I Write Like...

While mucking around with the internet yesterday, I stumbled on this little engine. It's called "I Write Like..." and it claims to be able to use a sample of your own work and, by the magic of modern electronics, analyse it and then say whether your style is similar to a famous author - or not, presumably: who you "write like" in other words.

Apparently, after extensive testing with different blog posts, I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Good grief!

I'd never really understood exactly what people meant when they described this blog as a horror story. I thought they were just being rude. But thanks to "I Write Like..." dot com, I now know it's because I write like the father of the grizzly modern horror genre. So there you go.

If you're a blogger or just curious about your general writing style, then give it a try. You might find you're (yet) another H.P. Lovecraft. Or possibly even worse.

Will Heaven On Freedland

I never thought I'd say this because I haven't really 'got' Will Heaven so far in my relatively short blogging journey (maybe I'm jealous of his relative youthfulness and palpable cleverness - I certainly apologise if those are the reasons!), but he's just posted a piece answering that desperate Freedland thing that caused a bit of a stir in the leftwing media today of such dazzling brilliance that I'm afraid I've caved-in to the temptation to cut and paste it here so that you don't have to venture into its natural habitat to read it:

Emails from my Lefty friends have been pinging into my inbox this afternoon.Their subject lines have all been similar: “What do you think about Jonathan Freedland’s article in the Guardian on life under the Tories?” Hardly surprising, since it has been trending on Twitter all day. But I thought I’d take a closer look at what’s really worrying the brilliant Left-wing columnist.

Freedland writes, à la Kinnock: “I warn you that a chance some have waited for all their adult lives will slip away, perhaps taking another generation to come around again: the chance to reform our rotten, broken electoral system.”

But do the voters really want Labour sharing power after 13 years in government? Surely not, judging by recent polls which suggest a Labour collapse worse than one overseen by Michael Foot in 1983. They’ve had enough. And if you won’t listen to the electorate, at least read Boris Johnson on the problems with PR:

With PR, you end up with two types of MP and two types of democratic mandate; you promote the rise of extremist and fringe parties, such as the BNP, which has exploited PR to capture a seat on the London Assembly; and you end up with a system that is not remotely proportional. As Clegg knows full well, the effect of PR is greatly to magnify the influence of the third or fourth or fifth party – at the expense of the first or second. Look at Germany, where the FDP was able to hold the balance of power, and retain the foreign ministry for decades, in spite of winning only 5 per cent of the vote. Look at Israel, and the disproportionate influence of the minority religious parties.

All these are grave defects, but there is one final and overwhelming reason why Britain should not and will not adopt PR – that it always tends to erode the sovereign right of the people to kick the b––––––s out. Look at Belgium or Italy and see the disaster of coalition governments, endlessly forced to appease their constituent parts, chronically unable to take the decisions necessary for the country.

Freedland knows this first-hand. The only time I have met him was on a trip to Israel during the last Israeli election, when he explained to me and other students – in crystal clear terms – why Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian Right-wing nut (and former nightclub bouncer), was about to be made the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs despite his extreme party, Yisrael Beiteinu, only receiving about 11 per cent of the popular vote. PR – and a weak coalition government – was to blame.

Freedland continues: “If Cameron wins, he will not only thwart any move to fairer voting, he will act fast to rig the system in his favour. Even neutrals agree that his plan to cut the number of MPs by 10% – presented as a mere cost-cutting measure – will be one of the grossest acts of gerrymandering in British political history.”

The above link – to an Independent story – was a curious one to include. The so-called “neutrals” are David Blunkett, some unnamed “Labour officials”, and – finally – there is some research from the University of Plymouth which concludes: “The geography of each party’s support base is much more important, so changes in the redistribution procedure are unlikely to have a substantial impact and remove the significant disadvantage currently suffered by the Conservative Party.” Right, so that supports Freedland’s argument, does it?

Thirdly, he calls for “reform of our absurd, unelected second chamber” which, he writes, “will be postponed indefinitely, enabling Cameron to pack the Lords with his mates and sugar daddies, including perhaps a few more of those businessmen who so obligingly sided with the Conservatives in condemning Labour’s plans for national insurance.”

Why not acknowledge the fact that the Conservatives have themselves pledged to reform the House of Lords? Here’s the key quote from their manifesto:

We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence.

Freedland laments the Tory plans for the economy, saying, “I warn you that the economy could slide back into despair… A sudden shut-off of the public spending tap could well send a frail recovery staggering back into recession: the dreaded double-dip. It’s happened elsewhere and could happen here.”

But, as I blogged earlier, the argument that swift debt reduction could endanger the British economy is wearing thin, as Greece’s debt crisis shows worrying signs of impacting Europe as a whole. As one influential financial journlist (who until 48 hours ago was planning to vote Lib Dem) put it to me: “There is only one way for the UK to avoid a Greek-style crisis, and that is to reduce the country’s deficit as quickly as possible. The Tories’ economic plans have been vindicated.” The Economist and the Financial Times – both of which have backed a Conservative government – seem to agree.

