Dept Culture Media and Sport is wrong to exclude hacking from its Murdoch considerations

The Department of Culture Media and Sport says that the News of the World "phone-hacking allegations are very serious, but they are not material to the issue of media plurality,” - media plurality being the criterion on which the Department is deciding whether to hand BSkyB over to Murdoch.

But it is.

If Murdoch allows criminality in one of his outlets, he has the propensity to allow criminality in all of his outlets. And if he dominates the news outlets as he does, that would be against the national interest.

So Jeremy Hunt must not hand BSkyB over to Murdoch.

The Avaaz petition is here: 

Blair knew Iraq war would increase the terrorist threat

I wrote in July 2005 that the London bombings were the result of Blair's Iraq adventure. This was the assessment that all anti-war protesters had made: the war would radicalise young Muslims.

In defence, the pro-war people use the fact that Al-Qaeda was active before the Iraq war. This avoids the question of whether the Iraq invasion would give Al-Qaeda a boost.

Now the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry has uncovered evidence that Blair was advised that his invasion would increase radicalisation and disaffection of Muslims.

Middle East Online reports thusly: Former British prime minister Tony Blair knew that invading Iraq in 2003 could increase the threat from extremism but pressed ahead nonetheless, a former top civil servant said Wednesday.

Here is the transcript from the Iraq Inquiry:
p41 line 10
Sir David Omand held the the post of Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN:So there is a sort of question of the strength of the warning that was going out on this question of the risk of terrorism within the UK, resulting from the war.

SIR DAVID OMAND: Well, I read out quite a long list of quotes from the JIC. I don't think there is any doubt that that was the conclusion. There was no dissent from any quarter that that was the conclusion.

The assertion is explored further, and Omand does not resile from that position.

Blair knew that what he was doing was going to alienate Muslims, going to increase the risk of terrorist attacks against the British people, increase our insecurity, but he still went ahead with his beloved war.

The role of Government is to protect the people. Blair chose to do the opposite, and in the process messed up a country, killed 100,000 people, lost the lives of hundreds of British soldiers, and sprayed toxins all over Iraq which are affecting the health of the Iraqis.

But, hey, he's a pretty straight kind of guy who believed he was doing the right thing.

So that's all right then.

[update] University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer will present findings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.

Osborne: "We are all in this together". NOT!!

Isn't it funny how you can never find a Marxist when you need one?

The sentient world gazes in numbed disbelief at the spectacle of the Conservative Party, who will (barring either divine intervention or a sudden accession of the electorate to a rudimentary grasp on reality) form the next government of the UK, drawing up and presenting its plans to punish those on low incomes who have the temerity to use, and indeed to work in, public services.

The key phrase is George Osborne's seven times repeated mantra: "We are all in this together".

NO, GEORGE OSBORNE WE ARE BLEEDING NOT ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!!

You and your clique are rich, privileged MPs with private means, and you are chums with the banksters whose stupid, systemic errors have created the enormous debt that has been dumped onto the public sector, to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds for every citizen.

To you, George, £10,000 is a trivial number to be written on a cheque and popped in an envelope. To your recently-made-redundant low skilled constituent, £10,000 represents the net profit of a lifetime of work - if they are lucky.

Your banksters chums have not only succeeded in annihilating millions of such lifetimes' savings with their fraudulent activities, have not only continued with Business as Usual, have not only dumped their losses on the public sector, but are also manipulating both the Tories and the NuLabs into making public sector cuts.

We are emphatically not all in this together. On one side, there are the banksters and the NuLabTory complex, on the other side are the longsuffering people, the turkeys of the Murdoch-reading masses who are about to vote for Christmas.

God, it makes me angry. In fact I am so angry that it makes me want to join some revolutionary socialist marxist leninist groupuscule and spend the rest of my life ranting against the analytical errors of some other revolutionary socialist marxist leninist groupuscule. That's how angry I feel. It'll pass.

Cameron Speech HSE falsehood shock

re: That Conservative Party Conference 2008 Keynote Speech.


Ah Cameron, come in. Pull up a chair. Won't keep you a minute, young chap, you've had a busy day.

Nice speech, Cameron.

Nice but boring. I'd blame the policy wonks if I were you - they don't let you express yourself, do they? I suppose they red-crayoned all the jokes.

They let you down a bit on the Health and Safety bit, though.

That bit about the teachers? You remember? Can't put a plaster on a child's knee?

It isn't true.

It is a myth.

An untruth, Cameron. A little porkie pie. A falsehood. A wee fairy tale, a nasty little rumour put about by some tabloid hack no doubt.

