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The truth is that terrorists are in US government. Government that knowingly hold innocent people as prisoners and tortures them in prison for eight (8) years can easily be considered terrorist government in itself, especially given how many of the tortured prisoners were just civilians, sold to the US government by Afghans for 5K a head, probably some were competitors in some trade, others may have had lovely wives, who knows. At the time of Bush and Cheney, if you were in Afghanistan and didn't like someone or wanted something that belonged to someone else, you could kill two birds with the same stone: get rid of the problem (the person) and make 5K while doing it.

Terrorists won, but they are closer than you think.

I am not defending what the National Post did in any way but their libel nor does the findings by the House of Commons completely exonerate the scientists of the UAE.

While the House of Commons showed there was no proof of "tampering" of the data in the climategate sample it was because the UAE deleted all of the raw data in question.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

There was no way to prove if the data had been tampered with because the data was deleted. The only thing that was left was their "value added" data.

I don't know if what the UAE did could be considered science because science is supposed to be an open and completely transparent process. When you throw out your raw data instead of releasing it when legally and morally obliged to you shouldn't be able to be called a scientist any more.

That's why the head of the CRU at UAE resigned his post.

They also engaged in trying to get skeptics from being published in scientific journals, among other things.

I absolutely wish we could debate the science and be 100% objective in its analysis when you put humans into the equation it simply isn't possible.

Yup. There is a foreign submarine bearing a nuclear bomb armed missile or three, off your coast right now...

Except when they're in dry dock after managing to crash into each other at the bottom of the ocean...

Do you really think they'll show up at your door with a turban and a single shot pistol?

Oh, and sorry to reply twice, but that's pretty much what they did here. It's not going to be an organized attack. It will be one or two nutjobs who answer the call for violence. I would take my chances with that. And let's just say that as an American I would not be hiding in a panic room waiting for the police to come and save me. Mr. Westergaard is a walking and talking argument for the right to keep and bear arms.

Even worse, some hack might shove the data through some perl code:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7028418.ece

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2971369.ece

That is not the way the United States Government, nor any of the state governments within the United States, works. The way the United States was initially setup, the states actually passed whatever amount of money they deemed appropriate to the Federal Government. Since the Federal Government was very limited(as it is supposed to be, per the U.S. Constitution), it did not need a huge volume of money to operate effectively. Fast-forward to today and it is a totally different scenario.

The Federal Government, like all state governments, has gotten out of control. Trillions of dollars in useless spending(I am talking about actual useless spending, not important spending, i.e. Military, enforcement, etc) and it does not appear to be getting any better. This is not a new trend, as this as been an issue for a long time.

If people are so enamored with the European's way of life, then those people need to move to Europe. It might seem cool to live in a place that sees vacations as a "human right"(not joking: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7100943.ece), but such stances are starting to get rather unfunny. Just how long does the EU believe it can fund every lazy person's wet dream(s) before it goes bankrupt?

I know that a VAT would seem a better solution(though not perfect, as you said), but it is not. It would kill businesses that rely on people traveling to get "a better deal", due to lower sales tax in certain states. I see it all the time between Tennessee and Georgia.

I also seeing this as a big hit to commerce, as people would quit spending near as much and many families would suffer. If a VAT were added only to luxury items(actual luxury items and not what government views as "luxury"), then I might concede the point, but that is doubtful. Food and other needed items would get more expensive rather quickly with a broad VAT were enacted.

Also, do you want to have to beat your head against the brick wall that is the IRS if they decide a merchant did not impose a high enough VAT against you? Answer: No.

There is a slight chance that ONE of those might be affected at high altitude.

OK, Sparky. You go first.

That's what Mr. Hartman, the CEO of KLM just did.

There is another, larger, volcano nearby called Katla and ...

"Eyjafjallajokull has blown three times in the past thousand years," Dr McGarvie told The Times, "in 920AD, in 1612 and between 1821 and 1823. Each time it set off Katla." The likelihood of Katla blowing could become clear "in a few weeks or a few months", he said.

Given this, and given that the last eruption was on and off for 2 years, we could have travel interruptions for a while to come.

What they initially took to be an RPG was actually the camera. I can't find the original news article I read, but it quoted a US military source as admitting as much.

Early in the tape, released by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks.org, Mr Noor-Eldeen is seen from the co-pilot’s perspective crouching on a street corner in Baghdad’s Sadr City, partly hidden by a low house but with his telephoto lens visible. “He’s got an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade launcher],” the co-pilot says. “I’m going to fire.”

