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In a Guardian article about Jack Straw to broker deal on party funding towards the end he is quoted, about his previous jobs at Home and Foreign Secretary as saying:

Mr Straw said that he welcomed the change of job in part because in nine years as home secretary and foreign secretary he had been on call, night and day, without a break.

"There had to come a time at one stage where I was going to be able, not to go off duty entirely, but not to have to respond to emergency calls all the time," he said.

This is a recurrent theme in my political outlook. We do not vote for these people to be "superhuman". To be the only person who can possibly field "emergency calls" all the time. The Prime Minister is even worse - we do not vote for him to pretend to be in a cabal ruling the planet on his own with the leaders of G8 or whatever group it is today.

It's one reason I so loathe the Westminster/Whitehall government model. I think of the MPs I know, and some of them have been top stream ministers, and well, they're not terribly extraordinary people. In fact the most extraordinary thing I find about most MPs is their rather off putting egos.

I don't know if a better system can be devised. I seem to think that in the past the pace of life, and diplomacy, has been that much slower than an individual did have the time to take it all in and have something of a life. Do they think it's a mark of humility to be our "servant" all day and all night? Well it's not, it's the worst of egotism that says "I am the only person out of 60,000,000 citizens who can possibly deal with this, so i must be constantly available".

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, politics

The Times continues its single minded investigation into that donation...Lib Dems' £2.4m was donated by fraudulent firm.

Now, don't get me wrong - if it came to it I would pay my share, on the condition that all the "muppets" were fired first of course...but the Times says at one point:

If the Electoral Commission forces the party to surrender the gift, each member will become liable for a share of the debt.

Whaaat? Since when? I expect the remaining few members of the Labour and Tory parties to resign immediately then to avoid being severally liable for their parties' debts. I've read and reread the section of PPERA on donations since this story broke. It mentions none of this whatever. Can the Times back this up?

Still...the judge did say that "It is also clear that Michael Brown tried to hide the fact that there had been no legitimate trading with the funds supplied to him". Seems like a good defense to me - if the person making the donation was trying to hide the fact that he wasn't trading to the extent that a judge mentioned that is what he was doing, how on earth is anyone else meant to determine otherwise in 30 days, when it has taken the resources of HSBC and the legal system 18 months to do so.

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

The Independent today reports that US researchers have found that Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects.

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 11 July 2006
A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claim today.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory. They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

Only a few millennia late. Maybe we can have 'shrooms' legalised again as a religious rite/right.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws