Talking to a business contact of mine earlier today, the subject of the Levenson enquiry concerning the alleged hacking of persons' phones by journalists/others came up. One thing that was mentioned was that the corruption of certain police officers, and possibly other officials with access to important data, highlights the dangers of aggregating large amounts of important data into a few places, since the temptation to abuse this for financial gain - by selling some of the juicy stuff to journalists - will be hard to resist. And that surely is another argument against centralised ID systems of the sort that groups such as No2ID have campaigned against.

Call me optimistic, but at least I hope I can say that for the moment, the case for compulsory ID cards is off the table in the UK. That does not, of course, mean that the Database State is not advancing, quite the reverse. But at least some of the more brazen examples of this are not advancing, and the public are getting a very good education in the dangers of data aggregation and the abuse of data by those who are entrusted to defend the public.

Comment just attached, by "Malcolm", to my posting here a while back entitled Austrianism as Number Two:

Newsnight has just introduced its story on Ed Milliband's decision today to back the government's pay freeze by playing the Keynes v Hayek video from Econstories.tv

The narrator even described it as a "fabulous" video that is "easily the most entertaining explanation of the issues" - as closely as I can remember the wording, anyway.

I realise I'm commenting on a posting that's six months old, but I'm hoping Brian, as the original author, gets automatically notified of comments. That the video is being used to give context to a now-current news item is certainly consonant with Brian's original theory about Austrianism as the new #2 (with apologies to The Prisoner).

I did get automatically notified of this comment. Many thanks for the kind thought. However, I also clocked this Newsnight snippet myself, and added an off topic bit in a comment I also added to the earlier posting today about SOPA, which Newsnight is also reporting on, thanks to the Wikipedia black-out that Rob Fisher noted.

The more I ponder those Keynes v Hayek videos, the more of a stroke of total genius I believe them to be. They play especially well with the BBC, because the BBC is never happier than when explaining an issue in terms of competing arguments. Yes, the BBC is often "biased", in the sense that you get a definite idea of which team they may prefer (which may not be yours), and which team they choose to give the last word to. But the "other" team often gets a more than fair crack of the whip.

As I made clear in that earlier posting of mine, the real sufferers from this kind of bias are the "other other" teams, so to speak, the ones who don't even get a look in, the ones who are shown as being not even wrong, on account of not even existing.

To quote Rob Fisher in the posting immediately below, about Detlev Schlichter's performance on the BBC's "Start The Week" show yesterday morning:

All in all not a bad day for the spreading of Austrian ideas.

Which adds up to two consecutive not bad days for the spreading of Austrian ideas.

Incoming from Detlev Schlichter:

Just a heads-up in case you are interested, I will be one of four guests on Andrew Marr's show Start the Week on BBC Radio Four on Monday, 16th January. The program starts at 9 am but there are various 'listen again' facilities, and it will also be published as a podcast. The topic is the financial crisis, and the other guests are The Economist's Philip Coggan (author recently of Paper Promises), Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association, and the Labour life peer Maurice Glasman.

I am interested.

Dymaxicon doesn't accept 'submissions'. I'm not a particularly submissive person, and I have always resented that writers were always cast in a submissive role... no one should ever be in the position of accepting or rejecting.

So says California-based Samizdatista Hillary Johnson about Dymaxicon, the new model publishing company she set up as an imprint of Agile Learning Labs. Yes, a software development coaching firm is its own publisher - and is putting titles on the market that cover everything from gardening to scrum (the geeky kind, not the rugby kind). Free from the politics and restraints of traditional publishers, Johnson is highly selective about the titles Dymaxicon puts out, and her gamut-running taste leads to releases such as a graphic novel telling the true story of two teenagers on a killing spree in the 1950s:

The model is simple: No one makes money unless the books sell, and Dymaxicon does a straight 50/50 split with authors. The publisher earns its half by editing the work, formatting it for a range of electronic reading devices and apps, marketing the work (including creative, easily shareable book trailers), and making sure the entire distribution process runs smoothly. Titles are available both in electronic form and, for more money, as hard copies.

So what kind of results are Johnson and her authors getting with this approach?

Nancy Rommelmann, another friend of Samizdata, has released one novel and one essay with Dymaxicon. The Bad Mother quickly became a cult favorite novel, and was downloaded more than 1,000 times within hours of Dymaxicon launching a promotional giveaway (you can still get it for free as I type). Her essay on growing up as a rebellious teen in 1970s Brooklyn, The Queens of Montague Street, hit number seven - and is still climbing - on Amazon's bestseller list of biographies and memoirs of journalists, topping titles by Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Barbara Walters, among many other celebrities. It was also named the number one long-form read of the week by top online outlet Longreads, with dozens of other blogs lauding the work as well worth the 99 cent price.

David Swinson, a former police detective, film producer and music promoter who released his first novel for Dymaxicon after a career of working with the likes of Nick Cave, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Social Distortion, saw his book A Detailed Man rise to the number one spot on Amazon's list of bestselling noir titles. The murder mystery also hit Amazon's Top 100 overall list of Kindle bestsellers.

The fact is, you can publish your writing on Amazon if you have 99 cents. (If you are an Amazon Prime member, it is free.) Yes, blogging has enabled anyone to publish their thoughts without cost for years now, but putting your writing into a digestible format and capitalizing on Amazon's distribution platform is kind of a big deal. Just because it is not difficult to do does not mean it is easy to do well - which is where a publisher like Dymaxicon comes in. This new model means that revenue-sucking intermediaries like agents can be bypassed completely, as can dealing with traditional publishing houses (if one was ever lucky enough to get that far in the first place). As Johnson says:

The way literature gets produced in our world seems positively medieval. Not to mention anti-creative. Publishers are gate-keepers, deciding who gets to be heard, and the process of putting a book out is glacially slow, linear, and hierarchical.

Not anymore, though. So if you have always fancied yourself a novelist in the making, or think the series of email rants you send friends might make for compelling content to read as a collection, consider making an author of yourself. All you have to lose is the expired excuse that it is hard to get published.

This morning I was prodded by the scourge of epidemiocracy, Chris Snowden, to read this piece by Theodore Dalrymple. What most struck me was not the main argument (I find predictable agreement almost as wearing as disagreement) but this piece of supplementary information:

A higher proportion of the Dutch population smokes than average for a developed country (27 percent), and fewer Dutch people are aware of secondhand, or second-lung, smoke — that breathed in from other people’s tobacco — than any other comparable country.

Why should that be? I think it demands an explanation. Certainly the Dutch population cannot easily be classed as ill-educated or poorly-informed. (I have been sworn at by a drunk tramp on an Amsterdam tram who switched instantly to English invective when he realised that it was going to be more effective in my case.) My mind leapfrogged towards ideas about the Dutch liberal tradition. They choose not to know, because they do not like to hassle people about their private behaviour, perhaps...

Unfortunately there are no sources quoted. When I looked for stats and background info, I found something even odder. That remarkable factoid contains no truth.

The OECD statistical library agrees with that 27% average - if it is actually daily smoking for males 15 and over. But it places The Netherlands fractionally below average, equal with Germany and slightly above Belgium for the proportion of males who smoke (26%), with slightly more women than either (20%).

How about "awareness of second-hand smoke". The points in the article about "relatively high" Dutch smokishness appear in less critical articles such as this one in Salon. (Which itself hints that it relies as a source on one Lies Van Gennip, director of the national tobacco control center.) Here we have a hint of the source for the "awareness" figure.

In a global survey on smokers’ awareness, only 61 percent of Dutch smokers agreed second-hand smoke was dangerous to non-smokers — much lower than smokers elsewhere, including Mauritius, China, Brazil and Mexico.

“Dutch smokers are among the least informed about the harms of smoking and second-hand smoke,” said Geoff Fong, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who heads a program that monitors smoking policies worldwide.

Note the built-in interpretation: failure to agree counts as being ill-informed. I googled down the global survey mentioned. It appears in the BMJ for 4 April 2011 under the headline "Dutch smokers are "alarmingly" ignorant of harms of passive smoking, study finds." The original findings do indeed appear under the aegis of the University of Waterloo here (pdf) But are published on behalf of 'The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project: ITC Netherlands Survey' — the presentation of which suggests it is intended to drive Dutch policy, and the naming of which suggests we should worry about that 'global survey' point. Some (more) cherry-picking, perhaps?

Inspecting a bit further suggests there is reason to worry. See here. The ITCPEP doesn't do a global survey. It surveys different countries at different times using different methods. The most recent French survey (2009) was a telephone poll with respondents reimbursed; the most recent Dutch one (2011) was an online survey. The critical common question is not "Do you think your smoking harms others?" but "How often, in the last month have you thought about the harm your smoking might be doing to other people?" In both surveys, the critical question is preceded by questions about respondents' attempts to give up and their degree of addiction, but in the Dutch survey that is the beginning. In the French survey there is much prequalification apparatus including emphasis of the importance of the survey itself, and information sought about the individual respondent's household. Longitudinal comparisons on a single country might make sense if individual surveys are consistent; but comparing attitudes in two countries on this basis does not.

We know nothing from the ITCPEP about the beliefs of either Dutch or French smokers concerning the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke. They were not asked. But we cannot even compare their relative preoccupation with whether they may be harming others—what they were asked—because they were asked at different times, in different ways, in different contexts.

The only reason for making the comparison in the first place was to condemn Dutch views as "ignorance", but even the variance in views is a pseudo-statistical phantom, if you can be bothered to look into the detail.

I am interested in variation in public attitudes and in political culture and their relationship to policy. But it is devilish hard to find out about those relationships when even critical discussion, such as Dr Dalrymple's, is predicated on 'facts' whose selection and interpretation is determined by the attitudes of interested researchers. Even specialist commentators are seldom suspicious enough to do more than re-word the press release and cast it in the light of their own attitudes.

We haven't here done a Kim Jong Il is dead posting until now, probably because what else is there to say besides Kim Jong Il is dead? A new Kim Jong has been installed. Un. From Il, to Un. In English it sounds like going from sick to nothing. North Korea, presently terrible, will either get a bit better, or a bit worse, or a lot worse, or stay much the same. Or, if it gets really lucky, a lot better! Will paid North Korea watchers, experts in North Korean things, do any better than that? I doubt it.

I have called Kim Jong Il Kim Jong Il. Others call him Kim Jong-Il with a hyphen, or Kim Jong-il, with a small i for il. Until today I never knew of this confusion. Blog and learn.

My favourite of the Kim Jong Il is dead postings that I have seen so far is this one, at Mick Hartley's blog, which features the very last Kim Jong Il picture: King Jong Il looking at toilet paper.

I wrote all that last night, but Mick Hartley now has another Kim Jong Il is dead posting up, in which he quotes somebody called Simon Winchester saying this:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out - its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Or then again, perhaps … not. No bad thing? Competition for commenters: concoct morally disgusting sentences which begin with "For all its faults …". You'll struggle to top that one. These obscene ravings are currently behind the Times pay wall, hence no link, although Hartley does supply one.

Says Hartley:

Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.

Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.

Commenter Martin Adamson adds:

And it's not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.

Assuming this is the Simon Winchester in question, it seems that:

Simon Winchester is a best-selling British author living in Massachusetts and New York City.

Heartfelt apologies from Britain to Massachusetts and New York City. Apparently American culture is itself sufficiently un-Americanised for Winchester to find it livable in. Winchester has a new book out, which looks rather creepy. Let's all not buy it.

Most readers will know about Detlev Schlichter and his book Paper Money Collapse. Some readers will know about Max Keiser who presents The Keiser Report on Russia Today. Yes, Russia Today. Doesn't sound good does it?

Well, it is not all bad. Keiser does predict global economic collapse (the non-badness here being that his prediction is (I think) correct). He does blame central banks and their printing of money. He does point out that what we are seeing at the moment is very definitely not capitalism. He does interview a good number of libertarians such as Peter Schiff. And he does advocate the ownership of gold and silver.

But then things start to go downhill again. He forever blames the global situation on "banksters" and their "fraudulent" ways. While apparently being in favour of capitalism he still manages to lambast any attempt to control government spending. The UK coalition government's austerity programme, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party have all been criticised by him. He also seems to believe in global warming or to be more accurate: CAGWIT (that's my new acronym: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny, by the way). And he interviews a whole bunch of nutters including Keynesians and anti-Israelis.

The other night he interviewed the distinctly non-nutty Detlev Schlichter. The good news is that Schlichter managed to get most of his main points across (now if only he were allowed to do that on the BBC!)...

...The bad news is that during the interview Keiser made his usual remarks about fraud (at about 20:00). And Schlichter said nothing or, at least, nothing in response. Now I appreciate that Schlichter is new to this kind of thing and that he has a book to sell but I think he should have at least said something. To acquiesce while Keiser makes his outrageous claims, to my mind, gives the impression of agreement.

Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight's economics editor (and the guy who fronted that Keynes v Hayek radio show we've blogged about here), picks Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse as one of his five economics books to give people for Christmas.

Mason begins his Guardian piece thus:

Two questions predominate in this year's slew of books on economics. The first is the most obvious: how do we get out of this mess? It's a question that has set authors along many roads but they all lead to the same destination: a bigger role for the state and the need for renewed international co-operation.

Which, alas, explains why Detlev Schlichter is so pessimistic about good sense prevailing in financial policy before ruin engulfs us all. The world's rulers have pushed the world slowly but surely into a huge hole, and all that Mason's authors (aside from Schlichter) can recommend is digging the hole ever deeper.

A "bigger role for the state" is not the solution to the world's problems just now. That is the problem, and it has been for many decades.

At least Schlichter's kind of thinking is getting around, and, as this piece by Mason proves, in some somewhat surprising places. Mason may not fully understand Austrian economics to the point of actually agreeing with it, but he does seem (as I said towards the end of this earlier posting) to respect it. He knows it is saying something important.

Schlichter has been unwavering in his pessimism about the world getting "out of this mess" and he is being proved more right with every week that passes. When total ruin does arrive, we can only hope that he and people with similar opinions to his will then be listened to rather more.

"...Journalism is a trade, not a profession; the idea that its practitioners should be licensed, that it should be a closed shop that only people who have passed a test can enter; and that a politically created quango can determine who is “right” and who is “wrong” and should therefore be banned is appalling and dangerous. It is a sure route to eliminating free speech and ensuring that only “approved” views can be aired. These days, there is a continuum between a lone tweeter or blogger with a dozen followers to a star broadcaster who speaks to 10m people every day. One cannot arbitrarily draw a line between journalism and non-journalism any more. All should be protected by free speech; all should be held responsible for what they write or say."

Allister Heath, talking about the disgusting idea of a UK Labour Party shadow cabinet member to licence journalism. It is important to note - as Samizdata regular Guy Herbert has from a Facebook comment I saw, that the sins of someone like Johann Hari would not have been picked up had he ticked all the right boxes by attending a J-school.

As Brian Micklethwait notes below, it appears the Labour leadership has disowned the idea - so far. You know how it goes: an idea is floated, is immediately rejected by the senior folk, but gradually keeps getting more and more traction.

I cannot overstate my loathing for the political class in this country. Glenn Reynolds says of the US equivalent that it is the worst political class since before the US Civil War (not exactly an encouraging thought). God knows what sort of epoch we can compare this lot to in the UK.

You could live decades in Manhattan and still be surprised by what its vibrant capitalism throws up at you. Last weekend I got an invite to go along to a party that was raising money for some charity cause, although I was not one of the ones there to be a high roller. Let us just say I got in via the journalists back door since one of the celebrity guests was a Fox News personality who was also a friend of my usual Manhattan drinking buddy. It should come as no surprise to long time readers that when in New York I chill with journalists, spacers and the odd Irish musician.

I knew it was going to be interesting before I met up with Taylor Dinerman at the usual media waterhole, but on the some thirty block walk we were lost in discussions about typical fighter pilot behavior with the fair sex, space policy and which foot Paul Krugman is currently inserting. I was expecting something exceptional but when I finally walked over to the railing of the rooftop party I was not quite prepared for a night time view of New York like this. It is really different when you can see the city laid out in front of you in every direction and yet you are close enough to be struck by the full three dimensions. I can hardly imagine what waking up to this every day must be like, but I am glad to know there are people out there who do.

The party had the standard accoutrements. If you simply looked at the bar man serving drinks from a table by the core wall, or at the disk jockey in the corner, it would look like the standard parties we have all attended. The DJ laid down a modern sound track to insure all would eat, drink, be merry and network till they dropped. I was of course doing just that. I handed out Immortal Data Corporation business cards to all and sundry while keeping up my energy from the passing trays of hors d'oeuvres. I do not think I had a repeat taste all evening.

Being the spacer that I am, my actual first photograph of the night was the stunning image of a fall moon rising over the East River from a southeasterly direction. A mere photograph cannot come close to what the eye took in. Believe me, this poor small subset of photons does not come close to doing it justice.

Later on, after several drinks and much mixing I decided to temporarily break from the crowd, and that was when I discovered the flat was even more spectacular than I had thought. This is where Tony Stark would live if he owned a flat in Manhattan. No doubt about it.

Taylor and I mostly talked with media folk, although there were lots of financial types there as well, with some of which we also spoke. I knew Taylor was fluent in French and Hebrew. Tonight I found him talking at length in German to a businessman and doing the occasional phrase in Mandarin. We were also joined by James Taranto of the Wall Street journal after he returned from a quiet far corner where he did a radio show call in to express his opinion of the latest Krugman piece at the New York Times.

One of the more fun people I spoke to was a woman who started her career as an NPR reporter assigned to Belfast. She was there in the seventies, well before my time, but we still had much common knowledge to share as she was a lover of Irish Traditional music and I think it fair to say that a few of my close friends in Ireland can play or sing a note or two of that genre.

It was a very international crowd, although it is sometimes hard to tell in New York. Someone who you think looks foreign may come out with a strong New York accent when they say hello... or they may speak with a strong accent from some odd corner of the world. You simply cannot tell.

Late in the evening Taylor and I were sipping our drinks and talking Chinese politics with a VP of Tang Dynasty TV, Mike Chen. He is very much the all American himself but is able to travel and mix in China and the three of us were off in a Samizdata like discussion of China's economy, ethnic strife problems, what happens when the North Korean penny drops, why China is building forces, what sort of aircraft India is buying and why...

I think it rather suitable that drinks in hand, we were looking down upon the United Nations Building from our high capitalist perch.

Oh, and we had a chance to talk with Rita Cosby, an old friend of Taylor's from Fox News, before he and I and James went off for our rather late dinner at McFadden's Bar.

Despite the Corona's, the wine, the rum and cokes, and the Johnny Walker I had already downed, or perhaps because of them, I decided after my dinner pint of Guinness that I could not let that poor pint feel lonely. So when they headed home, I headed further down Second Avenue to an old hangout of mine. The rest of the night (and pints) is another story and I was off duty as your Samizdata On The Scene reporter.

Slante!

Time was when Ford was the model for corporatism and seen as a template for the State.

But that was before we got to a situation where Communist China's state media castigates the US federal government for wasting money on welfare programs and over-borrowing.

I like the fact that Ford let Chris choose his own words to explain why he wouldn't buy a government bail-out car. Very Post-Fordist.

Correction: I mistakenly wrote in an earlier version of this that Hari was being sent on a course at the expense of his employer, but that is not so. He is paying for it himself. I am still not quite sure how this helps: do you need to learn how to be honest? Maybe he should read some books on ethics instead. Anyway, the error was mine.

Reading this comment about the revolting Johann Hari, a journalist who fabricated interviews and, well, basically made stuff up, I am still stunned that he has not been fired by his current employer. Instead, the creep writes a sort of mea culpa and is attending a course to learn about journalism. He should have been fired, in my opinion. There are thousands of talented people trying to make a career in the media; why should this shit be allowed to stay in the business?

Of course, in a free market, he should be able to do what he likes so long as he does so not at my expense, so I would, for example, object if he ever got a job working for the BBC, which is funded by a tax. But this sorry saga does rather suggest that if you are a leftie, self-styled preacher of idealism like Hari, that you can get away with a lot.

Here is a blog, with the beguiling title of Splintered Sunrise, by a man who obviously swings to that side of the political spectrum who is rightly appalled by Hari and his antics.

Sometimes it pays to call a spade a spade. Johann Hari is a conman. End of subject.

Christina Odone, who was on the receiving end of Hari's behaviour, is unimpressed.

If this lowlife ever resurfaces in journalism, he should be referred to as "Johann Hari, the plagiarist", in much the same way as Paul Krugman is sometimes dubbed "the former Enron advisor".

I was reading an article by Janet Daly, whom I rather like even if I do not always agree with (I met her at a Stockholm Network shindig once and found her sharp and charming), in which she excoriates the NYTimes for a risible screed about the recent riots in Britain:

Never likely to be outdone when it comes to Left-liberal sententiousness, the New York Times has produced a corker of a leading article on our very own riots. With a mock-judicious bit of throat-clearing, it begins on a tone of apparently unimpeachable even-handedness: “nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of lawlessness, etc, etc … the perpetrators must be punished, etc, etc.”

But it then lurches into an absurd compounding of the irrelevant and the ill-informed. David Cameron, the paper intones, is “a product of Britain’s upper classes and schools”. (This is scarcely intelligible English: does it mean upper-class schools?) And so, presumably as a consequence of his class-induced ignorance, “he has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subculture”.

Yes indeed he has, thus putting himself in agreement with about 90 per cent of the British population. But the New York Times in as uninterested in the overwhelming majority of British public opinion as it is in the great mass of American public opinion. It is as smugly and narrowly orthodox in its Left-liberal posturing as its counterparts in Britain

Good stuff. But what really caught my eye was a comment under this article by a blogger rejoicing in the giggle inducing pseudonym "He's Spartacus", which I reproduce entirely here as it is rather splendid:

Comments are pre-moderated at the NYT and I have little doubt that mine will not pass muster, so here it is....

It's difficult to know where to begin dissecting this flatulent nonsense, it's so full of holes, so I'll content myself with saying that the NYT continues to demonstrate that it knows as little about the reality of life in Britain as it does about America.

No....wait....scratch that....

This social disintegration is exactly what clear thinkers have been warning about for more than half a century.

Replace the family with the State, bellow "revolution!" from every street corner while in reality making the banks and corporations you claim to hate yet more powerful because, loath though you may be to admit it, they debt-fund the State's rent-seeking schemes and social engineering projects, steal our money at gunpoint to pay for it all, ghettoise entire communities by telling them they can develop separately (now where have I heard that before?)....

What were you THINKING?

Reap the whirlwind.

Now for the good news....

The state has failed, and the really good news is that a lot of people have worked this out for themselves, as evidenced by the thousands of ordinary, law-abiding folk who, once they had recovered from initial impact of the sheer cold-bloodedness and randomness of the violence, took responsibility for protecting their own streets and neighbourhoods.

If this spells the beginning of the end of the nanny state, I for one will raise a glass to the state-created bottom-feeders who initiated it.

To which all I can say is... amen to that.

Today I learned, from someone who was involved in the making of it, that:

The Radio 4 bosses liked the Keynes v Hayek debate so much that they are going to repeat it at 9 am on Wednesday 24th August. This sort of thing is very very unusual. This is probably going to add around 1.5 million listeners to the estimated 1 million radio listeners the programme has already had. (I haven't looked at the podcast stats yet but it was in the iTunes News and Politics top 5 in the UK.)

My own personal reaction to the debate was that a true clash of archetypes was too often, for my taste, dragged off into nitpicking about who said what, when, and just what Keynes would have made of Q(antitative) E(asing), when the real point is that he wouldn't have started from there. But then again, the show was flagged up as "Keynes v Hayek", rather than as "Mainstream Economics v Austrian Economics", so I probably shouldn't grumble but should instead be counting blessings.

Which are numerous. Far more to the point, the above news makes me think, again, more so, this, which said that we are at least, at last, having this argument, beyond the confines of the Austrian Economics tribe and of the tiny few others who had until recently actually heard of it. Austrianism is now emerging from the great gaggle of alternatives to the present disastrous economic policies to take pride of place, at least in the heads of a great many of those who think seriously about economic policy, as The Leading Contender.

This is, in short, very good news, which puts an interesting slant on the ever ongoing argument about whether and how the BBC is biased.

I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:

"The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain."

I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.

Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch's blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn't even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.

Anyway, here's another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:

"How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders."

On an optimistic note, I'd add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.

Tonight,BBC Radio 4, 8pm:

I'm told that it will sound a lot more coherent than it did on the night it was recorded.

More pre-publicity from the BBC here.

At lunchtime yesterday, the BBC's Test Match Special radio commentators held a most entertaining Q&A with former top cricket umpire John Holder, who was asked questions like: "If a batsman hits the ball, it hits the batsman at the other end, bounces off the teeth of the bowler onto the wicket and the stricken batsman is still out of his ground, is that batsman run out?" (yes); or: "If the batsman hits the ball into the air, and a bag blows across the ground and the ball goes into the bag, and a fielder catches hold of the bag before anything hits the ground, is the batsman out?" (yes again). "If the batsman hits the ball and it strikes the branches of a tree …?" "If a dog gets on the pitch …?" "If a passing bird of prey catches the ball …?" You get the idea. Ho ho, chuckle chuckle. Holder answered everything with utter confidence. Not once could anyone, as the cricket metaphor goes, stump him.

But, about two hours later, right at the very end of the immediately following session of test cricket between England and India, at Trent Bridge Nottingham, a question of just this complicated kind arose for real.

