The Furrowed Brow
What's on your mind?
Jump to more content from this blog
About this blog
PM The evening news and current affairs programme presented by Eddie Mair.
iPM The programme that starts with its listeners. Join the discussions online and contribute ideas for a weekly programme presented by Eddie Mair and Jennifer Tracey.
The PM Privacy Commission
Read the final report of the PM Privacy Commission.
- Full Audio and Transcripts
- Hugh Tomlinson QC
- Zac Goldsmith MP
- Max Mosley
- Stephen Abell
- Hugh Grant
- Sir Charles Gray
- Alan Rusbridger
- Helen Wood
- Max Clifford
- Marcus Partington
- John Kampfner
- Christopher Graham
- Louise Mensch
- Andy Trotter
- John Mullin
- Avril Sanders Royle
- Jimmy Wales
Meet the commissioners, view the terms of reference and hear the Commission Chair Sir Michael Lyons explain his approach.
RSS feed
Email us
Listen to PM
Right!
I'll be in the snug, hopefully Appy, Sid, and TSSC may join me to discuss the merits (or otherwise of , and any other matters to be tabled.
I'll 'table the first round. What's yours?
Slainte
ed
Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
Well, well, well. It looks like the has dropped, and the wisdom of continually bailing out the financial big boys with liquidity and ;accommodative interest rate reductions is poison for the system!
xx
ed
Those of us who are older than we dare admit, have lived through so many soothsayer predictions, are experienced enough to know that we will only have to wait a short while before the World Cancer Research Fund 拢4.5 million 鈥榚verything we eat is unsafe鈥 study findings will be superseded by an even more costly study claiming the opposite.
Hi,
I was reading something on another blog which was discussing the upcoming New Year's Honours List and who should be on it.
And that got me thinking about who I thought really deserved some recognition for the year which is almost finished.
The first name that came to my mind was Alan Johnston. His was an unbelievable year in every regard - yes, the chance of being kidnapped should have crossed his mind before he accepted the job but the fact that didn't put him off just makes him more remarkable.
Because of this, I've started a petition on the government's Number 10 website - if anyone feels Alan deserves this then I would be extremely grateful if they would join me in signing the petition - and spread the word to as many as possible.
Thank you!
If you want to prove that more people get a given disease or condition, you don't have to find more people who've got it. You just have to move the goalposts a bit so that you can say that more people have it.
Obesity is less overweight than it used to be, as it is defined; not surprising, more people per hundred are obese. Heart conditions now include several things that used not to be called heart conditions, and guess what? There is about to be a dramatic rise in cases of heart failure deaths per hundred. Diabetes is easier to have than it used to be -- you may not even know you have it, and it may not do you any harm. And the safe level of cholesterol in the human system has halved in the past five years.
So what exactly is a cancer these days, and does the definition include for instance moles on your arms for seventy or eighty years?
Seems to me that this latest report simply highlights areas that might be of interest for research, as for example are some forms of preserving meat less good for us than others? Dry cured bacon from organic pork versus factory farmed beasts whose carcases have been pumped full of preservatives.
What it does not do, as I think I did hear an interviewee admit, is demonstrate that eating any particular food is cancer causing per se. Nor does it apparently suggest any mechanism by which the more obese are more at risk than thin folk. Was this poor science or just poor journalism?
If you listen to activist judges these days such as Lord Phillips, the biggest problem facing Britain鈥檚 criminal justice system is that we send too many people to jail. Indeed earlier this year the Lord Chief Justice went so far as to suggest that future generations would view the whole-life sentences handed out to some killers as positively barbaric.
This view 鈥 that prison doesn鈥檛 work - has been repeated so often that it has become an unshakeable orthodoxy to be repeated parrot fashion by everyone from senior police officers to politicians of every stripe. Naturally, this philosophy has been greeted with open arms by the government because not only is it more 鈥榟umane鈥, it is cheaper too!
So instead of building sufficient jails to cope with the overcrowding crisis, ministers ordered that serious offenders be released from jail early.
They may be dangerous we were told, but don鈥檛 worry because they will be 鈥減roperly supervised鈥. How reassuring!
If only we had the courage to throw open the doors of all the jails 鈥 or even better stop sending people to prison in the first place 鈥 then all our problems with crime would be solved. The folly of this approach 鈥 and the true meaning of 鈥減roper supervision鈥 鈥 was revealed by Ministry of Justice figures released this week that showed the number of high-risk offenders freed from jail early who went on to commit murder, rape or another serious offence rose by more than third last year.
