This Dynamic Planet is an online, interactive world map of volcanoes, earthquakes, impact craters, and plate tectonics, jointly produced by the USGS and the Smithsonian.
(Click image to go to interactive map)
Clicking on a feature within the interactive map zooms in to even more detailed maps and information. I’m going to be playing with this for days. Weeks, even.
UPDATE
BBC’s The Beauty of Maps: Historical Maps– Experience five of the world’s most beautiful old maps and discover their secrets Digital Worlds– Find out how we map virtual spaces and understand our world today
What was it Jacqui Smith said about ID cards recently?
“Like every other citizen, they [pilots] ask themselves what will happen to the data they are coerced into providing; whether it will it be safe, whose hands might it fall into, and what might they do with the data?”
If you, like me, have been indulging in the bitter pleasure of having our belief that most elected politicians are deceitful, greedy, entitled egotists confirmed yet again, have you not idly wondered what fresh hells the government’s been quietly getting away with under cover of media furore? Me too.
MPs may be focused on covering up their corruption and incompetence, scrambling desperately to hold on to their lucrative seats, while bleating about data protection and invasion of privacy, but the implementation of the many repressive and unnecessary laws they’ve steamrollered through rolls inexorably on for the rest of the population.
First off, if you thought ID cards were a goner, think again. Spyblog reports that the planned advent of biometric ID cards is going ahead full steam . While we were boggling over 88p bathplugs, massage chairs and moatcleaning fees, four pieces of secondary legislation were laid before Parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006:
“Where it is not possible to proceed with an inquest under the current arrangements, the government will consider establishing an inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005”.
And who’d decide it was not possible to proceed? Jack Straw. Of course.
In legal news, the Attorney General and the police are collaborating on new legislation that will give ‘law enforcement’ – now there’s a nicely nebulous name – power to, amongst other things, remotely scan your hard-drive.
Oh yes, and terrorism legislation was used to spy on eight people suspected of committing benefit fraud.
But most worrying for any British parent is the announcement that the illegal government database containing your child’ fingerprints and other physical and personal details is about to go live:
Frontline professionals will start using the controversial children’s database ContactPoint from next week, the government has announced. Up to 800 frontline practitioners, including social workers, health professionals and head teachers, in early adopter areas will be trained to use the £224m system from Monday 18 May.
New Labour may have set all this repressive legislation in motion, but now the machine of enforcement grinds on regardless of expenses scandals or public opinion. And like disgraced Labour MP Shahid Malik claims to have done, the government will enforce the rules, however unjust and or illegal they may be, “One million percent by the book”.
MPs may be corrupt, but then we knew that already. This receipts hoohah is mere confirmation. Parliaments may rise or fall, but Government goes on – and I’m more worried about what the State is actually doing right now, and how to oppose it effectively, than I am about the petty bourgeois aspirations of Labour members or the mole problems of Tory grandees.
Though I do wonder just how far that purple-jowled prick of a Speaker Michael Martin can inflate himself in pique before he has an apoplexy.
Ed “So What‘ Balls, Brown protege and current Education Minister, is trying to give himself the power to prescribe and proscribe what British children are taught by choosing what textbooks and testing regimes schools use:
Opposition MPs will attempt today to remove from the apprenticeships, skills, children and learning bill the clause that gives the secretary of state control of basic qualifications content. Guidance published alongside the bill says it could be used to specify “which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English”.
Ministers insist the power would be exercised only as a last resort, to preserve the teaching of Shakespeare, for example, if there was a suggestion it should be scrapped from the curriculum.
One of New Labour’s many, many flaws is its propensity to bring in legislation seizing central government control in areas over which government should have no purview. This centralist tendency is allied with the mistaken conviction that if you mean well, it’s OK to make yourself dictator.
But when dissenting voices are raised to point out the totalitarian nature of yet another sweeping power they’ve abrogated to themselves, we’re told by ministers “It’s OK, don’t worry. We’ll never use it except in a emergency”. Oh well, that’s all right then. But what’s an emergency? Balls doesn’t say.