Freedland is suspicious of Cameron’s wicked, wicked plan to ringfence NHS spending and of the Tories proposed inheritance tax cut, which is unlikely to happen soon. He is also anxious that single mothers and widows will receive £3 a week less than married women, because the Conservatives believe that the tax system should promote the family.

And he is sceptical about fusty old Tory backbenchers, while failing to note that half of them are about to be elbowed aside by a new intake of younger, more progressive, Conservative MPs. He is worried by David Cameron’s friends in the EU – but I think Daniel Hannan has answered that claim effectively on his blog, pointing out that “the ECR is more respectable than either of the two big blocs, the EPP or the Socialists.”

Finally, Freedland wishes he had time “to make a positive case for Labour, echoing its promises on a living wage and a cap on predatory chargecard interest rates or its plans for green jobs.”

But the truth is that – after 13 years in power – there really is no positive case for Labour. Tomorrow, the electorate will show they know it.

Superb. And here here!

Clegg: Unpatriotic And Unfit For Office

Whatever Nick Clegg's chancer's instincts are telling him about whether he can go in for what, for him, would be the 'big win' of a ministerial role in either a Tory or (God forbid) a Labour government after this general election, all evidence thus far, in terms of his infantile campaign conduct and his hideously ignorant, arrogant attitude towards the country he thinks really desires his leadership in some form or another, points to the absolute certainty that this individual (just like the party that installed him as its leader) is totally unfit for any form of office.

Don't believe me? Nile Gardener, on his Telegraph blog, explains why:

Nick Clegg’s sickening disdain for both the military and intelligence communities was openly on display yet again earlier today in an interview on GMTV. In reply to a critique of his foreign and defence policy in The Times by three former senior national security officials, Clegg responded in typically condescending tones:

“I am not going to take lectures from a bunch of retired establishment figures about the security of this country.”

“Some of them actually made the biggest mistakes in the run-up to the Iraq War. I am not going to apologise for calling, for example, for a proper inquiry into the allegations that somehow the British security services made us complicit in torture.”

There is something breathtakingly arrogant about a party leader who feels he can sneer with impunity at highly distinguished figures that have served their country and dedicated much of their lives to keeping Britain safe, including a former chief of defence staff, Lord Guthrie, who fought as a squadron commander in the SAS. He can disagree with their views all he likes, but to mock them in derisive terms is highly insulting. At the same time Clegg seems obsessed with dredging up the spectre of the Iraq War, which has barely featured in this election despite his best efforts, and accusing Britain’s intelligence services of complicity in torture, which only serves the interests of Britain’s enemies.

As I wrote in my op-ed piece earlier today, Nick Clegg is the first major party leader to run for Prime Minister on an anti-British ticket. He is filled with a self-loathing for his nation and its institutions, which came across in spades in his response to The Times letter. I cannot think of a candidate for Prime Minister in recent memory who has accused his own country of involvement in torture. That is a damning indictment of both Nick Clegg’s leadership and his vision for the future of Britain.

Forget tactical voting. If you vote Lib Dem, maybe you'll get Lib Dem! That's strong enough reason on its own for any wavering voters tempted to turn to the Yellows to think again and do the right thing. If you want Brown out, you have to vote Cameron.

But if, for some peculiar reason, you honestly want five more years of Brown, then vote Brown - if you really have to. So be it - you are who you are and it's a free election.

But to vote for any years of the unutterable faker and Labour-lite cypher, Nick Clegg, is to betray your ideals and beliefs and to betray, if the evidence of Clegg's own spiteful, anti-democratic, anti-British words are anything to go by, your own country too. Who the hell does this idiot think he is?

So do not vote for a man like Clegg just because you still doubt David Cameron or because you've been told it's somehow a smart tactic. It isn't.

Whatever your political inclinations either way, you'd never forgive yourself if your actions resulted in any form of a Clegg-tainted government.

I wouldn't.

And I Quote...

Hunt: "...pushy little media tart"

Cool writer and all-round good egg, Toby Young, pulled no punches on his DT blog this afternoon in his description of Tristram Hunt. Hunt, as I understand it, is a nulab stooge pop-historian, Mandelson protege and BBC darling (no surprise there) who's just triggered a selection storm after being shoehorned into the Stoke on Trent Central safe Labour seat (are there any of those left?) in a risibly rigged run-off.

Someone called Gary Elsby, who is the local Labour party secretary apparently, is so angry, Toby Young reports, that he's now threatening to stand against Hunt as an independent. Marvellous.

Anyway, here's Young on Hunt:

I don’t think there’s anything exceptionally ghastly about Tristram Hunt. He’s clearly a pushy little media tart with an eye to the main chance, but that hardly makes him unusual within the modern Labour Party.

Ouch! But, you know, the truth often hurts, right?

Priceless.

Update:
The Spectator has an interesting scoop on the prospective anti-Hunt campaigner, Gary Elsby. He's a complete loony, and a very unpleasant one, too.

Curious bunch, these Labourists. Curious and corrupt.

Blogger Bugs

If you're wondering why all the piccies have disappeared from this blog, and, if you use blogger, possibly from your own, too, it's because of this:

Monday, March 29, 2010

Our image backend is experiencing problems which may affect the display and/or uploading of photos. We are working to resolve this and will update this post when we have more information.

