Trust the UN with figures? Ha!

The Copenhagen climate conference has been a shambles with journalists queing for up to nine hours and still failing to get in.
Copenhagen diaries

What was behind the monumental screw-up? A staggering inability to do maths.

The conference centre has a maximum capacity of 15,000, yet NGOs alone were allowed to register 20,000 delegates. That's not counting the 5000 members of the media, nor the 7000 staffers who are running the place, totalling 32,000 before you even get to the people who are meant to be doing the real work here: the negotiators. There were ministers hopelessly waving their diplomatic passes in the queues outside. They weren't let in any faster than anyone else.

They should ALL be hanged

Three guilty of post office murder

Three men have been found guilty of murdering a sub-postmaster's son during an armed raid in Worcestershire.

Craig Hodson-Walker, 29, was killed at Fairfield Post Office on 9 January, Birmingham Crown Court heard. Anselm Ribera, 34, and Christopher Morrissey, 32, both from Birmingham, and Declan Morrissey, 34, of Solihull, were found guilty of murder. They were also convicted of attempting to murder his father Ken. Adrian Snape, 25, was cleared of both charges.Snape, of Camelot Way, Small Heath, Birmingham, had pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and admitted he was the getaway driver. After he was cleared of murder, he leapt up in the dock and shouted obscenities.

Say no more. Useless vermin.

Beat the Trafigura gag on the BBC

Via Though Cowards Flinch: Copied wholesale from A Very Public Sociologist – everyone should repost, as widely as possible in solidarity:

Following a call by Left Outside and Liberal Conspiracy for bloggers to thwart the gagging of the BBC by Trafigura over allegations of toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast, I thought “that’s one bandwagon I’m happy to be part of”. If you’ve got a blog this is what you have to do:

1) Embed this BBC report:

2) Link to this censored report (pdf) of Trafigura’s activities.

What 'facts?

Labour MP, Greg Pope, offers an apologia for Blair and the sexed-up dossier. And contributes to the attempted rehabilitation of that dirtbag, Alastair Campbell


Iraq Inquiry: separating myths from facts over the 45 minute claim

There is much to concern us, not least the over-reliance on a single intelligence source; and, despite the fact that Saddam had previously used battlefield CBWs, the stockpiles to which he referred were never found. But we shouldn’t be distracted by tales of taxi drivers and media myths about Alastair Campbell.

Another warmonger, just more intelligent

Chris Hedges: Fighting Another Dumb War

Obama uses the veneer of intellectualism to promote the dirty politics of Bush. The president spoke in Oslo, when he accepted the Nobel Prize, of “just war” theory, although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not meet the criteria laid down by Thomas Aquinas or traditional Catholic just-war doctrine. He spoke of battling evil, dividing human reality into binary poles of black and white as Bush did, without examining the evil of pre-emptive war, sustained military occupation and imperialism. He compared al-Qaida to Hitler, ignoring the difference between a protean group of terrorists and a nation-state with the capacity to overwhelm its neighbors with conventional military force. “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace,” Obama insisted in Oslo. The U.S., he said, has the right to “act unilaterally if necessary” and to launch wars whose purpose “extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.” Obama’s policies, despite the high-blown rhetoric, are as morally bankrupt as those of his predecessor.

Magic cream

Olay rapped over Twiggy's lying eyes: Advert banned for retouching 60-year-old model

So the secret to Twiggy's youthful looks on adverts is the airbrush, eh?

Keep up! I pointed this out a long time ago.

Is it coz I'm a man?

Richard Black's Earth Watch: COP15: Climate 'scepticism' and questions about sex

Why are virtually all climate "sceptics" men?

Erm, they're not as Black himself points out it a little later in his article:

Opinion poll evidence provides some clues. A recent survey across the EU found roughly equal levels of scepticism between the genders.

What Black is really asking is why most prominent sceptics are male. He goes on to present some pseudo-psychological guff about motivation such as this bollocks from an "ex-scientist and now climate action advocate": "I've been debating the science with them for years, but recently Irealised we shouldn't be talking about the science but about something unpleasant that happened in their childhood". This is embarrassing, desparate, scraping-the-barrel stuff from Black.

Black could equally ponder why belief in 'angels', astrology and cod-psychological self-help techniques is largely a female occupation (just hang around that section of a bookshop for a while, if you doubt me). Why do more women believe the MMR jab is dangerous. Why do the audiences for those pathetic conmen who claim to be able to contact the dead consist largely of women?  Why are women more likely to pick up 'OK', 'Hello', 'Spirit and Destiny, 'Soaplife', 'Prediction', 'Now', 'Pick Me Up', 'Chat', or any of the other crappy magazines concerned mostly with Fern Brittons weight loss or Victoria Beckham's tits rather than, say,  'The Economist', New Scientist', New Statesman, 'Spectator', 'Scientific American' etc?  Ponder that, Dick.

You'll need more than wheelbarrows

The enormity of Zimbabwe's inflation

Over the last 30 years hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, was a quadrillion times worse than it was in Weimar Germany.

I did already

George Orwell would be appalled by the hypocrisy of online activism

This year has been a good one for chubby armchair activists. They’ve found new outlets for their impotent do-goodery in social media. The use of Twitter during the Iranian post-election protests, for example, recently won a Webby Award (yes, really) for being “one of the top ten internet moments of the decade”...Did Twitter and other online networks threaten the brutal Islamist regime? Not this time. The Ahmadinejad-led dictatorship continues to thrive, backed by volunteer militias. And an Iranian democracy is no closer to reality than it was in January. So if the “Twitter revolution” was all the internet could muster in the last decade – and if it’s something we’re supposed to be proud of – then we may as well all log off in the New Year.

I did already. Well, from Twitter at least.

I want a car too!

The moral conundrum at the heart of global warming theory

India and China will build up their carbon burning rapidly as their economies grow. As 2.5 billion people get closer to the living standards of the 0.6 billion richer Americans and Europeans, so there will be a massive increase in CO2 output. No Western political leader is going to tell poor Indians or Chinese they are not allowed a fridge, car and running hot water as their economies improve because the planet’s carbon budget will not allow it.

No conceivable amount of state aid to the poorer countries at Copenhagen will change that situation. Failure to address and resolve this moral conundrum lies at the core of why Copenhagen will not in its own terms succeed.

Detainees Are Not "Persons"

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Gitmo Torture Case Claiming Detainees Are Not "Persons"

The United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court's dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees' claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants." Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights.

Blink!

The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009 - Foreign Policy

The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009. A few ways the world changed while you weren’t looking.

The Northeast Passage Opens for Business; The Beijing-Brazil Naval Axis; Dead Man Gets Passport; Chechen Murders Go Global;
Iraq's New Flashpoint; America Joins Uganda's Civil War; A ROTC for Spies; A New Housing Bubble?; The ‘Civilian Surge' Fizzles;
A Hotline for China and India.

Via Kottke