And as for military procedure, they behaved like a bunch of trigger happy cowboys playing a video game. They were itching to fire and blast away, and were just looking for a reason to do it. There was no desire for clear information; they made assumptions that favoured the desire for action. Instead of verifying that there was an RPG, they immediately decided it was. The van that rocked up to take away the bodies could have been a makeshift ambulance - there was no signs of its occupants being armed - but they just immediately assumed it was hostile, and shot. They were urging the wounded Iraqi to pick up a weapon so they could kill him. Later, when they fired the first missile into the building, it was quite clear that a civilian had come into frame before firing, yet he shot anyway. The second missile was fired even though again, quite clearly, you can see civilians gathering outside the building to try help the wounded. Again, they fired without any consideration to innocents being nearby.

They demonstrate a callous disregard for the very human lives that they were supposedly trying to help/save, and clearly wanted to any excuse to open fire. And I doubt the fog of war really applies here since they weren't being fired on, so they could've taken their time to make good judgements.

The Wikipedia page for the K-159 submarine includes a picture of how it looked right before its sinking. (The sub in the picture faces the opposite direction as on the sonar image, so it is difficult to get an idea of the damage sustained in the sinking.) While on its final voyage, it was kept afloat with pontoons, which evidently are no longer with the sub. According to this article from 2007, one of the sources for the wiki article, the sub was crumbling at the end of its operational lifetime, and it may have had the hatches open at the time of sinking. So it will be a challenge to raise it. Notably, that Times article discusses a recovery "next summer" from the vantage point of Jan. 2007; it obviously has yet to occur.

I guess it was so obvious it was an RPG, people was armed and people make mistakes. Then why cover it up?

Yes, Switzerland is absolutely free of mayhem.

Wide availability of guns does nothing to stem violence either, a fact pro-gun people tend to ignore.

Nowhere to be found except for blogs and the not-yet paywalled Times of London, England.

The Article was dated 1st April - so we don't really know it's true.

Which is part of the reason why I object to serious news outlets participating in April Fool's jokes.

The *real* article was dated 3/31. The blog entry in TFA was dated 4/1. Which is part of the reason why I object to slashdot accepting regurgative [poetic license #31825] blog posts.

As irrational as this seems (to me, at least), it looks like more popular Apple mobile devices could lead to an even less accessible and standards-compliant web.

Indeed. Standards-compliance is critical in establishing developer confidence by ensuring availability of services across multiple disparate platforms. To avoid doing that, Apple and M$ resort to tactics such as vendor lock-in or other artificial platform boundaries. Removing choice(or even the awareness of choice) from the market indicates to me both companies lack of faith in their own ability to engineer good hardware/software, but hey, who would want that anyway?

I'd like to ask them to stop killing people first, much less respecting standards.

My point is that science is a variation of what is called "Byzantine game theory". Mixed in with the earnest scientists are scientists who for whatever reason aren't generating earnest science. The proper Byzantine game has players who are deliberately deceptive. I use the term more loosely. Those defecting scientists could be, as my example implies, deliberately falsifying data. Or they could merely be heavily biased (which I think is the current problem, key parts of the science like past estimates of temperature are owned by heavily biased sources).

Then there is the problem of heavy dependency. For example, it doesn't make much sense to speak of thousands of papers concluding that the Earth is the warmest its ever been (as some have done) in hundreds of thousands of years, when the fact is that these estimates apparently come from four sources, the CRU, in the US NASA's GISS and the NOAA, and as I gather, some group in Japan. That apparently is it, no matter how many papers are published on the matter.

Two of those groups, the CRU and the GISS had in the recent past leaders who demonstrated heavy bias (Phil Jones who used to be head of the CRU and James Hensen who is current head of the GISS) and recently issued papers with a very aggressive take on climate (a CRU paper in the Fall of last year claimed a 6C rise in temperature by the end of this century, the GISS issued a paper that claims (less than three months into 2010) that 2010 will be "nearly certain" to be the warmest year since the GISS started collecting data.

This dependency is insidious. For example, while I was reading up on how the "hockey stick" was corrected (a paper by Michael Mann and Phil Jones around 2000, CRU-sourced research), I noticed in the previous link two things. First, the original people (plus some other authors) are claiming that their original work worked in a 2005 paper. The "independent confirmation" cited there however turns out to use the 2005 paper. So we have a hidden dependence on the same people who came up with the hockey stick mistake in the first place. This doesn't mean any of the work is incorrect or that the link above is the definitive study of corrections to the original Mann and Jones work. But it is a warning sign in my view. The science is not as sound as it should be and it is confusing serious scientists in the field.

