Och aye the noo(se)

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Hanging With Frank
FrankPortrait of a Glasgow prison's execution chamber and a man that worked there in the 50's. Best Doc Award Reel to Real Festival 98. Shot entirely on 16mm black & white film stock... In the autumn of 1995, former Death Watch officer Frank McKue returned to the execution chamber of Barlinnie Prison to view the facility before its imminent destruction.  The following year, he returned and was appalled at what he saw.

Plus ça change

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normblog: Non-paradox in Norway

Some things never change. Geras is still banging on about the 'just war'.

It's Afghanistan, this time. After all, he got his fingers burnt defending the Iraq fiasco and eventually withdrew his support for it when even he had to admit that on the most conservative estimates the 'just warriors of the west' had ended up killing or causing the deaths of many more Iraqis than the evil Saddam.

Whatever did come out of all that Euston Manifesto bollocks, by the way?

Update: I've just taken a peek. The website seems to be supported almost singlehandedly by wedding photographer Damian Counsell who was responsible for eight out of the ten posts this year. Interest seems, erm, low. The ten posts managed to produce just a single comment (someone moaning about Arab anti-Semitism, natch).

Hang, Sheep, Lamb

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On the value of an education in economics

"You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just. An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero–and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims."
Via Tim Worstall

Hey! I'm Upper Class!

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Liberal Conspiracy - Class war quiz
I've only just seen this bollocks, posted at LibCon a few days ago by "Guest" (BTW, why are people allowed to blog anonymously at LibCon in any case?. Example:
Here’s the bottom-line: if your personal income is over £50K, you are not only one of the top 10% of earners in the UK, but you are quite comfortably one of the richest tenth of one percent of people who have ever been born. Anywhere, ever.
Fortunately Tim Worstall was on hand to bring a little perspective to the proceedings:
And if your income is £5,000 a year (just about the minimum that you can have given the benefits system) then you’re in the top 15% of all the people who have ever lived. Good thing this capitalism shtick, innit? We’re all vastly, humoungously, richer than those who do not live (or did not live) in a country that’s been using the system for a couple of hundred years.

Egregious injustice, you say?

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Israel Exempt From International Standards
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, President Obama essentially called for peace and justice while describing situations in which war is both unavoidable and justified. He also described situations in which, to avoid war, the international community must "stand together as one" to rectify egregious injustice.

For instance, he said this: "I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."

But he does not apply that standard to Israel and its illegal occupation of the territories it won in the 1967 war. Not only is Israel not held accountable, but the Obama administration actually blocks efforts to hold it accountable (i.e., the Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza). The Obama administration even backed away from its demand that settlement activity stop. Additionally, the world community knows that the United Nations is helpless in dealing with Israel because the United States uses its veto on Israel's behalf whenever Israel asks it to.

So where's the accountability?

Don't let the bedbugs, erm...

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How male bedbugs avoid getting shafted
Bedbugs (rather like Tiger Woods) are notoriously undiscerning about who they mount, and are wont to stab their penis straight into another male's abdomen. Now it seems they have evolved a way of telling mistaken mounters to back off. Female bedbugs have a structure beneath their carapace to guide the penis into a mass of infection-fighting immune cells, but males have no such protection. Camilla Ryne at Lund University in Sweden found that they respond instead by emitting a pheromone normally used to warn off predators.

The Big (Brother) Picture

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The picture that could land you in jail: How police in Big Brother Britain treat you like a terrorist for taking holiday snaps
Smith was standing on the corner with his cameras when he was approached by a security guard from the neighbouring Bank of America Merrill Lynch building. 'He asked me for ID,' says Smith. 'I politely explained that I didn't need to provide ID as I was standing in a public place. Then another, more senior, security guard came out. 'Again, I said that I didn't have to say who I was, and withdrew to the other side of the road.' Smith was then approached by a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) who demanded to know what he was doing. Their conversation was cut short by the noisy arrival of blaring police sirens bearing down from the east and west. As Smith watched in astonishment, three police cars, lights flashing frenetically, as well as a police riot van containing armed police officers, swerved into view and pulled up to investigate the 'incident' which consisted of nothing more than a man taking pictures of a church in the capital in broad daylight.
Yes, it's The Daily Mail. Oooh, send me to left-liberal hell!

Dithering dope

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Bob 'the bungler' Ainsworth blew TWO chances to save couple held by pirates
Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth let slip two opportunities to rescue a British couple kidnapped by Somali pirates. Elite Royal Marine commandos were twice ready to launch a critical assault on the gang who had captured Paul Chandler, 59, and his wife Rachel, 55. But each time Mr Ainsworth did not order the Royal Marines to move in. Nearly seven weeks later, the couple are still being held for a £4million ransom by the pirates
Let's face it.  If your life depended on the gormless Bob Ainsworth making a bold, swift decision you may as well consider yourself well and truly fucked.

Natural born liar

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Tony Blair admits: I would have invaded Iraq anyway
Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public. He made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power. "If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

Significantly, Blair added: "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat." He continued: "I can't really think we'd be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it's incredibly difficult. That's why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision." He explained it was "the notion of him as a threat to the region" because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people.
Saddam Hussein killing his own people?! Why, how dare he! That's the job of western coalition forces led by the great peacemakers of the world, the USA. And they certainly made a better job of it than Saddam ever did.

Blair is admitting that he was prepared to present any old set of lies to the British people and to parliament to justify invading Iraq, which he wanted to do on the grounds of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, even though that was not a legal justification for war and would have made the British involvement in the invasion a clear-cut  illegal act of aggression against a sovereign state.

Blair could be around for another forty years.Let's hope that at some point he is made to face something a little more substantial than the gentlemen's club masquerading as the Chilcot inquiry. What a shameless, contemptible little shit Blair is.