The Dark Ages

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Media Lens - media alert:
The reality of what has been done to Iraq ought to produce a level of moral revulsion to shake our political establishment to the core. It ought to generate mass movements demanding that those responsible be held to account, that changes be made to ensure such an outrage is unthinkable in the future.

How, after all, can our political system have become so rigged, so unrepresentative, that a vast mass of voters opposed to the war are forced to choose between a Labour party that launched the invasion and a Tory party that insists it would have invaded even if it had known there were no WMD? How can we have become so fundamentally disenfranchised?

One reason is that the means of mobilising dissent are monopolised by a corporate media system that is closely allied to the state. Over the course of three days last week, the extent of the BBC's servility to power was starkly revealed...


Not here guv'

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MP bids to block FoI curbs
A Liberal Democrat MP will seek today to derail a controversial backbench bid to exempt parliament from Freedom of Information legislation. Norman Baker has tabled a series of amendments to the freedom of information (amendment) bill, introduced by David Maclean, the former Tory whip, in a bid to block it when it returns to the Commons. Critics warn that the bill could be used to prevent wider scrutiny of MPs' expenses and allowances.
Norman Baker and Henry Porter were interviewed on Today this morning (nobody supporting the curbs was prepared to be interviewed):


Cognitive Dissonance

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Think Progress - Karl Rove: ‘I Wish The Iraq War Never Existed,’ It Was ‘Osama Bin Laden’s Idea’
On a visit to Ohio yesterday, White House senior political adviser Karl Rove claimed he never wanted the war in Iraq: “I wish the war were over,” Rove said. “I wish the war never existed... History has given us a challenge.” ...In June 2002, Rove was giving PowerPoint presentations candidates advising them to “focus on the war” in their fall campaigns.

In August 2002, Rove was chairing the White House Iraq Group, whose mission was to “develop a strategy for publicizing the White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.” ...In September 2002, Time reported that when friends asked whether Bush planned to invade Iraq, Rove was been known to reply, “Let me put it this way: If you want to see Baghdad, you’d better visit soon.”

Rove also claimed yesterday that it was bin Laden, not President Bush, who decided to launch the Iraq war: In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq. “I think it was Osama bin Laden’s,” Rove replied.


Seems so long ago already, doesn't it?

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Sean Smith in Lebanon
Guardian photographer Sean Smith travelled to Tyre, Lebanon last year to cover the Israel-Hizbullah conflict. His image of a Lebanese family in the immediate aftermath of a missile attack won the prize for Photograph of the Year at the Press Photographer's Year 2007. This gallery shows more photographs from that series, taken in July and August 2006. (Via JsF)




'Smoothmed'

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Medical Weblog: Botox to the next level
Two NYC plastic surgeons are going to start a Botox-on-the-go clinic: On a busy section of East 59th Street in Manhattan, a half block from Bloomingdale’s, two plastic surgeons are preparing to open a new kind of cosmetic medical entity: a Botox-only storefront office. No appointment necessary.
Of course, Count Arthur most certainly will not be taken advantage of this service:

Seeing the future, back then

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1900 Predictions

Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900.

(Via Kottke)

These predictions caught my eye:
  • Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.
  • Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.
  • Prediction #15: No Foods will be Exposed. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce. Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.
  • Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.
  • Prediction #19: Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented. Great musicians gathered in one enclosure in New York will, by manipulating electric keys, produce at the same time music from instruments arranged in theatres or halls in San Francisco or New Orleans, for instance. Thus will great bands and orchestras give long-distance concerts. In great cities there will be public opera-houses whose singers and musicians are paid from funds endowed by philanthropists and by the government. The piano will be capable of changing its tone from cheerful to sad. Many devises will add to the emotional effect of music.
  • Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed. Such wholesale cookery will be done in electric laboratories rather than in kitchens. These laboratories will be equipped with electric stoves, and all sorts of electric devices, such as coffee-grinders, egg-beaters, stirrers, shakers, parers, meat-choppers, meat-saws, potato-mashers, lemon-squeezers, dish-washers, dish-dryers and the like. All such utensils will be washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes. Having one’s own cook and purchasing one’s own food will be an extravagance.