The Guardian's initial summary of Lord Justice Leveson.

edit: Haha, forgot to mention Lord Justice Leveson has been appointed to head the inquiry into the phone hacking scandal and wider media ethics.

This is just a copy paste from the Guardian liveblog of events. However a lot of this stuff is easy to miss if you're not following it neurotically like I am. Relevant bit I copy pasted from is here

Lord Justice Leveson, who has been put in charge of the hastily-assembled inquiry into phone hacking, is a trusted senior judge who is currently chairman of the Sentencing Council, which draws up guidelines for the courts.
He was lead prosecutor in the case of Rose West, Britain's most prolific female serial killer ...

Leveson was educated at Oxford University and became a barrister in 1970, working out of chambers in Liverpool. He initially practised in northern England across a range of crime, personal injury and commercial work.

He was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1986 and began his climb up the judicial ladder, sitting as a recorder and then a deputy high court judge. As Sir Brian Leveson, he joined the appeal court in 2006.

He has already demonstrated his willingness to engage with broader public debates beyond the confines of the courts. Earlier this year he defended a district judge who had been severely criticised – by the prime minister among others – for imposing only a £50 fine on a man who burnt poppies during an Armistice Day event.

In an interview on BBC radio, Leveson explained: "[The judge] had to balance the insult caused to those who were respecting the two minutes' silence against the right which we all have to express ourselves freely … It depended on the evidence and what he heard."

On his appointment to the Sentencing Council in March 2010, Leveson said: "I am keen to look at ways in which the council can help to inform the public about the practice of sentencing in our courts. I am aware from personal experience that giving people the opportunity to explore and understand the way in which judges approach sentencing can significantly increase their confidence in the criminal justice system."

I don't know nearly enough about the English Judiciary to make a comment on the appointment but given a lot of the people who'll read this are American I will make a few basic points.

1) Because this was decided on last week to be a Judicial inquiry it was always going to be headed by a senior judge. All senior judges are Lords, this is a throwback to Britain's medieval heritage and all that, especially because the House of Lords (the upper chamber of our legislature) is the highest court in the land. So while it may seem elitist it is just a seniority thing. (well seniority in an elitist institution but still)

2)Activist judges don't really exist exist in the UK for various reasons so the guy's willingness to stand up and publicly support a fellow judge is noteworthy.

3)Judges are never elected in the UK (in fact I'm fairly fuzzy on how exactly they are selected) so he isn't likely to be overtly political. However since the British establishment is deeply intertwined with this scandal his impartiality is impossible to assert. That would however be true of all potential appointments.

Good news from Arizona.

Well maybe anyway, dictatorships don't tend to fall apart just because a couple of the inner circle go away. I'm getting ahead of myself, two key members of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's regime have been forced to resign due to some internal politicking. Any set backs for the most prominent dictatorship within the continental US is a good thing though surely?

Buy Silver, hurt JP Morgan

I've heard rumblings about this before but didn't really know what was going on. Heres all round cool dude Max Keiser explaining it in less than a minute:



More details here

Dissent in the age of Obama.

Cindy Sheehan has a short editorial about the COINTELPRO-esque raids on peace activists last week.

Among other things she raises the interesting point that Obama is still portrayed as the good guy to most Americans and in the US media to the extent people can't really conceive of him being in charge of a regime that is doing plenty of evil things. In effect because of Obama the entire apparatus of US imperialism is more or less given a free pass.

Legality has nothing do with right and wrong.

It is a wise person, a legitimate person, who looks upon the world and only respects that which is worthy of respect. This is such a person.

Being a convicted criminal not reason enough to stop recieving full pay as police officer

Its seems the Catholic Church isn't the only institution in the UK that feels the law doesn't apply to it. A copper was given six months in prison for assaulting a 57 year old woman in his custody but because hes out on appeal his police force thinks that is reason enough to put him back on full pay. To be fair given police officers are now allowed to kill with impunity and not just once either AND with those who killed innocents even appointed to the Independent Police Complaints Commission one can hardly blame Wiltshire police for thinking there is nothing untoward about keeping paying a police officer who merely grossly abused his power and beat up a middle aged woman.

Happy 9/11

Let us wallow in the deaths of rich asshole bankers and DoD apparatchiks, bemoan how terrible it is a bloodthirsty and imperialistic foreign policy has consequences and then use our deliberate blindess to reality to justify killing 300 brown people for every 9/11 victim. USA! USA!

Protesters force Blair to run away and hide.

War criminal and sycophant to imperialists Tony Blair called off a big signing event in London yesterday because he was afraid of protesters. Sure it isn't much of a victory but at least it made him aware just unpopular he is and prevented him from strutting around wherever he wants to go. Fun fact Blair no longer lives in Britain, so you can tell he left a pretty popular legacy here.