If a batsman hits the ball towards the boundary, and if the fielder stops the ball going to the boundary, but thinks he failed to stop it, and if the fielder then picks the ball up in a relaxed, casual manner, for all the world making it clear that he thinks it was a four, and if the fielders in the middle of the pitch receive the ball in the manner of people who also think that the ball went for four, but if then, as an afterthought, one of the fielders takes the ball and flicks off the bails, with no sense of celebration, just on the off chance, because the umpires haven't signalled a four, or said that it's now tea time, but nevertheless, one of the England batsmen has already concluded that it is tea time, and is walking off the pitch, and is thus out of his ground, the fielder who has removed the bails having appealed in a quietly interrogative rather than exultant manner … is the batsman out? That's what happened, for real. The umpires asked the Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whether he was withdrawing his appeal. No, said Dhoni. Out, said the umpires. Ian Bell run out 137, off the last ball before tea. Bell bewildered and angry. The England team, and the crowd … not happy.

Where, the commentators were all saying to one another during their frantic tea interval attempts to explain it all to us listeners, is John Holder when you need him?

But meanwhile, the two Andrews, Flower and Strauss, coach and captain of England, dropped by the Indian dressing room and asked the Indian team if they would withdraw their appeal, and India did. Boos turned to cheers and applause when the umpires (boo!), the Indian team (boo!!), and then … Ian Bell all emerged from the pavilion after the tea break. Hurrah!!!

We now live in an age when all sports fans and all players come to that, rather than just the official salaried commentators and newspaper hacks, can immediately say what is on their (our) minds. This fact may not yet have had very much impact on global politics, the banking system, etc., but it has already changed the atmosphere that surrounds international sport.

So who do I think was right? Were the Indians gents, or suckers? Spirit of the game, or letter of the law?

I personally incline, ever more strongly the more I think about it, towards the suckers side of the still ongoing argument. Nor do I consider the Andrews to have been very gentlemanly either. Not cheats, you understand, any more than the Indians were, just tryers of it on. I agree with the likes of Geoff Boycott and Ravi Shastri who have said that Bell made a very careless mistake, the laws were correctly applied by the umpires, no Indian did anything remotely like cheating, so … out. These things happen. Nobody says a batsmen should be left off if he plays a silly shot and someone catches it. So, why should Bell, who made a different sort of silly mistake, have been any luckier?

I have since heard it argued that the umpires were wrong to accept the withdrawal by the Indians of their appeal. According to someone but I forget who, once they all walked off the pitch at the start of the tea interval, the decision was, or should have been, irreversible.

If Bell had stayed out, and if the England team and the crowd had seethed for a couple of hours until they could all sleep on it and realise the justice of what had happened, so what? Fecal matter transpires. If the England team had continued to gripe days later, then that would just have proved that they are not ready to be considered the true cricket Number Ones, whatever it may say in the ratings. Top teams blow off steam (in the manner of England's Matt Prior chucking his bat around in the dressing room after getting stupidly run out in an earlier game this summer) and then move on. All of which is hypothetical. But I am enough of an admirer of this England cricket side to be convinced that they would have got over such an episode pretty much immediately.

I and Geoff Boycott are by no means the only Englishmen who think that the Indians not only would have been within their rights, but should have (politely) told the Andrews to take a hike and that the decision would stand. Contrariwise, many Indians agreed with the Indian team that Bell's dismissal had a bad feeling about it, and that if something like that had happened to one of their top batters they wouldn't have liked it, so it was right to withdraw the appeal. I respect such arguments, especially when you consider that it was the deeply-to-be-respected Rahul Dravid who was the designated putter of the argument yesterday evening on behalf of the Indian team, but I don't agree, and I was already coming to this conclusion during the tea interval yesterday. I know this, because when Bell got out for a mere twenty two more runs than I now think he should have got, I was pleased rather than disappointed. I am glad that England are now playing like they'd have won this game by a mile, whatever had happened during the tea interval yesterday.

Here, interestingly, is an argument that is cutting through national divides rather than being confined by them. Rather than two simplistically nationalist positions being entirely defined by a handful of tabloid journalists whose stock in trade is goading people into insulting one another, this argument has quickly become not a nationalistic horror story, but a disagreement among friends about, well, sporting philosophy. (Will England soon decide that they need a sports philosophy coach to add to all their other coaches?)

And how do I know that this is not a nationalistic horror story? For that, I and the rest of the cricket-o-sphere can all of us thank the new social media. We can all now blog and tweet and comment about this little contretemps to our heart's content. We are not now being told what we all think by lowest-common-denominator newspapers. We can hear and read what lots of others are thinking, and learn that the argument lines in this thing are not national battle lines.

When I write about sport here, I like to find angles on it that reach out from sport to beyond sport. I want not just to see sport, but to see the world through sport. The above paragraphs pass that test, I think.

As to the game itself, well, India are now certain, bar a total miracle, to go two down with two to play in this four match series. In the face of a Himalayan last innings target, they have already, as I finish this, lost six (that word kept having to be retyped) wickets. This series is not turning into the ferocious contest that we were all looking forward to, but instead more into a one-sided exhibition of the England team's ferocious determination to be the top dogs, by utterly destroying an aging and ailing Indian team, now past its peak. In a week's time that could all change, of course, but that's how things now look.

Sachin Tendulkar is still batting away and battling away. An hour ago he was batting like there was no tomorrow, which there now almost certainly won't be, but since then he has slowed down, as the wickets tumbled at the other end. I bet I'm not the only Englishman who would love to see him, today, get that hundredth international hundred.

The good news: those polars bears killed by "global warming," were not.

From the AP:

Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into "integrity issues."

... observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and "suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues."

Bad news for some, I reckon.

I see that, no doubt under the influence of the same editorial prodding as I received this afternoon, Johnathan Pearce has already done a posting here (see below) about the debate last night (also attended by John Phelan) at the London School of Economics. What I have to say is really just an expanded version of what Johnathan Pearce has already said, but I'll say it anyway, partly because I do have one distinct advantage over him in this matter. Unlike Johnathan but like John Phelan, I was actually there.

I took photos, including one that does quite a bit of further event describing, which saves me having to:

Click to make that more legible.

Here are the two bad guys, Skidelsky and Weldon:

And here are the two guys on our side, Selgin and Whyte:

Click on the good guys to get them bigger. (The bad guys are quite big enough already.) As you can probably deduce from my pictures, the lighting on the stage was what you might call excellent for radio.

As for what was said, my overriding impression was that the Hayekians won, but not in quite the sense that John Phelan means when he says that they won, i.e. (a) that the Hayekians were more numerous and shouted louder and (b) that the Hayekians included John Phelan. They were, they did and they do. The "Hayekians" included me as well, for whatever difference that makes to anything. No, this was a more significant victory for Austrianism in the broader sense than merely that some Keynesians were, in the opinion of one of the anti-Keynesians who attended, out-argued on the radio. The really important point is that Austrianism is being put up there beside the broadly Keynesian macro-economics orthodoxy, as the alternative. The alternative.

I recall in my youth reading a book by someone called Robert Townsend. Townsend was the boss of a car hire company called Avis, and it was on his watch that a go-ahead new advertising agency (a bit like the ones in Mad Men), urged on and applauded by Townsend and his underlings, coined the Avis advertising slogan: "We're Number Two and We Try Harder". Number One being the car rental company Hertz.

The point of the slogan wasn't that it caused very much immediate hurt to Hertz. On the contrary, it acknowledged Hertz as Number One, which got everyone's attention. Who are these guys calling themselves Number Two? Wow. The regular advertising thing in those days would have been for Number Two to scratch around until it had found some more or less implausible excuse to call itself Number One. Most of the hurts (pardon the pun) unleashed by this slogan were inflicted upon car hire companies Number Three, Four, Five and the rest of them. What the slogan about Avis being Number Two but trying harder did was separate Avis from the huge pack of "other" car hire companies. It turned Avis from nothing into Pepsi-Cola, you might say. Hertz continued to be Coke (whether Coke itself is still Coke is another argument), but Avis itself lept ahead, patronised by anyone who fancied trying a try-harder, less smug alternative to Hertz. The others, who were presumably trying just as hard as Avis, fell away.

That, I believe, is the significance of events like that debate last night. It puts Austrianism on the map as the "other" way of looking at all that financial turmoil we've been having lately. No Keynesians present at this debate will have been very discomforted by anything that was said during it. They had their guys up there on the platform and they clapped and laughed and cheered when their guys spoke with any eloquence, just as we (John Phelan, I and the rest of our team in the audience) clapped when our guys waxed eloquent.

For you see, this was a classic BBC event. Built into the DNA of the BBC is in order to "do" anything that is opinion rather than mere news, you have to argue about it, and to argue about it, you have to have two sides. Not three sides or five sides. Two.

And the big trick, if you aren't Number One in a BBC debate is somehow to wangle yourself the Number Two spot, and what's more to get that spot entirely for your team. Austrianism, judging by last night's show, is well on the way to accomplishing precisely that status. And this despite, as Lord Skidelsky himself quite rightly said, having a numerically tiny academic presence compared to the (approximately speaking) Keynesian orthodoxy.

The big point here is not, e.g., whether Lord Skidelsky said nice things about how the Chinese government goes about its Keynesian business (although he did), or whether Selgin spoke eloquently (he did in my biased opinion, eventually, and despite his rather comical reliance on waving minute and totally illegible graphs around, which don't exactly go over a storm on the radio, as everyone except him seemed to realise). The point is that this debate was "Keynes v Hayek", rather than "Keynes and his critics". The speakers were two Keynesians and two Hayekians, rather than merely two Keynesians and then a pathetic queue of anti-Keynesian pygmies of about ten different varieties (several of them complaining that the Keynesian headliner acts weren't being Keynesian enough) taking it in turns to be humiliated.

I agree with Phelan that Skidelsky's open admiration for Chinese "investment" in "infrastructure", in answer to a question about China from the floor (and huge kudos to whoever it was who asked it), was both an illustration of the inherently bossy nature of Keynesianism, just as Hayek said, and that this might have been seized on more eagerly by Whyte or Selgin than it was, which was hardly at all. Skidelsky's answer was also a horrendous hostage to fortune. If Chinese infrastructure "investment" in recent years becomes famous for being as wasteful as some here already suspect, Skidelsky should be reminded of this pronouncement.

Speaking very much for myself, I was delighted when Skidelsky spelt out, with admirable clarity, that we Austrianists believe that President Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression. At this point I shouted out words to effect of "quite right" and "he did". Skidelsky then said, glancing contemptuously in the general direction of my heckling, that anyone who thought that was living in cloud cuckoo land. Fine. He was on the platform and was entitled to the last word on the matter. On the night.

The point being not to win arguments like this, but to have them, to let everyone listening know that, when it comes to things like whether Roosevelt had a good Great Depression or a bad Great Depression, there is an argument.

When it turns out (this was not really talked about last night) that actually, far from having calmed down, our new version of the Great Depression is still at the you-ain't-see-nothin'-yet stage, arguments like that one in particular about Roosevelt making the Great Depression worse, and in general about Keynes versus Hayek, could result in the Number One team in this bunfight being deposed. Guess who I think might - just might - be invited to step forward to replace that Number One team. I agree with Johnathan Pearce that "wallowing in despair" (see below) is, in times like these, a cop-out.

A final point, concerning the BBC master of ceremonies, Paul Mason. Mason had a lot to contend with, what with urging speakers to cool it with the paper flapping, organising the re-recording of bits when microphones fell off or when there was a big noise interrupting things or when the audience wasn't quiet enough during the first attempt at a re-run, or when he himself had some intros to do but fluffed his lines, for instance by giggling. Also, from time to time, it was Mason's rather undignified duty to get us all to yell either "Yo Keynes!" or "Yo Hayek!", according to taste. Nevertheless, in among all that, I got the distinct impression that, if not actually on our side, Paul Mason is highly sympathetic to the case that the Hayek team were making. At the very least, he has taken the time to become thoroughly acquainted with what that case is.

An edited version of all this intellectual mud-slinging will be broadcast by Radio Four on August 3rd.

See also the latest Keynes v Hayek rap video. They played that at the beginning, to get everyone in the mood. Genius. If you want to know why I think it's genius, you must be one of those people who skips to the end of blog postings without actually reading them. Which is fine, but: see all of the above.

"It is worth asking in both the British and American contexts why people who regard themselves as believers in free speech and liberal democracy can be so openly eager to close off – silence, kill, extinguish – different political views from their own. This is the question that is at the heart of the matter and which will remain long after every News International executive who may possibly be incriminated in the current scandal has been purged. There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious."

- Janet Daley.

Someone I know quite well said she hoped the problems at Murdoch's media empire will lead to Fox News being shut down. Not changed in ownership, you understand, but closed. This person is, you will not be surprised to learn, very "liberal".

Well, the reactions to the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World, and try and halt his empire collapsing, continue. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, used to have a weekly column for a paper once known as "News of the Screws" (for non-Brits, this paper was obsessed by the sex lives of the rich, powerful and celebs). Nelson has thoughts about it at the Spectator's own website. I think he gushes a bit too much and as the comments suggest, readers are not happy at Nelson's defence of much of what the NoTW stood for over the decades. But never mind that. The great thing about the Spectator commenters is that they are often splendidly barmy, if not quite as consistently rude as over at the Guido Fawkes site.

This one, by a "David Lindsay," wins the prize for me. I quote it all, for its genuine insights and wrong-headed, state-worship of a kind that might make an old Soviet functionary blush (although it is entirely possible that Lindsay is a certain kind of "High Tory" who sentimentalises working class life). This comment reminds me of a piece of dialogue of that brilliant Peter Sellers film, "I'm All Right Jack", when Sellers, playing the union shop steward constantly at loggerheads with "the bosses", is praising life in Stalin's Russia. Take it away, Mr Linsday:

"In the farewell souvenir edition [of NoTW ed], it was heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers' educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either."

As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own final back page indicated, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers' Educational Association, the Miners' Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.

For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.

Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People's Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers' Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.

What are they doing "to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention"?

I loved the patronising lines about brass and silver bands. I wish Peter Sellers were still alive now; how he would have loved this sort of comment and used it for his material. I am not sure if Mr Lindsay would get the joke.

You see what's happening? Two separate grievances and two separate targets - one totally justified, the other largely not - are being joined together. The "journalistic culture" Campbell has spent the past 10 years complaining about is not newspapers that have invaded people's privacy - but newspapers that have been too unkind to important public servants such as himself.

- Andrew Gilligan, under the headline: "Phone hacking scandal: enemies of free press are circling". Indeed.

I've just discovered what many must have known for years, that the true test of a real news story is when you just don't believe it.

When I read just now, at Guido's, the news that the News of the World has been closed, I thought, you're 'avin' a laugh, and I was merely puzzled as to why. What, I thought to myself, is the point of concocting this bizarre joke (in the form of a fake press release), and at such bizarre length? Newspapers that are making tons of money and which have lots of readers don't just close, merely because they've done something wrong. Newspapers die, but that's entirely different.

Yet, it appears to be so. The News of the World is indeed to shut.

The only serious attention that I have ever given to the News of the World was when it broke this story about Pakistan cricket corruption. I was grateful for that sting operation then, and am accordingly a bit regretful now. Although I do agree that if you want to make your newspaper hated by everyone, then it is hard to think of a better way of doing it than to get caught busting into the phones of a murder victim and her family.

The NotW is being shut, I presume, to enable Rupert Murdoch's various television plans to proceed profitably. Will this dramatic step do the trick? Might it not make Murdoch look even worse, by drawing yet more attention to the skullduggery that he presided over and surely knew all about, and to the fact that he only closed the NotW when the skullduggery became public knowledge?

David Cameron, because of his close connection to the NotW gang, is also looking very bad. The line here at Samizdata on that will presumably be: oh dear, how tragic.

Buried deep in this article - which (and I realise this won't go down very well here) is effusively positive about David Cameron and his attitude towards the internet and internet entrpreneurship, at any rate when compared with Nicholas Sarkozy - is the following extraordinary claim:

… France just banned the use of the words Facebook and Twitter on TV ...

This report, however, at least adds the words "unless those specific words are a part of a news story", which makes it somewhat less mad. Still mad, though.

Can it be true? The story seems to have come and gone sometime around one month ago, and my first guess was that maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't, but that the wave of derision which greeted it will by now have caused the French Government to say that it never said any such thing, and that what it did was was totally misunderstood, blah blah, clarification, we didn't say it, we did say it but we didn't mean it, malicious twisting by foreign commercial interests saying that we said what we said, how dare they?, blah blah.

Apparently not:

The French reason that mentioning the companies by name gives unfair “advertising” to giant social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Their logic: why give a leg up to Facebook, already worth millions, when there are dozens of smaller sites struggling to survive. So, to be extra fair, when signing off, the newscasters can suggest that their viewers follow them on a social media platform in which transmission is limited to 140 characters. Bon chance!

They're not allowed to say "email" either.

Les Grenouilles are indeed strange people.

Ezra Levant:

There are about 100 professional anti-oilsands activists in Canada, who do nothing but attack Canada’s oil industry. Typically they pose as grassroots environmentalists. But the facts are different.

Most environmental activists are actually paid professionals. And most work for foreign lobbyists.

He is talking only of Canada, but even so, it puts a whole different slant on things, doesn't it? Read the rest of the piece for a few details.

I also think it puts a different slant on the constantly heard - and utterly ridiculous - claim that in the absence of Old School Dead Tree Media news reporting, there will no longer be any news, just bloggers blogging and twitterers twittering, about nothing.

There will still be plenty of news. But it may be somewhat different news.

In the post below, Jonathan quotes Theodore Dalrymple saying the following rather mind-boggling statement.

"[Journalists are taxed at lower rates than normal people] ... this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors."

He thinks this is a good thing? Seriously? Journalists have an incentive to cover up the wrongdoings of the powerful, and this is good?

Leaving aside the obvious corollary of this, that France effectively licenses journalists, I personally do not think that politicians and bureaucrats should have any right to privacy whatsoever. They choose to go into politics, and they are trusted with our money and are given considerable power over us. In return, everything they do up to and including going to the toilet should be subject to scrutiny. They should have some protection against being libelled (but even then a relatively weak right - the burden of proof should be on the politician and it should be necessary to prove both untruth and malice). In truth I am not that keen on extending much of a right to privacy to anyone else either. As long as you are telling the truth, you should generally be able to say it out loud, in any forum. This is one case where the Americans have it right with the First Amendment.

As for the vulgarisation of culture, London is the most culturally vibrant city in Europe. Culturally speaking, Paris today is about as interesting as English food circa 1955. At least, Paris inside the peripherique is. There are some interesting things going on in rap music, language and art in some of Paris' suburbs, but I doubt that Dalrymple is much of a fan. The price of cultural interestingness may be some vulgarity, but who gets to decide what is vulgar and what is art? Old men decrying the tastes of yoof today, I guess. The Nazis were very keen on doing this, too. As are the Chinese communists.

China is a deeply authoritarian place. As a consequence of that, the country is culturally pretty dead. The Chinese watch imported movies, and encourage their children to learn to play western classical music. What is produced domestically and gets wide distribution is frighteningly bland, which is what happens under authoritarian regimes. Interesting things can be going on underneath, which can sometimes lead to cultural explosions when the authoritarian regimes are gone (see Spanish and South Korean post-dictatorship cinema, for instance), but China is a way from that.

Who do you compare China with, though? There is one obvious rival.

In late April, a couple of days after some unspeakable barbarians had exploded a bomb in a restaurant in Marrakesh, I was sitting in a cafe in Fez, in a more northern part of Morocco. As in many cafes worldwide, there was a television in the room. This was showing a soap opera of some kind on a pan-Arabic TV channel. (There are many, many, many pan-Arabic TV channels. They are run out of Qatar and Dubai. Moroccan roofs have more satellite dishes on them than I have seen anywhere else on earth). This particular pan-Arab channel was showing a soap opera or a popular movie of some kind.

In any event, the program in question contained some Islamic symbols. There were mosques in the background of a few scenes. The TV was showing subtitles in Arabic. I am not sure if that was because the program was originally in some other language or if these were just closed captions in the same language as the original material, turned on because there was a lot of background noise. (It may have been that the program was in fact Pakistani, and the original language was Urdu, but I am not sure). In any event, though, the program contained musical dance numbers of a form that were familiar to me. And there were slightly more bare female midriffs than one expects on TV in an Arab country. I expect there were more than one sees on domestic Moroccan TV, too, which partially explains the satellite dishes. Morocco is authoritarian enough to censor its own TV, but not authoritarian enough to attempt to ban the dishes.

The program was not made in India, but the grammar of the program was entirely that of Bollywood. In North-West Africa, in the Arab world, one of the leading cultural influences is clearly India. This is hardly surprising. Go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar and who does the actual work? People from South Asia; Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. Even when they are making programs for Arab markets, they use their own cultural reference points. Even when making programs for their own market, Pakistanis use Indian cultural reference points. However it happens, and however second or third hand it comes, the cultural influence of Bombay on the Middle East and North Africa is clearly immense

And is Bollywood vulgar? Oh Lord yes. More conservative Indians elsewhere in the country denounce its amoral wickedness as much as anyone in America has ever denounced Hollywood. The entertainment industries of India are run by gangsters at least as depraved as any who have ever run Hollywood or Las Vegas. It isn't any great coincidence that the most savage terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists in recent years was on the city of Bombay. This is the heart of wickedness and vulgarity, and they know where the enemy is. Indian culture is vibrant and vulgar. On the surface and in the mass market at least, Chinese culture is dead. And Indian culture is the country's greatest weapon against its enemies.

I used to read Theodore Dalrymple (aka, Antony Daniels) quite a bit, and some of his collections of essays, such as "Life At The Bottom", are searing and very honest depictions of problems in the modern world, even though I find them to be short on remedies.

But while I can share some of his horror at certain trends - such as welfare dependency - there is an increasingly marked level of sustained, Daily Mail authortarianism and the sky-is-falling-in hysteria in his work, a sort of constant refrain that everything in the world is getting more "vulgar". (A certain amount of vulgarity is, if you think about it, a sign of health, or life generally). A particularly good example of this sort of humourlessness can be found in an article about the attractive sister of one of the new UK royals.. In that article, he made a generally good point but as is increasingly the case, overdid it to such an extent that he seemed to be doing what a lot of British grand journalists do: wallow in disgust at his fellow countrymen and women while at the same time keeping the object of his supposed disgust in continued view.

His current obsession is the "vulgarity" of modern culture, and, presumably, a desire that something less vulgar takes its place. Some idea of how Dalrymple thinks that might be achieved can be seen in this not terribly convincing defence of France's draconian privacy laws, which muzzle the media in its coverage of the shenanigans of public figures, such as the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund. He writes of how Mr Strauss-Kahn's personal life was kept private by the French media:

"Had the French press and media failed in their duty, or had they maintained the correct distinction between private and public life? The French often pride themselves that they are more respectful of the private life of public figures, more mature about sexual matters, and generally less prurient, than les anglo-saxons, who are at one and the same time libertine and puritanical, in short grossly hypocritical."

"It is obvious that the two opposed policies - to tell all or say nothing - have different disadvantages. The first leads, when carried to excess, to a general vulgarisation of the culture, well-illustrated by Britain, the most vulgar country in the world (at least that is known to me). The second, when carried to excess, leads to the impunity of the powerful in a sphere well beyond the private. Since most policies are carried to excess at some time or another, the question amounts to this: do you prefer the vulgarisation of culture to the impunity of the powerful? Within limits - and clearly there are limits in France - I prefer the latter."

He then writes about a tax issue as it affects journalists in France. I was not aware of this tax issue, but if true, this proves that French civil society is even more buggered than I had imagined:

"One of the reasons, not generally adverted to in the foreign press, for the journalistic silence about the behaviour of the elite is the special tax regime that journalists enjoy in France. In a country with very high tax rates, where a visit from the fisc is viewed with about as much pleasure as a visit from the Gestapo, this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors."

Here's another paragraph. I love the silkiness of how TD talks about the "tolerance" of French society:

"Should the French press have told all before the events in New York – with the implication that the events might then have been averted? It seems that Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour went considerably beyond the normal even for a tolerant country."

No kidding.

"It might be argued that his private behaviour in France made him unsuitable for his post in the IMF, not because he was incompetent, but because he was incapable of conforming to the mores of the country in which the IMF had its seat."

Ah, ze great seducer cannot be allowed to live in eeevil, puritan Amerika. Seriously, is the author of this piece arguing that a man who uses his power and influence to not just seduce, but allegedly attack, women, would be suitable in any part of the world, be it New York, Paris or Tokyo?

"As in so many matters, the relevance of a man's private life to his suitability for a position of public trust is a question of judgment, rather than of hard and fast rule. Public figures are not, and will never be, plaster saints; and wisdom before the event is always considerably more difficult than wisdom after it. Boring as happy mediums no doubt are, I should wish for just such a happy medium between corrupt French indulgence towards the elite, and vulgar, hypocritical, prurient British interest in the elite's private affairs. If, for some reason, a happy medium were not possible, I should prefer the French way."

In other words, a largely ineffective press. For all its many faults, I prefer the British way. After all, in the end - after a lot of attempts - the UK media were able to bring down a number of bent members of parliament over the expenses issue. As I write, there remains coverage of the venality of officials at FIFA, the global football organisation; the UK media has also in the past been willing to cover the corruptions, major or minor, in places such as the EU. And in the US, the First Amendment means that the shortcomings of politicians are covered. Yes, such a "muck-raking" press can be hypocritical, but for example, does anyone imagine that a journalist such as Bob Tyrrell could have hammered Bill Clinton under a French system of law?

I am only a very occasional Guardian reader, of things like classical CD reviews and cricket stories, but thanks to Mick Hartley, of whose blog I am a regular reader, I found my way to this classic of the grovelling courtier genre, perpetrated by a ridiculous creep named Stephen Wilkinson.

