The time has come, as they say, to move on.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm restructuring my online presence. That's management speak for I can't fit everything into the 24 hours allotted to this puny planet, so I'm cutting down on all the things that don't get books and stuff written. (I knew I should have paid the extra and gone to Omicron 5.) LJ is one of the straws breaking this busy camel's back now that my working day seems to get more packed every week.

This LJ will now cease to exist in its present form, and next time I blog it'll be via my web site sometime after I finish the current book next month and take my first break in some years. It won't be in quite the varied and rambling rantfest format that's been running here, more a regular column on industry-related issues. If I get lucky and find some spare time stuffed down the back of the sofa, I might re-open this LJ as a public-facing blog again, but if I do, it'll major on political commentary - sticking pins in Bliar and that kind of fun stuff, provided the twat hasn't already been impeached/ kicked out/ arrested by then. The writing commentary will live on the web site, along with all the announcements about what's coming up by way of new books, stories and Other Stuff in 2007

For readers who want to talk to me, discuss books and writing, and generally hang out, there's the newsgroup that solsticedawn was kind enough to set up. It does pretty well everything that LJ does, plus you don't have to wait for me to post to get a discussion going. (But you do have to make the effort to subscribe, so I'll know how motivated you are...)

So thank you for your time, insights, comments and participation. I'm calling Endex, and I'll leave you with the following random thoughts:

1. Impeach Bliar and his loathsome cohorts.

2. The Bialetti Mukka coffee maker is the greatest boon to mankind since cut-n-paste, and can double as a bubble machine when you use soy milk.

3. If you want to write - just do it. I don't want to re-open this LJ in five years to find you still planning the series based on the short story that you still haven't finished this year. Crack on with it NOW.

4. Unless it's real life, it doesn't actually matter. Whatever it is.

5. What you do shapes the world for everyone else. Yes, you. I'm talking to you. Make a positive difference. And I mean in the real world, which is a place that needs all the help it can get. Like the wess'har say, only actions count.

May 2007 treat us all as well as we treat others; may all those of you serving your country come home safely; and may peace break out somewhere.

Happy New Year.

Those of you who've read early copies of Ally will get a touch of deja vu here.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6216197.stm

I want my cut of the profits, damn it! And so do the Eqbas.

Another senior officer - the former commander of the UN's Bosnian mission - tells it like it is.

A former British Army commander has accused Tony Blair of putting soldiers at "considerable and quite unnecessary risk" with cuts in defence spending.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6220685.stm

In other interesting news - well, no, not news, really. Let's call it olds. This is stuff we've conveniently forgotten, so let's take another look at this: you'll have trouble spotting a government who comes out of this even remotely clean.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece

Sgt Graham Hesketh, 2nd Battalion, The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment. He stayed on in Iraq to be with his men at Christmas.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2114486.ece


The full list so far:

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3847051.stm

If Chris Allen (model maker) is reading this, I tried to respond to you but your server is blocking me. You might want to check your settings.

L/Bombadier James Dwyer of 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6217977.stm

Well, when the Labour party chair - a cabinet minister, no less - goes waaaaay off-message, the day when dogs date cats and the Four Horsemen saddle up can't be far off:

Cabinet minister Hazel Blears has joined a protest over plans to close part of a hospital in her constituency.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6213445.stm

It might be a principled stand (well, better late than never, sweetheart) or it might be what is known in the trade as saving your sorry arse. If her administration is in the shit, a girl can at least suck up to the local electorate and try to hang on to her seat (and salary) as an MP come election day, right? Astonishingly, she says this is not incompatible with the decisions taken collectively by the cabinet (you know, that funny little meeting you have to go to, Hazel) to close local hospitals everywhere else in the country. This might well be the most senior NIMBY we've seen in the wild, but it would have been so much more convincing - and uplifting - if she'd denounced the administration and foregone her ministerial salary by resigning over it, or got herself fired for calling Bliar's crumbling Reich the sack of doo-doo it so clearly is.

On a more intelligent and cheery note, I'm indebted to chrisbillett for this:

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3430481.stm

Okay, hands up anyone who is surprised by this. No? Good. I know solsticedawn won't be surprised at all, because her mum worked with Alex the African grey, subject of that well-known study.

I think I'm going to vote for the parrot.

What he said.

The head of British forces in southern Iraq has called for national support for soldiers serving in the country. Major General Richard Shirreff told the BBC that issues such as underfunding must be addressed in order to maintain the quality of his force's work

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6211949.stm

This may look like more of the same, but the fact that the main man in theatre is prepared to stand up and say this so openly is a measure of the crisis. In the interview I saw on BBC 24, he said that he wasn't blaming any political party, because it had been going on for so long - which is quite canny. It also happens to be true. The only difference was that the Tories didn't try to cover quite so many wars as Bliar.

I'm sitting back to watch Bliar's spin-minions desperately scrabbling for a form of words to claim that Bliar and the general are in complete agreement.

(But he's living it up with the Bee Gees, isn't he? and "Two Shags" has a kidney stone. So which hapless twonk will be minding the whelk stall?)

So, he was going to stay with one of the Bee Gees...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2106235.ece

What more can I say? I'm still in shock that he was taking a common plebeian flight that didn't have an RAF roundel on the fuselage.

Oh, the ship of state has finally foundered on the rocks of sheer bleedin' insanity. Pink prisons will be needed to deal with an upsurge in crime, according to Bliar's finest thinkers:

Secret memo warns Blair of crime wave

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2517940,00.html

No, the crime wave they mean is outside Number 10, silly. Not inside. But you might be forgiven for thinking that.

And it's not all bad news. All you folks with Fett costumes may yet have chance to strut your stuff:

To combat crime the strategy unit suggests adopting controversial measures used abroad, including: enforced heroin vaccinations, alcohol rationing, a ban on alcohol advertising, “chemical castration”, ID chip implants, the public shaming of offenders, the use of bounty hunters and enforced parenting classes.

Wow, that's going to work. I can feel it. Look, If this comes to pass, bounty hunting comrades, remember:

1. Bliar's no use to me dead. I want to pull his legs off first.
2. No disintegrations. We'll be scraping John Prescott off the walls for weeks.

Not exactly a shock to regular readers of this blog...

Britain's armed forces could be reduced to a "tinpot gendarmerie" because of a lack of investment, the former head of the Royal Navy head has warned.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6207267.stm

This is what happens when you let bean counters and other theorists run the shop. Do I need to tell you this? No. I just like to flag up these reports, because the volume of outspoken criticism from defence professionals whose normal corporate culture is to avoid washing dirty linen in public is a sign of how very bad things are.

It's one thing to run down the armed forces when we're not actively involved in wars. That's stupid enough. But it's criminally negligent - possibly in the literal sense, too - to do so when we're getting involved in increasing numbers of them.