I go to the Times weekly, just for Jeremy Clarkson's column. He has a monthly one at BBC as well, but a weekly dose is fun to read, but not worth paying that much for a subscription.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/

Been there, done that on March 2009:
 
  Spanish students beat Nasa with balloon and £56 camera
 
  Spanish students balloon

People who want to "lower birth-rate by improving quality of life/health" do not meet in secret with their aides been told it was "security briefings'"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece

Google is your friend: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5950442.ece

And there goes any chance the little guy would consider fighting for his rights in court against a multinational. Even in the UK where the system is exactly as you describe, changes are looking to be made. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6281621.ece

...that got done by the police for driving without due care and attention?

So presumably Facebook is a danger to kids whilst her talking on a mobile phone while driving is safe for kids who could be out in the street at the time?

In the UK it was recently reported that the government will not buy services from any ISP that does not implement the IWF blacklist.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article7055882.ece

And in the USA, the Minnesota Senate is considering a proposal to prevent state employees staying in hotels that offers "violent" pornography.

http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=843624

His whole adult life, after failing out of college, has been in pursuit of the modern sin accumulating excessive wealth at the expense of the common good of society. The current Pope made that clear in last year's Caritas in veritate . Even the media pandering with the pseudo-philantropy does nothing to mitigate the harm. That may fool the media hacks owned by him and his political friends but at the end of the day the pseudo-philantropy is simply using the fascade of charity to further personal investments and provide political leverage to increase power and block opponents.

You apparently know absolutely nothing about British politics. Mandelson has a massive amount of power both official and unofficial. This is precisely why he is a Lord, why he keeps turning back up in government despite repeatedly getting caught red handed in some scheme of corruption or another.

Unofficially, he's one of the most powerful people in the Labour party, and in fact, is the only reason Gordon Brown is still running the party, Brown made Mandelson a Lord and gave him a position on cabinet (more on that later), in return, Mandelson has protected Brown's position as PM. Further, Labour has had a decent jump in the polls since Mandelson was brought back, part of this is the fact Cameron is finally actually unveiling some policies which make the Tories less popular, but part of it is also again down to the fact that Mandelson is if nothing else, skilled at helping sway voter opinion.

If you do live in the UK, here's an exercise for you, go and find a few clips of Brown in public on the news and such, and count how many times Mandelson is less than a few metres from him.

But of course, his unofficial power is unofficial and as such, is open to dispute, even though it's commonly accepted amongst just about all political analysts that Mandelson has a massive amount of unofficial power. There's also his official power though, he is part of the cabinet, he is secretary of state for business, innovation and skills. In this position he was able to unilaterally ensure the return of the possibility of disconnection of repeated file sharers into the bill. Further, he later added clause 17, which would have given him full power to control copyright law enforcement without having to consult parliament, thankfully this was defeated in the Lords.

Combined, the claim that Mandelson has no power to act unilaterally to his interests is ludicrous. He's in a position to construct the bills relevant to his department, and amend as he sees fit and at his will. The Lords is a stumbling point for him because he has less power there, but ultimately if it passes through the Lords, then he has a free run in the commons because Labour has a majority of over 60% such that with the massive amount of power Mandelson holds unofficially within the party, getting laws that have made it through the Lords passed in the commons is, well, a piece of cake for him.

Perhaps the most prominent example since his return to power, is that the government had decided completely and utterly against the idea of 3 strikes, and disconnections for downloading copyright content illegaly, that is until, Mandelson went on holiday with one of Hollywood's richest players:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6797844.ece

A day or so later it was rumoured, a few days later it was confirmed, Mandelson after a meeting with Geffen, had decided to bring back the threat of disconnection. This threat now looks to have made it through the Lords, and is now in with a good chance of being passed before the election. This is a pretty blatant example, of Mandelson managing to get his policy through that until that point, the majority of Labour, and certainly the majority of MPs, simply did not want.

Make no mistake, Mandelson certainly can act unilaterally, and that, coupled with the fact he has been caught in dodgy deal multiple times is why he is so very very dangerous. You might be right that technically he needs the consent of his colleagues, but getting their consent is hardly a difficult task when they're either given incentives of future positions in the cabinet, or disincentives to vote otherwise such as being shunned indefinetely by the party. So, even if he does require their consent, he doesn't have any problem getting it, even if their consent goes against what they actually believe in- if you want a couple of examples, check the opinions of Stephen Timms, and David Lammy, both prior to

You and some of the other posters will enjoy this article. Critics and artists slam works that they 'should' like. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/article6964184.ece

Indeed.

When 10's of thousands of screaming fans pile into a local stadium to watch a computer shred in the style of Jimi Hendrix... then I'll be concerned.

