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Again from The Register: Government mulls mind expanding drugs, man

Government mulls mind expanding drugs, man

Soma time
By Chris Williams
Published Monday 5th June 2006 11:25 GMT
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New Labour's top science advisor has told government a new generation of brain function-enhancing pharmaceuticals are set to change how people live their lives over the next 20 years.

In a presentation to ministers at Downing Street, Sir David King said “recreational psychoactive substances” will be used by healthy people to improve their cognitive abilities, The Sunday Times reports.

Just what is "new generation" about this? And what is "brain function-enhancing"? Half a million clubbers a week apparently take one or two pills to enhance the sensitivity of their snog receptors. Or maybe the sort of brain function-enhancing that gave us Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes? Or that great DFD (Debate Function Disinhibitor) Tetrahydrocannabinol? Whilst millions' of eyes are opened to appreciate true beauty after a few shots of good old alcohol.

Better the devils we know, I say...:)

Technorati Tags: drugs laws

Wow! So now using a litter bin could land you with a fine...BBC NEWS | England | Leicestershire | Man faces £50 fine for using bin:

A man who threw away junk mail in a litter bin on his way to work is facing a £50 fine from his local council.
Andy Tierney, 24, from Hinckley in Leicestershire, is reported to have dumped the unwanted mail in a bin located in the street.

Council officers tracked him down using the addresses on the envelopes.

Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council said Mr Tierney had actually dumped a bag of rubbish, including food...

Wowie! I do this all the time. Sort of. If I'm in town, say, and buy a sandwich lunch from M&S or somewhere and get a carrier bag and put my local newspaper, fags and sandwiches in the bag and then swap over the fags for an empty fag packet, don't finish all the sandwiches and complete my thirty-four second in depth review of the local rag, I'll wrap them all up in the plastic bag and put them in the nearest bin. There'd certainly be "food waste" in it if I had an apple core or banana skin or something.

So, calling a police-horse gay, swearing at your best mate in the park and now putting litter in the nearest bin are all bad, and some people think we are not getting more authoritarian and petty as a society?

As if Oxford City Council hasn't had a difficult enough time adjusting to changes in the balance of power in May and since, the Oxford Mail reports another City Councillor Set To Quit:

Labour Oxford city councillor Dan Paskins has forced another by-election by announcing he is to quit the Town Hall.

The 26-year-old executive board member and Lye Valley councillor will become the fifth Labour councillor to quit this calendar year. He is due to leave officially in a couple of weeks.

Dan is generally the decent sort, and has done the decent thing - he's been offered a job in Liverpool and doesn't think, rightly, he should try to hang on at the Council pretending to attend the odd meeting or simply fading away over six months' inactivity. So he's done the honest thing and decided to stand down before he disappears.

Byelections always put a bit of strain on parties, and there was some discussion the other night about how much they cost to hold them separately (in this case unavoidably though as all recognised I think) rather than to announce any you know are coming up at the same time. So, whilst I am sure my party colleagues will want to crucify me for suggesting we want even more campaigning in early autumn, perhaps now is a good time for those who have not yet done the decent thing, who got where they are today through the efforts of other people in parties they have now abandoned, to do just that.

Paul Sargent, Sajjad Malik, if you're reading, you clearly have a couple of weeks to think about this. Do the decent thing, prove you have a mandate under the banner you now carry, or not. Let's have a "super Thursday" with three on one day.

Here's another thing about the Conservative party and their tenuous claimed link with the Co-operative Movement. It is no coincidence that the international rainbow flag for peace is also the international co-operative movement's flag. Nor that it was the Co-operative Womens' Guild that instituted the idea of wearing white poppies to promote peace instead of red ones that commemorated the "glorious dead". It is axiomatic that the Co-operative Movement strives for peace - the very phrase "Peace and Co-operation" encapsulates the ethos.

So, will Dave be wearing red, for the more traditionally Conservative Remembrance of War, or white for the traditional Co-operative Promotion of Peace? I think we can probably predict pretty well which it will be, don't you?

Charles Kennedy was presenting a Channel 4 "Thirty Minutes" tonight on "Politics and Power". I can't find it online, so if you missed it (as I missed the first five minutes being suckered in by those other great Liberals trying to rearrange the county in the Madness of King George) all I can find to give you a flavour is the Radio Times write-up:

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, examines the problem he sees as being at the heart of British politics: the way politicians too often sacrifice their principles in the pursuit of power. Speaking about his experiences fighting six general elections, Kennedy compares notes with parliamentary colleagues including Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith, Baroness Jay, Norman Tebbit, Baroness Morris and Jonathan Cruddas.

If it wasn't actually intended as a reminder to party members heading off to conference in four weeks or so of what we (were forced to) gave up only eight short months ago, it certainly succeeded in being so for me! Charles came across as we fondly remember - frank, honest and genuine. A real "home boy" still representing the constituency he grew up in. The man who, for all his faults and fumblings at times, managed to woo the electorate with his fireside chattiness.

I missed him setting out the hypothesis, but he diagnosed many of the problems lots of us feel about politics today - disengagement, lack of trust, unwillingness to debate with the public some of the biggest issues - especially at elections times - the concentration on what a tiny number of floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies think and want to the exclusion of the majority of communities in the country, even the whips system keeping MPs on the party line regardless of what they honestly feel and whether their constituents agree.

He said that reform was necessary. IDS, I think it was, argued that there was no such thing as a General Election nowadays because of targetting marginal seats. Everyone seemed to agree. One problem was that parties did not want to appear to be divided on these hot issues (they chose Europe, nuclear power and Trident, but it could have been any of a whole load of other big issues - environment, drugs and so on), again especially at election times. And it made me wonder - how would it affect my commitment to an election campaign, say, if these big debates were aired and I did stand divided from my party on something that I thought very important.

And as I thought about it, I found that Charles was making the perfect argument for electoral reform, and in particular STV voting. It's a little ironic as I know some Labour electoral reformers felt that Charles was pretty much responsible for us letting the long grass grow around PR as an issue at a time when they could have built a lot of support for reform in their own party if there was pressure from us and the issue kept at the fore.

Under STV you have larger constituencies with several MPs and you get to rank the candidates individually in order of preference on the ballot paper. Say Oxfordshire could be one instead of six constituencies, returning six MPs altogether. In order to get yourself a better chance of being elected than your party colleagues you've got to make a name for yourself, differentiate yourself a little from them. So you might be generally a Tory voter, but are strongly pro-Europe, so you can get to choose the Tory candidates who are least anti-Eruope and maybe throw in a vote for a more free-market Lib Dem as better than the more Eurosceptic Tory candidates.

So it would give the candidates a reason to highlight their individual issues where they differ from the predominant party line, an excuse for when the whips try to berate them for voting honestly on those issues when the pressures are on to vote with the lobby fodder. In short, more open, honest and public debate, a closer approximation to the overall political preferences in the nation as a whole and no safe seats to abandon to concentrate on targeted marginal constituency.

A great pity then that Charles did not take the opportunity to prescribe that remedy. But I do hope to see more of him, soon. Not just the party, but the British political scene is the poorer for his not being as big a part of it as he was. And I say that as someone who put him sixth (if at all even possibly) in my preferences when he was first elected.