August 2009
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Month August 2009

Entries 10 Total

Climate Camp’s open letter to the Met

Aug 26, ’09 12:50 PM

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Ser­vice. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

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The three parts of news stories you usually don’t get

Aug 23, ’09 10:59 AM

Mark Thompson, writ­ing on his web­log News­less — Time to stop break­ing the news, and start fix­ing it:

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that there are four key parts to news stor­ies, and we typ­ic­ally only get one of them, even though journ­al­ists pos­sess all four, and the other three are argu­ably more important.

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A gender experiment in policing

Aug 22, ’09 8:49 AM

Could be inter­est­ing. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian:

The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp – put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests?

Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see police work as involving con­trol through author­ity, while police­wo­men see it as pub­lic ser­vice”. In some respects at least, he con­cluded, “women are bet­ter suited for police work than men.”

Maybe this strategy should be trans­posed to inter­na­tional politics?

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Animal Farm: which character is Douglas Hogg?

Aug 19, ’09 8:58 PM

Douglas Hogg — the Brit­ish Tory MP who included the cost of clean­ing his moat on his expenses—reck­ons:

A par­lia­ment­ary salary does not sup­port the life­style to which most pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes aspire.

Which got me won­der­ing as to which char­ac­ter Hogg most resembles in Animal Farm. My money’s on Pin­keye.

He car­ries on to suggest:

The salary of MPs is now so low in both abso­lute and rel­at­ive terms as to deter mem­bers of pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes from enter­ing Parliament.

Sounds per­fect. Maybe MPs salar­ies should be lowered?

But ser­i­ously, my favour­ite, link the National Min­imum Wage to MPs wages in some way.

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Cheney: an evil person for evil times

Aug 14, ’09 7:19 AM

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’

Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

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Want to be bemused?

Aug 11, ’09 7:13 AM

Then try fol­low­ing the debate pro­pa­ganda war on health care reform in the U.S.

Dar­ing Fire­ball has a couple of pearlers:

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two

Update: Stephen Hawk­ing:

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treat­ment without which I would not have survived.

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The worst terrorist attack in history

Aug 8, ’09 8:08 AM

Photo of mushroom cloud of nuclear terrorist attack on HiroshimaThis week marks the 64th anniversary of one of the largest and most hein­ous acts of ter­ror­ism ever per­pet­rated: the nuc­lear bomb­ing of Hiroshima and Naga­saki by the United States of Amer­ica, the only coun­try to have ever used nuc­lear bombs to mas­sacre civil­ians. The largest attack, also per­pet­rated by the U.S., was the fire­bomb­ing of Tokyo five months earlier, killing 80 000 to 120 000 civil­ians in one day.

What I find par­tic­u­larly hard to con­tem­plate is not that these events took place but that most Amer­ic­ans ever since have viewed these incred­ibly hein­ous crimes as neces­sary, effect­ive and other than crim­inal and immoral, or at best neces­sary evils. This is to effect­ively believe that any­thing can be legit­im­ate means, as long as it’s car­ried out by the Americans.

I doubt this kind belief and the sur­vival of the human spe­cies are mutu­ally inclusive.

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What happens when the hang ‘em high brigade call the shots

Aug 8, ’09 12:05 AM

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing story this week illus­trat­ing how sex offender laws in the U.S. have run amok and are not only mak­ing mat­ters worse but are des­troy­ing the lives of many inno­cent people in the process.

Plonkers with bal­lots + self-serving polticians = per­ver­sion of justice.

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On Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge for news websites

Aug 7, ’09 8:02 AM

Andrew Clark writ­ing for The Guard­ian: “Rupert Mur­doch said qual­ity journ­al­ism is not cheap and so he intends to charge for all his web­sites,” includ­ing the Times, The Sun and the News of the World.

Two com­ments.

  1. The Sun and News of the World are not qual­ity journ­al­ism. They’re tabloids.
  2. A pre­dic­tion: Murdoch’s plan to charge for gen­eral news on the web will fail.
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‘They’ve made us scared to talk’

Aug 6, ’09 9:11 PM

Fam­ily of Ian Tom­lin­son — who died after being hit by police­man at G20 protests—speak out.

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