Where are all the listeners coming from? My first podcast from May is still being listened to and downloaded a few times a day. Almost nobody has left a comment. I have no idea where all these people are coming from, can anyone help? Are the podcasts being crawled and skewing the download figures?
Month: July 2008
Sunday Paper digest
Like Bernie, I scan the Sunday papers. Helpfully in work we have a reading room with all Sunday papers available for reading – though I still tend to scan the papers online on Saturday night.
Here are the best news/opinion articles I found today:
Shane Ross: FAS: the €20m-a-week quango
Shane Ross calls for FAS to be the centre of government cutbacks. And with good reason. The quango wastes huge sums of money. God knows what scandals will be uncovered at the agency.
SSHH. FAS is in the wars. And billions of euro are at stake.
Whisper it. The national training and employment agency is the object of murky allegations. Inquiries are uncovering odd antics. People are asking: what does FAS do with its €20m a week?
The answers are disturbing.
Brendan O’Connor: Gang of clueless ministers need to get real and meet those in the know
Mr O’Connor seems to have lost the run of himself. His latest rant borders on the insane. It is worth reading just to see how wrong he is. Richard points to an article by O’Connor from last year that is almost the opposite of what he is saying now.
See the Property Pin discussion on it.
Jody Corcoran: Don’t believe me, John? Believe this: repeating lies is bad news
Jody is suing The Phoenix over a recent article that said he sought a job at the Department of Education. Here he rants away rather badly. Made me chuckle for its sheer vanity.
Cliff Taylor and Niamh Connolly: State agencies to be abolished in reform move
The Post gets sight of what agencies face the axe.
David McWilliams: Central Bank must finally show leadership in the face of crisis
The Central Bank needs to do a helluva lot more.
Vincent Browne: Does Brian Cowen really know what he is doing?
Loses it over Lenihan, Cowen and government incompetence.
Cowen seems to have been unnerved by the Lisbon defeat. He has seemed unsure, vacillating and unsettled since then. His performances over the last few days have been his worst, aided and abetted by Lenihan.
Did you see Lenihan at that Japanese company function last Thursday, going on about how the company, which has been here for 20 years, had not yet ‘‘come of age’’? How Irish people don’t get the vote until they are aged 21? Scary, wasn’t it?
This can’t be shrugged off on the basis of a slip of the tongue – we all misspeak from time to time, but this was not of that order. At the time of making that remark, he believed the voting age was 21.
I must digout that Lenihan reference.
Eamon Quinn: Plan to bail out first-time buyers not a runner – NTMA
Some sense from the NTMA.
Johann Hari: ‘As the world’s oil dries up, the lies will begin to gush to gain control of Venezuela’s supplies‘
Hari makes no sense to me here. He seems to believe that Chavez is some kind of benevolent leader and that elections do a democracy make.
First they announced Chávez was a dictator. This ignored that he came to power in a free and open election, the Venezuelan press remains uncensored and opposed to him, and he has accepted losing a referendum to extend his term. When that tactic failed, the oil industry and the politicians they lubricate shifted strategy.
Hari glosses over the referendum to extend his term. The details of which would scare any democrat. Democratic institutions make democracies, free and fair elections elect people to those institutions, which have a mix of checks and balances. When those institutions are undermined by leaders, democracy itself is undermined – free elections or not.
Any articles you found interesting? Leave a comment.
Ahmad Batebi
In July 1999 the man on this cover of the Economist, Ahmad Batebi, was arrested by Iranian authorities. He was tortured and told he would be killed.
During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it. He recalls yearning for a swift death to end the pain. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured. His captors wanted him to betray his fellow students, to implicate them in various crimes and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint. He says he refused.
Last month he escaped via Iraq and is now in Washington DC. His blog is here. The Economist spoke to him last week:
Looking at the picture that sparked his ordeal, he says that another man in his place might be angry, but he is not. Mr Batebi is a photographer himself. He says he understands what journalism involves. Had we not published the picture, he says, another paper might have. Looking at the same picture, his lawyer, interpreter and friend Lily Mazahery says she is close to tears: in it, the young Mr Batebi’s pale arms are as yet unscarred by torture.