I understand that our government pays minions to spend their time monitoring the public's blogs. Well monitor this, and pass it on: arsewipes, the lot of you. If there are cuts to be made, we should start with you useless bunch of tossers. You'd never be missed.

But...it's not all bad news:

No 10 'in panic' as Yard extends 'cash for honours' inquiry

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2099973.ece

Go Yatesy!

I think Bliar's been done, as we say over here.

Cash for peerages? Bungs to help oil the wheels of business? Hahahahaahaa.......

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5142202.stm

Lakshmi Mittal is the third richest man on the planet, and spent £34m on his daughter's wedding. So how much did he donate to the Labour Party?

A massive £125,000. (Not that I'd turn it down...)

That's a price of a cup of tea to him. That made my day.

Keep the change, Tony.

Martin Bell says it all.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6200511.stm

There was an interesting line in there about suspending conscience. It set me thinking about moral choices, and who has the right to pronounce on them.

I've always said that I won't judge a man who's in the line of fire. I have no idea how I'd react if someone shot at me, or - here's the tough one - killed my mates. I'm prepared to bet that I wouldn't show much self-control or Gandhi-like tendencies, and I know my own proven reactions to serious physical threat well enough to say that. Even so, I'd still have to experience it to know for sure.

But people who've never done anything more risky than drive a car often feel free to pass judgement on others who find themselves in extreme situations. Now, I know you've heard me say that they speak from a position of confident ignorance, because anyone who's sure how they'd behave in a situation they've never experienced is talking complete toss. None of us know until we're in it.

But it's more than that. I think most people forego the right to judge because of their own failure to take routine moral actions every day. (And the you I use here on in is generic. Only you'll know if it applies to you personally, and that's a matter between you and your own conscience.)

People probably don't even see them as moral choices, but they take them daily, and in many cases every few hours. Here's a really obvious one that is invisible: environmental impact. I chose that because BBC 24 has just run an hour of climate change news, so it's fresh in my mind. Anyone in the developed world (i.e. us) who doesn't know that our vehicles and consumption have a direct impact on climate, and so on the life of the whole planet, is in dangerous denial. We know the figures and the rough timetable. We can see what's happening, and we know what will happen in our lifetimes and our children's lifetimes. We also know that if we recycle, it translates directly to environmental impact: recycling in the UK has effectively "cut" the equivalent of more than 3m cars, which is an easy sum to ponder. We know the impact that aircraft have, but we still want our holidays and our £99 Ryanair flights. And we still want our cars.

Actually, it doesn't even matter for the purposes of this argument if it's true or not. The key point is whether we believe it. Because, even believing it, we still fail to act on it. We can't be arsed to take a few extra minutes each day to sort recyclables, we can't be arsed to leave the car at home one day a week, and we can't be arsed to change our holiday destination to somewhere we could reach by ferry or train rather than one that requires a flight.

I don't want to hear all the excuses why it's tough to recycle, or why you deserve a Ryanair flight to wherever, or why you simply have to drive your car. The point is that if you believe that these things have a negative environmental impact, but you can't be arsed to make changes that aren't even life-or-death ones to minimise them, then you have failed to make a moral choice. You've done a bad thing because it was easier than doing a good thing.

In Lego language, that's Immoral. Unethical. Bad. And they're situations where it's easy to make the right choice.

So if you can't even face up to a little inconvenience to stave off the impact of climate change - not pain, not fear, not imminent death, just inconvenience - then who are you to judge a soldier who's in fear of his life?

Just a thought, next time we want to shriek outrage and say we wouldn't do anything so awful, whatever that awful thing might be. Chances are we'd do a lot worse.

...how SF writers like yours truly get their ideas. They almost always add, "...don't you ever run out?"

And, as you know, I always say: "The problem is having too many ideas, not too few." No, I never run out of ideas. I don't know many pro writers who do.

For anyone at a loss to find a starting point for a SF story, then, here's some raw material that flashed through my mind, started writing itself, and that I had to make myself forget about because I've got a mountain of thoughts already that'll never see the light of day. Plus a stack of stuff I'm contracted to do that has to be done, and pronto.

Take this:

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6202765.stm

...then add this from yesterday:

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6200005.stm


And you have the makings of a fascinating and ethically challenging story.

Get to it.

You know I've been ranting over the past week about the way my (former) media colleagues have been driving a Panzer division through the laws on prejudicial reporting on the Ipswich serial killer. (And apologies to those of you who haven't been able to access that, because some has been friends-only.) To recap for US readers, who have no laws about trial by media, the UK law says that you can't report detail about a case that might influence a jury once someone is charged, or - important point - once proceedings are imminent. It's called contempt of court.

I've felt that the BBC has been one of the worst offenders in peeing on this law from a great height. I'm amazed it took the Attorney General and the CPS so long to warn the media that contempt of court is the law of the land, and everyone was sailing way too close to the wind. But...well, maybe it was just youthful enthusiasm or one bad judgement call by 'Desk. After all, we haven't had a good prurient serial killer story in ages.

Er, no. This seems to be the way the BBC will be reporting from now on. I watched Newsnight aghast last night - yes, Newsnight, the serious stuff, the BBC programme that took the BBC itself to task for the Ipswich reporting - as they happily discussed the Iran spy case.

A solider has been charged under the Official Secrets Act with passing information to Iran; the man is an interpreter working for the senior commander in Afghanistan. He's been in court. There is no doubt that the case is now sub judice - the legal process has started. No potentially prejudicial detail may be reported.

And yet Newsnight ran a studio piece where folk discussed this man, his life history, how he's an Iranian who changed his name to an English one relatively recently, how he's filthy rich and had some run-in with a notorious property tycoon called Hoogstraten*, how he only joined the army a few years ago, and so on. Unless they'd run a crawler along the foot of the screen saying DODGY IRANIAN BASTARD then they couldn't have made a clearer point to a potential juror.

(*Google for Nicholas Van Hoogstraten and Brighton. There's way too much for me to even begin to explain.)

Don't get me wrong. If this soldier is guilty, he deserves everything he gets, and then some. If it's all true, then it does raise questions about how carefully we vet people. But OSA trials are jury trials. The contempt law still applies. Now, forget the civil liberties stuff, which is a given. What worries me is this: the more the media abuse the contempt law, the more likely it is that a conviction will be harder to achieve, and the more excuses my fellow hacks give the government to "crack down" on what they publish.

And we all know how that will be exploited by the current administration. So STFU, folks. Play clean.

On the topic of people who should STFU, may I now do something I have never done before on this blog? I'm going to say something bad about a US politician. I've never commented on your administration before, on the grounds that (a) who the Americans have running their country is their business, and (b) people in glass houses with a shit like Bliar for a PM really shouldn't be throwing stones.