More info can be found here in the Picasa Help Forum. Posted by at 09:49 PDT

I certainly can't upload any images, and none already posted is appearing on my blog. It's been like this for about two hours now. Annoying.

==Update==
Bloody annoying.

Mann vs Mannisms

Iain Dale (I 've been well impressed with his work lately) has highlighted this latest hilarious example of A-Labourist-Typically-Taking-Himself-Way-Too-Seriously. I've tried to join the blogospheric dots and apparently, as far as I can tell, Mr Dale has taken up the cause of a decent minor blogger who goes by the gently self-deprecating nom de plume of "Fat Councillor".

He himself has highlighted the plight of an even more minor blogger currently being threatened by the very minor Labour demon with libel action, if I get that right - it could be Fat Councillor himself who's getting the treatment. Matters not. Anyway, the future defendant (I think) in this deliciously paranoid action, distinctly lacking in class, calls himself, rather pithily, Mannisms, and whose wonderfully focused work is dedicated to scrutinising, among few other things, the various troughing activities of one John Mann, MP (Labour - prospective plaintive, soon to be out of a job). Mann is suing Mannisms for libel, as Fat Councillor highlights in a post I've copied verbatim below, for the post I've copied, again verbatim, even further below.

John Mann MP - Hypocritical Idiot, And General Gob Shite

Dear Readers

Every so often, your Fat Councillor needs a rest from Indy Alliance nepotism, assault cases, councillors getting the sack for failing to attend meetings, and provincial reporters calling black white. At times like these I cast around for a hypocritical national politician to laugh at. Tonight it is the turn of 'whiter than white' idiot and gob shite, John Mann MP.

Bandwagon jumping twat

Whilst sipping ice cold lager and watching the sun go down, your Fat Councillor came across www.mannisms.com. This site catalogues the trials of poor old Mann MP as he desperately tries to cling to his seat.

His latest wheeze would appear to be to use House of Commons headed paper to threaten to sue the author of the site for allegedly calling him a wanker, whilst at the same time, signing an early day motion calling for a change in Libel laws because "English libel law is stifling of free expression".

If that is not the sign of an idiotic, hypocritical wanker of a politician, I don't know what is.

So, Mr Mann, if you ever fancy chancing your arm in the Spanish libel courts, fill your boots.

According to Dale, Mann is "the most humourless MP I have ever come across". Well, yes. But even given that, what, I wondered, had caused him such a very deep sense of humour failure (or should that be skin failure, as in thickness of) that he's decided to go completely postal using taxpayers' money to try to nail a harmless minor blogger, even going so far as to try to get libel laws changed just to protect his own worthless reputation? Perhaps the answer lay not in Fat Councillor's funny hatchet job (I've read - and written - far worse, mind), I thought, (I'm really sharp, see), but the post to which Fat Councillor was referring, by Mannism:

In his recent letter to Retford residents (see previous post), John Mann’s loyalty to the Labour Party seems to have evaporated.

Click graphic to enlarge

I am asking you and your family and friends to support me in being re-elected as your MP because of my commitment to keep fighting hard for the people of Bassetlaw no matter who forms the next Government

Not a word about Labour Party national policies or a few words of encouragement for his boss. In fact, the only mention of Labour is in the letter’s address.

I’m sure Gordon Broon will be delighted to read this.

Every Mann for himself, eh?

Solidarity brothers!

Nope, can't see it myself. Just what, precisely, is libellous about this blogpost? Well, I really don't care. I want a piece of the Mann-baiting action so I've happily followed Fat Councillor's superb, spirited example and republished everything here, 'libellous' blogpost and all (it's definitely one of the two - possibly). Um. Anyway, I wait with very little anticipation to see what this self-important Labourist w*nker does next. Is he going to sue everyone? Oh, I do hope so. That would be marvellous.

As Iain Dale says, mainly about the jolly witty song Fat Councillor uploaded by way of a response to Mann's pathetic posturing (see below), though the comment resonates far more widely:

I doubt he will see the funny side of this, but it's another sign of how the internet allows the man in the street to fight back

Sometimes (occasionally) I really do love blogs - and blogging. It almost feels like democracy.

Blogging Commandments

This post, referred to by Dale, (mainly because it cites Dale), published on the excellent site "The Conservative Blog", almost wittily lays down guidelines for adequate political blogging. It frames these guidelines in terms of ten "commandments." Read them to believe them.

However, it missed one piece of vital advice - the Eleventh Commandment, if you will.

It's this: Never post on your own blog if you're absolutely shitfaced. And, let's face it, most of us happy amateur bloggers are generally off our faces when we put finger to keyboard (we wouldn't even bother reading the mainstream ones otherwise, obviously)

This is what happens if you do post when you're pissed:


Burp.

