Stayin' alive, stayin' alive...

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Murder rate drops as paramedics get better at keeping people alive
The murder rate has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years but police admit that the main reason may be the skills of paramedics and advances in medicine rather than a decline in violent attacks. Official figures to be published this month are expected to show a dramatic fall in the number of murders in the year to the end of last March.

However, many police accept that the streets remain as violent as ever, with the number of serious woundings and shootings continuing to rise in many parts of the country.
Via Tim Worstall

Waite and see

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Prepare for more Britons to be kidnapped by Iran in 2010

Even though there is no credible evidence that Iran was behind the kidnapping of Peter Moore that gobshite, Con Coughlin, is out to persuade us that the evil Iranians are set for an orgy of hostage-taking in 2010. To support his claim he refers back to, wait for it, the kidnapping of Terry Waite in 1987.

The Iranians should have been given a medal for kidnapping Waite. The only regretable aspect of that whole episode was that they released the tedious twat.


Less depressing for parents too!

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The earlier to bed, the healthier the head
Teens allowed to go to bed after midnight were almost a quarter – 24 per cent – more likely to suffer from depression and a fifth more likely to think about self harm than those who were set bedtimes of 10pm or earlier. The authors of the study, published in the journal Sleep, said that the more sleep adolescents get the better it is for their mental health. Adolescents who usually slept for five or fewer hours per night were 71 per cent more likely to suffer from depression and 48 per cent more likely to think about committing suicide than those who reported getting eight hours of nightly sleep, it was claimed.

Car-crash Labour

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This death-wish brigade will let Brown crash his party
Brown cannot admit the monumental error he and Ed Balls made in their economic policies because there are some mistakes just too big to apologise for. For the same reason Tony Blair cannot apologise for the Iraq war. Oops, sorry, the gun went off in my hand. Oops, sorry, I crashed the public finances. Even if Brown were verbally adept, rhetorically agile, a great communicator in touch with popular sentiment, he would struggle to find words to shape the next decade. It would be far easier for someone else to admit mistakes, draw a line under the past and spell out new directions...

...voters will throw Gordon Brown out – unless Labour does first.
No, not a quote from The Daily Mail but from the great Guardian Lefty herself, Polly Toynbee.

I'm amused that one of the common themes from the defenders of Gordon Brown is that there isn't anyone better to replace him. So there is not a single candidate in the Parliamentary Labour Party that could make a better job of it than the hapless, Hibernian miserabalist? What an admission!

Chinoiserie

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Hypocrisy of a weakling Foreign Secretary
Miliband's values are all wrong...if he is genuinely angry about the Chinese treatment of Akmal Shaikh, then why does he do nothing about the continued United States persecution of British computer hacker Gary McKinnon? McKinnon's mental problems are far better documented than Shaikh's, while his crime of computer hacking is far less serious than heroin smuggling. Yet the Foreign Secretary has not dared to utter a word of protest to the U.S. government, let alone haul in the U.S. ambassador for a richly deserved dressing down. Peter Oborne

Overpriced, overblown and over here

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Our Coffee, Ourselves - In These Times
Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks as central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain’t pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee—even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, “had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. … Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better.” Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little “self-gift,” an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean “third space” between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.
Via A&L Daily

Obama's Oceania

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New Statesman - John Piger - Welcome to Orwell’s world
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden". In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

Noughties movies

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Peter Z. Scheer: The 20 Best Socially Conscious Movies of the Decade
The last 10 years were abundant with films that pushed limits and attacked real issues in real time. The documentary and the foreign film both gained unprecedented mainstream acceptance, the studios experimented with edgier independent movies (though many have now given it up) and even the biggest blockbusters sometimes needled the Establishment.

Black(water) day for justice

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US judge dismisses Blackwater massacre charges

Good to see US justice alive and well. The prosecutors had used statements made by the murderous Blackwater employees themselves immediately after the incident.
"In their zeal to bring charges against the defendant(s), the prosecutors and investigators aggressively sought out statements the defendants had been compelled to make to government investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in the subsequent investigation", said the judge. 
Zealously pursuing killers? Seeking out incriminating statements? Good grief. Whatever next?

You can bet that somewhere in Iraq at this very moment plans are afoot to exact revenge. So even more people will die as a result of the activities of these homicidal mercenaries.

UPDATE: There are alternative views:
Mishandled by the government on purpose to get their buddies at Blackwater off? Ha! Things like that don’t happen outside the movies. That’s crazy talk!

Drinkers pay their way

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Rising alcohol addiction costs 'could cripple the NHS'
Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: "The nation's growing addiction to alcohol is putting an immense strain on health services, especially in hospitals, costing the NHS over £2.7 billion each year."

"This burden is no longer sustainable," he said.
The answer seems simple to me. Just spend some more of the £9 billion that was collected from drinkers last year in alcohol duty .
Cheers!