Month: February 2009

Two posts from one of my favourite blogs, John Naughton's Memex 1.1:

• What if Harry Markopolos had had a blog
  Fascinating discussion on Harry Markopolos, an investor who in May 1999 submitted the results of his personal investigations into Bernard Madoff to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Markopolos identified that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme and pointed out many of the 'red flags' only now emerging in the media — we was spot on a decade ago. Naughton explores whether Madoff would have been outed earlier if Markopolos had blogged his findings, and concludes that he probably would have been shut down by expensive lawyers before any damage to the Madoff empire could be done. Maybe, but Markopolos could have caused a fuss as they took him down which might have leaked out.

• Steve Ballmer's speech to Democrats
  Like John Naughton I'm not a big Microsoft fan either but the text of MS CEO Steve Ballmer's speech is definitely worth a read. Some very interesting threads there especially on Microsoft's dedicated avoidance of debt. Amen to that.

In the rush of all the council meetings of the past few weeks I haven’t had the chance to blog about the activity I’ve been doing regarding the terrible conflict in the Middle East.

On Sunday 18th January I spoke at a very well attended Arab/Israeli peace walk through the middle of Brighton. Thankfully I spoke first as some of the speakers, particularly Paul from Jews for Justice, were very good! I hoped to have a video of some of the speeches but my camera let me down, still I found a bit of video of the walk on YouTube here.

Then after the BBC and Sky News outrageously decided against showing the DEC Gaza humanitarian appeal I took part in and spoke at a small vigil outside the BBC’s Brighton offices. Part of my speech was captured by a bystander and has shown up on YouTube, see below. The picture above was one of the banners created by the very hardworking activists who got the whole vigil setup including finding 300 candles to represent all the children who lost their lives in the conflict.

The bone-headed nature of the BBC’s justification for refusing to show the appeal just infuriates me beyond belief. They have done their reputation far more damage by their refusal than showing it ever could have possibly done. When innocent people are starving this is about getting them food and medicine — because we can — regardless of who started it and who did what when. We have a moral duty to help one other in times of need.

More pictures and a report on the BBC vigil on Al Jazeera (in arabic)