Journalist Andy Worthington has a great piece over at LC looking at the way the presidential campaign has all but forgotten about Guantánamo Bay. The disappointment, therefore, is in Barack Obama’s unwillingness to tackle the administration’s crimes head-on. His team has presumably discovered that neither the plight of prisoners held beyond the law nor the executive’s dictatorial power grab is of paramount importance to voters, but this is lamentable for two reasons: firstly, because Obama clearly both knows and cares about the law, and secondly because it is the Bush administration’s quest for unfettered executive power that has led to almost all the ills that currently plague the United States. In a two-hour debate on foreign affairs the candidates mentioned Guantánamo once....

Finally, it seems that people are seeing through the Sarah Palin bullshit. The latest polls show a clear swing to Obama; this following Palin’s tepid interview with Charlie Gibson and McCain’s truly woeful appearance on The View. Below, CNN takes the McCain campaign to task over its proclivity for telling porkies :: via Shakesville (c/o...

I am more than happy to be joining Kirsty Williams outside Swansea's LC this morning as she announces her intention to stand for the leadership of the Welsh Liberal Democrats. As I say in this article she will make an outstanding leader.In other news the world is due to end shortly afterwards.Just joking...

…& fun? Leftwing Criminologist (over in Bangor boiling his water because privatised Welsh Water are incapable of supplying potable supplies…for the third time in as many years!) posts about a very strange phenomena- This article in yesterday’s Financial Times reported that charities are forming consortiums with private companies to bid for new prisons in the UK. Already NACRO has joined forces with Group 4 Securicor (G4S) and Rayner Crime Concern is teaming up with Serco. Apparently this is so that “involvement of the voluntary sector at an early stage in design and management of new jails would help improve conditions and effective resettlement of inmates” according to NACRO’s Paul Cavadino. Previously charaties occasionally subcontracted things...

by Craig “Lee” Dorsheimer   This is the third installment of this introductory series.  My intention is to provide a brief overview, not an all encompassing article.  The NAM/NWO is too large to contain in one article.    False Ecumenism / Religious Plurality   In its best usage, ‘ecumenism’ is a movement of unity among Biblical Christian denominations.[1]  I would call this true ecumenism.  However, a push to unite all churches who call themselves ‘Christian’ including the overtly new age Unity Church[2] among others, I would call false ecumenism.  Further, the attempt to unite Biblical Christianity to any other non-Christian faith I would term false ecumenism.  Unfortunately, the practice of much of the attempted unity today is a false kind and the term...

This Week in US Politics :: Huffington Post - Obama choo-choo-chooses the Senator from Delaware as his running mate. Joe Biden, a foreign-policy heavyweight (he’s chair of the mighty Senate Foreign Relations Committee), should boost the ticket in preparation for a long and dirty fight with McCain. Politico - Hillary Stiffed! Apparently, the New York senator was never even vetted by Obama. You have to wonder what he could hope to find out that he doesn’t already know, but this might further spice-up the convention, where rumours of a coup still hang in the air. Daily Kos - If you hadn’t heard, this week McCain dropped the mother of all clangers when he couldn’t answer the question: “how many houses do you own?” With America suffering economically, the...

I have just posted a bumper Netcast over at LC. Highlights include a couple of posts from OurKingdom :: OurKingdom - Anthony Barnett wittily unravels some vacuous Newspeak from minister Liam Byrne, who delicately writes with one foot in the Brown camp, and the other in Miliband’s. OurKingdom - Another cracking piece from OK, this time from Geoffrey Bindman, who warns those looking to define post-Brown Labour, about the vacuity of big strategies. Bindman takes one single issue, Legal Aid, and constructs a policy concept that would improve the lives of the poor and middle class, and foster a more equal society. It’s an intelligent step towards putting some purpose back into Labour. Highly recommended....

Sunny over at LC :: This is why I said earlier that the Republican Party is scum. They had a president who sucked up to Christian fundamentalists, who was financially reckless and ran a foreign policy so bad his only supporters now are nutjobs like Melanie Phillips and her counterparts in the USA (Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Bill O Reilly etc). My thoughts can be found in the...

via....

More Sadie - this time, the Normblog profile.What philosophical thesis do you think it most important tocombat?I'm not sure it's a philosophical thesis as such (given that its standard-bearers appear to be such intellectual colossi as David Davis, Henry Porter and Shami Chakrabarti) but I think the emerging 'liberty' narrative is something that requires a little more examination than it's currently getting in our principal organs of record. In the wake of 7/7 and 42 day detention, there has been a growth in the popularity of what I consider to be a destructive form of negative liberty which holds that 'The State' should be rolled back to allow people to be truly free. I guess there are arguments to be had in favour of that - if you happen to be a Tory - but a distressing number of people...

