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Yep, another gap of a couple of weeks between updates. But am I going to apologise for having a social life? No, I’m not…

Thursday 27th June

I actually heard this on the Today programme the other day: various people. including “intelligence sources” and LibDem MP Simon Hughes are get worked up that the safety of the royal family and various politicians as well as visiting statesmen is at risk because a guy called Paul Wey has a website publishing classified security information. Where does he get the information? From the transmissions of the police and security forces:

Radio scanning enthusiast Paul Wey is intercepting Special Branch and other communications and publishing their details on internet news groups, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has learned.

An intelligence source said Mr Wey was a “menace”, whose actions could help terrorists commit atrocities and may have already been used to counter police operations.

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Simon Hughes said the government must consider banning radio scanners, which are currently illegal to use but not to own.

It should be remarkable that a supposedly Liberal MP opts so quickly for the “BAN IT!” approach, but I can’t say I am surprised. What is astonishing is the assumption that if scanners are banned terrorists will not be able to get the information — as we all know, they really don’t like breaking the law. The answer isn’t to ban scanners, it is to use secure communications. Not surprisingly, The Register picked up the story and put it very well:

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, if police wish to make sure their communications are secure they should use encryption, a technology that it is provided with the latest generation of police radios, TETRA (a technology whose cost of use gives room for criticism, but that’s a different story).

Bad losers: Italy went out of the World Cup when defeated in the second round by South Korea. Italy has won the tournament three times in the past; before this year, South Korea had never won a match in the World Cup. This is not the only upset, of course. France had a disastrously bad competition, their burnup starting right at the beginning when Senegal defeated them; Portugal similarly fared badly; Argentina were — deservedly — defeated by England. But however shattered and demoralised by their defeats and early exits from the competition, none of these teams match the flouncing prima donnas of Italy.

The Italians blamed everyone — everyone except themselves, which is a pity because that’s really where the blame should lie; they blamed the referee. the linesmen, and FIFA — but most of all, they blamed Ahn Jung Hwan, who scored the winning goal in extra time.

Ahn used to play for Italian club Perugia. Used to — not any more: the club owner has fired Ahn.

Enough! That guy will never again set foot in Perugia!’’ team owner Luciano Gaucci told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “I am not going to pay the salary of a guy who has been the ruin of Italian soccer.”

Ah, yes — a lacklustre team losing a competition is the ruin of Italian soccer. Recent reports suggest that the team coach is — not surprisingly — more realistic and would like to keep Ahn in the team.

But it gets better — the Italian broadcaster RAI is thinking of sueing FIFA on the grounds that Italy was eliminated as a result of poor refereeing decisions and this has cost RAI lost advertising revenue.

This is a brilliant wheeze if it comes off (but I suspect it won’t) — maybe STV should have tried this on the numerous occasions Scotland have been knocked out early.

In the wake of the Italian defeat, FIFA received 400,000 hate mails, crashing FIFA’s email server.For their part, FIFA are understandably unhappy with the way the Italians conducted themselves following their defeat.

On the other hand, the way the England team conducted themselves after their defeat by Brazil — I don’t think anyone outside England ever expected any other result — was exemplary, with the players admitting that they were beaten by the better team. It’s also nice to see one of the players responsible for England’s exit from the tournament paying tribute to the goalkeeper he defeated with a spectacular (and, honest guv, not a fluke) free kick:

"I really was very sad when I saw those images of Seaman crying on the television," Ronaldinho was quoted as saying in Monday’s Daily Mirror newspaper.

"I have been a great admirer of him for a long time. He is a great player with a great past. It would be a terrible mistake if people changed their thoughts about him because of one isolated moment like that.…

"I’m sure he’s going to recover and find his way back up to be the great player he has always been."

There’s a sort of political correctness in the air these days which seems to make a lot of Scots reluctant to admit they would want to see any team short of the Evil Nazi Cannibal Bastards Eleven win rather than England. This is nothing to do, incidentally, with the England football team itself — at the moment it’s actually rather good and I suspect individually they are as decent a bunch of blokes as any football team in any other country; it’s also got nothing to do with the English people, who on the whole are probably slightly more decent than the average in some other countries; it’s got a little to do with the way the British establishment has treated Scotland over the past couple of centuries — to take one example, there are people alive today who were belted at school for using Scots words; but what really does provoke it is the mindless, mindnumbing anglocentrism of English sports commentators. It is not simply that they have problems differentiating "English" and "British", it is that in certain sports — football and tennis in particular — there often seems to be an assumption that the English team or players should win, as though the trophy in some way was England’s due — and this no less the case when the English players could be beaten by blind opponents without the aid of guide dogs.

I admit I’ve been in two minds about them going out this time. Yes, it was nice to see all the froth of anticipation of England carrying home the FIFA trophy collapse in on itself — but the irony was that this time, some of the time at least, England played well enough that it wasn’t such an outlandish expectation — and I do suspect the lacklustre performance against Brazil may have been due to the heat. If they had managed to beat Brazil, they would have deserved to go on and win. The upside to that would have been that just maybe the English commentators would have shut the fuck up about 19-bloody-66. (This is probably going to be unbearable in four years, when the World Cup is being held in Germany.) The downside we’ve been saved from, of course, is that they would have spent the next fifty years going on and on and on about 2002.…

The political correctness may have kept the quiet satisfaction of Scots at seeing the Auld Enemy go down out of the media, but it was there. Minutes after the end of the Brazil match I received an email from a friend who works in a large Glasgow office:

There’s a lot of very pleased people here.

This link was forwarded by a friend: JesusVeg.com. It does tend to leave the mind spinning, partly because it seems to be saying simultaneously “Be a vegetarian like Jesus was” and “OK, Jesus might not have been a vegetarian but if he were alive today he would be”. It may not be immediately apparent that this is a PETA site (no, not PETA — and definitely not PETA) which would help make sense of the occasionally bizarre comments on Biblical texts — for example, “regardless of whether the fish in these events are actual fish” when talking about Jesus feeding the 5,000, helping fishermen catch fish and himself eating fish. This reminds me of something once said to me by a teetotal Christian to the effect that, yes, Jesus turned water into wine at Cana — but it would not have made anyone drunk. Yeah, right.

Assertions are made that “the evidence is convincing that the historical Jesus was a vegetarian” — which is pretty good considering the lack of extra-scriptural evidence for the existence of Jesus — but whatever evidence they have, it isn’t presented here; there is a lot of assumption and drawing of conclusions based on what is or is not said in various Biblical texts. None of it would be remotely convincing to anyone who was not already a true believer in the PETA point of view.

Which is a pity, because some of what PETA is saying is important. A vegetarian diet is healthier for humans — there’s a lot of evidence supporting that; animals are treated appallingly in modern factory farming — especially in the dairy farming sector; but advancing bonkers arguments about what a preacher who may or may not have lived 2,000 years ago in the Middle East may or may not have eaten hardly helps their case. It’s the sort of thing which makes me feel inclined to kill a cow and eat it — and I’ve been a vegetarian for years.

And these people get to use guns? A British Army regiment used a couple of Oasis songs on a recruitment video — but didn’t bother to get the band’s permission. Noel Gallagher has refused to give permission for the use of the songs, so 300 copies of the video have had to be recalled. An MoD spokesman said: “We didn’t realise we needed permission to use the songs until it was brought to our attention.” Cue jokes about “military” and “intelligence”…

One for the sad Trekkies out there — and I know there are some of you. Some original costumes and props — including a phaser and a chair from Captain Pike’s quarters — are being auctioned. For the really sad, you can get the carpet from the Enterprise bridge set.