Katabasis

OPERATION BLACKOUT - STOP SOPA / PIPA

2012-01-17T22:45:00.001Z

This post is in support of the anti-SOPA / PIPA actions that are about to start in the U.S. Details of the "internet strike" are here. This blog, and the handful of sites I administer will also be joining the strike, which now includes big hitters such as Google, Wikipedia and Reddit.

Whilst SOPA has (for now) been put on ice, its sister bill, PIPA is still alive in the Senate. SOPA could quite easily return as it is on hold. Both need to be chopped up and burned, never to see the light of day again. Just like the Digital Economy Act here in the UK before it, though a much more far reaching version, it hands far too much power to copyright holders and will likely be used to censor huge swathes of the net. I say this as someone who supports IP / copyright in some form, though one who is still undecided on what the solutions might be - many aspects of the issue are intractable. What I do know is that concentrating power in the hands of copyright holders, who - in the case of SOPA / PIPA supporters - represent the old school mass media interests who really should realise that their time to die is long past and are desperately clinging on, is a terrifying and deeply wrong turn of events.

This video explains the mortal danger SOPA / PIPA poses to all of us, not just citizens of the U.S.

And if you think it doesn't directly affect Britons, just consider the fate of Richard O'Dwyer - if SOPA or PIPA pass, expect to see dozens if not hundreds more cases like his, and for a much milder "crime". It will surely include many of us in the blogosphere.

In solidarity with the sites that will be going into "blackout", all of my other posts will revert to 'draft' and be inaccessible for the duration of the draft - disappearing suddenly into the ether in exactly the same way that many sites will if SOPA / PIPA pass.

Join the strike! If you have no sites to 'black out' then help to raise awareness if you can.

And one last thing that has been lost in the drama of SOPA / PIPA is that the DEA has now officially been ruled compatible with EU law. Expect a fight on our hands very shortly on our own shores as it is enforced.....

Some Christmas Cheer.....

2011-12-24T14:02:00.000Z

We all know that the Euro is going down and quite possibly the EU with it. After we've all recharged out batteries over Christmas though, let's be sure to give it a helping hand in the New Year:

Churnalism: DEFRA churn - the Guardian is in the lead!

2011-11-26T20:20:00.000Z

(UPDATE: 27/11/11 - raw churnalism data available HERE - JSON format, zipped, 448kb)

After the churn analysis of the Environment Agency press releases (please read that article for more details and important caveats if you haven't read one of my churn posts before), I followed up with DEFRA.I will be making the raw data publicly available tomorrow for both the Environment Agency and DEFRA churn analyses.

This time I was able to construct the spiders and process the data faster - I also avoided (most of) the unicode problems that plagued me with the EA data, so this analysis can be considered slightly more accurate and slightly less forgiving of the media organisations (though it still strictly follows the rules I set down previously, such as no editing of the press release to remove extraneous information). Along with inevitable issues with some difficult characters slipping through and no editing of the press releases, it still means the data will naturally favour the media organisations. As I said on previous posts, when I make the raw data publicly available, churn analysis by other people will very likely improve upon my methods and yield results more detrimental for the media.

In any case - onto the results. The summary is presented below (click for full size image):

"Quality" press churn results

Summary of results:

- A total of 386 press releases were analysed, from 13th May 2010 to 24th November 2011. These generated 1959 detectable cases of churn. Again, there is probably a lot of interesting data within the "detectable" category that deserves analysis at a later date. For now it is discarded.

- Out of those, 173 were classified as "significant" and 18 as "major".

- The Guardian was the leader in both categories by a long way - accounting for 19.65% of significant churn and 27.78% of major churn.

- The BBC followed close behind in terms of significant churn with 16.18%, though for major churn was beaten into third place by both the Independent and the Daily Mail with a joint 16.67%.

- The Independent came third in the signifcant churn classification.

- A common factor in the most highly churned articles both in this analysis and the previous two appears to be lack of a named author in most cases (though see one of the exceptions detailed below). This suggests the media organisations are aware that what they are doing is not kosher.

- Continuing a theme from the last two churn analyses, the tabloids consistently embarrass the so called "quality press". This time I pulled out the statistics for the UK's major tabloids for comparison (click for full size image):

Tabloid press churn results

When I first started these analyses I fully expected to see a much higher showing of churn by the tabloids. It is interesting to see the contrast. Also out of the churn analyses done so far, it is consistently the Mirror out of the tabloids that has the highest percentage of churn.

As usual I select a few of the more egregarious cases of churn for your entertainment (and importantly - provide a manual submission to the churnalism database so they can be seen visually):

'Gloucestershire Old Spots pork protected by Europe'
An absolutely cracking BBC 79% cut and paste job on - er - crackling.

'Bonfire of the Quangos'
Remember that list of Quangos that were to go? Completely cut and pasted from a press release. This one is particularly fascinating because in the two worst cases the cut and paste was the list provided in the press release. It actually included several paragraphs laying out a context that was not cut and pasted across. If it had just been the list in the original both would have scored close to 100% pastes.....
The pastes are so large in any case that the churnalism engine falls over when the 'view' button is clicked to see the visualised version. Be warned if you click it, your browser may hang.

'New service for householders to stop unwanted advertising mail'
Absolute carnage on the churning front here with the majority of the main media outlets represented. The Guardian appeared to like this story so much they cut and pasted it twice - and this time each article has a named author. Where the hell was the editor?

It's mob rule at the Guardian....

2011-11-25T21:00:00.000Z

(This blogpost should perhaps also be titled - 'What I did/didn't/did say at the Guardian today....')

There's nothing quite like rank hypocrisy to boil my piss. However, to ensure it is fully evaporated in anger, combine rank hypocrisy with crass stupidity, naked opportunism, complete resistance to facts or reason and censorship.

For that was the bread and butter of Leo "bless 'im" Hickman's disgraceful piece of yellow bellied journalism at the Guardian today.

Hickman decided it was time to form a posse comitatus to try tracking down the source of the climategate emails, laughably using the README textfile included in the latest tranche of releases as the primary source of evidence.

This was one of those pieces - especially as it was in the comment is free if you agree section - that really reveals the Guardian's true colours. Numerous commentators including me (prior to the first round of censorship - sorry - 'comment adjustment') attempted to point out the Guardian's and Hickman's rank hypocrisy on this issue. The most striking and obvious example having been the paper's massive support for Wikileaks, however there were many other examples, including the anonymous Enron whistleblower, as another commenter pointed out. As was repeated again and again, it appeared that all leakers were equal but some were more equal than others in the Guardian's eyes.

This was of course brushed off by Hickman and his part-time principle party of followers in the comments section.

Next I pointed out (prior to 'comment adjustment') that claiming it was the work of a hacker was still just an assumption. Hickman replied to me directly on that and similarly brushed it off. He claimed it was irrelevant. The poor dear didn't seem to realise that if he assumed it was the work of a hacker and in fact it was a leaker then his "investigation" would lead him down to all sorts of blind alleys, not least because the MO and levels of access would be completely different (not to mention the trail of evidence left behind).

There were a plethora of delightfully dense comments in support of Hickman et al and stunning leaps of reasoning. These people were also apparently immune to criticism because they "knew" what they were claiming was true, especially regarding the "hacker" claim. Many pronounced completely ill-informed statements about this showing that i) they knew nothing about IT security and ii) that they couldn't even be bothered to use google to check details. After all, The difference between an internal security breach and a carefully coordinated external breach is vast. Pointman gave an excellent overview after the first climategate - here. Moreover they absolutely did not care about their ignorance. What a familiar pattern, eh? No wonder they were immediately supportive of the "scientists" at the heart of the climategate storm - they're just like them!

There were some absolute crackers amongst the received wisdom of this bunch of easily led zealots and I highly recommend you read through the comments - well those that are left - as it is a laugh a minute.

Komment Macht Frei

Speaking of the comments - when the piece first appeared this morning, it was absolute devastation from the moderator. ALL of my comments bar the first one were censored, as were numerous other comments by others. I had no clue why they'd been removed beyond the fact that we all seemed to disagree intensely with Hickman.

Now I should point out something important here for Guardian watchers - they have two types of post moderation. There is the one we're all familiar with - where the boilerplate 'this comment was moderated because it breached our community (puke) standards' but there's also a much more insidious type and I only noticed it because I've been paying a lot of attention to their censorship pattern over the last couple of years - its what I call "nuking". In this case they remove all evidence that the comment was ever there. It's particularly chilling for freedom of speech because aside from the fact that by looking at the comments one can't actually assess the general level of censorship, if it's *your* comment that disappears in this way it's only your word that it was ever there in the first place....

Now bizaarely, after the comments spilled over onto two pages I happened to click back to the first page to see what else had been censored and was surprised to see that most of my previously "moderated" comments had reappeared (except for the "nuked" ones). I don't know if this is a bug in their software or a disagreement between moderators but it adds even more to the general sense of confusion and latent fear of arbitrary censorship that completely fucks any meaningful contribution over there.

Another important point to be aware of is this: One way to guarantee being censored on the Guardian is if you make a reference to your, or someone else's having been censored you will immediately be censored and they often use the "nuke" option too.

The Guardian is - as a media institution - utterly reprehensible. Most other media outlets are of course too, across the political spectrum. But none outside the BBC attempt to present themselves so often as the default "good guys", nor do their followers similarly regard it as received wisdom...

The climategate 'gait' or the 'out of context paradox'

There's a regular pattern that occurs in any discussion of climategate (1 or 2). It is inconsistent but also entirely consistent with the unthinking nature of many of those who promulgate it:
i) They assert that the emails were "taken out of context"
ii) Responder says that they are not.
iii) A request is then made for evidence.
iv) Responder invites them to read the emails - there are numerous complete email chains, supporting claims against the "scientists" that ONLY MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT. But the trick is you have to actually read the emails....

A modern day climate "scientist"

Now given how unambiguous some of the exchanges are (in particular those that involve purposefully frustrating FOI inquiries and deleting emails....) one is then prompted to ask exactly what standard of evidence is required. For the evidence before us, if for example we stick with complete email chains rather than individual comments, is a magnitude higher than the typical standard accepted in the vast majority of journalism that we ever read or see. It means that - to be consistent - if one were to completely reject these email chains as sufficient evidence, one would have to throw out almost every received opinion on any quoted person in the press one has ever encountered. Will the zealots do that...no of course they won't. But of course consistency is in the same disused box in their basement as a regard for truth....

One final delicious irony of this of course is that 'The Team' will surely be scratching their heads now, trying to remember what on earth what was said to who. But because they very likely deleted these emails after they had been copied from the mailserver then they have only one place to go to check.....

Churnalism: Churning 'Frack Off'

2011-11-24T18:00:00.000Z

In several comments on my previous piece of work on churnalism I read at Biased BBC, the activist group 'Frack Off' were mentioned and questions were asked whether they had any detectable churn in the media as online links were often found to them at the BBC and the Guardian sites by Biased BBC readers.

I decided to have a look.

The group is very new and they have only released four official press releases. This meant I could work fast with this data as I wouldn't need to write specialised spiders for gathering, analysing or submitting the data as it could be done manually with such a small data set.

Again I find myself being surprised by the results:

A reminder on the scoring criteria:

>=100 is classified as "detectable" churn. I usually discard these results and they will always be discarded for comparing one set of data to another (e.g. this analysis to the previous environment agency analysis), however it still yields a rich seam of data and as this data set is so small compared to the previous one I decided to take some time to look into some of these.
>=500 is classified as "significant" churn.
>=1000 is classified as "major" churn - in these cases the articles simply could not have been written without cutting and pasting the bulk of its material from the press release.

Results:

- Out of four press releases, three have generated a total of 13 articles with detectable churn according to my criteria (score of >= 100 from the Churnalism engine). 14 were originally found but I removed one Guardian article as it was detected twice (probably because of the similar screeds issued by 'Frack Off' in their press releases).

- Out of those, 5 were significant churn (score of >= 500) - and as they were only a handful I have entered them manually into the Churnalism database so you can see the side by side comparisons yourself. 2 were from the Guardian, 1 from the Mirror, 1 from the Times and 1 from the Daily Mail.

- Several of the remaining 8 articles with detectable churn come very close to the >= 500 criterion (details below) and indeed in a couple of cases the Churnalism engine considers them to be significant enough to display when manually input (an API input by contrast gives an exact score; the churnalism seems to have a less forgiving standard than myself and will display many articles with a score between 400-500 as significant).

Further comments:

Now, even being generous to the media organisations and 'Frack Off', this means 50% of their press releases are being significantly churned - and primarily by the Guardian and the Mirror (one of the Mirror's contributions came close to a "major" ( >= 1000) piece of churn with a score of 870. I suspect that were I less forgiving with my methodology, removing extraneous elements in the initial press release (links, contact information etc) and didn't have to remove some characters to ease processing (e.g. single quotes), this may well have scored as 'major churn'. You can eyeball it yourself in any case here.

I say that 50% assessment is 'being generous' to 'Frack Off' also because it includes a press release they issued yesterday so it will not have had time to percolate through the media yet. If the press release yesterday results in any significant churn (which I will check again in a week or two), that percentage will climb to 75%.

Further details on the data for each press release:

26th October 2011 press release: - submitting it to the API yielded 3 detectable chases of churn and one borderline (score 96), so I looked at them in more detail. One of these articles is from the Guardian and already highlighted by the Churnalism engine as containing significant churn from one of the other FO press releases. Two are Telegraph articles, one by Louise Gray - both name check the activist group. The other is a Times article and unfortunately I can't verify anything beyond the paywall.

2nd November 2011 press release - 7 detectable cases of churn - 4 were "significant" churn and a further 2 came very close to being considered "significant" by my scoring criteria - one from the Independent (score: 436) and one from the Guardian (score: 448). Notice how the Independent article also cites: Chris Huhne, the WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. Cuadrilla Resources - the company responsible for the Fracking discussed at the heart of the article get one response of similar length to the others, along with a neutral response from the shadow energy secretary, Tom Greatrex.Cuadrilla don't get a single response in the Guardian article and in mentioning the independent report commissioned by Cuadrilla fails to mention that the report concluded that another earthquake incident was unlikely.

The Churnalism engine considers one of the Guardian articles significant that doesn't hit my threshold (500) - it scores 448, but the manual search on Churnalism.com also yields an entry that the engine considers significant, at the same time, the Daily Mail entry with a score of 521 isn't listed on the manual search so this balances out.

See visual breakdowns of significant / detectable churn for this press release here.

3rd November 2011 press release - four detectable cases of churn, one from the Guardian classifies as "significant".

See visual breakdowns of significant / detectable churn for this press release here.

23rd November 2011 press release - no detectable churn via either manual entry to Churnalism.com or to the more sensitive API system. This could well change however as it was only yesterday this PR was issued.

Final comments:

I find these results very concerning. A small single-issue activist group that has only existed for a matter of months should not be generating such a significant amount of churn with just four press releases. The Guardian and the Mirror in particular appear to be giving the group a free ride (though also see the commentary above on one of the higher scoring Independent articles). The Environment Agency at least has some kind of mandate and does carry out a wide variety of tasks - to that extent it's no surprise some of its press releases are churned (though this is no excuse for the journalists concerned, or indeed for any EA employees who are aware of and have no issue with any kind of symbiotic relationship here).

This is extremely dangerous, especially for such an important issue and shows how groups like 'Frack Off' can be so polarising. On a personal level I do believe there are legitimate environmental concerns regarding Shale Gas. Unlike 'Frack Off' however I consider these issues surmountable. They make clear from their website that they want this to be a polarising issue regardless of the facts. They primarily cite Gasland - a "documentary" itself which is making rational discussion of the issue of Fracking all but impossible. It is primarily a series of anecdotes that are themselves seriously problematic as evidence. 'Frack Off' et al should be citing careful and replicable research such as this for discussion. Why don't they? And moreover why doesn't the media, who are apparently falling over themselves to repeat 'Frack Off' claims without doing the very research most of us expect of them. My guess is that the research isn't nearly alarmist enough for them and has plenty of caveats that prevent them from easily reporting it as such.

And whilst I am sure many 'Frack Off' adherents are, as we speak, screaming that the unfolding "Climategate 2" saga is all about emails "being taken out of context", they themselves have a website about Fracking that not only cites factually incorrect and misleading material but - crucially - misses the all important context that Shale Gas could be an enormous energy (not to mention political) game changer. Meanwhile all of the companies involved in prospecting and mining are listed as "bad guys". Its utterly juvenile.

But what is truth to people like this? Or indeed to the mass media in whom we trust its flame is continually nurtured, not murdered as it seems to be?

Ammo: Churnalism - Churning the Environment Agency

2011-11-22T13:22:00.001Z

(UPDATE 27/11/11 : raw churnalism data now available HERE (JSON format, zipped, 2.1MB))

My work on bot-writing and churnalism has finally started to bear fruit. And its not often I write a blog here that is an "exclusive", however this is one of the few!

A large part of my research over the last year has focused on the nature of digital and virtual technologies and in particular on the nature of censorship and propaganda online. A perennial concern, as outlined in my Privacy 2.0 post is the arrival of 'mass dataveillance', where the monitoring of an individual is far less important - in both import and consequences - than the gathering of masses of data about lots of individuals. This is because those masses of data are able to reveal patterns and links that the individual members of the data set are very likely unaware of.

However, this is something that works for us as much as against us if we're willing to use the freely available data in the public domain. Its not just large corporations of whom one is suspicious who can gather, analyse and deploy the masses of data.

Nick Davies, in his excellent book, 'Flat Earth News', popularised the term "Churnalism". His book, and the research it is based on was an absolutely damning indictment of the UK media, with similar implications for the entirety of Western media itself. Davies said journalists: “....are no longer gathering news but are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false”.

His book was substantially based on research he commissioned by the University of Cardiff. In the course of that research, amongst other things, what they found "suggests that 60% of press articles and 34% of broadcast stories come wholly or mainly from one of these ‘pre-packaged’ sources." - a phenomenon that many of my regular readers will no doubt be familiar with and one that has now sadly started becoming commonplace in other areas too - we've been moving ineluctably from just 'journalism by press release' to also 'science by press release'.

Upon reading this research over a year ago, one of my first thoughts having had years of programming experience was, 'that could be automated!'. And not only could it be automated, but with enough data, direct patterns of bias and influence could also be detected. Lo and behold, around that time, the wonderful churnalism engine appeared.

This site plugs into the Journalisted database, where every single press item is archived online. The churnalism engine uses an algorithm that enables anyone to manually copy and paste text from any source (though most usually a press release) and compare it quickly to the entire journalisted database, it is then able to report back any cases that are likely to have been cut and pasted, along with an estimate of the proportions copied. It means one can effectively trace the provenance of many news stories back to press releases and also assess how much has been copied directly into the article - articles that were are so often led to believe are supposed to uphold high journalistic standards.

I decided that it should be possible to combine the churnalism utility with masses of data in a way that would not have been possible even a decade ago. The ability to write programs ('spiders' or 'bots' in this context) that could gather all of the press releases from a single organisation and then submit them to the churnalism facility, combined with cheap and readily available computing power means this is an entirely achievable goal.

So I programmed spiders that were able to gather every single one of the Envrionment Agency's press release, filter out the formatting tags (from the web page) to get the original text, submit them to the churnalism engine and then store and analyse the results.

The data shows several clear patterns:

- The so called "quality press" are the worst offenders for churning Environment Agency press releases - whilst there were many entries from the tabloids and local papers, their cutting and pasting was less egregarious than the "quality press".

- The BBC is by far and away the worst offender for simply repeating whatever the Environment Agency claimed in its press releases.Out of the 393 articles where "significant" churn had taken place, the BBC were responsible for 44%. Likewise for the 49 articles that had "major" churn (meaning in most cases they were almost complete cut and pastes of the press releases), the BBC was responsible for 30.6%.

- I was able to grab a total of 1962 press releases from the Environment Agency giving almost complete coverage of their press release output for the last two years. This total was orginally slightly higher, however since the first pass of my bots (to gather the links before downloading with the second pass), the EA has inexplicably removed 10 press releases. I also found a handful of duplicates. The lowest level of granularity I was willing to accept as "detectable" churn (see below) yielded 5089 articles.

Details:

- I had set the bar very high for counting articles as "churnalism". The churnalism API uses a "scoring" system that identifies how many 15-character chunks had been copied and/or pasted. It represents a compromise between the lengths of the source and end articles - so, for example, if a large proportion of the original press release has been copied, but this represents a lower proportion of the end article, this will still yield a high score. And vice versa (Louise Gray's articles in the Telegraph often followed this latter pattern for example - with her article being much shorter than the original press release it is copied from).

- Setting the filter on the data I gathered to a score of >=100 yielded 5089 articles. I regard this as an acceptable baseline for "detectable" churn, though for current purposes I am discarding this larger data set. One of my hypotheses is that any distinct patterns should be visible throughout and indeed this appears to be the case - those I counted as "detectable" were made up of 1983 articles from the BBC - a very similar proportion to those in the higher scoring category (38.9%).

- My methodology (to be detailed in a much longer post later on censoring.me) has massively favoured the media organisations, primarily in three respects:

i) for submitting the press releases to the churnalism engine, I did not edit the press releases to remove anything extraneous - so they often included repeated titles, contact details etc that would lower the percentage of hits in the churnalism engine.

ii) the original 'screen scrapes' of the website press releases included many characters that were difficult to work with programatically. Single commas cause problems for database processing so these were often removed. Also the data regularly contained unicode - and not all of this would be correctly re-encoded when sent to the churnalism web server. This further reduced the percentage of hits.

iii) Finally - as I already mentioned I set the bar very high for what I counted as cases of definite "churnalism". I decided upon three categories of scoring: 1) "detectable" churn - with scores of 100 or more (in practice this would mean maybe a paragraph had been copied) 2) "significant" churn - with scores of 500 or more (in practice this means more than one paragraph had been copied) and finally 3) "major" churn - a score of 1000 or more meaning the majority, or substantive minority of either/both press release and final article had been copied.

With these three aspects in mind, I consider it almost certain that when other people make use of my data (which I will make publicly available, along with a longer article detailing technical issues) they will find a noticably higher proportion of churnalism. There would also be a case for lowering the significance score of 500. I also think there is probably a lot of useful information to be found in the 5089 articles with "detectable" churn, however I won't be drawing any conclusions from this larger data set at present.

With those caveats and details in mind, here is the summary of the final results, calculated after any duplicates and outliers had been removed (click for larger image):

It should be noted that this data set alone is comparable in size to that used by the research that formed the basis of Nick Davies' 'Flat Earth News'. It took a team of several researchers many months to pore over the same amount of press releases and articles and come to the conclusions he presents in the book. It took me a week to write the spiders, and I'll be doing this again and again for different organisations and likely revealing more hidden patterns in the data. And yes, I'll be reporting them here first and sharing the data publicly!

For those interested, I aim to give access to the data on censoring.me by next week, which I am revamping this weekend as I finally have some substantial research to use the site to showcase!

For the most appalling cases of churn I submitted them manually to the Churnalism site (a different process to submitting them in an automated fashion to the API). Doing this enables me to save individual examples in the Churnalism.com site database and it yields a very useful side by side comparison so it is possible for one to see visually (and compare manually) the worst cases.

