David Bennett

Happy Birthday sung twice is the length of time for which one should wash one hands after possible contact with the corona virus, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested today.

He said that people should wash their hands with soap and water. He didn’t explain why that is effective, but it dissolves the lipid membrane of the virus and destroys it.

This follows the advice from the Government health advisors that one should wash ones hands for twenty seconds.

I imagine the Prime Minister or someone in his office realised that without a watch handy, people would have a poor idea of how long twenty seconds is. In contrast, we know how long to sing Happy Birthday twice. We just sing it. But how fast do we sing it? Well, if we imagine we are singing it to someone, we know how fast that is.

The Talmud

In the Talmud a question is asked as to how long one should allow a witness under oath to change the narrative of their evidence.

Should one believe them if they say something and then fifteen minutes later contradict what they said?

Peace Be With You, Teacher And Rabbi

The Talmud considered the question and decided the length of time for testimony to be accepted as continuous without alteration. They decided it should be the time it takes a person to say Peace be with you, teacher and rabbi.

if a witness takes longer than this then we question the truth of the testimony. We don’t automatically reject it, but it gives us cause to wonder. That change of testimony becomes part of the evidence.

The beauty of this is something we all recognise. That is that there is a speed and a cadence to the way that a person would say Peace be with you, teacher and rabbi. We would not rush the sentence, or if we did then we would say that is not the correct speed. And if we were to slow down to a crawl we would say that is not correct either.

Therefore, anyone can estimate the time without needing a watch or a timer. And it is something that can span all ages. Therefore we can always know how long a witness can take to correct his testimony.

To confuse things a little, another version gives a slightly shorter version, which is Peace be with you rabbi. I guess the decision might hinge on what testimony is being given and by whom.

I forgot the source of the decision. So I asked at the place I used to study – and received this reply.

The source is the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Makkos 6. The Talmud teaches that a witness can retract their testimony within tokh k’dei dibur (תוך כדי דיבור) or the space between what is said.

Happy Birthday Sung Twice

So, for washing one’s hands after possible contact with the corona virus, it’s Happy Birthday sung twice.

I wonder how the Prime Minister’s office came up with that particular piece of advice. And who specifically came up with it?

Was it Boris Johnson himself? He has a good educational background, so he may know about the Talmudic decision. Or it may be coincidence.

In conversation with friends recently I’ve been saying that the economic downturn could be the best thing that has happened for the chance to stop the destruction of the environment.

I want to take a moment to say that there is a tremendous danger in arguing that the reason to stop polluting the Earth is to prevent the kinds of catastrophe that global warming is likely to bring about. Of course that is a very potent reason.

But let us suppose that someone came up with a sky-scrubber that sat ten miles up in the atmosphere and pulled all the hydrocarbons and excess CO2 out of the system. Let us suppose it was up there, chugging away and cleaning up the mess. Would that be a reason to treat the Earth like a toilet and keep on pumping rubbish into it?

No it wouldn’t.

Treating The Earth With Respect

Treating the Earth with respect requires no more reason than a tree needs a reason to be there and to go on growing.

Having got that out of the way, I have been arguing that the economic downturn (a phrase I prefer to ‘going off a cliff’) presents the best opportunity we could hope for in order that responsible government would have the power to force big business to clean up its act.

And big business is more likely to be in a frame of mind to listen, quite apart from being weak and having to listen.

Psychologically, when you are running at 100 miles per hour, making money and the world is full of smiles, you are least likely to listen to that still small voice inside telling you that you are destroying everything around you.

But when things turn bad, you are more likely to listen.

Which brings me to the report by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. President Obama is said to have required the automakers to build a ‘company of the future’ with clean and energy-efficient vehicles as a condition of giving financial aid.

The political administration would have had a much harder time bringing this about if everything business was doing well.

And this carries into every other field where government is strong. This decade could be just what is needed for the tipping point to tip the right way.

Virgin Money made a bid for Northern Rock in 2008, and in 2011 it got the go-ahead from the British government to buy the defunct bank.