But I just want to point out that Condoleezza Rice is, as we Pompey Girls say, a dinlo. And there was I saying to frostokovich that Ms Rice was slightly better than baglady-with-portfolio Margaret Beckett, our sad excuse for a Foreign Secretary, because she was at least able to string a sentence together. (I thought I'd gone OTT on the gibbering inadequacy of Ma Beckett here but then I found what the Indie had said about that same interview, and it was both funnier and crueller, and also shows that journalists all react exactly the same way to the same stimuli.)

Wow. How wrong can I be? In the light of all that's been said both in the US and the UK this last couple of weeks by generals and paid analysts about what a bad idea the Iraq war has been, the smart PR advice is to shut up, and not say this:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again defended the war in Iraq, saying the investment in US lives and dollars will be "worth it".

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6202469.stm

Politics by L'Oreal. God help us all.

Never mess with a determined woman.

A woman who helped to detain a fleeing criminal in Worcester while armed only with her handbag has spoken about her actions.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hereford/worcs/6201353.stm

This is the second time in 24 hours I've seen a have-a-go hero story featuring women getting stuck in. In an age when people would rather walk by than get involved, this has a major feelgood value.

And I swear I'm not making up this next one. Kit shortages are not funny, because they kill soldiers, but at least this one is only cermonial. It does, however, show that procurement in the MoD continues to be farcical.

Five thousand soldiers in the controversial Royal Regiment of Scotland are having to share 320 kilts because no kilt-maker has so far been awarded the supply contract.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1078541.0.troops_told_we_dont_have_enough_kilts_just_share.php

Now all we need is robo-lawyers.

Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6200005.stm

Well, whatever rights we have left by then, and they can get in the queue behind the rest of us, the pushy tinnie bastards. Make 'em carry ID chips, I say. But at least the government has been forced to climb down on its plan to upload all patient records onto a new super-duper NHS central Marvin without our consent:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/19/nhealth19.xml

And we all know how incredibly successful and secure our government IT projects are. I had my don't-you-touch-my-bloody-records letter ready to slap on my doc's desk before this was announced, because I don't trust them to do it right, or to resist the temptation to sell the data to some pharmaceutical company.

I mean, even Bucky Boy Reid knows IT procurement is not the government's strongest suit:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6192419.stm

It's a shame stimarco is away at the moment, because he has some stunning government IT horror stories. If anyone else has a fave project from hell to relate, feel free. I won't bore you with mine, because there are just too many, but I still think that shutting down the police control room for the whole county by switching off a networked printer takes some beating for sheer surely-they-didn't-design-it-like-thatness.

(And yes, I know it's not all Labour's fault. Anyone recall the MoD's experience of building the system for Abbey Wood, under the Tories?)

Okay. How does this:

Mr Bush called for an increase in the size of the US military, but he said he had not yet decided whether to boost troop numbers in Iraq.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6197453.stm

...square with this?

...the US Air Force was riding high on the notion that air power could transform warfare. But the war in Iraq has changed that. Now the service's planes are wearing out. It is so short of cash that it plans hefty cuts in personnel.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1219/p03s01-usmi.html


And this was drawn to my attention by someone working in the defence world - I'll leave it at that - and it surprises me that I haven't seen more coverage of it over here.

http://www.amazon.com/Triple-Cross-Penetrated-FBI-Fitzgerald/dp/0060886889

A bit of background, subject to the usual caveat about doing your own research (no, not wiki...real research), but this should be an easy one:

http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html

Hmmm. A bit late: the BBC is, as of 11.54 today, touting "breaking news" that Yates of the Yard - the rozzer hot on the heels of Bliar's cash-for-titles scam - has told the PM's minions that he'll be wanting another chat with them, and that he'd hate to have to use more formal methods to get hold of their...er...rather selective and incomplete information on this thorny issue. (Note: shredders can overheat, kids, and forensic recovery software is pretty good these days.)

This steaming hot story - or the larger overarching version of it, when Yates warned MPs this was on the way - was actually broken in the Independent yesterday:

It also emerged last night that Mr Yates has warned MPs in private that he will force Downing Street to release records, if necessary.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2086675.ece

Meanwhile, the courageous chap doesn't look like stopping any time soon, which is upsetting some folk. Good. This is what I pay my taxes for; a law that nobody can be above.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2087555.ece


And, in "we only lied once..." news;

The Tories have called it "appalling" that ministers did not try to "put the record straight" over the now infamous 45 minute claim about Iraq's weapons. Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said the claim, in a government dossier, appeared to have been privately "discounted" long before war. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett had earlier said the 45 minute claim was of "little relevance" and used only once. "Perhaps people began to quickly think 'I'm not sure about that'," she said.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6192633.stm

Funny, I seem to recall that the "Saddam ad portas!**" bogey-man was the one that convinced ordinary folk over here that we had a legitimate beef with Iraq and that we weren't just trailing obediently behind Bush. But read that comment, and how it's worded, and weep with me.

Beckett - who seems to be able to get hold of air assets*** to pop home more easily than the poor bastards who need them in theatre - is indescribably lame. In a cabinet full of sad sacks that would disappoint even the most doting mother, she comes across as the weakest, feeblest and least articulate. Nobody can accuse her of slick spin and weasel words. But this is our Foreign Secretary. Be afraid. Be very afraid.



* If you get that title, then I know exactly how old you are...

** For those of you who didn't sit through Latin class like I did: "Hannibal ad portas!" was how Roman mums made their kids shut up and behave. "Hannibal's at the gates!"

***Yes, I know this is just Queen's Flight and not a Wokka. But you have to ask the question, don't you?

The news that another man has been arrested in connection with the Suffolk murders has further highlighted what a sorry bunch my media colleagues are these days.

I ranted yesterday about the insane amount of backgrounder material being put out despite the fact that a guy had already been picked up (but not charged.) It looked prejudicial to me. The BBC jumped on the bandwagon as fast as the tabloid boys, broadcasting a backgrounder interview with the kind of detail that might influence a juror even if they tried to put it out of their mind. This is the law in the UK: you can't make public any details that would affect someone's chance of getting a fair trial.

Backgrounders are interviews done for one reason and one reason alone. They're material that you can't use pre-trial and before the verdict because of its content, but that you need on hand to whip out when the verdict is announced so you don't have a scrum to get the info from scratch. It sits on your file until you can reveal it without falling foul of the law.

So... why the f*** would anyone broadcast backgrounders at this time? Because the Sunday Mirror had run their interview with the first guy? Why did we need to know this?

The BBC editor who decided to run the backgrounder interview was himself interviewed last night, and he said it was "in the public interest." Bullshit. Public interest would be if the guy was on the loose and thought to be a danger. Public curiosity is not "public interest" - which means public welfare. This was just tabloid journalism. It was entertainment.

