City leaders today warned against introducing a local income tax in the Capital after branding it unworkable.

Because it's so very simple and easy to administer and requires almost no effort on the part of the council [as it will invariably be collected by the Inland Revenue], not to mention much more efficient [remember Edinburgh's just sent out nastygrams to a third of households who haven't paid last year's council tax yet...] the Council is against it.

Once again, the flat earthers win.

SpoilYourVote.co.uk - a vote for none of the above

A way to tell everyone that you're not apathetic, but unconvinced by the available choices. [via Johnnie Moore]

McDonalds is planning to close all of its city centre branches during this summer’s G8 protests

It's hard to say what will happen then the G8 meeting happens, but it certainly seems that Edinburgh fears the worst... Hard to say if all the protest [etc.] stories are true or just media speculation, but they're increasingly unsettling.

My impression is that much of the population has come to feel that ideas themselves are elitist.

With 11 days to go until the deadline to apply for a postal vote passes, a Guardian survey of more than 20 key marginal constituencies shows that postal voting is soaring in crucial seats with small majorities, with applications in some areas up more than 300% since the last election.

It is beginning to look like the integrity of the UK's voting system is about to come under sustained attack from the UK's main political parties. Given that the postal vote system is a recipe for abuse, this does not bode well for the accuracy/honesty of the upcoming election. Methinks that there may be a number of constituencies with rather unexpected results.

Edinburgh has lifestyle options that are very attractive to workers in London because it is not such a crowded city, property is cheaper and journey times are shorter.

Such pithy but completely wrong comments are of course the raison d'etre of Donald Anderson, Edinburgh's erstwhile Council Leader, who is guaranteed to be habitually wrong about just about everything.

While not as crowded as London, Edinburgh's not bloody empty, property is already immensely over-priced, the education system is pretty shocking, and journey times are much higher [you're not going as far in Edinburgh, but you're going slower]. I know, details, details.

The national literacy strategy, the foundation of the Government's education policies, is almost certainly flawed, fails one child in five and needs to be urgently reviewed, a Labour-dominated committee of MPs said yesterday.

I could be cynical but no, literacy is the key to most social policy, and literacy is a much bigger problem in the UK than many admit.

There is the grisly spectacle of the corpse of an old man dressed and displayed to be venerated... Then there is the approaching marriage of a lugubrious middle-aged man and his mistress, a pleasant-looking if rather posh lady. Both have been married before, have grown-up children, seem to dislike publicity and have nothing special to say. Yet this humdrum event is being elevated into a moment of national significance, requiring TV crews, solemn-looking presenters and castellated backdrops. It is even delaying the Grand National

This is a reasonable, secular, undeferential, inherently democratic country... We have our ups and downs, but this is still a relatively friendly and comfortable place to live.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, old Adam comes stalking back, and we are expected to fall into line ... an ancient Britain of bloodlines, the throne of St Peter and the bellowing of Westminster man. Underneath the diverse day-to-day world, the old skeleton of power and belief is still there. A death, a marriage and a vote only need to combine, like planets, to bring it to life.

Mark Lawson: Our prime ministers should be given an expiry date of eight years

stops on length of office better suit a presidential than a parliamentary system. While many countries with the latter system do have a constitutional definition of enough, term limits under such arrangements can increase the risk of coalition governments and prime ministers being chosen by MPs rather than the electorate - unless, as in the US, a separation between party and national leadership can be achieved.

And while term limits for leaders may be problematic (the second half of the second term inevitably becomes a waiting-room phase), an increasingly powerful moral and pragmatic argument for them exists.

There are days when the punditocracy makes you despair. Prime Ministers aren't chosen by the electorate - the electorate has bugger all to do with it. Prime Ministers are chosen by political parties, who sometimes even let their members have a say, albeit for completely different reasons - Labour needs to ask their members to try and counteract the votes of the various Unions in their bizarre electoral system[1], while the Tories don't want to ask their members in case they unearth another Ian Duncan Smith.

You can only have term-limits in a parliamentary system if you divorce the election of the Prime Minister from the parliamentary party system, i.e. implement some process where the Prime Minister is directly elected through a State-sanctioned system rather than appointed by a political party.

[1] Yes, I know there are historical reasons for doing things the way they do. This doesn't make it any less bizarre.

With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome. Even this august organ [i.e. The Guardian], which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing.

The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost.

There has been no spectacle in the history of televised sport as compelling and atrocious as the night of 29 May 1985, when 39 Italians were killed on the terraces of the Heysel stadium, Brussels, in the murderous prelude to a European Cup final.

Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.

His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting 'pseudo-events'.

Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment.

You will notice, for example, how the fear of playing God operates exclusively on one side of the medical playground. Thus to help a patient end his or her life ‘prematurely’ is playing God, while extending it... is the mandate of ‘our Judeo-Christian heritage’ and the Hippocratic oath.

Scientific American's oh so slightly sarcastic April Fool's editorial. Unfortunately, this isn't a joke.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it... As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Historic Scotland has cancelled all six of this summer's outdoor concerts at Edinburgh Castle. Apparently tourists can't tell the difference between the Castle, the staging for the Tattoo, and tour buses. Or they get confused. Or the castle really is just there for tourists, not for people who live here. Some weak-ass excuse like that.

The only reason this happened is because the University of Edinburgh owns George Square... if they didn't, the poor wee lambs would have been told to get stuffed. Probably. Bah humbug.

For those who don't know, Bill James is the father of scientific analysis in baseball - he was the first to argue that you could use statistics [well, numbers really, not a lot of baseball analysis is really statistical...] to better understand the game and what was actually going on. This approach of course was made famous to many via Michael Lewis' Moneyball. But the point James is making is that our attempts at understanding this are always, no matter how sophisticated they are, somewhat simplistic, by definition simplified, invariably abstracted. This is the point Virginia Postrel is working around in her latest NYT column that I mentioned yesterday.

Oh where have you gone John Gummer, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

This is just so stupid to be unbelievable, although given this government nothing really does surprise me. Out of town shopping centres kill existing retail developments, and make it harder for the poor and the less mobile to buy cheap food.

And one does wonder what on earth this has got to do with the Treasury... is the Treasury really the guiding hand behind all government policy, or just a convenient scapegoat?

Despite this minor wee problem, the OFT seems to have decided that retailers were treating their suppliers fairly... rather than continuing their investigation 'till they've actually figured out what is going on in the supermarket business...

Virginia Postrel: How Changing the Sheets Can Make a Hotel Room 'New'

A good analysis of how many of the basic statistics we take for granted are built on a series of compromises and value judgements which disappear from view by the time we get "results".