Johann Hari’s Wikipedia editing history as David Rose ●

Not quite in the same league of journalistic malpractice as phone hacking is it?

Secular Americans praise Bloomberg – 9/11 ceremony religion free ●

A reflection of the cultural diversity of the victims of 9/11 and a reminder that America is a secular country. Meanwhile, most of the remembrance services in the UK were entirely Christian affairs. It’s predicted that by 2050, regular church attendance will be made by less than 100,000 people in the UK. Yet the stranglehold Christianity has on events concerning national mourning and remembrance remains strong. I often wonder why that is.

In 1960, the American Medical Association ran a campaign against the Democrats’ plans for free health care for the elderly. Calling it ‘Operation Coffee Cup’, they hired Ronald Reagan to record an LP entitled ‘Ronald Reagan speaks out against SOCIALIZED MEDICINE’. In it, he warns that socialised medicine is “a foot in the door” for further government intervention, and that “pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him.” The campaign didn’t really work, and the Social Security Act of 1965 was passed by congress, leading to the formation of Medicare and Medicaid, both a kind of ‘NHS lite’ for the over-65s and young, vulnerable people respectively.

Operation Coffee Cup was an example of a media campaign designed to spread fear amongst the American public and was a product of the McCarthy-era tensions during the previous decade. The Soviet Union had developed a public health service in the 1920s, China in the 1950s, and Cuba in the 1960s; in the eyes of the American public, socialised medicine became an evil borne of the socialist state, and any attempt to introduce it could only be a step towards such a state. This is the backdrop for the current controversy over Obama’s plans for US health care reform, and each attempt at reform by Democratic administrations over the last few decades has been met with strong reaction from the republican right.

America is the only developed country in the world without some kind of universal health care system. If Obama gets legislation through congress, the health insurance industry would lose billions as public dollars go into a single-payer system. Just as the Bush administration mis-directed the American public and Tony Blair to support the lucrative Iraq invasion, it could be argued that the threat of a meddling Obama administration is really just fear stirred up by the health insurance companies and their lobbyists who stand to lose billions if Obama’s plans go ahead.

Whatever is fueling the antipathy towards public health care, it’s true that Americans value their freedom and their free market, and libertarianism runs deep across the political divide. But I fail to understand how a universal health care system can lead to either a more controlling ‘nanny’ state or to poorer quality health care. There are many things that the British Labour government are doing that make me uncomfortable; the ridiculous anti-terror laws and the over-surveillance of our cities for example. I think we are being over-governed to some extent, but I don’t see our National Health Service as being part of this over-governance, it has become too well entrenched in British society for that.

A democratically elected government is there to serve not rule, and the NHS is owned by the public and governed by the people we elect. They are an authority that we elect to do to that job; they are not an authority over us. I certainly don’t feel as though my well-being is being controlled by the government, because I have a choice of public health care or private health care. Surely what Obama is offering is simply choice, and a chance for 50 million Americans to get the health care they need.

You can listen to ‘Ronald Reagan speaks out against SOCIALIZED MEDICINE’ on Youtube

Photography is under attack. Across the country it that seems anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer.

Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording.

This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not only photographers.

We must work together now to stop this before photography becomes a part of history rather than a way of recording it.

I’m a Photographer, not a Terrorist

The bloggers were a major force for political change in the United States, and in the run up to the US election, the presidential candidates were listening to them. They helped shape public opinion, an army of geeks facilitated a faultless online campaign and now Obama is revolutionising how the web is used to communicate to the American people.

Why do we seem so far away from such a grassroots effort in the UK? After all, it is something we need as the recession bites and our civil liberties are being eroded by a government bent on control though the pretence of protecting us, secure beneath watchful eyes.

It seems to me that UK blogs, ones which might affect change and have UK politicians listening, have and continue to be marginalised – not necessarily intentionally – by our large public service broadcasting and news organisation, the BBC.

The BBC’s significance to UK web users is huge; much like it fostered the UK home computing revolution in the eighties, it has been playing a key role in internet literacy since the mid nineties. Because of this, I believe that web surfing habits in the UK are kind of gravitationally bound to it.

Take, for example, the surge in the number of Twitter users in recent months after cross-media patronage by the BBC. No doubt it did the same for the blogging phenomenon towards the start of the decade, but it’s always Auntie Beeb that’s ruffling the hair of these new and potentially powerful online communication tools. The BBC’s approach seems to be a) how can we integrate this popular technology into the services provide, but b) make sure it doesn’t impact on our status as a major service provider so that we can continue to justify the licence fee.

Particularly at the start of the decade, much of the British media treated bloggers as self-serving loons who had nothing to say except for uninformed gossip and dull introspections on on their lives (much like what the Daily Mail says about Twitterers these days).

Of course, it irks professional journalists to see amateurs publishing opinion pieces without rigorous fact checking and sub-editing in place. In America, on the other hand, where quality journalism is spread very thinly or not at all and where there is no public service broadcaster people call Auntie, bloggers are seen both as a valuable source of the truth and as a powerful force for political change.

As a nation, we need this respect for the independent voice. After all, it’s the people that affect  change in a democracy, and we now have the technology for everyone’s voice to be heard.

With a controlling government, one which actively seeks to conceal information that is in the public interest, and one which threatens to take away our civil liberties (just listen to any interview with Jacqui Smith), we need a change.

So, let’s make our voices heard, preferably not just using proprietary and rather unstable platforms like Twitter.

Today, the Ministry of Defence published classified documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK between 1986 and 1992.

Those expecting high resolution photographs and detailed schematics of super-advanced alien tech may be disappointed to find thousands of poorly typed letters describing UFO sightings amounting to a stunningly feeble collection of evidence for extraterrestrial visitors.

There are also letters to the Prime Minister from distinguished organisations such as The Irish UFO Research Centre demanding that the UK Government release all the information they have on the program of ‘genetic cross breading[sic]… with potentially hostile “Greys”‘.

The files can be downloaded as PDF documents from the National Archive website.

What is it about politicians that makes them start talking more sense after they have left office? It happened to Robin Cook when he resigned from the Cabinet in protest to the UK’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Al Gore only seemed to become a much more powerful political figure, especially with respect to our attitude towards climate change, after he left office. Even Michael Portillo has managed to redeem himself slightly in the public eye after his fall from grace eleven years ago. And of course, everyone loves Tony Benn.

Yesterday, the man who played a key role in garnering international support for the ‘War on Terror’, powerfully enunciated what every right-thinking, educated person knows, that Barack Obama is the right person to be the US President.

Colin Powell resigned as US Secretary of State in 2004 after acknowledging that the sources who provided the evidence for WMDs – that was used to justify the deposition of Saddam Hussein – were wrong about their conclusions.

He was always seen as a moderate figure in the US administration, and was more popular with Americans than Rumsfeld or Cheney. However, I’m wondering how the same person who yesterday spoke so clearly and sensibly about his reasons for supporting Obama and not McCain could not speak out against the Bush/Cheney led invasion of Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in the US.

The adage ‘power tends to corrupt…’ may be true, but unless you reach ‘absolute power’, it seems the process is reversible.