Once more via Tom Nelson, yet another dissenter from the anthropogenic climate change consensus, Dr Vincent Gray.INTRODUCTIONAs an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for eighteen years, that is to say, from the very beginning. I have submitted thousands of comments to all of the Reports. My comments on the Fourth IPCC Report, all 1,898 of them, are to be found at IPCC (2007) and my opinions of the IPCC are in Gray (2008b)I am therefore very familiar with the arguments presented by the IPCC, many of which have now been copied by the Royal Society of New Zealand, and the responses to them.Dr Gray then proceeds to fisk, in fine style, the report on climate change issued on 12 July by the Royal Society of New Zealand's Climate Committee. Here are just a few...

While it’s not possible to play mkv files directly on the xbox360, you only need to do a few things to remux the video and audio streams into the mp4 format. This means that no re-encoding is done with the video, therefore there is no loss in video quality. At the time of writing, the xbox360 doesn’t support anything other than 2 channel AAC audio for mp4 streams, so you’ll have to put up with that. It does work well though. 1. Gather video information mkvinfo movie.mkv Look for things like the following: |+ Segment tracks | + A track | + Track number: 1 | + Track UID: 1 | + Track type: video - snip - | + Default duration: 41.708ms (23.976 fps for a video track) This shows us track 1 is the video stream. Remember that, it’ll come in handy later. Also, make a...

Numbers crunched over at Snowflake."From a European point of view, it's rather depressing. We didn't cause the problem and are already doing everything we can to reduce oil demand, so can't really do much more to solve the problem either. We can only wait on the rest of the world to see sense, and do what we did 25 years ago, which is to take steps to reduce oil demand using the tax system. Our only consolation is that by acting early, we have made our economies less dependent on oil and therefore more resilient to the shock than other economies."Via...

I’m amused to see that the excuses for London Mayor Boris Johnson have started already, and its only been two months! On Tuesday David Aaranovitch in the Times called it a ‘witch-hunt‘, saying politicians were being targetted for non-scandals. I usually like DA’s columns (incidentally, he quotes Sunder Katwala from this article on LC but doesn’t mention the website. It’s only courtesy, David?). But then you should have seen it coming when people were desperately trying to smear Ken Livingstone and his “cronies”… why should Boris be exempt? Poor Andrew Gilligan is still valiantly waiting for the promised land while muttering about “anti-Boris forces“. If that wasn’t bad enough, we had Iain Dale desperately blaming...

A few weeks ago I had lunch with Colin Byrne, the highly perceptive head of Weber Shandwick, along with my friend Rakhee Vithlani. Both love blogging too. Anyway, we talked again about political blogging in light of this article in the Economist which mentioned Liberal Conspiracy. Colin’s also a leftie and asked why British lefty bloggers seemed so ineffectual on the blogosphere. Are bloggers on the political left of the spectrum really that crap compared to those on the right? I don’t believe so, but I’ll come back to this question another time. I do want to point out how and what can be achieved if we put our minds to it. What left-wing British bloggers lack in media profile, they make up with numbers and ferociousness. And I think the abortion bill controversy was a...

Thought I'd feed on from this and this.I'll start off from a bit of Mike Ion's well penned analysis:"Since becoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his team of advisers have been seeking to trade on a reputation for economic competence. The problem with this strategy is that history also shows that centre-left governments invariably have to do more than this. Labour governments need to persuade people that there is a task for government, that collective endeavour really is a strength as well as being a virtue. For this reason alone the best prospects of future success for Labour lie not in defending the status quo of what is still a highly unequal Britain, rather it is in legislating to help rid our nation of some ugly realities such as child poverty, endemic inequalities in both health...

Dear all and welcome to the (unfortunately delayed - I massively underestimated how long this takes) Britblog Roundup, the first held here, hopefully the first of many! Without further ado, Let's get underway...Blogging about bloggingBeating up on those idiots in the Mainstream media, Matt at the Wardman wire points out that The Commentariat (as represented in this podcast) seem to be having a few problems getting to grips with the blogging medium - in particular coping with the diversity...which he blames on a lack of understanding of the aggregators (including the BBRU) and feeds available. Naturally Guido's "profundity of the Punditry" meme gets a mention. However I feel that there are great writers in the dead-tree press. Writing to order may mean they aren't brilliant all the time,...