The protests Mr Batebi took part in nine years ago frightened Iran’s rulers. The students were angry about censorship, the persecution of intellectuals and the thugs who beat up any student overheard disparaging the regime. Mr Batebi thinks Iran could well turn solidly democratic some day. In neighbouring states, religious extremism is popular. In Iran, he says, the government is religiously extreme, but the people are not.
He is cagey about how exactly he escaped. But he says he used a cellphone camera to record virtually every step of his journey, and will soon go public with the pictures and his commentary. Meanwhile, he seems to be enjoying America. He praises the way “people have the opportunity to become who they want to be”. Shortly after he arrived, he posted a picture of himself in front of the Capitol on his Farsi-language blog, with the caption: “Your hands will never touch me again.”
I look forward to an account of his life and his escape.
iPhone 3G
I had a mess around with it today, a colleague in work got one. Hmm. It is rather nice, not much different to its predecessor. Would be handy for blogging, among other things.
Should I, or shouldn’t I?
Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million
In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”
Paidcontent even got scooped. More here.
Fannie and Freddie on the brink
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares plummeted again today as concern mounted that the US government will be forced to take over the beleaguered mortgage finance companies, which some investors fear are at risk of default.
The markets opened two hours ago, and the Dow has already fallen below 11,000. We are now back at 2005 levels.
Sudanese president charged
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. From MSNBC:
The action by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will mark the first time that the tribunal in The Hague charges a sitting head of state with such crimes, and represents a major step by the court to implicate the highest levels of the Sudanese government for the atrocities in Darfur.
Some U.N. officials raised concerns Thursday that the decision would complicate the peace process in Darfur, possibly triggering a military response by Sudanese forces or proxies against the nearly 10,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers located there. At least seven peacekeepers were killed and 22 were injured Tuesday during an ambush by a well-organized and unidentified armed group.
I doubt al-Bashir is quaking in his boots.
New Books
Now that university is over I can try and go back to my regular reading. I purchased these books recently, not sure how long it will take to get through them all.
What Happened by Scott McClellan
Suicide of the West by Kock Smith
Your Government Failed You by Richard Clarke
Epicenter by Joel Rosenberg
The Complete Turtle Trader by Michael Covel
Trend Following by Michael Covel
I Am American and So Can You by Stephen Colbert
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero
Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
Chasing the Flame by Samantha Power
The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria
The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
China Rises by John Farndon
The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll
Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid
Hitler’s Empire by Mark Mazower (Proof copy)
The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie
Ahem. *Drools*.
The most popular story on NY Times today.
“You can’t underestimate the importance of salt in sweet baked goods,” she said. Salt, in the dough and sprinkled on top, adds dimension that can lift even a plebian cookie. To make the point, she referred to her recipe for Sablés Korova, a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie with a hefty pinch of fleur de sel, from her book “Paris Sweets” (Broadway Books, 2002). Five years ago, sea salt as a must-have ingredient and garnish for sweets wouldn’t have registered on the radar of many home bakers, but now it has become almost commonplace, in part because of Ms. Greenspan’s unwavering belief in its virtue.
Very true. A friend recently sent me chocolate from Nova Scotia coated with sea salt. Delicious.
Africa and Coca-Cola
AFRICANS buy 36 billion bottles of Coke a year. Because the price is set so low—around 20-30 American cents, less than the price of the average newspaper—and because sales are so minutely analysed by Coca-Cola, the Coke bottle may be one of the continent’s best trackers of stability and prosperity.
In other words, Coca-Cola sells sugar water to Africans for 20 cents and still manages to make a profit. Imagine how much profit is made from selling it in Europe for up to €2.00 a bottle.
Interestingly:
Coca-Cola says it is the largest private-sector employer in Africa. Its system of distribution, which moves the sugary drink from bottling plants deep into slums and the bush a few crates at a time, may employ around 1m Africans. A study at the University of South Carolina suggested that 1% of South Africa’s economy was tied up, one way or another, in the distribution and sale of Coke.