Wilkinson's piece concerns the content of a two and half hour speech recently given by Fidel Castro's younger brother. Although, Raul Castro is young only in the Young Mr Grace sense. Which is what I think we should now call this junior monster: Young Mr Castro. If a full-on comedy TV show about the Castro brothers happens, let it be called: Are You Being Shafted? But I digress.

The only people who will be unreservedly admiring of this piece by Stephen Wilkinson will be the geriatric despots on whose behalf and in pursuit of whose money it was presumably written, although if they realise how little anyone else will be impressed by it, other than for its comic appeal, even they may grumble. What Stephen Wilkinson feels about having written such a thing, one can only imagine.

The one honourable excuse for it that I can think of is that Wilkinson is a spook, keeping an eye on Cuba on behalf of the civilised world, and sucking up to its current rulers by recycling their interminable speeches and futile policy spasms into English. Alas, Occam's Razor says it's for the money. Mick Hartley draws our attention to commenters, here and here, who note that Wilkinson has an academic fiefdom to keep fed and watered, which is falling on hard times. He needs cash and cannot afford to be choosy. Come to think of it, he probably is a spook, part time, also for the money.

Meanwhile, few Guardian readers will warm to paragraphs like this, with its talk of "large landowners":

Among the economic changes he mentioned, two stand out - new laws being drafted to permit the sale of houses and cars and another to allow the transfer of more state land to farmers who are successful. The first will be a huge fillip for the internal market and the latter will create the conditions for large landowners to emerge for the first time since 1959. When taken with the new proposals to allow people to employ workers, it does not take a vivid imagination to see how substantial the economic transformation could be. In Cuba, 90% of the workforce is currently employed by the state - the target is to reduce that to 65% in five years.

Those of us who favour freedom and oppose despotism will be pleased about this further clear admission of utter ideological defeat. But we won't be that happy about such proclamations either.

What took these stupid old brutes so long to get with it about how economic life actually works? And are these brutes, who took so long to see sense, likely to preside over reforms like this with any success? It seems most improbable. And following the recent experiences of Russia, we will surely now fear an outburst of kleptocracy rather than of anything seriously resembling a free market. State assets, we must surely fear, will now be looted by the old Bolshevik nomenklatura, and the idea of a free market economy will then be as much discredited in Cuban eyes, as welcomed. The best thing about the next version of Cuba is that it may at least become somewhat easier to escape from, although not even that may be so, because leaving includes finding somewhere else to go. Might that soon become harder?

Many commenters at the Guardian focus particular derision on this particularly over-the-top claim from Wilkinson:

What we are witnessing here then is possibly something unique in history: a nation in a process of massive change and adaption.

What sort of ridiculous state of mind to you have to be in to write nonsense as totally and completely nonsensical as that?

In order to be sporting to the Guardian, Mick Hartley also links to another Guardian piece about Young Mr Castro's speech, entitled Cuba's theatre of the absurd, in which Carlos Eire writes that the present situation in Cuba is: absurd. Reform? Been there, seen that fail. According to this profile of him, Carlos Eire has written a book which just might be worth a look:

His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), won the National Book Award in nonfiction for 2003, but is banned in Cuba, where he is considered an enemy of the state.

Good for him. Although I personally fear that his complaints about Cuba are that it has betrayed socialism, failed to do enough of it, etc., instead of him pointing out that the problem is Cuba having done socialism.

Besides which, as Hartley surely realises, it is not much of a defence of something that presumably still wants to be thought of as a serious newspaper that only half of its recent commentary on some stupid speech by a stupid old Bolshevik was grovelling bilge, as opposed to all of it.

As for Cuba itself, there is, I would say, now some hope at least, not because of these "reforms", but because of who is proposing them, and the weakness and abject bewilderment and self-contradiction they reveal. Cuba is now presided over by men so old that they are palpably losing all grip. That's new. And cause for at least some optimism.

"I just caught the last couple of minutes of a cable-TV documentary about Playboy magazine, which featured a clip of Hugh Hefner opining about the huge cultural impact the magazine has had in its 50-plus years of existence. And it struck me as an illustration that, even in the realm of culture and ideas, it’s the supply side that makes the greatest difference. Two young men in the mid-1950s had vastly different ideas of what the American audience really wanted and needed, and ventured forth to create magazines that reflected these views. Hugh Hefner, convinced that America was too sexually conservative and really needed to let its hair down, founded Playboy in 1953. Bill Buckley, convinced that America was too politically liberal and needed to restore its older, small-r republican virtues that had been eroded in the Progressive and New Deal eras, founded National Review in 1955. Now, think about how these ventures must have appeared at the time. Playboy was an outrage to conventional pieties about sexuality. National Review was an outrage to conventional pieties about politics. How much money would you have bet, at the time, that either one would survive for very long? “A dirty magazine? Won’t people be embarrassed to buy it?” “A magazine that’s to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon? Are there that many real fringies out there?” But the supply side takes a chance. And, quite amazingly, both ventures succeeded beyond imagining. Playboy bore fruit in the Sexual Revolution, which may already have reached its high point but shows little sign of receding. And from National Review emerged Reaganism, and conservatism as the broadly dominant system of political thought in recent years."

Michael Potemra.

It is an interesting piece of commentary. Is it really true, though, that conservatism (however defined) is the "broadly dominant system of political thought in recent years"? I suppose it might be to the extent that the rise of Obama is in fact an aberration rather than anything else. But even if that is true, then it would be nice to see this reflected, long term, in the relative decline, not rise, of state power and spending.

Anyway, Hefner and Buckley were indeed very influential figures, no doubt about it. I have always had a lot of time for Hefner - he upsets the sort of people who need to be upset.

Update: Hefner has taken his business private.

Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in a suit walks up to you holding a large cudgel...

"Excuse me," he says, "I have seen you walk down this street on a daily basis wearing a tee-shirt and in future I would like you to wear a suit and tie to raise the tone of the neighbourhood."

"Er, no," you reply, "I am happy dressed the way I am."

"I see," the man replies, "well I would rather not have to threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you do not do what I say so I want you to voluntarily agree to wear a suit and tie."

"But you are threatening to hit me with that cudgel!" you point out.

"No," he says, "I will only threaten to hit you with this cudgel if you don't do what I want voluntarily."

This statement of the bleedin' obvious by me was brought on this sadly typical piece of 'press release' style journalism:

The three voluntary “responsibility deals” agreed with the food industry are aimed at helping the public to eat more healthily, in a drive to tackle the growing problem of obesity among both adults and children. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, believes that firms will be more likely to set ambitious targets for themselves if they are negotiated on a voluntary basis. Rather than a “nanny state” approach, he is keen to arm the public with the tools they need to cope in an “obesogenic environment,” where people are bombarded with adverts for unhealthy food.

If firms break their promises, the Government will however consider taking compulsory measures.

So rather than writing an article that explains the dynamic of what is going on here, Rosa Prince in effect just delivers a government press release complete with the approved spin... 'voluntary'... 'not nanny state'...

Why exactly does The Telegraph need to have a 'political correspondent' at all rather than just republishing whatever the government wishes? What value is Rosa Prince actually adding here? The fact that these food industry groups agreed to do something under threat of compulsory measures means that this clearly is a prime example of the 'Nanny State' in action... and moreover if there is an explicit threat of legal coercion, how is this in any meaningful sense 'voluntary'?

From the latest Radio Times, concerning a Radio 4 programme entitled In Denial: Climate on the Couch, to be aired at 9pm this evening. I will listen, and I will set my radio recorder.

Radio Times blurb:

Jolyon Jenkins investigates the psychology of climate change efforts, asking why some people seem unconcerned even though scientists are forecasting terrible changes to the planet. He questions whether environmentalists and the Government have been putting out messages that are counterproductive, and whether trying to scare people into action might actually be causing them to consume more.

My suspicion is that what I and all others who listen to this programme will hear will be an explanation of the failure of the Greenists to convince that omits the crucial matter of the mere truth, and what is now sincerely believed to be the truth by more and more of the mere people. The phrase "In Denial" does strongly suggest this. And "On the Couch" suggests that they think that some people, presumably all who deny, are mad.

You know the kind of thing: People don't think there's anything they can do! - No wonder they're being crazy! - We have not communicated successfully! - We have not got our message across properly!

It probably was rather a bad idea to make it look like they want to blow up children who disagree with them. But what if, despite such communicational ineptness, they have got their message across, but people just think it's a pack of lies? If that is what people now think, then no amount of improved communicational expertise that doesn't deal with the mere truth of things will make much difference.

But, my suspicions may prove to be unjustified. As of now, I live in hope that the truth, both what it is and what it is now believed to be, will at least get a semi-respectful mention, in among all the psychologising.

LATER:

This programme isn't about climate science so it's going to assume that the scientific consensus is true.

And a moment later, someone described (it may have been Jolyon Jenkins) this consensus as "undeniable". Which was an odd word to use, given the title.

Well, at least it has just been admitted that people sometimes say that it's all being exaggerated, even if it is assumed that this is mistaken and evasive. That it might be an honest opinion is not up for discussion, because that would mean discussing climate science.

So, the early and pessimistic commenters here are right. It looks like being a long discussion of what a bunch of true-believers can do to save the world, given that a huge tranche of people has decided that the world doesn't need saving, but will have to be convinced in the true-believer stuff is to even make sense let alone accomplish anything.

The elephant in their room is that they have lost this argument, in the sense that they need unanimity in this, but are drifting further and further away from unanimity. They are ignoring this elephant. They are behaving like that economist, stuck on a desert island with various other sorts of experts, who is wondering how to contrive a tin-opener. "Let's assume we have a tin-opener." This won't work.

LATER: Thinking about this some more, I should perhaps stress that the people who sincerely disagree that CAGW is happening were not called mad, as I feared they might be. They were simply ignored. All were assumed to really believe in CAGW, but to be using some kind of psychological doublethink to evade what they knew they ought to be doing really. Like I say: let's assume we've won.

I know this kind of thing has long been known about and talked about, but the single thing that I most like about David Cameron's speech about multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on, which he gave in Munich on Saturday, is that I can read it, in its entirety. I don't have to rely on a journalist, however conscientious he may or may not have tried to be, to pass on to me whatever small fragments of the speech he considers to be significant, along with hostile reactions to such fragments that he has got or read from various people with axes to grind, many of these reactions having probably been supplied by people who haven't actually heard or read the original speech and are only going on what the journalist tells them it said. And then somebody else gets angry about one of these critical reactions, and it all spirals away from anything that actually got said in the original speech. And the bloke who gave the original speech says to himself: why do I bother? Time was when that kind of thing was all that most people had to go on. But those days are now long gone. Good riddance. Disintermediation, I think this is called.

As I say, hardly a blindingly original observation, but in the matter of this speech, I have never before felt this internet-induced improvement so strongly. The subject matter of Cameron's speech is a minefield. Although I do not agree with everything that he said (see below), I am glad that he is at least talking about this stuff, at a time when many of our more thoughtful political leaders are scared to. The existence of the internet is the difference between a much-overdue, semi-intelligent public conversation about these vexed issues and mere mudslinging.

So, given that I am able to read it all, what did I make of it? Here are a few early thoughts.

One of Cameron's most important points is that insofar as "multiculturalism" means double standards in how Muslims are treated by the British law, them being allowed to behave far worse than us indigenous ones, then multiculturalism is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea if it involves state support and encouragement for groups which encourage terrorism. Well said, and about time too.

He makes many other points, which I agree with rather less. He uses, for instance, the now established habit of curtailing the freedom of speech of racists and fascists to justify further curtailments of free speech, for Muslims. But if we all get to hear what they all have to say, fascists, Muslims, (fascist Muslims?), then we can take issue with such notions. And whenever something nasty happens that some nasty has said should happen, the police will at least know where to start looking. Free speech, quite aside from being a human right and everything, is actually quite a practical policy for maintaining civil peace. It helps a lot that most of us think that merely saying nasty things shouldn't be a crime, and that in a world where people can say pretty much what they like, the police must confine themselves to chasing after those who actually do nasty things.

I also take issue with the way that Cameron muddles together two distinct, although related ideas. On the one hand there is the idea that Islam itself is a problem, rather than just "Islamic extremism". And then there is the further idea that therefore Muslims ought to be deported, forbidden from speaking their minds, from building mosques, and generally from going around being Muslims. He opposes the second idea, but makes it seem like that necessarily means opposing the first idea also. I support the first idea, but not the second. I definitely think that Islam itself is a problem, but I believe that the answer (see my previous paragraph) is to argue with it, to tell it that it is a problem and why it is a problem, and to invite people who are wondering about it to leave or stay away from it, rather than stick with it or join it. If you must be a believer in something religious, let that religion be something like Christianity rather than Islam, because Christianity, although at least as odd from the merely is-it-true? point of view is, at the moment, so very much nicer than Islam.

Everything I observe in the reactions of the nastier kinds of Muslim tells me that they are acutely sensitive to such arguments, to the point where they would very much like such arguments to be banned, whether such arguments include deportation demands, mosque-banning and so forth, or not. To me, Cameron's thinking says, first, that banning free expression for racists and fascists is absolutely fine, and that therefore banning free speech for "Islamic extremists" is fine also. But what next? Banning people from even saying (as I do not say) that Muslims should be deported and mosque-building banned? Or even from saying (as I do say) that Islam itself is a disgusting and evil body of thought and that the only absolutely morally correct thing to do if you are a Muslim is to damn well stop being a Muslim?

Which means that I was disappointed, but not surprised, that Cameron made no mention of the right of a person to stop being a Muslim, without being subjected to death threats and worse. Disappointed, but not surprised. For Cameron, being a "devout Muslim" (as opposed to an extreme Islamist) is more than sufficient, as far as he is concerned. As Prime Minister, he is not in the business of wanting anyone to convert this way or that, other than in the very feeble sense of wanting people to vote for him and for his political party. I see that. But he ought, I think to be ready to defend the rights of those who really do want to convert, from anything to anything else, and in particular out of Islam. Cameron called for "muscular liberalism". So, when push next comes to shove in the form of a big ruckus (will this be that?) concerning someone who has stopped being a Muslim, will Cameron apply a dose of muscular liberalism to that argument, to allow such a person to believe whatever they want to believe, and to be as public as they like about it?

I confess that the phrase "muscular liberalism" did appeal to me when I first read it, and no doubt this phrase has tested positive with the focus groups. But what exactly will it mean in reality? Might it mutate into the government telling people like me that we can't be rude about devout, law-abiding Muslims and the things that such people say they believe in? ("Muscular liberalism" in the USA would be a terrifying idea.) I am sure that many Muslims already fear - are being encouraged by each other to fear - that it may degenerate into a mere excuse for Muslim bashing, in the physical and wrong sense, by the government and its employees, and by many others. Perhaps (actually I'm inclined, as I read this through before posting it, to make that: probably), as we all challenge the phrase from our various different positions, muscular liberalism will degenerate into one of those mush phrases that mean whatever anyone listening wants it to mean, and then by and by, whatever the powers that be want it to mean. In other words it may degenerate into meaning nothing, just like the words "Big Society" have, in the minds of nearly everyone I meet or read.

But I want to end where I began, with the pleasure I feel that I and all others who choose to comment on this speech, here or anywhere else, are at least able, if we want to, to read the speech itself. Last night, for example, at the Christian Michel evening that I alluded to in an earlier posting, I got talking with an acquaintance about Cameron's speech. After he had begun to opine about it, rather intelligently, I asked him: Have you actually read the speech? Yes, he said. Me too, I said. This exchange pleased me then and it pleases me still.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that Emma Jay grossly misled Delingpole as to the nature of the programme.

It does occur to me though that in the internet age, this kind of thing, while remaining possible, will be hard to sustain in the long run. Anyone who is ever approached by Ms Jay can immediately put her name into Google and discover that she cannot be taken at her word. In the internet age a TV producer or journalist stands or falls on their integrity.

Emma Jay's looks to be gone, as does that of Rupert Murray, the guy who dissembled his way into Monckton's confidence. I wonder what these question marks over their trustworthiness will do for their career prospects.

- Bishop Hill, in a posting entitled Integrity in the internet age reflects on the lack of integrity that was involved in the making of two recent BBC attempts to drive a stake into the climate sceptics. The thing about Bishop Hill is that he does not make such judgements lightly. He does not indulge in thoughtless abuse, and constantly posts little homilies discouraging it among his commenters. If he says you lack integrity, the chances are, overwhelmingly, that you do.

Presumably, many will want to defend these deceptions as being beneficial in the same way as has been claimed on behalf of whoever it was who revealed all those Climategate emails. But the fact remains that if you are dealing with either of the two above mentioned people, you should not trust them to tell you the truth about what sort of progamme they are really making. Their cover is now, as Bishop Hill says, blown.

Strange to see an article like this in what is still sometimes called the Torygraph:

Mortgage lenders penalising couples with children

Mortgage lenders are penalising home owners with children by reducing the amount they can borrow. The crackdown could potentially prevent them from switching to cheaper deals when interest rates rise. Many banks and building societies have tightened their affordability criteria in light of the Financial Services Authority's post-credit-crunch review of the mortgage market. But it has emerged that families with children are being hit hard.

Emphasis added by me. All the terms emphasised relate to a metaphor of punishment. But it is not meant to depict just punishment; the author, Teresa Hunter, apparently feels that parents who are lent less money than non-parents are having something unfair done to them. This is reinforced by having the first person quoted in the piece as saying:

"It is absolutely unfair to penalise people with children by reducing their capacity to borrow compared with a single person or a childless couple."

The whole story is presented as being one of discrimination akin to racial discrimination. Did the author notice that there was a little financial unpleasantness in 2008 that had something to do with indiscriminate lending? Does she feel that encouraging people to to borrow more than they can afford is doing them any favours? Has she not noticed that children cost money?

As in BBC Radio 4, this coming Monday, January 31st, 8.30 pm:

That's from the current Radio Times. As you can tell from the pink, I will be paying close attention. My thanks to fellow Samizdatista Chris Cooper for alerting me to this radio programme.

But will it be an attempt at a hatchet job? It seems not:

This week, Jamie Whyte looks at the free market Austrian School of F A Hayek. The global recession has revived interest in this area of economics which many experts and politicians had believed dead and gone. "Austrian" economists focus not on the bust but on the boom that came before it. At the heart of their argument is that low interest rates sent out the wrong signals to investors, causing them to borrow to spend on "malinvestments", such as overpriced housing. The solution is not for government to fill the gap which private money has now left. Markets work better, Austrians believe, if left alone. Analysis asks how these libertarian economists interpret the state we're in and why they're back in fashion. Is it time to reassess one of the defining periods of economic history? Consensus would have it that the Great Depression of the 1930s was brought to an end by Franklin D Roosevelt's Keynesian policies. But is that right? Jamie Whyte asks whether we'd all have got better quicker with a strong dose of Austrian medicine and whether the same applies now?

I think I first encountered Jamie Whyte at a Cobden Centre dinner.

I was disappointed with the recent Robert Peston TV show about the banking crisis, despite appearances on it by Toby Baxendale, the founder of and Chairman of the Cobden Centre. All the fault of the banks was the basic message, with governments looking on helplessly. No mention (that I can now recall) of those same governments monopolising the supply of money and relentlessly determining the price of borrowing it, all day and every day, all the time.

But, my understanding of Baxendale and of the Cobden Centre is that he (it) is playing a long game, giving broadcasters whatever they ask for (in Peston's case Baxendale messing about with fish), while all the time asking them to give the Cobden Centre's ideas at least something resembling a decent hearing. Don't compromise on the ideas, but be endlessly mellow and accommodating at the personal level, intellectual steel in velvet glove, and so on and so forth. If that's right, then it may be starting to work.

The other night, when I had the TV on, I saw that one of the programmes, featuring the BBC top economics and business correspondent, Robert Peston, was all about the financial panic of recent years. Oh dear, I thought, I can just imagine the usual line about how it was all the fault of greedy bankers, insufficient regulation, "unregulated laissez faire capitalism", and on and on. Well, not quite. Yes, some of those elements were there, but there was also quite a lot of sophisticated explanation of how a combination of forces - leverage, "too big to fail bailout protection, over-confidence in newfangled ideas of risk management and misalignment of incentives for bankers - combined to create the storm. I would have liked to see more focus on the role of ultra-low central bank interest rates in creating the crisis, as well as government intervention in the housing market and through deposit insurance, but to be fair, this was mentioned, several times. There was little in the show with which someone like Kevin Dowd, recently referred to here, would dispute, although I imagine Kevin might want to make more about the vexed issue of ownership of banks and limited liability.

And about three-quarters of the way into the show was Toby Baxendale, founder of the Cobden Centre, the organisation founded last year to flag up the problems caused by central banking fiat money, and which sets out alternative ideas, such as the possibility of giving depositors in no-notice cash accounts the right to demand that their cash is properly looked after, not lent out for months in a risky play. (Yup, it is that pesky fractional reserve banking issue again). Toby was very forceful and his views were treated respectfully by Peston. There was no sneering.

In short, this was and is a pretty good programme as far as the MSM goes. I give it about 8 out of 10. Yes, I am not drunk.

As regulars may know, there is no hard editorial line in these parts about certain views, such as intellectual property rights (steady on, old chap, Ed). Take the case of the "whistleblower" site Wikileaks. Samizdata's founder, Perry de Havilland, has come round to taking the view that whatever collateral damage might be caused by Wikileaks, that the benefits outweigh the bad. I am less sanguine than that; I fear that the activities of Wikileaks may make governments become even more secretive. I admit that much of this stems around attempts forecast the unknowable. For all I know, Perry may be proven right and my reservations are unfounded.

But as they say about making omelettes and breaking eggs, a lot of eggs can be broken on the way to culinary goals. And this latest story, concerning a fired Julius Baer banker who has decided to publish reams of client data on Wikileaks two days before he goes before a court, is instructive. Sure, some people who use offshore bank accounts via Zurich or wherever are up to no good, and deserve to be exposed. This is particularly the case if such persons are politicians who favour high taxes, socialist economics and the rest. When it turns out that such folk are salting away their wealth in Zurich, Zug or Geneva, it is delicious to see their discomfiture. But - and it is a big but - many people who bank offshore are not primarily looking to hide ill-gotten gains or adopting a double standard; they are people who wish to take advantage of free capital movement and "vote" with their wallets for a low tax jurisdiction. "Exit" is often more powerful than "voice"; the ability to leave a jurisdiction, as I have said before, is one of the few incentives to make oppressive regimes marginally better behaved.

Consider what Wikileaks might want to expose next: health records? The insured art collections of certain people? You can see how leaking such data could be a gift to would-be kidnappers and extortion artists. This is not a theoretical issue. Dan Mitchell and Chris Edwards, in their book, "Global Tax Revolution: the Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It", published in 2008 by the Cato Institute, point out that in some parts of the world, a high proportion of individuals bank offshore because their domestic governments have habitually robbed them in the past. Disclosure of financial details can lead to a person having his daughter's body parts mailed through with a letter threatening further horrors unless a payment is made. Bank privacy is not, therefore, something that only criminals take advantage of, although that business is often portrayed that way.

Like I said, omelettes and broken eggs. We'll see how this dish turns out.

This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.

I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.

So here goes.

In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.

Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, there had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.

Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they'd deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.

Hard to choose, wasn't it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.

It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.

Enter the Tea Party.

The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …

I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I'll put the next five words into the title of this posting.

… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.

The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.

The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are "extreme" Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.

The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blaim for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)

No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.

This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don't say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.

As has already recently been noted here by Michael Jennings, Australia is just now doing rather badly at cricket. The first day of the recently concluded Melbourne game was, for Australia, particularly calamitous. Australia all out 98, England 157 for no wicket. That, trust me, was very bad indeed for Australia. Bear in mind that this was not just any old bad day; this was Boxing Day at the MCG, against England, one of the great days of the Australian sporting calendar, like Derby Day or Grand National day in England or Superbowl Sunday in the USA. After that first day disaster, there looked to be no way back in this particular game for the Australians, and so it proved. England, having won the Ashes back in 2009 in England, will now keep them. If I am optimistic about England's chances of avoiding a deeply disappointing 2-2 draw in the series in the forthcoming final test at Sydney, it is because I believe that the leaders of the England team agree with me that if they lose in Sydney that will seriously take the shine off their entire campaign.

Okay, sport hurrah! Blah blah blah. But last night, as I settled down to watch the televised highlights of the final spasms of that Melbourne game on ITV4, I realised something else that was, for me, new and different, besides England thrashing Australia in Australia at cricket. Someone else was suffering, if my behaviour was anything to go by, besides Aussie cricketers and cricket fans.

In the past, when a major sports team that I am fond of (usually either the England cricket team or the England rugby team) has done really well, I go out and buy an armful of newspapers and have a good wallow, with newspaper pages spread out all over my living room floor. I know, I know, the internet has been with us for at least a decade. But the habit of newspaper buying has been a hard one for me entirely to break, especially at times like these. Well, now, finally, I seem to be cured of it. I made no conscious "decision". I simply, I now realise, didn't buy any newspapers. Never even thought about it.

It seems that I have learned enough about surfing the internet to no longer want newspapers even for sporting excitements, even when I would actually enjoy reading about a quarter of what is in them, and might learn all kinds of other things if I at least glanced through the rest of them. Recent newspaper purchases, made for this or that forgotten reason, have only resulted in them being almost totally unread.

It also helped that, this time around, I now have a brand spanking new computer, with several tons more RAM than before, and quick as lightning compared to anything I've ever had until now.

It seems that I am not the only one now thinking like this about newspapers, and more to the point buying (as in not buying) like this. (My thanks for that link to Guido Fawkes.)

