Sim-O

Just because your son lived for 36 hours unaided before the hospital decided to provide support when he was born at 22 weeks, doesn’t mean that every other child born at that age will. He is the exception. There will always be exceptions, but we mustn’t work to them. Take them into account, yes, but not make them the yardstick.

There is another thing to take into account.

You wanted your child. For whatever reason, the people having abortions after 20 weeks, don’t.

A couple of thoughts.

Nadine keeps banging on about when she assisted in an abortion that didn’t go well, twenty or so years ago, the latest retelling in the Telegraph:

as a result of botched abortions such as the one I assisted with, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) issued guidelines to ensure that an abortion never again becomes a live birth.

To avoid this happening, a lethal injection is placed into the baby’s heart through the mother’s abdominal wall via a cannula… [and it’s ‘babys’ ‘ and ‘mothers’ ‘, the apostrophy goes after the s to denote possession, before for abreviation]

Now, for someone so concerned, surely that would be a good thing. You see, all babies that are to be aborted are by definition, live. If they are not it isn’t an abortion it’s a miscarriage.
What would be the better way to go about killing a baby? We stun animals before we kill them to make sure they don’t feel anything, so why not kill the baby quickly?
I’d put money on the amount of live-born abortions (failed abortions?) dropped rapidly after the introduction of the potassium injection.

This debate started with the conversation centreing around when a baby becomes a baby proper, rather than a collection of cells that look like they might turn into a baby. The first I remember of it was when Nadine accused Ben Goldacre of leaking confidential information from the government somehow.

All the talk was when the feotus began to feel pain or show a response to external stimuli, with the flagrant Nadine quoting and arselicking her new best friend, Prof Sunny Anand.
Now it has been diverted to the more emotive area of viability of the baby if it was to have been born, with examples of 22 and 20 week old babies surviving.
This I think is misleading. These babies are the exception, not the rule. They are either incredibly strong or are given the very best care available. Just because it looks like a little person, doesn’t mean it will be able to live outside of the womb.
There are many more babies that are born at that age that die, than survive. The date limit for the abortion should be the worked from the national average, not the figure plucked from the Guiness Book of Records, which is what it looks like Nadine and her gang are trying to do.

Extracts from an interview in the Guardian with Nadine Dorries MP that help to show her attitudes and the way she has approached this whole abortion debate:

When I ask what result she is expecting, she forcefully replies: “a win. Well over 200 MPs are supporting it.” Most significantly, David Cameron is among them.

Because Dave is such an expert on all things feotus.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Either it’s market rate or it’s not. If it’s reduced, then it’s not market rate, otherwise it’d just be market rate.
The market rate is a range, so shouldn’t it be ‘lower end of the market rate’.

Politicians, eh? Don’t know their arse from their elbow.

ei:

It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.

But this year’s Independence Day festivities have concealed as much as they have revealed. The images of joy and celebration seen by the world have failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land.

They have also served to shield from view the fact that the Palestinians’ dispossession is continuing in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. Far from being a historical event, Israel’s “independence” — and the ever greater toll it is inflicting on the Palestinian people — is very much a live issue.

Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population — more than one million Palestinian citizens — remembered the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.

As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel’s Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.

But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.

Read the rest

Not sure why the UK libel law needs changing? Well, it’s not just about bloggers.
This article may be a good place to start you off:

Arnold Schwarzenegger started the trend in [libel tourism in] 1990 flying in from Los Angeles to sue Wendy Leigh, a Florida-based American author, for an unauthorised biography to which he took exeption. A stream of celebrities followed, suing for slights that are not actionable in the US.

The low point came when Roman Polanki, the Polish film director, sued the US magazine Vanity Fair. To their undying shame the courts in London bent to accommodate this fugitive from US justice and allowed him to give evidence by video link from Paris — there being no extradition treaty with the US.

After the celebrities came a slew of Russian oligarchs followed, after 9/11, by a camel train of Gulf billionaires.
…
by accepting jurisdiction to hear the cases of libel tourists, we have to accept that the courts of other jurisdictions from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe will want to follow suit and accept jurisdiction on libel claims in relation to matters where there is little or no circulation or connection to the jurisdiction.

Those countries will judge our journalists according to their own standards. We have seen the internet availability of articles drag The Guardian to Zimbabwe, other English newspapers have seen their journalists criminalised for their writings in countries with criminal libel laws; Tesco is suing three individuals in Thailand for £17 million. And that in a country, with a touch of Dickens, which still has debtors’ jail. The courts of Indonesia have recently fined Time magazine £50 million, provoking widespread outrage at the amount of the award. We have a cap on damages of £200,000 and they must be proportionate to the means of the defendant.

Books are already being cancelled by publishers because the economics of publishing are such that they cannot sustain the costs of a libel action. Cambridge University Press recently pulped a book on the mere threat of suit.

Most worrying of all is the latest trend for foreigners to drag NGOs into our libel courts over their reports. Typically an NGO will publish as responsibly as it can a detailed piece of research on an area of controversy or difficulty. Foreign politicians, businessmen and companies now seek to drag foreign NGOs to our courts to try to gain a victory against an indigent opponent. NGOs reporting abuses of the environment, human rights, corruption, torture and so forth are forced to dissipate their resources defending claims brought by the rich and powerful.

Of all the news bulletins I’ve read/watched/listened to, something has only just occured to me.
It’s always a 17/18/19 year old boy that gets murdered but a 17/18/19 year old man that does the murdering.

Chicken Yoghurt:

Blogger Guido Fawkes was sentenced to a three month curfew order this afternoon. Appearing at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court the blogger, real name Paul Staines, was told the curfew would operate between the hours of 9pm and 6am. Staines, 41, will also have to wear an electronic tag.

The judge also handed down an 18-month supervision order and a three year driving ban. Staines will be required to retake his driving test when the driving ban has elapsed. He was also order to pay the prosecution’s £60 costs

(additional reporting by Tim Ireland)

Heh.

With reference to the recreation of the ‘liquid bombs’.
Obsolete:

…this is the experts who know what they’re doing using the exact same materials as the rank amateurs were meant to, and the danger of rather than explosives blowing up a plane but instead going off in the face of the bomb-maker was so great that the detonator had to be inserted using a remote-controlled machine. We’re meant to assume that if this plot was going to come to fruition that the 8 men were going to overcome the volatility of the materials they were using, something the experts couldn’t, succeed in smuggling the bombs onto an airplane without the explosives going off prematurely on the journey to the airport and then the plane, and then again manage, after fully constructing the bomb, to detonate it without anyone else noticing what they were up to with an explosion so successful that it would result in the deaths of everyone on board.

The Telegraph:

A voluntary code of conduct for bloggers and internet commentators is supported by almost half of all internet users, a survey has claimed.

The researchers said 46 per cent of web users believe bloggers should agree to a set of guidelines which reflected the laws on defamation, intellectual property rights and incitement.

Four per cent strongly opposed the suggestion and 15 per cent had no opinion.

There is a code of conduct already. It’s called the law and the UK one is already an arse without these gits stirring it up.

It is an arse because the bloggers are usually individuals without the financial ability to back up their claims in court. A letter from a solicitor is usually enough to have the offending article removed, by the author themselves or just as likely, their hosting company, even if the accusations in it are true.

Bloggers don’t want special privileges or rights, just a fair libel law that does not favour the rich and powerful.

The report’s bollox anyway. It can’t be almost half of all internet users, because I haven’t been asked about it and I bet you haven’t either.

Via An Englishmans’ Castle