Spontaneous Monotony

I’ve just read that John Reid is to be appointed as the next Chairman of Celtic - despite the controversy surrounding his political career. Celtic was founded to help immigrants and the working class. John Reid based his political career on patronising the working class, brutalising immigrants, and attacking human rights safeguards - in other words, his actions in government go against everything the club is supposed to stand for.

It is difficult to imagine someone less suitable for such an important post. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t stay as long as the excellent Brian Quinn - having Reid as Chairman for seven years would be a travesty.

Different people may have different opinions as to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program - whether it is a peaceful, civilian power system as asserted by the Iranian regime, or a weapons programme as asserted by the American regime. Both sides present a compelling case, and the question of whom to trust often comes down to which side you dislike the least.

What I can’t understand though is the storm over Iran threatening to bomb Israel if the latter attacks Iran. What is so startling about that? Isn’t it a given that, if one country attacks another, the attacked country will fight back? Had Iran threatened to bomb Israel pre-emptively, that would be a cause for alarm. But for Iran to promise to do what every country in the world would do in the same situation? Sorry but I fail to see the threat.

External Links

• BBC News - Iran issues Israel attack warning

Just when you thought that ‘Scottish’ Labour might have finally realised they do not have a divine right to run Scotland, their new leader comes out with this at her coronation:

That’s the road on which I will lead Scottish Labour and it is the road back to power,

Aside from having fewer personality flaws, one thing about the SNP is that they actually care about doing the job, case in point the Crichton Campus

Glasgow Uni: We’re making an 800k loss on the Crichton Campus, we can’t afford that
Labour Executive, pre-election: Tough
SNP Executive: Here’s the necessary money to not only maintain the Crichton, but make it even better.

Let’s hope that nobody actually listens to Wendy Alexander - it’s only when we have a proper government in power that we begin to realise what a complete dog’s mess Labour have been making of our country for the past ten years.

Today sees the launch of Alex Salmond’s campaign for a ‘national conversation’ (Worst. Title. Ever.) on the future of the country. The general idea seems to be that the public will be overwhelmingly convinced by the words of El Salmondo and the naughty unionist parties will see the error of their ways and back a referendum. When you’re finished ducking to avoid airborne pork products, perhaps you might see the reason why a referendum would be a good idea.

As the unionist parties have been crowing for the past few days, a poll conducted for that well-known bastion of objective journalism. the Daily Mail, showed that support for independence had dropped significantly. Leaving aside the strong possibility that this does not reflect the actual responses in the poll, even a well-conducted opinion poll generally proves to be as accurate a reflection of public opinion as if I threw two gerbils in the air and waited to see which landed first. Previous polls have shown a majority support for independence. Remember the poll that predicted an SNP-Green-Socialist majority government? The only way to really find out what the public want is to ask them, in a proper referendum.

This is what leaves me so baffled by the position of the unionist parties. They confidently proclaim that ‘the majority of Scots do not want independence’. So why are they so worried about the prospect of a referendum? The cost of holding one would be about £7m - that’s approximately 2 hours’ worth of Iraq War (based on the total dollar cost of the war to date), or approximately one seven-hundredth of a trident submarine (based on the official estimate of £20bn for 4 new submarines).

I would suggest that the constitutional future of our country is more important than illegal wars or illegal WMD, and I therefore fail to see the disadvantage in asking the question - the ‘independence issue’ would then be settled, one way or the other.

External Links
National Conversation

Technorati Tags: Alex+Salmond, Independence, News, Politics

The BBC’s decision to offer its ‘iPlayer’ download service only to customers of Microsoft is facing referral to the EU’s competition authorities. For those of you outside the UK, I’ll give a bit of background:

The BBC is funded by the public through a tax known as the ‘TV licence’. Anyone who owns a TV is obliged to be a paying customer of the BBC, even if they have no interest in is content. Failure to pay results in criminal sanctions. As well as having to provide the service which members of the public have paid for (some under protest), the BBC is required by its charter to be impartial.

The company intends to use Microsoft DRM with its ‘iPlayer’ service, which results in the exclusion of all BBC customers who are not also customers of Microsoft (as the latter has not provided DRM players for other operating systems). This is despite the existing use of RealMedia for all of the BBC’s streaming video services - a DRM system which is available on most computer operating systems. This shows that there is no need to endorse one operating system vendor in order to ‘protect’ content.

EU law prohibits companies from concluding market-restricting agreements which harm competition or consumers. The Open Source Consortium (who I’ve never heard of, despite using a lot of OSS) plans to make a complaint to the EU authorities on this basis. Although I’m actually a Windows user myself, I think it is unacceptable for a publicly-funded broadcaster such as the BBC to refuse to provide its services to customers of companies other than Microsoft. What is worse is that the government has allowed this to go as far as the EU - this proposal should have been stomped on at the UK level.