For your amusement, amongst my favourites were:

- "Glaciergate should not distract us from climate battle"
Here the chairman of the Environment Agency is asked to write a piece for the BBC. It repeats exactly the majority of a press release issued by the Environment Agency two months beforehand claiming to quote the chairman by declaring what he is going to say at a forthcoming event. Yes I had trouble getting my head around that too.

- "Llamas help protect an ice-age fish"
The infamous (and crazy) Llamas protect fish from climate change press release in fully churned glory.

- "Flood defence project gets small seal of approval"
An absolutely stunning 94% paste job by the BBC. Even the churnalism engine struggles to represent it visually - make sure you click through to the BBC article itself. You can see from eyeballing it and comparing it to the submitted press release that it is a straight cut and paste.

Sometimes humour is the only weapon left....

2011-11-18T17:05:00.001Z

....and the most appropriate to get the point across:

(click picture to see full size version)

Story here.

Ammo: Privacy 2.0

2011-11-15T15:15:00.010Z

For an explanation of the 'Ammo' prefix, please see here.

My research work is now reaching the stage where I'm able to usefully share parts of it (updates to censoring.me with actual working parts is coming soon too...). This is the first of those contributions and is a necessary prelude to some upcoming posts that will require reading this first.

I was prompted to write this blog entry today with the very sad news of the death of one of the co-founders of Diaspora, 22-year old Ilya Zhitomirskiy. I'll be writing on Diaspora soon and making important contrasts with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I think Diaspora is incredibly useful and will argue why in a later post - including recommending why you should switch from the latter three tecnhnologies to Diaspora.

First though, its important to understand Jonathan Zittrain's concept of 'Privacy 2.0'. And why is this included in the 'Ammo' series? Simply because our conceptions of privacy are outdated - scholars and technologists such as Zittrain and his peers (such as Morozov, Benkler etc) are beginning to provide immensely useful analyses and concepts for understanding the brave new digital world we find ourselves in. The powers that be, including the mass media, have found themselves flat-footed by the new social media technologies. And its more than that they are vested interests trying (and failing) to protect their turf. It is that they simply don't have the conceptual know-how to even begin to grasp this new domain and the promise (and pitfalls) it offers. Staying ahead of their (albeit very slow) curve will arm you (and help to protect you against the mendacious individuals who have already grasped it...).

Below is a summary of Zittrain's 'Privacy 2.0' concept. It is written in a very academic style and I make no apologies for that - it is one component amongst many in my current academic toolbox and so is expressed that way. I hope you find it useful:

'Privacy 2.0'

Instead of simply ‘privacy’, this particular concept appends the ‘2.0’ to reflect the new era of digital and internet privacy that are still being addressed using concepts, practices and legal precedents that can be said to apply to an ‘earlier’ conception of privacy – ‘privacy 1.0’.

The “generative” technologies that form the basis of digital, networking and internet devices and behaviours put old problems of privacy into new and often unexpected configurations. In both the digital and internet landscapes, broadly understood, there are enormous amounts of uncoordinated actions by actors that can be combined in new and often unpredictable ways thanks to these same technologies.

Limitations on actors to preserve freedom has up until very recently focused on constraining institutional actors (governments, large corporations) etc. New privacy problems however go beyond this traditional paradigm, which centres on the collation of data in centralised databases logging potentially sensitive information on individuals. Whilst this is still an issue within the purview of ‘Privacy 2.0’, it is only a small part of a much wider breed of new problems. More modern legislation in the UK, such as the Data Protection Act recognises this to a limited degree, yet still largely targets the same institutional actors as previous ‘Privacy 1.0’ legislation. The precedent setting Privacy Act of 1974 in the U.S. remained limited to public institutions. The 1998 UK Data Protection Act recognises part of the new privacy problem by the casting the net wider to “data controllers” generally and investing them with legal responsibilities. The fears motivating both pieces of legislation however, originate from the idea of “mass dataveillance” – i.e. de facto surveillance via centralised data collection. Solutions such as restraint, disclosure and encryption are appropriate for these ‘Privacy 1.0’ concerns but extremely limited for the new generative technologies.

The generative mosaic

'Generative mosaic' is a term coined by Jonathan Zittrain, in ‘The Future of the Internet’ that I think elegantly expresses the data mining privacy issues now coming to the fore.

Certain datasets collected on individuals, even if only focused on one aspect of their behaviour, allow patterns to be mined from the data that the individual themselves may have no awareness of (and thus may also never have cause to complain if such – potentially advantageous – information is used against them).

Such data can be immensely powerful even when only gathered for a very narrow range of behaviour. For example, Amazon were able to roll out differential pricing of their products according to past customer behaviour. They were caught when some individuals deleted their browser cookies and discovered that the advertised price would change (no longer having had a reference point to the individual’s previous behaviour).

This example brings home the fact that data mining can very quickly produce tangible results with a comprehensive enough data set. Wonga.com currently claim to have a “market leading” bespoke algorithm for predicting whether a customer is likely to default on their loan. The standard assumed default rate in the retail loan sector is 10%. Wonga claim that their default rate remains in single figures, which is particularly astonishing considering their risky lending sector (short term loans of hundreds of pounds at an astronomical interest rate). Their two primary sources of information are a set of approximately thirty questions asked on the initial application followed by “thousands” of online data points. The fact that Wonga have monetized such information so efficiently demonstrates that there are hidden behavioural cues in people’s data available online that most are not aware of.

(see my earlier blog 'The Rights of Wonga' for more information on this).

The new threats to privacy

Compounded with the ‘generative mosaic’ problem is the fact that government and corporate databases are increasingly less threatening privacy concerns than those created by our ‘generative’ digital technologies and those who use them (virtually everyone in the first world and ever increasing numbers in the second and third worlds).

Ever cheaper processors, networks and sensor technology have created billions of constant data gatherers worldwide. Further, the flow of data from (and to and between) said data gatherer is not generally impeded by gatekeepers – unlike the relatively restrained government and corporate sectors.

A key feature of “Web 2.0” is peer production, and the rise of the ‘prosumer’ – people who are constantly consuming and producing new content, often ‘remixing’ the content they have consumed. The process is chaotic, ever changing and usually without gatekeepers. As a result, the surveillers (and ‘sousveillers’ to add Steve Mann’s lexicon) are us. Government and corporate actors and their intermediaries represent an ever shrinking portion of the ‘Privacy 2.0’ landscape.

From Intellectual Property and Copyright to ‘Privacy 2.0’

“The intellectual property conflicts raised by the generative Internet, where people can still copy large amounts of copyrighted music without fear of repercussion, are rehearsals for the problems of Privacy 2.0” – Jonathan Zittrain, ‘The Future of the Internet’, p.210.

Whilst intellectual property and copyright issues generated by modern digital technologies and environments (‘Web 2.0’) are at the forefront, with various legal scholars such as Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig at the coal face philosophising the quintessential issues and concepts, the impact of ‘Privacy 2.0’ is yet to be truly felt or understood. We are – as Zittrain puts it – effectively ‘all on notice’ as anyone can become a youtube superstar in minutes.

Daniel Solove, in ‘The Future of Reputation’, considers the impact this can have, highlighting examples such as the ‘bus uncle’ of Hong Kong and ‘dog poo girl’ of South Korea. Incidents which, whilst public, would have remained relatively ephemeral in the past can now be recorded and spread virally across the globe, often with undesirable results due to a mass public reaction that would never before have been possible. ‘Bus uncle’ was attacked at his workplace in a targeted attack and ‘dog poo girl’ left her job, both as a result of the firestorms resulting from the videos. Lives are easily ruined in these cases because the total outrage generated is completely disproportionate to the social norm (or possibly, law) violated at the time. And as Zittrain puts it, “…ridicule or mere celebrity can be as chilling as outright disapprobation”.

A debate that regular resurfaces as a result of this scrutiny concerns the idea of the ‘participatory panopticon’ – popularised by science fiction authors such as David Brin (in non-fiction works), the proposal is that total surveillance would not be a problem if it was comprehensive and equal: any and all surveillers could themselves be surveilled. Steve Mann has frequently carried out ‘sousveillance’ interventions to test social norms in situations of surveillance and data sharing, often finding that a Brin style participatory panopticon may not be as remotely welcome as Brin and others suppose.

A strong counter –argument to the idea of the participatory panopticon, which itself rests on an assumption of inevitability and technological determinism, (c.f. the quote from McNealy – similar sentiments have been expressed by other prominent figures in IT and data mining industries such as ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt), is the charge that such extensive scrutiny renders us all into automatons – hence the “chilling” effect referred to by Zittrain above. Indeed, Zittrain compares the situation to that of politicians whenever they are in the public eye – and he implies – they have been the first to understand and adapt to “Privacy 2.0” in their public behaviour (even if they are disastrous at articulating and applying these concepts) and as such we should regard their behaviour in modern times as the canary in the coal mine:

“Ubiquitous sensors threaten to push everyone toward treating each public encounter as if it were a press conference, creating fewer spaces in which citizens can express their private selves.” (Zittrain, ‘The Future of the Internet’, p.212).

Public statements by politicians cleave to an uncontroversial and bland centre ground. This isn’t just a result of realpolitik; it is also a direct result of ubiquitous media coverage (increasingly now an activity of citizens – especially those from opposing camps) and the ease with which a sentence can be taken out of context. This has a chilling effect that stifles behavioural outliers, and as examples of which, politicians are only the most prominent case. Speech and behaviour in the past was only subject to a relatively small group for disapprobation. Now the exposure group can potentially be society-wide in seconds.

New conceptions of ‘Public’ and ‘Private’

It isn’t just legal conceptions, of the ‘Privacy 1.0’ type, that lag behind. It is also a whole raft of concepts – one of the most important pairings in this case is our notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ which still inform debates on privacy using ‘Privacy 1.0’ understandings. The most ubiquitous uses of these terms are not subtle enough to capture what we as individuals may want in privacy terms in the ‘Privacy 2.0’ world. Typically we use notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and ‘in private’ that forget this. Whilst behaviour ‘in public’ is technically open to the public eye, it is usually only a small number of eyewitnesses, often strangers, who observe it and it remains ephemeral. What were previously private public spaces become public public spaces.

The principle of freedom of speech framed in the U.S. constitution assumed that private conversations in public spaces would not become public broadcasts. There were no means at the time to effect this and now that those means do exist, we are effectively naked in the eyes of the law with no defence and a potentially chilling effect on our behaviour that may only allow new, or radical behaviours or speech to those who are completely disconnected from existing norms and so do not fear them.

Combining this ‘conceptual slippage’, (generally ignored – commercial interests are rarely threatened in the same way by ‘Privacy 2.0’ as they are by ‘Web 2.0’ and its attendant dilution of Intellectual Property and Copyright), with the mass generation of fresh data and ever increasingly convenient and accurate means of tagging and identifying (including the kind of facial recognition being pioneered by Facebook, Google and others), creates the perfect ‘Privacy 2.0’ storm.

Generative ‘mash-ups’ of data and the vast array of tools and APIs available for processing them mean it is increasingly trivial to find answers to questions such as ‘where was person x on date y’. And the answers will increasingly be coming from the general public, not from government or corporate surveillance.

For a practical application of this, see for example Tom Owad’s application for identifying subversives on Amazon via their wishlists using a bot that queries the site. A mashup combining this with photo recognition technologies would be relatively straightforward and itself could be combined and recombined endlessly with other mashups to provide a much sharper slice of someone’s life than is now visible through even the most invasive state database systems in the world.

The ‘peer production’ technologies have, effectively, been disruptive for Intellectual Property and Copyright, whilst restrictive for privacy. Even were it possible to circumscribe a database describing the total picture of an individual that is accessible digitally, this would be of little use for what the database itself is changes rapidly, often from one moment to the next. The emergent and inscrutable nature of the outputs of these technologies mean that the current ‘Privacy 1.0’ concepts and legal structure we operate within, from the government to the corporate to the academic worlds, are urgently in need of revision.

They Shall Not Grow Old

2011-11-11T09:11:00.004Z

Those of us in generations 'jones','x' and 'millennial' will be the last to have known veterans from either of the World Wars. Something about that fact makes me profoundly sad, although I'm not entirely sure why. I think part of it may be to do with the fact that it only took 10 years for the upcoming generations that will follow us to forget who Osama Bin Laden was.....

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. – Lt.-Col. John McCrae

Remember, remember...

2011-10-31T17:29:00.004Z

...its time again for the annual November 5th walk with Old Holborn and the rest of us assorted libertarian ne'er do wells. As Witterings from Witney says - it falls on a Saturday this time, so no excuses - be there!

Its always good fun and brings out quite a few interesting people you might want to meet!

Hopefully we won't get section 44ed like we did the first time....

People ask me why I don't trust the media...[Warning: Potty Mouth Post....]

2011-09-27T16:21:00.005Z

HERE is why.

Be prepared for truly colossal weapons-grade fuckwittery.

"Here’s an upload of a video from a recent ITV documentary into Colonel Gaddhafi’s support of the IRA. It contains shocking footage of a helicopter being shot down using weapons allegedly supplied by that baddie.

Except. Umm. It’s actually ArmA 2." [A COMPUTER GAME]

Do go and read the whole thing. Your blood pressure will shoot up right about the point where the likely provenance of the video is pointed out.

ITV - if brains were dynamite, you wouldn't have enough to blow your fucking hat off. Unfortunately your Stupid is only the apex of the current media-class general cockpuppetfuckwittery.

I used to find the film 'Idiocracy' funny. I don't anymore.

About that global warming......

2011-06-11T11:21:00.004Z

....the catastrophic prophecies of climate disaster require an essential ingredient that all too often is completely missing in debates on the subject: positive water vapour feedback. Without increasing amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere (being a much more powerful GHG than CO2), allegedly as a result of human contributed CO2 (in reality, something that could be caused by any heating mechanism), then any catastrophic predictions are bunk. Period.

(Click for larger version)

Over 50 years of data with no sign of the fabled feedback.

And yet we continue to do this to ourselves.

When enough people forced into penury and suffering realise the source of their misery, email death threats are going to be the last thing the catastrophist "scientists" will have to worry about.

The Rights of Wonga

2011-06-01T15:59:00.010Z

No not money itself, the company that loans it out.

Wonga.com have come in for a significant amount of flak for their business practices. I have to admit, I gawped as soon as I saw the interest rate of a whopping 4,214% typical APR. I initially shrugged it off as a business that would only appeal to the most desperate of people.

However, the creators of the business gave an interview to the UK edition of Wired this month and they have a lot of interesting points to make. None of which are likely to escape the techno-fanboy realm of Wired; and they certainly won't make it into the pages of the likes of the Guardian.

Wonga argue that they are disrupting what has fundamentally been a monolithic monopoly market by providing small, short term loans. Something that the current banking sector in the UK simply does not service. In the interview the creators claim that customers want three things from such a service: "Firstly, simplicity - the ability to borrow what they want, when they want. Secondly, speed - the transaction needs to happen fast. Thirdly, they want to know exactly and clearly what the loan is going to cost them whether they pay on time, pay early or even miss their deadline."

Banks, they argue, have no incentives to meet these needs. Internet technologies however make all three perfectly servicable.

Errol Damelin (one of Wonga's creator) even goes on to make the oft-made by libertarians, rarely-heard by others, corporatist point: "Banks love regulation. They have been better than anyone else at co-opting it to suit themselves. They love embedding themselves into the messy greyness of how policy is created. And that makes it harder for them to innovate. They're all wink-wink. They don't compete. When did you last hear of a bank competing to bring down the cost of CHAPS payments? When was the last time you saw an interesting new Barclays product? I don't think ever."

And looking at the figures Wonga no longer seems so bad or as exploitative as their detractors have made out. Despite the horrifying interest rate, in practice it would mean a loan of £400 repayable over 30 days would come to £525.48. I've occasionally been up the proverbial creek because an employer has screwed up my pay and my rent and bills are due the next day. I can certainly see occasions where Wonga's services could have been useful in the past and in today's increasingly hand-to-mouth economy I can see why other people might have cause to use them too.

The position is that they are not exploiting people, but providing a service to a generation that has had expectations of flexibility and speed for some time in this sector that simply are not met.

Damelin puts its utility this way in the interview: "We do small, short-term things, and the cost of delivering that service is high.....Catching a cab might be expensive, but it's convenient and nobody complains that being charged £15 for getting across London is immoral."

And the competition?

It gets more interesting: In order to provide an incredibly fast turnaround for their loans, Wonga have opted to have sameday loan applications processed solely by their algorithm. You read that right. No human input.

Their algorithm uses a bespoke method of credit scoring that learns from previous transactions. I, and many others it seems, supposed that the business must have a high default rate. Initially they used the same credit scoring methods as the rest of the finance industry, leading to a 50% default rate from the customers who were being granted loans. However as they moved away from this system and onto their own algorithm, the default rate dropped to single figures (they refuse to release the exact figure however they claim that it is industry leading). The typical default rate assumed by banks is 10%.

This means that despite being in the most high-risk financial sector Wonga are outperforming the high-street banks. They speculate that they could possibly do the same for consumer banking. It's an interesting thought that such an upstart could seriously challenge the retail banking monopolies isn't it?

Your virtual body of evidence

In amongst the innovations and the counterpoints to the bad press Wonga have got there is an important warning. One that our errant media has failed to note: Wonga's nearest competitor, U.S. based prosper.com process all of their applications manually and yet end up with a 40% default rate. Wonga's algorithm works on up to approximately 30 pieces of information initially supplied by the applicant and then finds a further "6,000 to 8,000 online data points that relate to the applicant".

Wonga won't say what those data points are, so one is immediately drawn to asking what they must be. Social media will definitely be a large factor (there exists a similar facility named Duedil that harvests social media such as LinkedIn to assess the soundness of companies for example...), which means an enormous amount of people are revealing patterns in their online data that they are probably not aware of themselves. This is a recurring theme in my own research - finding and helping people to expose such patterns, with the normative judgement that people should have access to their own data - and patterns - to enable them to be self-aware enough to avoid being manipulated by others who hold that knowledge. Wonga have mastered these techniques to the point of being able to create a multi-million pound turnover on the back of it, which means the data and the patterns hidden within are of significant value.....

Point someone to this blog entry next time someone questions you as to why you don't want the state gathering more information on you than you want it to....

One Ring to rule them all...

2011-05-24T19:20:00.004Z

Today a debate took place in parliament regarding an absolutely crucial issue for the future of the UK and the financial well-being of its citizens: Mark Reckless MP proposed an anti-bailout motion that would have been the first strong anti-Euro (and with it - anti EU) sentiment expressed by the house in decades.

Many a strong word was spoken in the chamber earlier against the EU by many of the handful (circa 50) present - and by MPs from both sides of the aisle. For once I actually felt proud of the MPs participating, and I recommend you watch the debate on iplayer, or read the proceedings in Hansard tomorrow. It was such a sharp contrast to the puppet show that passes for the Prime Minister's Question time and I had to fancy what Parliament would be like if these individuals occupied the front benches instead of the back.

Yet how many of those words will be carried by our ever useless peon media to the the ears and eyes of the masses? Instead the media will be perhaps focused on some prat who sought injunctions against revealing a relationship with a woman trying to extort him (and try finding *that* latter fact reported in the media....they would have known had they actually read the linked document....).

However this pleasant fantasy of a functioning representative democracy was soon blown to pieces as I remembered how Daniel Hannan had detailed the "wrecking amendment" put forward.

It didn't matter what the attendees actually said. The whips ensured another 250 MPs turned up to guarantee it was the amended version that went through and not the original motion, turning what was a strongly worded motion into a wet-through general statement of discontent that the government can safely ignore.

I sometimes find it difficult containing my anger over such shenanigans in parliament - regarding how easily results can be 'fixed' in this fashion. I don't remember sleeping in and missing the vote for which whips I wanted. Do you? And I find it intolerable that the people who both proposed the wrecking amendment and voted are not obliged to participate in the debate.

The People's Pledge valiantly attempted to encourage people to write to their MPs beforehand to ask them to vote against the amendment. Would that doing so have had any effect in any case where the majority of MPs are concerned. Aside from the whipped MPs I note, with utter disgust, that ALL of the MPs from Sheffield (which has been my home for far too long now...) failed to even turn up to either the debate or the vote. So much for the salt-of-the-earth Labour MPs standing up for the working man and woman, eh? My current MP, Mr. Paul "I ran Sheffield University Student's Union" Blomfeld, ignored my letter on the topic - as indeed he has done with the last few letters sent to him.

(UPDATE: One of my friends has just informed me that however that "Blomfield did manage to find the time to attend a drinks reception for Sheffield Union officers")

The final vote was 267 to 46. Had it been just those present for the debate voting I am confident the original motion, not the amended version, would have been carried. Such is our utterly dysfunctional democracy and its attendant handmaiden Fourth Estate that not only did this happen, but it won't even be reported.

It doesn't matter what we think. It doesn't matter what we want. It doesn't even matter what most of our MPs do either.

The One Ring has called and the Nazgul are answering their master's call.

Ammo: Applied churnalism.com - the BBC and the Environment Agency

2011-05-03T13:49:00.012Z

(For an explanation of 'Ammo' - see here).

In a previous post I highlighted the fantastic new facility, Churnalism.com. I used the example of a recent idiotic climate change story to highlight how useful the site was.

However, aside from individual queries, it is possible to use the site to process more substantial amounts of data that can potentially reveal trends or biases, and that is what I have done today.

My interest piqued by the utterly moronic 'Llama' story (eviscerated here) I decided to carry out a thorough survey of exactly how many press releases are cut and pasted (and how much is copied) by our media class in the UK.

My findings shocked even cynical old me.

I took all of the press releases from May and June 2010 available on the Environment Agency site. (Oddly, as I was working through the data the public link to the May 2010 data simply disappeared...however this isn't a problem as I stored the URLs of every single press release so others can verify this for themselves).

The research covered a total of 166 press releases. I will work out the statistical significance later, however I believe the sample is representative as it covers two out of twelve months of data. The data needs to be arranged in a tidier format; when this is done I will add an update to this post with the data in an excel spreadsheet so others can replicate my results.

My methodology was simple, every press release was copied into churnalism.com in its entirety. Some had a lot of data that could have been regarded as extraneous, however I didn't want to start editorialising and putting all of the data in is more favourable to the media organisations. I have carried out some analysis of the data below; I'm sure there are more interesting links and patterns to be found - you are welcome to see what you can do with the data yourself when I upload it. Additionally the figure I used as a percentage was the percentage of the article that is made up of pasted material. Every entry can be verified on Churnalism.com

Summary by Media organisation:

The BBC:
The BBC cut and pasted significant content (at least 20%) from 78 articles. Out of those, 39 had 50% or more of their content cut and pasted from the press release. In a number of cases the BBC also generated 2-4 articles from the same press release. In percentage terms, and regarding the sample as representative I conclude that the BBC cuts and pastes content from 45% of Environment Agency press releases. Out of all press releases, 23% are partial (20-49%) copies and 23% are majority copies (50%+) of the Press Release content.

Can you see the political bias yet?

I probably don't have to spell out the implications of this - any level of churnalism is obviously undesirable, yet such an enormous amount carried out by the BBC, uncritically carried on behalf of the Environment Agency, is absolutely not acceptable and completely shocking. BBC 'impartiality is in our genes', or BBC 'the worlds greatest media organisation' my arse. Not to mention the fact that it has billions at its disposal, is publicly funded (by compulsory tax) and is the nation's media monopoly organisation.

