My first Daily View of the new decade so a pledge up front: none of these stories will be about the weather.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

Two posts from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Which top Tory has U-turned on Married Couple’s Allowance?
• Ewan Hoyle has a plan to reduce drug-related deaths and wants your help

2 Interesting Stories

Yes please, Richard

Writing his column in the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn suggests he’d like to sleep through the next five months. Sounds like an excellent suggestion – go for it, Richard.

Sadly, I’ve a hunch this offer is as realistic as Littlejohn’s re-writing of General Election history. As the great journalist writes:

Election campaigns used to last three weeks. This one seems to have been running for about two years and there are still another five months to go.

So when exactly was this mythical age without any pre-election jockeying? And if you’re so keen to get away from the politics, why do you keep on writing about it in your column?

Two Chinook angles

Whilst most of the media sides against the MOD over the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash, The Register takes a different stance.

The Daily Express says:

CAMPAIGNERS yesterday made fresh calls to clear the names of pilots blamed for the Chinook helicopter disaster 16 years ago after damning new evidence emerged.

And The Register counters:

Overall, considering the sequence of events, it seems a lot more likely that ZD576 flew out of cloud to find rising ground unavoidably close and crashed within 3 seconds. But it’s remotely possible that the [computer software] could have chosen to do something bad just at the exact moment the helicopter was about to fly into a hill, or in the immediately preceding seconds, so one could give Cook and Tapper the benefit of the doubt – not that they are being tried for any criminal offence.

In the end, though, helicopter flying is always dangerous, and low-level poor-visibility helicopter flying is very very dangerous no matter who you are, though sometimes necessary in the military. It’s no dishonour to a pilot, no stain on his reputation, to say he could have made a mistake under such conditions. It’s no slight on Cook and Tapper to say that it’s likelier they flew into a hill under those conditions than it is that the [computer software] chose that exact moment to play up.