If one newspaper puts itself behind a paywall, well, there are plenty of others who have yet to do this. If they all, sometime soonish, go behind a paywall, well, I'll deal with that problem when it happens. Meanwhile, plenty of verbiage is now given away on big sports dramas, and I can now find all I want about England cricket successes for nothing, and in a paperlessly calm manner. Personally, I don't believe that there ever will be any great lack of good free-to-read stuff about cricket, even if the "professional" journalists do all end up requiring payment to be read (as well they might). The amateurs will happily step forward, I say, in fact I'm pretty sure that they already have. It's just that for as long as the old school media mostly give their cricket stuff away, I haven't bothered to find out which new websites and blogs I could go to. I'd welcome suggestions as to where else I might be reading about cricket, besides Cricinfo and the big newspaper websites of the cricketing world.

Part of my point here is: although these kinds of changes are absolute in nature, and very abrupt in historic time, at the time they happen they are often experienced as oddly gradual, and even preventable should you happen to want them prevented. What is later clear to have been a total wipe-out happens at the time as single figure percentage drops. This particular bit of writing has long been on the wall, but it often takes a bit of a while for sufficient numbers to read such writing and to make the long-prophesied on-off switch actually do its switch. For one thing, the hardware often needs to evolve, speed up, get easier and nicer, and so on. In this case, gradually, they (we) are, and it is. And in this case, the phrase "writing on the wall" seems peculiarly apt, even if the wall in question is virtual and electronic rather than literal.

What seems to be happening is that many are now willing to pay pennies to read professional media stuff, on their iPads and iPhones and Google-Android equivalents. How much of a real business this will turn into remains to be seen. Very big but very different from the recent past would be my current guess. I don't believe that Rupert Murdoch has necessarily made a big mistake with his Times paywall decision, by the way. His old regime couldn't last, and had to be changed. He has merely decided which bit of the new internet business he wants the Times to be in. The Times now faces turmoil as it adjusts to its new reality, but that doesn't mean that it won't adjust.

Meanwhile, all those who, like me, want also to write about it (whatever it might be) and to link to other writings about it will continue to want free stuff. It's absolutely not - or not only - that we amateurs are cheap. The key is linkage. If we can't say to everyone reading our own free stuff: hey, have a read of this (no link there because that is my exact point), there is, for us amateur writers, no point in us reading it either.

Another way of putting all this is to say that whereas it used to be that the Mainstream Media were … the mainstream media, while us internetters all lived in our dusty little caves of off-message opinion, gibbering and cursing with only our closest friends, now it is the pay-as-you-read ex-mainstream media who will be the ones living, if not in caves, then at least indoors, so to speak, and hence ever more cut off from "public" opinion. Think: Palace of Versailles. That this switch is already happening explains a lot about the current state of politics, worldwide.

The Telegraph is weird. It has Booker and Delingpole raining curses down upon the whole climate science watermelon scam. But elsewhere on its plantation it has someone or something called "mytelegraph" saying things like this:

Scientists have called for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions, as world leaders meet in Cancun for the latest round of talks on climate change.

Do you agree that rationing is the best solution? Should governments be investing more in green technologies? Is there any point in agreeing carbon limits if some countries opt out?

What should leaders be trying to agree?

My thanks to "bravo" (who commented on Delingpole's latest posting) for alerting me to this absurdity, and for in particular recommending that we all look at the comments on it.

Such as this:

They should agree how lucky they are to have such a fine old time on taxpayer money, then go home and get real jobs.

Or this:

Not to meet again?

To throw in the towel?

To admit they've being rumbled and now the greatest scientific scam of all time is collapsing faster than anyone could have predicted?

Or this:

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Those being a few of the shorter ones. Many are longer. Many are far more abusive.

There is not one comment among the fifty odd that have so far accumulated that make suggestions of the sort that "mytelegraph" seems to have wanted.

On this particular matter at least, the best are now full of passionate intensity, while the worst now lack all conviction. It's all over bar the defunding. In other words it is not all over by any means. It will take decades for the world to recover from this scam and clean up all the mess it has caused. But totally winning the mere argument is a necessary and excellent start.

"The Wikileaks story is great fun. The embarrassment of others always is. But however much the Guardian, the New York Times and Julian Assange assure us that this represents a shattering blow to every assumption we hold about foreign relations, the fact remains that it’s a collection of little substance that will do nothing to reshape geo-politics. The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding. Afghanistan is run by crooks? Really? Hillary Clinton would like to know a lot more about the diplomats she is negotiating against? You surprise me. The Russian government may have links to organised crime? Pass the smelling salts, Petunia. The Americans are secretly whacking al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen? What, you thought the Yemenis were doing it? Muammar Qaddafi has a full time, pneumatic Ukrainian ‘nurse’? Nice one. Diplomats are terrified of Pakistan’s nukes? Me too. And so on, ad infinite boredom."

Ben Brogan, The Daily Telegraph.

I had some thoughts on the Wikileaks outfit a short time ago. As Brogan says, none of the revelations seem be dangerous in terms of revealing, say, agents in the field who might now be in fear of their lives, nor has it betrayed deception measures of the type designed to foil the enemy, as in leaking cipher codes. All I would say is that Mr Assange had better get himself some decent personal security. He's pissed off the likes of the Saudis. Very unclever.

Pro Tea Party writers in the USA still, mostly, call their statist enemies "liberals". Later in that same piece I've linked to, its author, Michael Gerson, also uses the phrase "panicked progressives", partly because "progressive" is an alternative word for "liberal" that is now doing the rounds with what appears to me, from here in the UK, to be particular vigour just now (having (like "liberal") been around for many decades), and partly, presumably, because panic and progressive both begin with p and the phrase sounds good. I like pretty much everything Gerson says in this piece, but put it like this: I wish he lived in a world where there already were better words hammered into everyone's heads to describe the people he is criticising other than "liberal" and "progressive".

Because, the word "progressive" is just as wrong as the word "liberal". The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren't "liberals". They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call "progress". Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled "progressives" are only making things worse.

Underneath these unsatisfactory labels, which the statist (a better word for these people in my opinion) enemies of liberty and progress have chosen for themselves and have been using for decades, is an assumption, both by the statists and by those who really do believe in liberty and in progress, that the statists are the people who will inevitably continue to decide about such labels.

But the statists no longer do. One of the biggest events to have happened in the entire world in the last two or three years is that the statist tendency has lost its monopoly control of the media in the USA. The statist media used to be "mainstream". No longer. Now, their bias is utterly clear and out in the open, because there is now a whole different torrent of different media outlets exposing this bias, every day, every hour, every minute. The statists no longer control the agenda. The statists no longer control the language.

Well, that's not quite right. Statists are still controlling the language, because they are still being allowed to.

But statist words will go on meaning what the statists want them to mean only if the real liberals and the real progressives allow such foolishness to continue. For the people who really do believe in liberty and in progress can now decide their own language. They can use their own preferred words amongst themselves and they can attach their own preferred words to their enemies, and when they do, there will not be a damn thing that the statists will be able to do to stop them.

In this blog posting, which is centrally about not using the words "liberal" and "progressive" to describe people who are neither, I have instead called these people "statists". I am somewhat unsure about that word's rightness, not least because it might suggest greater devolution of power within the USA, in accordance with its Constitution, from the Federal Government to state governments, rather than any sort of generalised opposition to or suspicion of governmental compulsion of all kinds. Comments on that, including comments to the effect that there are much better words than "statist" out there, just waiting to step up or which already have stepped up to verbal stardom, so to speak, which I hadn't thought of or which I have temporarily forgotten about, would be very welcome. Dirigiste? Centralist? Governmentalist? Despotist?

Whatever. "Statist" (or whatever) is not central the point of this posting, which is a double negative, rather than anything positive. What I am very sure about is that people who really do believe in liberty and in progress should stop calling the enemies of liberty "liberals" and should stop calling the enemies of progress "progressives".

Instapundit (and yes I am reading him a lot just now) has been linking to a book called Gray Lady Down, which is about the downfall of the New York Times, from a persuasive proclaimer of the statist consensus to an unpersuasive proclaimer of the statist ex-consensus. I've not read this book, but it has a big picture of a skyscraper on its front cover. Might there, I wondered, be a brand new, custom-built headquarters involved in this story? There might indeed:

The New York Times Building is a skyscraper on the west side of Midtown Manhattan that was completed in 2007. ...

Previous example of something very similar here. Since writing that earlier posting, I have dug out the original description of this syndrome, by Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, and I note that he sees the causation involved as a bit more complicated than I had previously stated. It is not just that building a new headquarters building causes an enterprise to take its eye off the ball. Its eye already was off the ball, or it would never have decided to build its new headquarters in the first place.

Quite a lot of the time, I get irritated by the Channel 4 news programme, and its anchor, Jon Snow, who is often so blatant in his bias that it no longer angers, merely bemuses. But in fairness to that channel, it still seems willing to take risks with genuinely intelligent and argumentative programmes of the sort that the BBC will often rarely touch these days. Case in point was this programme. It does not pretend to be coolly objective: it is fiercely pro-free market; it hammers away at the fact that Britain is massively in public debt and that this issue primarily stems from decades of the Welfare State and a socialistic polity. Various people, such as Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, appear on it. (Very good he is too, as the old film reviewer Barry Norman used to say). I would imagine that anyone watching this who is a Keynesian or big government type would be spitting blood by the end of the show, particularly as a result of how, for example, it raves about Hong Kong under the benevolent guidance of John Cowperthwaite during the late days of Hong Kong's colonial history. Another thing struck me: Alisdair Darling, the former finance minister in the recent Labour government, came across as incredibly weak in defending his views; he looked a broken man. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, looked like a complacent City banker during the fat years.

This show is not an isolated example of how the channel has thrown rocks at the received wisdom. This show was another case; and this more recent tilt at the gods of AGW alarmism was another.

Of course, these may only be isolated examples. But I am not so sure. There is, at the moment, a general questioning among some people about certain supposedly "settled views", such as that we need governments to prevent AGW, or that printing money and expanding the state is a good thing, or that genetically modified crops are the mark of Satan, and so forth.

And I can remember the Channel 4 Diverse Reports series of the 1980s, including its show, The New Enlightenment (which I don't know is still available). I remember watching it for the first time and imagining how the the heads of leftists and tweedy Tories would be exploding.

Indeed.

The thing about Delingpole is not just the things he says, but the huge numbers of people he says them to, throughout not just the UK but the entire anglosphere. He said "climate science" was hooey to his massed readership, when saying that really counted for something. Now he is arguing for serious cuts, as in actual reductions, as in large reductions, in government spending, here in the UK, in the USA, and pretty much everywhere, at a time when that too needs to be said very loudly.

It is an odd feeling watching all the things I have have been banging on about for the last third of a century or so - about taxation, spending cuts, Hong Kong, the Asian Tigers, etc. - being banged on about by someone half my age and of several times my eloquence. Extreme jealousy mixed with extreme delight about sums it up. The former, I am getting over. The latter will last. I can remember when we used to dream of getting stuff like his in the Telegraph ... blah blah.

So, well done Delingpole, and keep it coming.

I read this article by Peter Oborne and felt more or less in sympathy with it until I came to this clanger:

"But this shift, while of long-term significance, has been dwarfed by the most astonishing development of all: the apparent ending of the 20-year Tory civil war on Europe. Last weekend, David Cameron opened the way for a sharp increase in our budget contributions to Brussels, while giving the green light for a new treaty to save the eurozone. On Monday, he announced a new era of defence co-operation with France. The Prime Minister has developed an easy, relaxed and mature relationship with both President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel. Until very recently indeed, there would have been uproar had a Tory leader countenanced any of this. Last week, there was scarcely any reaction on Conservative benches. The spectre of Europe, which has engulfed the Tories since the assassination of Margaret Thatcher exactly 20 years ago, may have been laid to rest."

That paragraph is written in a tone of approval. Now, unless I have missed something, wasn't Mr Oborne the man who wrote a book a few years ago condemning the rise of a political class that tended to associate its own material interests with those of the country? I remember at the time pointing out that Oborne failed to give due weight to the significance of the European Union in all this. Well, now it appears he has become a sort of cheerleader for Britain giving ever greater sums of money to countries determined to pursue wrongheaded economic policies.

Well, it was nice knowing you, Peter.

I see that EU Referendum thinks as I do.

More up-to-the-second analysis from the fourth estate:

Dennis, a wealthy businessman and investor who says he's been a Republican for more than 25 years, has a strong libertarian streak and supported Rep. Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential race. But ask him how he would have voted on the most important bills that came before the House in the last two years and you'll get a pretty Republican answer. Obamacare? He would have voted against it. Stimulus? Against. Auto bailouts? Against. Cap and trade? Against. Wall Street reform? Against. He also favors making all the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Byron York apparently does not understand Libertarianism.

(H/t: Drudge)

It looks as if some reporters who wrote about the late British comic actor, Norman Wisdom, have learned - assuming they actually gave a shit in the first place - that using Wikipedia as your source for information is a high-risk strategy.

Doh.

The Daily Telegraph is the main conservative newspaper in Britain - at least that is how it presents itself and some of its content really is conservative, but often it follows the line of the left (the doctrines that Telegraph journalists will have been taught in school, including most private schools, and at university).

Yesterday's print edition (which I read on a long journey from Northern Ireland) gives an interesting example (the online edition is arranged differently). Most people will see the assumptions in the article by Telegraph employee Mary Riddell - "Osbourn's brutal cuts play right into the hands of the unions" (actually the British government spending review is not even published to October 20th - and I would not be astonished if, behind all the smoke and mirrors, government spending next year was even higher than it is this year) with language such as "slash and burn" and "destroys the very charities and community groups" (in Mary's world, which is sadly very close to the state of modern Britain, a charity or community group is part of the government to be funded by the taxpayers) inflicting "maximum pain" and threatening a "concordant with the unions" ... etc, etc. Propaganda of this sort is not really dangerous - everyone can see it for what it is and make their own judgements. However, it is not what interests me - I am interested in what people will not tend to spot, what flows into their minds without their even knowing it.

On the obituary page people will notice the obituary for John Gouriet (one of the founders of what became the Freedom Association in Britain), and some people will get angry at the scare quote marks around the word "oppression" in relation to the Soviet Union (as if Mr Gouriet was silly to think that the totalitarian Soviet Union actually was oppressive), but most people will just read without really thinking the little extract from "Great Obituaries From This Week In The Past" next to it - an extract from the obituary of the famous supporter of racial segregation Governor George Wallace (who died in 1998).

First of all the placement of the "extract" associates Mr Gouriet with racial segregation ("paranoid Paul - they just happened to die in the same week, twelve years apart, so we have put them next to each other") as does the stress on South Africa in the obituary of Mr Gouriet - it implies (but never actually states - "no Paul - we are just reporting that he opposed the postal boycott of South Africa") that John Gouriet supported the laws on racial segregation in South Africa. But also the extract itself is a wonderful ("nice" in the old Anglo Saxon sense) distortion of George Wallace himself.

George Wallace is made out to be a man of the right (in the small government Ronald Reagan or Mrs Thatcher or John Gouriet sense) - he "detached a substantial portion of the blue collar vote from the Democratic party for a generation" with his "anti Washington" themes. In reality George Wallace was a Democrat - and a big government Democrat at that, he stood for vastly increased government spending (on education, health and old age) his whole political life, not just at the State level in Alabama, but also at the Federal level (so much for being "anti Washington" in the sense of being anti big government).

Now the full obituary back in 1998 may have told the truth about what George Wallace actually was - but the extract certainly does not. And it is little things like this extract (the "drip, drip, drip" effect) that form the background knowledge of people on subjects that people do not really know anything about. "Oh George Wallace - that racist anti big government conservative, a bit like Reagan or Sarah Palin or..."

People wonder how the left can redefine such things as the big government "Slave Holding States of America", the Confederacy, as anti big government (and since the time of Woodrow Wilson's history of the United States they have done such a good job of this, that some libertarians even go about showing their support for the Confederacy without having a clue about the big government polices, far worse than those of Lincoln and the Union, that Jefferson Davis and co actually followed), or how they managed to redefine the life long socialist Mussolini and his "totalitarian" Fascists as somehow pro business conservatives (and associate being pro free enterprise with being a Fascist), but here we see the process in action. George Wallace, life long big government man, is transformed into an anti big government activist before our eyes - and racism is thereby connected with being anti big government.

Is this a deep, dark plot by leftist infiltrators at the Daily Telegraph? Almost certainly not - it is "just" people following what they were taught at school and university, at that is about the most harmful thing a journalist (or non journalist) can do when writing about history, politics, economics...

If "those who control the education of the young control the future" is correct then civilization is already doomed - but I believe that people can break free of what they were taught, if we make the effort.

Christ but I hate the BBC. This morning - probably out of some masochistic urge - I had the BBC Breakfast News channel on. I suppose my only defence is that I wanted to see those goals that England had contrived to score against that footballing colossus, Switzerland. Anyway, one item that came up was the issue of a proposed nationwide minimum drinking price for booze. There is already one in Scotland . There is a very high chance that such a minimum price, which flagrantly breaches the rights of sellers to flog their stuff at whatever price they think fit, will come into law.

Now it is no surprise, really, that the BBC tends to act as unwitting or even witting voice of government-favoured conventional wisdom, but the interviewer on this morning's show who was giving a representative of the alcohol retailing industry a hard time was particularly bad. This is the guy I mean, by the name of Simon Jack. His biography states he worked as a decade as an investment banker, so presumably the BBC thinks this gives him a terrific insight into the world of business. Well, I don't know about that - it may be that if this guy was any good at that job he'd be still working in the financial sector and earning zillions. Or maybe he realised that his heart was not in it and preferred to act as early-morning interrogator of businesses instead. This character seriously gets up my nose: a lot of his questioning is hectoring and demogogic, with questions such as: "But how can you defend your profit margins, Mr Evil Banker?"

This morning, he asked about how can the booze industry justify selling product at below cost of production. Surely, he said, this is designed to entice us poor moppets into buying lots of liquor and drinking ourselves into a stupor? Well, if Mr Jack had been awake during his college days while studying some economics, he'd realise that firms routinely sell some items at such cheap prices, even below production costs, to encourage a new market, whether it be for booze, cars or whatever. Free samples and all that. But obviously such pricing policies could not occur indefinitely: firms wish to make a profit. It was particularly weak for the industry lobby man not to state as much, and to assert that the industry is entitled to set its prices how it wants, and that anyway, why should not people be able to buy at prices mutually agreeable to them and the sellers - the vast majority of alcohol consumers do not turn into George Best or Oliver Reed and do not vomit over the pavement. But of course the BBC now endlessly repeats the charge that cheap drink is turning our city centres into beery nightmares and therefore, the rest of us should have to pay more for whatever is deemed to be causing the problem.

The BBC is leading the way as a news organisation that constantly hammers the booze industry, just as, in times past, happened to the tobacco industry. And the BBC Breakfast show, with its mix of hard news and what is a lot of fluffy, lifestyle features with lots of chats on the sofa, is a particularly persistent channel for this sort of temperance advocacy. In some ways, with its red sofas and pretend air of jollity in the morning, it is far more dangerous in this regard than snarling Jeremy Paxman in the evenings. At least you can usually switch channels to a late-night movie and watch Clint or whoever blowing bad people to glory.

I've known about the Kochs, and about their legendary wealth and about their massive support with some of it for the US libertarian movement, ever since I first became a part of the London libertarian scene in the late 1970s. (Although, I'm still not sure how they are pronounced. Cock? Coke? Kotch? (Coach?)) So the idea that their support for libertarianism is now or ever was some kind of covert operation, rather than just rich people spending their own money trying to do and spread goodness as they saw it, is, to me, utterly ridiculous. One of the Kochs even ran for vice-President, I am reminded here. Was that secret too?

Well, I guess it sort of was. What happens is that you spend two or three decades generally stamping and shouting and raising all kinds of heaven and hell, saying that every bit of sex and drugs and rock and roll and free marketeering that you can think of should be legalised, and they ignore you. Finally you start making some rather big waves, in some way that doesn't involve them helping in any way, even by them deigning to denounce you, and they then call you "covert". It wasn't even that they couldn't get you on the phone despite trying, twice. No. You couldn't get them on the phone, ever.

Personally I think it's a very good sign that they are now attacking libertarianism, pro-capitalism etc., by pointing out that there are these rich capitalists who are in favour of it. This tells me that they feel they are running out of actual arguments. It also tells me that they don't think that them drawing attention to the libertarian movement, by banging on about how these evil capitalists support it like this, can draw much more attention to this movement than we are now contriving for ourselves. In short, we are now up and running as a force in the real world beyond that of mere ideological intercourse among consenting ideologists, and they know it.

I would be very interested to learn what our American commenters make of Andrew Breitbart. My impression is that he's really making misery for the One Party Media in the USA, but occasionally making mistakes. Did he mishandle that video featuring Shirley Sherrod? Or is he being falsely accused of having done so by lilly-livered Conservatives who are too keen on being liked by liberals who will always despise them? My impression is that Breitbart didn't call Sherrod a racist, but that he did, rightly, call her audience racist.

I ask because the latest Breitbart sally seems to contain a (another?) quite serious error. The New York Times has issued what looks to me like a deeply dishonest "retraction", saying that the racist things said to some Congressman in the street were nothing to do with the Tea Party Movement, when the actual truth, as commenter number one on his piece immediately points out, is that they were nothing to do with anything because they never even happened. And Breitbart seems to me to be letting the New York Times get clean away with this piece of blatant scumbaggery, contenting himself with merely demanding that all the other One Party Media organs issue the same utterly dishonest semi-retraction. If this is Breitbart hitting back twice as hard, my reaction is that he could have landed a far heavier flurry of punches than he just did. Is that a fair criticism, and even if it is, am I just doing that old arm-chair moaner thing of saying that whoever is doing the real business for my team, when I am doing nothing, could be doing even better. Am I demanding the best in a way that is for practical purposes hostile to the good?

Whatever the particular truth about just how good a job Breitbart is or is not doing on the One Party Media, I get the distinct impression from over here that something very big is happening to the US media. Some kind of - sorry but the phrase is exactly appropriate - "tipping point" seems to be being reached.

The thing is, people on the whole tend not to unleash cumbersome solutions upon circumstances that don't seem to be a problem. It takes time for people to desert their old familiar ways of acquainting themselves with what's going on in the world, and there has to be a solid reason to do this, same as there has to be a solid reason to move house or switch from PCs to a Mac, or to stop drinking any alcohol. It takes some particular lie about something that they are personally familiar with, to "tip" them, like when their own genuinely good-guy cousin and his thoroughly nice wife get called (along with a few thousand other people) racists by some loud-mouthed hand-deep-in-the-government-till scam-artist on the television, without any corrective complaint from the grey-haired professorial old guy introducing it, and when they read the same stuff in their newspaper the next morning. At which point they start suspecting that everything else in their formerly trusted newspaper, or on their hitherto perfectly adequate TV channel, could also be deception and scumbaggery. The point being that this switch wasn't going to happen all in one go, with the overnight arrival of the internet. But I have the feeling that the number of US citizens who are, just about now, arriving at this point in their news and current affairs habits, is becoming something approaching a Moment in US History.

Is that right? Or just wishful thinking. To put it another way, Paul Marks is fond of saying in comments here that "most people" still get their news from the regular old media rather than from blogs and such. Is that observation starting to become seriously obsolete? After all, if a quite large percentage of those who still read (exclusively) and trust (implicitly) the regular old media now have family or friends whom they do not consider to be completely mad who don't and who don't, that has to change things. Doesn't it? At the very least, that means that the One Party Media are now experienced by most as putting forward a distinct point of view, rather than just serving up The News. And that's quite a change. Isn't it?

ADDENDUM: I wrote what is immediately above before reading Dale's piece immediately below.

For all of the talk about a fourth branch of government, calling to account corruption on both sides of the aisle, and informing the people’s decisions with transcendent objectivity, the media has always been a bullhorn for specific biases. The virgin media of our youth did not exist, and it should not exist. As with every other facet of life in a free society, it is only competition that creates progress and openness. In media, this means diverse views and diverse sources, calling not only corrupt politicians into account, but each other as well.

- Jeremy D. Boreing

Yet again "JournoList" (the international organization by which leftist journalists cooperate to serve the cause of collectivism) has been exposed. Tucker Carlson over at the "Daily Caller" has exposed more of their propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Specifically the effort to distract attention from, and smear as a "racist" anyone who tried to report Barack Obama's two decade membership of an extreme "Black Liberation Theology" (an ideology that mixes Marxism with black racism and then puts a "Christian" cover on both) church and his close connection with the vile bigot the Rev. Jeremiah "Audacity of Hope" Wright.

Outwardly such magazines as Time and the Economist pretend to compete and to offer different world views (the Economist pretending to be a free market supporting journal - in spite of its support for endless bailouts and other corporate welfare, and support government "stimulus" spending). Yet Mr Carlson shows (by publishing their discussions) that high ranking people at these (and most other) "mainstream media" outlets actively cooperate, and coordinate their disinformation and propaganda campaigns for the collectivist cause.

As I have attacked the "mainstream" media, especially the Economist - whose lying claim to support liberty has long offended me, for years, I might be expected to be saying "I told you so" at this point...

...But actually I am astonished...

This is because like Bernie Goldberg (of "Bias", "A Slobbering Love Affair") I have long believed the source of the pro-big government bias in the media to be a "mindset" produced by education at both school and university, and the environment that MSM ("mainstream media") people operate within. To find out that their really is a sort of electronic "Star Chamber" where people (supposedly from competing media outlets) deliberately set out to cover up the truth and to coordinate their lies and disinformation (knowing they are lies and disinformation), well that is rather a shock.

What is next going to be exposed? Will we find out, for example, that important people within the British publishing industry (and book trade generally) conspire to undermine books that do not fit in with their view of the world - and to promote books that do? For example, the endless efforts to promote Andrew Marr's "The Making of Modern Britain" ("2 for 1" offers and so on) deserves a look to see why that is - as the book has no merit as a work of history.