Today - and the police are still not giving any detail, just as they indicated when they announced the arrests - the media are beating their collective breast about how bad and sordid and awful everyone else's coverage has become. Self-flagellation is one thing, but we're in mote-in-eye territory now. Veil of irony time: BBC 24, having apparently abandoned coverage of all other world events again, is interviewing a criminologist about why the media have become the drivers of this whole case. He points out that 24-hour news has to be filled, which makes this kind of thing inevitable, and just as he's getting on to prejudicial material issues, the anchor stops him...to talk by phone to a member of the public in Ipswich who has seen the second arrest take place or something. A guy who works in a shop, suddenly taking on the "citizen journalist" mantle (meaning: anything to fill the bottomless pit of coverage) and having absolutely nothing to contribute. It said it all.

And now I'm watching a BBC journo on the scene - with nothing to occupy her time - claiming the police created an expectation by giving news conferences. Sorry? Did I miss something?

How is it the police force's responsibility that journos don't have enough news to fill their 24-hour agenda? (Actually, there's quite a lot of news still going on - Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Iran...even here in Blighty, a government going down the pan. Plenty to go around, kids.) This isn't new. The law has been there for many decades. We all managed to work within it. But it doesn't happen to fit the business model of rolling news, and it must be a bugger when you've moved all your resources to Suffolk and don't know if you dare pull them back to cover other stuff and maybe miss the Big One.

Is it just me who wants to puke when I see all this? Well, I don't care if it is just me. This is shit. This isn't journalism. And why has the BBC suddenly lurched into this new corporate persona? I expect it of other media, but this is not what I pay my licence fee to support.

The whole Ipswich case has been an exercise in prurient sensationalism by nearly all the media. I don't buy their social-concern-for-tragic-girls either: trust me, when we're on a story, we're hard and blind. We don't care. We're amoral and neutral. We just see angles to freshen the story.

At the end of the day, this coverage makes a fair trial harder and harder to obtain. I say that not out of hand-wringing concern for suspects (you know me for what I am) but from a fear that if the police do eventually charge the right man, whoever that turns out to be, that a smart lawyer will use the prejudicial material to get the guy off.

That doesn't help anyone. And all for entertainment. Because it isn't responsible journalism, and when our collective image is tarnished, it means that the important issues we report get cheapened too, be they murdered girls or betrayed soldiers or hapless populations caught in the crossfire of a war.

So, why is this story not making more headlines? Why is nobody screaming at the French for civilian deaths? If anyone can find this story reported elsewhere, please send me some links. No mention of it on the BBC site. (And thanks to Sean for that link.)

France admits air raids on Darfur neighbours

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2076138.ece

It's probably less risky than fighting in Afghanistan, I suppose.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/29/wafghan129.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6187921.stm

And this hasn't had a lot of coverage, either: again, I can't find this on the BBC site even with a search.

Desperate Mugabe allows white farmers to come back

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2081650.ece

Pass it on, as they say.

It's official now.

The death of a UK tank commander killed by "friendly fire" was due to an "unforgivable" delay in providing body armour to troops, a coroner has said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/6190337.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6183445.stm

The kit cost £167.00 a throw, apparently. Like many people, I'd happily have written the cheque for it, but I'm not aware of a UK equivalent of Operation Helmet. If anyone finds one, let me know.

Footnote: there's some interesting argument emerging from the inquest about whether or not presentation issues affected the timely order of the armour that hasn't appeared online so far but is being reported on TV. I may have more updates to this entry.

Update, 1732: Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has just said on BBC 24 that a board of enquiry found that the armour had been first requested in 2001, when the Army warned that it didn't have enough to go around if they had to deploy at any time. That went on into 2002. The enquiry found it was not supplied for Iraq because of "political considerations" - to avoid alerting people to the fact that we were already preparing to invade. Fox has called Bliar and Hoon on it, saying that someone is personally responsible for that decision and that we should be told who.

I love it when a copper rolls out a news conference and leaves the media gaping like goldfish.

DCS Stewart Gull - he of the shiny polished media skills - just floored a presser of anxious journos by announcing they've arrested a man for the five Ipswich murders. Fast and no frills. Just an announcement, and he gets up and walks out.

Classy.

BBC journos were left spluttering, "Well, we weren't expecting that..."

Gull's da man.

UPDATE: see the unravelling hoo-hah over this suspect, who had already been talking to the media about why he'd been questioned by police before in this investigation. This is, as they say, being played out in that well-known location "the full glare of publicity."

Nothing to do with solving the crimes, but watching the peripheral people involved in this case is fascinating for anyone with an interest in the media and its role in society.

There are the bandwagon-jumpers, like the spokespeople for prostitutes' organisations, who are using this to press for full legalisation of prostitution and general police-bashing. Look, it's not the job of the police to enable your business, love - especially when most of it involves illegal activity. It's not about sympathy, it's about the law. Cops are also under the cosh from taxpayers who don't want prostitution on their doorstep, and if anyone thinks that having legal brothels will reduce the risk of violent clients, or remove the elements that upset the neighbours of red light zones, then they're not paying attention.

There are the Clueless Ones who purport to be running the country, like minister Harriet Harman, whose bright idea of the day was to suggest making paying for sex illegal because it would put the onus on the man. (Yeah, that's really going to work. That's really going to stop prostitution. It'll be such an easily enforceable law...)

And then there are the cops who haven't come to terms with the way their colleagues have to operate in today's media world. I've just heard an ex-Scotland Yard commander ranting on BBC 24 about the stupidity of allowing the media such access to this enquiry and saying it's amateurism. (His word.) Suffolk's finest should have restricted media access, he argued. Yeah, it would be lovely if the media could be put in their box and only taken out when we need them to issue appeals for witnesses. Sadly, that just doesn't work. They're there, they can get in your way, they have their own ways of finding stuff out, and anyone who thinks they can "control" the media in a running incident - be it a crime or a civil emergency - is delusional. It won't happen. They'll be all over you like a rash. Best thing is to accept it and work out how to minimise the hassle they cause, and not spend your energy trying to block their access when you should be dealing with the incident.

Nasty reality: members of the public will call the media before they call the cops, and the media will be at an incident even before the emergency services in many cases. Ask anyone who's worked on a big incident.

Okay, sometimes I miss all this, but sometimes I'm bloody glad all I have to worry about now is spaceships, talking squid, and harmless idiots.


Update, 1810: OMG. Has anyone at the BBC (or Sky, or the Sunday Mirror come to that) heard of contempt of court? I'm sitting here gobsmacked by how far they've gone in their coverage of the suspect. If this guy is charged, his lawyers will have a field day. What the hell happened to responsible journalism?

Update, 2239: thank God I'm not the only one who thinks this is desperate tabloid hackery, including by the Beeb. They're broadcasting a backgrounder interview they did with this guy. Now I'm watching the edifying sight of Newsnight (BBC) giving the BBC a hard time (you read that right) for potentially prejudicial reporting. Remember, folks: the fact that the public is interested is not the same thing as in the public interest.