None of the other media organisations came even close:

The Independent:
14 Articles cut and pasted. Of those 12 were less than 50% pasted content and 2 were more.

The Telegraph:
10 articles cut and pasted. Of those 7 were less than 50% pasted content and 3 were more.

The Daily Mirror:
7 articles cut and pasted, all of which were lesss than 50% of content pasted.

The Guardian:
7 articles cut and pasted. All were less than 50% of content pasted.

The Express:
6 articles cut and pasted, all of which were lesss than 50% of content pasted.

The Daily Mail:
6 articles cut and pasted, all of which were lesss than 50% of content pasted.

Financial Times:
1 single article, less than 50% pasted.

The Times:
1 single article, less than 50% pasted.

Caveats:
The data should not be trusted for statistical analysis on the basis of dates as I believe the environment agency may have put the wrong dates on their some of their Press Releases - sometimes up to a week ahead of articles that have copied them.

There may be some crossover either in articles cut and pasting material from more than one article or from parts of the Environment Agency's press releases being repeated from one press release to another. Further work is required to weed these out (which could either strengthen or weaken the churnalism respectively).

Finally there are likely some minor errors in calculations; I've gone through the data twice so far but will be applying a finer level of attention later.

**Data to be uploaded later in the week**

I'd like to invite others to replicate this work - potentially crowdsourcing such efforts could allow us to check the entire content for the Environment Agency's press releases and churnalist enablers such as the BBC so there would be no ambiguity whatsoever, especially if the data is kept public.

There are countless other comparisons that could be made using churnalism.com between particular organisations, individuals and media organisations to reveal what was previously hidden.

Fight the endarkenment!

ASI Blogger's Bash

2011-04-21T09:36:00.004Z

I will, along with numerous other libertarian type bloggers, be attending the 'Bloggers Bash' at the Adam Smith institute tonight.

Details are here

If you're coming and we don't already know eachother in person please do come and say hi. I'll be the scruffy dodgy looking one who you might mistake for a long haired stunt double for Frodo Baggins. My secret night time vigilante identity is 'the incredible hobbit'.

No I haven't been drinking. Yes I will be tonight. :)

Ammo: Climate Change Churnalism

2011-04-16T11:52:00.010Z

*for an explanation of 'Ammo' see here.

Anyone who follows Watts Up With That, or similar climate sceptic blogs will have seen this recent - and absolutely barking mad - story 'Fish carried up a mountain on backs of llamas to escape global warming'.

As you'd expect, the story is torn to shreds both in the comments on the original story at the Telegraph and at WUWT. Aside from the fact that this cubed idiocy is even tolerated is the fact that it has been reported uncritically by our ever useless media. Just how uncritical is the reporting though? Now we have a superb tool to discover the answer to this question: churnalism.com. This story was an ideal test case.

The premise behind the site is that the majority of content we receive from the media is simply recycled propaganda - a.k.a. 'press releases' - from institutions, organisations and individuals to whom the media are happy to give an uncritical free ride. The site has access to the 'journalisted' database. What the site creators ask users to do is to find press releases and paste the content in, which it then compares with its archive of news articles and provides links to any articles that appear to have been cut and pasted, along with a percentage of content so copied.

Finding the press release is usually fairly straightforward - just look for the organisation or body they are referencing and look for press releases on their site. In the case of the llama-fish article, I soon found the Environment Agency press release here. Copying and pasting this content into churnalism.com, here are the results (click on the image to see a full size version):

As you can see - the press release has been cut and pasted for the majority of content in three of our largest media organisations. The publicly funded BBC has 75% of its content cut and pasted. Great value for license fee money, eh?

The churnalism database now has a permanent record of this here.

Now a number of people have started adding content to the database, the site is now able to offer some interesting categorical breakdowns here.

The more people who make use of this facility, the more useful it will be. In addition it offers API functionality for programmers, opening interesting possibilities for automating the checking of proliferation of bullshit from certain sources (Number 10 I'm looking at you). It also opens up fascinating avenues for genuine comparative research - for example, how much and how often the BBC uncritically cuts and pastes content from certain sources relative to others.

It also hands those of us in the libertarian leaning or climate sceptic communities an immensely powerful weapon - especially if we all make regular use of it and highlight the media's pathetically compliant churnalism. But we need to use it and promote it! Please do share this around and make use of the facility for your own blogs. Rest assured there will be plenty more 'churnalism' stories coming up here thanks to the research facility churnalism.com now offers.

This could be a game changer.

Use it!

Fight the endarkenment.

Ammo for the Freedom Fighter

2011-04-16T10:09:00.007Z

This is a short blog post to explain the new series of blog entries I am beginning today, 'Ammo for the Freedom Fighter'.

Too many of us libertarian leaning bloggers are unduly focused on bad news and analysis of said material. Whilst this is an essential activity for us to undertake (don't expect any less angry commentaries from me), what is often lacking is a focus, if only occasional, on very real actions, techniques or technologies that we can use in our ongoing war against statism and the coming endarkenment.

Forthcoming over the next few weeks will be continuing series from me sharing tools, practices and philosophies that have been of great benefit to myself and others. Some of these things will simply be of help with gathering, analysing, dissecting and disseminating the constant diet of crap feed to us by the political and media classes. Others will be much more positive, focusing on very real ways to help yourself and others become much stronger, more powerful individuals. Literally. I'm increasingly of the belief that it is truly the latter that our hateful would be overlords and corporatists fear most so I hope you give at least one of them a sincere try.

The first entry will be up later this afternoon. Remember to keep on keeping on, all of you.

It's not about the size of the army, but the fury of it's onslaught.

Crushed

2011-04-14T13:00:00.004Z

Looks like LPUK (the Libertarian Party of the UK) has become nothing short of a full on liability to have anything to do with.

Read the whole distressing and profoundly disappointing story over at Anna's place.

Aside from feeling completely crushed by this I think it also goes without saying that I won't be renewing my membership of the party.

What a complete and utter tragedy for both Anna and family and the hopes,dreams and energy of everyone who got involved with the party.

UK Customer Service - get things done by "promising not to use offensive language"

2011-02-24T17:19:00.007Z

This is a story for everyone (probably meaning all of you) who have been on the receiving end of appalling customer service, possibly involving an endless problem with no solution in sight.

Here is a solid gold rant from a friend of mine on such an issue with Virgin Media regarding internet bandwidth that, owing to its ferocity looks like it might actually achieve something as long as he "promises to not use offensive language in future". This might be the future model for us consumers in the modern age of de rigeur bureaucratic resistance.

Also of great interest is the fact that his very angry email was sparked by the fact that Virgin Media apparently place close attention to comments made about them on Twitter. The Virgin staff watching Twitter contacted him after noticing angry tweets condemning their service.

After being invited to phone a particular member of staff directly to deal with his issue, he was further reprimanded for "offensive language" for referring to the staff he had previously dealt with as "lackeys", leading to him writing in his conclusion that:

"To be honest, this wound up being one of the most surreal conversations I think I’ve ever had with a living breathing human being. At one point, I briefly considered whether or not this could be some sort of prank, the sort of pseudo-comical prank call the Fonejacker or a radio station might make, but even then it was simply too imaginative, too ludicrous for that. Instead, the insanity can only be the reality - that this genuinely was the way Virgin Media dealt with angry customer complaints, like an offended schoolteacher telling you off for using the word tits in front of the girls."

If that resonates with any of you, I highly recommend you read the entire rant, complete with the angry email he sent where he blew his top.

Gaddafi Duck

2011-02-23T01:46:00.001Z

I make no apologies for the language. It had to be done:

The song you should hear whenever they speak

2011-02-20T12:46:00.003Z

It has now reach the point for me that whenever I hear British officials, Eurocrats or climate catastrophists speak, alarming us with some new supposed crisis or other, all I can hear in my head is this song. I find it a great palliative and recommend its regular use:

Why did Assange make his stand in the UK and not Sweden?

2011-02-14T19:38:00.003Z

Lots of people have been openly wondering about this, including me.

If this video is to be believed then there is a list of reasons as long as your arm that would make any rational person in Assange's situation stay well out of Sweden's reach.

Just as one example, you could just stop at the fact that Karl Rove is advising the Swedish government - yes that Karl Rove, who's attitude to an underling who wouldn't follow the party line was to say "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!". The same Karl Rove who appeared to be instrumental in punishing Senator Jo Wilson in nakedly political revenge, for him casting doubt on the case for Iraq's possession of WMDs, by outing his wife, Valerie Plame. Valerie Plame who was at the centre of a CIA operation monitoring Iran's WMD programmes; with part of the fall out being that the CIA estimated it had set them back 10 years in their monitoring of Iran's putative ambitions.

The Mystic Met Office - the 'forecasts that are not forecasts'

2011-02-01T13:24:00.016Z

Autonomous Mind has just published further information on the Met Office story, showing that in internal discussions, the Met Office's 'forecasts that were not forecasts' were nethertheless referred to numerous times as forecasts. As AM puts it, "The Met Office logic is that although it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck it is actually a horse."

There's lots of spin going on here, however there is no avoiding the fact that the 'forecast that was not a forecast' was used by the National Grid to determine their winter preparedness report, as I pointed out on Friday. They apparently didn't even have access to the now notorious "secret" report (the "secret" adjective originating from the BBC's Roger Harrabin).

The Mystic Met Office has now responded to the Register's inquiries on this issue, stating that it "has never suggested that we warned cabinet office of an 'exceptionally cold early winter'." - thus throwing Harrabin immediately under the bus.

Harrabin's response? Now that is another interesting story in and of itself. He claims: "This doesn't match a more conclusive forecast I gleaned from a Met Office contact in December" .

So what is this "more conclusive forecast" and who gave it to you Roger?

I note that he is also not paying attention when he says: 'I note a blog report (which I cannot yet verify) saying that a civil servant commented: "The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter."'

Roger, that "comment" is clearly visible in the FOIA material I received, amongst the email traffic. It's more than just a "comment", it is the government outlining its official position, with which the Met Office appears to agree in its return email.

On that particular point Roger, it leaves a striking odd one out. You.

There's also another deception in play here. Harrabin goes on:

'A spokesman for the Cabinet Office told me they had passed the forecast to key stakeholders ("Government departments, local council as appropriate - we don't have a list").' [My emphasis]

Are we really to believe that the "key stakeholders" didn't include the National Grid? (Not that it would have helped much anyway).

You may be wondering why I highlighted that word. Here's another clue:

Both Autonomous Mind and the Register articles highlight a claim found in the Mail:

"Last night the Met Office confirmed it had passed on the advice, but a spokesman denied that withholding it from the public was motivated by embarrassment.

‘We did brief the Cabinet Office in October on what we believed would be an
exceptionally cold and long winter,’ she said."

Whilst Roger Harrabin is definitely not off the hook - and neither, if the veracity of the Mail's source is to be believed - is the Mystic Met Office, there is another underlying cultural problem:

The use of 'spokespeople'. These are used so often that it now drifts into the background consciousness for most of us, most of the time. Yet it is an extremely insidious propagandistic technique. The use of an anonymous spokesperson gets the organisation, or person, they are representing off the hook. There is no chain of accountability and any statements they make can easily be dismissed in the future.

The fact that both the Met Office and the Cabinet office are deploying spokespeople on this issue concerns me. It means we're not going to get to the actual truth without some serious hard work and implies that someone definitely does have something to hide, even if it is just their own bumbling incompetence.

Whenever this occurs journalists should immediately insist on knowing the identity of the person providing the information. Of course they don't, because they want easy copy, and access to the source of that copy. So it's up to the rest of us to apply the pressure and ask, every single time, who? The reasons why this is such a pressing issue are described eloquently by Heather Brooke in her excellent new book, 'The Silent State':

"Official spokespeople are powerful because they speak for the powerful; anonymity means they can exercise that power without being held individually accountable for it....When a 'spokesman' makes an accusation or spreads a smear, what recourse is there for the target? Anonymising spokespeople suits some journalists because if every source is simply a 'spokesman' or 'official', then it's easy to make up any old quote to suit your story.....As long as secrecy and anonymity reign, public sector bureaucracies will bethe hiding places for the incompetent, lazy and corrupt"

And if that doesn't hammer the point home enough, try this summation from Brooke:

"...we cannot be an informed electorate without access to information and a right to hold officials to account. And if we're not an informed electorate then we cannot call ourselves a democracy." [Emphasis mine]

This use of selective anonymity also has the potential to inflict very real damage beyond just the nature of our democracy:

"...special advisers and spin doctors operate a principle of never admitting a fault. can't we be treated by our leaders as grown-ups? Spin is costly for taxpayers because small problems aren't acknowledged, they are spun into successes or stifled until they reach a magnitude of catastrophic proportion."

And we've just seen this principle in action with regard to the Met Office, the government and the BBC:

Due to yet another year of officially sanctioned lack of preparedness, chaos, suffering and likely unecessary deaths, have occurred. The game of pass the blame parcel will be no comfort to those identified by Anna Raccoon as on the receiving end - "Those pensioners found frozen solid in their front garden, the scenes of half starved refugees huddled against the cold at Heathrow airport, the two kilometre long lines of frozen travellers queuing round the block at St Pancreas Station, the double dip recession caused by the ‘extreme weather’"

All of which no one is willing to take responsibility for as the parties at risk of having to take it are hiding behind 'spokespeople' already. This looks like a tough battle ahead to pin down who is responsible, who is telling us the truth and who is lying.

And its a battle - yet another - only being fought in earnest by the 'fifth estate' of the blogosphere, with little assistance from the 'fourth estate' as they languish in the doldrums of increasing irrelevancy and distant relationship to the truth.

But fight it we will.

The Revealed Mystery of the Mystic Met Office

2011-01-28T16:31:00.013Z

I have just received the Met Office's "secret report" and email correspondence with the Cabinet Office from a FOI request I made three weeks ago. The information they contain is quite significant and I hope others who have been working hard highlighting this issue such as Autonomous Mind and James Delingpole will find the following addition useful. God knows this is an extremely serious issue and the only people who appear to have been digging into it have been the bloggers (AM's investigation and analysis can be found here, here and here).

At the turn of the year we heard the revelation that, following an absolutely brutal start to the UK winter, the Met Office had allegedly warned the government in a "secret report" to expect such.

The Met Office also claimed that, in part because of the ridicule it had suffered for completely out of sync seasonal forecasts previously, it did not share this information with the public. It attempted to throw the government under the bus by claiming that the Cabinet Office had been informed, implying that it was central government's fault that the country was so unprepared and nothing to do with the Mystic Met Office's computer models with built in warmist bias that is perpetually out of touch with reality as a result.

It was Roger Harrabin, one of the BBC's chief climate alarmists, who originally claimed that the Met Office had issued this "secret warning". He said: "The truth is it [The Met Office] did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October. But we weren’t let in on the secret. The reason? The Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts because of the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009 – the summer that campers floated around in their tents.”

I find it utterly pathetic that such an allegedly august institution can hide behind the excuse of fear of ridicule. It would be funny, self-satirising material were it not for the fact that, as a result of their influence, many people have died and suffered. That's not to mention the hole made in our economy and damage to tourism and international standing. Visitors, and those observing from abroad, perceived the lack of preparedness, especially at the airports, as akin to third world levels of disorganisation. They were right.

This is an extremely serious issue and so far no one appears to have been held culpable, not least in part to the (as per usual) relative silence of the mass media.

I immediately sent Freedom of Information requests to both the Cabinet Office and the Met Office, asking for copies of this "secret report" and any related correspondence after initially reading the story.

The essence of the Met's "secret report" has already been revealed by Bishop Hill who was able to obtain a copy before me; revealing it in all its simplistic glory (and showing clearly that the Met Office has been completely dishonest on this issue). It was reported over at Watts Up With That, and was quickly neatly eviscerated by the commentators.

They have also been claiming that paying customers receive more extensive information than the public. The "public" information mostly consisted in this probability map, which claimed, to quote AM, an "80% probability of warmer than average temperatures for November, December and January for Scotland and a 60-80% probability of the same for Northern Ireland, Wales and most of England."

As you will see from the link below, the special information released to paying customers, which apparently constituted their "secret warning" of a harsh winter is a complete joke and comes across like something written by a child.

You can see for yourself that the Met Office actually predicts a slighty higher chance of a "cold" winter, rather than a "near average" or "mild" winter. This is based on a series of probabities out of 10. It boggles the mind that aside from the tiny amount of actual prediction in the report that this is the output of their energy-guzzling, multi-million pound supercomputer.

On the next page they quantify what these terms might mean, but even here they are completely out of sync with what we actually experienced - for "cold" it meant "typical lower and upper limits" of temperature ranging from -1.5 to 0.4 degrees Celsius.

Further, the email correspondence is enlightening between the Met Office and the government:

Someone at the Cabinet Office wrote to the Met Office to tell them what the official position would be: "The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter". The Met Office writes back - "That is fine." - also note the first mail sent my the Met Office, these are their "initial thoughts" (!)

So, as if the "secret" prediction wasn't awful enough, any claim that the Met Office actually warned the government of an impending harsh winter, and by implication that the government therefore did not act responsibly is a 100% complete and utter lie.

However there is more to this story that really needs to be aired. Not only have local councils been complaining of the complete failure of the Met Office to warn them, but even more seriously, the National Grid of all organisations, was flying completely blind too. See the National Grid's Winter Outlook document. Skip to page 7. The Grid obviously never received the "secret report" (not that it would have been much use anyway). They had to get their information from - the website! The same website that promised the 60-80% likelihood of a warm winter and which the Met Office has told us plebs we should ignore.

Largely as a result of this, the predictions for maximum demand were out by nearly 1 GW on the closest match to a horrifying 4.7 Gigawatts on the worst (information from NETA):

Had we not been able to buy approximately 2GW of power from France across the channel interconnector and ramp up the domestic production there could have been a serious outage. In a few years, thanks to complete government intransigience on our future power supply, we won't be able to repeat the feat and of course there are no guarantees that the French will always be able to sell us that much energy when we need it. When the total demand goes up to close to 60GW, in still winter conditions, the 3000+ wind turbines installed provide an incredible 0.1% of our power needs. That lunatic Huhne seems to think our power issues will be solved by the costly build of another 10,000 turbines. So in similar conditions that "capacity" will provide approximately 0.4% of the power supply, just when we need it most. Outstanding, no?

By the way, Browned Off's comment to me is well worth a read. He corrected me on the relative positions of the government, EU and energy industry on this. It certainly seems plausible - the government is happy for the EU to take most of the blame for something that - at root - is its own fault. It fits perfectly into the singular principle that defines modern British politics - expediency.

Unfortunately the combination of this political expediency - at the expense of our national power supply - and the religious convictions of the warmist-infested Mystic Met office are going to result in many more deaths and suffering. There have already been needless deaths and suffering thanks to both.

These people have gone from being an annoyance to an active menace, and no one appears to be holding them to account.

Anyway, here are the files, including the email correspondence and the "report".

Enough of student hypocrisy already.....

2010-12-16T18:51:00.009Z

I've had enough of hearing ignorant and self-serving arguments from students and the NUS regarding the future of higher education funding.

After attending the various actions to support Julian Assange over the last week I was bitterly disappointed to notice the almost complete absence of students. At the most important event - the hearing on Tuesday, there were barely 100 people. We virtually had a journalist bodyguard each and I ended up giving four (four!) interviews as a result. The spirit of '68? Don't make me laugh! Students are rioting, being violent, destroying property and causing massive disruption in the name of completely misunderstanding the nature of the Browne Review proposals. We hear disingenuous claims that this is about standing up for poorer students who won't now go to university (the Browne review is actually much fairer for students from poorer backgrounds) or that the violence is justified because of the supposed 'violence from the state in ruining future students life chances'. Their self-serving articulation of arguments based on ignorance is frustratingly transparent.

There are many very serious issues that the students would be turning their attention towards if this really was about resisting vicious government policies or authoritarianism more generally. Issues for which I would be much more sympathetic regarding violent or destructive civil disobedience - to name just a few examples: i) the future of the internet, investigative journalism and anti-authoritarian truth-telling at stake with the reaction to Assange/Wikileaks, ii) the fact that a third of scots are now in fuel poverty, iii) the fact that the country will have a catastrophic energy deficit in 2015 iv) the fact that the majority of working age adults in the UK are illiterate and/or innumerate, v) the continuing destruction of British sovereignty and its economy by our successive quisling governments integrating us even further with the EU or even vi) that Britain has been party to the deaths and torture of tens of thousands of people in Iraq.

But no.

Instead we have the most breathtaking hypocrisy. (Make sure you read this before viewing the video below).

So I decided to create an Angry German Kid parody of Aaron Porter, president of the NUS to vent my spleen. As is de rigeur for these types of videos - bad language throughout:

Thanks to the folks who produced the inspirational previous tranche of downfall and angry german kid videos, especially the Derek Draper version from whom I borrowed a joke that is simply too good to pass up on for the purposes of this video.

The first world infowar has started

2010-12-07T18:45:00.004Z

"The word was spread that bold Assange and his 300 Anonymous, so far from their websites, laid down their rigs and lives; not just for Wikileaks, but for all of the Internet and the promise it holds."

"Now here on this ragged patch of internet called 4chan, let the DDOS hordes face obliteration! Just there the corrupt government barbarians huddle, sheer terror gripping tight their hearts with icy fingers - knowing full well what merciless horrors they suffered at the LOICs and botnets of 300 Anonymous. Yet they stare now across the gateways at 10,000 commanding 30,000"

Wikileaks / Cablegate - the end of Turkish EU ambitions as we know it.

2010-11-29T11:56:00.018Z

As longer term readers may remember I have written a number of pieces on intelligence matters, particularly those that involve the work of our so called "intelligence" agencies regarding nuclear proliferation and immigration issues. See also this piece I wrote, which pulls a number of these diverse strands together.

One of the primary figures in these narratives was FBI whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, who clearly identified numerous corrupt interests at the heart of the U.S. government who were tied deeply into Turkey's thoroughly corrupt "deep state" (a concept so well entrenched in popular Turk consciousness that it has a specific term in Turkish - derin devlet).

Having spent a lot of time working through Sibel Edmonds various pieces of testimony, and following up as many of the links as I could, I was naturally horrified to hear of David Cameron's insistence that he would "fight" for Turkey to join the EU, saying that without Turkey at its heart, the EU was "not stronger but weaker... not more secure but less... not richer but poorer" and "I'm here to make the case for Turkey's membership of the EU. And to fight for it." (it would be lovely if you expressed "fighting" for Britain in the same strong terms Dave).

I often used to joke with an Italian friend that both our countries were competing to see who could produce the most corrupt and mendacious political officials. We both agreed however that British and Italian corruption would pale into insignificance when compared to Turkey's. Accession to the EU, giving complete open borders to what is effectively Europe's drug funded, weapons (including nuclear) proliferating gangster state would be an immense disaster for all Europeans, for it would give these same corrupt interests unfettered access to Europe.