Two-Faced Telegraph Needs A New Ed

Just what the hell is wrong with the Daily Telegraph? Not satisfied with hiring easily the worst columnist in any newspaper in the form of Mary Drivell, taking a schizoid stance on the climate change scam (which itself smacks either of editorial opportunism or serious infighting - both bad signs), it has now gone into Tory-bashing overdrive. By hiring a sitting, partisan, left wing Labour MP in the form of the ghastly Martin Salter as a regular blogger, and by allowing green (in more ways than one), wet behind the ears lightweights like Will Heaven to attack Tory policies he doesn't even 'get' - and his fellow bloggers - whenever he feels like it (and he's not the only one), one can only conclude that some kind of major civil war has broken out in that newspaper's offices.

We all know that Will Lewis is a mate of Brown's and that Lewis's brother, Ivan (I think that's his name - don't really care, though), is Brown's accident-prone spokesman, but honestly, how much longer can this go on before people really do start voting with their feet. I gave up on it some years ago when they hired Lewis and then that venomous, sub-Toynbee Labour-groupie, Riddell. I suspect many others will feel they must follow suit before too long.

It's not just the Telegraph's political identity crisis that is frustrating readers, however. Once again today, we have evidence of its totally split personality on all things environmental, too, with its own bloggers regularly and flatly contradicting stories appearing in the same newspaper on the same day. Not sure I've ever seen anything quite like that before - and it is, at least to me, further evidence of that civil war I was talking about. On the one hand, you have a dutifully, totally uncritical article - (if not a tacitly supportive article) - about James Hansen's, one of the most discredited scientists in the world, implicated, as he is, in the Climategate scandal and a proven cooker of figures, latest lies about global warming, while on the other, with what has become slightly predictable haste, you have James Delingpole shooting down the article (and the man) in flames - again. The odd thing is, however, at no point does Delingpole mention the article in question which is something that I find extremely odd, if not quite disturbing.

The point is that while I accept that these examples taken in isolation do not amount to much, but taken together they reveal a worrying trend for that newspaper. It is completely at odds with itself and to say that it is drifting badly in terms of its journalistic cohesion and editorial coherence would be to put it very mildly. The fact is, it reads now like it's being put together every day by a bunch of warring factions, each desperately vying for the attention of its (falling) readership. None of this represents healthy signs for what was once a great, well-edited, confident, broad-church conservative, and usually Conservative, institution.

At the moment, the Telegraph comes across as being at the very least two-faced. Not even the Grauniad has that problem. Which just goes to show how very bad things have got at Buckingham Palace Road, at least to me. It really is time Will Lewis was fired and replaced with someone who isn't such an utterly divisive and horribly compromised figure. Someone sound, in other words (like the Telegraph used to be).

How about Matthew D'Ancona? I hear he's available - and he's a hundred times better than left wing Lewis will ever be.

Until the change comes, the crisis at the Daily Telegraph will only deepen. Sooner or later, something's gotta give.

Blogger Tebbit

Lord Tebbit's second blog post cheered me up no end after a long day. For one thing, he's an absolute natural, writing with relaxed cogency and richness and engaging his many commenters - fans or otherwise - with authoritative charm. His chief idea - that tax thresholds which harm the poor so much and destroy any nascent inclination for self-improvement must be raised radically and swiftly - is one that resonates powerfully, too.

His introduction to this second post was brilliant, I thought:

Well, well. What an introduction to blogging. At first I thought it was quite unlike anything else I’d done in my political life, but after a while I realised that it is really rather like an old-fashioned political public meeting of the kind that has melted away since television took politics away from the grass roots in the constituencies and concentrated it into the TV studios. It is a pity we can’t have real-time heckling (yet?) but blogging has got life and guts.

Talk about putting it in a nutshell. He's made a observation that no one else has, as far as I know - that people want to be involved in politics, not just when there happens to be an election about, but all the time. And they always have, but while the MSM (TV and the modern DTP) certainly took politics to the masses, in a sense, it also stripped people of their ability, incentive - and right - to engage directly with their political representatives and servants. New Media is correcting that error and "Norm" has just revealed to me why I blog (I didn't realise, see. I thought it was just because I was angry!).

After thanking commenters on his previous post, he then turns to his main argument:

Then thank you, “michealp”. I think you answered my question: What is it that has changed our society for the worse? In your words, it is “because actions no longer have consequences”. Well, they do perhaps, but they are often perverse. It seems to me that our masters these days are willing to use a carrot and stick approach, but they almost always use the stick on the poor old donkey’s nose and inflict a terrible indignity on the beast with the carrot at its other end.

People are not daft. They do respond to incentives. If you let a burglar go free and jail the householder who defends his home and family by thrashing the burglar, the message is loud and clear and well understood.

And I hate to say it, but only one party leader seems to have grasped that, if you construct a system where unskilled people are worse off by taking a job than by staying on welfare, they remain trapped in poverty – and that is Nick Clegg. Lord knows, Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith spelled it out in words and figures that only a simpleton could fail to understand, but the two main parties are unwilling to bite on the bullet and commit themseves to raising the income tax threshold from £6,475 to something like £10,000 or £12,000.