I'm indebted to macleana for this link.

Downing Street aides and Labour officials involved in the cash-for-honours inquiry are being investigated on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, The Times has learnt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2509953,00.html

There's a Caponesque feel to this. We all know that selling peerages - bribes, as we simpler souls used to call that kind of thing - is par for the corrupt course in government, and by all parties over the years. The real crime - illegal war, anyone? - will go unpunished, but if you can only nail a murdering gangster for fiddling his taxes - that'll have to do.

See, some things won't go away. No matter how many e-mails you delete. The material that follows isn't new, but probably fogotten by most. chrisbillett reminded me of these links.

Robin Cook had been our Foreign Secretary, and then Leader of the House, but he resigned from the government over the Iraq war just before it kicked off in 2003. Not exactly the best loved of men, but you don't have to be well-liked to speak the truth and gain respect. He died in 2005 of a heart attack. This is how he took his leave of the government on a point of principle, a rare thing in British public life these days.

It's in two parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn5S8Q2J7Vc&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R12grgLp-Fo&NR


Full text: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2859431.stm

Interesting quiz: all those chaps slapping him on the back at the end of the speech. What did they do next, and where are they now?

I hate it when the Independent and I agree, but it happens pretty well daily now.

Cpl Bryan Budd was posthumously honoured last week. With much less fanfare, the MoD and media reported the death of Marine Richard Watson.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2081642.ece

I too have been struck by how little mention there is of our casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq now. But you can't lay that blame wholly on the MoD. The BBC, as I said yesterday, is showing the same tendency and is complicit in this. Other media seem perfectly able to find detail to report, but I have to really hunt for BBC news items when our troops are killed. (Forget injured - that's almost never reported.) I often end up having to use the search engine for deaths within the previous 24-hour period - that's how fast they wipe them off the front page. It's the same on BBC News 24: it's airbrushed over fast.

So it's back to BBC Online. I know the page proudly boasts that BBC Online is updated every two minutes, but there's running news, and there's indecent haste. It's as if they've taken a decision to bury bad news. Take one look at the trivial shite - showbiz crapola and what we hacks call "waterskiing squirrel" stories - that floods in and you wonder how that can knock dead soldier stories way down the menu and then off the page within hours. One RM death was rolled up into a final paragraph in a general story, making it effectively invisible.

I've been keeping tabs on the coverage of troop deaths and in the last couple of months, the glossing over of the stories is very, very noticeable. All I can say is that as a viewer/consumer of BBC news, something seems to have changed, and my belief that it's probably the most reliable news source is being eroded every day.

Captions, please.




As I was saying to chrisbillett earlier - I'd have taken him on a nice sightseeing tour of Baghdad and left him in a convenient marketplace for the locals to "chat" to.

It was good of him to pop in, though, what with being so busy and everything. In the meantime, "Two Shags" Prescott is running the whelk stall, and revealing how highly qualified he is to take over the reins should Bliar meet with an unfortunate accident in said marketplace. I assume that by his mighty dismissal of a party Deep Throat as a "teenybopper" he's referring to Labour Party thinkers - there have to be some left, surely - with enough youth on their side to have good eyesight and hearing, and who are therefore able to notice the depth of dwang the government is in.

Downing Street has denied any connection with an internal memo suggesting the government has lost its grip and is seen as a "shambles"....Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott dismissed the memo as the work of a "teenybopper" not a significant figure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6187033.stm

I bet he has a set of Ker-Knockers too.

Read more grubby Bliar stories here.

I admit I watched this running story on BBC 24 yesterday with some anxiety. But all was well in the end.

Power has been restored at the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham nearly 24 hours after a blackout left its exotic species at risk.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/6187045.stm

Nominative determinism being what it is, the manager's name is....Crabbe.

But that pales against the best name for the job that I've seen this week. In the reports on how HIV infection rates in Africa could be cut by male circumcision, the WHO Aids expert interviewed by the BBC was...Dr Kevin De Cock.

Utterly bizarre.

Crichton finds novel way to exact revenge on critic

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2079349.ece

And a bit sad.

Have we really reached the stage where we can't just smack each other across the face with a finely-made leather glove like gentlemen?

Amusing and generic replies only, please. No slagging of any named individual. (Although you may titter privately.)


(Off topic: I'm having no end of tech problems with LJ at the moment - error messages, posts delayed and missing, pages not reloading - so if chaos ensues, you know why.)

Worth reading, especially when you realize that the poor sod was killed. Make sure you read the Powerpoint, not just the commentary.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2729584

Nothing to add.

So, want a K, or a big P?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6185075.stm

Cruel to point it out, but...you probably have to have a fragile ego somewhere down the line to want a knighthood or a peerage that badly. If you have that much money, you don't need any power, because power is in business and Cabinet, not in the House of Lords. But it makes you look Important, and people have to call you "Sir Bubba" or "Lord Bottiwhype."

It's rather pathetic in its way. If I were rich and had a bung to offer someone, it'd be for something concrete, like...well, a huge arms deal, or even the last seat on the last flight out of the UK.

I doubt if the Independent gets much attention outside the UK - in fact, even the BBC is ignoring its front page today - but it's worth reading. I'm not an Indie fan but it pays to read the media you don't care for as well as the comfy stuff like the BBC, who, I fear, may have lost their balls a hair at a time since Greg Dyke stood up to Bliar over the Hutton enquiry.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2076137.ece

It makes you wonder how loud a whistle folks have to blow before Parliament - MPs, all of them - stand up and say it's time for a few votes of no confidence. Every Labour MP who isn't rocking the Bliar boat is complicit in this, but when those trotters are firmly in the trough, I imagine that extracting the snout is bloody hard.

I'm noticing that bad news from Afghanistan and Iraq is now getting an ever lower place on the daily news agenda at the BBC, and I don't mean on red-hot news days like yesterday. I mean generally. It's as if they've agreed not to harp on about it and upset the viewers, who want to know what Girls Aloud think of politics. Some Beeb stalwarts have continued to be the pain in the arse they're paid to be - notably the splendid Nick Robinson, recently seen giving Bush a hard time at a presser in Washington - but generally the Beeb is being less savage over the wars than ITV, which has fallen foul of the MoD for mouthing off too much about the treatment of troops. The MoD responded by stopping their access to war zones.

So maybe the BBC is playing nice just to stay in the game. Fragile things, balls. But like all parts of the body, it's a case of use 'em or lose 'em.

UPDATE: Oh, and if you want to see why we have the government we have, and the truth of the statement that we get the politicians we deserve, just have a look at the responses to the BAE bribery story:

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=5041&&edition=1&ttl=20061215212459

If anyone has any doubt of the impact of fiction on the public's perception of reality, please study the live news conferences for the Suffolk serial killer. I aim that at both readers and writers.