For example, the book repeatedly implies that living standards for ordinary people were better in late 19th century and early 20th century Germany than they were in Britain - not only not true, but the exact reverse of the truth. On this deception Mr Marr bases his support for early 20th century British politicians, such as David Lloyd George, copying the big government policies of Germany - only crying that they did not do so enough. "But Paul, Mr Marr is a big media name - that is why the book is pushed". Perhaps so - but how does that explain all the works by lesser known (or even unknown) people that are pushed.

For example, how does one explain the fact that every book in a typical British bookshop about Barack Obama is supportive of this man? And every book on Bill Clinton (at least in my home town) is also supportive? Whereas every work on Mrs Thatcher is hostile - with even such straight forward things as her claim to have read F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" after World War II dismissed (even though it was best selling book). Thatcher can not have read this (or any other) book you see - and her policies (and I am certainly not saying I approved of all of those policies) can not possibly have been based on any principles (only class interest).

I do not believe that British people are a different species of animal from Americans. Once the leftist near monopoly of American publishing broke down many conservative and libertarian books proved to be best sellers in the United States - in spite of the efforts of such publications as "Publishers Weekly" (so often a source of biased and dishonest reviews - which, sadly, still appear on Amazon.com). In Britain the problem is not so much biased and dishonest reviews - as no reviews at all. For example, the Economist has not published (over a period of years) a single review of any book that blames the economic crises on government intervention - in spite of several of these books (such as Thomas Woods "Meltdown" and Thomas Sowell's "The Housing Boom and Bust" being best sellers in the United States).

Actually I do not believe that their is a British book trade version of "JournoList" - but then I did not believe there was such a thing in the media either.

One of the biggest eye-openers you can have is seeing a story in the press which you have personal knowledge of...

Of course, it could be that you just got unlucky and that all the other stories out there are 100% bang on, deadly accurate.

But that seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?

- 6000 ruminates on false media prophesies of doom regarding the organisation of the soccer World Cup in his native South Africa.

Paul Marks, as regular readers know, regards the Economist as a sort of bellweather of conventional (ie, frequently wrong) wisdom. The magazine recently carried this editorial on the supposed inadequacies of the US political Right.

He sent this letter to the magazine. Somehow, I think they are unlikely to run it, but we can:

Dear Sir,

In your current edition you have as the main cover story an attack upon the "American right". In reality, of course, it is not the fact that the people you attack are American that causes you to hate them - you hate them (and attack them in the most abusive terms you can) because they commit the dreadful crime of not agreeing with you.

You hate the British "right" just as much as you hate the American "right" - with "right" really being defined as people who do not support endless bailouts, corrupt "stimulus" government spending, and corporate welfare (such as the Central Bank producing more credit money and issuing it in various sweetheart loan forms to politically connected financial sector enterprises).

I am not really interested in the fact that you use abusive language ("mad" and so on) and cartoons against people whose only crime is to have different political opinions to yourselves, after all I have used abusive language (such as "corrupt") to describe your editor, Mr John Micklethwait, and the only reason I have never drawn an abusive cartoon of him is that I can not draw.

No, what interests me is your claim that America needs a "better opposition" to President Barack Obama - and your implied claim that you should be the guide to such an opposition.

I could simply say that your American sales do not really compare very well to those of the people you attack (such as Sarah Palin or, of course, the evil common-as-muck Glenn Beck), but you would dismiss that as "vulgar commercialism" the sort of thing the "corporate leaders" you claim to speak for in your article, despise. And I have no doubt that you would be partly correct - for example I remember the head of General Electric's European operations sneering that in the past companies had been obsessed with "customers" whereas "we are the partners of governments". Sadly I suspect there are many high corporate managers who are like this - although, hopefully, not a majority even in these times. However, my objection is a more basic one. What standing do you have to claim to be a guide to an opposition to President Barack Obama?

To make such a claim a person or organization would have to have the following things to show:

Opposition to the wild spending measures of President George Walker Bush - such things as the No Child Left Behind Act (yet more unconstitutional Federal government intervention in the sphere of State and local governments) and, especially, "TARP". This being the vast (some 700 BILLION Dollars) in bailouts that was passed by Congress on a fraudulent basis (in that the money was not spent in the way it was promised it would be spent). All this wild spending having undermined any moral case that the Republicans were the party of the free market (rather than corrupt corporate bailouts) and paved the way for the collapse in conservative morale that led to the victory of Barack Obama.

Opposition to Barack Obama himself - to claim to be a guide to his opponents one would have to show how one wanted him to lose in the election of 2008, how much one fought against him, and so on. Otherwise why should foes of Barack Obama trust a person or organization?

Opposition to the "Stimulus" spending measure of Barack Obama - i.e. the 700 to 800 BILLION Dollars of additional government spending (on top of the wild spending of George Bush) designed by the "Apollo Project" - an organization dominated by such people as the unrepentant Marxist terrorist Mr Jeff Jones (the cofounder of the "Weather Underground" along with Barack Obama's other friends Mr and Mrs Bill Ayers, both of whom are also unrepentant "we should have planted more bombs").

Opposition to the health care takeover. More than half of American health care spending is already from government (Federal, State and local) and the imposing of yet more regulations and subsidies will have the same effect that imposing all the other subsidies and regulations of the last several decades has done - make American health cover even more expensive (just as subsidies and regulations have made higher education so expensive in the United States) and drive more and more people into dependence on the government, as business enterprises and individuals simply can not afford the higher and higher costs - an increase in costs caused directly (and intentionally) by the "Obamacare" Bill.

This may be a noble intent (from the collectivist point of view), but it is hardly something that pro liberty foes of Obama would support.

And Opposition to the new financial bill, which will enable the arbitrary control by the government (with very little ability to appeal to the law courts) of every financial sector enterprise in the United States - on the whim of politicians and officials.

How does the Economist magazine measure up to these tests?

You supported the wild spending and regulating measures of George Walker Bush - including No-Child-Left-Behind, and even the TARP bailouts (which totally undermined the moral basis of the free market - and made the Marxist case against "capitalism", that it was just the corrupt subsidy of "capitalists", seem true).

You actually supported Barack Obama to be President of the United States - even against the ultra "moderate" John McCain, a man who had spent decades trying to be the friend of the "mainstream media" (such as yourselves). You pretended friendship for Senator McCain, you eagerly printed his attacks on more conservative Republicans and then (at the hour of his greatest need - other than the times of his years of being tortured in a cage in Vietnam, or his fight with skin cancer) you stabbed him in the back. And you even had the bare faced cheek to say that John McCain had "changed" and was not the "moderate" you had once known. A claim that conservatives and libertarians could only read in utter astonishment - as we watched John McCain vote (against the will of the vast majority of voters) for the TARP bailouts, thus destroying conservative morale.

You then supported the vast "Stimulus" Bill of Obama and Jeff Jones - and you still do.

You also supported what may well turn out to be the last stage in the bankrupting of American health care.

The vast majority of voters opposed such things as the disgusting "Stimulus" Bill and fully understand that the way to deal with the results of debt is not to build up yet more debt - but you (the "free market" Economist) supported it and continue to do so, the same is true of the Obamacare Bill.

Lastly the Financial Reform Bill - if you do oppose the destruction of what little is left of the rule of law in the American financial services industry (and its replacement with the arbitrary will of politicians and administrators) then you have not made your voice of opposition a very impressive one.

In short you have no standing what so ever to imply that you can be some guide to the opposition to Barack Obama.

Your only case is based upon SNOBBERY - i.e. the fact you are wealthy and Oxbridge educated, and your foes are from poor backgrounds and did not go to elite universities (where Keynesian drivel is taught as holy writ).

On all the great matters of the subject of the struggle against Barack Obama and what he represents you have, as the above shows, been on the other side. The side of Obama and his Comrades - not of the foes of this collectivist movement.

Paul Marks.

P.S. Some libertarians and conservatives may note that I do not mention the various wars of George Bush in the above. However, whatever the merits or otherwise of these wars (and I do not doubt that defences of them can be written) I do accept that they helped undermine support for the Republican party and for moderate Democrats and helped in the far left take over of first Congress and the Whitehouse. For the record - the Economist supported all these wars.

The Times has vanished behind a pay wall and... frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

There is nothing about The Times that cannot be easily replaced with other on-line sources. Move along, nothing to see (literally).

Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.

That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:

As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.

The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:

"What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?" one of them complained.

A key point made by the Telegraph piece above is that less is now being done than you might expect by Chinese higher-ups to suppress such reports:

Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

This all made me think of a book I read a year or two ago about the Western Way of War, or some such title, by Victor Davis Hanson (I think it was this book, although I believe I read a proof copy with a different title). The connection? Well, Hanson identifies one of the strengths of the Western Way of War to be the way that western war efforts are often preceded by almighty rows, often woundingly public, about how to set about, or even whether to set about, doing whatever it is they are attempting, which typically continue after the effort has begun. One of his major points being: this is not recent, it's always been like this.

The result, for all the mess and unpleasantness and unfairly ruined careers, tends not to be the division and confusion that you might expect, or not only that, but also (a) better decisions, and (b) better understood decisions. Even the losers of such arguments at least understand the plan the others fellows are now making everyone follow, so even they follow it better. Both decision-making and decision-implementation are improved. Then, often with even greater doses of injustice, wars, even successful wars, are then raked over and argued about yet again, afterwards. It's all very indecorous, and "debate" doesn't do justice to the chaotic nature of such public rows. But the result is better decision-making and better informed and better prepared decision-makers, at all levels.

And for war, read: everything else big and dangerous also, like mega-engineering projects. Tyranny, aka dogshit government, in war and in everything big, imposes bad and un-thought-through decisions on baffled subordinates, decisions which still might have worked after a fashion if implemented properly, but not if even quite senior subordinates don't really have a clue about what they are supposed to be doing and are just following orders blindly, or worse, perhaps not even doing that, because, you know, who gives a shit.

It must now be becoming clear to quite a few Chinese high-ups that had they had a big, messy, public ruckus about how exactly (or indeed whether at all) to build this damn great dam, then it might at least have been a damn sight better dam than it now looks like being. It might have been messier and more difficult and more stressful deciding about it all beforehand, but far better afterwards, once all the dust, and in this case also all the mud and all the various bits of collapsing land and roads and buildings that are now sliding and tumbling hither and thither, had settled.

And even if they failed to argue about the Three Gorges Dam properly beforehand, it would be better than nothing to at least have a bit of a public row about it now. At least that way, some harsh lessons might be learned and spread around, and such things might be done a bit better in the future.

As well as the normal "liberal" distortions (in this case pretending that the de facto ban on both Alaska land drilling, off shore shallow water drilling, and Mountain State oil shale production, do not exist - these being the restrictions that force difficult and expensive deep water drilling) that Michelle Oddis outlines - please ponder the John Stossel story.

J.S. said whatever libertarian says on race - that racism is evil, but people should be allowed to keep people they do not like (for whatever stupid reason) off their property.

And for that all Hell broke lose - with "MediaMatters" and all the rest of the (very well funded) leftist (in the modern sense) organizations demanding that he be dismissed. The man is Jewish (counts for nothing - the left will smear him as a racist anyway), the man was a Democrat before he became a libertarian and has never been a Republican (counts for nothing - the left will smear him as .....), the man has "socially liberal" attitudes seeing nothing wrong with homosexual acts or whatever (counts for nothing - the left will smear him as......).

Being opposed to the left (in the modern sense of the establishment - to the elite that control most of the institutions in society, including many private ones) and yet in the public eye is to undergo trial by fire every day - against a ruthless enemy that will stop at nothing to destroy you. They will lie and cheat and smear, do anything they believe they "have" to do for the collectivist cause).

So one faces a choice - either give in and become a de facto leftist (like the house "conservatives" the New York Times employs to attack real conservatives, or like David Frumm, or Andrew "cash for clunkers is an example of good limited government" Sullivan) or accept that you will be treated as a monster - and that even after you die your name will be spat on and the left will try and train even your own children to hate your memory.

That is the alternative that, for example, Glenn Beck has accepted (he knows that the left will eventually destroy him - and has asked his children to keep private journals so that they will have something real to remember their father by), but it is a hard road to walk. As Mr Stossel is discovering.

Stossel is lucky that he works for the one major media organization that might not fire him or force him to resign - but even that is not certain, for Rupert M. is no hero.

"Why do journalists not dissent from the leftist consensus" - because the left will DESTROY you if you do dissent (if they can find any way to do so).

Deep down the left support the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States about as much as they support the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And the British left is not different.

This is what Oddis wrote:

I turned on the TV Sunday morning just in time to hear TIME Magazine's Joe Klein on the "Chris Matthews Show" claim that Obama's approval ratings won't be affected negatively by the Gulf oil spill.

He is "incredibly lucky in his opposition -- the oil spill is a great example," said Klein. "The Republicans look worse on that than the Democrats do." A chuckle was shared between Klein and Matthews.

In hindsight Democrats should be reminded that we are drilling in deep offshore wells (5,000 feet or more) because berserk environmentalists refuse to let anyone drill into the rocky tundra of ANWR even though over 75% percent of Alaskans support this kind of exploration.

Now how does this situation make Republicans look worse? Read more here and watch Glenn Beck back in 2008 explain the truth about ANWR.

British tax funded broadcaster the BBC (it does not like the term "state broadcaster" as it prides itself on its political independence from the government of the day - although it shows no independence from collectivist ideology in general) does not run advertisements apart for what it considers good causes. Such as, of course, itself - BBC shows and other products.

The first "Director General" of the BBC, when it stopped being a commercial company, was a man called John Reith - and annual lectures are given in his name, the "Reith Lectures". The BBC proudly advertises these lectures as a high culture jewel, something that no nasty commercial or charitable broadcaster would ever produce. Each year some establishment person actually lowers him or herself to speak to the unclean masses.

However, this year the endless advertisements were useful. The lecturer (a former head
of the Royal Society - although Newton, Boyle, and the others must be spinning in their graves) is to be a man of science, but of the modern sort in that the advertisements quote him saying that science must avoid investigating certain things - there are "doors that should remain closed". This is an attitude that would have pleased the more extreme people in the Inquisition, but is unlikely to inspire children to question established orthodoxies - but, of course, questioning is no longer the function of "science". Also the main modern functions of science appear to be to combat "climate change" (by supporting ever greater power for governments, pretending that more regulations and taxes will "save the planet" rather than be a corrupt scheme for special interests to gain money and power - by the way this is true even if, as may well be the case, the theory that human C02 emissions are a danger is correct, as such schemes as "Cap and Trade" will do nothing to reduce such emissions and such political scams are not part of science anyway) and to make sure that the "benefits of globalization are equitably shared".

How "science" can be twisted so that this last nakedly political aim can be claimed to be part of it, I will never find out - as, of course, I will avoid the Reith Lectures as if they were the plague (which they are - the plague of ignorance and collectivist fanaticism), but I am still grateful for the advertisements for, as always with BBC advertisements, they warn people that the show being advertised is excrement, something to be avoided unless one enjoys stepping in excrement. However, if should be remembered that for children, especially for intelligent children interested in the world, such things as the "Reith Lecturers" are presented as key to the golden door of knowledge.

This is the tragedy - it is the most intelligent and hard working children who are ruined, those who hunger for knowledge are poisoned with a political message disguised as science (or history, or high culture). Not everyone has access to books (especially in modern times - the days when ordinary homes were full of serious works are long gone, at least in Britain), and many people are not first inspired by books in any case - they are inspired by the spoken word. And both the education system and the media (especially the broadcasting media) target such young people for ruination - for taking what is good in them, and turning it bad. Teaching them a rigid orthodoxy (which they must not question) which is really a mask for a political ideology - world egalitarianism, the "equitable sharing" of "the benefits of globalization", with its basic denial of private property rights.

Perhaps, as so many tell me, the internet will save such young people - but perhaps it will not. I remain doubtful.

Oh and I, of course, remain open to correction - for example it is possible that the lecturer (his name did not make an impression on me - such beings being rather close to being parts of a hive mind anyway) may explain various new designs for atomic fission power stations in his lectures and discuss various approaches to nuclear fusion in great and enlightening detail. If he does I will have been, partly, refuted.

I commend this fascinating article to those who have not yet come across it - A Hidden History of Evil:
Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Unread Soviet Archives?

The archives contain "unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War", yet their guardian "can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation." Amongst numerous other tidbits, there is some very interesting stuff about Soviet dealings with François Mitterrand, Neil Kinnock, and several past and present "European Project"/EU bigwigs.

(From the excellent Michael Totten, who's doing a fine job of holding the fort over at Instapundit)

The Institute of Economic Affairs is the mothership of the free market think tanks, certainly in Europe. Or, it was. Because now, the IEA's reputation is almost entirely based on the stir that it managed to make when it was presided over by the stellar duopoly that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Those two men ensured that the classical liberal intellectual tradition remained alive in Britain, and they brought it, and the developing tradition of Austrian school economics, to bear on the failed Keynesian consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, laying the intellectual foundations for the Thatcherite economic rescue act of the 1980s.

Harris and Seldon had always been very careful, first, to ground their activities in pro freedom scholarship. The intellectual war was what they cared about most. Seldon fought that war. Harris, although also a considerable warrior himself, concentrated on making sure that the war effort was paid for. Second, they were careful not to get too closely intertwined with the Conservative Party, to the exclusion of any others. They always kept their lines open to anyone who was willing to listen to what they had to say and to help them say it, of any party or of none.

However, when age inevitably caught up with Harris and Seldon, the IEA then chose a man called Graham Mather as its new boss, who proceeded to use the place as his personal campaign office to turn himself into a Conservative MEP, while declaring that "the intellectual arguments have been won". Mather was hurriedly dumped, and under John Blundell's leadership the IEA then did rather better, even if it never really lit up the landscape like it had in the old days. To switch metaphors from fireworks to aviation, under Mather, the IEA was crashing earthwards and was about to burn up completely. Under Blundell it glided near horizontally, not at all disastrously, but without any upward impetus that I could see. When I heard that the Institute of Economic Affairs had, however long ago it was, appointed as their new boss Mark Littlewood, whose previous job was as a media relations person for the LibDems, I reacted with indifference. I hardly, that is to say, reacted at all.

Mark Littlewood has clearly always understood what classical liberalism and libertarianism are all about, and has done as much of them as he could, given the day jobs he has had. He has always been a friendly and civilised presence, albeit rather too EUrophile for my liking, at the various Libertarian Alliance events I have seen him at over the years, at quite a few of which he has spoken. Nevertheless, I assumed that in hiring such a person, the IEA was merely going to throw a big chunk of its still impressive stash of money at a pointless media-based charm offensive, which would achieve nothing. Pick a nice chap, with lots of contacts in politics and in what they used to call Fleet Street, hope for the best and get nothing very much. After a few years, Littlewood would move on. In due course, the building would be sold and the IEA would move from Westminster to somewhere or to nowhere. Its few surviving supporters would become even more geriatric. Another member of the Political Class, more unscrupulous than Mark Littlewood and cut from the same cloth as Graham Mather, would move in and hoover up all the remaining money, and that would be that. Way of the world. Old order giving place to new. Such is life. Such is death.

I never really thought any of this through, apart from the Mather episode, when I became tangentially involved as a junior advocate for the team that ousted him. I merely realise, now, that the above sentiments about Littlewood were what I was thinking, insofar as I was thinking anything at all. The point being that as far as the IEA was concerned, and like many others, I had pretty much stopped thinking.

So it was that when I got invited to a Libertarian Alliance dinner about a fortnight ago, at which Mark Littlewood was to speak about how he was setting about his various IEA tasks, I did not, as they say, jump at the invitation. I merely, having nothing else fixed, said yes and went along, expecting little more than some nice food. But as soon as Mark Littlewood started talking, I realised that I had been seriously misjudging him.

He began by talking, not about the media, but about academia. The relationship between the IEA and academia must be reinvigorated, said Littlewood, as indeed it must. Freedom friendly academics must all be identified and made much of. Students, undergraduate and post-grad, ditto. It must be made easy for such people to meet and talk and network and learn, at the IEA itself, and everywhere, amongst themselves.

The thing is, it is useless to talk about relationships with the media, or for that matter about turning the ground floor of the IEA into a meeting place and/or coffee bar, or about whether a different part of London might make better sense as a meeting place and/or coffee bar, all of which Littlewood later did talk about, unless you start by talking about what will be said to the media and in that coffee bar, and by whom. Start with content. If you start only with form, then content will never happen. Soon, form itself will melt away. At the heart of the IEA must be the cultivation of a community of approximately like-minded academics and aspiring academics and intellectuals influenced by those academics some of whom will both establish themselves within academia and others if whom will sally forth into the world outside of academia and shape how it will be run, many of them doing both of course, and all of them been able and willing to dig in for a long intellectual battle. Mark Littlewood, thank goodness, seems to understand all this. I had assumed that the IEA was seeing the academic/media nexus as an either/or thing. The IEA, having spent a couple of decades presenting an intellectual face to the world, but of gradually diminishing appeal, and having spent a couple of decades in a state of obscurity in terms of its media impact, I feared that the IEA was now turning anti-intellectual, in a desperate bid for media attention and nothing else. Happily, this is not so.

Samizdata readers will be pleased to hear that the recent, disastrous identification of the IEA with monetarism, that is, with a particular theory about the exact way to run the nationalised industry that is the world's banking system, got a thorough and thoroughly critical airing. Littlewood's attitude was that the monetarists are part of the broad free market picture, and the IEA need not take sides. It can merely make sure that the argument takes place, in particular at the IEA. I, like most others present, am confident that, provided the IEA does not (as it now does with its disastrous Shadow Monetary Policy Committee) skew the debate disastrously in the wrong direction, the right side in this debate will prevail. And Littlewood had earlier said that when it came to the recent market turmoil, the free market movement in Britain had failed to measure up, or words to that effect, which didn't sound to me like a ringing endorsement of that Committee.

The point was also made from the floor, or rather the table, that the hunt for like-minded academics should not be confined to Britain. There is a world out there, still burdened by many of the errors of development economics. Good point.

Once I had heard Mark Littlewood talk about the academic and intellectual content of the IEA operation, I was then quite ready to listen to him talk also about the media relations angle. Him having spelt out the message, then fine, and given that this is his particular area of expertise, what does he want to say of the media? By now, he had my full attention.

This discussion can actually get quite subtle. The media problem is this. Suppose you round up your free market intellectuals, and it turns out that a surprising number of them are, I don't know, theologians and historians of theology, wanting to research into and write about the history of free market thought among the medieval Christians. Great. Such people must absolutely not be made to feel like second class citizens in the republic of liberty. Quite the reverse. The idea that such persons should be bullied out of studying theology and into writing tedious screeds about monetary policy of a kind that their hearts are not in, is the reverse of what should happen. We need our people, as the late Chris Tame used to say over and over again, everywhere, in every academic speciality, in every institution, in every kind of economic endeavour, living many different lives. And the IEA needs to find people in as many different academic and educational niches as possible. Theology? Terrific. However, as Littlewood pointed out, media organisations are not exactly falling over themselves to interview free market theologians on a daily basis. What they want to know is stuff like: what the hell's up with this credit crunch? And now: how the hell should government spending be cut in a way that is even approximately fair? What Thomas Aquinas might have said about such dilemmas is less high on their list of things to have talked about.

The answer to such tensions between academic inclination and the questions being put by the media, it seems to me, is another twin track approach. Encourage the theologians to continue with their theology, but also ask them, in such places as that hypothetical downstairs IEA coffee bar, what they think about the government's current economic policies. It could be that, having listened to their more statist-inclined theological friends talk foolishly about such things, they have become interested in contesting such foolishness. In fact, which is part of the point of Chris Tame's we-need-our-people-everywhere doctrine, maybe they have already been having such conversations during the informal bits of their theology gatherings, and are actually quite well primed to go on the radio or the telly what they have already said, or at least thought, in the course of personal debate like this. You may say, but isn't that a bit unrealistic? Do such twin-trackers really exist, deep into the political subtexts embedded in Japanese comic books or the history of pre Robert Peel policing, and able to hold their own in a ruckus on early morning radio about bank bailouts or taxation policy? The short answer is: yes.

To illustrate that, let me tell you about someone else I met at that Libertarian Alliance dinner. He must be around twenty, although to my now senescing senses he seemed about fourteen and looked like one of those cherubic boy band child-men who appears on TV talent shows. I'll call him Sam, because Sam is his name, Sam Bowman.

My conversation with Sam began delightfully, for me. He started it by saying, as I recall it: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, that is, for all those Libertarian Alliance pamphlets that the LA cranked out in the 1980s and 1990 in that faraway time when only scientists had the internet, and the rest of us had to make do with paper, and which we then shoved up on the internet as .pdfs for the likes of Sam Bowman and his friends to read and ponder, in some faraway spot in Ireland that I didn't catch. Sam said he and his mates particularly enjoyed reading the stuff about libertarian tactics. This child, I thought, certainly knows the way to my heart. Are you leaving now? Me too. Let's walk.

I asked Sam what he is doing now. The answer turned out to be twofold. He is working in some capacity or other at the Cobden Centre, which is the recently founded advocacy enterprise trying to push Austrian economics into the heart of the UK political policy debate, one of the Cobden Centre's leading spirits being this newly elected British MP, already noticed here in this posting, and another being this guy. Sam made it sound like he makes the tea and answers the phone, and maybe he does do that as well, but his job, its title and description anyway, is actually (I later googlearned) a bit grander than that. But see also the picture of Sam here (he's number three in that list), and you'll see what I mean about the boy band look.