Here it is. A poster. From the HSE site.


[Click in the box above to see poster. Sorry, you just can't get the programmers nowadays, can you?]

And here is the text from the HSE site.

We’ve often heard of teachers, volunteers and carers being told to ask parents for permission, or even requiring parents to drive over and put the plaster on themselves. This persistent myth causes a lot of unnecessary hassle and worry.

There is no rule that says a responsible adult can’t put a plaster on a child's minor cut. Some children do have an allergy to normal plasters. If you know a child is allergic you can use the Hypo-allergenic type of plaster. The important thing is to clean and cover the cut to stop it getting infected.

So. There we have it, in black and white. Sensible advice with which the medical profession will happily concur.

I hope you are going to get up in Assembly and say sorry to the school for slurring the good name of the Health and Safety Executive who generally do a good job. Except that they totally failed to do their duty at the Newbury By Pass Resistance actions.

As for the crack against "human rights", David. I am a bit disappointed. I just want you to bring me 1000 words this time next week on "Why it is not good practice for aspiring Head Prefects to produce sound bites denigrating Human Rights".

So, Cameron. Only 3/10 for the speech.

I know you can and will do better.


That's all. You may go now.

Feeling sorry for Gordon (or, Electoral Reform NOW!!)

I keep finding myself feeling sorry for Gordon, until I remind myself of his policies on nuclear power, Trident, the failure of NuLabour to bring about a convergence between the income rates of poor and the rich, his all-mouth-no-trousers approach to AGW, war, Afghan Opium, the Index of Human Rights, Bees, forestry, and so on. The only good thing I can think of about NuLabour is that their ministers are marginally less irritating than the Tories. At least NuLabour don't keep braying at us on the airwaves about how good they are.

And I do not really care if Cameron gets in. Not that I expect him to deliver on his green promises.

No matter who you vote for the Government always gets in (so vote Green, they (almost) never get in. Except for Caroline (and Adrian and Darren, he added quickly, staying on-message)).

In this land of historic democracy, the new PM is influenced by:
1 The Corporations
2 The Civil Service
3 The media
4 Europe
5 ..last and least, the electorate.

No conCERN over the Large Hadron Collider

Interesting note on the Large Hadron Collider. The consensus among physicists is that there is no danger of catastrophe tomorrow. There are a couple of maverick scientists who will be under their desks with their fingers in their ears when CERN presses the button because they think it could cause the LHC and/or Switzerland to implode into an anthropogenic black hole. However nobody takes any notice of them; the tabloid journalists are going with the scientific consensus.

This is a mirror image of the situation with man-made global warming (AGW), when the tabloids are giving disproportionate attention to a handful of maverick "scientists" (some of whom have no climate science credentials), and are using their outpourings to cast doubt on the consensus.

Why the difference? Simply because humans would prefer to believe the comfortable message (CERN will not explode) rather than the message that demands life-changing action (AGW is happening).

Hey ho.

CNN war propaganda scam

CNN showed Georgian forces attacking South Ossetia,and Claimed it was Russians attacking Gori.

CNN, and possibly other western media are airing misleading footage of the war between Georgia and Russia, skewing public opinion in favour of the Georgians, according to a Russia Today cameraman interviewed this morning.

The Russia Today satellite TV company aired the interview on its English language news channel, but the story is yet to appear on the Internet or in any other news outlet.

The Russian cameraman charged that CNN had used his footage of Georgian forces attacking Russian civilians in Tskhinvali, the provincial capital of South Ossetia, but then claimed it showed Russians attacking Georgians in the Georgian town of Gori.

The Georgian assault on Tskhinvali, described as an act of genocide and a war crime by Russian officials and other eyewitnesses, led to the slaughter of at least 2,000 civilians. The fact that Georgia, backed by the U.S. and Israel, were responsible for the provocation that led to the Russian response, has been buried by the majority of western corporate media.

Western media bias to skew popular opinion in favour of the U.S. and NATO client state Georgia was evident from the very start of the conflict.

A prime example of media bias in shielding Georgia from responsibility for the carnage is the fact that news outlets like the BBC continue to report that "thousands of civilians were killed in Georgia", with the obvious inference being that these are victims of the Russian onslaught. But these victims were not killed in Georgia, they were killed in Ossetia - by Georgian forces.

While the Ossetians claimed over 1000 dead the BBC neither reported this or any newsreel coming out of Ossetia showing the destruction caused by the Georgian shelling of the breakaway republic. All we are getting is one-sided reports of the destruction being caused by the Russians.” Chimes of Freedom Blog

http://tinyurl.com/5jvvxg
or see the video here: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/28880/video