This background is important to lay out the significance of the contents of the diplomatic cable, marked with 'secret' classification from the U.S. Ankara embassy in 2004 (the target recipient isn't clear): Cable #04ANKARA7211

Turkey's corruption alone is reason enough to strenuously oppose EU entry - this diplomatic cable however sets out in stark terms the powerful Islamist influence at work within the Turkish government - a government we are repeatedly told is secular. EU nations such as Austria and Greece (among others) have extremely bitter - and in the latter's case, historically very recent, ancestral memories and histories tied up in the aggression of the Ottoman empire, in a way that I don't think most Britons can fathom. Once this cable does the rounds there I can't see any MEPs from either nation not attempting to block Turkish progress into the EU.

The U.S. assessment of the Islamist influence begins from paragraph 10:

We have also run into the rarely openly-spoken, but widespread belief among adherents of the Turk-Islam synthesis that Turkey's role is to spread Islam in Europe, "to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683" as one participant in a recent meeting at AKP's main think tank put it. This thinking parallels the logic behind the approach of FonMin Gul ally and chief foreign policy advisor in the Prime Ministry Ahmet Davutoglu, whose muddy opinion piece in the Dec. 13 International Herald Tribune is in essence a call for one-way multi-cultural tolerance, i.e., on the part of the EU.

I'm sure there will be Spanish and Austrian heads exploding, even amongst so called political "moderates", at the references to Andalusia and Vienna, respectively. British people besieged by the de facto serial monoculturism of "multicultism" in the UK will be deeply familar with the utter hypocrisy expressed in the last sentence, especially those who have objected to it and erroneously been written off as racists, or supporters of the BNP.

In fairness, the cable does detail some distinctly secularist efforts that are more pro-Western, including some that aim explicitly to bring forth the more humanist - Sufi-influenced - side of Islam (see for example Paragraph 24). However the bulk details the impact of the Islamist element in stark terms. There are for example, allegations that the West is fomenting a clash of civilisations and can effectively be "saved" by the spread of Turkish values, along with "concern that harmonization and membership will water down Islam and associated traditions in Turkey". Paragraph 13 goes on to point out the Turkish government's civil service hiring policy: 'to hire on the basis of "one of us", i.e., from the Sunni brotherhood and lodge milieu'. The cable frankly expresses the opinion that previous hires were incompetent and a change to hiring 'on the basis of competence' (!) would still mean that new recruits would be frustrated because of their predecessors incompetence.

The Turkish leader, Erdogan, who Cameron so praises, is described as having "hunger for absolute power and for the material benefits of power" . He has "a sharp authoritarian style and deep distrust of others" and he surrounds himself "with an iron ring of sycophantic (but contemptuous) advisors". As a result, he has a "susceptibility to Islamist theories". And this is supposed to be the Secular leader who Call me Dave assures us will lead Turkey - and the EU - to a better age!

On this particular topic, the remainder of paragraph 17 is worth quoting in full:

With regard to Islamist influences on Erdogan, DefMin Gonul, who is a conservative but worldly Muslim, recently described Gul associate Davutoglu to us as "exceptionally dangerous." Erdogan's other foreign policy advisors (Cuneyd Zapsu, Egemen Bagis, Omer Celik, along with Mucahit Arslan and chef de cabinet Hikmet Bulduk) are despised as inadequate, out of touch and corrupt by all our AKP contacts from ministers to MPs and party intellectuals.

Paragraph 19 also gives us specific numbers regarding the number of Islamists within the government itself:

Judging by comments to us of insiders in the influential Islamist lodge of Fethullah Gulen such as publicist Abdurrahman Celik, the lodge, which has made some inroads into AKP (Minister of Justice Cicek, Minister of Culture and Tourism Mumcu; perhaps 60-80 of 368 MPs; some appointments to the bureaucracy), has resumed the ambivalent attitude it initially had toward Erdogan and AKP.

Further down, in paragraph 23, the cable identifies a prominent Islamist appointment: "Omer Dincer, an Islamist academic whom Erdogan appointed Undersecretary of the Prime Ministry, THE key position in the government/state bureaucracy."

Can you imagine the popular media reaction to the idea that the BNP had a quarter of the seats in parliament and several ministerial appointments? The above is certainly no different.

The additional information the cable provides us on Turkish corruption is also enlightening:

in increasing numbers AKPers from ministers on down, and people close to the party, are telling us of conflicts of interest or serious corruption in the party at the national, provincial and local level and among close family members of ministers. We have heard from two contacts that Erdogan has eight accounts in Swiss banks; his explanations that his wealth comes from the wedding presents guests gave his son and that a Turkish businessman is paying the educational expenses of all four Erdogan
children in the U.S. purely altruistically are lame.

Specific Ministers identified as corrupt were: "Minister of Interior Aksu, Minister of Foreign Trade Tuzmen, and AKP Istanbul provincial chairman Muezzinoglu". The cable even goes on to point out that Turkish police are investigating "Muezzinoglu's extortion racket and other activities has already produced evidence incriminating Erdogan." - a minister openly identifed as running an extortion racket!

The final assessments in the cable are absolutely damning:

the broad, rubber-meets-the-road reality is that Islam in Turkey is caught in a vise of (1) 100 years of "secular" pressure to hide itself from public view, (2) pressure and competition from brotherhoods and lodges to follow their narrow, occult "true way", and (3) the faction- and positivism- ridden aridity of the Religious Affairs
Directorate (Diyanet). As a result, Islam as it is lived in Turkey is stultified, riddled with hypocrisy, ignorant and intolerant of other religions' presence in Turkey, and unable to eject those who would politicize it in a radical, anti-Western way. Imams are for the most part poorly educated and all too ready to insinuate anti-Western, anti-Christian or anti-Jewish sentiments into their sermons. Exceptionally few Muslims in Turkey have the courage to challenge conventional Sunni thinking about jihad or, e.g., verses in the Repentance shura of the Koran which have for so long been used to justify violence against "infidels".

Yep - that sounds just like the fundamentally secular state we've been sold all these years. It is also very important to take note of the U.S. take on the Turkish relationship with history:

A second question is the relation of Turkey and its citizens to history -- the history of this land and citizens' individual history. Subject to rigid taboos, denial, fears, and mandatory gross distortions, the study of history and practice of historiography in the Republic of Turkey remind one of an old Soviet academic joke: the faculty party chief assembles his party cadres and, warning against various
ideological threats, proclaims, "The future is certain. It's only that damned past that keeps changing."

Having been on the receiving end of multiple hacks and defacements on my own websites by Turkish hackers for daring to mention the Armenian Genocide, the above paragraph certainly rings true for me.

Simply either the pervasive - and deep - corruption, or the extensive influence of Islamists within government would be enough to give anyone in the EU pause regarding the wisdom of welcoming Turkey as possibly the 28th member state. But both?

It is reasonable to assume that given the general convergence of views on other matters, the UK FCO assessment of Turkey would not have differed greatly from that of the U.S. Although, as Peter Oborne has repeatedly warned us in his excellent excoriations of the political class - the British FCO and the government parted ways many years before, and in fact the British government under Blair and Campbell has made best efforts to make it irrelevant, despite its long history of expert local knowledge. This is all the more significant in the light of Cameron and LibConfused giving the European External Action Service a free pass to replace the FCO and gives credence to Godfrey Bloom's accusation of "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer" - a vision that, if Davy Boy is anything to go by, surely involved having the Turkish nightmare foisted upon us without a single one of us having a say.

The release of this cable could well change all of that however. Spread it far. Spread it wide.

Details of wikileaks 'cablegate' emerging

2010-11-28T18:27:00.001Z

Several publications have just this half hour coordinated publication of initial details regarding the wikileaks material.

Here is the Guardian and the NY Times to get started. Oh my life - it really does look like this contains some very serious material indeed.

Has Van Rompuy just exposed himself as a rank amateur?

2010-11-16T18:28:00.003Z

Good old Van Rompuy, our glorious unelected, unaccountable President. A complete and utter clutz? Surely not!

What is the Number 1 rule, with regard to the financial markets, when you are in the midst of a catastrophe Mr. Rumpy?

Hint: It ISN'T to talk UP the damn crisis, you stupid &*%&^%!!!

Van Rompuy: Euro crisis could bring down the EU.

What to remember on the 14th of November

2010-11-14T18:13:00.005Z

Remembrance Sunday.

Every year on both Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday my thoughts turn to my grandparents and great grandparents and the generations they represented.

I am as sad for them as I am for what we have become in their absence. In the last few years of his life I started to have the odd conversation with my surviving grandfather about this. He seemed to be of a similar opinion - that most of what had been fought for back then had not just been lost, but actively given away by both a venal political class and an apathetic population. The baby-boomers had everything relative to the generations before them and they happily sold off the farm.

I get a sick feeling that goes to the root of my stomach trying to imagine myself in the shoes of these solid people, of whom many of our generations are paltry shadows in comparison. Whether it was war in the trenches, the possibility of everything being destroyed in an instant by a German bomb or never knowing if you were going to see so many loved ones and friends again; in the face of this their courage must have been inestimable; especially as the odds would have seemed so overwhelming at the time.

In the 1930s, a single man would sign up to fight and his entire family - and street! - would sign up to go with him. Could any of us imagine that happening now?

It is in this spirit that I feel so aggravated by others seemingly giving up so easily. There has been a mass exodus from the libertarian-leaning blogosphere recently. Something some commentators have taken unjustified delight in, claiming 'I told you so! They were just Tories in denial' or some other similar nonsense.

I think blogging fatigue is a big part of it, and I'm certainly sympathetic, even though I'm an irregular blogger myself. I also think the departure of ZaNuLabour is a small factor, however it is a long way off of the whole story. There is a much much deeper weariness seeping in and I think the Devil has identified it in his (hopefully temporary) signing off post: it is the fact that the new LibConfused overlords represent almost zero change from what went before. The state is increasing in size, in power, the climate hysteria continues in spite of the counter evidence and the EU is still receiving massive handovers of power (not to mention handouts). Many people, including the Devil, are asking - what is the point?

Well here's the damn point: Until our sacrifices and suffering match or exceed those of our grand parents and great-grand parents' generations, I don't want to hear any such defeatist talk. And to make the point that talk is cheap, it is very easy to utter platitudes about what "they" were making sacrifices for back in that pit of despair that must have been their lives.It is quite another to grit our teeth and dig in for the long haul. They did it and we owe nothing less than to do the same.

No one said it would be easy, that the going would not be long and arduous. What will you tell your children or grandchildren, or those children of others (if, like me, you plan not to have any yourself). What will you tell them, especially when you relate the tales of your own grandparents' heroic struggles?

Is a comfortable life worth a fucking damn when it is purchased so cheaply - at the expense of other people's liberty, even their lives?

For me it isn't. And it is crucial for the coming generations - sold already into penury and quite possibly a third world status by the most recent generations - that they know that while there were many who collaborated, there were some who fought back.

Hope may be a distant thing right now. Our opponents are many, and mighty. I fully understand the despair, even the surrealism it seems to engender as our political establishment and its enabling classes (the media, the apathetic) appear to exist in a parallel universe to anything that could be remotely regarded as "reality" (explaining the multi-trillion debt to someone who believes in "free" everything will give you this mind-bending trip of an experience).

It is why we must nurture the tiny, flickering flame of hope in our hearts, breathe on it regularly with our irreplaceable life energy, just like those who gave of their irreplacable lives with honour before us. On this day, we should not only remember the fallen but not forget the future - a future which we have a direct hand in forging.

As regular readers will know, I'm quite a fan of science-fiction and am fond of using poignant scenes from it to make my point. Below is a video that I think is entirely fitting for Remembrance Sunday. It utilises a fictional alien character in a fictional future scenario where humans fought a war against impossible odds. The ode he gives to the humans is fully deserved of our immediate ancestors. Is it, or will it ever be deserved of us? That's for you and me to decide, starting today:

Alastair Campbell and the Shame of Sheffield

2010-10-30T17:30:00.008Z

I found out at the last minute this Thursday just passed that Alastair Campbell had a speaking engagement at Sheffield University. Interestingly the student group, 'The Exchange', who normally inform everyone on their mailing list of upcoming political speakers kept quiet on this one.

I managed to get hold of a ticket in the nick of time and attend.

I've never been so ashamed of Sheffield in my life.

There is simply no way the BNP, for example, would ever be able to have a speaker attend Sheffield University. Even if there were no 'no platform' policy, UAF and every other student group would be mobilised to stop it, and if they failed, protest outside in their hundreds and likely attempt to intimidate everyone going in.

How then is it possible that this serial distorter and murderer of the truth, who was amongst other things the chief architect for the fabric of lies that led the U.K. into that obscenity known as the Iraq War, was to be welcomed with open arms, his every quip received with warm chortles? This man has the blood of thousands on his hands through murder, injury and torture.

The host of the event, which was set up in an entertainment chat-show format, asked him expectedly softball questions. This was an irritant, but expected. It was the audience however who absolutely stunned me with their almost sychophantic acceptance of all of his talking points (such as the idea that anyone bringing up the deficit had some kind of pathological 'deficit fetish') and - most importantly - when they had their chance to question him themselves they went for the most mind blowingly anodyne and saccharin questions one could imagine.

Examples included 'what do you do in your shed?' and 'do you get free tickets for Wimbledon?' I spent most of the event shaking my head in absolute abject despair at the level of political dialogue. I continually put my hand up but did not get picked by the presenter. I'm not surprised, my body language must have looked very angry and aggressive and I spent the whole time staring at him, not clapping or laughing along with the ship of fools that was the Sheffield audience.

One of my friends wrote the idiocy off as just students being generally uninformed after I related this to her. I was sorry to tell her that the vast majority of the audience, which packed out the entire Octagon centre (1250 capacity auditorium) at the University, were not students and the average age was between 40-50. So these people have been fully cognizant of our wonderful 13 year journey with the Labour debt - and people - bombers.

Towards the end, the presenter allowed a 'quick fire round', where people could shout out brief questions that Campbell would then try to answer. It was at this point that he received his only difficult question of the night - one young chap shouted out "how right was Andrew Gilligan?"

When Campbell finally got around to answering this, his response was simply "Andrew Gilligan? Completely wrong on everything". That was it. I blew a gasket and started heckling. I'd purposefully sat in a prominent location, in a raised seating area at the back that gave me direct eye contact between the row separating the seating areas in front of me. "Andrew Gilligan was VINDICATED" I boomed down the aisle. The entire emasculated audience appeared absolutely shocked at my audacity.

Campbell repeated his line again at which point it degenerated into a mouth off between him and me. He said something outrageously idiotic which I can't remember, however it set me off into a long belly laugh which irritated him, and he said something like 'whatever facts the gentleman is privy to do not worry me'.

At which point I completely lost it and fully sounded off in a rant at him, telling him that I know he wouldn't be worried by facts, by his fake affectation to be down with the common man, (one of the questioners had previously asked him what it was he brought to the table for Tony Blair - his response was to claim that when he went to football matches he didn't sit in the VIP area, but deigned to mix with the 'common man' and therefore he understood the 'common man'),because he was a member of the political class, in the Westminster bubble.

He got shirty for a bit then remembered his snake-oil training and chose very carefully neutral words simply restating his position. I was shaking with rage and only began to calm down at the end when a nice chap and his girlfriend approached me and thanked me for standing up to him and said I was "very brave".

On the whole the evening really reminded me of why I'm glad to be leaving Sheffield. It is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, having failed completely to start evolving into a more cosmopolitan and forward thinking place unlike most of the other core cities, and is packed - still - with people in complete denial regarding the economy, who expect state handouts for everything, who think there is an endless source of money for everything and everyone. I frankly have no sympathy at all. Sheffield is going to deserve whatever bad things come its way - the audience in the room were certainly representative of the City's more influential and better informed people.

For shame Sheffield, for shame.

God help this city.

INDECT: The good news and the bad news

2010-10-19T15:12:00.004Z

Hat tip to IanPJ for this latest development:

EU Parliamentarians have sent a letter to the Commission requesting that ALL documents relating to the EU funded INDECT scheme be released.

What is INDECT? It is a research project related to develop the basis for electronic profiling via gathering data from freely available online media (including social networking sites), and also enable it to be merged with privately held data (e.g. police records).

The get out clause provided is that such profiling would only take place after a specific crime had been detected (presumably online). Of course nothing in the software itself would prevent it being used in other situations and we're all well aware of the EU's function creep fetish. In any case, as you will see however from reading the description on the project's front page, what might be considered a crime is sufficiently vague and wide reaching that anyone who expresses a strong opinion, or shares any files should consider themselves at risk (I can hardly wait to see how this interacts with uniquely British efforts like PHORM and the Digital Economy Act).

You can browse for youself the currently available list of deliverables. There is a lot of information here. In particular, I would recommend anyone with a computing background look at Deliverable 4.1 - this gives extensive details on the planned methodology and also will suggest to anyone with some knowledge in this area numerous lines of attack for countering such invasive surveillance technology. In this context deliverables 4.2 and 4.3 would also be worth consulting.

Also of interest may be a similar project that appears to be focusing more on the conceptual issues (also hat tip to IanPJ for noticing this): Detecter

The bad news:

The bad news is that this event highlights just how pathetic the EU parliament is. This is basically a begging letter to the EU Commission; the unelected executive who determine the EU's policies (and who are also able to keep all of their discussions secret if they choose to). It is very likely the Commission will simply say no. Or if it doesn't, there will be a very quiet announcement that will be missed by our wonderful mass media. Which brings me to my final point:

Tips to the blogosphere:
As per usual the mainstream ("quality") media has consistently let us down on these type of EU funded research projects. It is difficult to understand because all of the EU funded projects must release deliverables to the public. Not only that but many of the researchers are keen to generate publicity and thus are open to contact. Despite these incredibly rich picking grounds, especially knowing how the News Factory Churnalists are often desperate for quick copy, it is incredible to see so little comment on these projects.

I worked on a couple of these projects previously. There is a lot of interesting work going on, some very good and positive, some very detrimental. There is very little reporting on either. However it is a massive area for research and exposure by the blogosphere community. The EU operates numerous - what it calls - 'framework programmes', each one running for a few years, issuing calls for proposals for research funding in areas dictated by the EU as important. Each programme is numbered sequentially FP6 projects have just ended and FP7 projects are now starting. You can search for all of them on CORDIS. Googling any search terms you like and also adding 'FP6' or 'FP7' can also be effective. Have at it!

An Ode to Anna Raccoon

2010-10-16T15:34:00.007Z

This week we lost one of the best bloggers and Libertarian activists not just in Britain, but in the world.

Anna Raccoon was a phenomenon. Possessed of tremendous skill, experience, kindness and persistence, all in equal measure, she was one of the true warriors of both the blogosphere and the Libertarian tradition.

She was silenced by a continual, unabating campaign of threats and intimidation. Read the sorry, sickening details here, at Grumpy's place, where she leaves her last words. For those of you who never read her material or followed her various campaigns (which helped real people in the real world, acting as an serendipitous angel to their often unknown plights), the Devil has her very last blog post copied here. This post shows her at her best, detailing one of her many interventions to help those vulnerable people on the receiving end of the most banally evil dead hand of the state and its mendacious agents, and its also an inspiring summary of just how and why we can make a difference.

I'm going to miss her presence so much. However, she was an absolute inspiration. As Oldrightie comments on her goodbye note - "Life is for living first, fighting oppression second." Quite. Where you led the way Anna, the rest of us will take up the charge into the breach and beat back the enemy.

Gildas wrote an eulogy for Anna here and I certainly couldn't better it. So my ode to Anna, and to those of us now duty bound to take up the slack and fight in her place, and in her honour is by means of this song:

10:10 - The best response yet

2010-10-03T13:17:00.006Z

Simply the most eloquent and to the point response to the 10:10 obscenity yet:

(Small) bonfire of the Quangos

2010-07-27T17:36:00.004Z

For anyone who hasn't heard yet, the government has announced the list of quangos that it intends to abolish. See here in the Independent.

One of those quangos is Ufi - the parent company for Learndirect and the disastrous UK Online. It was with the latter (UK Online) that we first learned about the government's actual attitude to talking to it's citizens online - - censor them if they don't agree with you.

Now if you were to look at the sites listed above it would look like Ufi/learndirect actually did some worthwhile work. It did in it's first year or two, very successfully in fact. But then the targets bullshit culture took over and it morphed rapidly into a horrific tax eating monster filled to the brim with completely pointless jobs and ever changing "targets" and "priorities". It sucked in taxpayer money from one end and out the other produced - literally - tonnes of patronising acronym-filled meaningless bullshit.

Also, most of the actual teaching took place in independent learning centres, previously private businesses that then became effectively Ufi franchises. This would have been OK if the said businesses hadn't been jerked around constantly by changing targets and funding models that would alter sometimes within months of the last regime being imposed. As a result lots of previously good learning centres went to the wall or became completely ineffectual.

I came to despise the organisation with a passion after working there for two years and as it seems to be receiving it's long overdue and richly deserved destruction I thought it was the perfect time to share my resignation letter from five years ago, which I sent to the entire company.

Read it here

How Crichton called it...

2010-06-05T16:54:00.009Z

Michael Crichton was one of the first high-profile climate sceptics to refer to environmentalism, in particular in its modern global warming alarmist guise, as a religion.

So I was very interested to read a book handed to me by a friend last week by Crichton, called 'Next'. The book deals with serious ethical issues raised by events in the near future involving biomedical science, intellectual property, genetic engineering and - importantly - scientific fraud in this area.

In part of the book my interest was particularly piqued by a fictional news article, discussing the very real case of major scientific fraudster, Dr.Hwang Woo-suk. It contains several very interesting passages on "peer" (now widely ridiculed in the light of Climategate as "pal") review, with many quotes from a fictional 'Professor McKeown'. Below is the last portion of the fictional article:

"Peer review. All of Hwang's papers in Science were peer-reviewed. If we ever needed evidence that peer review is an empty ritual, this episode provides it. Whang made extraordinary claims. He did not provide extraordinary evidence. many studies have shown that peer review does not improve the quality of scientific papers. Scientists themselves know it doesn't work. Yet the public still regards it as a sign of quality, and says, 'This paper was peer-reviewed,' or 'This paper was not peer-reviewed,' as if that meant something. It doesn't.

"Next, the journals themselves. Where was the firm hand of the editor of Science? Remember that the journal Science is a big enterprise - 115 people work on that magazine. Yet gross fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, were not detected. And Photoshop is widely known as a major tool of scientific fraud. Yet the magazine had no way to detect it."

"Not that Science is unique in being fooled. Fraudulent research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, where authors withheld critical information about Viox heart attacsk, in the Lancet, where a report about drugs and oral cancer was entirely fabricated - in that one, 250 people in the patient database had the same birth date! That might have been a clue. Medical fraud is more than a scandal, it's a public health threat. Yet it continues."

'The cost of such fraud is enormous,' McKeown said, 'estimated at thirty billion dollars annually, probably three times that. Fraud in science is not rare, and it's not limited to fringe players. The most respected researchers and institutions have been caught with faked data. Even Francis Collins, the head of NIH's Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn."

"The ultimate lesson is that science isn't special - at lest not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It's no longer a calling, it's a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren't saints, they're human beings, and they do what human beings do - lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That's human nature. It isn't going to change."

I do wonder what Crichton may have said had he lived to see Climate-gate and the other tumble of climate related scandals in the last year.

