Enter title here
So today I did 1h and yesterday I did 1h 5 minutes. I am doing 3 sessions a day averaging about 15-20 minutes. I am thinking after I can get the time up a bit I might start running, like, outside. I would like to. We shall see. [edit: I am talking about exercise. Yes. It might have helped if I had mentioned that.]
The phone hacking story has gone so boring. Louise Mensch/Bagshawe is odious. I can’t be the only person to think this. She jumped into the spotlight when she semi-quoted Piers Morgan’s book in parliament saying that he boasted about using phone hacking. Then when questioned on this outside parliament she decided she couldn’t quote the book again because she didn’t have parliamentary privilege protecting her and she might get prosecuted. Err, you do not need parliamentary privilege to quote a source which is available in bookshops. Either the book says what you say it does and parliamentary privilege is unnecessary, or it does not say what you say it does, and you’d get sued if you ordinarily claimed it did. Obviously, as it turned out, it did not.
I can’t stand her. She is unapologetically smug and she appears to revel in confrontation when she knows she’s going to ‘win’, if such a thing is possible. She has the air of a student who’s just joined a debating society and desperately wants to prove someone else wrong in the most condescending fashion possible. The video of her confronting Piers Morgan via a CNN interview is interesting viewing because she starts it off with a smirk which gratingly says “I’m right and I’m going to enjoy being right”, which disappears around the time that Piers Morgan reads out the part of his book she alludes to and notes the glaring absence of any of the incriminating claims she alleged existed in the passage. She still stands her ground though, which is a rather moronic thing to do when the entirety of the evidence for your position has just been refuted. At this point you either apologise or say “okay, I’ll check that and get back to you”. But not if you’re Louise Mensch.
And for the record, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he does get implicated in the phone hacking. He has made a few interesting statements in passing in some Daily Mail articles which would be worth investigating, but still, if you use a highly televised and reported on event to slander someone without checking your sources, you are a cretin.
Many people don’t hold this opinion though. Many people quite like her because 1) she went up against Piers Morgan, and 2) she’s rather attractive (in their opinion). As for the former, the fact she went against Piers and Piers was the one who ended up looking reasonable says all you need to know. I find the latter point completely baffling. It is not just that I don’t find her attractive, which admittedly I don’t in the slightest, but it is more that she is an MP who acted so irresponsibly and so disrespectfully to the notion of verifiable fact as to be a disgrace to the whole system, not least to those who elected her, and you can’t simply overlook that because you think she’s pretty. Yes, I know, I think Rebekah Brooks is hot, but she was privately employed and has obligations to nobody but herself. Therein lies the key difference.
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titles are hard
not another fucking hat
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Has Ed lost the plot? Is he trolling us? Is he auditioning for a role in Dragon Age 3?
Charlie Brooker has a vaguely interesting dissection of the shenanigans here. Several politicians have done this before on purpose because it amounts to hacking the media; they know that the full interview will probably not be newsworthy but someone could get a story out of any particular sentence he says, so he made sure there was only one that could be reported on. It might have backfired a little this time, though.
also I wish WP would fix the bug with vertical spacing and youtube videos. All my recent entries are going to look stupid when they do because I’m using a ‘.’ to artificially create a new paragraph.
edit: the title is a reference to a punchline of a joke involving a character called “Eddie the ‘ed”, not Team Fortress 2.
A couple had a child, but when the1 child was born it was only a head – no arms, legs or anything else. The couple were devastated but the doctor said ‘Don’t give up hope. When the head’s grown to its full size, which will be when the boy is about 14 years old, we’ll fix him up with a body‘. So the couple put Eddie on the mantle-piece and looked after him for the next fourteen years. On his fourteenth birthday they said to him ‘Eddie, we have a very special present for you’, and Eddie replied… ‘Oh no… not another fuckin hat!’.
ian tomlinson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/22/ian-tomlinson-police-not-charged
(notice I am now linking to the Guardian instead of the BBC due to their hideous website redesign, plus they deserve it for all the work they did on making this story come to light)
Absolutely disgraceful.
Raoul Moat shoots a policeman and overnight they have about 50% of the country’s police force relocated to several square miles in Northumbria to search for him.