You'll see the CSI effect in full swing. Journalists - and we should know better, we really should - are having trouble understanding that it's quite common not to be able to ascertain a cause of death at PM. Dressed up in reality, CSI has convinced folks that science can answer every question. Actually, it still can't. Sometimes - as we know from recent child murder cases - it can't even use the data it has to come up with the right answer. Life's not as tidy as a 45-minute TV show.

People are influenced by fiction, be it in on TV or books, and most heavily when it touches on things of which they have no experience to alert them to where it diverges from reality. I can prove it. I've given examples here time and time again, and cited the psychology behind it, and even how evil spin-docs (okay, like me) use it to shape the public's view. Fiction gets under the radar. That's why we have myths. It's bleedin' obvious that fiction is not real, but every working day I see evidence that humans are crap at factoring that into the way they see the world.

I'm not talking about those with a fragile grasp of reality who treat soaps, comic strips and...er..even Star Wars as if they actually exist and can be quantified. I'm talking about normal people who have a rational outlook, but still can't escape the drip-drip effect of having a particular image injected into their brain on a regular basis. And, the better the fiction, the more insidious it is: the more reality thrown in, the more plausible the trimmings, the easier the fiction is to swallow and believe at a subliminal level that it's how things are.

Like CSI. Grissom and his crack team of strippers and hunks can tell the cops exactly what happened, and fast.

That's why I say that authors have a responsibility to tell the truth in fiction. The better you are at it, the greater your responsibility. We know how to make people believe things. I feel I have a particular duty because I'm not just good at making fiction believable, I'm also trained to influence opinion without too many people noticing it's happening. That's a dangerous combo, and it's why I keep it in check. One of my more arrogant colleagues pooh-poohed the fiction effect, and said fiction doesn't influence people, and I say to him now what I said then: you're talking through your arse, son, as any psychologist or PR pro will attest.

It even influences pros in the same field - rc_ghost told us about police colleagues who've also been caught up by the CSI version of forensics.

So that's why I'm careful how I portray people, especially those that most readers will never meet and be able to judge for themselves. Because right now, I can see educated and professional people, whose business is facts, getting uppity with cops because the real murder investigation isn't as neat and fast as it is on the telly.

If you create fiction, and you repeat it often enough and well enough, it works like Goebbel's big lies. The human brain is waiting to suck up plausible repetition, even when it thinks it doesn't want to.

It's a good day to bury bad news, or so he might have thought.

Well, maybe not, because Bliar's shame is top headline on all the news outlets now, despite what looks like another feeble attempt to disappear in the noise of a busy news day. Even police sources are telling the BBC that the timing was Bliar's choosing, and suggesting that it might have been because he thought we'd all be too agog at the Diana debacle to notice the PM was having his collar felt by the Met's finest.

But you have to admit this has been the kind of a news day that even Bliar's spin machine couldn't have predicted. I'm glad I'm not still on news desk. I'd have run out of reporters. Just when I thought the story of the world's tallest man using his exceptionally long arms to save dolphins couldn't be beaten, darth_vadere lays this one on the desk:

Wisconsin Man Runs Over, Eats Seven-Legged Transgendered Deer

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,236483,00.html

The tidal wave of newsgasms continues unabated. Here's one more story that stinks to high heaven that might get a bit more attention if only we can find more intrepid reporters to ferret out the truth:

The Serious Fraud Office has ended its corruption inquiry into a £6bn fighter planes deal with Saudi Arabia. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the SFO was "discontinuing" its investigation into Britain's biggest defence company, BAE Systems...Lord Goldsmith also told peers that Prime Minister Tony Blair had agreed that the continuation of the investigation would cause "serious damage" to relations between the UK and Saudi Arabia.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6180945.stm

Damn, I remember the Al Yamamah deal: it dates back to my days as a def corr. So, now we turn a blind eye to corruption if it's inconvenient to do otherwise. We always have, but now we're brazenly open about doing it.

There's some truth in the saying that the sun never set on the British Empire because God didn't trust us in the dark. Perfidious Albion, indeed.

Update: get your sorry arse down to that inquest, Hoon. It's nice to hear a coroner threatening a minister with a summons to explain why troops didn't have enough body armour.

After all that talk of Bliar, let's wash the bad taste out of our mouths with a story about an honourable man. This is, sadly, a posthumous VC, and he never lived to see his second child born.

A hero soldier who died saving seven comrades from Taleban gunfire has been awarded the highest recognition for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. Corporal Bryan Budd, 29, of Ripon, North Yorkshire, was killed when he single-handedly stormed a Taleban position in Afghanistan, in August.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/6179661.stm

Bliar has been helping the police with their enquiries.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has been interviewed by police investigating allegations of cash for honours.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6179911.stm

That's right. The Prime Minister of this country has had to have a chat with the rozzers because of his sleazy, dirty little administration's tendency to give its financial backers a seat in the House of Lords, and not hide it terribly well. He's the first serving PM ever to be interviewed by the cops.

This extraordinary disgrace will be overtaken in the news agendas by the Suffolk serial killer and the Diana death enquiry findings. In a more decent age, cabinet ministers resigned after being caught bonking prostitutes, which wouldn't even make a single para NIB these days. Now, you can brazen out any scandal.

I shall comfort myself with the happy daydream of Bliar having an unexplained fall down some steps at the nick, and a ripe black eye from walking into a cell door. If they want any help with breaking his fingers, I'm only a phone call away.

* sigh *

Update: nothing remotely funny about Bliar, but this Time Trumpet spoof does offer hope. (Thanks to chrisbillett for that.)

I could not possibly make this up. Ever.

The world's tallest man has saved two dolphins by using his long arms to reach into their stomachs and pull out dangerous plastic shards.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6178659.stm

And...people are going off the idea of blogging.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6178611.stm

Well, yeah. I'm getting a touch of blog-ennui too. But more on that later.

Just casting a professional eye on the Suffolk serial killer inquiry. (For US readers: ongoing major story.)

DCS Stewart Gull of the Suffolk Constabulary is handling the feeding frenzy of hacks - now there's a man who's done his media training courses. What a slick operator. I watched him open the presser on day one like a pro, and thought, "The PR Force is strong in this one..."

Perfect. Text-book. How I wish they'd all been like that in my day.

At last, the message has got across - the best way to keep the bloody media out of your hair when you're trying to manage a running enquiry/ emergency/ shitfest is to give them someone totally media-friendly to keep them fed with what they need to keep their news editor out of their hair.

He's been talking utterly openly on Sky News about what it's like to try to manage media while he's got a nutter on the loose, too. As one hack said: "It's like something out of 24. You wouldn't believe it if you saw it in a drama."