Eighty-three freed prisoners in the 鈥渉ighest risk of harming the public鈥 had gone on to commit serious offences, compared to 61 in the previous year. But even this is a serious under estimation of the offences committed by ex-cons, because the statistics don鈥檛 include those deemed a lower risk to the public.
The first point that springs to mind is that if these people are at 鈥渢he highest risk of harming the public鈥, why the hell are they walking the streets? The next is that 鈥減roper supervision鈥 means no meaningful supervision at all. We were lied to when these people were freed.
Eighty-three lives ruined and families shattered thanks to people like Lord Phillips, who are, of course, cocooned from the disastrous results of their own policies by their wealth and position in society. Unfortunately ordinary people are not.
It is surely no coincidence that the only time a tough 鈥減rison works鈥 policy was tried 鈥 by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard in 1993 鈥 the result was the sharpest and most sustained decrease in crime in modern times. But still we don鈥檛 learn the obvious lessons.
Nothing sums up the feeble response of the liberal-left to this catastrophe better than the comment by David Heath, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman: 鈥淭his report confirms that prison is clearly not discouraging these people from reoffending.鈥
How dense can you get? It does nothing of the sort. The reason prison wasn鈥檛 discouraging them from reoffending was because they weren鈥檛 in prison. If they had been, none of these vile offences would have been committed.
Why has C Diff, recently, killed more people in England that terrorist activity?
Who should we be more aprehensive about, HMG attitude to us or Alkida?
Anne P. - hold on just a moment. Having worked in the food industry for many years, I can assure you that no process involves carcases being "pumped full of preservatives". Cuts of meat can be preserved through various curing methods.
Bacon curing is by definition a method of preserving. Dry-cured bacon from an organic pig may taste better than your bog standard bacon - but it's the nitrates and nitrites wot will get you in the end......... (maybe) and they will be in dry-cured, sweet-cured, and any way of curing you can think of -cured products, regardless of provenance of the meat.
To the Carolyn Quinn show on Radio 4
Having built his political career on the back of acts of petty vandalism, one might have expected former Liberal now New Labour Peter Hain to be more experienced at glueing locks than opening them - but his own, no doubt absolutely sincere, apology for the government's substantial understatement of the number of migrants who have arrived in the UK since 1997 (by, you know, only 300,000) is just not good enough, and far too late.
If a government has no handle on data, it cannot formulate policy. If it cannot formulate policy, it cannot govern. In 10 years, we have thus evolved from being one of the most governable nations in the world into one of the most ungovernable.
We have done this to ourselves and it is not an achievement of which any of us can be proud. Sorry, folks, but we're right up there with Chad.
God Save the Queen.
On my mind is being told that being fed up with the DiPoW inquest is in some way conditioned reflex before I have heard what is being said about it.
I don't think Roger realised just how infernally rude he was being when he made this suggestion, so we had probably better let him live...
The fact of the matter appears to be that the woman died from travelling at high speed and without safety precautions into an immovable object. In other words she was not wearing a seatbelt in a fast-moving car that hit a concrete post, and the impact killed three of the four occupants of that car.
The fourth, the only one wearing a seatbelt, survived.
The father of one of the other people in the car cannot accept that his son died of being driven at high speed and not wearing a seatbelt (both of these being choices made by said son, and impossible for any outside source to influence at that time), and is desperately trying to blame anybody other than the person who by his own negligence and folly was killed (and by extension, his own blame for having a son whom he brought up to behave in this very stupid way).
This is costing everyone in the country a lot of money.
The sooner the Fayed parent accepts that his son is dead and that it was his son's own silly fault, the less money and time we will have to waste on his preoccupation with blaming anyone other than his son and by extension his own way of bringing that son up, and the better off we will all be.
He doesn't need an inquest, he needs a good shrink.
I therefore find the whole proceedings boring beyond belief, because in the final analysis it can be summed up in the words of the Australian website immediately after the event, referring to DiPow, and updated every hour. Each update said 'Yup -- still dead'. She is. I know it. End of 'story', as far as I am concerned.
Chris (11):
I must admit I'm a bit troubled by Roger's comment on the Tuesday Glass Box stating that editorial policy is unaffected by the blog comments.
