“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Intervention by armed civilians on the spot aborts hundreds of crimes a year in the United States, and thousands more could be prevented if there were more of us. Carrying is not just a survival tactic for me; it’s a service, a net benefit to my neighbors and my nation and my civilization, and I feel good about that.

Surely, I thought, policy decisions must be guided by facts. Not so. Instead, I was castigated for “bringing numbers and percentages into the debate”!

This, in the context of a debate in the Senate of his old university, on which he sits as an elected member. But then, he went on to write:

Stephen Colbert famously invented the word “truthiness” to refer to the “truths” which a person claims to know “from the gut” without regard to evidence or logic. He applied it to George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in spite of the total absence of evidence linking Iraq to Al Quaeda or the 9/11 attacks; and we all pointed and laughed.

It’s bad enough when the President of the United States of America, armed with thousands of nuclear weapons, makes decisions without regard to facts. When truthiness enters the debates of the senior academic governing body of a university, I fear for our society.

This is a perfect example of “truthiness”. It is a received wisdom, bearing no relationship whatsoever to reality. The irony makes it worth posting about it, but what compounds this irony and turned it into hypocrisy was Percival’s deletion of my comment that pointed out, politely, that by 2003 we had been at war with Iraq for 12 years, authorised by UN Security Council resolutions, that skirmishes and hostile fire were almost daily events in the no-fly zones, that Saddam had made and used WMDs before and was pretending to be hiding a WMD programme from the UN Inspectors.That had something to do with the invasion.

But it mustn’t be mentioned in a blog post titled In Defence of Truth, for Christ’s sake.

Cedric the Tasmanian Devil has died. Or perhaps I should say, Cedric has been killed. He was deliberately introduced to Devil Facial Tumour Disease, an aggressively infectious, fatal cancer that is threatening to make the Devils go the way of the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, which probably became extinct in the 1930s (some sightings are still occasionally reported but none has been substantiated). Cedric showed some early signs of resistance to the disease, but succumbed at the age of 6, euthanised when it became clear the cancer had spread internally. The search for a vaccine, or even a clue to how resistance might be cultivated in the species, continues.

Marsupial species are very fragile, competing poorly with mammals in their various niches. Human movement has made island sanctuaries like Tasmania far less safe for these remnants of a branch of life that once populated Australia and South America with giants. I’m not whinging about that, it’s a fact of life, but humans can do something to help. The research that took Cedric’s life might just save his species.

As the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void.

By October 2011, the State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police, a task that will largely be carried out by contractors. With no American soldiers to defuse sectarian tensions in northern Iraq, it will be up to American diplomats in two new $100 million outposts to head off potential confrontations between the Iraqi Army and Kurdish pesh merga forces.

To protect the civilians in a country that is still home to insurgents with Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000, according to administration officials who disclosed new details of the plan. Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said.

Dead and injured security contractors rarely make the news in the way dead and injured soldiers do. Obama is privatising the Iraqi mission for one reason only: to enhance his personal political standing. This is part of a pattern. For example, Bush was heavily criticised for not doing enough when Hurricane Katrina hit, so Obama cheerfully drove BP to the brink of bankruptcy in order to ensure he wasn’t similarly criticised.

They wanted a machine pol from Chicago, and that’s what they got.

I am a proud son of a proud Afghan nation, and nothing and no one has made me and my fellow Afghans more proud than the extraordinary exploits of this superhuman group of lads. They are not just a credit to their families, their nation but also to sportsmen, sport enthusiasts and fans all around the world. They play the game in the right spirit, and with an inimitable passion rarely seen in professional cricket teams. Having already qualified for the world T20 they could have taken their collective foot off the pedal against Ireland in the final and qualified for the easier group comprising of England and the West Indies. But they stretched every sinew and flexed every muscle in that final to win the tournament ,just as well because having lived in England for over 15 years my loyalty would have been divided (nah!!!). If anyone bemoans the persence of the British troops in Afghanistan, then all I can say to them is that, the sacrifice of one group of brave men has facilitated the possibility of another intrepid group of guys to take to the oval field and vindicate efforts of the British boys in Afghanistan. Long may the fairytale continue.

I can’t remember where I saw this, so can’t link back.