Alri’ boyez and gurrels… The new Monday Digest as promised.
HOE’UM
Gerard O’Neill on the economic impact of declining marraige rates.
John Naughton; Twitterphobia and the mainstream media.
Read this by the inspiring Mark Pollock; undressed and smiling again.
Top journalist spun by continuous repeatition of government claim. Karl Whelan gets the nuance.
Mark Davenport of BBC NI on a political session of competing insults.
Ken Foxe on a trip Noel Dempsey took to London on the government jet…
When I sought details of what Mr Dempsey was doing in London under the so-called Freedom of Information Act, all references to the meeting were deleted from the records.
Access to them was refused under a variety of different grounds of the FOI Act, chiefly relating to ongoing government deliberations and the argument that it might indicate a government position.
The Department of Transport – which in my personal experience has a particularly severe approach to Freedom of Information – thus censored the documents in the “public interest”.
[…] He arrived at the Embassy from the Kensington Hotel, had a 90-minute meeting, was collected and headed back to Dublin on the government jet.
The Minister was accompanied by his Private Secretary Veronica Scanlan, who is the decision maker on this Freedom of Information request.
It is nice to know that Ministers can now use the government jet, run up a bill of €23,000 in the process, and then simply refuse to give an explanation of what they were doing.
This, at least in my experience, is an unprecedented situation
Documents are there too.
P O’Neill; You can’t lock up and entire bank, can you?
WURRELD
Al Jazeera cameraman explains how to do a [stunning quality] live link in low-light with a fairly basic DSLR camera and some clever rigging. The future is now, broadcasters, da’fuhcher is nah’.
Restrepo is currently showing in the Irish Film Institute in Templebar. Well worth a trip into town. Lots of additional footage from interviews on that website too. Below Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne talks about going to war and losing a friend. So many of the soldiers involved have Irish surnames.
Revered economics commentator, John Cassidy, in the New Yorker: Why buy Liverpool FC?
Zimbabwe Review: So many dead political heroes, so few living ones. On the cheapening of the term hero by Zanu-PF.
Outside the box: Scott Adams on taxing the rich…
Society has accepted the notion that the rich can be taxed at a different rate than other people. I think we should consider the idea that the rich should be taxed in a different fashion than everyone else too, as a purely practical matter
Lastly; The Tea Party’s Cold War roots.
UDDER
The Beat of New York by Tim Hahne. Jakers, I love the look you can get with a low aperture lense on a HDDSLR.