Spontaneous Monotony

Fresh from lying to the public over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, it seems that Sir Ian Blair has now entirely lost touch with reality. Let me think – which murders have got the most press coverage over the last year or two? Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare (black) and Anthony Walker (er… black). As shocking as these two murders were, they received grossly disproportionate levels of coverage to, say, Kriss Donald, whose murder was even more vicious. In the latter case, the opening of the trial didn’t even get TV coverage.

Of course the fact that this case was a) A white person being killed and b) Asians committing a racist murder against a white person meant that it had a lot less political correctness points than either of the other two I have mentioned. Perhaps if Sir Ian could STFU and do his job, violent crime wouldn’t be soaring and innocent people wouldn’t be getting shot on underground trains.

Sure, Google has decided to censor the Chinese version of its search engine. But there are some key differences between this and Yahoo’s shenanigans:

1. Nobody has been put in jail or otherwise abused
2. Google is doing nothing that wouldn’t have happened anyway had they not complied – after all, pre-agreement, Google was being filtered by the Great Firewall
3. If people accessed these websites via Google then the Great Firewall would more than likely detect it, and punish the users, so by removing them from the search results Google is helping to protect its Chinese users from persecution

Yahoo has admitted that its search engine will never be as popular as Google. Fine, maybe now they’ll go back to whatever rock they crawled out from under, and no more Chinese journalists will be put in jail thanks to their western email providers!

I don’t really have time to dig out all that Creative Commons RDF stuff again, so I’ve fixed the RSS 0.92 feed by reverting to the default Wordpress version. Lacking the CC metadata, but that’s the lesser of two evils (the greater being nobody being able to use the feed at all).

EDIT: I’ve also re-instated the “link rel=” feed code in the page header, so that browsers such as Firefox will be able to auto-detect feeds for their own built-in feed reader features.

OK, you won’t have seen any spam comments on this blog due to the excellent Spam Karma 2, but I’m just not receiving any any more – the total number of spams has stayed at 1009 for about a week now. There have always been peaks and troughs of spam activity, but I’ve never had an absolute halt since I started blogging a year ago. Could this be a start of something good? Have the spammers finally worked out that most bloggers have spam filters? Here’s hoping!