While I completely agree that the Froggers aren't statistically representative of the PM audience and our views should certainly not be taken as gospel, the point (I thought) of the Glass Box was to put our views on the programme to the editorial team.
If those views have no effect, even a consistently uniform view about a recurring topic, I'm not sure that there's a lot of point to that part of the blog.
Is the daily Glass Box thread of any interest to the editorial team? Roger, Eloise et al, do you get anything out of reading it? If so, I'm happy to try to constructively contribute to it, but if we're just flapping our fingers to no effect, I sha'n't bother.
I should say that I've been finding PM's latter coverage of the DPoW inquest to be reasonably subdued and not at all intrusive, though I'm aware that it's taking space away from other items I may be more interested in. That could be said by anyone about any item, however.
UptheTrossachs (9) I stand corrected as to methods of preservation, although in a way you've reinforced my point about it being the chemicals rather than the meat itself that (may) be the problem.
At some point in the future some poor policeman is going to be asked to put a bullet in the head of someone suspected of being a suicide bomber, without being absolutely 100% certain that's the case. How will today's judgement impact on that situation I wonder. It's not enough to say what the Met shouldn't have done, what do we want them to do? Shoot someone who might possibly be innocent? Don't shoot and see scores of people blown up?
Ed (1):
I've skimmed Wendell's piece that you linked to; but I need to read it a bit more slowly to do it justice. My first instinct is that it matches my views quite closely.
(I just wanted to let you know that I'm still here.)
Sid
Hello Member of the Public (no, don't answer - yes, I know you weren't going to).
Anyway. Your response to this news was so slow it barely merits the usual 'knee-jerk' epithet.
May I just pick out one point? (As usual, there are so many incoherencies in your piece that it wouldn't be sensible to attempt to deal with them all.)
"This view 鈥 that prison doesn鈥檛 work - has been repeated so often that it has become an unshakeable orthodoxy".
That's baloney, I'm afraid. Michael Howard's view - that prison DOES work - is the current orthodoxy, which is why we now have 80,000 prisoners as opposed to 40,000 a few years ago. Are these 80,000 all murderers, rapists and child-molesters? I don't think so. These serious crimes have remained fairly steady over the years. The increase is due to sundry other offenders being incarcerated, most of whom are really not very dangerous at all.
I would go on, but I can see you're not paying attention.
Sid
SSC @ 12, well, yes, it's a bit baffling to be told that one might equally profitably shout down a well for all the use one's views may be, but I was reacting peevishly to the 'oh you all have a Pavlovian reaction to mention of DiPoW so we just ignore you when you say so' implication. He thinks this ten-year-old item is 'news', and anyone who disagrees is Pavlovially (well, it *ought* to be a word!) conditioned? Bah, say I. We've had ten years to make up our minds about it, and nothing has changed.
I agree that PM hasn't been making as much fuss as whichever silly newspapers it is that've been banging on about this dead woman ever since she died, but I don't really think that any coverage at all is particularly justifiable, given that it changes nothing.
Since we're having fun with statistics...
"You can prove anything you like with statistics"
"97.3% of all statistics are made up." - Anonymous
A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.
Statistics are like a bikini - what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein
It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest. -- S. den Hartog, Ph D. Thesis Universtity of Groningen.
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive. - Wallace Irwin (1875-1959)
The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. - Sir Josiah Stamp
Two things:
[1] the Blog seems to be working. Congratulations to all concerned, and thanks particularly to Marc the NBP for keeping an even temper all this time.
[2] Is it possible to convince politicians that the words 'a wake up call' are now so much a cliche that there's no point in using them? They've become like 'um' and 'er' for some people, it seems.
Pleade excuse any typos, I caught my left forefinger in a door today anf am trying to type wit the remaining ones - not easy!
I was very annoyed with Guiliani's smug remarks about our NHS. I have a friend in the Statef anf his family's experience of their own sysrem was not at all good.
My friend's 92 year old mother died in early Feb this year. She efll ill in September and was taken into hospital to have part of her foot amputated. She was released inro a nuesinf home, but caught MRSA and had to go back into another hospital. They let her out into another home where she deceloped pneumonia. Back into a 3rd hospital, then back into yet another nursing home where she had a stroke. Each home anf hospital was cheaper than tge previous one.
