Actor David Prowse MBE, who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars triology, has announced his support for UKIP in the coming June 4 elections.
“I’ve looked right and left and right again and the only party I can safely vote for is UKIP,” said Prowse, pictured right.
“And I have two messages for those considering how to vote. Firstly, stop, look and listen to what is being said. Only UKIP is actually telling us the truth about the European Union and why we need to leave it. Secondly, may June the fourth be with you.”
Loathed and feared by millions as the embodiment of evil, Robert Kilroy-Silk has long left the party, making Vader the second supervillain to voice his support for UKIP. Well, I say voice, but nobody has asked James Earl Jones what he thinks yet.
Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.
The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.
Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.
That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).
This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.
Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?
Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.
Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .
I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.
Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?
Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) […] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.
Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.
Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack
That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.
At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d’ve been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?
Greek “Robin Hoods” raid stores to fight high prices
Greek anarchists stormed a supermarket on Thursday and handed out food for free in the latest of a wave of raids provoked by soaring consumer prices.
About 20 unarmed people, mostly wearing black hoods, carried out the midday robbery in the northern city of Thesaaloniki, police said.
Local media have labelled the raiders “Robin Hoods” following previous raids.
They take only packets of pasta, rice and cartons of milk which they drop in the middle of the street for people to collect, a police official said.
“They have never stolen money or hurt anyone. They ask people to remain calm but use ambush tactics, jumping over cash desks,” he said.
[Just an aside on how the editorial voice can potentially distort a story: how do Reuters know these people are ‘anarchists’, not just tapped-out supermarket customers or a gang of generous common thieves with a sense of humour? And what do they mean by ‘anarchist’ exactly? Small ‘a’ anarchists or big ‘A’, Black Bloc, agents provocateur type Anarchists?]
More bad news for those US leftists considering the allegedly liberal Netherlands as their reserve bolthole now Canada’s gone wingnut. Here’s Radio Netherlands on the witch-hunt being orchestrated by far-rightist Geert Wilders against former 80s activists now in Dutch mainstream politics:
What did you do in the 1980s? That question has cost one Dutch member of parliament his job, and led one party to bring a motion of no-confidence in a government minister. Here in the Netherlands, the 1980s was a time of economic crisis and of social activism, particularly in the housing rights and anti-nuclear movements. Now a number of Dutch politicians are being called to account for their alleged activities, or support for activities, dating from that period.
Accused of activist past: Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer
Resigned: former MP for GreenLeft, Wijnand Duyvendak
Geert Wilders’ right-wing Freedom Party has spearheaded the accusations.
[…]
Of course the other parties are loving it, and are even rubbing salt in:
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