It is madness to claim that people so poor that they need welfare payments are at the same time sufficiently well-off to pay income tax. The effect is that people at the bottom of the stack living on benefits who try to get back into work are hit by 20 per cent tax, 11 per cent National Insurance and benefit losses that can add up to amost 100 pence in the pound. It is all very well for the better-off to complain about the disincentive effect of losing 50 per cent of every extra pound they earn, but what about the poor devil at the bottom of the stack who loses 90 per cent?

It neeed not cost that much. There would be a huge saving in benefits if we got those people back into work. We could redeploy all those people shuffling paper and money around the tax and benefit system to some useful work. And it would be easy enough to lower the 40 per cent threshold so that better-off people did not benefit from the increase in the basic rate threshold – so why don’t “the party of the workers” or “the party which believes in incentives” say they’ll do it? Why leave it to the Lib Dems, who are not going to have the power to do it?

It's a damn good question. I also note that he carefully (loyally) leaves deducing the obvious implications of it up to the reader: it's a pretty damning indictment of Conservative policymakers that this is not right at the very heart of the Tory manifesto, namely, a pledge to stop taxing people who are borderline impoverished, in UK terms, altogether. Another implication here is that he has dismissed Labour, New or Old, as a party capable of helping the poor, shout and jeer however much they like. They brand themselves the party of the poor, and then imprison them in a tax system designed to keep them down and reliant on the dishonest 'benevolence' of the Big State. Labour betrayed people just like Tebbit long ago. We should listen to him.

All in all, Lord Tebbit's blog seems to promise rich insight and entertainment for us commoners - and some serious and, perhaps, slightly unpalatable food for thought for David Cameron. (He should listen, too!)

Above all, however, the blog will (unintentionally) provide people from all over the political spectrum, but especially from the moderate-right end of it, with a daily reminder of just how formidable a politician Norman Tebbit is, and how much the Conservative party and the country still needs his tuned-in wisdom and his unwavering vision. On the strength of his writing so far, both of these signature Tebbit qualities appear to be undimmed by the years. How lucky we are.

The MSB

One thing that has struck me over the past few weeks is that an as-yet little recognised media phenomenon has been thrown into stark relief by the Climategate scandal, and it's not the MSM, of course. We always knew that they would follow on in the jet stream of this ever-growing story, pressured by the veritable torrent of people lending their support to the 'new realism' over so-called man made climate change (a sexist term in itself, if you want to be picky - ie: politically correct). The legacy media has once more been shown up for what it is: hopelessly old hat and out of touch with public opinion, preferring instead to peddle the alarmist lies, for the sake of ratings in ITV's case (you should have seen that channel's coverage on their 10 o'clock bulletin last night) or for the sake of politics in the case of the BBC. The newspapers have been fairly predictable, as one might imagine. Left wing rags have followed the left-green ideological armageddon scenario to the letter (naturally), while the rest of them have hedged themselves even deeper into a kind of editorial schitzophrenia.

So that's them, then. But what about the blogs? Well, something has now emerged that seems to me quite interesting, what you might call the "Main Stream Blogosphere." These would include established, high-traffic ones like Dale, Guido, Spectator, the Telegraph (especially Hannan and Delingpole, increasingly) and others I can't think of off the top of my head. What they have done, Guido included (but less so, to his credit), is played a similar game to the non-left media, they've set themselves up as some kind of adjudicators of the debate, thus providing themselves with protection for what they clearly view is their "credibility" among their high-powered political sources and buddies. By pretending to be outside the debate looking in (or down), they don't need to get off the fence. Thus they can avoid rocking the political boat and risk losing access to their MSM and lobby sources - and maintain what they regard as a principled editorial position which enables them to pass judgment on the great mass of genuinely independent, and genuinely (justifiably, given the nature of the revelations) critical, rational anti-MMCC blogs that make up the vast majority of the IB (the Independent Blogosphere). A political predilection has no bearing on these terms, only a willingness to speak one's mind when one feels moved to, and not to stand on the fence for any other reason than genuine agnosticism.

Take this recent Spectator post by David Blackburn, coming as it does hot on the heels of Fraser Nelson's editorial policy statement on Climategate for the paper edition:

Lord Lawson is Andrew Neil’s guest on this week’s BBC Straight Talk and, among other topics, the former chancellor rebuffs Ed Miliband’s accusation of climate change heresy. Lawson said:

“I hope that all parties…take a good hard look at this, we don’t want a sort of Stalinist monolithic line in everything. But I do think, because of the damage that will be done to the economy, that is why, and for very little good, if any, that is why we have got to take a good hard look at the fact that we can’t get a global agreement on this anyway, as will be seen in Copenhagen…So, I think you have got to go back to the drawing board and have a fresh approach. And that is why my think tank is the Global Warming Policy Foundation, it’s not the Global Warming Foundation, it’s the Global Warming Policy Foundation, because it is policy which is so damaging at the present time and threatening so much, and it doesn’t work and it can’t work, and that’s why we’ve got to think of another approach.”