Okay, the Cobden Centre. Great. But, anything else? Any studying? Yes. Sam Bowman is also doing post-grad study of the history of Zaire, the Belgian Congo that was, at SOAS, which stands for School of Oriental and African Studies. I was effusive in my praise for this choice of subject (mentioning this Samizdata posting as proof of my genuine interest in such things), and for the fact that Sam was studying at SOAS, rather than just anywhere, SOAS being a prestigious place, and one which I believe to have foisted some seriously bad policies on a seriously large number of places. As we made our way towards Sam's tube station, I told Sam of the Chris Tame doctrine, and of how Sam studying Zairean history at SOAS was a perfect implementation of it. He seemed pleased about this, hinting that others had said he should drop his Zaire enthusiasm and study something more "relevant" like, I imagine, privatising Britain's railways or cutting waste in the public sector. I said: No! No! No! We need our people everywhere!

Sam Bowman is a perfect example of the sort of person the IEA ought to be making much of, and connecting to other like-minded academic-stroke-political-stirrer people, of his own rank and of all other ranks.

In order to prove to you that the IEA under Mark Littlewood's leadership is serious about cultivating such people, as well as their academic superiors of course, let me also tell you some more about Dr. Stephen Davies. Yes, the very same Stephen Davies who featured in my posting here on Monday, about his lecture to the Libertarian Alliance. Because you see, Stephen Davies has just been appointed the Education Director of the IEA, starting in September. His job will be, among other things, to hunt down potentially IEA-sympatico academics in the UK in particular, and in general throughout the world in such places as the British Commonwealth. Davies will, until he starts at the IEA, continue with the similar job that he has been doing for the last year or two for the Institute for Humane Studies, having previously been a history academic in the UK. After his LA lecture on Monday night, I asked Davies about all this. It all sounds, I said, a bit like a footballer transfer battle. Was it amicable? Yes, he said. The IHS entirely sees the point of Davies moving to the IEA, and he will, he told me, continue to work for the IHS part-time. More to the point, the experience of working as an academic-hunter for the IHS will enable him to hit the ground running at the IEA. In fact, email being email, cheap international phone calls being cheap international phone calls, I would guess that he is already jogging along nicely on the IEA's behalf. This is because the US free market think tanks, and in particular the IHS, now know better than the IEA does, or than it did until recently, where freedom friendly academics are to be found, anywhere in the world. They even know more about freedom friendly academics in the UK than UK think tanks like the IEA do. And if you think that reflects rather badly on how the IEA has been doing its core job in recent years, then I agree with you.

Stephen Davies is the perfect man for this job, I think. As I explained in this recent posting at my own blog, Davies is actually a lot more friendly and good humoured than his rather severe demeanour suggested by my recent photographs of him. He relishes all company, not just company like me that agrees with him about everything. He is very tuned into the way that affinities can develop between intellectuals who are apparently situated in very different parts of the intellectual spectrum, having, like Littlewood, no particular tribal loyalties towards the Conservative Party. So, for instance, in his talk on Monday he mentioned a book called The Fiscal Crisis of the State which, Davies noted, was written by a Marxist. Wrong cure, said Davies, but very shrewd diagnosis. At other points in his talk, Davies mentioned other interesting intellectual linkages that also took us beyond the terrain of the usual suspects, so to speak. This is exactly the attitude, catholic in the secular sense, that the IEA needs to adopt in its outreach towards academia.

It's a plus that Littlewood is not a member of the Conservative Party, any more than Davies is. But Littlewood is a LibDem and there is always the danger, when you listen to a Liberal Democrat say things to you that you agree with, that you are being told what you want to hear, even as others are simultaneously being told entirely opposite things that they want to hear. However, the Stephen Davies appointment tells me that all the talk from Mark Littlewood at that LA dinner about cultivating academics was more than mere talk, more than just a think tank politician telling us what we wanted to be told. This was made clear on the night, because Littlewood told us then that Stephen Davies was about to be appointed to his new academic outreach job, and a few days later this was, see above, duly confirmed. In short, I think Littlewood both thoroughly understands and meant what he said. Which means that there is now considerable reason to be optimistic about the future of the Institute of Economic Affairs. I for one am extremely pleased about this.

Guido Fawkes wryly notes that the Financial Times, which for a long time has backed Labour in its editorial pages, and for a long time taken a ploddingly, predictably, wrong-headed stance on many issues (such as joining the euro), has now come out for the Tories.

Of course, the FT, like the Economist - which has also backed Cameron - is a purveyor of conventional wisdom, so it may be that a centrist, social democratic paper like the FT feels fairly comfortable in backing a party that has not shown any considerably conservative political views. But as Guido says, there may be another reason in that the FT has seen some of its readers die off or defect to other, more robustly pro-market, publications. If the latter is the case, then that is an admirable lesson to be learnt: if you want to see how a product has to change in the face of consumer trends, look at the business media.

I seldom read the Independent, but today the blogosphere lead me to this story, about an Indy journalist, Jerome Taylor, who got beaten up for the crime of investigating electoral fraud in East London.

I also learned something that I did not know, about the art of being beaten up:

As their fists and feet slammed into me, all I could think about was some advice a friend had given me. She's a paramedic and has dealt with countless victims of assault. "Whatever you do don't get knocked to the ground," she once said. "Blows on the floor are much more dangerous." ...

I never knew that, but it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Punched in the face is not good, but you really don't want to be kicked in the kidneys. Presumably Taylor managed to remain standing. It reminds me of an old Elton John song that I have always quite liked.

Luckily for Taylor, he was saved from further punishment by a nearby onlooker who intervened, which was enough for the beaters-up to go away, two of them "into the candidate's house".

Good bit of journalism, that last bit. Your face is a mess, but you still clock the vital fact about your attackers. I hope (a) that Jerome Taylor's career prospects improve as a result of his ordeal, and (b) that both the barbarians who did this and the barbaric puppeteers they were doing it for live more miserable and complicated and dysfunctional lives from now on.

Raedwald, the blogger who lead me to this story, says that it was "naivety or foolishness " that got Taylor into this fracas. Maybe so, but that strikes me as a bit harsh under the circumstances. Isn't trying to learn the truth about things, sometimes naively and foolishly, going where people who already know it all are too wise to venture, what journalism is all about?

Also, was that Good Samaritan onlooker who chased away the villains also perhaps being rather naïve and rather foolish? Again, maybe yes, but it's a good thing he did what he did.

One of the most striking political developments of my lifetime has been the rise of opinion polls. Now that we are into an election campaign, rival polling enterprises announce results concerning the relative strengths of the various political parties, major and minor, and the relative popularity and performing skills of their leaders, seem to be announced every day and sometimes, when something dramatic like an election debate has just happened, every hour, and become the object of obsessive analysis by the kind of people who like thus to obsess.

The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such as the one in 1945, when the election result, a massive Labour victory and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the war that made his reputation had even been concluded, came as an enormous surprise to vast numbers of people, not least to the amazed and delighted mass membership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were gobsmacked. Were there opinion polls then, telling anyone who would listen about this landslide before it happened? My understanding is: not. The only poll that happened then, certainly the only one whose results were widely discussed, was the election itself. Now, opinion polls don't just happen before elections; they happen all the time.

So what has this change, from pretty much no opinion polls to wall-to-wall hour-by-hour opinion polls done to politics? I am sure that commenters will be able to suggest all kinds of effects that have not occurred to me, but I can certainly think of a few political trends that have at the very least been reinforced by the relentless rise of opinion polling.

One trend, I suggest, is that opinion polls have drawn political leaders away from concerning themselves with the opinions of the members of the parties they lead, towards the opinions of voters generally. I'm not saying they totally ignored mere voters way back when, before opinion polls, or that they totally ignore mere party members now, but that is surely the direction in which things have gone. If their members believe X, but it turns out that most voters, especially swing voters in marginal seats, believe the opposite of X, then those party members will now tend to lose out. Opinion polls have discouraged parties from adopting ideologically distinct positions, and tugged them all towards the centre, partly because now they know far better what the centre consists of.

Not only are the opinions of party members now set to one side. These party enthusiasts are no longer even needed as sources of information about what the voters think. So, it is no wonder people have been leaving all the major political parties in their hundreds of thousands. They leave because they have become superfluous to requirements. All anyone asks them to do is shove pamphlets through doors and stuff envelopes. What they think doesn't matter.

Another effect of opinion polls is that they have turned politics into continuous campaigning. One of the most off-putting features of New Labour's moving spirits, to me, has been their inability to shake free of their most glorious moment, namely the 1997 election campaign. This was the moment when everything they did worked a dream, and they have carried on with the formula that worked then ever since. The people running the resulting Labour government have remained in campaign mode, behaving in government as if still in opposition, crafting policies and laws and announcements about policies and laws not on the basis of the impact of such policies and laws on the country, but on the basis of what the media will say about these announcements. And hence what the opinion polls will then say. Many, me included, particularly associate this perversion of political leadership with the recent years of the Labour Party, as lead by Tony Blair. But does anyone think that Brown's regime has been that different in this respect, or that the next government, whatever it turns out to consist of, will be any less media and opinion poll driven? Why do modern governments obsess about opinion polls? Because they can. Because, you might say, they can't not.

Another suggestion I'd want to offer concerning the rise of opinion polls is that opinion polls have made a nonsense of old-fashioned political demonstrations, and have thus created an atmosphere, and a somewhat misleading one, of political apathy. It's not that people don't any longer have any strong opinions about anything. It is more that if you gather up lots of placards and hire lots of buses and descend on London and march through the streets and stop all the traffic, and shout whatever it is that you want to shout, well, so what? How ever many thousands of you think whatever you think. Big deal. Immediately an opinion poll reveals that many thousands of others, often many more thousands of others, think that you and all your friends and comrades are greedy and/or deluded fools. Result: fewer demos of any kind, about anything.

You may reply, but what if your demo aligns with public opinion? Well, if that's the case, you should simply commission your own opinion poll that demonstrates that fact. If that's what your demo was supposed to draw attention to, why not simply prove this, and make that your story? Far more persuasive, and far more efficient.

Which brings us to another fact about opinion polls, which is that they are political ammunition. I first learned this when I got to know Dr Julian Lewis (now a Conservative MP) in the nineteen eighties, when he was making it his business to sabotage CND and (as it turned out) helping win the Cold War. Oh, Lewis and his gang of collaborators had great fun ratfucking those CND demos, by such methods as hanging his own signs (saying things like "KGB APPROVED") above the crowds of his enemies, thereby hogging about half the media attention, and driving the demonstrators mad when they watched themselves on the evening news or looked in the newspapers the next day. But at the heart of Lewis's operation were cunningly worded opinion polls, the results of which he would then show to the politicians. In the old days, politicians would be mightily impressed by mass demonstrations. What else, other than election results, did they have to go on? But, Lewis argued then, and proved then, opinion polls trump demonstrations. The next generation of politicos who are determined to have some day to day influence on things (such as those who run organisations like this one) have learned this lesson well.

The impact of opinion polls is hard to separate from the impact of that other great game-changer, television. But the impact of television on politics (to say nothing of the impact of television on, in particular, opinion polls and opinion poll results) has been talked about a lot more than has the impact of opinion polls, even before the Kennedy Nixon TV debates, and pretty much continuously since then. Television has also strengthened the hands of political leaders compared to political followers, provided of course that they are leaders who look good on it, because the leaders can use the telly to talk directly to voters (having first checked with their opinion polling what the voters want to hear). They no longer need their own followers to arrange mass meetings for them star in.

How opinion polls would have played out in politics if there had been no television, or how televised politics might have worked without opinion polls are hypotheticals I leave others to ponder. I will content myself with saying that television with no opinion polls would have meant that demonstrating would still now be in full swing, what with television having done so much to encourage demonstrating in the first place. The reality, meanwhile, is that the two transformations have in fact gone hand in hand, or perhaps I mean hand in glove.

Meanwhile, old fashioned politics, the kind where you have opinions of your own, has migrated elsewhere. We manic internetters like to think of the internet and blogging and twittering and all that as very modern, and of course technologically it is indeed the latest thing. But there is also something very old-fashioned about it. The internet, you might say, is where old politics has found a new home for itself, at a time when politics itself had become something different.

And now, this new-old politics is starting to have consequences of its own, maybe not here in the UK yet, but certainly in the USA. To anyone who says that nobody told the Tea Partying tendency that the age of public political demonstrations is over, I would say: yes, good point. But I think I'd want to distinguish between the kind of demonstrations that are merely arranged, in a top-down, organised way, and the kind that erupt from below. The organised kind strike me as the pointless ones, because all that clout can now be better directed to cannier indoor stuff. It's also worth asking where the Tea Partiers would now be without those plummetting Obama poll ratings. The long-term importance of something like the Tea Party movement is that it will bring together lots of people who will do more than merely demonstrate. If all that those Tea Partiers organise is yet more demonstrations, then they will accomplish little. But now I can feel this argument crumbling in my hands. Time for me to stop, and ask others what they reckon.

So, have opinion polls changed politics? 55 percent say yes, 35 percent said no way, and the rest said sod off you nosy bastard, who gives a toss?, what does it matter what I think?, etc. etc. ...

I thought that this quote, by a commenter called "Berlinerkerl" in response to a Guardian article that really was called "Arm our children with media studies", was too good to be left languishing in the "more than 50 comments" bilge tanks of a Comment Is Free article.

In his detailed study of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Jones (2001) draws our attention to the mass of early post-modernist contradictions running throughout the series. Whilst Bill and Ben live in an idealised, hedonistic, not to say nihilistic world, they only come out to play when the Man Who Works in the Garden, the authority figure par excellence, goes to have his dinner. Whilst the Class Oppressor is therefore an absent figure, he nevertheless should not be ignored. Class Oppression is, indeed, a recurring theme, as every time Slowcoach the Tortoise appears, the Flowerpot Men dance on his back, as Marxist critics such as Stalin (1995, p786) have pointed out.

That the Flowerpot Men are invariably awoken by the Little Weed is a clear pointer to a drug-addicted subculture. The language used by the Flowerpot Men harks back to the Theatre of the Absurd - Smith (1997, pp 129-150) draws parallels with Ubu Roi.

Bee-bop-flobbalob :-)

Another commenter called Pressman56 suggested instead that instead of arming our children with media studies we arm them with Kalashnikovs.

I recall a time when President Clinton was really quite unpopular, or so it appeared from where I was sat, then as now, in London. It was during his first term. In particular, I recall a libertarian friend who had recently been in America (although he may not himself have been American – not sure about that), sitting on my sofa in my living room, at one of my last Friday of the month libertarian talk evenings, telling me that President Clinton was absolutely not going to be re-elected. Too many people just did not like him. I pressed for details. Are you sure it's not just that you don't want Clinton to be re-elected? No, he isn't going to be re-elected. And the point is, my libertarian friend was sort of right. Clinton wasn't going to be re-elected. At the very least he didn't then look like being re-elected. But then, Timothy McVeigh blew up that big office block in Oklahoma and from then on, Clinton never looked back.

Politics is all about story telling. It is about, as we like to say here, the meta-context. And what this explosion accomplished for Clinton was that it completely changed the story being told at that time about what the state was and is. It turned the state from an economic and regulatory threat to the people, into the leading protector of the people. And it turned right wing grumblers about all those damned taxes and regulations into enemies of the state, and hence enemies of the people. Clinton no longer had to struggle to tell the story that he had been trying all along to tell, of the state as the necessary partner of the people, and of the people who were suspicious of the state as people who, at best, simply did not get this. Timothy McVeigh did that for him. And I remember how my heart sank when I heard about the Oklahoma bombing, and who had done it, and why, because I feared exactly the story switch that then happened.

Now the grumblers against taxes and regulations are back being the people. And the Democrats might yet find themselves losing their epic battle, the one which was supposed, in the words of Kyle-Anne Shiver, to have ...

... delivered the plum of America to the international socialist collective, or at least pushed us past the point of no return.

Even if regular people forget what turned this kind of story around for Democrats last time around, Democrats surely do remember. And just in case anyone has forgotten what a difference Timothy McVeigh made to the story told by President Clinton in particular and the story of America in general, Clinton is himself now reminding everyone.

But Bill Clinton, not for the first time in his life, is taking a chance. The danger for the Democrats is that they risk looking like they want another Timothy McVeigh. As quite a few of them surely do.

However, if the Democrats do get lucky and another McVeigh really does materialise, there is a big difference between now and the time when the original McVeigh did his thing. Then, there was no internet. The story was whatever the then mainstream media decided it was. But that rule no longer applies.

And guess who the new owner of this leftist newspaper is? I wonder how Robert "my brain hurts" Fisk, columnist at that paper, is taking the news.

A good example of not getting it. Some Michigan agency, surprised and aroused by the success of social networks, thought that it would be a bright idea to replicate this for students undertaking the transition from school to university.

The state of Michigan is currently building a custom social network called the Michigan College Access Portal, at a cost of $1.5 million, to help students looking to transition from high school to college and beyond.

One point five million dollars of public funds. To build a Facebook knock-off.

This needs no further comment.

The late Chris Tame, whom I used to assist in the running of the Alternative Bookshop and of the Libertarian Alliance, used to say, of blogging, that it was "here today and gone tomorrow". Well, indeed, most of it does pretty much fall off most of our merely mental radar sets by around the middle of the following week, but most of it is still there, and if you want to remember and refer back to an ancient internet essay or blog posting, you can usually find it. And actually, as the internet gets older, what is striking is how much better it remembers things than did the old print media, or even than did the pre-internet apparatus of print-based scholarship. Why? Basically, because anyone (you don't have to spend the entire day in some newspaper library in North London) can type a few vaguely remembered words or phrases into Google, and up it comes. So long as you have even a vague recollection of whatever it was, then you can dredge it all up again, and tell the world all about it, again.

I was reminded of all this by a posting yesterday by Mr Eugenides, which is basically a quote from something written in 1995, which is about – please forgive how self-referential this is becoming - how the Internet wouldn't ever amount to anything:

Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.

The author now admits he was quite wrong. He has had to, however much he might have wished that his unwise words could just have been forgotten.

The central point is that the power of the internet to entertain, inform, and by and by to change the world for the better, is not derived from the average quality of the average internetter, but from what the best internetters manage routinely, and from what us more routine internetters manage at our best. And that power just grows and grows.

The internet adds up to a brilliant bunch of reviewers, a brilliant bunch of critics, and a brilliant bunch of editors, brilliant meaning whatever you think brilliant means. It corrects errors. It draws your attention to things that on your own you would have entirely missed. It plants numerous flags and banners in that "wasteland". It filters data relentlessly, to suit all intellects and tastes. A "wasteland of unfiltered data" is exactly what it is not.

It helps that almost all persistent internetters, as a natural consequence of what we do and of how others respond, also learn and learn.

Which reminds me, I must dig up an ld posting that Mr Eugenides did a few months back about what a useless git Richard North is. Ah yes, here. This took me about ten seconds to find. I wonder what Mr E thinks about that now.

My Climategate pieces here have been of two sorts. There have been the big set-piece pieces where I at least try to say vaguely original things about it all, which given my life experiences tends to mean what sort of argument this is, how it is going and how it seems likely to go on going. And, there have been little bits like this one which basically just say: be sure not to miss this.

So anyway, be sure not to miss this, which is a report, from one of Bishop Hill's readers, of a tactical discussion by a bunch of climate alarmist journalists, thinking aloud about how to handle the situation now that the general public has started smelling rats all over the place, rats which they helped to bury, but which those mad bloggers have been digging up. How to bury all the rats now?

Typical quote:

I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad. We published a string of articles in late Jan, early Feb showing that people had misinterpreted the emails as casting doubt on CC.

We as in the Guardian. And that worked really well, didn't it?

Oh well, at least they are finally getting that we sceptics say what we say because we actually believe it, rather than merely because we have been paid to say it. That's something. Next thing you know, they may even be admitting that some of their fellow climate alarmists are only still climate alarmists because someone is paying them, and that many more who would like to be sceptical are staying mum for similarly economic reasons.

Don't miss the comments, which say everything that the good Bishop himself didn't feel the need to say.

LATER: Bishop Hill now has a Tip Jar. The Bishop has a wife and three children, and I am guessing that even a quite small amount of cash that has been earned directly from his blogging efforts would make him an even more potent force in the Climategate debate. If the commenter who says Big Oil might be about to switch sides in this argument, again, is right, then how about a little oil money in the Bishop's collecting plate?

At the start of my previous Climategate posting, I suggested that James Delingpole might be slacking off on the subject. Maybe he is. There is still nothing up at his blog beyond his afore-linked Beano bit. Maybe he feels he needs a breather. But maybe he is working very hard on another Climategate story, of which there are now dozens to chase up. Talk about a target rich environment for journalists.

Not that you would know it in the USA, if blog complaints like this are anything to go by. The way that the USA's old media are mostly ignoring the biggest scientific fraud in history, and one of the biggest global stories of the century so far, is itself an amazing story. Delingpole has written an entire book on recent US politics, and surely has many acquaintances in the US old media. Maybe he is now grilling these people, and will soon be doing a piece on why these persons are covering themselves in such unglory, Climategate-wise. Someone should.

Although, maybe I'm out of date and the US old media are getting their Climategate act together at last. Or maybe the Americans I've been reading are wrong, and the US old media have always been noticing Climategate, just not in the way those Americans would like. Comments from US readers about those possibilities would be most welcome. The Washington Post seems to be noticing. Weren't they the guys who lead the way on that original gate thing?

ADDENDUM: In the course of shortening this post, cutting out some digressions, I omitted one crucial non-digression which I now take the liberty of adding.

If it's true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn't that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren't these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren't you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying "What's up with Watt's Up With That??" One way or another, this is a huge story.

Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they'll find it going the other way.

ANOTHER ADDENDUM: Bishop Hill:

Steve Mosher, the man who broke the CRU emails story and author of Climategate: The CRUtape Letters, is interviewed on PJTV. Some interesting thoughts on what it means and why the US press has largely ignored it.

Which would at least further suggest that they have ignored it.

There has just been a burst of speculation about whether a certain Paul Dennis leaked the Climategate files. In a comment on a posting at Bishop Hill, Dennis denies it. The police did talk to him. But that's all, he says.

A few weeks ago, in among the comments on this posting at Watts Up With That?, I came across the following comment from Anthony Watts himself, following earlier comments speculating about who the leaker was:

You missed the joke, the "mole" was CRU's own incompetence, they left the file out in the open. The mole was whoever left it there. Steve McIntyre can confirm this, as can Steve Mosher. We were all just having a bit of fun with CRU until they figured out their own blunder, and when they did, they started erasing all sorts of public data on the FTP server.

http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/31/the-cru-data-purge-continues/

I got half way through doing a posting about this at the time, but then I thought, what do I know? I am about as much of a journalist as I am an astronaut. I mean, if I had noticed something, how come nobody else had?

But did I perhaps stumble upon the simple truth of this, told to me by the people who actually know? Simply, the CRU people (Jones?) just left a lot of stuff lying around in a what they thought was a private place, but which was actually rather public, to anyone who knew their way around. Then CRU realised this, and scrubbed it. But by then the bird had flown, as speedily as such birds can nowadays, and, over the next few weeks, it was a skeptic or skeptics quite unattached to CRU who put together that Read Me file. He/They started out that editing process with a lot more stuff.

Dennis did send some emails asking about the leak, but he did not initiate process. That is what he says in his comment at Bishop Hill, and I do not think he would lie in a blog comment. Not now, or ever if he's the kind of guy I now guess him to be. And not there. If he was the leaker, he'd now be working on a big splash admitting it (proclaiming it), and meanwhile telling no lies, or very many truths come to that.

Or have I got the completely the wrong end of completely the wrong stick? Apologies all round if I have totally misunderstood this situation. This is one of those postings that may find itself with an ADDENDUM, saying ignore all that, see comment number whatever from so-and-so. But, maybe not.

For several years now, most of us mainstream bloggers have been loftily contemptuous of paper and television "journalists". They are ridiculous dinosaurs, say most of us, slaving away fully clothed at desks and at computers that they often don't even own, pushing prejudices and biases that may not even be theirs, stuck in their own myopic little worlds and blind to the larger forces at work in the world. Worse, these bizarre individuals often insist on tramping about in the open air, talking to people who are, if anything, even more bewildered by the story in question than they are themselves. They need to get out less. Don't they understand that there's an internet in there, full of blogs, which they could learn stuff from? And none of these journalists have proper jobs, because this is how they make their living!

Actually, most journalists do make extensive use of the blogosphere. Where would they be without bloggers to supply them with facts and with coherent arguments?

But as for the idea that these journalists, writing in "newspapers", present any sort of competitive threat to the mainstream blogosphere, well, most of us greet such outlandish notions with a pitying smile at best, and as often as not with loud laughter.

But I believe that we bloggers may be making that common error of confusing the typical with the most significant. Just opening up ten random newspapers and sticking a pin into them ten times, and then reading whatever one happens to encounter, doesn't do justice to the potential importance of newspaper journalists. Sure, most of what they write is pompous crap recycled from anonymous political or business spin-doctors and gossip-mongers. But the best of the output of these journalists is often well worth reading, and bloggers can often learn useful extra titbits from them.

Obviously, there have to be bloggers to draw the attention of readers to the good stuff in newspapers. Regular people with jobs to do and lives to lead haven't time to search through great piles of paper every day, looking for the occasional treasures buried in among the landfill. And the average journalist is indeed bizarre figure, with little in the way of a future. But the best of the journalists are, I would argue, worthy to be ranked alongside the better bloggers, and some bloggers are starting to sit up and take notice.

Bishop Hill, for example, wrote magnanimously yesterday about the efforts of a journalist who writes under the name of "Fred Pearce":

Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn't made a bad fist of this story.

