Philobiblon

… if you’re a human, just snort with annoyance at the hysteria over bird flu. It is the only symptom you are likely to see, unless you are in the habit of rooting in the entrails of dead birds in the park, or collecting guano for garden fertiliser, in which case it would probably be a good idea to stop. Yes, I am very fed up with bird flu stories already, and there’ll be days and days and days of it yet…

Meanwhile, the government is destroying civil liberties and centuries of checks and balances in government, as neatly laid out by Jenni Russell in the Guardian:

The government is briskly and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the individual to the state, of the Lords to the Commons, and of MPs to ministers. The ID cards bill will allow the authorities unprecedented surveillance of our lives, and the power to curtail our ordinary activities by withdrawing that card. The legislative and regulatory reform bill, now entering its final stages, will let ministers alter laws by order, rather than having to argue their case in parliament. Then this weekend brought another shocking government proposal to increase its own power and weaken the restraints upon it. Lord Falconer made clear that the government intends to drastically curtail the powers of the Lords. The current convention is that peers cannot block any legislation contained in a party’s manifesto. In future peers will have to pass any legislation that the government deems important, whether it was in the manifesto or not. They will effectively be neutered.

Now that really is something to get hysterical about.

And to demonstrate what these sorts of things mean in practice, two Yorkshire grandmothers face up to a year in jail for taking a walk:

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.
Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary’s Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

Finally the good news, the discovery of the missing link between fish and land creatures. The Guardian is hopeful that this will be a blow to the proponents of “intelligent design”, but that of course presumes that their views have anything to do with evidence, which sadly I doubt.