Lawson’s comments are aimed at Cameron as much as anyone else, but he is not ‘denying’ the science, though I am sure he’s sceptical, and rightly so. Like David Davis, Lawson challenges the political approach inspired by the Prophet Stern, which will endanger global growth and condemn billions in the developing world to a slow and grinding death in poverty. Ed Miliband’s “saboteur” jibe proves what Fraser says in this week’s magazine: climate change has morphed from debate to catechism. It is now an issue bereft of rationality. A debate on policy, not science, is an immediate necessity - I fear all Copenhagen will amount to is a joyless shindig.

Rod Liddle was doing the same thing last week, as I wrote at the time, namely, calling for some sort of reasoned debate without actually saying which side of that debate he would feel moved to support. And here we have it again. Ordinarily, you might think that that's all fine and dandy: people are right to keep an open mind, you might think, and that would be true - if that was what was really going on here. Only, it's not. What you are seeing is confusion as the MSB has to face up to something it had hitherto taken for granted. The people who run these uber-news sites (they're not really blogs) had swallowed the whole AGW thing hook, line and sinker, at least publicly. It was the way the wind was blowing, after all. However, they've been left in something of a quandary by the fact that almost their entire readership is taking a much, much harder line on the issue: the traffic is moving!

People who read the MSB avidly, like me, never really thought of it that way before - up until now, that is. They previously regarded it as some form of blessed, independent news source free from the traditional forms of bias and/or strong-arm editorialism. Not any more. I'm afraid that one thing Climategate has done, in polarising the debate so completely, whether MSB hacks such as Nelson or Blackburn or Liddle - (the list goes on and on - you know who you are) - like it or not, and encouraging people to stand up and be counted on this great fraud, is smoke out the MSB from its comfort zone. And what a nuisance that must be for them. It's certainly a source of irritation if Liddle is anything to go by. That's a good thing because they need to get off the damn fence, show some backbone and call it as they really see it, because I strongly suspect that is exactly what they are not doing, for the reasons I've noted. (I actually - kind of - respect Will Heaven of the DT blogs for doing just that, though much good it did him! Mainly because he's wrong.)

My point is that the last thing we need is another "Main Stream" anything, much less an MSB, especially when mainstream thinking on this (and many other issues, lest we forget - NHS anyone?) is so compromised and ideological. But it looks like that's just what we have got. Ah well, maybe it was inevitable. It's just another emergent phenomenon in the cultural continuum - and could be just another sign that New Media really has come of age and truly eclipsed the old. So it's not all bad and besides, all of us little people can always vote with our blogrolls - and our mouses - if we're really that unhappy.

The Swarm Intelligence

Just scanned this very interesting article about Climategate in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute's "Enterprise" blog by someone very bright called Jay Richards. The specific points he makes (extremely well) about the ongoing, forensic analysis and reconstruction of the leaked data, revealing some of the worst abuses of the scientific process imaginable, are by now quite familiar and can be found in the usual places, several of which are linked to on this blog. It's not these legitimate observations so much, explosive as they are, as his conclusions about the significance and cultural impact of the blogosphere that really intrigued me. Here's an extract:

Of course, most of the big broadcast media are still in full blackout mode on this story, choosing instead to report on breaking news about Pete the orphaned moose. They’re following the pattern of the Dan Rather Memogate controversy in 2004. With that history-making story, the legacy media mostly tried to ignore the story, and then, when it got too big, began to spin it. Rather and CBS issued increasingly bizarre denials. Even though the gig was up within a couple of days, they continued to defend the document in question, and the stories based on it, for two excruciating weeks. (Compare CRU’s Phil Jones offering similarly risible explanations.) Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called reality, unknown and often apolitical bloggers with specialized expertise in font styles, IBM Executive Series and Selectric typewriters, military protocol, and word-processing software dismantled the details for any curious person with an Internet connection. Other, politically oriented blogs consolidated, analyzed, and broadcast the findings.

MemoGate gave many of us our first taste of the swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere, and showed that it cab beat the legacy media for getting to the bottom of a story via a networked, open-source form of peer review, with a highly refined division of labor.

We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we’re dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it’s becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up.

I hadn't really grasped what Guido Fawkes meant when he talked about similar things regarding, if memory serves, the expenses scandal* . I do now. The blogosphere, with its "swarm intelligence," is no longer potentially the most powerful communication medium in the world, Climategate has proved (at least to me) that it now is the most powerful communication medium in the world.

It therefore seems that it was no accident the Climategate documents weren't first leaked to a newspaper, as with the expenses scandal (the last real scoop of the dead tree press?) but to a blog instead, albeit what turned out to be the virtual dead end of a BBC weatherman's blog. I think it likely that given the technical complexity of the material, the whistleblower eventually appreciated that no MSM (what Jay Richards calls the "legacy media") provider would even want to touch it, all compromised as they more or less all are, much less spend a lot of time and money unpacking its secrets. It needed some serious processing power to do that, and, as Mr Richards asserts, the only place that that could be found was in the blogosphere.

So, complete paradigm shifts all round, then - not just in terms of the AGW belief system, but in terms of how we produce, analyse and trust our news-information supply, too.

I for one am pretty proud to contribute my modest (some would say infinitesimal) intellectual resources to The Swarm Intelligence.

