Sleep tight

"You are made more safe

With each point that I collect"

Or so you are told
  
  

First thoughts

I've had consciousness

Since the head of, these three words

Said, 'Collect It All'

 

Interlude: real life

9^th March 2015

re. Interrogation techniques

Dear Mr President,

I recently saw a news report on the demonstrations outside Homan Square in Chicago, which included an allegation that one of the law enforcement officers who worked there, Detective Richard Zuley, had also worked at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The article implied that transfers of this sort were not unusual.

I have since found out that the most common technique used in the USA for questioning suspects, the Reid Method, prioritises obtaining a confession rather than gathering information. I find it easy to imagine this style of questioning degenerating into the type of abuses enumerated in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ‘Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program’ (1) from which I quote Dianne Feinstein:

“It is my sincere and deep hope that through the release of these findings (...) U.S. policy will never again allow for secret and indefinite detention and the use of coercive interrogations”

This report states that it has been known within the CIA for some time that non-coercive interrogation methods and humane detainee conditions are better at eliciting accurate information. It is implied that it was the suddenness and urgency of the situation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that resulted in their being abandoned in place of coercive ones: even, apparently, upon suspects who would have been willing to co-operate.

I infer from this that the main reason for the use of the wrong type of techniques was a lack of available trained personnel.

This looks to me like an opportunity to solve two problems at once: if civilian law-enforcers were trained in non-coercive questioning techniques such as those found by Laurence Alison in the UK (2) to be most effective, this would solve more conventional crimes while also providing a ‘pool’ of ready-trained personnel who could be transferred to interview suspected terrorists effectively and humanely should the need suddenly arise, for example following the breaking-up of a large terrorist cell.

It would also avoid future damage to your country’s reputation overseas: a point made in the Senate Committee study (point #20). This is a matter about which I, personally, know you to care: only last week your ambassador, His Excellency Matthew Barzun, took the trouble to visit my children’s school to discuss our two countries’ ‘special relationship’ and take questions (3). 

Yours sincerely,

(the Real) Dr Verity Player

(1) http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf

(2)  http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-dark-science-of-interrogation/

(3)http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/NEWS/11840767.US_ambassador_discusses_politics_with_keen_pupils/

Bond issues: part four, a letter

Dear Hugh Bayley,

RE: BACKBENCH DEBATE ON MONEY CREATION ON THURSDAY 20TH NOVEMBER 2014

A backbench debate on “Money creation and society” has been tabled for Thursday 20th November 2014. This will be the first Parliamentary discussion of money creation for 170 years, and I urge you to attend if at all possible.
Money creation affects almost every aspect of our lives, including public and private debt levels, house prices, and rising inequality. It is also the reason why an economy whose growth is constrained (for example by natural limits) cannot remain stable: debt will inevitably overtake the means available to repay it.

97% of money is created by banks as they make loans (as recently confirmed by the Bank of England - see link below). Most of the money created by banks is directed towards the very "casino" banking which the Labour Party wishes to rein in, as mentioned in your letter to me on 24th September, in which you also noted that you found the information interesting.

Please find a briefing for the backbench debate “Money Creation and Society” here [https://www.positivemoney.org/…/11/Backbench-Briefing-Note.…]

I know you are often busy on issues of overseas development, but would you be willing to commit to attending this debate on Thursday 20th November?

Yours Truly.

Bicycles: the dénouement

It need hardly be repeated that, on the weekend of 5th-6th July, the Tour de France temporarily became the Tour de Yorkshire (including such linguistic delights as "le Cote du Jenkin").

It all made for a great weekend. Day 1: accidental choice, in deepest Wensleydale, of one of the best vantage-points ever (because it happened to lie just after a watering-point, so we got to keep team logo water-bottles as souvenirs). Day 2, riding four miles along the river path to catch the Peloton as they leave town and start the race proper, serenaded by (among other things) the strains of "Riders on the Storm" (it had been raining heavily earlier on) from a local resident's garden, then our delightful glide afterwards along completely car-free roads all the way home.

But I could never quite stop myself from looking twice at each yellow-painted bicycle that the Great Yorkshire Public had put up all along the route just to check: was it my missing bike?..

It was some consolation to read the following week in the local paper that an aid charity had offered to take all the yellow bikes, recondition them, and ferry them to villages in Africa. There they would enable people to launch small businesses, go on health visits, or otherwise improve quality of life at a tiny cost.

Cool Space

A dilemma occurs over lunch: the weather is hot enough that any butter left in the butter-dish on the kitchen counter turns, in short order, into unpalatable goo. And yet, if we were to put the same butter in the fridge, it would be too rock-solid to make ham-and-raspberry sandwiches*. 

I found myself wishing we had a Beurrier-a-l'eau,one of those useful little devices that no self-respecting French kitchen would be seen without. And this got me thinking about France. 

Americans like to sneer that the French have yet to discover the delights of air conditioning. But have you ever noticed, on a hot day, how cool it is inside, for example, Chartres Cathedral? Heat energy soaks into the walls. When it gets there, instead of heating them up, it goes to work on evaporating years'-worth of accumulated dampness from them.

An air conditioning unit uses the same idea, but with an ugly twist. Instead of leaving the dampness floating around in the open air, only condensing once it has found a place (or a time, like 4:00 a.m.) cool enough to do so, the unit expends a lot of energy compressing the vapour it creates, so as to retrieve and re-use the liquid. The compression process produces heat, which is then dumped unceremoniously on to passers-by of the car or other space in which our transatlantic punter wishes to remain, well, cool.

In other words, the thick walls of Chartres Cathedral, and the entire French fleet of beurriers-a-l'eau, are quietly doing their job in a much more considerate and public-spirited way than typical air conditioning. As befits French dirigisme rather than American laissez-faire, in fact. They also give much less of a shock to a body as one moves from one space into another. 

After all this existential musing, I now recall that there is a
beurrier-a-l'eau lurking in a high-up cupboard here at Space: it was bought as a souvenir in, where else, France.









Looks as if it's time for lunch...


*At 32^oC it is a touch too hot for Wensleydale-and-honey

Schrodinger's Bicycles

Wedged between the frame and brake cable of the bicycle that wasn't mine was my original note, now very faded after all the rain. Without thinking, I pulled it out and stuffed it in my coat pocket.

There were two reasons I could not bring myself to lay instant claim to the bicycle that wasn't mine: firstly, shifting it would require quite some physical force and I was on my way to a concert, and thus dressed in clothes which I wished to preserve free of rips, mud smears and oil stains; and secondly (and rather obviously) it wasn't my bicycle. I found the nearest person with a phone (to protect other people from the consequences of my absent-mindedness, I don't take phones to concerts) and called Rozzer Central once again. Having taken the details, they assured me they would deal with it.

Then, nothing happened. When nothing had continued to happen for two more days, I emailed Rozzer Central to enquire if they had at least re-united the bike with its owner. Their reply came as a bit of a shock.

It transpires that, at least here in Viking city (which, I might add, has somehow awarded itself the strapline "cycle-friendly"), the Police don't recover stray bicycles: that job is delegated to the Council. And the Council, in their turn, don't treat bicycles as objects of value, but as items of fly-tipping, to be got rid of pronto.

Which leaves me in the horrible position of not knowing whether my bike, or indeed the one that wasn't mine, are still in existence at all: they may by now have been melted down as scrap (probably in Sheffield).

The theory of continuity of bicycles may therefore have to be abandonned. The saddest thing of all is that, as I smoothed out the note to take a photograph for this blog, I noticed an addition in neat, pale pencil along one edge:

"This bike just arrived on my doorstep _ please keep!"