Wings Over Scotland

We had no idea it was so hard to give money away, to be honest. Indiegogo delivered the final tranche of donations from our recent anti-poverty fundraiser last night, and we’ve now sent it all on to good causes.

We said previously that we didn’t want to spread it too thinly, because while the sum was 30 times what we set out to raise it’ll barely make the tiniest of scratches on the surface of poverty in Scotland, so we’ve split it between half-a-dozen organisations. For the record, this post lists where it went.

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Today, readers, we’re slowly building our way up to an aneurysm trying to give away a fairly sizeable sum of money to foodbanks and other charities, who appear to have collectively decided that that should be an experience only slightly less challenging than the Krypton Factor assault course. (Ask your parents.)

While our nervous breakdown continues apace, we thought we’d draw your attention to this story in the Independent about how the new Conservative government has been avoiding putting any senior ministers up for questioning by the media.

It’s a tactic you may recall from the “Better Together” campaign, and we thought you might like to read this piece (and more here) by a videogame-journalism friend of ours which explains what’s going on when it happens.

We’ll hopefully be back with you soon.

As we write, Alistair Carmichael’s QC is two hours into a seemingly-interminable drone in an Edinburgh courtroom, in a case brought by ordinary citizens against a former government minister funded by a public appeal. Our own recent fundraiser, inspired by a case a world away from such high-minded concerns, closed a few days ago on a phenomenal total of £16,083.

Indiegogo have now disbursed the first half of the money (the rest, specifically that part that was donated by credit card, should follow in the next fortnight), so now we need to decide what to do with it.

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We can’t help feeling there’s a simpler way of putting that.

The papers these days are full of horrendous stories. For some reason this one just tripped a nerve, and we wanted to do something. Click here for details.

Alert contributor Calum Ferguson tells us the first bookie to come out with odds for the 2016 Holyrood election is Ladbrokes. Fortune-making opportunities seem limited.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

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For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the document at the heart of this insanity has been leaked, so you can now see it for yourself. We’ll have more on it later.

EDIT 12.55pm: File now deleted, mirror here.

So, an experiment. Here on Wings we don’t tend to deal very much in specific political issues, other than independence. We’re not aligned to any party, and our primary goal is to see Scotland become a national democracy in which all voices can be heard. We happen to be on the left of the political spectrum, but that’s neither here nor there while Scotland’s politics are at the mercy of the whims of voters elsewhere.

But just for a change of pace at the weekends, when there tends not to be much happening, we thought we might try having a space where broader ideas can be debated outwith the framework of the constitutional debate or party politics. If there’s something you’d like to talk about in front of a sizeable audience, drop us a line.

To give you an idea of what we mean, we’re going to start off by outlining a personal pet idea we’ve had for years, and which is an attempt to tackle one of Scotland’s most toxic problems – alcohol abuse. It’s a simple concept, it’s cheap to implement, it doesn’t punish the innocent and it seems like it’d work. See what you think.

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We’ve got nothing today, readers. We don’t want to turn into Wings Over Jim Murphy, but otherwise the Scottish political scene is a bit tumbleweedy. Tell us something interesting that we should be covering. Or just a fun fact, or a joke, or anything.

In the light of the absolute horror at Charlie Hebdo today, it’s either that or we’re going to start running cartoons of Mohammed on principle.

A traditional brainteaser to test your Alert Reader Quotient for 2014. All the answers can be found somewhere on Wings (though not always in the obvious places).

Using the Search facility is cheating.

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Merry Christmas, readers. Have a good one and we’ll see you soon.

In the absence of much news, this morning we’ve been having fun with this.

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