“Crying. Angry. Yelled for Allah.”

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Vanity Fair -The Green Light: Politics & Power:
As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee wouldn’t talk, the Bush administration’s highest-ranking lawyers argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army’s own Field Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the pressure—then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes charges.


How very appropriate

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Iraq sculpture destroyed by fire
A sculpture put together out of oil drums, cardboard boxes, cable wheels and adhesive tape has been burned down just two months after its completion. The £2,000 Sajida Talfah - named after former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein's first wife - was unveiled in February in Holland Park, west London. Artist Graham Hudson said it was meant to symbolise the war in Iraq. A spokesman for Mr Hudson's gallery said the sculpture had been completely destroyed.


What IS he smoking?

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Brown will upgrade cannabis to class B substance despite advice of drugs experts
Gordon Brown is preparing to override the views of his own expert advisers and tighten the law on cannabis. Downing Street made it clear yesterday that the Prime Minister is determined to upgrade cannabis from a class C to a class B substance with a maximum jail sentence of five years for possession. But opposition parties claimed the Government's drugs policy was in chaos after it emerged that Mr Brown would ignore the conclusion of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that cannabis should remain a class C substance. It will be the first time for 30 years that a prime minister has disregarded the recommendations of the body set up to advise ministers on drugs legislation.
Let's leave aside the obvious question of the point of having advisory expert bodies if they are going to be ignored just because this one-eyed, Hibernian miserabalist has a contradictory feeling in his bowels and look at the consequences of Brown's proposals.

Firstly, how many people will stop smoking dope because its a class B drug rather than a class C? Answer - none, of course! Most of the people that I have known over the years who smoked the stuff couldn't have told you whether it was class B or C  and couldn't have cared less anyway. And where are you going to put all the people you are going to be banging up for possession, given that at any one time there seems to be only about 14 spare prison spaces available?

Look at the sums. There was a time, in my memory, when the total number of heroin 'addicts' in the entire UK numbered under 200. Again, in my lifetime, there was a time when mention of the word 'coke' referred only to a dark, sickly, carbonated sugary drink. Since that time, about 40 years ago, the use of both drugs has rocketed and the fact that they were not class C or B but A, carrying a possible maximum life sentence for possession, did absolutely nothing to slow this process down. Not to mention the huge takeup of Es, the spread of crack and the beginnings of a market in crystal meth.

I don't know what reason Brown has for ignoring the advice of the Council, who would care to speculate exactly what goes on in that deeply disturbed mind of his? But I know one thing, it will make absolutely no difference to the levels of drug use or cultivation, apart from the fate of an unfortunate few who get caught with a bit of weed on them. Oh, and it might put the price up a touch. But then most dealers would welcome a bit of relief from what has been an extended period of somewhat tight margins.



More Blog Bollocks

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David Pogue: Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.
...every now and then, a couple of messages come in that really irk me. These messages tell me how wrong I am about something I reviewed, which is fine — but they come from people who have never even tried the product. It was that way with the iPhone, in the time after it was announced but before it was available. “This will be the biggest flop since the Cube,” went the critics. “No removable battery? Nobody will touch this thing.” Etc. The blogs were full of this stuff. As it turns out, they were massively, humiliatingly wrong. Four million iPhones were sold in the first 200 days. Its sales surpassed Treos, Windows Mobile phones — everybody but BlackBerry. So what’s the lesson here? Simple enough: those vocal pre-release blogger-bashers are terrible predictors of a product’s success or failure.
Pogue is one of my favourite tech guys. Intelligent, witty, knowledgeable and without pretension. If only all the others were like that.

A load of Hari (Monk)

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Johann Hari: I like to be informed – but TV's not helping
What is the effect on British politics when television coverage – the public's main way of learning about how their country and planet is run – is distorted or disappears? Democracy doesn't work properly. Look at the current London mayoral elections. If you go through the polling issue-by-issue, the London electorate agrees with Ken's policies over Boris's by a very large margin (with the single exception of immigration). They also think Ken is more competent than Boris. Yet it looks likely they will elect Boris next month. Why? Because they don't know the policies. The media has simply failed to tell them: it has offered them a London game-show instead.
So Londoners prefer Ken's policies but they are still going to vote for Boris because they...erm..."don't know the policies".

Jeez. Does Hari even read through what he writes?


Poignant images of death

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This is the end - a German photographer captures the dying


German photographer Walter Schels was terrified of death, but felt compelled to take these extraordinary series of portraits of people before and on the day they died. His partner Beate Lakotta recorded the poignant and revealing interviews with the subjects in their final days. The couple tell Joanna Moorhead how facing death changed how they felt about dying - and living


Got the decorators in

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Making some style and structure changes here today and tomorrow.

Includes a much wider sidebar (which can accept a greater choice of content) and some colour and typeface tweaks.  That's a temporary header (UPDATE: I've re-coloured the old old and kept it)...I also need to change the dimensions of everything in the sidebar now that it has grown by 130px.

You can tell I'm bored and pissed off, no?

If all else fails...redesign! :)

UPDATE: That's pretty well that done. I'm pretty easily pleased. If I find something that works by chance or trial and error I'll go with it. Makes life a lot easier, which is my main concern!

I've now got to get busy and load up my Splashcast player and my Wimpy Juke Box with lots of cool videos and tunes.




A picture says a thousand words

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Why does the New York Times use this particular picture of Barack Obama alongside a smiling Clinton (who looks twenty years younger and far more presentable than she does in real life) and McCain? The NYT people must know how powerful a visual representation is. Obama isn't smiling. He isn't showing any teeth. Half his face is in shadow giving the impression of a very dark-skinned black man. And what is that expression, exactly? There are plenty of alternative images that could have been used, such as the one below the NYT triptych. Why did they choose this one?