However he did give the topic of yesterday's favoured liveblog Sunrise a quote that shows what hes all about:

Mr Blair earlier told ITV it was "not as if we need" to do signings to sell copies of his memoirs.

Deeply unpopular with the people of the country you lead? Not a problem, dudes just in it to get paid.

A moral grey area.

This one has been lingering in the elephant graveyard that is the ever expanding number of tabs I really am going to post about soon it was old when I was linked it about a month ago so perhaps I can get away with it being a little older still.

I understand that This American Life is quite popular with liberals in the US and this is an episode from it. It is also counter to the righteous indignation that usually characterises my posts, as the title states, this really is a moral grey area. It is about three individuals who are part of an online community that likes to scam Nigerian scammers which seems a reasonable thing to do but these three in particular have put those they target in some pretty extreme danger. Plus you have the usual problems vigilante justice brings and the nagging question of why obviously white and affluent first worlders decided the group they most needed to bring justice too was relatively poor Africans, plus their choice of terms such as "Safari" further muddies their motives. Nonetheless it is also made clear the Nigerian Scammers are really not pleasant people and false payoff the vigilantes use against the individual highlighted in this episode involves them defrauding a fictional church that is trying to distribute aid to war victims.

In the end its hard to say the Nigerian scammers they target are in any way nice people but you do still have to wonder if this is the right way to deal with them as well of the question of if two wrongs make a right.

Unpaid internships are illegal, ubiquitous.

Not much to say about this one, just a UK graduate ranting about how bad the situation of the necessity of unpaid internships is especially because it is illegal.

Read here

thanks RPS

The Best Bull

A bull, who was to be a victim of being tortured to death in Bull "fighting" managed to jump out of the arena and injure forty of the sadistic scum that had assembled to watch it die. Sadly no one was killed but nonetheless all praise to the bull for turning the tables on those motherfuckers.

Obama loves torture just as much as Bush.

Whitehouse spokesperson Gibbs will have to refer most of the ACLU for drug testing thanks to a report that shows Obama is just as bad as Bush. To be honest it would seem the Tea Partier assertions Obama is like Hitler are true, albeit for policies the astroturfed dupes likely approve of, operating concentration camps, the widespread use of torture and gaming the judicial system to suppress opposition. But yeah, that Mosque in New York thing is totally what Americans should be publicly and angrily debating.

4chan founder Moot's testimony

The guy that "hacked" Sarah Palin's Gmail account is / was on trial and 4chan founder / administrator Moot was one of the witnesses called, he was asked some odd questions:

http://www.businessinsider.com/4chan-founder-moots-weird-testimony-in-sarah-palin-email-hacking-trial-2010-8

Full transcript can be found here:
http://i.cdn.turner.com/dr/teg/tsg/release/sites/default/files/assets/poole-testimony.pdf

thanks jonny

Some good news to start off the day.

Turns out that the worthless sacks of shit who willingly committed prisoner abuse and torture are suffering awful PTSD now of course this is nowhere near what their victims are suffering if they even survived and the higher ups who ordered this and bear the true responsibility are sitting pretty but its nice that a little bit of justice has occured.

Cross your fingers as hard as you can.

Dick Cheney admitted to hospital feeling ill. Let us all hope that this is his sixth and final heart attack.

Fucking kids and... uh.. oh yeah that Jesus fella.

Belgium has become the latest country to investigate a major child abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church. Its pretty mind blowing how nearly every western country at this point has investigated and convicted Paedo priests, this isn't a few bad apples or even one branch of the church being lead by someone who let paedos get away with abusing kids, it seems a root and branch problem. I'm sure at this point priests in the developing are also abusing kids but the power of the church and religion in general is precluding investigation.

I don't think the Catholic church is all bad, Liberation theology is an unquestionably good thing and I am certain there are many catholics who are truly decent people who want to help their fellow humans. It seems the clergy are letting them down and major independent investigations into all aspects of the church and especially how the vatican operates need to be carried out. As much as I like to rag on corporations and governments niether would have gotten away with such widespread abuse of western children (Child slavery in the 3rd world is a-ok of coursE) so the low key reaction to such widespread problems in the Catholic Church is disturbing to say the least.

Furthermore if they're allowing this in the rich nations lord knows what could be happening to children from poor countries.

Strike first, strike fast, strike hard.

With transport already identified for big cuts by the Lib-Cons it seems public transport has gotten a pre-emtive strike in.

There isn't much justice in this world so enjoy the little bits of it you find.