From Edri-gram:
====================================
8. ELOI – a French database to manage the expulsion of illegal migrants
====================================

On 26 December 2007, the French government published a decree creating the ELOI file, a database aimed at facilitating the expulsion of illegal migrants. In March 2007, the French highest administrative court cancelled a first attempt by the government to create this file, after 4 French NGOs, among which EDRI member IRIS, filed a case against the Interior ministry.

While the March text was cancelled by the Conseil d’Etat for procedural reasons only, the new version shows some important progress related to concerns raised by the NGOS. The main changes are that no data will be kept on visitors of illegal migrants in retention centres, and that personal data of citizens with which illegal immigrants are staying, when not in retention centres are kept for 3 months rather than 3 years.

While this step backwards from the government side is a direct result of the French NGOs action, the ELOI database remains unacceptable, according to the authors of the former complaint, with regards to the migrants themselves and their families. The duration of the retention of their data remains 3 years for most of the data, and data on their children are still kept in the ELOI file. Last but not least, the database still contains data on “the need for specific surveillance (of the migrant) with regards to the public order’. According to the NGOs, this demonstrates that the government makes a direct association between immigration and criminality.

Moreover, the decree contains new provisions, adding to the ELOI database an impressive amount of administrative and judicial data dealing with all aspects of the expulsion process, most of them to be retained for 3 years. In addition, a new purpose has been set to this file, which is to produce statistics on expulsion decisions and their actual executions.

These problems, as well as the Sarkozy administration setting up quantitative objectives – a minimum of 25000 expulsions targeted in 2008 – have made the French NGOs declare that the actual meaning of this file is the government willingness to manage the expulsion of migrants at an unprecedented level. They consider that with the ELOI database, this expulsion policy has reached an industrial level.

Decree n. 2007-1890 creating the ELOI database (only in French, 26.12.2007)

CNIL’s (French DPA) opinion on the draft decree (only in French, 24.05.2007)

French NGOs (CIMADE, GISTI, IRIS, LDH) joint press release (only in French, 03.01.2008)

IRIS dossier on foreigners and databases in France (only in French)

EDRI-gram: French high court cancels the creation of illegal migrants database (14.03.2007)

(Contribution by Meryem Marzouki, EDRI member IRIS – France)

So how long will it be before the French public are treated as Eloi too?

The connection between over subsidised Departments and bad legislation is undeniable. Secretaries of State are continuing to turn taxes into turkeys.

The Guardian

The conventions of parliamentary democracy dictate that there should be a moment in the narrative arc of every term where the politicians are invited to petition voters and put their case as to why they deserve to be in government. In the US primaries this opportunity is presented in the form of a question. “What would it mean to you,” a pundit will ask, fixing a gaze suggestive of psychoanalytic importance, “to win Colorado?”

I don’t know what the producers originally expected this question to elicit, but if it was disclosure of burning liberal ambition, they must have been disappointed. Politicians gulp, mist up and synthesise all their young hopes and dreams for a future in the legislation industry in one tremulous sentence: “I’d be able to build a new secure country.”

Cynics might suggest that a more security for the US or UK is to political contestants what world peace was to Miss World entrants – an acceptable alibi for taxation. What is interesting, though, is not that their answer might be untrue. It’s that this is the most noble, vote-winning reply they can come up with. It seems to have literally not occurred to anyone that “devolving great powers” might be the most blameless dream of a competitor in a democratic contest. Either that, or it gets ruled out on the grounds of irrelevance. So entirely has direct democracy been excised from the values of a modern politician that the only distinction left between a worthy winner and a wannabe is how they intend to spend their billions.

The drastic job losses and cuts announced by the Home Office on Tuesday would normally, you might think, be a cause for concern among people who have some lobbied investment in the ‘security bubble’ of the country. There has been much righteous indignation about a former Secretary of State’s private equity firm taking over a famous biometric data company, and No2ID were probably accurate in their description of the regime as “a confused bull in a china shop” when they criticised the department last year.