Tamara and I were in London on the day that Northern Rock’s demise was being debated in the House Of Commons. Tamara had been invited to tea at the the House of Lords earlier that day, and I went to collect her.

We decided to walk down the corridor and watch the proceedings in the House of Commons. We stood in line and went through endless corridors to eventually find ourselves in the Visitors’ Gallery looking down on the Speaker and the assembled MPs.

It couldn’t have been better timing because, the House was at that very time debating the proposed takeover of Northern Rock.

The chamber was packed and the two sides of the House were arguing bitterly over whose fault it was that the bank had collapsed. Was it due to easy credit, poor regulation, bad tax incentives, sky-high commissions?

We watched the debate for a long while, looking through the new plexiglass screens along all sides of the chamber that separated the visitors from the MPs below.

Northern Rock’s Background

Northern Rock was a bank. It started out life as a Building Society, and its lending policy was governed by the Building Societies Acts, which meant it could only lend money against mortgages on property and that it had to follow the strict rules applicable to building societies.

Changes In Legislation: From A Building Society To A Bank

Northern Rock became a bank in the 1990s when, owing to changes in legislation, many other building societies were taking the opportunity to do the same. The advantages were that as a bank it could invest and also borrow more widely.

Unfortunately, the new latitude led to its becoming the first bank in 150 years of British banking to suffer a run on its assets. Trading between banks, is conducted on a short cycle. The borrower borrows for six months and must then repay unless a new borrowing cycle is agreed. Bigger banks decided they didn’t want to lend on Northern Rock’s lending portfolio and the Bank of England having to step in.

Northern Rock had of course bet on an international portfolio that was caught in the 2008 financial crash. It had gone out to play with the big boys and it had been caught short.

For the UK, the run on Northern Rock’s assets carried the risk of a total default, so the British government bought the bank.

Northern Rock wasn’t the only bank to fail. For whatever reason, the Government bailed out the Royal Bank of Scotland and LloydsTSB Bank, but it let Northern Rock go to the wall. Perhaps it wasn’t too big to fail, to quote the US authorities who rescued the biggest US banks.

Crown Copyright

As Tamara and I lined up to go into the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons we were each handed a thin A4-size booklet that contained a copy of the day’s proceedings.

I would show you a photograph of the booklet, but it is Crown copyright. What that means is that I would need a licence to copy it.

Growing up in England, I was aware that Crown copyright protected all kinds of things from being copied to the detriment of the publishers – namely the Crown, the courts, Parliament, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and other similar institutions.

An American Perspective On Government Copyright

At least that was how I looked at it until I read Heather Brooke’s book The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From The Information War.

Heather Brooke is an American who at the time was living in Britain. It was she who blew open the MPs’ expenses scandal.

In the book, which is mostly about Wikileaks and whistleblowers, she explains what Crown copyright is from her perspective, contrasting copyright in the United States and in Britain.

Originating with a principle laid down by Thomas Jefferson, all documents originating with the American government belong to the people.

That is why all Americans are free to copy, for example, Dorothea Lange’s world-famous photographs of poverty during the Great Depression.

In Britain the situation is different. And as Heather Brooke puts it, Crown copyright means that citizens have to ask their government for permission to use public data.

She found this out first hand when she made repeated requests for information about MPs’ expenses under the new Freedom Of Information Act and found that public bodies placed copyright notices on their responses.

Her view is that copyrighting of public information in Britain is specifically used as a means of restricting the flow of public information.

They Try To Work For You

As an example of what that means, in 2004 Parliament demanded that the They Work For You website shut down because it published details of how MPs had voted on matters in the House of Commons.

The information is published in the official records of Parliament known as Hansard, and Hansard is owned by Parliament and not by the people. So copying information from it is protected by Crown copyright.

In the end, Parliament was itself backed into a corner and was forced to grant a licence to They Work For You because the idea of suing a website for making such information available to the public was embarrassing to it.

One could say that democracy prevailed, but the reality is that TheyWorkForYou survived because it accepted that it needed a licence, and the Crown Copyright system sails on into the future.

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Originally published November 17th, 2011