(*It could have been something else, though, I'd need to check. But he does bang on about that and the fall of the dead tree press fairly regularly, it seems to me.)

Tory Champions....!

Seeing as my blogging name is probably mud anyway, I might as well go for broke with the greatest piece of rock music ever created.



Well, maybe not ;)

Little By Little

I was criticised (though not by online people visiting this amateurish blog, naturally), for erasing a musical interlude I'd posted in my cups some nights ago. Even my own sister was less than impressed with what she perceived in her effortless wisdom as a cave in and a cop out.

Charming - and a bit harsh, I thought.

But maybe she's right. If she is, then here's a great bit of pop music, reproduced on my blog for your viewing pleasure ;)

Friends Like These

Sometimes, you read something that reinvigorates your natural faith in the idea of "people". This post, from one of my blogging chums, is one of those times. So I've done what I always do (wicked internet parasite that I am) and nicked it.

Read on...

How do you solve a problem like the BNP?

This post is little more than linkwhoring to this excellent post over at Coffeehouse by Fraser Nelson.

It explains a lot of the reasons why the mainstream parties are experiencing such difficulties dealing with Griffin and his party and the best ways to take them on. Certainly I think the left have been the biggest cause of the problem, shouting them down and screaming 'racist, racist!' has not been a successful tactic and has only led to their own natural supporters becoming disillusioned and switching to BNP. He also points out that for all the press coverage and handwringing by mainstream politicians they haven't been very succesful because deep down, Britain's the most comfortable multi-cultural country there is.

The issues that are causing people to vote for the BNP now isn't racism but immigration (and before anyone bitches it isn't the same thing). But anytime a politician mentions immigration they are automatically accused of playing the race card (unless it's a labour politician, there's nowt like double standards!). Michael Heseltine was shouted down on Question Time for suggesting that the people waiting to cross Calais to get here were 'economic migrants'. It's plainly obvious that the vast majority of them are. If they were purely seeking asylum then they could have done it in France or one of the multitude of other EU countries on the way. No, they try to come here because we are a soft touch, with free housing and handouts more genorous than they will get anywhere else. To suggest otherwise is complete bollocks. And this is what is the grist to the BNP's mill.

Fraser also queried who would be a good person to take Griffin to task on Question Time. I'd suggest the tory invite goes to John Redwood. He's a very straight talking politician who would deal with the immigration issue without trying to fudge it...and he would completely destroy the feasibility of any of the BNP's other so-called policies which are further to the left than Dennis Skinner (Expect maybe the EU, it's probably the only thing he'd agree with them on...though I'm sure his argument would be far more coherent.).

"Uncle Bob", as far as I'm concerned, is one of the very good guys.

(Sincere apologies to him for what he will no-doubt think is a rather lame moment of fake hero-worship. Soz, Bob ;)

Blogs And Booze...

...don't mix!

Ooo, my poor head.

I Am A Parasite

According to an article in the Guardian yesterday, some Yank judge is saying that because I write a blog which uses material from MSM newspaper websites, including the odd link through to articles , I am little more than a parasite.

"The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media," Posner wrote. "They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper."

I'm not sure this charming American's comments make any sense whatsoever. In what way do link throughs "cost" newspapers? Surely papers benefit from the extra traffic. How is quoting from articles written in newspapers "parasitical", exactly? I would have thought journalists would find it fairly flattering in the main, especially if the blog referring to them is nice about their scribbles. The dots in this guys reasoning are certainly not joined-up.

Newspapers are collapsing across the United States, with some venerable publications having already gone to the wall (such as the wonderful Rocky Mountain News - which was very sad). More are bound to follow. But this has mainly been caused by the recession in America, not by bloggers. There is evidence that the same thing's happening in this country. And what do we get? The same, nonsensical attack on what for most of the thousands of people who blog about UK politics and current affairs is just a pretty harmless hobby, and a wonderful outlet in many cases for deep, pent-up fury at the way our useless politicians have sold us down the river. However, unlike the MSM, we don't do deference. And our comment is genuinely free. If you don't like my opinions, for instance, you are welcome to say so and then go away. As for sourcing, well, this is a personal diary not a newspaper. I mean, duh!

The Fawkeses and Dales of this world are the exceptions that prove the rule, but if newspapers think they can pretend those two, who as far as I can discern almost always present original material that they've researched themselves (you know, like journalists do), are the cause of their dwindling sales, they need to think again. Newspapers' own business models and professional practices are what're broken. People didn't much like the "dead tree" product any more once the internet came along offering a speedier, more efficient and free news source, so the papers had to react. Why else would all of them have spent such vast fortunes building flashy websites and relaunching themselves in brand spanking new office complexes? To look modern and hip, to compete with television for a following, to generate more advertising revenue and to increase the profile of their respective products. Oh, and to keep lazy journalists more thoroughly occupied.