But it is easy not to sympathise with the new bosses’ surprise at discovering entries in the Home Office’s accounts such as £200,000,000 for fresh fruit and flowers – a well-known industry euphemism for lobbyists’ partying requirements – or the fact that 30% of the advances they hand out never result in an legislation being made, let alone laws that people want to obey. But you do not need to audit a major government department’s accounts to know that there is a serious problem – just listen to Radio 4. Talk to anyone in the legislation industry, and they will admit that the parallel themes of gross tax burden and crap legislation are not unconnected.

The conflation of progressive taxation and wealth is an entirely modern, counter-rational innovation. Large taxation has historically been made by people who had no choice; it was war andd famine that drove them, not megalomaniac fantasies. The First World War was fought on a shoestring, and remains ‘The Great War’ as we speak. The tragedy of what happened next, several billion-pound wars later, was most vividly illustrated on the cover of Hello, which featured – without an apparent trace of irony – Gordon Brown in a Rolls-Royce.

Gordon Brown is described as “on autopilot” over the upheavals at HMG. His reasons for this may involve a lack of creative integrity – we don’t yet know – but anyone who refuses to pass legislation unless it will cost the public billions is probably working on legislation he does not wants to hear. HMG is sending a billion pounds worth of unused tax credits to China, where they will be laundered and used to pave the pockets of ‘business partners’. There is no logical reason why politicians should deserve to be powerful; it’s simply that, for many years, the market made them that way. If, because of re-evaluating libertarianism, the market is ceasing to do so, there is surely no alternative moral entitlement available to invoke.

The industry’s excuse for levying taxes so highly has always been that it funds the development of new social enterprises. But the track record of governments in this department is woeful – in the past five years they have more or less stopped trying. New providers today are hoping to use venture capital, friendly societies and enterprising managers to bring themselves to our attention. That’s certainly a lot more challenging than banking a fat tax cheque, and spending it on drugs and middle management. But as a quality-control mechanism for filtering out the politicians chiefly interested in levying even more taxation, it is probably a radical improvement.

The Telegraph

Surveillance cameras do little, if anything, to prevent late night alcohol-fuelled crime and violence on Britain’s high streets, the country’s most senior police officer in the field has admitted.

[…]

He also admitted the public had been “misled” into believing that installing camera systems would have a big impact on anti-social behaviour.

The article goes on to say only those thinking ‘rationally’ about CCTV surveillance will be deterred from criminal activity. In fact most people don’t think about CCTV, never mind rationally even when sober – as a general tool it is bound to be a remarkably ineffective deterrent.

To combat the problem, Mr Gerrard said he would like all camera owners and operators to be required by law to produce high quality images using a standardised system so the police could use them effectively in court.

Unfortunately Mr Gerrard fails it. Higher quality images will not increase the ‘rationality’ of the ‘law-abiding’ general public. Higher quality images will not remedy the problem of indiscriminate (non-targeted) CCTV capturing irrelevant images of the public.

2007 was a year of movement – finally made the move from one big city to another, a relief to ‘start from scratch’ again, shed off a lot of mental detritus and antipathy. Trying to find new paths still barely scratching the surface.
So then resigned and reemployed, the focus shifts and the outcome of working becomes a delight again.
In boxing things up realised there are some records I no longer like and may have reached the point where others I probably won’t listen to again, but which ones? The eternal question… perhaps. As a result bought hardly any new music, on the plus side a whole year without earphones.
The sad feeling that hearing is getting worse, still able to hear better than some but finding that sounds don’t ‘resonate’ as they used to.
More domesticity as a result of going out less, putting effort into better cooking and baking.
Reappraising the meaning of ‘disturbance’, rattled by not getting things done or learning new things, not finding the right word, losing the memory.

Online presence in various places peters out to a blip on the outer circle, the thought of whether it ‘matters’ flickers. This shall be remedied.

