wherever you may be
For I am the Lord of the dance settee

where a dance settee then became an object of idle theological speculation.

But the Mondegreen from Carnal Knowledge is, instead of:

    Gladly the Cross I'd bear

the excellent mishearing,

   Gladly, the cross-eyed bear

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a
Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End of
Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the
major religious texts, he documents the ways in which
religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual
repression, and a distortion of our origins in the
cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument
for a more secular life based on science and
reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s
awesome view of the universe, and Moses and
the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.

The Académie Française is a French language King Canute. It is an official authority on the French language, publishes an official dictionary, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française; Wikipedia says its rulings are not binding on the public but it has attempted to stem the tide of English or Americanisms befouling la belle langue.

So much for l’Académie. Now, M^cDonald’s is lobbying the Oxford English Dictionary to remove the term M^cJob.

It’s as though M^cDonald’s, having given up attempts to understand what makes a decent burger, is now trying to ignore what makes a dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t invent English it catalogues and describes the language. For M^cDonald’s to suppose the OED acts in a similar fashion to the Académie Française is an odd position for a US-company to adopt.

On this side of La Manche, we have Labour MP Clive Betts regretting the use of derogtory phrases such as M^cJob to describe low-paid service-sector employment. Clive Betts seems excessivley busy-bodyish. According to TheyWorkForYou.com he is:

• Strongly for introducing a smoking ban.
• Very strongly for introducing ID cards.
• Very strongly for the fox hunting ban

– although his sort of record is not too unusual for the sherpas of New Labour.

So I’ve created an OpenID server for myself – don’t want to delegate to other people for my authentication, do I, and the point of it, partly, is its distributed nature.

I’m all tested with it and thanks very, very much to Simon Willison‘s brain for the really good idea it’s had, which I hope will benefit handsomly its owner and primary user, Simon Willison.

So now can everyone start using it, please? I’m fed up of logging into my hosting provider and Digg and Wikipedia and my bank and Flickr with different usernames and passwords. The future is already here and for one would very much like to start living in it.

Hitch, looking as though he’s sucking on a wasp throughout, defends the right to be pissed-off by the (thankfully) dead Jerry Falwell and his brand of Christian-Right bigotry.

The clip’s been embedded all over the web but did you catch the last words of Hitchens as the video ends?

“If you gave Falwell an enema he’d be buried in a matchbox”

Another pic from Helen

• 11 tonnes of greenhouse gases generated annually by the average UK one car family
• 1.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases generated by one person’s share of a transatlantic round-trip flight

These 50,000 tonnes of Carbon Offsets from Free Carbon Offsets should see me ok for a while.

Here’s Wikipedia on Indulgences:

Indulgence, in Roman Catholic theology, is the paid full or partial remission of temporal punishment… The indulgence is granted by the church after the sinner has confessed and received absolution