Orwell/Wells

"It's not quite War of the Worlds but some say there's something Orwellian about..."

Who says the BBC is dumbing down?

Drudge Report decides to break OPSEC

In case you've missed it, the Drudge Report is boasting about its scoop on Prince Harry's tour in Afghanistan and the rest of the media have now broken their silence and are reporting the story. The Drudge Report's headline ends with "3 MONTH TOUR", and of course, such is the self-fulfilling nature of this headline, it will now only be a three month tour. It is more than likely that Prince Harry will soon have to leave Helmand, where he has been operating as a JTAC since December 14, as the man known as 'the bullet magnet' is forced to fulfil that nickname. Jon Snow thinks this is marvellous and tries to draw a link between this and the recent loss of trust in the media, asking "whether viewers, readers and listeners will ever want to trust media bosses again."

However, this isn't a matter of faked footage or contrived competitions; this is a British Army officer who, through no fault of his own is of particular interest to our enemies and whose life - and the lives of those around him - is now placed at greater risk because of one desperate blogger. A great many people knew he was there; it takes a very special kind of egomania to release that information for one's own benefit.

Update: Channel 4 News' desperate hunt for a negative spin to put on Cornet Wales's deployment knows no end; now they think British Muslims might be offended by Harry's description of his mission there as "killing the bad guys." For British Muslims, as fellow members of the Ummah, must surely feel some affinity for the mass-murdering, medievalist and misogynist fanatics that make up the Taliban's ranks?

The Channel 4 News website reads like the ramblings of a series of competing personalities manifested in a muddled stream of consciousness; it describes its competing - but equally odious - opinions as "voices" and one of these voices is not so sure that Harry's words don't apply to all "Muslim fighters". Quite who Channel 4 News means by "Muslim fighters" is another, more pertinent, question that they fail to address.

Stopping people won't help; we need to stop idiots.

Williams: "a deal that went wrong or something that didn't really go too right..."

Watching BBC News 24's coverage of Britain's recent spate of youth gun crime and Keith Jarrett's response to it reveals a new and revolutionary strategy in policing. Knacker of the Yard should long ago have hung up his truncheon and stepped aside in favour of Sipho Williams who offers up the stunning critique of Stop and Search that "it's not gonna help if you just stop more people; you need to stop people committing crime." Blimey, what a clever sod.

Haymarket Bomb witnessed by idiots

Idiots: "some kind of skirmish"

Watching BBC News 24's rolling coverage of the attempted car bombing in London's West End there have been interviews throughout introduced with the contention that people who were at Tiger Tiger last night have had to stay so they could get into the cloakroom for their coats. Now, am I insane or is twelve hours a rather long time to wait to get your coat? Wouldn't it have been better to go home at 2 in the morning and then come back when a major security alert is over? Why are the BBC lamenting the fact these people didn't have beds? They were out drinking, they're not homeless; how are the self-inflicted hardships of their sleep deprivation even remotely part of the story?

Now maybe some would disagree, but this is definitely the most important story to come out of this major terrorist attack on the nation's capital.