legal and moral obligations

I'm no fan of our former Minister for Justice (given that I felt he was far too right-wing), but I can't help but feel that he's been somewhat misrepresented by the Irish Times in this article which claims he's in favour of a legal obligation to report crimes. If that was indeed what he said, it wouldn't surprise me, and it's the tricky sort of thing I haven't liked him for in the past, where on the face of it it looks harmless enough, but digging deeper it's veering off into over-policing. However, reading further down the article it appears that he's actually referring to someone who is already being questioned with respect to a serious crime, i.e. a witness or a suspect, which puts a slightly different tilt on his argument - I'm still not wholly comfortable with it, but it's hardly a KGB-style "kids! tell us your parents are capitalist running dogs!" as implied by the opening paragraph.

in re: the previous post

I picked up the link to the previous post from Google News' Irish News filter, but it's getting harder and harder to read it because it's flooded with links to Irish tabloids whose idea of news is not so much "all the news that's fit to print" as "whatever voyeurism will get us a lurid front-page headline". It'd be nice to see a more intellectual counterpoint to the Irish Times, which has its own biases, but unfortunately it seems that the only Irish papers running an opposing point of view are doing so from the gutter.

and now for something completely different

One of the tracks on heavy rotation down at the gym is "Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy". There's a bunch of clips of this on Youtube, so you can go dig it out yourself if you don't know it, but damn it there's a catchy banjo line in it. Evidently I have some sort of Country Music hook in my head that I wasn't previously aware of. Listening to the track right now, it sounds pretty much like Country Rock, but I've a vague notion that the version at the gym has a more dance-music feel to it (probably just amped-up bass). Certainly makes me wonder what a Country/Techno crossover would sound like...

till receipt FAIL

(double FAIL if you count the misplaced apostrophe, but they've been doing that for months)