I just want to publicly thank Brian of London for the marvelous work he did in eliminating the hiss from my parts of the recording.  Kudos, sir!

It's about time you lazy bast...poor, over-worked souls got a new podcast up.  I was getting worried.  Well done all around and let's see if we can get the schedule sorted out.

I'm not Jewish Doug.

And actually, I'm not "Jewish Doug" either.  >chuckle<

You are now JD.

Dear Jewish Doug,

You are in for an enlightening experience.  Now that you are (unofficially until the...well, you know) a Jew, you have a whole new world of philosophy, literature, humor, recipes and contacts at your disposal.  I envy you.

As a Catholic of Polish background I have had a great deal of interaction with your new ethnicity and, I promise you, you will be well fed and have no shortage of intelligent conversation.

 My best to you in your new life.

 U. S. Beast

Excellent podcast Doug.

 With regard to the 'English' (North Americans and Canadians note: the UK/Great Britain has not yet been rent asunder by Welsh and Scottish nationalism, so we still, generally, refer to ourselves as British) civil servant who left the Secret documents on a train: There are a couple of theories doing the rounds here in the UK as to why this happened -

 i) It was a deliberate 'plant' to get information out into the public domain (through the MMS) to support the governments plans to increase the time that terrorist suspects can be held by the police without being charged with a crime. Currently this is 28 days maximum but the UK parliament voted (by a narrow margin) last week to extend this to 42 days. The reason for this is that the police in general  need time to interrogate and investigate leads, clues, forensic evidence, etc, etc. and they, and others, do not think that 28 days is enough. There are some senior police officers (PC, in this case, does NOT stand for Police Constable!) and other spineless appeasers who worry about the 'suspects' 'Human Rights'....***???!!!! ...what about the human rights of the terrorists victims.....don't get me started!.

 ii) It was caused by the drop in standards of the UK senior civil service. There is some comment in the MMS about poor standards of personal security, lack of responsibility, etc. caused by multiculturalist bullshit which permeats our civil service and PC 'dumbing down' of entrance exams for obs in government departments and agencies. In times past,  our senior civil servants had experiences of the first and second world wars and therefore had an intense sense of duty and a patriotic view of their role as servants of the elected government of one of the best democracies on the planet. Many of the senior people were also ex miltary so knew how to handle such sensitive information. aNowadays, the standards are much lower and it is everyone for themselves and damn patriotism, freedom and democracy and all that 'old hat', what does it matter? Modern universities in the UK (the usual recruiting ground for the high flyers in our Civil Service) are hotbeds of PC crap, junk courses and pseudo degrees.

iii) it was, as Doug suggested, a 'cock-up' and was simply some dumb-arse (ass) who shouldn't have taken that file out of the room it was kept in let alone home on the train.

 I cannot be sure which is true but, given the low regard in which the labour government is currently held by the UK populace, I am erring on the side of the deliberate drop theory.

 Anyhow, that's my view on this one. Maybe other listeners can provide a different angle or corroborate or dismantle this further.

Great show all, please keep up the excellent work, you are amongst the lone voices of reason in a jungle of MMS bullshit. You have provided me with a rapid educatin in the dangers we face from Islam and the crazy lefties (yes, I am another ex-leftie who has fallen for the pleasures of the dark forces....fun isn't it!)

Regards

Roland

Thanks for your comment, Roland.

So he was a British, not English, civil servant with an English, not British, accent from the United Kingdom, not Britian or England.  Or something like that.

Is this a metric system thing?

Hi Doug,

I was wondering what kind of set up you are using to record your segments. Compared to the other hosts the audio quality is significantly different - almost like someone jacked up the treble band (especially around 4khz). I find this somewhat grating (I love the content though). I'd prefer it if the entire Shire network news podcast was recorded in such a way that all the segments were recorded in such a way that they sounded similar to each other (sonically speaking).

Kolya, indeed the sound quality of my recordings is something we're working on rectifying.  I typically try to run a bass boost on whatever I record, but that didn't work our so well this time, and instead we got tinny AM-radio.  Trust me, I am painfully aware of this, but the hosting job really brought it to the fore.

Hi Doug,

One thing you could do would be to describe your setup on the blog. I am sure there are folks with professional audio experience that could provide advice, help etc.

Doug,

you know we English/British like to confuse things. I think we try and get away with it by describing ourselves as 'eccentric'. Anyway, we've had several hundred years to get very confused about our identities and now the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists (and now English, too..yeah, it gets even more confusing, some English nationalists want to have their own parliament to debate matters that only affect England) are trying to bust it all up. Arguments within families are always the worst I guess. We sure don't need them given that we have plenty of the followers of Mohamed who want to pick a fight with all of us unbelievers for our bad and wicked ways!

Kolya, you'll be glad to know that The Powers That Be have rectified the situation.  My next segment will be sooo much better.

Personally, I believe the train/intelligence incident to be a cock-up. Also, I look on British and English as much the same thing, just with the Scots, Welsh and Irish included (speaking as someone whose ancestry includes Scots, Irish, English and French...)

On a seperate note, has anyone noticed the BBC smirking about Zimbabwae? There is a furious discussion (sic) at Harry's Place about the covert racism being displayed by John Simpson. I repeat that which I wrote over there: Let's hire mercenaries, give them weapons and pay (say) Mozambique to host them. Then we say "kill everyone of Mugabe's thugs and restore a democracy there".
Do you think I'm being naive?

You guys... You're a week overdue! Damn it! Where's the next installment of SNN? Or is Doug still mailing the studio back to New York and Brisbane (I presume)?

We're trying to get back on releasing at the beginning of the week (Sunday night/Monday morning).  The release of my show on Thursday meant we either would have a really short lead time for the next show or a really long one.  We opted for the latter, since FedEx couldn't guarantee delivery of the studio in time.

The equipment has been received, a new show has been recorded and should be up very soon. So calm down like (say it in a Mancunian accent if you know how).

We're back....

Brian

Glad to hear you guys are back! We here (in the UK) ae getting quite addicted to this wee conservative podcast (speaking as a Labour Party member).
Oh, yes. FedEx are great!