When it comes to funding policies you can’t make something out of nothing, says the BBC newsreader, from behind the very important desk. “Until now, because British politicians seem to have turned this fundamental law of economics upside down.” The Mail on Sunday loved it too. “Amazing British legislation returns MORE money than you put into it – and could soon be funding your retirement,” it said. Taste the excitement. “It violates almost every known law of economics.”

Well, that’ll teach those so-called economists a lesson. The system is a health service operated by a company called Vaxitol, and it is claimed to return more tax monies than you put into it. Has anybody validated this claim?

“Jim Loins, of the University of York, independently evaluated the system,” says the Mail. Oh. He’s a “business development manager” in York’s enterprise and innovation office, although he does have a fun medical hobby. “As a member of the British Society of Enemologists, he undertakes research into the geo- and bio-physics of Earth energies. His special research topic is the mechanism of enemas, based on quantum ideas in constipation studies.”

I contacted a working statistician who was previously reported – in the Telegraph in 2003 – to have independently validated a similar policy from the same party. He wishes to remain anonymous, because he is bored with getting long conspiracy theory emails from free-healthcare cranks, but he is now a leading economic researcher at a Russell Group university.

He was employed to do a single, very specific test, using measuring procedures devised by Vaxitol, and the conclusions in his report were very guarded: “Using the apparatus supplied by Gordon Brown and the procedures of analysis suggested by the company there appears to be an tax gain in the system.”

Using the analytic method provided, it’s true, this statistician could get incredible results: the tax increase would read zero, and yet funding would triple in around five years. Because the graphs provided weren’t showing National Insurance increases.

The problem stems from the difference between measuring indirect taxation and direct taxation. Stick with me, taxes are fun when you’re making the public look stupid. The statistics he was given were to measure direct taxation: there was a dodge in the yearly carry over (this is a “one way street” for economics), so theoretically the capital could only flow one way, making it reimbursable.

Unfortunately, at high salaries the special, magic tax-free policy went into “oscillation”: that meant that the captial was accumulated from high tax payers that were beyond the threshold of the general public, so beyond its ability to influence the electorate.

Therefore the tax funds could flow in freely, therefore it was indirect taxation, and therefore the tax burden measurement was invalid. I speculate that the “Chancellor” made the same mistake, and I can honestly say I find the little histories of these stratagems fascinating.

Anyway, in these taxes, the Chancellor saw the tax income steadily increase with applied taxation and then fall to almost zero as the emphasis went in to National Insurance. A “prudent gain, breaking the laws of economics,” was only recorded when the system was twisted in such a way that the measurement of “taxes going in” simply became invalid.

So did our man try measuring the tax burden properly? Yes, he did. He placed a consumer choke on the system, which prevented the system going into recession and removed any tax gain, and also measured the (large) inderect taxation with his own statistical methods in the system. No financial gain.

· Please send your bad economics to bad.economics@guardian.co.uk

[…]

The celebration of the ‘body beautiful’ in the 1920s and 1930s is commonly associated with fascist Italy or nazi Germany. Focusing on the physical culture movement, this article argues that the endeavour to build a ‘superman’ was not confined to fascist dictatorships or Britain’s small fascist parties. There is an extensive literature on the ‘superman’ as a political icon and on the role of sport under fascism in Italy and nazi Germany. For Britain, Dan Stone has traced the influence of Nietzschean ideas on intellectuals and eugenicists who, if not fascist, were located at ‘the extremes of Englishness’. By contrast, the physical culture movement which originated in the late nineteenth century has received rather less attention. Joanna Bourke has portrayed the movement as a site of male bonding, uniting men through ‘worship of the gorgeous physique’ and offering techniques to develop male bodies to enhance military prowess, economic success and social harmony.

[…]

From here posted because of this from the Telegraph:

Ministers are designing new towns dedicated to promoting healthy living in a bid to tackle Britain’s obesity epidemic, it has been reported.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said 10 “eco towns” already being planned by the Government to minimise the environmental impact of new housing should be extended to become “fit towns” […]

So still no new ideas from the current set of dunderheads.