Until then, music is starting to return to it's roots... it's a PERFORMING art and is meant to be an experience not just background noise.

Sure people will always listen to music, but eventually musicians will become rich by putting on stage shows and recordings will merely help them develop a following. It's already trending this way with the rise in popularity of indy music, the increase in "illegal" music downloads, and recent stories I have read that say musicians are making more than ever on their tours. (http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/)

You name it, someone will be accusing the BBC of it.

However the BBC themselves have admitted to a left wing bias.

Well, we know that:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

I'd hate to know how much CO2 was used for Rickroll.

You are certainly welcome to dispute those claims, though #2 is clearly a strawman. The thread is already deep and I don't see where you found that one.

But the #1 - some of "people who accept poor salaries and working conditions to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of truth and knowledge" are known to exaggerate or fake results to reach a predetermined conclusion.

They did obstruct FOI requests, and Phil Jones stated he would prefer to destroy the data rather than let an individual access it, but did any data actually get deliberately destroyed? Maybe you can point me to the specific email that says this. Until then, I think that it is a vague claim.

Both of the first two reflect very, very poorly on the CRU establishing intent to conceal their data and prevent any chance of examining the validity of the data used in conclusions. As to data being deliberately destroyed, that is confirmed here. Now they say it was to save space. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But we have confirmed that they had the intent to prevent others getting hold of their data and that they did destroy data and there's bugger all reason to not keep data in this day and age, imo. In this particular case, it was actually illegal to dispose of the data as FOI requires they keep it. I've worked in such environments - we had piles of this stuff for legal reasons. Anyway, you can being concerned about it being a vague claim now, so there's that, at least.

Oh please, it was obviously too extreme to be anything other than a paraphrase of an idea. Certainly not a quote.

Well you were responding to my post and there's nothing in there that you could paraphrase as you did. You say this, and other points, are illustrative of what denialists believe. You seem to have missed that my original post was an objection to the way some describe those who don't accept AGW as proven with as "denialists" and argue against what "denialists" supposedly believe rather than what the person they are talking to actually believes. You're providing a great example of this.

As to this:

Since you claim not to be a denialist then obviously it couldn't be about you, could it?

Well, yes, I do think you're talking about me when you say denialist, actually, because your very first post began with this:

Actually, it is quite reasonable to say what the deniers will be satisfied with because they are so predictable. For example, look at your own post:

Do try and remember what you wrote two posts ago. :)
Regards,
H.

If we ever get Bin Ladin in the sights of one of these things, it'll be well worth the investment.

Just like before, right?

The pictures are part of a mass of evidence now emerging of the missed opportunities to kill or capture Bin Laden and his associates before they launched the terror attacks on America in 2001.

They include at least three further occasions in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 when the CIA had Bin Laden in its sights but was prevented from acting. There were divisions between the agency and the White House over who would have the authority to fire and the legality of killing the Al-Qaeda leader.

There are many other climate research groups who would I'm sure be very happy to hoover up any money that might become available as a result of CRU's demise

You miss the point. Either you're being willingly blind, or you're really that stupid.

Why would organizations who fund the CRU and similar "scientists" specifically to get studies that reach a prearranged conclusion ever give funding to someone who torpedoed the CRU's bought-and-paid-for conclusions?

You could torpedo the CRU, but that money won't come to you, it'll go to someone else who can be bought to reach the same conclusion CRU was reaching before they were discredited. Therefore, most scientists in the field have no reason to torpedo the CRU. The money is in agreeing with AGW hustlers, not in disagreeing.

Again, this happens in other fields. In medicine, drug companies routinely pay researchers to do drug trials with an expected conclusion, and then pay money to "bury" any study that fails to meet their pre-decided conclusion. Why is it so far out of the reach of your AGW-religious mind that people trying to make moeny off of selling "carbon credits" would do the same thing?

the times article gives you a theory why the US been hit so bad with lots of snow, that's all, it also states at the end of the article (I quote):

Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming

Reagarding stopping the ocean current, Well, the Gulf stream is weaker now, or rather, more is directed towards africa and not towards europe, so there certanly seems to be a connection between the theory and the measured results.

and how exactly are we going to look at future climate change? Our models have already been proven the most useless rubbish in the last three years, and they might be based on tainted data: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece

And that red herring about sea level rise, here's a news flash for "climatologists", the sea has been rising for millenia, for most of the time much fast than it has been rising today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

a cursory glance at the mainstream UK news media will provide all the proof you need
or parliamentary reports for that matter
also guessing their lawyers are a bit busy coping with the billions of pounds of compensation claims against them
though they did have a crooked labour peer in their pockets
you could start here or here

Citations? One can argue if you want to believe them or not, but: US data., Austrailian data., and African data.. And there's plenty more of non-data related repudiations (wrongly quoted, science does not support the conclusion....) if you bother looking.

