New Orleans has been tested and, whilst there are losses of life and considerable damage, things are not as bad as they could have been had people just been left to their own devices – as we do in the UK.
This American ability to plan down to the teeny-weeny nitty-bitty detail has impressed me since I worked for Occidental Oil. At the time in 1979 when the US Embassy in Tripoli was burned down, I was given the task of evacuating all wives and dependents from Libya, through to London and onto any worldwide destination they chose. This had to be achieved between 3 a.m. when I got the instruction and midnight the next day. As it was such an emergency, I was told that I could throw money at it. In a US oil company there is a lot of money when it is needed. Having achieved the desired result and then some, I was tasked with writing evacuation plans for all out-of-USA locations but without the luxury of flying dollars. Being a founder member of Pedantics Anonymous this was right up my street but even I was amazed at what was thought necessary in the way of instruction to those likely to be involved.
The ability to plan deeply is commendable but it seems to have gone overboard where banning pornography is involved. Strikes me that all this will do is increase illegal pornography that does not comply with the controls. This will mean that the material will just naturally become more pornographic. Same result as with Prohibition really.
Reading back through this as I write, I realise I may have let the pornography genii out of the bottle – insofar as this blog is concerned anyway. I suppose the main concern is with exploitation of children by pornographers. There are some details – a little out of date maybe but it is almost certain that the situation has not improved very much.
Google into various aspects of pornography comes up with an extremely large number of hits. The majority of these cancel each other out. Some aspects are interesting – what porn is generated and distributed by organised crime as a means of laundering money? What controls could be imposed? Indeed, even the definition of porn is confused. It can be extreme hard-core distributed under the counter to extremely unbalanced people (and police officers at Friday night parties) to the soft-ish material available as in-room movies at a hotel. My own police background hardly helped and my working-policy conclusion was that those I found with pornography were marginally more likely to have some other criminal interest. No more than ‘likely’.
To confuse things further, some of what appears almost without comment as a blog may be pornographic. Some perverts are turned on by the weirdest things and reading these blogs might well serve to give them their kicks.
Oh - breaking news just in
"The government today launches a new consultation on banning obscene pornographic and sexually violent images on the internet. Home Office minister Paul Goggins said that the government wants to create a new offence of deliberate possession of violent and abusive pornography. The move comes in response to calls from the family of murder victim Jane Longhurst, who was killed in 2003 by a male friend obsessed with violent sexual pornography. "This is material which is extremely offensive to the vast majority of people, and it should have no place in our society," the minister said"
But, note - even this anally retentive government speaks of 'violent and abusive' So, images more suited to a gynae. lecture hall will be freely available in newsagents and the better class of male public lavatories.
No comments:
Post a Comment