I don't agree with his view of 'human nature', if indeed that is his view being presented in the fictional article. This presented view however puts a lot of the alarmists on the spot. A great many of them tend to align with the misanthropic, big state strain of leftism, complete with suspicion of "big Pharma" etc. Many of them would probably have nodded sagely in agreement with the last two paragraphs of the quoted section. Their misanthropic views of "human nature" confirmed by such incidents, especially where substantial amounts of money are concerned, needing the strong hand of the state on people's shoulders to ensure proper behaviour. These beliefs hang together quite consistently.

However if pharmacology and biomedical science was replaced by "climate science", with its tens of billions of dollars in funding plus the high-profile nature of its findings, how would they compromise such cognitive dissonance given that they give "climate science" a knee-jerk clean pass?

Religious fervour of course.

An appeal to reason

2010-05-05T22:09:00.003Z

Any of you who have read some of my older posts will know that I'm a fan of thought provoking science-fiction. I find a lot of the narratives contain some very important and topical truths. So I'll communicate my message in this blog via means of two clips from an old favourite, Babylon 5.

Here is the choice you are actually being presented with tomorrow, between the "main" parties:

And what can be done about this? Vote with your heart. Vote for the party who really does, most reflect your values. Most of all - vote for anyone but the 'big three'. We have a chance to give the three heads of the single state party an absolute kicking tomorrow. Tomorrow might be the last chance we have before condemning this country to a permanent and very ungraceful fall:

And the violence spoken of in the video may well come to pass if Labour are pushed over the top tomorrow by their ward structure and a few thousand of their fraudulent postal votes.

If that happens, we are officially living under a tyranny.

Clegg just confirmed he is more of the same....

2010-05-04T16:57:00.004Z

As I've argued before, having had many interactions with Clegg over the last few years, he is - quite simply - more of the same. Despite the many evangelical supporters of the Illiberal Undemocrats' idolised view of him, he's far from a straight talker and is in fact a very slippery customer indeed.

Clegg has just backtracked on one of the key promises of his campaign - the one promise I think which has won him so many undecided votes: That in the event of a coalition government, where the Illiberal Undemocrats would be the kingmakers, Clegg would demand a change to a proportional representation system.

He spoke to the Financial Times yesterday and said this:

“I’ve never talked about preconditions. What I’ve said is it’s unavoidable. Of course it’s a vital element to the renewal of politics that we need in broad terms. That’s all I’ve said.”

So there you have it in black and white folks. Pure, unadulterated and all too typical politician double-speak. I wonder how many of the new supporters coming to the fold over the PR issue will have the chance to hear about this before Thursday? Probably very few.

A key concept in information and communications theory is that the meaning of the message is what is received. Clegg knew full well what people thought he was standing for with regards to this issue, unless he and his team are all deaf, dumb and blind. There is simply no excuse for this deception.

Our audit of the IPCC: Torpedoed again.

2010-04-18T13:37:00.006Z

With what is now becoming a horribly frustrating irony, the denial that anything is remotely wrong in alarmist circles is now nothing short of astonishing, not to mention frightening.

This week, Canadian sceptic, Donna Laframboise of noconsensus.org released our Audit, for which I was one of the auditors, of the IPCC's supposed gold standard peer review references in their 2007 report.

If you're short on time, the press release is here, which gives the main points. 21 of the chapters provide less than 60% peer-reviewed references, despite the continual claims by Rajenda Pachuri that their work uses only peer reviewed work.

The work we did got front-paged on climate depot and Watts Up With That but - unsurprisingly - didn't make it much further beyond the sceptical blogosphere. It is however further hard evidence of the IPCC's, and in particular its chairman's mendacity and yes you can check the raw data for yourself and see the methods used to gather it.

Back to the future

In the course of this investigation, one of the auditors noticed something remarkable that really deserves much wider acknowledgement: "While doing the Audits assigned to me (and skimming each of the above 44 documents while standardizing the formatting), a number of questions and quite a few anomalies jumped out at me – not the least of which were several references to articles and other material with a publication date of “2007“. I thought this rather odd, in view of the fact that the publication deadline for inclusion of material in the 4th Assessment Report was December, 2005 (or sometime in February 2006 at the very latest.)"

Just a few typos right? Wrong:

"Together, team IPCC succeeded in taking a combined total of 354 leaps back to the future.
This astounding number raises far more questions than it answers."

The most obvious conclusion is that the IPCC included 354 references outside the review process, and presumably in the final editorial stage of the document.

Meanwhile....

Incredibly, now their manifesto has been released it appears that the Greens have managed to piss off even Sunny Hundal and his merry band with their "anti-science" (their words) approach: "In short, while The Greens mean well, we found that their science policies in many areas were a disaster" - yes you read that right. Furthermore: "The truth isn’t democratic, and the whole structure of the party works against the idea of evidence-based policy." - welcome to the world of Post Normal Science guys - it is has become the Green's forte.

The fact that this is on Liberal Conspiracy of all places, is off the scale. Sadly, reading through to the linked Guardian article, it is clear that they i) haven't considered the possibility that if the Greens have such a shoddy understanding of science generally whether this might also apply to Climate Science and ii) still present climate scepticism ("denialism" - oh yea gods, the irony!) as fundamentally irrational without having yet - to my knowledge - debunked any of the massive holes ripped in the Alarmist case.

It is, in fact, now so laughably straightforward to debunk that I challenge any alarmist out there to make their case to me. The brain of the enormous Tyrannasaurus is dead yet the body still stomps around causing untold damage.....

.....speaking of which - despite all of the alarmist hysteria, it appears a single volcano has single handedly done more damage to the U.K. in a few days than what we are told "global warming" will do to the country over the course of the next century.

The economy of the Digital Economy Bill

2010-04-09T13:51:00.013Z

'Economy' in the title here is meant in the sense of 'making savings' - for that is exactly what our wonderful Lords and Masters have done in following appropriate procedures for consideration of this legislation. For, almost as awful as the legislation itself is the contempt our politicians have shown us in the way they pushed it through.

The Digital Economy Bill, now Digital Economy Act is shortly to become law. Whilst some of the worst draconian provisions have been removed or amended, many still remain. And like so much government legislation, contains a number of 'reasonable' (as far as any fresh legislation can be said to be so) provisions, along with a number of extremely dangerous clauses that never would have passed muster if proposed alone.

Much has been written already on the issues with the Bill. The long and the short of it is that it hands the government an enormous amount of power with regards to shutting off people's internet access and blocking websites that are accused of "copyright infringement", all on the basis of a bare minimum of evidence. It has 'bad legislation', 'law of unintended consequences' and 'guaranteed abuse' written through it like a stick of seaside rock.

For what I consider to be a highly optimistic (and unlikely to my mind) account of what the Act will now mean read the Register's article here. For a more realistic and wide ranging analysis, try this telegraph blog.

Their contempt for us is total

What really struck me about this legislation however, is in spite of the valiant efforts of organisations like ORG, is how it demonstrated just how much contempt the political class hold us in. This is possibly the most important and controversial piece of legislation under the aegis of this government since the Lisbon Treaty was ratified.

Here was parliament for the second reading of the bill:

And here was parliament for the third reading of the bill:

Notice a problem? That's right - most of our so-called "representatives" are missing. In the second reading, no more than 50 MPs were present. So nearly a whopping 600 could not be bothered to show up. The third reading, when the vote was taken, was not much better and also demonstrated one of those MP behaviours that makes me want to smash their teeth out with a hammer - a handful of dedicated politicians actually debate the bill, then when it comes time to the vote the numbers swell to approximately 200 so the MPs can vote according to whatever the whip tells them. Given the severity of this legislation this is absolutely unforgivable.

In any case, if you want to check to see if your MP was there, pop by the public whip. If they did not even turn up, perhaps when they are campaigning for your vote you might want to ask them why the fuck they weren't there and why anyone should vote for them if they can't even be bothered to do their job and turn up to debate and vote.

You'll note that the CHAMPION, nay the LION of civil liberties, Nick Clegg was absent. I checked his whereabouts and according to his itinerary he was in Westminster that day for Prime Minister's Questions. Why he couldn't stick around for the evening debate and vote I'd really like to know - I guess the Vote-grubbing tourbus and its groupies was too much to resist. I'll be pursuing this one for sure and have already written to him, though I think the best explosion can wait until I can catch him in public again. Here are the details of my last encounter with the Cleggover.

Miserable enough yet? There's more!

If you're ready to beat your head on the desk until unconscious, read this article. You'll see there that our "Digital Tsar" - 'Minister for Digital Britain' and chief cheerleader for the Digital Economy Bill, Stephen Timms writes the most colossally embarrassing drivel for someone in his position. The fact he obviously has NO CLUE what Internet Protocol (IP) is should be grave cause for concern for our entire political establishment and everyone that suffers under its yoke.

On the bright side.

There is an upside - I thought this comment over at boingboing was particularly apropos and funny, maybe even practical:

"This is great news, it will bring about a new era of lols.

I offer a reward of 1 million internets to the person or group who manages to disconnect a member of Parliament or recording industry executive for an alleged copyright infringement."

And another:

"No effort must be spared in getting MPs and their families banned from the internet with only accusations, no proof..."

Particularly impressive is the official position of TalkTalk, who have publicly stated that the company will resist the Act on behalf of its customers:

our pledges to our customers:

* Unless we are served with a court order we will never surrender a customer’s details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
* If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

I can only hope their bravery will gain them lots of custom and inspire others to resist this, truly, the most awful and corrupt of all parliaments.

Freemen on the land - stand!

2010-03-21T12:37:00.003Z

This is quite amazing - see UKWebSpider for the full story. And of course it goes without saying - you won't hear about this on the BBC. I've not been sure what to make of the Freemen movement, however I have great admiration for those brave enough to take up the challenge. These videos are important for showing that, in fact, becoming a Freeman on the Land is significant and does appear to send a stab of fear into the establishment:

A Call to Arms - Dear IPCC: THIS is peer review

2010-03-13T12:29:00.005Z

Donna Laframboise of Noconsensus.org has issued a call for help in auditing the IPCC report. Many of the recent revelations of incredible claims made on the basis of tenuous literature came from analysis of just two random chapters. The finding was that in one only 58% of the citations were from peer reviewed literature and in the other - even worse - only 25%.

The IPCC is constantly held up as the gold-standard of endlessly peer-reviewed literature. So far this looks highly suspect, but we need more information to judge the 2007 IPCC report as a whole. So Donna has launched a crowdsourcing project, asking volunteers to work through the references in individual chapters to determine what is peer-reviewed, and what is in the 'grey literature'. Her chosen method, unlike that of many supposed climate scientists, is exemplary. Each chapter will be reviewed by three separate individuals and their findings collated - if the numbers are close, then the figures most favourable to the IPCC will be used. Any large disagreements will result in a second review by other people.

This will obviously require quite a few people, so please contact Donna (email address given further down in the text) if you are interested. Ideally she would like reviewers to be as publicly identifiable as possible, so will be asking people to provide their real identity if they feel comfortable with this (though, as far as I'm aware, this is not mandatory, especially as some at academic/research institutions may have to tread carefully).

Met Office review: Climate change Human link evidence 'stronger'? Uhh.... NO

2010-03-07T13:10:00.059Z

This is the angriest I have been for a while on the issue of supposed Catastrophic Anthropgenic Global Warming. The Met Office recently issued a new "review" of papers produced since the IPCC 2007 report. The usual alarmist suspects in our - increasingly surreal - mainstream media jumped on it immediately with spin completely disproportionate with the actual contents of the report. The reporting in the Independent contains outright lies, with the Guardian and BBC including a substantial dose of exaggeration. The Times offers the most neutral summary I've seen, though is let down badly by the headline - which, of course, is what will stick.

To give the BBC credit it looks like their reporter actually spoke to the lead author, Peter Stott. What is clear from all of the mainstream reports I have seen however is that none of the reporters have actually read the report themselves. I'm becoming sick to the back teeth of this "churnalism". And I find myself asking why it is interested individuals like us bloggers who take the time to actually carry out the "investigative" part of "investigative journalism" on the part of these lazy hacks.

Both the Independent and the Guardian, describe this as a "powerful riposte" and a "fightback" respectively against sceptics, despite the BBC reporting that "Dr Stott denies that the study has been published as part of a fight back by the climate research community." The Guardian, bless 'em, talk about the "latest battle" in the "climate change fightback". Don't let your bias show there chaps, will you? When did scientific discussion become like a pay-per-view wrestlemania match? Oh - that's right - when the likes of the Guardian infantilised the whole thing.

Pay per view

On that note - some vital statistics on this "review". The first one being that the paper is not publicly accessible. Probably one of the reasons our cast of lazy churnalists haven't read it. It costs $35 to gain 24 hours access pay-per-view for the article. Seriously. This is despite the fact that the Met Office is a massively expensive publicly funded institution. And despite the fact that Stott is quoted as saying: "I just hope people look at the evidence of how the climate is changing in such a systematic way. I hope they make up their minds on the scientific evidence." Sure Peter - "evidence" that Joe Public has to pay $35 for 24 hours access to. The only way to get it "free" is to access it via a University network, but even then that is only the case if your institution is subscribed to this journal. And it means the paper will not get the bredth of critical attention it really needs. Most people will rely on the mainstream's "analysis".

Second, and more importantly, is the neutrality of this "review". It covers 110 papers published since the IPCC-2007 report (it is *not*, as the Independent claims, an "update" on the IPCC report). A number of questions have been raised regarding how the 110 papers were selected (by people posting in the comments section to the "news" articles of course - not the journalists, silly!). Well - here's Guardian/BBC style neutrality for you: Out of the 110 citations, 24 are papers by Stott (first, or second author) and a further 22 are by other authors of the "review". So with 46 citations, 41% of the papers in this supposedly independent "review" are self citations.

Third, the reporting on this "review" give the impression of an extensive, comprehensive piece. It is not. The entire paper is a 20 page puff piece in 12-point font and lots of diagrams, and out of those 20 pages, 4.5 are the list of references.

And - a final statistic for you - the word "robust", or "robustly" is used eight times in the text.

Recycling old crap. (But if its behind a paywall, who notices?)

So, what is the primary basis of the paper? The paper claims to be able to "detect" climate change and "attribute" it appropriately. This is where the "human fingerprint" idea comes in. The paper's authors claim they can show a clear human influence.

So how do they go about this. First they have to engage in "detection" of a problem. How do they do this?

Wait for it -

They use the HadCRUT temperature dataset, complete with Michael Mann's hockey stick as their primary example of how to detect a human fingerprint.

Someone kill me please.

In case you're new to this controversy - here is John Daly's original critique of Mann's Hockey Stick, and here is Bishop Hill's analysis. Note that *both* of these critiques were prior to Climategate. The Register's Interview with Bishop Hill makes for slightly easier reading.Chris Booker links it all together - post climate-gate - here.

If after reading the above, you can't see why any subsequent research, or *any* assertion for that matter, based on the HadCRUT data set and, in particular, Michael Mann's hockey stick contribution, is automatically worthless then I can't help you and you best stop reading - go off and enjoy whatever catastrophic toss-fantasy the alarmists have in store for you.

Annoyed? It gets better. Stott et al. place the HadCRUT data over a set of 'control' data. Where does the 'control' data (which shows no significant variation before 1850 and after 2000) come from? It is: "A 'control' simulation of a couple ocean-atmosphere climate model over many centuries, with no changes in the external drivers of climate such as increases in greenhouse gas concentrations or in solar output, does not exhibit the sustained rise in temperatures seen in the observational data."

- Of course it doesn't you dimwit!

The built in assumption is that there are no significant variances in the climate prior to 1850, so they can use a computer simulation to fill in for actual data! (Andthe few sources of real data we have for earlier periods are extremely problematic for the alarmists) One of the key parts of the scandal surrounding the HadCRUT data, and the "hockey stick", was its use of "proxies" such as tree-ring data, for previous temperature records. Only, the tree-ring data diverged from observed records in this century, so Michael Mann fraudulently "fudged" the data to make it fit the "hockey team" bias.

There is definitely a Mann-made "fingerprint" here. His dirty paws are all over the data. This presentation of "research" is one of the most shockingly disingenuous things I've seen since "climategate" itself: i) Stott et al. Assume no significant variation in climate outside their chosen window (roughly 1850-2000) so think it is OK to replace what little data we do have for the prior period with a "model" of no variation and ii) during the chosen window, humans began expelling CO2 into the atmosphere from industrial activities. The HadCRUT data (and other land based temperature data sets) showed a modest increase in temperatures in this period. However - not only are all the land based data sets now suspect (especially HadCRUT), but Mann forced his figures to fit with the increases in human CO2 contributions.

Stott goes onto establish statistical significance at the 5% level for warming in the 50 year period 1959-2008. Of course this will seem significant - the bald assertion is that the correlation between CO2 output and temperature can be clearly observed when compared to the "control simulation", because no such rises are present in the control.

This isn't science. It is complete rubbish.

A litany of caveats and qualifications

The paper goes on to cover various environmental phenomena and the supposed "detectable" human fingerprint. The process for obtaining this fingerprint is rarely made clear with the other environmental indicators the "review" subsequently covers - the gold standard for the initial "detection" phase is apparently the above completely rubbish HadCRUT analysis.

What is apparent from beginning to end though is that it is chock-full of caveats and qualifications. Many of them are very telling, because Stott et al. have effectively taken on a number of the points sceptics have made over the years. The MSM reporting missed this because none of them read the damn paper!

I'll go through a sample below:

"decade long trends with little warming or cooling are to be expected under a sustained long-term warming trend".

Uh huh. Might this mean that sceptics have been correct all this time that there are other factors than CO2, (including other Anthropogenic influences and natural influences) that can significantly affect the climate to an extent comparable with CO2?

You bet:

"Further refinement of our understanding of the causes of decadal variability would benefit from tracking the changes of energy within the climate system and better understanding of the role of natural and human-induced external drivers of climate, including, for example, the effects of changing solar activity." [Emphasis mine]

^ Stott et al. Would be called "deniers" in some circles for saying such a thing.

Now, the "standard approach" Stott gives for identifying a "fingerprint" "is to use a climate model to determine the expected response to a particular forcing....Once the fingerprints have been derived, an analysis is carried out to determine if there is a significant manifestation of these fingerprints in the observations" So in other words, just as with the "great" example Stott gives above of "detection analysis" (HadCrut), it all rests on assumption first, observation second. This seems like more of that fuzzy science where an assumption about how things should work trumps actual observational data from which you *then* are supposed to form a theory.

Stott says later "The fingerprints...are estimated from the average of a finite number of simulations [Ed: hah!] with identical forcings but different initial conditions (typically 3 or 4 for most analyses), and are contaminated by internal variability (which reduces as more ensemble members are averaged)". So the "fingerprints" are derived from assumption-laden simulations. He at this point again invokes the HadCrut "detection" above as the basis for a sound way to estimate internal variability. So one assumption laden data-set of questionable integrity is used as the base line for the further-assumption laden simulation of "fingerprints". Is this crap squared?

More caveats and qualifications:

"The assumption of linearity is found to hold for some combinations of forced changes, particularly the direct effects of sulfate aerosols and greenhouses, although there is evidence that additivity does not hold so well for some other combinations, including greenhouse gases in combination with the indirect effects of earosols and greenhouse gases with solar forcing;"

"...the response to non-greenhouse gas anthropogenic factors is under-estimated"

So other factors *are* significant?

"it is appropriate to conclude that significant observed changes are attributable to human influence."

Take note here. "Human influence". Not just CO2.

Aerosols are a significant factor:

"it is very likely that aerosol cooling is suppressing a major portion of current greenhouse warming".

In true assumption-laden form though, the conclusion naturally is "As a result, additional warming is implied if aerosol pollution is removed from the atmosphere in future." (In other words - one of the classic alarmist hedges - our observed data does not provide a linear relationship between CO2 and temperature, so we'll hide the energy in another factor).

Models at sub-global scales.

Stott et al go on to analyse climate data at more local levels - "going down to the scales of climate model grid boxes or of order 500km". Grid boxes. Oh goody.

"The first systematic investigation of conteinental scales to use the optimal detection regression approach described above was by Stott". By the author of the very paper we are reading? Fantastic. And this wonderful new "optimal detection regression approach" is applying statistical multivariate regression on the basis of the assumption-laden "fingerprint" models that use the assumption laden HadCRUT "detection" model as a control for natural variability. For the non-statistically au fait, "regression" is a statistical technique that allows you to predict trends over time, varying some variables and holding others constant to see what the results might be. The entire practice, while an interesting exercise, is heavily dependent on initial assumptions. In other words, it doesn't produce what I regard as "data" - it just shows you were your assumptions might take you with "real" data (assuming any real inputs are provided - it looks in many cases in the Stott et al. cited research that this itself is a tenuous assumption). A good example of this is given later: "When signals were regressed individually against the observations, an anthropogenic signal was detected in each of 14 regions except for 1, central North America, although the results were more uncertain when anthropogenic and natural signals were considered together." Read: regression + assumptions + real observed data = some results contrary to assumed expectations when extrapolated into projected trends.

Stott goes on (about his own research) "This study found a detectable change over the 20th century in decadal mean temperatures over each of the six populated continental areas...and furthermore found that these changes could only be reproduced with the inclusion of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions."

Really? No mention of Urban Heat Island effect in the data sets then? You know - that effect that it's possible for a 12 year old kid to detect, using an excel spreadsheet?

More uncertainty when we start looking at regional variations:

"Relevant model simulations considering the different forcing factors separately are often not available, so the attribution to different forcings is limited to a consistency analysis rather than a full attribution analysis in which all plausible forcing factors are considered. For example, increases in irrigation in California have been important for regional temperature trends, while land cover change can be important for regional temperature changes."

Another interesting point - a lot of the regression simulations only go up to 2000. With real data available for the last decade also, why did they not continue the "simulation" and match it against real data? Is it perhaps because they don't match?

"attribution at regional scales is limited at present by the relatively lower signal-to-noise ratios, the difficulties of separately attributing the effects of the wider range of possible forcing factors at these scales, and lmitations of models in capturing some characteristics of regional climate variability."

Right. Some question begging is occurring here. It is very similar to the "climate is not weather" conundrum. At what point do the separate "weather" data points morph into "climate". Similarly, the "global" data is made up of "local" data. Stott et al. seem to carry out regular hedges on the regional data, where it doesn't fit their preconceptions (even sometimes the "simulated" and "regressed" data FFS!). The fact is that as soon as they look at more local areas, they are forced to apply more (local) factors and thus end up with more complex models less likely to support their position. The 'global' models are more simplistic and so therefore more likely to be amenable to smoothing.

Another strange statement here:

"Human influence is estimated to have more than doubled the likelihood of positive warming trends in every region considered except central North America."

How interesting. Especially when you consider the 1934 problem.

On the hydrological (water) cycle

Yet more hedges, caveats and qualifications....

An anticipated consequence of these flux and transport changes is that wet regions should become wetter and dry regions drier. Many of these anticipated changes, reasoned from physical principles, have been observed and confirmed by climate model simulations."

Sorry, wait. How does a "simulation" confirm anything? And how on earth do Stott et al. compromise this bald statement with this research cited in National Geographic: "Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago." Uhhhh......

Precipitation:

"Mitchell et al. theorized that the latent heat of condensation in the troposphere is balanced by radiative cooling."

