Murderous dirtbags

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Security guards fire on Iraqi car
Foreign private security guards escorting a convoy through central Baghdad have killed two Iraqi women in a passing car, Iraqi sources say. A Dubai-based firm confirmed one of its teams had opened fire after a car failed to heed warnings to pull away, and said it regretted the deaths. One Iraqi policeman likened the guards to "gangsters riding away".
The convoy was empty. The women were Christains. The security guards drove off into the sunset like the cowboys they are. Just Iraqis. No big deal.

I swear if I ever find myself in close proximity to someone openly justifying the invasion and occupation of that benighted country I'll throttle them with my bare fucking hands.

Update: The two Armenian Christian women murdered on Tuesday in a hail of bullets from private security guards in central Baghdad were buried today.



First peel off label

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ParisLemon
Fresh on the heels of Radiohead's announcement of the you-name-the-price In Rainbows album (due tomorrow), perhaps the poster child of the 'DRM sucks, record companies are lame' movement, Trent Reznor, has just announced that Nine Inch Nails is now free of a record contract and will move forward with getting music to the fans "as I see fit and appropriate".

This likely means two things for certain: 1) completely DRM-free and 2) either free or very cheap directly to the fans.


How WILL they manage?

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BBC set to shed 12% of workforce
The BBC is poised to cut at least 12 per cent of its workforce, with the brunt of more than 2,000 redundancies falling on factual programming, senior staff have been told. The final tally of job losses, which will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, could approach 2,800, according to one person familiar with the situation.

Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, is seeking cuts amounting to 6 per cent of its £3bn-plus annual budget over each of the next five years. A below-inflation licence fee settlement in January left him £2bn short of the funds he had sought for the period.
Somehow they'll have to struggle on with just 20,000 employees and a paltry £2,820,000,000+ next year. And we might have to cope with the loss of things like, erm, BBC4, (annual budget: £46.8, million, mission: "An ambitious range of innovative high-quality output that is intellectually and culturally enriching", audience share: 0.4 per cent) and it's marvellous innovative and high-quality productions such as, Armando Iannucci's Time Trumpet. Somehow I'll think we'll survive.

I'm a supporter of the BBC but when any large organisation is handed billions of pounds every year which it doesn't need to earn you have a recipe for waste and extravagance. But why does the brunt of the job cuts fall on factual programming? Why can't cuts be made accross the board? There isn't an organisation in the world where you couldn't find 6 completely redundant employees in every 100.


Black cookware and all that...

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Bruce Anderson
Mr Brown's character flaws have been chronicled by Tom Bower, but also by Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Andrew Turnbull, who all worked closely with him, as well as in scores of anonymous briefings by ministerial colleagues.

All these witnesses portray a gloomy, obsessive, profoundly selfish and insufferably ill-tempered man, wholly unfitted for the stresses of high office.


Character analysis by Alastair Campbell?! I nearly fell off my chair.

Of course, Anderson is a complete buffoon. Here's some more guff from his article.

On Brown's visit to Basra:

"It is worth dwelling on that episode, which is probably the most immoral act ever committed by a Prime Minister. "

Or this:

"When the history of these years comes to be written, last week's Tory Conference will emerge as a fateful event. It may have been the most important party conference in political history, and no party leader has ever delivered a more successful speech than Mr Cameron did on Wednesday. He took an awesome gamble by speaking without an autocue for over an hour."  (emphasis mine)

What utter bollocks. This man gets PAID for his political insights? Jeez! And if I hear another mention of Cameron speaking for an hour without an autocue (I just heard it yet again on TV) I'll SCREAM!

The leader of the opposition speaks with just some outline notes for an hour and for this 'awesome' task he must now me accorded status as a great leader. Well I've stood on a stage and spoken for an hour (several times) without autocue or notes and with the added pressure of having to be funny. It's called a performance and you can see it being done by hundreds of people up and down the country every night of the week. Big fucking deal!


