If you run a broadcasting organisation, you hire a journalist who discovers that the government is misleading the public in order to justify a foreign war (but who makes his report in a slightly exaggerated fashion, even though that has no impact on the substance of the accusations), and you back him up in the early stages of the subsequent investigation, then that is a resigning matter.

If you are the producer of a kids’ TV show, your external phone lines go down during a phone-in, and you put a child from the studio audience on the line instead of abandoning the item (or if you decide the audience has picked a silly name for a cat, and go with their second choice), then that is a resigning matter.

If you run a TV channel, you hire an independent producer to make a documentary about an elderly woman, and the independent producer cuts some PR footage of the elderly woman visiting a photographer in a way that implies she was more angry with the photographer than she actually was, then that is a resigning matter.

However, if you merely spread outrageous, scaremongering lies, in order to turn something which is entirely and unequivocally safe into an issue of serious concern and worry for gullible parents everywhere while promoting a pig-ignorant anti-science and anti-scientist agenda, then that is an ‘improved training” matter.

Quite right too. We should save resignations for the things that are really important…

If you name a teddy bear Mohammed in Sudan, you face barbaric and draconian punishment. But if you avoid going to Sudan in the first place, which is a good idea, then you are at no risk of such lunacy.

America is different. Its laws are just as mad (under a system where your sentence is discounted by 90% for a guilty plea compared to a conviction, a fair trial is simply impossible), but you can’t escape them by not going there.

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A long time ago on a blog far away, I posted a graph showing the oil price in euros. The resulting trace looked rather different from the conventional US$ measure.

With that blog dead, several years passed, and another round of ‘oooh, isn’t oil expensive’ fussing currently taking place, I thought it might be a good idea to update and repost…

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…and you live in London, then you should be aware that the Metropolitan Police Authority is meeting this Thursday, November 22, to decide whether or not to sack Ian Blair.

While some MPA members are strongly Labourite, others are not – and they’re the crucial ‘swing voters’ who’ll decide whether the Commander stays or goes. So – politely and gently – they need a little bit of lobbying to ensure their vote goes the right way.

Alex has more details.

Rachel North is right, as usual

The Nadine Dorries feedback facility

Craig Murray is the UK’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan. He’s an excellent exposer of evilness in ex-Soviet extremities, and was one of the main figures behind the campaign to stop Alisher Usmanov gaining control of Arsenal. In short, he’s a good man.

However, he’s not a man who should really be writing about financial statements. At the moment, he has a piece on his website that not only misunderstands the nature of auditing and falls for myths from my favourite accountant, Dr Prem Sikka, but is probably libellous to boot…

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The War Against Terror has reached a new high-point:

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court. The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. It is alleged he had a copy of the “Anarchists’ Cookbook”, containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

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Dan Davies’ Freakonomics review: at last

I like to think that, despite living a champagne-and-caviar lifestyle, spending my time with models and rock stars, and living in a luxury penthouse [*], I’m still in touch with my left-wing roots.

As a result, I’m always slightly reluctant to denounce trade unions and strikers: had they not existed in the past, there’s a reasonable chance we’d still be in some kind of neo-Victorian exploitationist hell [**]; there are still plenty of employers playing the kind of dirty tricks that unions would be wholly justified in fighting against; and without the ultimate mutually-assured-destruction logic of striking (‘unless resolved, this strike will destroy your business and our jobs’), unions might as well not exist in the first place.

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