are nuts. I was wondering if he would step out on the sexism jib-jab about how women like to talk, are more verbal than men, etc and that's how psychos pull 'em in.. He seems A L M O S T there in one paragraph, but doesn't leap into it, can't cross the finish line..

Have you read Norman Spinrad's totally bonkers "The Iron Dream"? I wonder how much of an influence it might have been, though the subject matter is very different.

(Wikipedia link too)

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It's political correctness gone mad!

I have no comment other then to say I'm jealous.

is code for high sugar. Because they're embarrassed, they'll show a serving as less calories. But look closely, and a serving is also less food as well. Especially for something like crackers, where they say "about 1.5 crackers" is a serving.

I am sure you will not regret it, it is one of the great towns of the world.

I'm finding Criminal Obsessions unreadable. On page 12

Successive governments over the last 20 years have made crime control a top priority.

If the author had written "For the past 20 years government has been bigging up crime, talking large, and using the fear to make ordinary folk their bitches." then I would be able to recognise the Britain he was talking about.

I don't understand how the language of priority applies to a heterogeneous budget. How can you assign a truth value to a claim about some-ones priorities? A single individual engages in mutually exclusive activities, so one can look at the one they do first. A civil service has multiple civil servants allocated to every function, so you cannot order by time. You could look at overall budget; if the government spends more money on the Army than the Navy you could say that the Army is its top priority, or you could say that Armies are more costly than Navies. The allocation of budget in a homogeneous environment reveals priorities, who got most, but in a heterogeneous environment allocations will naturally vary.

How is one to understand the phrase "a top priority"? Presumably it contrasts with "the top priority" which was education. So "a top priority"  is a way of saying that successive governments over the last 20 years have not made crime their top priority. WTF?

Next sentence

In the UK the amount committed to law and order has increased faster than any other area of public expenditure...

Citation needed. How can I check this? Over the last 20 years isn't a date, what years do their figures apply to? How does the "amount committed to" differ from the "money spent on".

...and, as a result, more and more peoples' livelihoods are dependent on crime and its control.

No. There are people who support themselves financially by acquisitive crime and people who earn their living by working for government crime-control agencies. If we are talking about the result of government commitment of money, we are only talking about more people depending on crime control, not more people depending on crime. The government is not spending money drafting people into the criminal classes.

All this has to be read against a background of well intentioned government action being conceived at a low intellectual level. Unintended consequences are often severe. Too high a minimum wage leads to social exclusion, and some argue that this creates an underclass who turn to crime. In this sense government action really is  resulting in more persons' livelihoods being dependent on crime. But this is not the result of the governments commitment to law and order, it is the result of the government commitment to fairness.

When the authors conflate livelihoods dependent on crime and its control was that what they had in mind? I suspect they are trying to talk about rising crime leading (through a chain of cause and effect that goes through political choices) to rising expenditure on policing, that is a rise in employment on both sides of the law, and that they are accidentally fudging the question of whether government needs a real rise in crime in order to shovel money to its chums in the biometric ID card business.

So far the text seems unworldly and confused. I'm giving up.