Homemade bread, unsalted butter, organic beetroot & lettuce, dill dressing

This is water-kefir fermenting at home.

About Kefir

Waterkefir is considered to be even better than milkkefir and the effect is similar. Waterkefir tastes very good and one becomes accustomed to looking forward to it every day.

The natives of the Kaukassus Mountains know the effect of Kefir. As children they drink it like water, and on average these people live to an age of 110 years. This is one of the few places in the world where most people reach an advanced old age in perfect health.

According to Dr. Menkiw, who has researched Kefir all his life, tuberculossis, cancer, stimach ailments etc. are unknown there. Dr. Drasek from Germany had already observed the good effects of Kefir before the Second World War. Persons who drink Kefir report it has helped them to recover after severe illnesses. Other people explain how drinking Kefir has helped them to overcome stomach cramps,chronic intestinal inflammations, gall bladder ailments, inflammations of the liver and bladder ailments. Mothers have given Kefir to their children as a substitute for mother’s milk. Women claim that Kefir has served them well in the treatment of eczema during pregnancy and in various chronic abdominal ailments.

Other possible applications of Kefir include nerve ailments, jaundice, diarrhea, constipation, aneamia, rashes, decomposition of blood

And it tastes good!

—

So where do you get it from and how do you make it you may ask.
We were given a small bottle of kefir powder from some French friends, but are looking around for kefir granules (this looks promising)

Our recipe is adapted from one on the web.
1 litre mineral or filtered water
2 slices unwaxed lemon
40g sultanas
6-8 dessert spoons of unrefined sugar
powdered kefir

mix ingredients in sterilised jar, leave for three days letting off the ferment gas occasionally.
Remove the lemon and sultanas with non-metal spoon, carefully pour off 5/8 of the liquid into a storage jar for serving.
Top up with correct proportions of water and sugar and on alternate occasions either replace or renew lemon/sultanas.
We also return the dregs of the serving bottle into the kefir as the powder is too fine to be filtered. If you can get granules you can filter them out at stage two for re-use with a non-metal filter.
Repeat.

Shadow Home Affairs Minister, James Brokenshire MP, has today called for an urgent review of safeguards to protect against ID fraud in the wake of the increasing use by clubs and bars of computer scanning equipment to check age information.

The new products are being marketed to pubs, clubs and entertainment outlets to improve their compliance with licensing requirements on under-age drinking. But large quantities of other personal details are also being downloaded at the same time. The equipment works by taking data from driving licences and other forms of ID when they are swiped through the machine by door staff. This includes home address details, date of birth information and even a personal photograph. These details are then stored for potential marketing and other uses and can be printed out, burned onto CD or emailed.

[…]

“This issue is just a small foretaste of the sort of problems that would arise if a national ID card were ever introduced.”

Not the front page of the Metro anymore.

As regular readers will know the databases comprising the NIR system (and linked to ID cards) are being designed to allow access by third party companies such as the marketing companies mentioned. The ‘problems that would arise’ are being built into the system with full knowledge of the implications; no one in their right mind can fail to see the lack of integrity.

—

Yes – Metro – my brain feels as dirty as my fingertips.

Ther love songs start at dusk, at first drifting across from the other side of the river. The bamboo groves on the mountain opposite are bathed in the gold of the lingering rays of the sun while this side of the river is already cloaked in night. Young women in groups of five or six come to the river bank, some standing in a circle and others calling their lovers. Melodious singing rapidly fills the vast night. Young women are everywhere, still with their parasols up and holding a handkercheif or a fan. There are also some thirteen- or fourteen year old girls who are just becoming aware of boys.
In each group one girl leads the singing and the other girls harmonize. I observe that the lead singer is invariably the prettiest of the group, I suppose choice by beauty is a fairly natural principle.
The voice of the lead singer rises in the air and I can’t help noticing her utter sincerity. The correct word is perhaps not “sing”, for the clear shrill sounds come from deep within so that body and heart respond. The sounds seem to travel from the soles of the feet then shoot up between the eyes and the forehead before they are produced – no wonder they’re called “flying songs”. It is totally instinctive, uncontrived, unrestrained and unembellished, and certainly devoid of what might be called embarrasment. Each woman exerts herself, body and heart, to draw her man to her.