Indeed.

Richard North is taking all this a stage further. Not only does he make extensive use of the reactions of journalists to stories first aired in his and other blogs. He also himself sometimes writes things for a newspaper. He even occasionally appears on television.

Wise moves. We bloggers must guard against complacency. We cannot and must not assume that our current domination of the media world will last indefinitely.

Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, now TV pundit and all-round-media mogul and stirrer, has a fine column here about the latest developments surrounding the scientific credibility, or lack thereof, of the IPCC.

I notice that the Times (of London)'s front page splash is on the unfolding scandal of what sort of data has been concealed as inconvenient to the AGW alarmists. As some of us have noted in recent weeks, the MSM has been a very slow - to put it politely - to pick up on this issue. But not now. The other night, the issue even figured on the evening news on the BBC's flagship news channel.

Of course, it is unclear how far the effect of these stories will go. The other day, chatting to an investment manager who was talking about a climate change fund he was promoting, I casually mentioned the University of East Anglia scandal, and he gave me a funny look. The problem is that a lot of money is now tied up with this AGW stuff, not to mention a lot of political credibility.

All of which proves a point that the new media forms are now breaking stories that could and should have been broken in the days of yore. The internet is having an effect. I'd even go so far as to say that one of the reasons why Barack Obama cannot count on fawning coverage any more is because, while the MSM was in adoration mode, the internet and related channels ensured that the less flattering aspects of his administration got attention. And sooner or later, people noticed.

Last night I watched most of a discussion programme "chaired" (I'll get to that) by Kirsty Wark on BBC2 television, about President Obama and how he is doing. It was something called The Review Show.

Three things struck me about this show.

First, the BBC is finally acknowledging that President Obama is in some political trouble. This is refreshing.

But second, the dominant explanations of why Obama is in trouble are delusional. There is, said Bonnie Greer, without contradiction, a racist backlash going on. Sadly, in BBC-land, if a black person accuses white people of racism, the accusation is still allowed to stand, no matter how unpersuasive it may be, and no matter how unsatisfactory it is as an explanation for whatever is being talked about.

The other dominant explanation for Obama's fall from political grace, aside from racism, offered by a blond American lady who talked too fast, was that this backlash is "emotional". Obama, she said, is making the mistake of concentrating entirely on being "rational" in how he responds, and we all know what wins when facts have a face-off with feelings.

As for whether there is now a race-based backlash going on, how come those who are now backlashing were forward-lashing when they picked Obama to be President in the first place? For the question here is: what has changed? Why, in the opinion of many Americans, is a man who could do no wrong now doing a lot of wrong? Did a lot of Americans deliberately pick Obama, so that they could later hurl racist abuse at him? Come on. Obama's presence in the White House is evidence that racism in America is abating. Millions upon millions of Americans wanted Obama to do well and were eager to give him a chance because he is black. But, they are now disappointed. Are they disappointed because he is black? Have they only just noticed? I can believe that racists are now coming out of the woodwork to explain why Obama is now screwing up. But racism as itself an explanation of why Obama is now so much less popular, and so quickly, is absurd. Insofar as race-based feelings are relevant, it was the enthusiastic willingness to see an apparently qualified black man, any apparently qualified black man, become President, followed by the realisation that mere blackness and mere intelligence is insufficient to ensure Presidential adequacy, picking a white man who merely looks and sounds nice being a similarly imperfect way to pick Presidents. No, Obama is now unpopular because, in the opinion of many Americans, he is indeed screwing up. They hoped he wouldn't, but now, they think, he is.

As for the claim that this anti-Obama feeling is all about feeling, well, yes it is a feeling and many people are indeed angry, but it is also a very potent clutch of arguments. Obama is prioritising, as he did not in his campaign, his widely unpopular plan to nationalise healthcare, and lying about what this will cost. He is increasing taxes and regulations, in particular those based on the excuse of climate change. The idea that the objection to that whole rigmarole is all about feeling and in no way based on fact is, to put it with extreme politeness, a feeling rather than a fact. The idea that Obama is a communist was mentioned, by Bonnie Greer, but only as evidence of the complete irrationality of those now opposing Obama, as an illustration of what a certain sort of deluded white American suspects of all black people. But to a greater or lesser degree lots of Americans do now fear that Obama is something a lot like a communist, and they have plenty of good reasons for such a fear.

My third impression was that the chairing of this discussion was incompetent to the point of being ridiculous. Kirsty Wark should be giving a real talking-to. She was far too keen on joining in the discussion with her own opinions, instead of ensuring that all the other people present refrained from all talking at once. One of the reasons I immediately forgave the blond American lady for talking too fast was that she clearly feared that if she talked any less fast, she would not have made any of her points before others piled in, thereby making all points inaudible. One of the great arts of chairing a discussion is knowing when to stir things up by expressing opinions of your own, and when to concentrate on controlling the resulting flow of opinion in such a way that everyone gets their turn and is heard, and it can all be heard by all present. Wark behaved as if all present were too shy to say anything and had to be aroused with some chairmanly provocation. In fact, they all had plenty to say and needed to be arranged in a queue rather than a unanimous scrimmage. Kirsty Wark should, to use a tranport metaphor, have stopped flying her plane and concentrated on air traffic control.

As a result of this conversational chaos, the programme was hard to follow. So, don't take my personal impressions as any sort of objective summary of all that was said.

Ironically, Wark's incompetent chairing only served to reinforce the impression that the entire discussion was dominated by feeling rather than rationality. It wasn't, or it wouldn't have been. But that is what it sounded like.

A tiny but brazen piece of churnalism has just amused me in a post on WITsend, a blog on ComputerWeekly.com that is '…a place for women in IT…tackling issues facing women and other minorities working in technology'. The post, dated 12 January and headed 'Frances Allen: first woman to win Turing Award', begins

Frances Allen was has become the first woman to receive the prestigious Turing Award since it was set up in 1966.

Why did the author first write 'has become' and later correct it to 'was'? And why did she draw attention to the change by retaining the struck-through words? The explanation is at the end:

Correction: this story is true, but it's not new! Allen received the award in 2007, no idea why I got sent a press release on it now.. sorry!

So she took a single press release, and without even the slightest cross-checking – not even a quick glance in Wikipedia – she generated her blog post. Wish I could be so fluent. I have been all over the Net in the course of checking this and that, just for this tiny squib.

In case any reader does not know the term, 'churnalism' is the journalistic practice of recycling press releases as news with only the minimum of rewriting. It is a Bad Thing, and the blog author should care, because it is one of those issues facing women and other minorities working in technology. And men. And majorities. And people not working in technology.

When this woman got egg on her face, she did not even have the grace to be embarrassed by the exposure of her sloth. Instead of making the change silently, hoping no-one would notice, she flaunted this decline in standards (can you see what's coming? Yes ...) She should have hidden the decline. Phil Jones could have given her some pointers.

In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.

To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading "Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March":

That's certainly why I'm supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?

Today's Guardian leader, purportedly on social class, is worth reading. It is utter rubbish. But it is worth reading because it is utter rubbish.

It is an informative compression of the muddled thinking of the reflex left: non sequitur piled on fallacy, piled on miscomprehension of both theory and real people, piled on all-or-nothing thinking, piled on misprision of fact, bonded together only with a sticky, sighing outrage. Read it out loud and you may find yourself using that furious-sobbing-child tone and plonking emphasis affected by professional radical activists—especially women—to convey how strongly they feel about the world. As is universally acknowledged, strength of feeling is the same as strength of argument.

I say 'the reflex left' because the alternative, 'the conventional left', though it offers the pleasure of mocking the unoriginality of the radical, suggests a developed coherence in what is usually just attitudinal stamp-collecting reinforced by mutual approval (libertarians beware). Considering that the reflex left is obsessed with economics and sociology, and professes to derive its policy from them, the arrant ignorance of either, even as they are invoked, is an unending wonder. (Libertarians beware, bis.) That is on fabulous display here in a jazz hands incursion into social mobility, offering numbers that are not numbers ("But a child born 20 years later who is a successful professional now would probably come from the top quarter...") and that lead to no detectable conclusions, which can only have been included for emotional colour. Impersonal social forces are held to dominate, but paradoxically regarded as tools of the wicked if they do not do what is wanted.

There is another way that 'reflex' is appropriate: this is reflexive discourse. It preaches to the converted. It says, "Look! We were right all along." And assumes therefore that nothing need be said to engage the unconvinced (and again, beware). It is offered within code.

The best non sequitur in the piece is an epitome of an epitome. I considered offering it as a quote of the day. It has everything: it erupts into the discussion from nowhere, is complete nonsense, is nowhere meaningfully followed up, involves an appeal to shared attitudes and beliefs in the reader as reinforcement, and contains an implied accusation of wicked motives in others:

Politicians want us to believe that it is possible to make better-off people richer without making poor people poorer.

The Guardian leader-writer thinks we already do believe that it is impossible. Not even unlikely. Impossible. If we object that sometimes people have got rich by enslaving and impoverishing others, but that mostly both rich people and poor people have got richer together, though at different rates, then we must be wrong. The rich are richer ergo the poor are everywhere poorer. If the Prince of Wales is running his Aston Martin on spare wine and skiing every winter, it can only be at the direct expense of the Duchy of Cornwall's serfs - who are now starving in greater numbers than in 1337. The politicians stand accused of denying such an inconvenient truth

No wonder the people think they are out of touch.

The most successful media companies out there are just digging their graves more slowly than the rest

- Greg Hadfield

(hat tip to Kristine Lowe)

Someone called Andrew K is using the excellent Bishop Hill's blog to help him to compile a database of environment correspondents, complete with educational qualifications or lack of them. Says Andrew K of this project:

This is as much as anything an appeal for information: to do a little crowdsourcing.

Commenter MikeE is not sure he likes the tone of this post:

... I am not sure I like the tone of this post.

Yes, interesting. One of the biggest frauds in the whole history of our species is still being attempted, but don't let's be too nasty to the newspaper cheerleaders still trying to promote it. Let's not get the tone wrong. I say that Andrew K's tone is spot on.

Bishop Hill himself defends his guest-blogger:

One of the most interesting aspects to the history of AGW is the sheer unquestioning awfulness of the media coverage. This is an attempt to explain that phenomenon, and is not unreasonable.

Well, I think it goes beyond that. This is indeed quite nasty, as MikeE says, but only in the same sort of way that a prison sentence is nasty for a criminal. It is nasty but thoroughly deserved. Nasty but still the exact right thing to do. Just as I am in favour of prison sentences for criminals, I am also thoroughly in favour of the spotlight being shone on these (mostly) ridiculously unquestioning environmental correspondents. I said when Climategate first broke that once the "science" had been given a good seeing to, then next in line would be people like the idiot journalists who had been passing this "science" on with such enthusiastic credulity, them being a big part of the story itself. Excellent. What a difference an internet makes, eh?

So, if you can help with relevant information, please go to the Bishop's blog and provide it. Comments about the general goodness or badness of compiling lists of bad people can go wherever that makes sense to commenters. Personally, as I say, I am all for it.

The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.

Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn't, has it?

As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:

... which of the climate models had predicted this?

None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband's faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).

But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband's "experts" (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn't they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood's follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world's climate than the British Met Office.

Forgive me for always banging on about that other Cold War whenever I write about Climategate, but I truly believe that these comparisons are relevant. Much the same people were locked in combat then as are now, and the same economically catastrophic policies are being argued for and against then as now, the big difference being that now it is the entire global economy that is being threatened with economic derangement, which means that the world won't now, as the deranging tendency well knows, be able to make the obvious and damning comparisons that it could make then.

Meanwhile, the AGW debate has arrived at the same position that the Cold War argument had arrived at in or around about 1970 to 1980. An informed minority of pro-economic-progress critics had won the academic argument against the pro-economic-derangement academics, and word of this victory was spreading. And a particular thing that happened then is starting to happen now, which is that even intelligent layman critics of the John Redwood (and Brian Micklethwait) variety are starting to understand the details of the argument better than even the very smartest of the pro-derangement scientists, of the sort who are still advising governments, or who are still receiving and still trying still to believe this advice. It's not that these "experts" were born stupid, nor that they are now ignorant. Nor is Ed Miliband stupid, even if, what with all the other things on his mind, I suspect him of still being fairly ignorant. The climate science "experts" still know far more mere facts about this debate than John Redwood does, or than I do. It is simply that these people have now said - and nailed their egos to - too many stupid things, too many non-facts, and there is now no sensible way out for them. It's what these "experts" still insist on saying they know, but that clearly ain't so, that is hanging them all out to dry. The science, they keep saying, still, is settled. In their dreams.

I remember when I and my fellow anti-Marxists began correcting self-declared Marxists, who suddenly found themselves as a result on the theoretical defensive, about what Karl Marx himself had actually said. Communism is fine in theory, they then said, retreating hurriedly, but it just didn't work quite so well in practice. No, said we, pressing forward some more, a theory that doesn't work "in practice" is called an untrue theory, a bad theory, and anyone who persists in following it is stupid, and by and by: evil. And so on. So it is now with AGW. Okay, I might not now be able to demolish the sinister and preposterous Michael Mann in a television studio, but give me another few months, weeks even, of reading the skeptic blogs and I surely could.

Then as now, the mainstream media were very reluctant to report what had become obvious then, and is gradually becoming obvious now. But despite there being no internet then, the obvious economic inferiority of communism was nevertheless reported and did get around, in the form of capitalist stuff galore and adverts galore for yet more capitalist stuff galore, and nothing but jokes and complaints about the communist stuff. Not even journalists could fail to observe in which direction the Berlin Wall was pointing, and which side built it. Now the word about the fraudulence of the AGW crowd is also getting out, in the form of misbehaving weather, and, despite the best efforts of most of the regular journalists, via the internet.

The next step is to destroy - or at least try to cut down to size - the various Evil Empires that have been erected upon the fraudulent foundations of the AGW argument, as Richard North also well understands.

I thought this might interest and rile up some of our readers, many of whom I expect are as great fans of Michael Yon as I am:

Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not "arrested", but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with national security. Port authority police eve...ntually came -- they were professionals -- and rescued me from the border bullies.

He was not at all pleased by the treatment and has written:

When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.

When, I ask you, are we going to FIRE these un-american, untrained, brainless, worthless, useless apes? (I beg forgiveness if I offend any of our near relatives by use of this comparison. Great Apes are marvelous creatures.) Of course, they might have to go on welfare if we fired them because no one but a government bureaucracy would be stupid enough to hire people whose only contribution to America will be their retirement.

Mad? You are damned right I am mad. The TSA and INS are out of control. Disband it. Fire them all. NOW, DAMN IT!!!

New info from Yon in addition to the above on FB: "The Customs people (CBP) were the actors who handcuffed me."

As Michael Jennings has already reminded us, it is now that time of year, when we look back at the rest of the year. I too will now look back at 2009. Whereas Michael trots the globe, my preferred outdoor activity is walking around London, taking photos, an activity which, as of now, remains more or less legal.

And one of the things I especially like to photo is Evening Standard headlines. Not the headlines in the actual newspaper itself, but the ones on the outside of the contraptions behind which the sellers of the Evening Standard sit. I don't do this as obsessively as this guy, but I do it every few days or so, whenever a particularly intriguing or doom-laden headline hoves into view.

Click on all these headlines to get the original picture that I took, often a bit prosaic, as in: just the headline and its immediate surroundings; but sometimes with further fun and games, in particular further headlines next to the one I've featured in the little squares below. So, for instance, to consider just the first two snaps, on Jan 5, besides the amazing news that it was quite cold in January 2009 (just as it is quite cold now - see Dec 22(a)) you can also see talk of "TORY TAX CUTS". We wish. Still in January, you can ponder the ever widening gap that separates the ever more bogus hero Barack Obama from the real deal: "CAPTAIN COOL IN RIVER JET CRASH".

The most regular themes are: economic woe, politicians cheating on their expenses, the consequent relentless criticism of and plotting against the Prime Minister, and the equally relentless way the Prime Minister just bashes on with his ruinous activities, seemingly impervious to all complaints.

See especially June 5, which is worth clicking on for, I humbly submit, artistic reasons This is certainly my favourite photo of all these, in terms of the atmosphere it evokes and the memories it will stir in me in future years, one of the main reasons I take photos being just remind myself of what I was interested in, whenever it was. I love that digital cameras automatically attach dates to everything. So, here we go.

There are three for July, because none of the three headlines you see seemed to me to deserve exclusion.

Well, I hope you liked all that, even if without a lot of clicking.

You may now be saying to yourself that November and December have become pretty anti-climactic, and you would be right. For there is another story here, besides all the stories alluded to in the headlines. These photos serve not just as a random walk through the year 2009, but as a probable elegy for the Evening Standard itself, and certainly for the long London era of Evening Standard headlines in the streets.

Click on October 20 for the first clue. That's right. Some time around then, the Evening Standard stopped costing any money, and started being handed out free. At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing.

This switch to the ES being a giveaway came only a few months after its takeover by a Russian Oligarch. How soon before the ES vanishes altogether, becoming itself the subject of a few more doom-laden headlines in other organs, before it sinks from the memory of Londoners?

Richard Castle of the Burton Mail wrote the following story about a recent act of vandalism: Vandals deface the town war memorial :

A ROYAL British Legion boss says vandals have “dishonoured those who have given their lives for our country” by defacing Burtonʼs war memorial.

Roy Whenman, vice-chairman of the town’s Legion branch, received calls from members saying an extremist message had been written on the statue. Having been informed at 9.20am, borough council chiefs had cleaned the graffiti from the relic, situated outside Burton College, in Lichfield Street, by 9.40am.

Mr Whenman, of Birches Close, Stretton, has described whoever committed the offence as “diabolical”.

He said: “There’s nothing worse, in my eyes, than discrediting a war memorial. It dishonours those who have given their lives for our country.

“I don’t know how long it was there for, but I was pleasantly surprised by the council’s quick action and I commend them for it.

“What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.”

Dennis Fletcher, chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, said he suspected someone from the far right was responsible.

He said: “My reaction is one of horror. Just two nights ago at our general committee meeting we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.

“I suspect members of the far right have done this to stir things up and there are generally very good inter-cultural relations in East Staffordshire.

“Graffiti of any type is terrible but when it includes racist material it has to be considered utterly unacceptable.”

An East Staffordshire Borough Council spokesman said: “We would say that this vandalism is deplorable and we do our best to clean such graffiti as soon as we possibly can.”

■ The Mail has manipulated the mainpicture to remove some of the content of the message.

The Burton Mail would like you to think that what was removed in the manipulation was swear words or something like that.

Actually, no. A picture of the graffiti has been posted by "OldWarDog" of the "4 Freedoms Worldwide" blog. It shows that the censored words were...

...Before I tell you, see if you can guess. Not the exact words, but the general idea. You can make a guess based on this gnomic comment from the vice-chairman of the Burton branch of the British Legion: "What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.” (What issues? Why are you talking in this strange, indirect way?) You can make a guess from the otherwise inexplicable involvement of the chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, and his guess - unsupported by any evidence - that "someone from the far right was responsible", when the British Far Right are usually all too anxious to muscle in on displays of support for the armed services. You can make a guess from his further comment, which only starts to make sense when you realise that something is being hidden, that "Just two nights ago ... we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough."

Did you get it? Here is the picture.

And in case that link goes dead, let me just tell you. The graffiti says "Islam will dominate the world. Osama..." The next few words are difficult to read in the picture. Never mind, you guessed the general thrust of them anyway.

Now read Kathy Shaidle's post :When media bias becomes media malpractice.

What is the Burton Mail playing at? I was about to write, "you can't get away with that sort of thing now we have the internet" until half a second's more thought told me that you couldn't get away with that sort of thing in the days before the internet either. Hundreds of people in Burton must have seen the graffiti, even if it was removed quickly by the council. When even one or two of these hundreds saw that report in the Burton Mail they will have instantly realised they were being lied to, and will have become far more likely to spread the news about what they really saw. The graffiti on its own will do harm to race relations. The graffiti plus the cover up will do far worse.

(Via House of Dumb)

Within a few seconds of cranking up my computer this morning I was reading this posting by Steve McIntyre, which I got to via Bishop Hill, who says of it:

McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It's not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and "hide the decline" from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.

There are going to be months of revelations like this.

So that's two links to the McIntyre posting in this already. The internet already contains a lot more. Watch it go viral, much as this just did.

A commenter on McIntyre's posting, Jonathan Fischoff, says:

Every time I hear people say “the emails are out of context!” I think, be careful what you wish for.

Chris S says:

People are now beginning to realize how “so much was owed by so many” IPCC Summaries, “to so few”.

Indeed.

What of Al Gore's other argument (beside the taken-out-of-context argument), that all these CRU emails are ten year's old, so, really, what the flip? As thousands have already pointed out, many of the CRU emails, which Gore has clearly not read or even read very much about, are far more recent. But yes indeed, the emails scrutinised in this latest McIntyre posting do indeed go back a decade. But what that shows is: so does the scientific dishonesty. Gore is saying: "Relax, it goes back a long way, these guys have been conning us for a decade." This doesn't really work as a put-down, does it?

Will "the media" give this McIntyre posting the attention it deserves? I am increasingly thinking that it doesn't matter what these people say or don't say about this story, or about anything else. McIntyre's posting, one of the many fragments of this far bigger mega-story, is now out there, for anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and read about it. Tens of thousands of comments on it, attached directly to it, and such as this one that you are reading now, are even now being concocted, by and for all who care. Whether the old-school journos join in (Delingpole is a good example of that trend) and thereby become part of the new media, or prefer to keep looking away (see Delingpole's excellent recent posting about the pathetic Climategate non-performance so far of Private Eye) this says more about their own future than it says about the story itself. As with the named and shamed CRU scientists, the exact motivation behind each particular item of old-school media deception, neglect or misdirection is a matter of debate. The fact of it is not, and any who want to can now see this.

Michael J just emailed me this link to a piece by a scientist. The point is, guys like this can now can now say all this. He no longer needs any journo to open the door for him.

Bishop Hill, who has been working overtime to keep apace with the whole University of East Anglia climate change kerfuffle, has this remarkable example of how some journalists have been threatened by AGW alarmists. How lovely.

By the way, as a native of East Anglia, I feel ashamed of how my region has been tainted by these arseholes. When the UEA was originally built back in the 1960s, it was constructed, much to my father's chagrin, on a golf course. Given the collapse in that institution's reputation as a result of the emails, perhaps it should revert to golf and do less harm to what remains of the UK's intellectual life.

So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn't watch to find out what's contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we'd read it for ourselves.

We only watched to see if he had.

For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.

- Small Dead Animals describes how the mass media of Canada finally got around to noticing Climategate. Thank you Counting Cats.

Last night I channel hopped into Question Time, the BBC's late night political panel show, and caught the beginning of the question they had about climate, etc.. And I can report that, although maybe only temporarily, there has been, I think, a definite change of atmosphere in the argument about climate change.

Melanie Phillips and Marcus Brigstocke said, respectively, yes and no, to the question about whether global warming was a scam. Neither Brigstocke nor Phillips said anything I haven't heard either say several times before. Brigstocke made much of the fact that the articles he agrees with about melting icecaps were all "peer reviewed", which Melanie Phillips wasn't able to come back on, as she was surely itching to do. But Brigstocke wasn't the sneering, jeering, arrogant shit I'm used to. Melanie Phillips was heard reasonably politely, and the general tone of the event was thoughtful and hesitant rather than dogmatic and intolerant of dissent. David Davis made a point of criticising the use of the word "denier" to describe people who might disagree with you. Science, he said, can't work like that. Science is never settled, he said. Nobody objected to those claims in any way.

But it wasn't so much what they all said. It was more how they said it, and the general atmosphere of how it was received. The audience was the usual pro-warming crowd, but its partisanship was not the monstrous thing I usually see on Question Time, and it included at least two brave souls who thought quite differently, because they said so out loud. First, there was the questioner, who dared to use that word: scam. And at the end there was a bloke who claimed, mentioning those familiar (to us lot) historical stories about the medieval warm period, that "only one point of view is allowed". But as he himself proved, both by how he spoke and by how he was allowed by all others present to speak, i.e. without jeeringly self-righteous interruptions, that he was a bit out of date.

Put it this way. A mere wordsmith like me struggles to get across what the change was. But a theatre or movie director would have known at once that something quite big had happened, and would have been able to itemise quite a few more specifics to back up that observation than I can, to do with body language, tone of voice, crowd noises, and so on and so forth. I hesitate to say that "things will never be the same again". But I do think this might now be true.

Listening to Brigstocke talking about the problems he said the Inuits have been having, and about retreating icecaps and water that is less saline than usual because of so much ice melting into it, made it clear to me that the question now is: How much evidence is there, still, for the global warming thesis, that has not been taken out, not contaminated (so to speak) by those wretched CRU conspirators. (Later: in connection with that, see this. Even later: I'm not completely sure, but I rather think this may be one of the very best pieces yet on all of this. And whatever you do, don't miss the final paragraphs about all those bewildered environmental correspondents. Real Samizdata quote of the year stuff.)

Who, by the way, have now been thrown to the wolves by many on their own side, if this show was anything to go by. It's not just Monbiot. Only total fanatics are now trying to defend these people. Marcus Brigstocke never breathed a word in their defence; he merely claimed that there was plenty of other evidence for his and their opinions besides the rubbish they've now been caught trying to foist on us. Whether the earth is being cooked is now, more than ever, open to debate. But the goose of those silly CRU pseudo-scientists is, I would now say, irrevocably cooked.

In other climate-of-opinion news, see this excellent piece by Gerald Warner about the still-in-motion attempt by large swathes of the BBC to bury this story, and about how the internet, Fox News, political turmoil about this in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, etc., is making a nonsense of this.