Onion comments

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TechCrunch
User feedback on blogs (or any Internet forum/community) is always fascinating to watch. Things start off great, but as the community gets larger basic human rules for interaction break down and, basically, everything goes to hell. The Onion, as usual, has a very funny look at how big media might interact with user feedback in this video


Viewer Voices: Where We Respond To The Opinions Of Our Uninformed Viewers

Aris

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Brown makes decision Cameron doesn't like. OMG! is this what politics has come to?




And the problem with that is what exactly? With over two years left before an election is required Brown decides he's not taking any chances just now thank you very much and for this we are supposed to consider his judgement 'suspect'. WTF! It would have been the height of political ineptitude and stupidity to have called an election without feeling confident of victory. Cameron doesn't like that. Tough! It's called politics old boy.

Of course Cameron is miffed, even he must know that it takes more than a speech without notes and a promise to raise the Inheritance Tax threshold to make his position as leader secure. Did he really transform himself from 'dead in the water' to 'great white hope' in the space of 69 minutes? Short answer, no! And when the waves die down Cameron will be spotted floating belly up on the surface exactly where he was a couple of weeks ago.


Devastating results of a snake bite

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Justin's Rattlesnake Pics

Warning: Very graphic images of this guy's arm and hand during extensive surgery. But an incredible piece of work to save and reconstruct his arm and hand over a long period and something like a dozen operations. Keep well away from rattlesnakes! Read the whole story of the snake bite and its aftermath.
On July 21, 2002, just after my 13th birthday, I was bitten by a Northern Pacific rattlesnake...I was located on a trail in a hiking area near Yosemite National Park, California. The bite occurred when I was sitting on a small boulder at a distance of 4.5 miles from the trailhead with my cabin group at camp. I had my arms dangling at my side, and a 5 foot long rattlesnake bit me in the middle of my left palm.

From this point, an amazing rescue took place, taking 4 hours to transport me the 4.5 miles to the trailhead. The camp director had previously called the hospital, and a helicopter was waiting at the trailhead. During the 30 minute helicopter ride I was going in and out of consciousness, having trouble keeping my eyes open. We arrived at the Modesto, CA hospital, where the doctor in the emergency room decided that my case was too severe to treat at that medical center. He told me this, which was the last thing I heard before going unconscious...

Via b3ta

Three spikes

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Three from Sp!ked this week:



Enough to tax the patience of a saint

Inheritance tax, inheritance tax, inheritance tax. If the coverage of the Conservative Party conference is to be believed, that is to be the big issue in UK politics in the run-up to the expected autumn election. It is enough to tax the patience of a saint – or indeed, of anybody who believes that politics ought to be a contest to decide the big questions facing our society.

A tyranny of experts

Lacking confidence in their authority, political elites have started looking for other ways to authorise their actions. For example, they have embraced the authority of science and expertise. With the rise of ‘evidence-based policymaking’, a buzzphrase in Western political life today, traditional electoral authority has been replaced by the authority of the dispassionate expert. Increasingly, national government policies are authorised by external institutions and conventions. Such outsourcing of authority is especially striking in the European Union. Governments that have joined the EU no longer have to take direct responsibility for certain policy initiatives and measures; instead they point out that these policies emanate from a technocratic, supra-national body: the EU. In earlier times, national governments jealously guarded their policymaking processes and prerogatives. Today, they are eager to subordinate themselves to international protocols, and to ‘share’ authority with others.

Who embalmed the Diana crime drama?

We are all supposed to have been studying CCTV pictures of Diana, Princess of Wales, smiling mysteriously in a hotel lift shortly before she died, and asking ourselves, as one headline put it: “What did her smile signify?”

I have no idea what, if anything, was on her mind. But I have another question. What on earth were the authorities thinking of when they turned an inquest about a ten-year old drink-driving accident into a titillating theatrical crime drama, with “exclusive” film and swimsuit shots of a celebrity princess?

On a train last week I sat opposite a crusty bloke dressed in black, carrying photocopies of “The Global Structure of the Illuminati” and the works of David Icke (who thinks world leaders are giant lizards) in a bag labelled “I’m Not Mad”. But why should we think such conspiracy theorists mad when the State spends millions on an 832-page report by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, and now on a months-long courtroom spectacle headed by Lord Justice Scott Baker, both of which take seriously crackpot notions about the Princess’s death?