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• Wednesday 3 February 2010

• As the Iraq inquiry and 'glaciergate' show, the truth is slippery

  This may be an eccentric view, but I am increasingly fascinated by the parallels I detect between two controversies currently dominating the news pages of the Guardian: Sir John Chilcot's Iraq war inquiry and "Glaciergate".

  In the one case you have Tony Blair, George Bush and others accused of rigging the intelligence on WMD to justify a costly invasion of Iraq that has resulted in many deaths, injuries and damage – and cost a great deal of money that could have been put to better purposes.

  Their case has been dissected and will be found wanting by the inquiry's eventual verdict, though not sufficiently to justify the bloodlust of their principal detractors – whose own case is full of holes too. I have yet to read a wholly persuasive article on the subject, including my own.
  Continue reading...

  Posted by Michael White 11.45 GMT

• Friday 29 January 2010

• Blair, Wakefield, climate change – beware of scapegoats

  There seems to be a lot of zeal in the atmosphere this week. Not just over Tony Blair's appearance before the Chilcot inquiry today, but Scott Roeder, that righteous born-again Christian doctor-killer in Kansas and, of course, the case of Dr Andrew Wakefield, the MMR rese Continue reading...

  Posted by Michael White 11.10 GMT

• Thursday 20 August 2009

• How much does association with Taleb damage Cameron?

  Have you been following the mini-row over David Cameron's appearance this week with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the prodigiously clever author of The Black Swan – his theory of the importance of rare, "low-probability, high-impact events" such as 9/11 or the Lehman Brothers crash?

  As well as taking place rather early in the morning for the hacks, and being little publicised too, the session with Cameron didn't fit easily into the template of mainstream media "news", though it has featured in the blogosphere. But Nicholas Watt managed to get an account into today's Guardian under the headline "Cameron's guru says rich should not pay more tax to help the poor".

  Though an accurate representation of what this ex-Wall Street derivatives trader turned academic – he is a professor of risk engineering, no less – seems to have said, it is certain to annoy him. Yesterday Taleb complained vocally about British press distortion of his comments – "incompetent journalism in its most insidious form" – though Jim Pickard of the FT robustly defends his own reporting on his blog.

  I wasn't present. But Pickard and others who were – including Watt – insist he did say "I like crashes" in the economic sense and did tentatively question the notion that climate change is caused by man-made activity.
  Continue reading...

  Posted by Michael White 11.19 BST

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