The media interview a prostitute about the killer one day...and she's dead shortly after. The police helo lands to check out a body in a field - and finds a second one as media watch. One hack used the word "exciting" and at least he had the balls to say the word, because the journo newsgasm is just oozing off the TV screen and pooling on my table. For all the caring and concerned language - including one less experienced reporter who used the word "dreadful" in every sentence - this is news stiffy time.

I'm not being censorious. Were it me nowadays covering that, I'd be just as bad.

I don't cover-blurb just any old book, you know...I endorsed this one for a good solid political reason. The war on stupidity. Stupid is more dangerous than anything I can imagine.

http://fjm.livejournal.com/

GLORIFYING TERRORISM (Rackstraw Press) is, technically, illegal - because every SF/F story in this anthology breaks the current UK law that bans the glorification of terrorism. Whatever that is, of course. The point of the book is that it's such a stupid and badly thought-out law - or, says my cynical inner hack, a very loose law that can be shaped to catch whoever it likes - that even writing basic SF/F can put you the wrong side of it. Buy this book direct from Farah Mendlesohn at the address shown on the LJ.

The foreword is by another good old Tory, Daily Telegraph writer Andrew McKie.

When you have Tories like us endorsing a book largely by the liberal left, you know it's time to sit up and take notice. Read the book, and see if you feel any less safe afterwards. And why.

Updated:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6176921.stm

One of my few virtues is tenacity, but even I realise when it's time to admit there's no point sticking with something in the hope that it'll improve. Some horses die, and that's life. Even I notice when the horse is not only dead but decomposing in the shafts.

I have watched Torchwood religiously, despite my gag reflex, because I didn't like the new Dr. Who when it started, but I persevered and grew to love it. I happily ate my words. The more I see of the new Who, the more respect I have for the craft behind it, as well. So I suspended my knee-jerk reaction to Torchwood - which was that after the first twenty minutes, I thought it sucked like a Dyson.

I speak as a TV viewer and a payer of the BBC licence fee here, not as an SF writer. I never give my opinion of other writers, but this is TV drama, so I'm still firmly in the consumer bracket and can vent without crossing that compromising line.

Torchwood is more than I can stand. As a viewer I find the stories are weak, the acting weaker, and the characters unlikeable - no, they're worse, they're couldn't-give-a-shitable. The dialogue makes me cringe. I haven't been this disappointed in a series I was looking forward to in a long time, and I can't shake the feeling that this is what a bunch of smart but inexperienced SF-loving drama students would create if they were given a budget for a TV show. It never quite gets it right (for me, anyway) at any level. I actually feel embarrassed watching it sometimes. I hate TV that does that to me.

So I've admitted defeat (after studiously watching repeats, too) and that I'm not going to get into it. It's the best part of an hour I could use productively for something else. For all I know it's getting great audience figures and everyone else loves it. But I'm switching off.

There's always the next series of Dr. Who to look forward to. And the Christmas special.

OUTRAGED EDIT: wait, I have seen what smart but inexperienced SF fanboys make! Star Wars fanfilms. And they're generally good. Better than Torchwood. And without a budget. So, BBC, what's your excuse, and can I have part of my licence fee refunded, please?

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's...it's....horrible.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife posed naked for the artist Euan Uglow when she was an unknown lawyer-in-training in her mid-20s.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,235809,00.html

I usually thank folks for links, but all I can say to rc_ghost is....you've damaged my psyche more than words can ever say. I only hope that macleana doesn't see this. And that there are no more hideous revelations of this kind.

I declare my undying respect for Stephen King. I had that already, I admit, because anyone who can write Misery has Been There, but it just gets better.

I've been watching a BBC4 interview with him and it's the first time I've actually heard a major-mega established author argue some of the same points that I froth on about at the lower end of the food chain.

Glory be, he says that creative writing can't be taught - which is what I keep telling wannabes who ask if they should take a writing degree or take such-and-such a programme. King points out that the belief that it can be taught stems from the fact that a lot of writers have to teach to make ends meet...

He's also wonderful on litsnobbery and its sour attitude to commercial success. "I'm a preacher of my culture, and I hate the idea that there's a line drawn between serious literature and popular literature....it's a country club culture...(where) we only allow in certain types of people. It sets off all kinds of alarm bells...about prejudice. Right away I got a chip on my shoulder about that....they seem to think that the number of books you sell divided by the number of books you've written equals the IQ of your audience."

(Actually, that would still put his readers at the smarter end of the bell curve...)

He's also very good on the unshakeable belief that many readers have that novels are all autobiographical. (The inability to understand that they aren't is the thing that divides writers from readers, I think.) He likens fiction to a handball game. The wall is the real world, and the ball is fiction, and the ball is in the air more often than it's in contact with the wall: reality is the wall off of which fiction bounces. I don't think I've ever heard it put better.

Funny, I watch lots of interviews with writers, and inevitably to appear on TV they tend to be more arty than successful, so they bore me to the point of nosebleeds. They have a lot to say about themselves, and their Ahhhht, and not much else. But King is riveting: he's talking about writing to eat (literally) and the nuts and bolts of putting books together. If you're interested in writing, and you get the chance to watch a King interview, grab it.

Troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan by criminals could be in line for compensation payouts worth millions of pounds, the Ministry of Defence said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6167011.stm

That's not millions per soldier, of course. The top payment is £500k. As a civvie, you can get £800k over here for hurt feelings.

Let's see how this works in practice.

I don't know why we're getting our panties in a bunch about this. After all, we'll only have two of the bloody things flying. That should be enough to do the job, right? I mean, we wouldn't want to waste taxpayers' money that could be spent on consultants, spin docs, receptions for oxygen-wasting z-list pop stars, and our cronies, would we?

The UK should not agree to a US deal to buy the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter unless the US releases details allowing independent operation, MPs have warned.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6219122.stm

In other we-used-to-have-a-country-and-an-infrastructure news, I spent yesterday afternoon outside an NHS hospital treatment room - and I mean that literally, because I like to be in a good sniper position, not kept appeased in some grubby waiting room - while Dad had some routine treatment. (It's okay, I scrubbed myself down when I came out...) As we all know, patients and visitors occupy a sensory niche much like servants once did for the nobs: you can say anything in front of them, because they won't hear or understand it.

While I waited, I could hear a spirited discussion going on between three or four women about hospital waiting lists and poor treatment. I had my back to the source of the sound. This unfortunate woman was having the devil's own job getting to see a specialist about her back trouble; her doctor, she said, was pushing to get her moved higher up the very long waiting list. She had seen someone, apparently, who had treated her kindly, but most in the health system had not. Nothing unusual there, of course.

But it was when I heard the sympathetic murmurs of "...but we should get special treatment, not be treated like people (sic)...we're a special case...we should get a perk..." that I did a quick recce and found that the group of disgruntled women slagging off the health service for being total crap was...a bunch of nurses.