Carefull Peter, that sounds a bit "denialist" to me....

"Liepert and Previdi show that 20 years may not be sufficient to determine whether models and observations agree on the rainfall response to global warming."

Quite.

"Generally, however, detection and attribution of regional precipitation changes remains difficult because of low signal-to-noise ratios and poor observational coverage. To date there have been no detection and attribution studies of precipitation over oceans because the available satellite data sets... are short and not considered to be sufficiently reliable for this purpose."

This is one of the clearest expressions of doubt in the whole paper. So no alarmist fingerprint to be found in regional precipitation then. Which means global precipitation too, on the basis of the available evidence.

Runoff and Drought:

More doubts!

"Monitoring and understanding changes in runoff and drought is more difficult thatn for temperature and precipitation because soil moisture is poorly observed, and soil moisture and runoff changes are difficult to constrain from the residual difference between precipitation and evaporation, both of which are also relatively poorly observed.

Many factors can cause soil moisture and runoff changes, including changes in climate, land use, stream management, water withdrawal, and water use efficiency by plants in high CO2 environments."

Despite these expressed caveats, Stott then goes on to cite the Palmer Drought Severity Index, without further explanation or comment, claiming that increases in the index "has been attributed to anthropogenic influence".

A pretty funny couple of statements in the context of recent events (and alarmist claims regarding precipitation):
"In a warmer world, less winter precipitation falls as snow"

And

"There has been a reduction in the ratio of precipitation falling as snow in the Western US that cannot be explained by climate models including only the natural effects of solar and volcanic forcings and which has been attributed to anthropogenic forcings."

Right Peter. Whatever you say.

Arctic / Antarctic:

Stott refers to "dramatic sea ice retreat" and - guess what? - "Human influence on Arctic sea ice is detectable in an optimal detection analysis." Really? Where is the mention of the recent recovery?

This is hilarious. All the Antarctic gets is:

"In contrast, Antarctic sea ice has not significantly decreased."

Whoops! No further comment is given whatsoever as to why this might be the case.

Atmospheric circulation:

"anthropogenic circulation changes are poorly characterized"

OK - so we don't have a clue on any anthropogenic influences here then?

Well, Stott then cites himself (again): "were able to detect an anthropogenic response independently of the natural response and with an amplitutde consistent between model and observation." - so Peter, given your first comment, do we trust this research or not?

Oceanic changes:

"It has been estimated that over 80% of the excess heat built up in the climate system by anthropogenic forcing has accumulated in the global oceans."

This is a hedging assertion used by alarmists to explain where the energy goes when the observed pattern does not exhibit a proportional temperature increase with CO2.

So how much do Stott et al think they know about this?

"..the subsurface ocean has been sparsely observed in many regions, and sampling errors remain an issue when comparing observed and modeled timeseries of ocaen properties, with the choice of infilling method being potentially important in poorly sampled regions."

No shit sherlock. In other words, not much, and too many gaps in the data to enable them to fill the gaps with bullshit without anyone noticing.

Apparently we can attribute "...the short term cooling episodes to volcanic eruptions and the multidecadal warming to anthropogenic forcing." Right - so nature *does* have an in built cooling mechanism (which will presumably continue), and if Stott et al are thereby going to attribute the warming primarily to anthropogenic forcing (N.B. Note *again* this does not state CO2), then without it we would all be significantly colder?

And then we have the issue of salinity - this has caused a lot of confusion in people commenting on how the journalists have presented this. Interesting because Stott only gives a paragraph to the whole topic - here is what he says:

"It has been suggested that freshening at high latitudes is consitent with observed increases in precipitation at high latitudes although climate model studies suggest that Atlantic freshening could be associated with changes in northward advection associated with variability of the meridional overturning circulation.

An optimal detection analysis [Ed: LOL] of Atlantic salinity changes by Stott et al. [Ed: LOL again] detected a human influence on the observed increases in salinity at low latitudes but found that high-latitutde changes, including a recent reversal of the freshening observed previously, are consistent with internal variability."

So, despite the way the salinity issue in the "review" has been reported in the press, there is nothing significant here and a good deal of it is attributed to natural variation.

Extremes:

This is possibly the best section. The alarmists are continually banging on about extreme weather. But even Stott et al. couldn't fit their simulated data to the pattern.

He writes it off for hurricane activity for example:
"...the importance of the anthropogenic increase in sea surface temperature in the cyclogensis region for past and future changes in hurrican activity is still poorly understood."

And his conclusion is pretty clear:
"In conclusion, while there has been progress since AR4, there are still many gaps in our understanding of changes in extremes and in our ability to attribute observed changes to particular causes."

Sorry alarmists - no evidence here for your extreme events fantasies.

The conclusion:

Is a little bizarre given the actual content of the paper - and appears to have been what has grabbed the headline writers attention:

"The wealth of attribution studies reviewed [Ed: including all 46 of our self-citations] in this article shows that there is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change id dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic factors."

Notice what Stott has done here. Taken as a whole, his review has shown, in fact that both natural, and non-CO2 anthropogenic factors have a significant role to play in the climate. In many ways, he has actually presented quite a sceptical position in some areas in that he has shown (his "optimal detection analyses" notwithstanding) that climate is being driven by a range of factors, of which human contributed CO2 is only one. Remember the thrust of the paper is anthropogenic influences NOT CO2.

My own conclusion is that, not only does the "review" completely fail to support the claims being made for it by the quisling useless media hacks, where it does make a case at all, it is one for much more doubt over climate issues, and for the inclusion of a great many factors, including non-CO2 anthropogenic factors. Notice how the BBC wrote their title: "Climate change human link evidence 'stronger'" - many people will immediately read that as - 'case for human CO2 forced catastrophic climate change stronger'. Which isn't what the review shows - and that's assuming you trust the methods used by Stott et al. Which I don't at all. The combination of extensive self-citation, with an extremely dubious statistical modelling method (the "optimal detection analysis") that often seems to skip real data simply looks like utter utter crap to me.

If we had a media deserving of the name we'd all know this.

Appeal for Nick Hogan

2010-03-03T14:45:00.030Z

First of all, apologies to everyone subscribed to lots of other blogs discussing this who have already seen the appeal cross-posted a dozen times.

I decided I should add a blog entry on it myself as the donations to Nick's funds seem to be slowing down after the initial rush to six grand in its first two days. We only need to make it to 10 and he - in theory - walks free. If one more person donates as a result of seeing this blog, its worth writing it.

For those not already familiar with this story, a quick précis from Old Holborn:

Nick was actually jailed for non-payment of the fine originally imposed for a 'mass smoke-in' on the day the ban came into force in 2007 in his pub, the 'Swan and Barristers' in Bolton. He no longer has that pub. He was fined again when council inspectors walked into his present pub and discovered a group of customers smoking - Nick wasn't even on the premises.

There is more to it. What we are seeing here is effectively a debtors' jail. Nick did not pay the court costs. He couldn't. He was bankrupt. Instead of coming to an arrangement to pay the money, the state has opted to jail him, presumably as an example to anyone else who dares make a stand against the completely illiberal anti-smoking law. For this is the core of the issue - Nick refused to be a deputised agent of the state in order to harass its citizens into complying. And on his private property too. And policing an act that is - in and of itself - not illegal (smoking). He is being jailed for refusing to be an unpaid policeman for a law that is ignored in many parts (such as the EU and UK parliaments). The menace behind all of this might be too subtle to comprehend immediately. Leg-Iron explains it beautifully:

Regarding the shop-keeper who refused to put up 'no-smoking' signs:

"You will be prosecuted for not putting up signs to tell people to stop doing something nobody has ever done. As that shopkeeper has. Not for smoking. Not even for allowing others to smoke. For not putting up 'Thou Shalt Not' signs in a place where they were totally superfluous."

The end result of the government's Righteous crusade is:

"Smokers, drinkers, fat people, salty people, drivers, ethnic divisions, religious divisions, a fragmented society is easy to control simply by pitting one fragment against another. The Righteous don't care about any of those fragments."

And the point of helping to free Nick is:

"A very important point. That we have noticed the tyranny of the law and that we are angered by it. That we are not going to sit back and just take it any more."

The reason we've had trial by jury for hundreds of years (until this year), was amongst other things, to enable the people to acquit defendants who were being charged on the basis of laws that most people regarded as unjust. To prevent the state from abusing the law. Yet here it is multiplying not only ridiculous, but in many cases, victimless, crimes but also forcing the deputising of citizens in their enforcement:

Thanks to Rogerborg (@ Old Holborn's comments) - note the deputising clause in the Health Act 2006 itself:

"(2) Any person who without reasonable cause fails to give to an authorised officer of an enforcement authority, acting in the exercise of his functions under or by virtue of this Chapter, any facilities, assistance or information which the authorised officer reasonably requires of him for the performance of those functions commits an offence."

Now, to be clear here on my own position. I'm a non-smoker and always have been. In one way the smoking ban has actually benefited me. As regular readers will know I have worked in nightclubs for some time. And I've also played in them as often as I've worked. I dance a lot when I go out - and some nights at work its one punch up after another. Prior to the smoking ban, if I'd exerted myself for an extended period of time inside the club I'd often have a heavy cough for a few hours afterwards and bad throat. This wasn't, to be fair, just down to tobacco smoke - there are plenty other things to inhale deeply in nightclubs such as dry ice. Its a pleasure to no longer have to put up with that. I also like the fact that I, and the women I end up sleeping with, tend to smell much fresher (though not always, hah).

That's as far as it goes though. Because in spite of this, not insignificant, difference to my lifestyle, I can recognise an illiberal piece of shit when I see it. I said from the beginning that venues should have been given the choice, or tax incentives to have smoke free areas, keeping at least one room available for smokers. As it stands - as others have pointed out - a venue could not be set up staffed and patronised exclusively by smokers (and of course non-smokers who weren't complete wusses). And I said this as someone who stood to benefit with the ban coming into force. I recognise this authoritarian, righteous unholy monster, in whatever form it takes; and one of those forms has definitely been the smoking ban and associated villification of smokers.

How to help

Nick Hogan wasn't just standing up for smokers. He was standing up for all of us. If you want to help - and every contribution really does help - you can donate (and get the latest news) from Old Holborn's place. Look for the paypal section in the top right. Alternatively you can send a cheque:

"We have another safe avenue for donations for all those of you who would rather send a cheque. If so, your Cheques for the Nick Hogan fund can be made payable to Freedom to Choose (Scotland).
They will be retained in the Freedom to Choose (Scotland) account until further instructions are available. The address is Freedom to Choose (Scotland), c/o The Dalmeny Bar, 297 Leith Walk, Edinburgh EH6 8SA.
For total transparency I will update the 'donations sent' on a daily basis as soon as the Treasurer informs me of such.
This now gives the Nick Hogan fund twice the opportunity to reach our target folks."

There is also an event planned to carry out a 'national day of mourning for British justice' on Saturday 13th March, outside the prison where Nick is currently being held. Facebook group here

Finally, if you wish to write to Nick to give him support, the address of the prison is:

Nick Hogan DN5431
HMP & YOI Forest Bank
Agecroft Road
Pendlebury
Manchester
M27 8FB

Other thoughts.

There has been so much blogged on this topic in the last few days, I wanted to share some of the gems I'd come across myself. Apologies for any attributions that are not clear - many of them were in the comments sections of various blogs:

Assegai mike: "we smokers are the lightning rod for all civil liberties abusers"

Dick Puddlecote: "The reason tobacco companies stay distant to such things as this is that their intervention is classed along with kiddie-fiddling by the righteous. Once they put their hand in their pocket, the whole thing would be reclassified as a stunt by murderers. And there are plenty holier-than-thou morons in the UK who would believe it."

Rogerborg again: "He went to court to try to re-negotiate a payment schedule, now that he's bankrupt. The beaks would have none of it - the State is always a super-creditor - and gaoled him for the inability to pay, an inability that's due to their actions. Dickensian doesn't even begin to describe it."

Old Holborn: "no one has consented to the State making Nick Hogan a convicted criminal for offering his customers a choice within his own property instead of reporting them to the Police, as all publicans are now required to do by law."

Mort: "ok let me get this right?
he got fined for not upholding the law/statute (as defined by numpties and lobbyists), he was not paid to provide the state with a service which they invoked, he was fined for not invoking the state clause and therefore he chose not to pay the unlawful fine/tax because in effect it is unlawful? they revoked his right to earn income in his chosen career/profession/trade or skill..?"

Dick Puddlecote again, citing Huxley:
"No offence is as heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual – and after all, what is an individual? We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

and then, in contrast, citing H.L. Mencken:

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

Anonymous over at Leg-Iron's place:
"Almost all real law was created a long time ago, most of it is common law.
Much of our law is now ‘derivative’ law, which, like its financial equivalent, is not real. Much of it also contravenes our constitutional law. Second order offences such as failing to stop someone else doing something have no place in free society."

On the subject of the other brave citizen tackling these laws, detailed over at the Velvet Glove:
"The smoking ban is the only law which requires millions of signs to be prominently displayed on private property. Shops are not compelled to put signs up saying 'No assaults permitted' or 'No drug use permitted'. Mandatory 'No Smoking' signs should never have been part of deal."

And let us, last of all, never forget these words spoken in Croydon:

"Dermot Lineham, the enforcement officers co-ordinator at Conservative-controlled Croydon Council wrote he was "emphatic" that his officers should not have to approach teenage yobs in an email he sent out last Wednesday.

Instead, officers should 'focus our activities on adults who are less likely to attack us and more likely to pay fixed penalty notices'."

(UPDATED) Argentina and Britain: the enormous EUlephant in the room...

2010-02-23T19:01:00.012Z

(+++ UPDATED 05/03/10 +++ - some additional points added to the end of the blog in response to some of the comments made here and at Leg-Iron's place)

The continuing hostile words between Argentina and the U.K. regarding the Falklands Islands is missing a crucial component. Other Latin American leaders are jumping on the bandwagon to criticise Britain and even rattle the sabres. And a number of commentators here in Old Blighty have noticed that, in their current state, the British armed forces could not carry out a repeat of the 1982 Task Force. One commentator over at Guido's place also pointed out that while we are knee-deep in bullshit commitments in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, liberties may be taken with us regarding genuine territorial concerns such as the Falklands.

The Argentine foreign minister is quoted as saying recently that "We will do everything necessary to defend and preserve our rights." Some people are wrting this off as toy-town smackdown talk of no substance. Let us hope so. Because this was similar to the position the Falklands and Britain were in all those years ago - both taken completely by surprise; even if now the country is not under the fist of a dictator general. And it is not as if provactive actions have not already begun. (And it doesn't help that the Guardian appear to be cheering them on: "Before doing anything silly, Kirchner's Argentina might be best advised to wait and see whether there is anything worth fighting over." and then there's the strapline to the article "Sabre-rattling over Malvinas oil" (note the name 'Malvinas', not 'Falklands')).

Now this could all be a storm in a teacup. We'll see what happens if and when significant recoverable oil deposits are found...

All in all, it could spell serious trouble for Britain if it does result in outright aggression given the military's current status and capabilities. Or not:

...What isn't being discussed is the enormous elephant sitting silently between Argentina on one side and Britain and the Falklands on the other. That is the EU and the commitments, now EU law, as ensrhined in the Lisbon Treaty amendments. Of interest in particular is Article 42, Section 7 of the Lisbon amended Maastricht treaty. It states:

"If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power".

And the note in the document accompanying this - in case you weren't already clear on what it meant - states: "Mutual assistance clause for ALL member states in case of an armed aggression."

Having read carefully through all of the consolidated treaties, (Part 2 (Part 1 is here) of my analysis is still in progress - the amendments to the Rome/Amsterdam treaty are far more numerous to those to Maastricht, its going to be a monster piece), what is striking about these sections is the clarity of the language. There are so many places in the treaties where matters are left - I believe intentionally - vague, so as to be amenable to whatever sort of spin the EU wishes to put on them at the time, it is noticable when the treaty suddenly expresses things in crystal clear clarity.

If you read all of the complementary sections (articles 34 up to 42 regarding security issues, and for extra clarity, Articles 24 onwards regarding foreign policy) you will see just how specific the clauses are. When I initially read them (as you can see from my reaction in my earlier analysis), it was from the point of view of the U.K. having to do all of the heavy lifting with regards to a conflict with which - prior to the rise of the EU's power - it would have had no interest in pursuing. Now the tables are turned.

My major point here is that if Argentina attacks, this single issue will call the EU's bluff - and at a potentially far more significant level than current concerns over the status of the Euro.

So who is going to tell the Irish or the French that in signing Lisbon, they might now be shortly committed to sending troops to South America to defend British territory?

UPDATE:
In response to some of the comments - there is more to this issue:

Bear in mind the substantive point is that this is likely to become the make - or break - point for the Lisbon treaty and the EU for Britain.

A number of good points have been raised as to how the EU may wriggle out of its support (the most likely I think, the suggestion that they will simply point to the fact that the Falklands is a protectorate of the UK).

It does not need to come to a military confrontation for the point to be forced however.

Under Lisbon, the seats on the UN security council (UK and France) are now supposed to work in unison under one EU position (i.e. our very own one-and-only Cathy Ashton). Argentina are pushing for a UN resolution on the issue.

If the UK and France don't veto in Unison then this is almost as powerful a damning indictment as the EU failing to assist the UK in the event of an attack. There's also the minor matter that Austria also currently sits as one of the non-permanent members of the UN security council. We should watch how they vote on any resolution also.

Read through Articles 24 to 34 in the Lisbon amended Maastricht treaty - the stance on a unified Foreign Policy is made very clear. And despite the idiocy of the Argentine government and stupidity of Team Obama, this is a very clear cut issue. Clinton has acted as if Argentina has a case. It does not.

A final point - on the issue of NATO not leaping to the UK's defence, don't forget that NATO is a U.S. dominated institution. A lot of people involved in the EU project dearly want to find something that would give the EU 'big-hitter' status. Backing the UK on this would achieve both this goal and that of bringing the UK onside for continued EU expansion. Also remember the EU response was quite belligerent with regard to recent tensions between Russia and Estonia, not to mention the rhetoric flying around with regards to Georgia (and proposed EU membership of the latter)...

RIP Joe Stack.....

2010-02-18T20:42:00.004Z

Hat Tip to Matt Davies for this.

This has quite upset me. Like Matt I don't agree with some of his conclusions or his final actions. But ye gods I can feel that frustration; like the society you find yourself in was one perpetually remarketed Kafka novel. Joe Stack appears to have been the person responsible for crashing a light aircraft into a Tax office in Texas.

Some people have expressed concern that what appears to be his suicide note, published on his website, might go offline (for legitimate, or nefarious reasons), so here it is repeated in full, below the picture. RIP Joe:

"If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

Â· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.

Â· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.

Â· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.

Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to XXXX XXXX, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, XXXX knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)"

The next step for climate sceptics....CONTINUE FIRING!!

2010-02-01T21:22:00.005Z

The back of the IPCC and with it the alarmist case for "global warming" has been broken.

This has yet to filter out into general awareness, however it seems the MSM (MainStream Media) is finally starting to swing behind the sceptic cases (for there are many, many issues with the "consensus", not all of which sceptics agree on - and indeed, as it should be). Currently the Daily Mail, The Express, The Telegraph and The Times are all sticking the boot in. Good. Its long overdue and thanks to climategate and the resulting flurry of activity from sceptics acting as good citizen-journalists and citizen-scientists the true extent of the IPCC, and their quisling supporters', deceit is being laid bare.

We barely missed what could possibly have been history's most colossal fraud perpetrated on the people of the planet, with attendant devastating consequences for freedom and prosperity. Yet the wounds already inflicted are grave. Most of what was good, remaining in the left, has been filleted and hollowed out by so many left wing groups jumping on the bandwagon and giving it up wholesale; I don't think they'll ever really be able to recover from this. Neither will all of the genuine environmentalists, whose very legitimate concerns about human impacts on the environment will now never be addressed or taken nearly as seriously as they should. Everyone will just remember the incredible Big Lie that almost was CO2 based anthropogenic global warming. Its a shame it morphed into a big left-right battle, but that was because, despite a mere handful of noble exceptions (Counterpunch, Spiked, for example), the left wing groups wanted it that way.

The list of consequences already endured could go on and on (the likelihood that the lights will start going out in Old Blighty by perhaps 2015 not the least among them....). But that wasn't the point of this post (though it will be of a later one).

Instead, I wanted to dedicate my very first effort at video editing to all the brave and noble people who have dared to challenge the "consensus" over the last few years - particularly those who began asking questions many years before I did.

I have found increasingly recently that scenes from an old sci-fi series, Babylon 5, have increasingly resonated with me in response to current events, and think I will be making some carefully edited videos later from the series to represent what is happening to us now.

So I cut a clip below that indicates what the climate sceptics should do next. The warship, and the crew aboard, in the clip represent the climate sceptics who were responsible for breaking through the enemy lines. They're going to continue taking hits from all angles while the beast dies (in the clip - significantly - these hits are coming from the Earth's "defence grid" which has been turned, by a thoroughly corrupt and authoritarian World government, on the population of the Earth itself). The captain (Sheridan) in charge of the warship states clearly what needs to be done next, despite continuing to soak up massive hits:

"CONTINUE FIRING!!!"

S.Yorks Police Farce - at it again - negiligent, abusive cowards

2009-12-19T14:08:00.012Z

Right. I've had it with South Yorkshire Police Farce. I've now witnessed dozens of cases, and know of many others anecdotally, where they have behaved in a completely negligent, bullying, cowardly, abusive - and quite possibly criminal - fashion. I've never seen a Police Farce like it. Its time to start making a record of their actions and this blog is as good a place to do it.

A bit of personal background just to clarify matters - I've worked as a nightclub doorman on and off for over a decade. Truth be told I haven't needed to do the job for years, what with jobs during the day ranging from IT consultant to researcher. I've kept my hand in though because I don't want to go soft and I see tough times ahead. It also confers a lot of social benefits, including having a much better intelligence network in the City than the police have. They could share it if we trusted eachother, but since the introduction of the complete farce and sinkhole of money that is the SIA (Security Industry Authority), relationships between doorstaff and the police in the city have moved rapidly from neutrality to complete distrust. The Police - apparently driven by targets madness - find doorstaff a particularly easy group to score points off and there's no better way to do this than use the threat of the idiot SIA. But that's another story.

This week they took the piss beyond belief. I don't like to litter too many of my blog posts with swearing, in this case however I have to use the expletives to express the rage and frustration at what is occurring - and is largely invisible to the general public.

Wednesday 16th Dec 2009 - Incident 1
Wednesday night they arrive at the club for one of their regular 'harassment rounds'. They said they have come to find drunk people in the club (!!). In they go, search through roughly 1100 people and manage to find one person who, they think, is "too drunk". They drag him out into the freezing weather. He's just wearing a shirt. He seems to sober up pretty rapidly and is compos mentis. He asks if he can go back in to find his friends and get his jacket and wallet (apparently in the care of his friends). On account of his distinctly non-paralytic state the club staff are more than happy to let him back in. The police refuse however. They send him on his way, in the freezing cold, without his friends, jacket or wallet. Presumably because they couldn't stand the possibility that he was actually in a relatively fit state and it was more important to save face than consider his well being.

But wait, there's more.....