By way of illustration of what Warner says, and talking of total fanatics, and talking of (to quote the headline over Monbiot's first admission, linked to above) "Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis", see this ludicrous piece in the Times. The Times, seems to be behaving an order of magnitude more insanely over Climategate even than the BBC, only deviating from total Kremlinoid madness in at least allowing commenters to write the news that the Times team of enviro-fanatics are so unwilling to pass on. The only story these enviro-fanatics have allowed anyone apart from commenters to mention is about is how much of a frenzy us climate sceptics are getting into about a non-story, which is something I suppose. Says guest enviro-fanatic Stuart Parkinson:

But what these emails clearly do not show is any sort of systematic campaign across the environmental sciences to create evidence for climate change. ...

Oh yes they do sunshine, as the commenters, many of them Americans, on this daft piece of self-deception then queue up to tell him.

The Times and Fox News are owned by the same tycoon, Rupert Murdoch. In this video clip, Murdoch denies wanting to shape any agendas and I believe him. He's a businessman, selling whatever sells. Funny how so many people don't seem to get that.

As Warner says, where the hell would we now be without the internet? I say: who knows? Just rejoice.

Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid chap, but I cannot understand how he can fail to see the absurdity of his latest remarks. His threat to block his online content from search engines is an indication he does not grasp the fact his content is almost entirely fungible in a world where the plentiful alternatives are simply a click away.

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

Let me correct that...

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to find alternative content elsewhere online.

Not only will people not be motivated to pay Rupert Murdoch for content if they cannot find it via google, they will not even be aware of the content Murdoch is hiding from them. In short, Murdoch will become completely irreverent irrelevant on-line almost overnight and I am not sure why he thinks all too many people will care one way or the other. This is a bit like threatening someone that if they do not give him their money, Murdoch will cut his own throat. Er, sure Rupert, whatever. I suspect folks at the Guardian (who may not be my favourites ideologically but they certainly 'get' the internet better than most) and elsewhere can hardly believe their good luck.

Sorry to obsess on the subject but I just keep seeing these howlers by the professional journalists who we are told are so essential for democracy/social justice/world rotation/whatever. The latest giggler comes from Ed Pilkington writing in the Guardian:

There is also evidence that Hasan purchased a high-powered pistol three weeks ago as well as several high-capacity ammunition rounds that would allow him to continue firing without reloading.

Well... a 5.7mm pistol round is kind of low-powered really, at least in terms of 'stopping power' and I suspect the main reason that traitorous Muslim creep at Fort Hood killed so many people was they were defenceless and thus died from multiple point blank shots... therefore I can well believe he purchased several high-capacity magazines... you know, the sticky-down bits that hold the "ammunition rounds" (presumably as opposed to "newspaper rounds" or "doctor's rounds")... hehehe.... and I assume he got several so that he could reload quickly during his shooting spree.

It seems a crime reporter writing for a 'quality newspaper' does not need to know even the most rudimentary technical terms when describing a firearm used in a crime. The fact the editor of the Guardian lets a journalist make a ass of himself writing about something they obviously both know nothing about tells you a great deal about the state of the 'indispensable' news media.

I am grinding my teeth trying to restrain myself from commenting on some of the drivel being written about the recent murder of US soldiers by a muslim US army officer... but this is just a measure of the ignorance that permeates the profession and which is directly responsible for the growth of so called 'new media', i.e. things like blogs. Nick Allen writes in the Telegraph in an article titled "gunman used 'cop killer' weapon in massacre at US Army base" (a catchy 'yellow journalism' title if ever there was one):

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven, a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that can fire armour-piercing bullets.

Oh for fuck sake. Any weapon can fire 'armour-piercing bullets'. I know little about Nick Allen, but I assume he is a Brit and therefore knows bugger all about firearms and thus parrots the equally dismal urban US journalist propensity to describe any handgun firing a round capable of penetrating (some) body armour as a "cop killer". Also I strongly suspect 9mm and 10mm handguns are far more popular with SWAT teams, as SWAT teams have rifles for use against armoured targets.

The weapon is designed for high(-ish) penetration for use against low end body armoured targets (the victims at Fort Hood were almost certainly unarmoured), but it has rather poor stopping power (that said, when it comes to handguns, bullet placement rather than calibre is the largest single determinant of stopping power), making the FN actually a poor choice... presumably the high magazine capacity may have been why the murderer chose it, knowing he was going to commit his crimes at very close range in a 'target rich' environment.

If journalists want to be credible, they need to try to avoid loaded (no pun intended) and rather ignorant terms like "cop killer" and not make meaningless remarks about weapons being capable of using "armour piercing" rounds (which is just another way of saying "they can shoot the rounds they are loaded with"). This ghastly incident contains more than enough news fodder that such sloppiness is inexcusable from 'professionals'.

For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of "Stalinism" among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty's reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return - and has never done so.

Nor is this ancient history.

The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).

The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama - a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.

Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on "Soviet Disarmament Policy") so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day - a year will do.

Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago - by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.

I mean nothing "racist" when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else "Stalinist" is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.

P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a "McCarthyite" as a complement. But then I have read "Blacklisted by History" by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.

There is obviously plenty of controversy - seen across the internet and the MSM - about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC's Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional "personality" take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.

Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only "mainstream" parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as "mainstream". After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK's membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.

Given that the BNP - a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way - has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?

The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It's the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn't have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.

Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.

If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.

Sir Christopher Bland (somewhat unfortunate surname, Ed) has a debate in the latest edition of the UK magazine, Standpoint, with Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor, as his opponent. Moore - who has vowed not to pay the BBC licence fee tax until Jonathan Ross - a boorish chatshow host and radio DJ - is sacked for a certain incident, challenges the whole idea of tax-financed broadcasting. His arguments are forceful, not least the point that the BBC, as a privileged recipient of funds raised on pain of imprisonment, can and does undermine would-be commercial competitors, therby stifling potential new ideas and models of broadcasting. He points out that while the BBC claims to not be biased, it is in fact biased, and it would be better for such biases to be upfront rather than concealed. I am sure that Samizdata readers are mostly familiar with the standard liberal critique of the BBC's very existence, so I will not rehearse the argument here again.

What struck me, however, is how lame Sir Christopher's debating points are. Check them out for yourself, gentle reader. Pretty much most of his comments fall into the "only a fool could deny how wonderful the BBC is" and gives variations on how the sky will fall in on the quality of UK television if the licence fee system is scrapped. We get the now-standard sneer about American and foreign TV. Zzzzz. In fact, he rarely engages very energetically with Moore's points; rather, he harrumphs that Moore is some sort of free marketeer zealot, and of course, brings out the standard BS line that anyone who disagrees with tax-financed broadcasting is a "philistine". The lameness, the refusal to think in principles of any coherent kind, is really quite striking. It is hard not to smell a certain whiff of defeat.

The attitudes of Sir Christopher - no doubt a most civilised and agreeable member of what might pass for the "establishment" in this country - are pretty widely shared across much of the population. His worldview, his inability to understand a world in which the state did not grab such a huge share of our lives and attempt to manage it, is shared, for example, by all those who cannot consider how healthcare will be delivered without a Soviet-model system such as the NHS. Moore makes this point; he even points to the parallel between the old Church of England, and its now-abolished tithe on parishioners, be they Anglicans or not, and the licence fee, which is paid by those who either watch the BBC, or who do not. Bland, of course, just brushes it aside. One suspects that much of his worldview is shared by the likes of David Cameron.

Incidentally, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Standpoint. It is a definite plus in the UK magazine scene.

It's no secret. No secret at all. Every second or third blog I read has stuff about it. Film Director Roman Polanksi (Repulsion, The Pianist) did something bad of a rape-like nature to a teenage girl several decades ago, and lived in Europe from then on.

But now they are going to extradite him or not as the case may be, from France or Switzerland (somewhere European), and big cheese lists of Hollywood big cheeses are saying he's a great artist and therefore regular morals and laws and suchlike don't apply to him, ease up, forget about it, freedom of artistic expression, it wasn't really rape ("rape-rape" as Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, Girl, Interrupted, Rat Race) has famously put it), it was her fault, it was her mother's fault, it was the judge's fault, blah blah, and the rest of us are saying: bullshit you evil bastards.

If you care about the details you now know them. I care about the details, a bit, and I too am of the bullshit you evil bastards tendency. Not my point here. No, what interests me about this ruckus is how the internet has so completely changed the rules of such debates, and so completely wrong-footed the big cheese evil bastard team.

Twenty years ago, regular people had opinions, but no obvious way to express them, unless they were paid to do it, or were obsessive opinion-mongers the way I was. But even I, an amateur opinion-monger more obsessive than most, had no easy way to say what I thought about the Roman Polanski thing. I had vaguely heard that he had been accused of something sexually bad and was being chased around the world by American cops, but so what? What was I going to do about it? Sit down and write a Legal and/or Cultural Notes piece for the Libertarian Alliance? Well maybe, but frankly, I didn't care to do that. Spend too long trawling through the details of some rape case on the other side of the world, and you risk being thought a bit too interested in the raping (or whatever it was) of underage (if that's what she was) girls yourself. Writing for the Libertarian Alliance in those days meant either writing something a bit serious, of some length, digging into all the details and making sure to get them right, or writing nothing at all. So, for practical purposes, I was in the same position as all those people in pubs saying: "How about that Roman Polanski then? What's that about? No, I don't know the details either. Hollywood eh? Nice work if you can get it. Well, anyway, who cares what we think, fancy another pint?"

At the time, and for many years since, I too guessed that it may well not have been "rape-rape". That is, I guessed that maybe this was one of those furores where the legal age limit had definitely been transgressed (hence the fuss being made by all those puritanical US cops and judges), and Polanski was indeed a bit creepily old, but that otherwise, well, whatever turns you on and whatever you agree to. Silly girls in Hollywood will consent to all sorts of stuff to get their careers cranked up, and it should be their choice. But more fundamental to my point here: I didn't know, and I didn't care to go to the trouble of finding out. Me and millions of others.

The internet has changed all that. What the internet supplies is a vastly higher class of gossip. Before the internet, finding a piece which listed what you considered to be all the pertinent facts of a complicated, foreign and creepy matter such as this one could take weeks, and the chances were that if you really, really wanted a piece like that, you'd have to write it yourself, and risk being branded a creep yourself. Which would anyway probably never be read by anybody in significant numbers. Too creepy. Now, a few links, and you have all the facts you want.

Facts like: she was thirteen, rather than sixteen or seventeen. Facts like: he drugged her. Facts like: She said no!! Several times!!!! In every respect short of the use of a chair leg or crowbar and there being blood all over the place alongside all the other rape-fluids, this was most definitely rape-rape, and we all now know it.

All over the world, blog postings and think pieces like this one, this one, and this one, and of course this one, are now being penned - in America, by people who have long doubted the accuracy and quality of the Hollywood moral compass, all over Europe, by people who don't want it thought that all Europeans are as "sophisticated" as their damned Culture Ministers are about child rape, and all over the world by people who think that child rape is wrong, dammit.

Who the hell knows what should have been done about all those damned collapsing banks? Who's fault was that? What does that all mean? Not even the internet can sort that out for you in half an hour. But it can sure as hell tell you in fifteen minutes what bloody Roman bloody Polanski did to that poor girl, and admitted to doing to that poor girl, and how old she was, and how she said no no no no no, and it can tell you that it was wrong, and that he should be punished, and that how long it takes to catch him and how good or crappy The Pianist was are absolutely not the issues, and that if Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, Shine a Light) thinks otherwise then Martin Scorsese, fine film maker though he may well be, is a piece of shit who deserves to have his moral compass wrapped around his neck.

It took me way less than two hours, in among boiling a couple of eggs, having a couple of coffees, setting the video to record the Japanese Grand Prix, listening with a half an ear to Martinu's Sixth Symphony, and scanning several other things on the internet that I've already forgotten about, to say all that. Having read and thought, a bit, I then wrote and posted it, a bit, in, for all practical purposes, no time at all, and it's now being read by Americans, maybe even including Instapundit, and maybe even including Martin Scorsese's press agent. A comment on some other think piece or blog posting would only have taken me a minute or two, as many, many others have been demonstrating. It's a different world, my friends.

A final point. Not every member of the Sophisticated Class is being as dumb about this as a lot of them are. Luc Besson, it seems, is not on any of those stupid bastards lists:

But support was not universal; Luc Besson, a prominent French film director and producer, was not on the list, though he describes himself as a Polanski friend.

“This is a man who I love a lot and know a little bit,” Mr. Besson said in a radio interview with RTL Soir. “Our daughters are good friends. But there is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone. I will let justice happen.”

Well said.

The other day, I criticised a short programme slot about how the Chicago school of economics - to use that rather loose term - might have to carry some responsibility for the credit crisis. The programme was put together by the Channel 4 news programme. Anyway, someone at the show noticed my comments, and the journalist who put the programme together, Faisal Islam, was kind enough to comment at some length in an email to our editors. Here goes:

"Hello Johnathan,"

"I saw your comments on the piece on economics that aired on C4 News last month. I thank you for your understanding of the limitations of television. Even C4 News would be hard-pushed to do a piece on the history of economic thought. It was really meant to be the entree for a main course of red-blooded economic debate, but that didn't quite come off. Anyway, clearly I would dispute the notion that it was 'propaganda'. I think it's a bit harsh when the main protagonist is a chicago professor who does a fairly good job of defending his position, yet also recognises that they did get some things wrong."

"Likewise we ran almost unchallenged a piece featuring Jim Rogers' Austrian-ish critique of Obama/ Brown's global stimuli. so I'd like to think we are more eclectic than you seem to indicate."

"Anyway, you'll be interested to see the rest of the Robert Lucas interview. I put it on the blog as a balance to the Paul Krugman NY Times magazine article. It's all here, I'm sure it might stimulate some debate on your excellent blog."

Here is Faisal's link.

Good for Channel 4 for its reponse to what was a fairly grumpy posting by me. I guess I should have mentioned its Jim Rogers interview. I actually did link to it a while ago on this site. Jim Rogers is great value.

Anyway, I think my original point still stands, although in the light of the reaction, I will be a bit easier on Mr Islam from now on. It is gratifying that we got a response, and that Mr Islam even understood the significance of why we are writing about this topic and get annoyed if schools of economic thought are presented in a seemingly unfair way. If parts of the MSM pick up on the idea that the credit crisis cannot be blamed on "greedy bankers" and derivatives - although these instruments can be aggravating factors - but has origins in erroneous ideas of printing money, "too big to fail" bailouts and the rest, then we might be making progress. By continuing to slog away at it, we can influence ideas that are held in the media/academy and even public affairs more broadly. And influencing a guy who presents economic and business news for a major UK news channel is a pretty big deal.

Rod Liddle, in his role as knuckle-dragger-in-chief at the Spectator, has an article bearing a most arresting headline. Now the writers of such articles often don't get to choose the headlines, so this might even have taken Mr Liddle aback somewhat:

"We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist".

The Spectator now has a new editor in the form of Fraser Nelson, one of journalism's good guys. Well, I know it is good to start one's term in the editor's chair with a bang, but er, isn't this a bit off? Actually, if you read the article, it is quite clear that Rod Liddle, despite his salty turn of phrase and spirit of cheerful nastiness, is not saying that being a racist is a good thing.

The journalists who produce the UK's Channel 4 news programme produced a rather sly piece of leftist propoganda last night (Quelle surprise? Ed). Faisal Islam - whom I have met - had a brief slot on last night's daily broadcast suggesting that the Chicago school of economics, most famously associated with the likes of Milton Friedman, is somehow partly to blame for the credit crunch. Yes, you read that right.

Mr Islam went on about the "complex models" that were used by these economists and somehow sought to draw a link between the Chicago School, and the decisions taken by banks, both central and private. That seems a bit rum. I don't recall Dr Friedman or his associates granting a sort of blanket blessing to financial engineering techniques of the kind associated with recent turmoil, suchas using derivatives to put bank liabilities off the balance sheet. That school has also hardly been in favour of encouraging sub-prime lending by legislation. After all, quite a lot of economists with conventional "soft Keyensian" views pretty much signed up to how banking has operated in the last few decades, and of course signed up to the idea that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, and his successor, Ben Bernanke, did a spiffing job.

There was no apparent attempt - admittedly quite difficult in a short TV spot - to explain what the key arguments of the Chicago school of economics actually are. Nor was there any attempt to point out that this "school" is only one of the centres of free market economics. The Austrian viewpoint, which tends to eschew statistical formulae completely, went unmentioned. And yet it is the latter approach, as exemplified by the likes of Thomas Woods, that has been most active in pointing out the sheer folly of central bank activity in the past decade or so. And this central bank activity is what has been the prime culprit, a fact that Mr Islam's documentary left unmentioned.

The programme also failed to ask any questions of the Keynesian tradition, with its love of big, artificial aggregates such as "consumer demand" etc. If one is going to point to the hubris of statistical models of economic behaviour, then the Keynesian macroeconomic tradition is surely as much in the firing line as the Chicago one.

As propoganda, it was very effective on anyone who might not understand the issues. It might have been put together by that performance artist, Naomi Klein.

Maybe the problem is that these issues are often highly complex and difficult to portray intelligently in a 5-minute news slot. Well indeed.

ELSPA director general Mike Rawlinson said:

The discovery that the Video Recordings Act is not enforceable is obviously very surprising. In the interest of child safety it is essential that this loophole is closed as soon as possible.

In this respect the videogames industry will do all it can to support and assist the government to that effect. ELSPA will therefore advise our members to continue to forward games to be rated as per the current agreement while the legal issues are being resolved.

FFS!

Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.

And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill... stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.

PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.

Dan Rather is calling on the state (naturally) to prop up the old mainstream media and had this to say:

"If we do nothing more than stand back and hope that innovation alone will solve this crisis,” he said, “then our best-trained journalists will lose their jobs."

From your lips to God's ear, Dan.

But innovation is indeed 'solving' this 'crisis' as the meteoric spread of blogs and other forms of new media are demonstrating. And Dan, if you think all those bloggers who are pissing on the ashes are trying to help put the flames out, I assure you their motives are rather... different.

(Via Instapundit)

Which is why you can't trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to "punish savers"?

As I wrote at that time,

[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don't do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.

Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky's prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.

For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.

Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.

It is revealing in the coverage of the conviction of two racists for expressing their views, that there is a near complete lack of any debate over the profound civil liberties issues involved. It is being flatly reported, but not debated.

The mainstream media are always telling us how 'essential' they are for 'our democracy'. But I have yet to see anyone raise the point that just because the people stating their opinions are crackpots, maybe crackpots should also be allowed to say what they think? I was waiting for the papers to surprise me today...

But no. This is 'ground breaking' we are told, and indeed it is, but that is as far as the reports go. Does the Guardian or Telegraph not have anything to say about the broader implications?

State commissars like Adil Khan in Humberside, who is in charge of making us diverse but cohesive (or face prison if we demur) tells us:

"This case is groundbreaking. The fact is now that we've been able to demonstrate that you've got nowhere to hide; people have been hiding on [sic] the fact that this server was in the US. Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows."

Which is actually quite a misleading statement. The state only regards people stating their extreme opinions as "incitement" if they belong to ritually abominated groups like white racists, whose extreme views must be punished because there is no political cost to doing so. For groups who actually throw bricks when the cops come calling, well, stating their extreme views is treated rather differently.

This is hardly new of course. Incite violence with words, but be unlikely to actually do anything, well you might well go to jail... actually kill people over many years, ah, that eventually gets you invited to help govern. No? I have two words for you: Sinn Fein.

Last time I called Britain a police state, I was dismissed as overheated because, after all, I can run this blog and state my contrary opinions, so this is hardly a police state.

Yet were Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle not just jailed for running a website on a US server (just as Samizdata is on a US server)? If you cast your eyes back through our archives, you will find we have on many occasions called for this or that group to have fairly violent things done to them (Ba'athists for example... and certain Wahhabi folk on occasion too... and certain Serbian nationalists)... and I suspect trawling through the archives of the Daily Telegraph would turn up articles 'inciting' not just 'violence' but calling for full blown wars.

Well it is now clear that we can say what we think, not by right as 'freeborn Englishmen' (hah!) but rather at the sufferance of the likes of Adil Khan and the whole apparatus of thought control that people like him represent. They do not feel the urge to come after us because we are not unpopular enough, although I doubt they like folks like us suggesting they prose a vastly greater threat to liberty and, gasp, "social cohesion" than a couple comically wacko racists.

Have you seen this being hotly debated in the media? Even a little? Pah. So much for the fearless and 'essential' media guardians of our liberal western order.

The sooner the old media are driven out of business by the internet, the better... ten years tops... except they will of course just rent seek tax money to keep themselves alive (or more accurately undead as no one will actually read them/watch them any more) due to their 'essential role' and the 'public interest' of having newspapers and TV channels no one really needs and do who not actually do anything essential or even particularly useful.

A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was "getting better", for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to "stimulate the economy"), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.

So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article ("editorial") on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:

It starts with a lie - Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to "fix American health care".

In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts...), but stressing some specific plan to "fix American health care" was not one of them.

Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.

"Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system" even for a magazine "as economically liberal as this one".

This is a standard Economist trick - propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of "economically liberal"), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market - but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.

However, we are not "starting from scratch" so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations - facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile - it suggests five years.

The first step, according to the Economist, must be to make everyone buy health cover by statute with the poor being subsidized by the government "as is done already in Massachusetts". That the Massachusetts "reform", introduced by Governor Romney, has turned out rather badly is a fact that the Economist article neglects to mention - even though the percentage of "uncovered" in Massachusetts was very low compared to other States so if this "reform" was going to work anywhere it would have worked in Massachusetts.

Of course, says the Economist, insurance companies must not be allowed to exploit government subsides for the poor. They must provide "affordable" plans (no prices are suggested - it is all left vague), and must not be allowed to exclude the old or the already sick from their plans.

In short - lower prices and covering high cost groups. As (contrary to the propaganda) American health insurance is already not a high profit margin industry, these "reforms" should be enough to bankrupt the insurance companies - even before the five year period comes to an end and the government plan the Economist suggests takes over.

However, just in case the private health companies are not bankrupted, the Economist also suggests that "anti trust" be introduced into the area. As the late Ayn Rand (and so many others) have pointed out, there are no clear principles (things that can be clearly defined in advance) in "anti trust" or "competition policy" in fact the whole thing is an excuse for arbitrary power for the government working with the politically connected. But the Economist either does not know, or does not care, about this point - and loves "anti trust".

Almost needless to say the Economist does not mean getting rid of regulation (such as the licensing regulations for doctors - exposed as a racket by Milton Friedman 60 years ago,. or the F.D.A. and its price inflating and new medical adavance preventing "health and safety" regulations). On the contrary the Economist means yet more regulations on top of all the ones that exist already.

Of course the Economist does not mention the real problems of American health care. Neither the ones I have mentioned already or the others. It does not mention how Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP have vastly inflated prices (just as the subsidies for higher education have had the effect of inflating tuition fees over the decades) or how the vast web of Federal and State regulations prevent much of a real "market" in health care at all, or how American hospitals are forced to provide free ER cover in spite of the fact that an expensive (although terrible - rather like some British NHS hospitals in fact)) network of government "county hospitals" already exists, or... But of course it does not - because it wishes to add subsidy schemes and regulations, not get rid of them.

Lastly I must mention one other policy suggestion of the Economist.

It suggests abolishing the tax deductibility of employer health care provision - not to switch the tax deductibility to individuals to buy health cover themselves, but because the lower taxes "cost the government" lots of money (all money belongs to the government it seems - although it should kindly allow people to buy toys, not important things like health care).

This massive tax increase is something that even Barack Obama is wary about talking about (although it would only pay for a fraction of the costs of his plans), but have no fear the Economist will hold his hand - it is all about "The Renewal of America" to quote one of the most vile magazine front covers I have ever seen.

As for the Obama plan of one and half TRILLION Dollars (according the Congressional budget office in reality it will grow to far more than that, entitlement programs always do) that will only cover a fraction of the people he says it will. Well if the Economist is truly "economically liberal" it will help lead the fight against this evil - but judging by this article...

Of course it could be claimed that I am being unfair - that the American coverage of the Economist is the worst element in the magazine. Although I have not noticed the Economist denouncing the move to income support schemes and government health cover in India (in spite of the ever growing fiscal deficit) in India - or indeed in any country.

Be that as it may, it is the United States where the alternative of a free market current affairs magazine is most needed - an alternative to the statism of Time and Newsweek and the rest of the mainstream media. And the Economist utterly fails to provide this alternative.

So, friend (again you know who you are), do not ask me to give the Economist a chance again - to do so is not good for my liver.

I rather like the recently-launched magazine of UK current affairs, Standpoint. This item on Ken Loach, the film-maker, is particularly good.

I wish the magazine success and it should give publications such as The Spectator, Prospect and The New Statesman a run for their money.

In an earlier piece here today, Perry de Havilland referred to the great fuss that Britain's broadcasters are now making about the rather small successes of the BNP in the Euro elections, and their relative silence concerning the much bigger success achieved by UKIP. True. UKIP is indeed being ignored, and the BNP is indeed being talked up. But I don't think it's right to dismiss the talking up of the BNP entirely as tactics. I think that genuine fear is being expressed by our former gatekeepers of correct thought. The rise of Adolph Hitler has been obsessively taught in British schools for the last generation or so, as the very definition of that which Must Not Happen, yet now, something not wholly unlike it appears to be happening, here in Britain! Calamity!

I say "former" gatekeepers of correct thought because that is surely the other thing now happening that scares these people. The internet, as we enthusiasts for it have been saying ever since it got started as a mass phenomenon a decade ago or more, entitles people to say whatever they like. T