The progress of Ball’s Bill fits the usual Labour pattern. First quietly insert a small, unnoticed clause deep in one of those sprawling, unreadable, government white papers. (Ensure the drafters are so overwhelmed with draft legislation they’ll let any old bollocks through – after all, it’ll be scrutinised in committee. Won’t it?)
Make sure the bill’s published on a ‘good day to bury bad news’. In committee and in debate draw the opposition’s attention to some other contentious clause, one you don’t give a damn about. ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier…’
Watch the media and the opposition chase off futilely after that hare, while your neat little power grabbing clause slips through all its committee stages unnoticed. The thumping government majority and general supinity of your MPs sees to that.
The resulting bill sent to the Lords is so voluminous and their time so taken with other, more pressing, interests these days that a complacent and complicit House either fails to spot the bait and switch or just doesn’t care and bingo, unprecedented power is all yours.
When you start exercising those powers and the electorate protest, just tell them it was democratically decided, so STFU.
Ball’s Bill purports to be creating a more independent and fair qualifications system; but this particular little clause would allow the government of the day to interfere in what’s taught in schools, colleges and universities, even down to the choice of books. Think what New Labour could do with that.
Think what the BNP could do; but Labour MP’s don’t seem to have thought beyond the end of their control-freak noses.
This passage of this clause would mean that any political party who can do the maths and target the correct marginal constituencies successfully could, quite legally, dictate exactly what children are taught at school. The potential for political interference in education that an unpopular and discredited political party elected on a minority of the popular vote (or even with an unelected Prime Minister at the helm) might have on education of coming generations doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?
Let us also not forget that under Labour school attendance is compulsory, with prison the sanction for parents whose children do not attend. I’d write ‘Imagine if a fascistic party had these powers…’, if it weren’t so horribly close to the truth.
Yet Labour politicians individually and severally will protest loudly and volubly from the comfort of their John Lewis sofas to all available media platforms should their left wing credentials or democratic bona fides be questioned.
“Who us? Stalinist? But.. but… apartheid! Free Nelson Mandela! Some of my best friends are freedom fighters… Up the miners!”, supported by a high-pitched chorus of “But we’re nice! We’re on Twitter!” from the younger, slightly more photogenic Fabian wing.
Yet these putative soft left-wingers voted to give any future government powers any wannabe Stalin would envy.
Oh, but they’ll only use these powers ‘in an emergency’ say Labour – but it was Labour who gave themselves and any future government the power to decide what an emergency is.
One of the first bills passed in this way, the Civil Contingencies Act, was passed, we’re told, in response to 911 and other bomb attacks, although such a massive all-encompassing piece of portmanteau legislation had to have been in preparation for some time before.
It allows the government of the day to declare an emergency (it decides exactly what an emergency is), to suspend democracy, to override normal checks and balances and all local democracy and to rule by fiat. Is this is the type of emergency Balls means? Ball’s Bill, like the Civil Contingencies Act, is a license for totalitarianism.
If only out of self-preservation, has no-one in this bloody government ever stopped to consider how another less nice minority-elected government a few years down the road might use such potentially repressive powers against them? Has it never, ever occurred to anyone in the Cabinet or the Commons that Labour and its supporters might well find themselves on the receiving end one day? Apparently not, which inevitably leads one to wonder why it is they feel so invulnerable.
I suspect it’s the success of power grabs like the Civil Contingencies Act, and now Ball’s Bill, that support such complacency. With all-sweeping acts like that in their collective back pocket they can just declare an emergency if it all goes to shit, and let El Gordo and the executive reign unopposed for ever, while they continue to draw a comfortable stipend for doing precisely nothing. No wonder they’re smug.
The Opposition Tories say they will oppose this bill as written, as do the Lib Dems. They said that about the civil Contingencies Bill as well, and again about Parnell’s draconian welfare reform bill with its unprecedented interference into the autonomy of the individual .
But they can’t resist the lure of unlimited future power either. This week Parnell’s legislation passed the Commons, with Lib Dem and Tory support – and I expect Ball’s Bill will do exactly the same.