At thid point, her insueance company pulled the plug anf declared rhat they would not fund any more treatment for her - she had reached the limit.
My feind, his sister anf their elderly father haf to go to a lawyer anf get her declared bankrupt so the State would pick up the tab foe her treatment.
Oh yes - they were also faced with a $640 bill for the ambulance which took her to thr original hospital!
Green is not just a thing!
;-)
ed
Well, I'm disenchanted too. We're all disenchanted.
-- James Thurber
???
xx
ed
So do the noble fall. For they are ever caught in a trap of their own making.
A trap -- walled by duty, and locked by reality. Against the greater force
they must fall -- for, against that force they fight because of duty, because
of obligations. And when the noble fall, the base remain. The base -- whose
only purpose is the corruption of what the noble did protect. Whose only
purpose is to destroy. The noble: who, even when fallen, retain a vestige of
strength. For theirs is a strength born of things other than mere force.
Theirs is a strength supreme... theirs is the strength -- to restore.
-- Gerry Conway, "Thor", #193
Sid (15),
I thought there might be a certain amount of congruence. I do hope you get the time to read it properly. It's related to what's known as "Jeffersonian" thinking where I come from.
Salaams,
ed
Armstrong's Collection Law:
If the check is truly in the mail,
it is surely made out to someone else.
Just to pick up on the subject of all these studies about which particular foods are "bad" for us, or "show an increased risk of" [insert name of current horror disease here].
If all the money, time and expertise that is put into these studies was actually put into finding cures for the disease, or solutions to the problem, and implementing them, would we have a cure for cancer by now?
If you think about it, life is a sexually transmitted disease. And it's always fatal... sooner or later.
;o) []
Wonko (25); I share some of your concerns. I think such dietary advice can only be appropriate when it's thinghs that are simple and direct, such as eating lots of fatty foods is more likely to make you overweight/obese. As I understand the most recent "food" story, certain people who were at risk of developing certain cancers were statistically more likely to get that cancer under certain dietary circumstances. This is too much detail to be helpful to the general population. Yes, let the medical profession have this useful information, as they will be able to use this with the patients who it applies to. To make a national headline out of it only adds to the confusion of the general public as to exactly what a balanced healthy diet is supposed to be Last week a glass of red wine was recommended to help with preventing heat disease. This wook, don't touch it in case you get cancer. No wonder people are confused....
and at namelink
xx
ed
Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences.
Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce.
Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
UptheTrossachs @ #9, I read Anne P's post at #6 as suggesting that the carcases were full of chemicals that had been ingested by the animals before their deaths. It's an utterly ambiguous phrase, now that I look at it properly! 'factory farmed beasts whose carcases have been pumped full of preservatives' might mean either, and I can't think of any way short of Anne having said which she meant for me to have known which was intended.
Love the language... :-)
Ok Chris (28) - I stand convicted of loose use of language and inadequate knowledge of the processes. What I think I was suggesting was that some processed meats, after the animal is dead, have materials such as water or preservative solutions injected. I would prefer not to eat such meats. I would also prefer that the animals were fed on a 'natural' diet by which I mean not antibiotics and other growth promoters or their own dead relatives.
I was also trying to say that interesting as the correlations might be they did not provide information on which to act, nor clear evidence of cause(s) and effect. The point about the uses of statistics has been far better made by others!
(loved the piece about the dangers of bread....)
swear to its liberating power in tones that bear witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity.
;-))
USAF Struck Syrian "Nuclear" Site
By JPOST.COM STAFF
The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction......
So who's the terrorist?
Salaam/Shalom/Shanthi/Dorood/Peace
Namaste -ed
Lots of people drink from the wrong bottle sometimes.
-- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever",
stardate unknown
Anne P @ 29, I posted last night to say that I wasn't getting at you, just in love with a language that lets us be so clear and at the same time so open to misreading; sorry if it looked as if I were being beasterly, it wasn't meant so.
That post was one of the ones that has simply vanished. At the moment I seem to be running at about one-in-three is accepted and held for approval, but gets no further. I would apologise, but I think that may not be my fault! :-) So I am saying 'I am sorry' in the 'I regret' sense not the 'I apologise' one. If this gets through, of course.
And now, for some from one of my favourite dirty old men ;-)
xx
ed
Q: How do you save a drowning lawyer?
A: Throw him a rock.