Spontaneous Monotony

That’s the crass way that Sir Ian Blair chose to describe the moment when he discovered he had been lying to the public about the killing of an innocent man. Except it obviously didn’t affect him that much (24 hours after the death of Jean Charles de Menezes) since he continued spouting the same lies in media conferences for days afterwards. And yet he still has the full confidence of the Blairites.

Since I’ve now got a few images (OK, those five or so gif button things in the sidebar) on the server, I’ve enabled Hotlink Protection- basically meaning that other sites won’t be able to steal my bandwidth by loading images on my server in their pages. It shouldn’t affect anyone visiting this site, or entering the URL of an image directly (e.g. if you want to save it to your hard disc), but if you suddenly get redirected to Wikipedia’s article about bandwidth theft, please let me know.

For some reason the W3C Validator is not parsing my pages correctly- it’s claiming that tags are missing which (from going to View Source in Firefox) clearly aren’t. So, for the moment, officially at least the site is not valid, but if the damn thing was working it probably would be, so I’m not going to bust a gut trying to write a template from scratch. Anyone has problems viewing the site, e-mail me.

All posts from now on will support Technorati ‘tags’- basically a feature that lets you access (via the links at the bottom of posts) a list of different blogs that are discussing the same topic. And don’t worry if you see a + sign in any of them (like Xbox+360), that’s just what gets used for multi-word tags since spaces are used to separate between tags. Anyway, hope it’s useful!

As I suspected, the official police account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes turned out to be complete BS. The full comparison between the police story and the evidence is available at that BBC link, but here are the key facts:

• He was not wearing ‘a heavy jacket’ which could conceal a bomb- he was wearing a light denim jacket
• He did not attempt to run from the police at any time- he walked through the station, stopped to pick up a free Metro paper, used his travelcard to get through the ticket barrier, and walked down the escalator
• He was in his seat on the Tube train when his killers caught up with him
• He was physically restrained and then shot eight times: seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. Another three bullets missed him entirely

Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net has concisely summarised what I (and many others) want to happen as a result of this:

There had damn well better be a very heavy accounting for this with a lot of abruptly and dishonourably ended careers and jail sentences. For a start, just a start, the head of the Metropolitan Police should be out of a job by this time tomorrow.