Do you get on with your next door neighbours?After years of people in the maisonettes and houses around us moving after a short period of time things are a bit more settled in our cul de sac. Best of all, we're not having any ongoing arguments with anyone, and, even better, they don't want to be our friends.Finding that balance with neighbours is an ideal state. You say hello to them when you see them outside, but it doesn't develop into a half hour conversation.The fact that very few people even know the names of their neighbours these days is often said to be an indication that civilisation is heading for the dumper. I'd say exactly the opposite. I hate community, Neighbourhood Watch and anyone who tells you their life story when all you want to do is mow your lawn in peace and...

Unity, over at LC, has kicked over a hornet’s nest with a piece - inspired by a Donal Blarney (hiss, spit) post, addressing intolerance towards the BBC’s various ethnic-targeted content. Google Alerts must have gone crazy, as by 6am the usual trolls had surfaced. Now, as long-time readers will be aware, I curry no favour for “political multiculturalism” - it’s a busted flush, as I have outlined in some depth. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think a multi-ethnic/cultural society can’t work. Also, I get very annoyed when whites claim that they’re being victimised and prejudiced against when an organisation seeks to redress its own bias towards the dominant ethnic populous. The argument against multiculturalism is not helped by such...

I have just completed today’s blog review, and it’s up at LC. Also… Justin has an important post over at Chicken Yoghurt, re. an Iraq anniversary “blogswarm” (related blog here), as “there needs to be a loud volume of voices countering the pro-war propaganda from far too many politicians and corporate media outlets.” I plan to participate with one major proviso: I can’t swear with hand on heart that I’d like to see the occupation’s troops out of Iraq. I was against the war but I’m for the occupation, at least in an abstract sense. I think I’m off the ‘you broke it you bought it’ school. ~ Justin McKeating Obviously I’ll be posting my thoughts on the matter nearer the time, however I have raised a point or two in the...

I’m late to this particular party, but still… As regular blog-watchers are no-doubt fully aware, another ongoing row has broken out between Tim Ireland and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes). Staines has been fairly quiet, instead using his lawyer-pal as a proxy. Tim, as ever, has been anything but quiet, reproducing correspondence that highlights just how pathetic Staines’ legal threats are. I agree with Sunny over at LC, Guido is a nuisance. But he’s also a fool. One would have thought that, following the incredible response to the Shillings/Usmanov/Murray affair, that the last thing the credibility-desperate Staines would chose to do would be to try and fight challenges with legal threats. It may indeed silence Tim, were Staines’ flimsy charges a little more...

Sunny is hosting some lively “Super Tuesday” debate over at LC. Nice live blogging software too. Looks like Obama has claimed a convincing win in...

Today’s net review is up at LC. Including this video-homage to Barack Obama: -...

Today’s blog review is up at LC. Off into Nottingham - it was Mrs. tyger’s birthday yesterday so she wants to be spoiled. No doubt this will mean the Visa will get a hammering, but she’s worth it (I may even get to squeeze in a few record & electronics shops). I have a few ideas for posts this week. Hopefully I’ll get chance to do some writing. I seem to be being pulled in every direction at the...

Casting the net is up at LC. Highlights include a goth-related shitstorm in the Lib Dem...

The latest blog review is up at...

Today’s netcast is up, over at LC. Mrs. tyger is back from Madrid, and has brought back some tasty Iberian dried ham. It’s so yummy. I rushed out for fresh coffee and Petit Pains, and we had a continental breakfast to die for. Now Mrs. tyger and her sister have gone into Nottingham shopping - with the kids(!!!!), leaving me the afternoon to myself. Well, I have coffee and XBOX so I’ll be fine, don’t worry. I’m going to be really busy for the rest of the week on a finance project (yeah, I have my accounting hat on again), so blogging (even maybe even the netcast) will be...

Another example why this is the most consistent, and best, blog in the UK. “septicisle” makes writing LC’s Casting the net a very predictable affair. BTW. LC seems to have gotten over the holiday malaise very well....

I’m busy working on a new website, which hopefully will be up and running by the end of the week… Anyway, my daily blog review for today is here. LC also has a rare Justin sighting, which - as always - mustn’t be...

Really busy again. Apologies that the blog has been slow this week. Normal service will resume Monday. Today’s blog review is up at...