There are six police officers stood intimidatingly outside the club. A call comes in over the emergency radio (given to all venues in the City) from another venue. Its kicking off and they need police assistance urgently. The CCTV centre tells them that "there are no units available". Oddly enough our lying eyes can see six "units" doing fuck all stood outside our venue. The member of staff in the box office who looks after the radio comes out to the front and demands that the police go to assist immediately. After a bit of grumbling they piss off.

Ten minutes later they are back, "looking for drunk people", Oh and holding the club responsible for what people half a mile a way are doing through being "too drunk". Meanwhile, calls are coming in again over the emergency radio from the same venue, more desperate this time, saying that the situation is escalating and they really really need the police there. The "units" outside our place stay put, busy "looking for drunk people".

Friday 18th Dec 2009 - Incident 2

The police turn up mob-handed again. Go in for another one of their tours looking for "drunk people". They come out of the club and announce to the staff that the club is "serving alcohol to drunk people". What the fucking fuck? Its a nightclub you stupid cunts. And those who know our venue know that its one of the safest places to be in town drunk or sober. (Meanwhile we have the Gangster's paradise around the corner that attracts gangs from all over the country who regularly attack eachother with champagne bottles, bring knives, guns, set fire to cars outside etc. But they get a clean bill of health from South Yorks Plod...).

Anyway, the "units" announce that they will return in half an hour and if we are still "serving alcohol to drunk people", they will close the venue down.

There aren't words to describe the seething anger at this point.

They turned up again later and planted themselves in a line a few meters away, directly opposite the main entrance to the club. Anyone would think that we had just had a riot at the club. The club's customers come out, as they always do, generally chilled out and happily drunk to be presented with intimidation from our local "units".

I spoke to the club management about it. Apparently the club is coming in for "special treatment". Why? Well the council has decided that the era of cheap alcohol must come to an end in all venues. Our venue doesn't agree and is still providing cheap vodka deals. So, in the absence of any vaguely fucking relevant laws, they decide to engage in harassment.

South Yorkshire Police Farce has form.

I wish these kinds of incidents were the exception rather than the norm with South Yorkshire Police. To my great disappointment they are not. Here's a small selection of other similar incidents recently:

- After talking to staff from other venues it appears that, often on the same nights, there are mysteriously "no units available" when an emergency call goes in. The emergency radio isn't used lightly - calling the police out on it can cause problems when the venue's license is up for review. A particularly low example was when one venue's doorstaff pulled all the customers back in and barred the doors because there was a gang outside brandishing a shotgun. An emergency call went out - apparently the police would not come unless the staff "were sure that it was a real firearm".

- Brett Blake was stabbed to death last year in a city venue. Here's what the news reports didn't mention: The police were already outside the venue in force when it was kicking off inside. They refused to go in. Multiple people were hurt with knife wounds, including staff. The venue in question only had two exits, easily covered. The police could have easily nabbed the people responsible literally red handed. One of the doorstaff who had been fighting to protect customers inside from at least one knife-wielding assailant came out, covered in blood. He demanded that the police go in. They refused. He called them "a bunch of useless bastards". They arrested him.

- About a year back I gave evidence in legal proceedings that directly contradicted the "evidence" provided by one of our wonderful local officers who was trying to climb the greasy pole by getting a club closed down "for not operating a membership scheme for its under 18s night" (n.b. this was an occasional night that was kept completely separately from the adult nights, ending at 8pm....). What, it transpired, the police had been doing is engaging in what I can only describe as "evidence construction". Aside from my testimony as a witness, I also pointed out that if the police are to construct evidence then they might want to use a calendar. The night on which several officers apparently claimed to have seen several youths under 18, (n.b. they didn't actually age check these alleged youths), clearly under the influence of alcohol,(they saw from being sat in their car) and clearly having had attended the under-18s night (there was no under-18s night on the night specified - in fact, the date they gave was for a night renowned throughout the city for having an average age of 35+).

- We had a massive ruck outside the club with a gang of 20-something hoolies. They were throwing bricks, sticks and whatever else they could find at us. A police car had been sat about 200m away watching the whole thing. After the gang had gone, they cruised down and demanded to know what we had done to start it. (This was one of many incidents where police were actually there, witnessing something from beginning to end and letting the assailants walk away scot free).

- We threw three lads out who had been causing trouble inside. When outside the club they threatened two separate groups of people with a knife, then ran up the road, beat up some kids (including one girl) and came back to stand outside the club again. One of the groups called the police. Two officers turned up. Despite multiple witnesses we had to harass them - harass them!! To go and have a word with the lads in question. They didn't even search them, despite allegations from multiple witnesses that they had been threatened with a knife.

- One of our staff was on their own working the early doors for a band. A group of kids came running down the street being chased by another gang Of No Specific Appearance. Our member of staff let the kids hide inside the club and told the following scrotes to fuck off. They did and came back later with two dogs and knives. An emergency call went out. Apparently the police were too busy (at 7pm) to come deal with knife wielding Youths of No Specific Appearance with dogs, threatening to kill a member of staff and do god knows what to a bunch of kids.

I could go on.....these stories go on and on and I'm sick to fucking death of it. And those are just some of my stories - there are plenty of other people in South Yorkshire who could tell you more. So I've resolved to start making a record of every one of these incidents. I've got to the point where I really don't care about my badge any more. Frankly, if you're interested in keeping people in a nightclub safe from predatory criminals and just garden variety dickheads, you're better off being a member of the public than a badged member of door staff. And forget phoning the police for help. I don't understand what we pay the South Yorkshire Police to do except make "normal" people's lives a complete and abject misery.

If it keeps on this way there is going to be some kind of ugly reckoning.

The Green snake in the grass

2009-12-05T20:33:00.099Z

What would you think if I told you that the furore over climategate was not the most critical topic where the AGW lobby was concerned? How would you feel if I said that the EU and our almost silent drift into a federal super-state should not be at the top of your list for ways to raise your blood pressure? What would you think if I pointed out, at the centre of all of this - where Climategate has been the signal symptom pulling back the curtain - there was, at base a sustained assault on reason itself?

Hyperbole? Paranoia? Read on....

Buried deep within the furore over Climategate is a deeper and far more insidious issue, so far only mentioned in passing by a few in the odd comment on Climategate, and only one politically focused blogger recently (at least in direct relation to AGW "science"), along with a handful of lone voices scattered around from some time before climategate - for example here. Despite its critical seriousness, this issue didn't reach critical mass in the blogosphere, being commented on by a few disparate observers.

What is this hidden monster to which I refer?

It is the fact that many of those involved in what I will call the 'AGW confluence' (the historically unprecedented coming together of (many previously disparate) interests around the AGW issue), are followers of the philosophy of "post-normal science".

As BuyTheTruth explains in their blog on this topic. This isn't just a case of science being politicised and brought, or even a case of moving from modern to "post-modern" science (where post-modernism at least provides a useful contribution of highlighting the subjective element in everything). It is an altogether more fundamental shift. And in using the term "post normal science", they hoped we wouldn't notice. They were right.

BTT's blog really deserves very wide readership - wider than that of Climategate itself. The stakes here couldn't be higher. I've tried getting a few of the high-traffic Libertarian bloggers interested, but no joy so I decided to go into some detail on this issue myself and hope it will be picked up by my fellow bloggers:

The idea behind "post normal science" (PNS) is to make science instrumental and democratic (even "moral"). I hope you balked at reading that idea, just like I did. We libertarian minded folk naturally seek a political settlement that maximises the liberty of the individual. The idea of applying such a principle to Science however is pure anathema, yet that is exactly what has happened. And it has not simply morphed into a scientific tyranny of the majority (despite the oft cited "thousands" of scientists supposedly supporting the IPCC conclusions unequivocally) - it is the brought and paid for appearance of (tyranny of the) majority that counts. PNS scientists and philosphers don't care for truth you see - only 'values'.

The originator of this philosophy is one Jerome Ravetz. If the following quote from Ravetz doesn't make your head explode, you probably need to read it twice:

"…climate change models are a form of “seduction”…advocates of the models…recruit possible supporters, and then keep them on board when the inadequacy of the models becomes apparent. This is what is understood as “seduction”; but it should be observed that the process may well be directed even more to the modelers themselves, to maintain their own sense of worth in the face of disillusioning experience.

…but if they are not predictors, then what on earth are they? The models can be rescued only by being explained as having a metaphorical function, designed to teach us about ourselves and our perspectives under the guise of describing or predicting the future states of the planet…A general recognition of models as metaphors will not come easily. As metaphors, computer models are too subtle…for easy detection. And those who created them may well have been prevented…from being aware of their essential character."

This is as nasty and insidious as nasty and insidious gets.

And the glove fits more perfectly than you could imagine:

"The theory of Post-Normal Science…needs to be renewed and enriched…The time is not ripe for a modification of PNS, and so the best move forward is to raise the issue of Sustainability. For that I sketch a theory of complex systems, with special attention to pathologies and failures. That provides the foundation for a use of ‘contradiction’ as a problem incapable of resolution in its own terms, and also of ‘characteristic contradiction’ that drives a system to a crisis. With those materials it is possible to state the characteristic contradiction of our modern industrial civilisation, and provide a diagram with heuristic power."

[emphasis mine]

I'll repeat BuyTheTruth's commentary here as there is no point paraphrasing what is probably expressed more succinctly than I would have done:

"Heuristic power is the power to explain ‘factual novelties’. ‘Contradiction’ and ‘characteristic contradiction’ are Marxist speak. Heard about ’sustainability’ recently? You bet! Ravetz gives the Greens the tools they need to do their dirty work. He gives them the philosophical blueprint to attack modern industrial civilization. Now, let’s be clear: post-normal science is one of the manipulative arts that Machiavelli would have been proud of."
[My emphasis]

Instead of "truth", what we should have instead is "quality" (c.f. the idea of "value added data" coming out of Climategate.....)

Another doozy is quoted by BuyTheTruth, from Eva Kunseler, Towards a new paradigm of Science in scientific policy advising:

"The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors…Scientists’ integrity lies not in disinterestedness but in their behaviour as stakeholders.

....he guiding principle of normal science – the goal of achievement of factual knowledge - must be modified to fit the post-normal principle…For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts

....Involved social actors must agree on the definition of perceptions, narratives, interpretation of models, data and indicators."

Is *any* of this making you feel sick yet? For me its positively vomit inducing. Are you getting this? Scientists should no longer pursue the goal of being "disinterested", they should be considered, instead "stakeholders". This is a paradigm shift onwards from the post-modernist observation that no science, or scientist is value free. That's one of the whole points of the scientific enterprise - that different scientists correct one another's bias.

Another quote provided by BuyTheTruth from a critic of "post normal science", Richard Fernandez really hits the spot:

"All in all, the notion of “post-normal science” seems like a complete contradiction in terms or a perversion of the standard definition of science as commonly understood. It appears to be an elaborate and dishonest attempt to pass off the preferences of a single group as some kind of pseudo-science. There’s a much simpler term for this dishonest phrase: politics. Post-normal science is nothing but a cheap and lying term for a political diktat; for the rule of the self-appointed over everyone else. Whatever truth “Global Warming” may contain it has surely been damaged by its association with this disreputable and vile concept which brazenly casts aside the need for any factual basis and declares in the most unambiguous terms that whatever values it chooses to promote constitutes a truth unimpeachable by reality and a set of values that none dare challenge."

I'm at risk of repeating BuyTheTruth's entire blog, so I must recommend in the strongest possible terms that you read the original in full. As far as I'm concerned, the collated quotations from Mike Hulme are more damning than if he was caught anally raping goats (without lube) in sacrificial rituals to gaia and the almighty Al Ogre (and this list of quotes alone is worth reading BTT for). And claiming "out of context quotes" won't cut it. He hides these conclusions in amongst lots of reasonable sounding points. I've read enough of his quotes in context now to see that he does indeed mean it.

Look at the way Hulme, in the Guardian, dismisses sceptics Singer and Avery: "So this book from Singer and Avery can be understood in a different way: as a challenge to the process of climate change science, or to the values they believe to be implicit in the science, rather than as a direct challenge to scientific knowledge."

At points in Hulme's piece in the Guardian it seems that his main intention is to ask scientists to be very open about the values that inform their inquiry. Obviously this is something I applaud. However, his conclusion - here and elsewhere - appears to be that because scientists do bring values to the table, we should give up on rational truth-seeking traditional scientific behaviour and focus instead on transmitting these values, using science as a vehicle, as he reveals here: "What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy; it is whether we have sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered."

Shockingly, the highest profile treatment this has received has been from Melanie Phillips, who draws equally sinister conclusions to myself, BTT and the few others who have encountered these carrion ridden philosophers.

The reason they escaped notice is because - in 2007 when Phillips was writing - no one even realised what the CRU was, or how critical it was to the IPCC conclusions, never mind the individual names of its members. What climategate has done for us is more valuable than reveal the dodgy science behind a key pillar of the "consensus" - it has revealed the work of this insidious bunch and their underlying philosophy. Instead of just asking "is this junk science", we are now obliged to ask - did they ever, at any point, even care that it was junk science if they believed in PNS?

One scientific blogger writes:

"Hulme has collected some of the most disgraceful, immoral, anti-scientific, and anti-civilization principles how science should interact with the society that I can imagine. He has brought the methods of the Inquisition right to the 21st century and combined them with the most modern methods to brainwash, corrupt, and intimidate people.

He is completely open that he wants to return us to the Middle Ages when a church ideology dictated what scientists could think and what they couldn't think, what they could learn and what they couldn't learn if they didn't want to lose influence or life, for that matter. It just sounds extremely worrisome."

And later he says... "Why should anyone sensible ever take Hulme's criticism of Fred Singer and Dennis Avery seriously if Hulme's approach to science is a self-described fraud?"

Why indeed. And this was precisely the question I was asking myself whilst originally reading Hulme's proclamations on Singer and Avery.

A problem we have is Hulme can make himself appear as one slippery customer. He makes a lot of valid points about the philosophy of science and subjectivity (I can fully appreciate this as I'm a philosophy graduate myself). Yet the fact he makes a few reasonable and insightful points should not, by any stretch of the imagination, distract one from witnessing the conclusions he draws. One trap that it is easy to fall into is to assess his writing using rationalist, scientific values yourself. To do that is to not understand Hulme et al. You see - he himself is already beyond those values, engaging in "Post Normal Science".

To be fair to Ravetz, it appears that Hulme and others have taken and twisted his orginal philosphy somewhat, at least if one of the commentators on BTT's blog is to be believed (see the entries from 'tallbloke'). I've yet to spend much time on Ravetz's original work, though I intend to go through everything produced by these folks, from Ravetz onward, with a very fine tooth comb. Reading Hulme in the original is pretty clear though. He really does believe this philosophy, even if it is a distorted version of Ravetz's original vision. I'm having trouble believing Ravetz's innocence however, given that he has been appearing, with Hulme, to comment on Climategate. And if you read the comments from 'tallbloke' over at BTT, you realise he might have made the same mistake I almost made - forgetting that these guys are not writing from the same rationalist perspective as you, already having 'gone beyond' as it were.

Both of them have written an article for the BBC on this issue. I find this equally disturbing and hilarious and wonder what the hell the BBC editor was smoking when he agreed to publish it. Apparently "Doing science in 2010 demands something rather different from scientists than did science in 1960, or even in 1985." - it does? Other than perhaps now requiring a desktop computer and internet connection? Read their proposals for "extended peer review" - to include "individuals from industry, environmental organisations and government officials as peer reviewers of early drafts of their assessments".

In the article they also subtly (re)introduce the idea of the "democritisation" of science. Something that sounds so reasonable on the surface because so many unthinking dolts have been trained to think that "democracy" automatically equals "good"; worse they do this under the cover of demanding more openness. More openness and "democratised science" are most certainly NOT synonymous.

The calls for publicly owned scientific knowledge and increased openness are so seductive. Yet these are things that should affect the end-result of investigations, not redirect the flow of the scientific method itself. "'Show your working' is the imperative given to scientists when preparing for publication to peers.

There, it refers to techniques.

Now, with the public as partner in the creation and implementation of scientific knowledge in the policy domain, the injunction has a new and enhanced meaning."

Amen to the first sentence. Of course we want to see how scientists have worked out their data. As to the second part though - no, no and thrice NO! The 'public as a partner in the creation of scientific knowledge'? When it enters the realm of politics, there is certainly a case to be made for public involvement in the "implementation" stage (assuming this doesn't have a special "post normal" meaning). But creation? What is this supposed to be? Interactive myth making?

This is terrifying, even in the lamed-down version for the BBC (which, I suspect was much more subtle owning to Ravetz's influence...).

And its funny how so many of these confluences come together. Again - from BTT: Not just a radical Marxist past for Hulme. Also apparently a major player previously in CND. This is particularly apropos to note given the recent questions raised by UKIP's Nigel Farage regarding the most powerful woman in the world, Cathy Ashton, and her past. And then there's the revelations about just how much influence the Soviets had, via espionage, over (now) prominent Labour figures back in the 80s.....

The more I have looked into this, the more the metaphor of a snake is very appropriate, given the mythological links to notions of original sin and - of course - snake oil salesmen.....only in this case it isn't a snake in a tree offering us a bite of the apple of knowledge. Its one hidden in the grass at our feet, about to bite us and sap our strength before we even dare reach for the goddamned tree....

And some people appear to be making the dangerous mistake of thinking that Hulme is giving us description of what has occurred. No folks - he's selling us a prescription!!

From inside the science bunker

A quick bit of background - I'm a philosophy and politics graduate. Twice in philosophy (BA, MA) and once in Politics (MA). I've also spent the last three years working at a scientific lab in a university. So I thought I'd seek out some reactions on climategate - and boy, have they been depressing.

A lot of the scientists appear to have taken the official damage control line at face value. They simply would not believe the most damaging accusations. One of them, someone I actually hold in high regard, even patronisingly accused me of not being critical enough and of 'believing everything I read in the papers'. If only it had been in the damn papers! I asked him if he'd looked at the emails, or files himself? No. Interestingly I also argue with him frequently on the EU too. And no, he hasn't read the consolidated treaties as amended by Lisbon. Who the hell isn't sufficiently critical?

Another scientist said he was completely unsurprised and said he thought it was completely normal that they'd seek to protect their funding first and foremost. All well and good but this is research that will fundamentally change the world. Literally. He opined that research funding is fundamentally too politicised. Which was amusing to hear from a scientist. I've been pilloried by a number of my (now ex) friends who were committed AGWers for constantly asking the political questions. Climategate has completely vindicated me on that score (hasn't changed anything for them though, I got back in touch with one who's reaction was that 'even if it turned out CRU was an al-quaeda front, it wouldn't change anything because the rest of the science is settled and CRU were such a small part of it'). Right.

I also had a bad experience with senior staff from the EU commission who attended a conference I was supposed to be presenting research at last week. They seem to think the Commission's priorities and choice of research funding is value free. The discussion was on the future direction of technology and what the EU will fund. It seems decisions on this will be made on the basis of 'European values'. When pressed they said that "of course" principles like "solidarity" will trump those of "subsidarity". That 'value free' research funding again, from the body that is the buyer, seller *and* regulator of the research. I think I scotched a few career opportunities here by asking too many pointed questions and regularly trying to draw people back to the politics of the science. I guess maybe I'm behind the times and with regard to the EU, we're in the realm of "post normal" politics.

One minor victory I did have however was speaking to one of the lead scientists behind what one could consider the university's environmental unit. He didn't believe it at first, but went away and had a look himself at the climategate material, only to return quite shaken. Good. As much as I like the man, and didn't want to upset him it at least caused him to reassess.

The problem is, there seems to be an institutional bias to take things on trust from other scientists. I used to feel like that until I started investigating the politics, realising that - just like with journalists - I would finally have to check everything myself.

Hulme is - to repeat the point - a slippery one because he appears to occasionally attack the "consensus", including colleagues such as Jones. The problem is, he's not criticising them for having engaged in a travesty of science, not to mention academic integrity, he's criticising them from the position that they aren't engaging properly in Post Normal Science.

Also - see this bizaare op-ed from Hulme in the WSJ. A common thread in Hulme's work is to point out how unbelievably complex climate science is, whilst at the same time proclaiming that the AGW is certain. Apparently the old model of science, and how science should be used, "places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty.". He goes on to identify the fact that climate science had been so politicised as a fundamental flaw in the traditional model of science itself. Never mind the fact that it was the AGW shills themselves who polarised it themselves. Lots of readers have already expressed disgust (and cancelled subscriptions) at publications such as Nature and Scientific American for shamelessly promoting the "denier" meme. That wasn't a failure in the scientific method, it was a consciously made and personal failure of the scientists themselves.

Another disturbing angle is the fact that we've heard this kind of thing before...

Back to the future - Neocons reloaded

The editor of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, tirelessly documented many of the hidden links and shenanigans of that cabal we came to know as the 'Neocons'. One of the most striking aspects of his research was to spell out the philosophy underlying that collection of warmongering corrupt liars. The similarities with the philosophy of 'post-normal' science are striking.

The neocons were inspired by philosopher, Leo Strauss. For Strauss, society should be 'guided' by an appropriate self-appointed elite.He also praised the art of political lying - lying for the 'social good'.

Raimondo also details that other common thread - the radical left wing past of the main actors. Its a shame he doesn't go into more detail on that other pernicious strand - the fact that as soon as bad things are done with state power a concerted effort is made to associate this with the 'right'.

On that issue, Burt Blumert from lewrockwell.com is worth quoting: "Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state."

These were also the chaps who famously derided the anti-war movement as part of "the reality based community". The neocon vision was to 're-shape' and determine reality (for social good, of course!).

Sound familiar?

It's one of those things that ensure partisan divisions keep the elements of the 'left' and 'right', who actually substantively agree on certain issues, fighting uselessly with one another. Meanwhile the powermongers at the helm continue directing the ship of state to despicable ends and they don't care whether we call them 'left' or 'right'. Worth noting perhaps how the current crop of neocons have lauded their new War President. The confusions in names, allegiances etc, almost seem sometimes to be consciously chosen to maximise confusion, doubt and conflict - acting like a chinese finger trap for your mind.

The similarity of vitriolic counter-attack is also striking: People attacking the neo-cons were labelled 'anti-semitic'. Critics of AGW - as we all well know now - are 'deniers'. Curious, no?

So what next?

Apologies to those who have been waiting for the next part of the Lisbon treaty analysis - it is coming. This current issue however, in my view, is so serious it trumps everything else I've been concerned about for the last few years. What these "post normal scientists" are discussing is the murder of reason. And for very particular political goals, supposedly for our own good. Climategate has given the opportunity to see how one particular cell has been influence directly by this kind of arrogant misanthropic anti-scientific thinking. What needs to happen now is not just a weeding out of everyone who was part of the Climategate team, and mapping the extent to which their flawed research has infiltrated and corrupted the body of research making up the IPCC. I, for one, intend to go far beyond that and seek out all of these 'post normal scientists'. They don't just threaten the end of our economies, or freedom, or even the end of science. They promise the end of reason itself.

I've found the enemy's heart and I intend to stab it.

Registering the Climategate Dissent

2009-12-02T21:08:00.010Z

I have in the offing a longer piece on Climategate, dealing with an underlying issue that I've not seen taken up in detail yet. Whilst there is a lot of good work already done on analysing the confluence of political, financial and media interests behind Climategate, there is a snake in the grass yet to be properly aired.....more on that in the next few days.