But newspapers were too slow to react, too set in their ways, too prejudiced and too blinkered to even begin to appreciate how the internet might force them to change the way they generate news. And they still haven't got it. "Competition" from "parasitical" bloggers is a stupid myth dreamt-up by somebody or other with some kind of axe to grind or some sort of vested interest. But that's the point: it's just a myth. You can (sort-of) understand the economic argument for enforcing intellectual copyright laws for music downloads: people buy a record to listen to it over and over again. Why, so the argument goes, shouldn't the same thing apply to downloads? Fair point. But newspaper articles? For Pete's sake, who wants to read a newspaper report, or even an editorial piece, over and over again? Exactly. It's nonsense. People will just go elsewhere for their online news.

On the issue of banning linking without permission, however, I have one suggestion for the lumberjack press: if you don't want the linking, get rid of your website. And a word of advice to them: try in future not to let some preening American judge call a significant section of your readership "parasites" on your behalf. Apart from being rubbish, it doesn't actually go down too well.

No hard feelings, though. I rather like the idea of being some sort of parasite, in fact. I think I'll be a tapeworm.

Fancy That!

The Good Old Days

Ian Hislop did write that pisspoor piece of abject, deadtree snobbery in Private Eye a few days ago that got so far up my nose. Paul Waugh in the Standard says the snivelling cub scout tried to justify his position thus:

He made the point that the McBride emails scoop was published first by national newspapers rather than on Guido's own blog, partly because it was the papers that took the legal risk and partly because of the wider exposure and impact.

Which sounds awfully similar to this, from the Hackwatch feature in this month's Eye:

Congratulations too [to Paul Staines] for his belated realisation of the superiority of the "dead tree press" in choosing to print not a word [of the smear emails] on his own "Guido Fawkes" website and hand them over instead to the Sunday Times and the News of the World.
That allowed Rupert Murdoch's lawyers to take on the legal risks and potential costs over which the fearless Fawkes had been fretting for some time...

Hmm, not like Hislop and the late Peter Cook, then. Independent, 2006:

"When I took over, I made a number of very pompous statements about how I was really going to cut the libel bills and this shoddy approach to libel wasn't going to exist any more. Then over the coming years, I managed to enter the Guinness Book of Records for the most money ever lost and hit a number of just huge payouts." Particularly painful were awards to the late Robert Maxwell and to Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who won £600,000 in libel damages from the Eye, although this sum was reduced to £60,000 on appeal.

So Hislop is apparently saying it's hyprocritical of Staines to have a sugar daddy like Peter Cook Rupert Murdoch and thus not have to worry about the consequences of publishing risky material. Fancy that!

(It's also rather interesting that Hislop's become such an institution, rather than digging up the dirt on parliament and all its evil works, he's now giving evidence to Select Committees, using his own articles as 'material'. Fancy that, again (sort of).

The last word came from Hislop, who for an anti-establishment figure sounded remarkably traditional on the shape of the meeja. He has no plans whatsoever to put the Eye online. "If you want to find out what's going on, buy it. Don't try and get it for free".

Charming. Well, ta Ian, but I think I'll pass.)

Eye Envy

After a heavy day of largely unproductive library toil, yours truly decided to unwind with a Tesco cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. Choice of reading material was a tricky one but eventually nostalgia beat common sense and I opted for my one-time favourite, Private Eye. My mistake.

Don't get me wrong, 80% of this satirical dinosaur remains quite entertaining and occasionally even germane. But the other 20% (that which is written, I suspect, by royal scrote Ian Hislop) is just abject, vain hackery. But stumbling across yet another reminder of why I gave up taking this once noble organ, I nearly choked on my pickle. So I dawdled rushed home, unpacked my scanner, spent half an hour working out how to plug it in, scanned the story (12 times), cropped it, fiddled with it and finally uploaded it so I could share it with you, my phantom readers (click on piccy).

Hislop, for it is almost certainly he, has surpassed even his own legendary standards of smug journalistic conservatism. Masquerading for years as a renegade moral crusader with a nose for the big scoop, my view is that his cover has finally been well and truly blown. Read it and you will see that all he has managed to do in his inadequate counterpoint attack on Guido is ably advertise his manifest ignorance of all things 'new tech' and display what can only be described as a level of old world, MSM snobbery that makes Michael White look like Iain Dale.

Don't get me wrong, I am no lickspittle creepy sycophant with my tongue up Staines' fundament: I hadn't even heard of him until a few months ago. But credit where credit is due. The substantive point about 'smeargate' is not, awful though it was, the content of the hatemail. It's the fact that Guido broke the mould - obliterated it, in fact - the results of which we are still witnessing today as our pisspoor government finally collapses. He shat on the twin pillars of media capture in this country from a great height at the same time: this government's spin machine and print journalism, the former feeding the latter with much-needed copy in exchange for an easy ride. Private Eye has gradually evolved into a slightly eccentric extension of that cartel. And all it can do is have a feeble dig at 'the blogosphere' (Hislop's real target):

These [comments beneath a 2006 story on Fawke's site I can't find] make McBride's smears look almost gentle and show the blogosphere in typically unhinged and rancid mode.

Yes, yes Ian. I'll get your blanket for you dear. I give Private Eye 12 months. Sell-by dates and all that.

Its oft-mimicked modes of reporting, however - none of which were invented by eternally snide cub scout Hislop - will last forever.