More citations:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177230/New-errors-in-IPCC-climate-change-report.html

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-hottest-hoax-in-the-world

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html

http://digg.com/environment/Scientist_Admits_IPCC_Used_Faked_Data

Ok, is the theory of Gravity proven? No. But we have a pretty good idea that it exists. One (evolution) has an enormous history of scientific study and experimentation validated by peer research.
The other (Christian Creation) is believed by a bunch of people that have no evidence verified by any experimentation and in fact has plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1072638.ece.
So how about in Science class we study the information gathered by the scientific method and leave faith to the people who choose to believe things not in evidence?

All great points.

Related:
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
"A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues."

Related links:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery (organized mostly by me)

My senior thesis in college about 25 years ago was about intelligence and survival, and argued, as you suggest, that there may be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence.

Still, with that said, the problem today is not so much about intelligence as values (or emotions, like my point on Descartes' Error, or Einstein said a similar thing here).
    http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

Here are some letters I wrote to Ray Kurzweil (and someone else put on their site) about why his vision of the singularity reflects his own (capitalist, competitive) values more than any necessity of how it has to be:
    http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

Scientists need to realize that if they're going to get public support, they really need to be very careful with their choice of wording. Like it or not, the scare mongers, and I mean scare mongers in the sense that there are people who are trying to scare folks into believing that Global Warming is some sort of wealth redistribution scheme by the socialists, are going to use any hint, real or not, that scientists are making up their findings.

Scare mongers? Let's take a look at some of these "hints" that scientists are making up their findings. From May 7, 2002

Dozens of mountain lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are so swollen from melting glaciers that they could burst their seams in the next five years and devastate many Himalayan villages, warns a new report from the United Nations.

From January 17, 2010:

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Do I need to pull the quotes that claim NY and Florida will be underwater?

As for the "fear mongers" saying that GW is a socialist wealth redistribution scheme.

Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change. The United States, for example, has promoted its three-year-old Millennium Challenge Corporation as a source of financing for projects in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.

Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.

Strange. When did Rush and Hannity start writing for the NY Times?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6024677.ece Pretty sad that they're even able to make that argument.

He's in good company then...

Only if you look at it from an atheistic point of view. If indeed there is a God and we are spiritual creatures, wouldn't it be important to find out more about Him (or Her)?

Religion is man-made, regardless of the existence of God (for which there is no reason to believe in).

If God exists, "he" never writes.

Studies have found that religious people tend to live longer than non-religious people.

Studies have also found that "RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide".

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece

Living longer isn't that great when it's a living Hell. It's funny how dearly the religious cling to life though. One would think they would be eager to enter eternal paradise.

This is why we have a strong civil service (watch "Yes Minister" if you have never seen it, very funny) and the House of Lords as a safety net.

I have just finished watching all three series of "Yes, Minister" and I've finished the first series of "Yes, Prime Minister".

I would point out that the "strong civil service" was usually portrayed as wanting to increase their own empires (and, with it, power). I don't know how much of it came from truth, but legend has it that Margaret Thatcher considered it compulsory viewing for junior ministers and there was a surprising amount of research going on behind the scenes.

Most of the proposals Labour has put forward over the years also dramatically increase their own power, generally with powers which are so far open to abuse it's amazing that anyone was stupid enough to propose them in the first place. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is the most obvious one that springs to mind - it's already been abused quite a bit - but there are plenty more laws on the books which are open to serious abuse. The Proceeds of Crime Act is another: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6892915.ece

I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with Lord Mandelson having dinner with David Geffen of Dreamworks, and I certainly wouldn't dream of suggesting that a politician whose first resignation was due to lying about business dealings might not be telling the whole truth when he denied discussing it with Geffen.

You know what's the mistake with your argument? Ralph Lucas is not an electioneering politician and does not need to be. He is a hereditary peer for life.

Peers like dirty cash as well as any psychopath in power.

If a politician speaks, it's because s/he's telling a lie. There are no True Idealists in power because they all die in small airplane crashes and/or are not admitted into the power circles because they refuse to diddle child sex slaves at parties. I'm not joking even a little bit. Nobody in power circles will trust or work with you unless you share dirty secrets on each other. I've had friends whose parents were high level political figures and the inside scoop is enough to make you want to vomit and/or kill somebody. -Or most likely, get killed. These people are evil. Period.

-FL