Ian Tomlinson is attacked in an unprovoked incident by a policeman and dies shortly after as a result, and it takes a year to decide there won’t be any charges pressed because a dodgy-as-fuck pathologist who was known to have been writing bullshit reports for 11 years disagreed with two other pathologists thereby making a ‘conflict’.
what the fuck.
Yes there’s a conflict. That’s the way it works. There are two sides. One tries to convict someone and the other tries not to convict him. Then the jury weighs up the evidence and supposedly reaches the right decision. In this case, the Crown Prosecution Service presumably has taken on the role of jury themselves and completely subverted the legal process. In one single report they have destroyed their credibility, their respect, and they have done this to protect one thug who should never have been in the police in the first place.
In Canada (Toronto) recently they also had some G20 event, and, this seems to have escaped a lot of news (I heard about it on Dinosaur Comics), they tried to lock down the whole city as a police state to increase security. The result of which was the total opposite as citizens rightly objected to this and the police weren’t either capable of or interested in distinguishing between peaceful protesters and actual threats, so they basically incited violence and gave a lot of it out themselves. It was a total clusterfuck which came about only because the police did not seem to be aware that they were only going to incite opposition by using disproportionate force. The outcome to that is that the police have lost a lot of respect and will find their job in future a lot more difficult because the public will be unsympathetic to them.
This is similar to what UK policing has been like at protest events in recent years. It starts off peaceful then the police come in all fired up and looking for a fight, and do their outright best to escalate the whole thing into violence. There’s no shortage of footage on Youtube of the police going out of their way to cause trouble at climate protests. A lot of them remove their identification numbers (which is illegal) because the riot squads tend to be made up of ex military types and thugs, both of whom are just looking for a fight, and they know what they are likely to be doing is borderline illegal and they don’t want to be identified. They very promptly remove anyone filming them asking for their number.
This was really the ‘big’ event, there were a bunch of smaller ones showing unprovoked attacks which failed to get any real results against those responsible, and failure to bring charges against this one is utterly disgusting. If manslaughter is not sufficient, what exactly will riot police have to do before they have to take any kind of responsibility for their actions? And David Cameron wonders why Raoul Moat had 35,000 fans on facebook.
ramblings
I know I am out of date with this Roal Moat thing, I can’t spell Roul either.. is that it? RAOUL. What a strange word. Anyway… I couldn’t help but notice this during the proceedings: Originally the police said that Moat had made threats against the police and explictly said that he bore no grudge against the public. They had a hand-written letter with all this in which they happily gave over to the press.
After a few days of no progress they suddenly produced out of thin air that he had changed his mind and was now threatening the public. They never produced any evidence or explanation for this. Oh come on, what bollocks; the police were still in danger but the public were generally complacent. They introduced the ‘threat’ to make the public more likely to come forward with leads and to allow them to get away with more intrusive policing. And let’s be honest, their policing was rubbish, just like it was last time there was a gunman running around northern England. So were their press conferences. I understand that as you go north it gets harder and harder to find people whose parents aren’t related but I’m sure they could have found some better candidates to put on TV.
It is entirely unrelated and coincidental that I watched V for Vendetta on BBC3 this evening. It is a little far fetched though; you couldn’t run a police state with our police force.
In other news, BBC news changed its site layout. Never in the history of the internet has a site changed its layout and been greeted with any kind of praise whatsoever, which is because people then have to start reading all the text again to figure out where everything is and most likely you crammed far too much information onto the page and they find the process frustrating. Even ignoring that, this one is terrible. I used love the BBC news site, it was one of the champions of good user interface design in a world of web designers who have figured out they can charge more for every useless and annoying feature they add. It is like with academic papers. Anyone who’s ever read one knows that ground-breaking research is rare and the average academic paper explains a simple idea which is totally obvious after you give the reader a push in the right direction, but if you explain it simply you risk your reader grasping the idea as you’re explaining it and then thinking “well that wasn’t so clever” and then imagining that they thought of it too. In order to make it look like you’re doing some intellectual work, you have to make it so it’s totally incomprehensible to all but the most dedicated reader. Web designers have to make their site needlessly horrifically complex to make it look like it’s better than everyone else’s. Simple and easy to use interfaces just don’t impress the client like a sensory overload of uninteresting information. But now it’s going to be a pain to use.
Here is my reasoned criticism.
apologies to colour blind readers. And readers who when trying to read that probably feel colour blind. I should have drawn a green beard on Jonathan Ross.