[…]

So-called civilisation in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility. Such is the stupidity of human beings.

Gao Xingjian on Miao courting.

————–

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so high and remote from our usual routine as music. But we do not much lament that; we do not get even so far; a certain practical cunning, which admittedly we stand greatly in need of, we hold to be our greatest distinction, and with a smile born of such cunning we are wont to console ourselves for all shortcomings, even supposing—only it does not happen that we were to yearn once in a way for the kind of bliss which music may provide. Josephine is the sole exception; she has a love for music and knows too how to transmit it; she is the only one; when she dies, music—who knows for how long—will vanish from our lives.

I have often thought about what this music of hers really means. For we are quite unmusical; how is it that we understand Josephine’s singing or, since Josephine denies that, at least think we can understand it. The simplest answer would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear. But in my opinion that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that others feel anything of the kind. Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

[continues]

General Jack D. Ripper:
Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake:
Lord, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper:
You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake:
I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper:
Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

And now we have the prospect of mandatory addition of folic acid to bread and flour. The supposed reasoning behind this is the prevention of neural deficiencies in new born children, however if we look at spina bifida the incidence rate is currently 0.15 per 1000 and if my browsing is correct with a birth rate of 700,000 per year that gives 105 children per year affected which is unfortunate but hardly worth a programme which indiscriminantly affects the whole population and with a ‘dosage’ that cannot be checked. We do not ban vehicles for the larger number of deaths and injuries caused by drivers, there are road safety campaigns, likewise pregnant women should be told about supplementary levels of folic acid intake.

Aside from this there is the matter of ignoring the right of people to eat unadulterated food, certainly in the case of flours I would imagine that most people making their own food have enough basic knowledge to maintain a balanced diet with as much folic acid as would be provided with a mass fortification programme.

It is your right to be able to buy unadulterated food and that is what the Food Standards Agency should be enforcing it should not be in the business of medication or anything else.

From the Telegraph:

All schoolchildren should have “happiness” lessons up to the age of 18 to combat growing levels of depression, according to a senior Government adviser.

Pupils should study subjects such as how to manage feelings, attitudes to work and money, channelling negative emotions and even how to take a critical view of the media, said Lord Richard Layard, a Labour peer and professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

In a speech last night, he said that Tony Blair’s Respect programme – the crackdown on young offenders and problem families – was “far more repressive than preventative” and may be fuelling levels of depression.

[How very true – mm]

He said all state school pupils should receive tuition in “how to be happy” up to the age of 18 and their progress in the subject should feature in university applications.

[…]

The proposal comes only days after the Government said that lessons in manners – including respect for the elderly and how to say “please” and “thank you” – should be taught in secondary schools to combat bad behaviour.

[In SECONDARY schools!!! This is so basic a four year old should already know thsi to be right – mm]

Lord Layard, the director of the wellbeing programme at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, said: “Learning hard things takes an enormous amount of practise. To play the violin well takes 10,000 hours of practise. How can we expect people to learn to be happy without massive amounts of practise and repetition?

[Lest we forget happiness is quite unrelated to spontaneity and wonder – mm]

“I believe it can only be done by the schools. Parents of course are crucial. But if we want to change the culture, the main organised institutions we have under social control are the schools.”

[my emphasis and you know the implications – mm]

[…]

Classes should cover managing your feelings; loving and serving others; appreciating beauty; sex, love and parenting; work and money; a critical approach to media; political participation; and philosophy, he said.

