Cosmodaddy is Moving…

To all my readers, both casual and regular, because of the success of this blog, I’m now upgrading! From this point on most political content will move to:

http://www.cosmodaddy.com

Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers accordingly. It’s already up and running, has its own ethos and I’ll be joined by four other admins/writers initially. Submissions will be very welcome in time for regular other contributors.

For the more chatty, less serious content, well that’s already moved to:

http://lewishamdreamer.wordpress.com

And you can update bookmarks/RSS readers for that too. Everything which doesn’t ‘fit’ into Cosmodaddy.com will go over to Lewishamdreamer. I hope to see most of you on both sites, and to have as many comments as you can manage. I will be monitoring continuing comments to this site, and add to them as necessary, but from this point on it’s all change!

X-Factor 6:2

The new blog may have started, but it won’t contain material like this. In the spirit of silly fun, I’ll again be liveblogging tonight’s second episode of series 6 of X-Factor. Will anyone be able to stop the Danyl Johnson juggernaut? At 7pm BST:

Click Here

[NOW CLOSED but still viewable]

We’re Paying For Big Brother

In an extraordinary turn of events, the Metropolitan Police have not just decided to troll the internet for criticism of them in advance of this week’s Climate Camp protest in London – the first since the ill-fated G20 protest in April. Or rather they’ve outsourced it – that’s right Big Brother is watching you, and you’re paying him to do it:

Police worried about the force’s reputation are scouring Facebook and Twitter for criticism and rumours, ahead of the imminent Climate Camp protest.

The force has hired 6 Consulting*, a firm of “social media monitoring and engagement specialists” for a one-month pilot to monitor the web for relevant chatter.

It follows a series of reports criticising the Met’s policing of major events, including the G20 protest earlier this summer.

A spokesman said that the deal was not part of any investigative or intelligence-gathering programme. “We are increasingly looking to the internet to get our message out,” he said.

He said the G20 protests had seen “unhelpful” rumours spread fast online, and the pilot would help Met communications staff be more proactive in addressing public concerns. It would not however react to specific messages on Twitter, however, where a special Climate Camp account has been set up to release police messages.

(via Marc Vallee)

The Met can address public concerns by guaranteeing they won’t be violently attacking innocent protesters again. They say “unhelpful rumours” at the G20 protest – unhelpful in revealing their media-blocking, peaceful protester-bashing behaviour perhaps. Maybe they should consider that there would be no need to spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money in the name of spin if they actually policed in the name of protecting human rights rather than wilfully trampling on them. We will shortly find out if their pre-Climate Camp charm offensive is all mouth, or if the lessons of G20 have actually been learned.

Zac Efron and Bulge

On the set of The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud…

(via Towleroad)

Would You Trust the Met?

After the debacle of Kingsnorth and G20, Climate Camp certainly don’t:

While most visitors to previous Camps have had an inspiring and positive experience, some of us have had to suffer violence, intimidation, theft, sleep deprivation and harassment, thanks to past examples of “pre-planned and proportionate policing operations”. Local communities have been disrupted by police road closures and indiscriminate stops-and-searches. Members of the public have been attacked with batons or arrested on trumped-up charges simply for standing on the perimeter of a campsite (nearly all of them have now been acquitted or had their charges dropped). Judging from past experience, the best thing the police could do to ensure the health and safety of the public at Climate Camp 2009 would be to stay as far away from it as possible.

It sets up an interesting collision course, with the Met attempting a media charm offensive in advance of the Climate Camp ‘swoop’ at the end of the week. It looks like they don’t believe them any more than I do, but I’ll be very interested indeed to see what happens next, and will hopefully make it a focus of the soon-to-launch new blog.

X-Factor 6:1

This year I’m not going to tweet my comments about the new series of X-Factor, I’m going to liveblog them. You’re welcome to add your comments as well (and by Twitter, if you let me know in advance that you’d like to). It’ll kick off at 7pm BST and that’s when you:

Click Here

[NOW CLOSED but still viewable]

Cosmodaddy.com

Coming soon…

Look for tight focus on:

– Pirate Party UK/Liberty/No2ID and civil rights issues in the UK

– Amnesty International and human rights issues worldwide

– Regular film reviews/impacts/countdowns

– Issues affecting Vote for a Change, Hope Not Hate and I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist!

There should be a huge number more tools, allowing you to share or clip content easier, not to mention (hopefully) an embedded video player so I can interact with you regularly and more immediately. I hope all my regular readers choose to stick around! I promise the photos of cute boys like Alex Pettyfer won’t be disappearing either…;)

Jason/Cosmodaddy

Film Countdown: Avatar

Vodpod videos no longer available.

By now many of you will have seen the trailer for James (‘Titanic’/’Terminator’) Cameron’s ‘Avatar’. What not so many of you will have seen is the 3D IMAX footage which was first tested at the San Diego Comicon, and was yesterday released to preview cinema audiences worldwide. To be honest words fail me. The storyline seems interesting enough – an interstellar, cautionary environmental tale – but the 3D IMAX footage just blows it through your mind and out the other side. The entire production is in 3D – not just the odd wheel flying at your face or one part of an animation, rather every single thing on screen. My brain struggled to process what I was seeing, which was a remarkable experience – certainly not one I’ve ever had at the cinema before, amplified by a complete synthesis between fantasy and reality. Cameron blends CGI and live action, making the boundaries completely unclear, and delivering a whole new cinematic experience. From what I saw it’s unlikely to win any awards on the writing side (although I could be wrong), but noone will be able to avoid the unforgettable experience.