Laugh? Oh yes. Somehow, the connection between what they did for a living and the product they were consuming (or not, in this case) simply didn't happen for them.

I resisted the urge to leap out, yell "Surprise!!!" and lecture on the health risks of using petards carelessly.

General Sir Mike Jackson tells it like it is in this year's Dimbleby Lecture. Like the man says, if we want our troops to put their lives on the line, then we bloody well better be prepared to pay for decent kit, care and support for them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215296.stm

UPDATE: as the row rumbles on today, Tory MP Liam Fox says:

"They measure not what is necessary but what is measurable and therefore you very often end up with results which suit the government statisticians but not those who are actually on the front line."

As someone who spent the best part of ten years watching this government impose a culture of tick-lists and performance indicators* on the public sector, none of which achieved one damn positive thing for people but kept fat consultants fed and some waste-of-DNA pen pushers happy, I can only say: truth. Even now, Bliar responds to attacks on poor education standards with the line that there are now computers for every child. The wankers don't know the difference between inputs and outcomes. It's all about presentation, which is why someone like Jackson or Dannatt has to humiliate them publicly to get anywhere.

(*If you ever have nothing better to do, ask me for the list of the 100-plus useless PIs that I had to spin for my masters annually. In fact, I might do a separate blog on that when I have time. You won't believe most of them.)

Traviss interview up at John Scalzi's AOL blog:

http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/bytheway/entries/2006/12/05/author-interview-week-karen-traviss/6831

Regular readers of my rantfest have heard most of the views before, but if you're new here, check it out.

Sometimes even I run out of words.

Organisers of a village Christmas party have been told they must carry out a risk assessment of their mince pies - or their festivities will be cancelled.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/6207970.stm

And just when you might have thought that Bliar's New World Order couldn't possibly find any new ways to spit in the faces of our troops:

The families of troops killed in Iraq are being charged hundreds of pounds to obtain official documents relating to their deaths.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=420537&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=

And, gosh, Tessa Jowell - she of the Berlusconi-paid mortgage - accused of more sleaze? Surely not.

Tessa Jowell was at the centre of a new crony row last night after packing the board of the Big Lottery Fund with Labour supporters.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=420474&in_page_id=1770

If I sound muffled, it's because my head is in my hands as I despair at ever seeing anything change in this sorry excuse for a country.

This is one of the most interesting and sensible items I've ever seen on BBC Online.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6199716.stm

It's a former vicar talking about what made him a committed agnostic. Not an atheist, in the longer term - a firm agnostic. The line that really resonated with me here is this: a lust for certainty. He sees it not only in fundamentalism, but in mainstream religion, and in science, and he sees it seeping into other aspects of our daily life.

I think we've been here before on this blog.

'Thus, a corresponding "lust for certainty" characterises many of the debates currently doing the rounds. In religion, fundamentalism is the obvious case in point....When it comes to the scientific worldview, a lust for certainty is manifest in different ways. Think of the way that some atheists go on at great length about the need to throw off superstitious belief and don the freedom and reason of the Enlightenment....TH Huxley meant his neologism as a rebuke to all who peddle their opinions as facts - notably their opinion, scientific or religious, about God.'

But as he goes on to say, it's about a lot more than God. It's everyone who's so scared of life and the fact that a lot of the world around them just isn't reliable and definable that they create their own rigid orthodoxy as a shield, and respond with panicked hate to anything that shakes it just a little. It's about fighting over whether God really prefers us to sacrifice goats rather than pray in silence, or even getting hysterically and irrationally hate-crazed about the plot of a comic. (And you know that I know all about that kind of lunacy...)

I see it in people who want absolute "facts" and definitive statements about fictional universes, as if fiction can ever be known and defined, but they don't really want to enjoy the fiction. They want certainty. Well, there ain't none in fiction, and - here's the hard bit - there isn't even much in real life. I see the desperate quest for certainty in aggressively evangelistic atheists. I see it every bloody where.

I've even had folk harangue me about my complete lack of belief or disbelief in God, because they just couldn't get their heads around the fact that I'm neither on one side nor the other, and that it doesn't matter to me anyway. You must take sides! Er...no, I don't. I've got strong views on a lot of things, but I don't have to take sides about everything. I'm comfortable saying, "I don't know." But I'm equally comfortable saying, "Well, who'd have thought that would happen? Looks like I'll have to change my views...."

I'm glad Mark Vernon has the guts to have a go at all sides of the various absolutist debates. Ambiguity - and its inevitable bedfellow, the ability to change our minds based on experience - is part of the fabric of our existence. What we thought was scientific fact in the past is debunked daily, no doubt to be revised again in years to come. Religion changes its collective mind as it sees fit and when the really challenging stuff - like being nice to other folk - gets a bit too inconvenient. Atheists begin to look like the Taleban with the serial numbers filed off and "reason" written in crayon over the word "God." And if you really, really want me to tell you definitive "facts" about a world that doesn't exist except on the pages of a book, or comic, or on a screen....well, just don't.

It's all bollocks. Let's stop being scared, grow up, and accept that life is shifting sands. Then it might just start to make sense.

Damn, I might even go out and buy Vernon's book.

Oddly, I stumbled on this while I was trying to find data on missiles. But it's a happy discovery. How about some of you Brits out there make use of it? I found loads of US military sites like this, but it's taken me forever to find a UK one. (Ironic: I have more daily contact with the US armed forces now than I do with our own.)


uk4u Thanks! is a registered charity and its primary aim is to raise funds to ensure the continuation of the "Box" for the Troops! at Christmas

http://www.uk4u.org/home.htm

At least it's one thing the government won't be able to claw back from them. (I hope.) It's not substitute for being home with the family, but at least they'll know some people back home do give a damn.

One of the best series I've seen in a long time: Victoria Cross Heroes, on Five.

When you watch three crowded documentaries' worth of individual cases of heroism, it becomes hard to take it in. We're not just talking brave: we're talking you-wouldn't-believe-it-in-a-movie brave. And the number of men awarded the VC who performed these acts of heroism not just once but multiple times is testament to what that level of courage really is - not a fluke, but the result of some deep-seated determination to look out for your mates and not to yield.

The defence of Rorke's Drift (best known to most folk as the film Zulu) produced a rash of VCs. I pick out Rorke's Drift simply because it's well known, but also because it shows that - as has happened so many times in history - a tiny number of troops can achieve astonishing things in battle. A hundred troops - some of them already wounded when the attack started - held off 4,000 Zulus, who showed phenomenal courage themselves. Those sorts of odds cropped up more than once in the history of the Victoria Cross. The number of men who had no previous combat experience is also interesting to note.

Homo sapiens is frequently the least appealing of creatures, but when I look at the holders of the VC - latest one being the wonderfully modest and engaging Private Johnson Beharry, 1 PWRR - I can at least see what humans can be at their best.