Sun sense

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The Sun Online - Sun Says:
Here are the facts: Northern Rock will not collapse — the Bank of England will not let it. And now the Government has guaranteed all your savings. So there you are. Whether you continue to panic is up to you.
It's not often I agree with The Sun but on this subject they are spot on. Old men in their nineties camping out all night to retrieve their savings?! Idiots. And what exactly are they going to do with the money? Stash it under the mattress? Watch out for an increase in burglaries in the Golders Green area.


Craig Murray on 'The Choice'

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Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, interviewed by Michael Buerk on 'The Choice' this morning.
Wikipedia:

While in office, he accused the Karimov administration of human rights abuses, a step which, he argues, was against the wishes of the British government and the reason for his removal. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, January or early February 2003, and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda, suspected of being gained through torture, was unreliable, immoral, and illegal. He described this as "selling our souls for dross". He was subsequently removed from his ambassadorial post on October 14, 2004.


BBC Listen Again (eventually) or listen here in glorious streaming audio:



Fried brains

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Mobile phones are safe, but let’s panic anyway | spiked
The continuing failure to uncover evidence that mobiles are bad for our health, coupled with the continuous warnings that mobiles might be bad for our health, shows that the mobile phone panic has little to do with science. This is not an ‘evidence-based’ scare, to use the buzzphrase of the moment. Instead, the mobile has become a metaphor for a generalised free-floating feeling of fear, and for today’s widespread sentiment that everything should be treated as dangerous unless it has been shown beyond a shadow of a doubt to be 100 per cent impeccably safe.
My experience of mobile users suggests that the brain damage had already occurred before they got their phones.


Cognitive dissonance

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Bush's War Without End - Consortiumnews
In a nationally televised speech, George W. Bush laid out his vision for an indefinite military occupation of Iraq, essentially a war without end.

But the premier American newspapers followed the President's bidding and published headlines stressing his plan for modest troop cuts over the next year, albeit leaving more American soldiers in Iraq than there were at the start of 2007. Busy Americans just glancing at the headlines will likely miss this more important point.


No Fisking required

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Pattycake, pattycake Baker man:
If America is to emerge from Iraq with a renewed sense of its global role, you shouldn’t really debase the motives of those who lead US forces there. Because in the end what they are doing is deeply honourable – fighting to destroy an enemy that delights in killing women and children; rebuilding a nation ruined by rapine and savagery; trying to bridge sectarian divides that have caused more misery in the world than the US could manage if it lasted a thousand years. It is helpful to think about Iraq this way.

Imagine if the US had never been there; and that this sectarian strife had broken out in any case – as, one day it surely would, given the hatreds engendered by a thousand years of Muslim history and the efforts of Saddam Hussein. What would we in the West think about it? What would we think of as our responsibilities? There would be some who would want to wash their hands of it. There would be others who would think that UN resolutions and diplomatic initiatives would be enough to salve our consciences if not to stop the slaughter.
In most cases there needs to be some sort of analysis and interpretation, however minimal, in order to reveal the utter bullshit embedded in this sort of pro-war/pro-surge/pro-Bush fluff but good old Gerard saves us all the trouble by displaying his crap, unmediated, directly on the page.

It's a kind of 'self-Fisking'. Saves me the effort.


Do you 'own' your blog?

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Can a source make your published scoop go away?
So you've got a juicy scoop? If you worked for a newspaper, it'd get set on the page, printed up and distributed throughout your circulation area. Once it was out, there would be no taking it back. If you worked for a TV or radio station, you'd sked it for air; put it out... and there would be no taking it back, either. But let's say you work online. You get your story and upload it. But unlike in print or broadcast media, online stories can be "taken back." If your website is hosted by an outside ISP, a letter or e-mail from an angry source might be enough to knock your story off the Web.

That's what happened to a blogger in Claremont, Calif. this month. The anonymous blogger who posts as "Claremont Insider" had found the salaries and benefits of city employees on the city's website. He published what he found in a Labor Day post on his blog...

Soon after...Google, which hosts the blog through its Blogger service, pulled the post, in response to a note from the city claiming that the salary information was confidential, which would make its publication a violation of Google's terms of service for Blogger. Claremont Insider followed up, disputing that public employees' salaries could be confidential information. The city came back with another argument, according to Claremont Insider. It claimed copyright over the images of employees' paychecks published on the blog. The blogger accommodated by publishing the data in text form, and Google allowed the edited post to stand.


And he wants to run London?!

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Boris on the Madeleine McCann saga
I can't stand it any more. I can't stand the dizzying manipulation of my sympathies. First I had a pretty clear idea of what had happened to poor little Maddie McCann.

Then all these horrible rumours started to emanate from the Portuguese police, and my emotions lurched off in the opposite direction; and then there would be a pretty compelling counter-rumour, and a learned essay from some expert in forensic science explaining that DNA tests were not all they were cracked up to be, until I have reached the position at 5.30 on Wednesday afternoon - the latest I dare to sit down to write this piece - when I frankly haven't got a clue what to think. (emphasis mine)

I look in vain for guidance to the tabloid press,  with its legions of reporters in Praia da Luz and long expertise in knowing which way to fan the hysteria of their readers. Which is it?