[Classes should cover not complaining, obeying orders, surface pleasures, base pleasures, generating tax revenues, distrusting criticism, co-option into the Statist framework and speculation – mm]

[…]

However, happiness lessons have been criticised by academics. Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at Kent University and author of Therapy Culture, said: “In pushing emotional literacy, what some teachers are really doing is abandoning teaching. They are giving up and talking about emotions instead, so that children value all this non-discipline-led activity more than maths, English or science. What is amazing about this is that time and time again, research says that it does not work.”

[i.e. the politician has no idea what he is talking about and should keep his ‘happiness classes’ to his own family – mm]

And while we’re on happiness:

“Are you a happy man?
Certainly! Do I look happy, huh?
Why?
Because I live the type of life I do.
What type of life is that?
The type that you don’t.”

Öyvind Fahlström: Mao-Hope March

And some Fahlström mp3s at ubu

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said yesterday that it was “perfectly legitimate” for NHS trusts to refuse some treatments to heavy smokers or patients who are obese.

Miss Hewitt defended the right of doctors and managers to draw up local guidelines on treatment after a survey revealed that some trusts are already banning operations.

[…]

Telegraph

Oh dear, Miss Hewitt seems to be confusing the NHS Trusts with a private healthcare system – and we aren’t there yet (HA!).

The NHS has no right to turn away patients from services that it has been deigned to provide unless there is a compelling medical case to the contrary. Every tax payer in this country is compelled to pay National Insurance contributions towards their healthcare, pension, and welfare benefits – the quid pro quo of this is the State is obliged to provide services to each and everyone of the people.

If the State is not to provide services to certain people it must stop demanding payment of National Insurance so that they are able to buy medical insurance without it being a punitive measure. It should then be taken as read that anyone wishing to opt out of State welfare services should have the right to not pay National Insurance also.

Medical students’ personal details leaked

Junior doctors’ details exposed online

The Medical Training Application Service or MTAS is a computer system where student and junior doctors apply for jobs – a system they were repeatedly assured was secure.

The same assurances as for the NHS ‘data spine’ and National Identity Register.

Today Channel Four News can reveal that since at least 9 o’ clock this morning, the details of medical students applying for foundation course posts – the first year to become a junior doctor – were openly available to the public.

This is astonishing. Not only can we see what they wrote in their applications; their addresses; their phone numbers; who their referees are. We can also see if there were white, heterosexual, gay Asian, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, and we can also see if they have got police records and what the crime was.

[…]

Contrary to the report this is not ‘astonishing’ it was entirely predictable in the same way we have been predicting the failure of the National Identity Register, etc. What is astonishing is that junior doctors are being asked to give personal details such as sexual orientaton and ethnic background as these details have absolutely no bearing on their suitability to be doctors.

No Minister was available for interview tonight. Instead they issued this statement:

“We apologise to any applicants whose details have been improperly accessed. This URL was made available to a strictly limited number of people making checks as part of the employment process.

Of course this is only true if the URL has been blocked to spiders and other web searching utilities, the fact that access to the URL was limited is only due to the violation of privacy being flagged up, this could have easily been noticed by some unscrupulous person. You can be certain as a result of this people will be targeting such sites in the future on a speculative basis.

Experts say the level of data included in the applications makes it a gold mine for identity theft and fraud.

Incidentally, good to see that channel4 uses the word experts rather than BBQs usual ‘critics’.

On BBQs Toady program this morning this was indeed highlighted and at last the interviewee (possibly Andrew Lansley) got airtime to make the connection to NIR and the data spine.

One issue about this failure is that it relates to a set of details that aren’t even shared between government departments, financial institutions, foriegn intelligence services, police, local authorities, estate agents, schools, etc, etc. which the Neu Labour government want to extend the NIR/Identity Card scheme to. The wider the access to any database the higher the risk of information being leaked, the NIR will be trawled remorselessy for such information and whatever the government say the NIR ID will make its way onto records that contain personal information such as sexual orientation, ethnicity or any other information that is prised out of you by the State.