‘Avatar’ is released on the 18th December. I can’t imagine any of you will be mad enough to miss it…

Safeguarding Should Act Both Ways

Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club looks at the Home Office guidance for the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA):

the case worker will examine the individual’s ‘predisposing factors’, such as ‘those factors relating to an individual’s interests or drives’; ‘cognitive factors’, such as ‘strong anti-social beliefs’; and ‘behavioural factors’, including ‘using substances or sex to cope with stress or impulsive, chaotic or unstable lifestyle’. Drug use, sex life, favourite films… it all gets thrown into the mix.

The appendix of the Home Office’s guidance document elaborates on the ‘risk assessment models’ that case workers will use to reach a final decision on whether somebody should be barred from their job. The aim of this process, it says, it to make decisions ‘in relation to standardised points of reference that minimise subjective decision-making’.

The risk assessment model starts by identifying a series of possible ‘hazards’, which may come about as a result of a person taking a job/volunteering position, and listing them in a table. It gives the examples of ‘inappropriate physical contact with a 12- to 16-year-old pupil during a lesson’, ‘building a relationship which is exploited out of school resulting in underage sex’, and ‘taking photos of 12- to 16-year-old pupils (eg, during swimming lessons)’. Once they have identified the hazards, the case worker will give each a figure from one to five for the impact it would have on a child (in the examples above, it gives these hazards the figures of four, five and two). Then, they will give it a figure between one and five for the likelihood that the event will occur.

Once they have these two figures for each hazard, they will transfer the figures to ‘a matrix’, which seems to involve basically plotting them on a graph. So for each individual they are considering barring, they will end up with a graph with a series of dots on it: ‘The risk matrix gives a picture of the risk assigned to each hazard as a result of the likelihood and impact assessments.’ Then – somehow, it doesn’t exactly specify how – the ISA is supposed to be able to tell from this graph whether the person is a risk or not, and whether they should be barred.

Surely noone can agree this is anything other than completely insane. Any rational person should look at this and acknowledge that on a moral standpoint using society’s predisposition for predictability, standardisation and methods of control is a step too far in such a sensitive area. For a bureaucracy which one commentator believes is necessary because existing child protection agencies and policies are incompetent (rather than managing or reforming them) to make its rulings based on such guidance, such criteria and meaningless data should surely be abhorrent. The case workers won’t have any involvement in the lives or cases of those people people submitted to them for vetting, instead they will (already in many cases) destroy lives based on the appalling ‘guidance’ you see above. This is not the way to protect anyone, it won’t be able to identify abuse – after all how could the equivalent of a bean counter possibly do the work of a social worker? Yet here we are, abusing and endangering innocent adults at the altar of ‘child protection’.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

(via James, with thanks)

It’s About More Than Damian Green

As I mentioned last year, following the victory of the S and Marper case against the British government in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Home Office became obliged to remove innocent people from the National DNA Database. Not only then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith showed a lack of interest in doing so, but then this month the for-profit policing organisation ACPO outright instructed Chief Constables in England and Wales not to comply with the ruling. Makes it interesting when Tory shadow cabinet minister Damian Green then finds himself able to be taken off the database:

Damian Green, the Conservative frontbench immigration spokesman whose arrest during a Home Office leaks inquiry sparked a parliamentary storm, has won a four-month battle to have his DNA, fingerprint and police records destroyed.

The Metropolitan police told Green’s lawyers he is to be treated as “an exceptional case”. His DNA sample and fingerprints, taken when he was arrested, will be deleted within “a number of weeks”.

Green last night welcomed the decision “as a small but significant victory for freedom” but asked when DNA samples and profiles of 850,000 other innocent people who had been arrested but never charged would be destroyed.

Now why should a Tory front bencher (likely to be in government in the next 12 months) be able to force the Met to change their position on the DNA database, when so many others can’t? Green has the same question:

The home secretary is dragging his feet in producing even a consultation document in response to the European court’s ruling, which destroys the legal basis of current policy. So the policy, which intrudes on the privacy of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, could remain in place for months.

Britain is at the extreme end of this kind of state intrusion. At the end of September 2008, the national DNA database contained computerised DNA profiles and linked DNA samples from approximately 4.7 million individuals (more than 7% of the UK population). This is a much higher proportion of the population than any other EU or G8 country.

It’s quite unthinkable that the Home Office should so willingly ignore the ECHR’s ruling, although less so for the Association of Chief Police Officers, who contrary to popular belief aren’t even a government body. It might make political sense for both to limit their future embarrassment at a government minister with his DNA on the register, but their compliance with the ECHR ruling should be paramount. It’s a joke, as Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti points out, for decisions about which innocent people get their DNA removed from the database to be determined by whether or not they have an entry in Who’s Who! Liberty’s response has been to begin ‘DNA clinics’ in Hackney alongside local MP Diane Abbott, to begin helping people locally who have had their DNA retained illegally. Liberty says:

“If Damian Green MP can have his DNA destroyed in record time, young people in Hackney should be entitled to the same. Those without a powerful voice are just as innocent, yet the police seem to find their requests for DNA destruction considerably easier to dismiss.”

Forty percent of Britain’s criminals are not on the database but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are. The National DNA database is one of the largest in the world, holding 4.5 million profiles – this includes around 300,000 children and approximately 850,000 innocent people who have never been charged or cautioned.

And Abbott provides an important reminder why it’s important to begin this process in somewhere like her constituency:

[But] as the Home Affairs Select Committee pointed out this month, black men are disproportionately represented on the database. In particular there are tens of thousands of completely innocent young people who have been stigmatised in this way. It is time that the government acted on the ECHR ruling that automatic retention of DNA is wrong. And I am looking forward to working with Liberty to make sure that young people in Hackney who are innocent of any crime can have their DNA taken off the government’s database just like Damian Green”