In the meantime I felt compelled to write a brief blog post though because of today's headlines. Whilst a lot of deserved focus has gone to the Express printing a Climategate story on its front page, the lesser known breakthrough appears to have been in the Environmental-Shill extraordinaire - the "Independent".

For as front page news, the "Independent" has reported on the climate sceptics within the Tories. As soon as I saw it I wondered how many people, up until that point, were even aware that there *were* climate sceptics in the party. What is especially surprising is that the coverage of this dissent actually seems fairly even handed. They still couldn't bring themselves to mention Climategate however, though it was great to see David Davis's contribution, referring to proposed Green measures as "hair-shirt policies".

Then, of course, one gets to the rest of the paper.

On the front page, above the 'Cameron hit by Tory backlash on environment' is a big 'RED ALERT' banner highlighting the "FREE 20-page climate change supplement" inside. Looking through it after having read the coverage of the Tory sceptics, it is difficult to believe that the paper does not have an editor who not only has multiple-personality disorder, but also co-exists in two different parallel universes.

All the usual platitudes are there in the supplement:

- The front page of the supplement has the obligatory picture of cooling towers belching evil -uh - water vapour into the air.

- Turn the page and not only are we told that we have "Twelve days to save the world", but "We face a threat as terrible as that posed by Hitler". Godwin's law invoked even before we hit the first sentence? For fucks sake.

- Next its "Time to confront the invisible enemy that threatens us all". This section goes on to detail how "No government in the world now thinks that global warming is hugely exaggerated".

- Loads of terrifying statistics on the next page, including the Independent surpassing itself yet again, and after its recent screaming frontpage warning of rises of 6 degrees, now ups the stakes to 7 degrees. No source is given of course.

- And then, (after a full page advert for Soya) - surprise! The recent floods in the UK are signs of AGW! Full colour, two page spreads of high waterlines.

- It gets even worse on the next double page - almost nothing but dramatic pictures of the recent bushfire in Australia.

- And more! Another two page spread showing the devastation from Hurricanes. All courtesy of course of our invisible enemy!

- The final doublespread - showing a large body of ice - quotes "a selection of public figures who ought to know what they are talking about". I found that particularly funny as I thought I'd zero in randomly on one and landed on James Lovelock. He says "...the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now unprecedented". This is a blatant falsehood. If he'd appended "human- contributed" carbon dioxide it would have been true. Who cares about precision on this issue though, eh?

- We're almost done at this point - with a full page table outlining different scenarios given various rises in temperature, from 2 degrees through to six degrees. All of which, as the article states at the top, based upon the figure that "the world grew 0.74 degrees hotter in the 20th century". What seems to have passed the writer by is that it is this very figure that is now in serious doubt as a result of Climategate. Doesn't stop a good bit of scaremongering though, because the page is finished off, after detailing successively more terrifying scenarios with - guess what!? That's right, the obligatory picture of a stranded polar bear. FFS.

Hidden bonus!

If you're still conscious at this point, a big bonus buried within pages 26-27 of the paper is a hit piece on Ron Paul who is - according to the "Independent" a promoter of a "radical brand of extreme libertarianism" (I thought it was just plain old 'Libertarianism' myself...) He apparently appeals to "libertarian-minded college kids" (not us, sensible, adults obviously) and is "the token nutjob". Of particular note is what the paper has to say on his economic policy; apparently wanting to end the monopoly position of the Fed is wanting to "take the US back to a Nineteenth-centure version of every-man-for-himself capitalism".

It's been a long while since I've read anything in the Independent beyond its latest hysterical front page. Its simply difficult to imagine a more sickeningly obvious propaganda rag with a very loose grasp on accuracy. I can only hope - like the New Statesman - that it continues hemorrhaging readers. Its demise is long overdue and well deserved.

Revealing Lisbon - Part 1

2009-11-07T15:32:00.003Z

This is my commentary on the consolidated Lisbon treaty, working through it line by line, containing all the amendments to the various treaties (Maastricht, Rome and Amsterdam (which itself was an amendment to the Rome Treaty)).

This is a work in progress - please bear with me as I may have to come back and make amendments as I get deeper into the treaty, where some of the amendments clarify previously covered sections. This, part 1 covers the amendments to Maastricht, including *some* references to the amendments made to Rome that are relevant to the Maastricht amendments.

While considering the entire EU project, in monstrous form now that we are truly locked into it by Lisbon, it is well worth keeping two charts in mind, - hat tip to Tom Paine for alerting me to these, both from Wat Tyler:

i) The graph that matters

and

ii) The "worst placed in the world" graph.

In particular in ii) look at the performance of Norway! Not only is Norway outside the EU, it also had the foresight to create a Sovereign fund from its Oil and Gas wealth.

As an amusing sidenote - on the - tiny - plus side of all this, with the new 18 members of the European Parliament coming in as a result of Lisbon, one of them is from Sweden's Pirate Party, giving them their second seat. Not that much can be done with 100 seats there, never mind 2.

General observations

- It turns out the office of the "High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy" (*not* created with Lisbon as as commonly been reported, but just with expanded powers) is actually substantially more powerful than the position of President of the Council. Maybe that was the game all along - promote Blair for the presidency, fail and get someone in the back door as the High Rep. This post is effectively a very powerful, Euro version of the Foreign Secretary, so I will interchangeably refer to this position as such where I don't have to explicitly identify it as the 'High Representative' (even the damn name sticks in my craw).

- Most of the final power seems to be vested in the council. This puts tremendous strain on the individual heads of state as single points of failure. It also means they will not represent a plurality of views as the Parliament at least has the potential to do so. This also brings to a head the issue of having an unelected leader - e.g. Brown. Some people have said this issue of an unelected head doesn't matter. In the context of the European Council being the only real effective vetoing power in the spaghetti mess that is EU governance it matters a great deal and the personality, capacities and perspectives of that individual person are thus crucial.

- Well worth bearing in mind Vaclav Klaus's comments regarding the distinct lack of an 'official opposition' in the functioning of the EU Parliament before anyone gets too excited about its potential capabilities.

Despite it being the "consolidated version" - I *still* had to use external references for key clarifications. Particularly tricky was the - often out of context - references to roles such as 'president', 'council' etc, of which there are more than one and it isn't always clear which one is meant!

N.B. This represents the *total force* of Lisbon amendments and previous treaties. Many of the provisions are not completely new; most are strengthened.

- Contrary to the "this isn't the constitution" propaganda, this consolidated document states clearly in its opening notes - "The treaty retains most of the content of the proposed EU Constitution which was rejected in the French and Dutch referendums". Sometimes it feels like they really are laughing at us....

As to my suitability for this task? I can beg only the qualification of a Master's degree in Politics and International Relations (with an EU elective) and over recent years regular contact with EU officials research work, plus having been an avid EU watcher for a number of years. In practice none of this should matter though - as the treaty should be intelligible for any educated lay person in any of the member states. It falls far short of such promise however.

This is of course the kind of job we pay our "representatives"(fah!) to do and expect our glorious, our incredible, our LIONs of world journalism in the British mainstream media to do when our Lords, Ladies, Masters and Mistresses let us down. Unfortunately it comes down - again - to concerned citizens.....

Because these notes ended up being far more extensive than I expected, I've decided to highlight the most pressing and outrageous parts with a link to Grumpy Old Twat's 'WTFF!?' link immediately prior to, or after said part. If you see that link, what follows isn't good. At all. However, it does deserve your full attention. And given that this document has already grown to 6000+ words and I'm only a third of the way through, you could save yourself by skimming down to just the sections near those WTFF!!? Links.

Opening notes

- At the bottom of the 'Key to Symbols' table, is mentioned the Passerelle Article (Article 48). This is one part of the constitution that has caused so much stir as it is what enables the "self-modifying" behaviour. This is the piece of the legislation that means there may never need be another treaty, as by vote of the relevant Eurocrats, it can modify itself. As blogger EU referendum put it, this should be called - on account of its incredible power - instead, the "dual carriageway" clause. It states (and in so doing, feels like they're laughing in our faces again) that such changes, using the Dual Carriageway clause currently require unanimity of a vote on the European Council (*not* the same thing as the European Parliament btw - see later), but "It may alter unanimity to voting by qualified majority". If that still sounds kind of representative and democratic to you, wait until you see my comments on what the treaty says on the European Council later.

OK - step by step:

Amendments to Maastricht
(Maastricht being referred to now as "The Treaty on European Union (TEU)").

- The preamble explicitly identifies the highest representative of member states responsible for signing off on this. In case you didn't know already, for the UK, this was the Queen. Bless her complete and utter fucking silence on the dissolution of British sovereignty.

- Typo on the very first page - "esatblishment" - nice one guys!

- Principle of "sustainable development" is now introduced several times into the legal binding of this treaty.

- ALSO inserted (amongst other things): "price stability", "social market economy", "aiming at full employment", "social progress", "social justice", "free and fair trade", "eradication of poverty", "protection of human rights, in particular the rights of the child [Ed: why the hell is this one privileged??]" and "a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment"

Reading those statements, many may not see immediate reason to object. At least some of them seem like laudable goals, right? If you're not already well studied in the behaviour of the political class however, (such as how certain positive human rights can be played off against one another for political advantage), you should consider carefully what abuses can easily be carried out in the name of any of the above, very vague, ideals, which are now enshrined in law. and given a mandate to be made flesh by the Union.

- The Charter of Fundamental Rights is now to be regarded as having the same legal status as the other Treaties (i.e. on a par with the constitution). Which is just great as it means even more legalese to plough through in order to find clauses that can be selectively played off against one another.

- The Council now appears to have the power to "suspend certain of the rights deriving from the application of the treaties to the Member State in question, including the voting rights". Reading this in its entirety, the council can do this on the basis of "breaches" of the values referred to in Article 2 (those values being "respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities". No room for abuse in such a long list of vague concepts that political philosophers have argued about for centuries is there?). The possible consequence of any member state seen to violate these values are that it can have all of its essential, beneficial, rights (including voting) removed by the council, yet still be held to other binding parts. Are we having fun yet!?

- A bit later the treaty asserts that "Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen". How this is to happen isn't spelled out at all. Needless to say it gave me a good belly laugh.

- Three further interesting clauses worth repeating in full here:

(From article 10):
"4. Political parties at European level contribute to forming European political awareness and to expressing the will of citizens of the Union."

(From Article 11):

"1. The institutions shall, by appropriate means, give citizens and representative associations the opportunity to make known and publicly exchange their views in all areas of Union action."

and

"2. The institutions shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society."

^ More comedy gold it seems. I'm speculating that many people reading this post will already have some interest in politics. Can any of you clearly identify where / how the glorious government of Old Blighty has worked to achieve any of the above? I'm having trouble myself. How much do you even know about your MEP, never mind what other "options" are available for "dialogue"? - What, where, when, why, who?

- Another amusing claim - the Commission is to "ensure that the Union's actions are coherent and transparent". Oh gods. Stop making me laugh so much.

OK here's your first major spanner:

WTFF!!?

- Want to demand that the Commission makes a change of some kind? No problem. All you need is one million citizens. Not only that, this one million have to be "nationals of a significant number of Member States". A clause so sufficiently fucking vague (no, there is NO further clarification on this - how many member states?), that its easy to slide out of. And that's assuming you can get the herculean task achieved of a million citizens from even two member states to agree on anything.

- Apparently, the number of members of the European Parliament shall not ever exceed 750 (plus one - the president). Also, there is a minimum threshold of six members per Member State. Well that's great news. It means that in future EU expansion, in search of more people to fucking subsidise, it will only ever be able to swallow 125 out of the world's (roughly, depending how you count them), 195 nations. Wow, what a relief! As if it wasn't bad enough having to deal with 646 self-absorbed, greasy pole climbing, troughing, corrupt genetic defectives in the national parliament, I now have to also be concerned about up to another 750 on the continent. And that's not including all the unelected members who hold the real power, but more on that shortly.... They call this being degressively proportional, a name I that seems somehow appropriate.

- Article 14 reminds us about the nature of the European Parliament. This is actually the (yes *the* one and only) democratic element at work here (and before you say 'elected heads of state in the Council', I give you Gordon Brown). The Ministers of the European Parliament (MEPs) "shall be elected for a term of five years by direct universal suffrage in a free and secret ballot". Hold onto your fucking hats, because from here on in it gets worse:

- The European Council (what?! You thought a parliament would be enough?) "shall not exercise legislative functions." Phew. Or not. As the Council "shall define the general political directions and priorities" of the EU. That's still perhaps the most important share of power even without direct legislative capability. They can't specify the exact details of the debate, but they can specify its terms. The main veto power seems to sit with the Council also.

- And how is the Council made up? It consists of "the Heads of State or Government of the Member States". It also has the - brand spanking new - position of president (separate from the president of the European Commission or the president of the Council of Ministers - confused yet?). This was the role Blair was being tipped for. It also involves the other EU Foreign Sec. It should be noted however though that this expanded EU Foreign Secretary role is treated very differently to the Council President role..... (see below).

- The council apparently has to rule by consensus (except when it doesn't - exceptions abound throughout the treaty). Useful eh? As I'm sure the members of any collective decision making at an Anarchist social centre can tell you. Those who all agree with eachother *already* and stick around anyway....

- Now the council president is voted on by the members of the council, requiring a qualified majority and for a term of 2.5 years, renewable once. They are also not allowed to hold a national office, which is why Blair is in the running as he's busy being a worldwide tax dodging tourist...

- Article 15, 6, (d), the president, after the council meetings, is obliged to "present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council". Will we, the hoi polloi, get to see it? It doesn't specify. Personally I doubt it and UKIP's Lord Pearson doesn't think we'll see it at any stage outside the EU Parliament.

- Next up, in article 16, we have another body, The Council of Ministers. Just to confuse you further (and if you were naughty, and jumped ahead in reading the treaty, you wouldn't have a clue which council, or president was being referred to here, because the context is all relative). To get in on *this* council, you only need to be considered as at "ministerial level" within your national government. This group is supposed to represent "relevant" ministers for the discussion at hand. This means if discussing agriculture, they have the agricultural ministers, security and its the justice and home affairs ministers.

However, it does have permanent members:

And the sidenote clarifies that this does indeed include civil servants. And looking at the current list for the UK, that is exactly what it consists of, for us at least. I didn't have a clue who any of them were, or how I'd make them accountable either. And the primary contact email given is for the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) (ukrep@fco.gov.uk). Great.

...here comes major spanner #2:

WTFF!!?

- Guess what? This bunch of unnacountable civil service hoons from across the empire, sorry, "Union", have legislative powers. Just to put that in context - the heads of state in the Council DO NOT have direct legislative powers (even though they, are, however tenuously, accountable in *some* sense to their electorate). However the relatively faceless, and - not voted for - civil servants in the Council of Ministers DO have direct legislative powers.

And it gets even better. The Council of Ministers can bypass the European Parliament. It is supposed to work "jointly" with the European Parliament, but is not obliged to follow its will. i.e. the undemocratic, permanent group staffed by unelected unaccountable civil servants can ride roughshod over the democratic chamber. There is much usage of terms such as "consult" with regards to the Parliament; the strongest term used is "consent", meaning a qualified majority where the Parliament gets the incredible ability to rubber stamp something. Most of the time it seems the EU Parliament should feel privileged to even see the damn proposals (and thus be "consulted").

The permanent members by the way are known as COREPER. And they are "responsible for preparing the work of the Council" (of ministers). Oh, and by the way, their meetings are private. Ain't democracy great?

- Now, we get to the European Commission.

- *sigh* - yes its yet another powerful group within the EU framework. You remember the Parliament? You know, the guys and gals who vote on stuff and who are, in turn, voted in or out by us? You'd think they would have been the ones to initiate legislation wouldn't you?

- Nope - it is the European Commission who decide on the legislation itself - "Union legislative acts may be adopted only on the basis of a Commission proposal". So the parliament can vote legislation up or down, but they can't decide what it is in the first place, only make amendments and (at best) throw it back to the Commission (the Commission, who's terms of reference and overall direction is determined by the Council).

- So who are the Commissioners? Well they have terms of five years and are selected on the basis of - wait for it "their general competence and European commitment...persons whose independence is beyond doubt." Uhm. "European commitment"? "Independence beyond doubt". Right. Not only that, they are forbidden from taking "instructions from any government or other institution, body, office or entity". In other words, they are there not to represent us, but the dream of Pan Europa.

- The Commission is supposed to, currently, be made up of one national from each member state (plus the positions of President (it isn't clear *which* president) and the EU Foreign Secretary. However, from 2014 this will change. The Commission then only needs to represent two thirds of member states at any one time. This opens the door to a substantial abuse of power because at any one time, one or more nations could be completely unrepresented and yet subject to legislation determined by the other Commissioners. This also obviously makes an individual, or small grouping, of member states even less likelier to make a principled stand.

- The Commission president gets to appoint Lieutenants (sorry, "Vice-presidents"). The president also has the power to compel Commission member to resign - except for the EU Foreign Secretary who cannot be so compelled (in this case, only being sackable from the Commission by the European Council. Goddamn these interlocking relationships are more complex than a teenage emo soap drama). The more I read about this latter position, the more it seems significantly more powerful than the office of President in the European Council. Given the rotating nature of the Commission its quite possible too to create a perpetual chain of mutual masturbation between successive presidents and their appointees. But I don't need to tell anyone who has studied the nature of political expediency that.

- In another complex twist to these relationships, whilst the Parliament gets to vote on the president, it is the council who proposes the candidate in the first place. More rubber stamping from the "democratic" chamber.

- The council and the president then decide the other members of the commission. Therefore the only stage at which any kind of accountability enters the process is when the Parliament gets to vote on a pre-selected candidate. FFS!

- Here's the supposed safety valve: "the European Parliament may vote on a motion on censure of the Commission".
- They've never succeeded in doing this before (AFAIK) - look at what happened last time ("the major political groups in the parliament, including the EPP-ED group (to which British Conservatives are affiliated -- some reluctantly) started ferocious campaigns of pressure and intimidation to get members to withdraw their names"). Oh yeah. There's a system to be confident in.

- They also can't censure individual members, it has to be the whole Commission. That really limits its usefulness as any kind of check or balance.

The Court of Justice
- The Court of Justice itself is supposed to have one judge from each member state.
- The General Court "shall include at least one judge per Member State".
- AGAIN, the selection criterion is: "persons whose independence is beyond doubt." Uh huh. (No mention of "European Commitment" this time though).

Interesting clause in Article 21:
- "foster the sustainable economic, social and environmental development of developing countries, with the primary aim of eradicating poverty." - I really don't see those two goals as compatible.

Also

- "encourage the integration of all countries into the world economy, including through the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade." - Utter hypocrisy. No mention here of the EU's protectionist practices.

Foreign and Security Policy.

This is one of the parts where it gets really serious. And this one is definitely spanner time - worth reading all of the notes I've made for this section:

OK - time for another: WTFF!?

Article 24, paragraph 3 repeated in full:

"The Member States shall support the Union's external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's action in this area.
The Member States shall work together to enhance and develop their mutual political solidarity. They shall refrain from any action which is contrary to the interests of the Union or likely to impair its effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations.
The Council and the High Representative shall ensure compliance with these principles."

Combined with further clauses (see later), this effectively marks the end of both independent operation of British Armed Forces and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Moreover, the combined legal bindings mean that both are also to be subject to "the Union's" wishes in future.

To illustrate further:

The treaty formalises the existence of the "European External Action Service" (i.e. the EU Foreign Service). Its particulars, like specific military policy of the Union are not clarified in the treaty, however powers given to the Council to determine both ARE. It specifies (Article 28, paragraph 1) that "Where the international situation requires operational action", member states will be bound by the decisions of the Council in military and foreign affairs.

The only exception to this is in "emergency situation" which require an immediate national response. Even in such cases however, it is a requirement that the Council is informed immediately.

There has to be an opt-out though, right? Sort of.....

The member of the council (head of state) can *abstain* from the vote on a military/foreign policy if they disagree with it. However, all this means is that the objecting member state (or rather, the head of, who - for reasons given above - isn't necessarily representative of that member state anyway)is not committed to the particular action voted on. Moreover, they ARE obliged to recognise the Union itself being committed to this action and are told, explicitly in "...a spirit of mutual solidarity, the Member State concerned shall refrain from any action likedly to conflict with or impede Union action based on that decision and the other Member States shall respect its position."

In other words, an objecting member state is expected to shut up and stay out of the way. The *only* safety valve offered here is the clause that one third of the member states abstaining is sufficient to stop a proposal.

This, needless to say will impact severely on British strategic and foreign policy goals.

A vague veto right is given in the last subparagraph of section 2; only usable for "vital and stated reasons of national policy".

The problem is, this "safety valve" is a fucking farce anyway, because later on, paragraph 4 (in the same article) nullifies paragraphs 2 and 3 (those allowing for abstension) for "decisions having military or defence implications". - FFS!!

Weakening of UN security council powers

If there was any doubt that Britain's military and foreign policy independence was not already holed below the water line, this should finish it off: Another doozy worth quoting in full, Article 34, Section 2, subparagraphs 2 and 3:

"Member States which are also members of the United Nations Security Council will concert and keep the other Member States and the High Representative fully informed. Member States which are permanent members of the Security Council will, in the execution of their functions, defend the positions and interests of the Union, without prejudice to their responsibilities under the provisions of the United Nations Charter.

When the Union has defined a position on a subject which is on the United Nations Security Council agenda, those Member States which sit on the Security Council shall request that the High Representative be invited to present the Union's position."

In other words, the independent positions of France and the U.K. on the security council are GONE and they are obliged now to go through the EU Foreign secretary.

- And what influence does the democratic chamber (the Parliament) have on these policies? They are allowed to "ask questions" and "make recommendations" - i.e. NO legal binding power, even a veto. FFS.

- It also looks like the member states with the best developed military structures will be asked to do most of the heavy lifting (no surprise there). What is irritating beyond belief though is clause 2. in Article 41 that seems to state that any costs incurred for military or defence implications are to be taken on by the member states, *not* the Union. It gets better - Article 41, clause 2, subparagraph 2 states that any state using the previously mentioned abstention clause will not be compelled to contribute to "military or defence" expenditure. In other words, the member states with no military to speak of can simply register an abstension and not be expected to pay anything towards a security or defence operation full stop. FFS!!

- Let's clarify that commitment again - Article 42, Section 7: "If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power". The accompanying note restates this, in case you were in doubt: "Mutual assistance clause for ALL member states in case of an armed aggression."

Summary: Fuckwit extremist in Estonia decides to bomb a building in Russia, Russian forces invade Estonia in response, British forces are legally compelled to respond immediately and start fighting Ivan, meanwhile the British taxpayer, not the Union, has to foot the cost.

- A "start up fund", to be taken from Members' contributions is introduced, which is expected to "provide the Union with an operational capacity drawing on civil and military assets". This is intended to fund the following:

- Disarmament
- Humanitarian tasks
- Military assistance
- Combat forces
- Conflict prevention
- Peace-making
- Stabilistaion

- ^ With such a vague list of terms, could this "security" remit get *any* damn wider!?

- The "specific character" of NATO commitments are to be "respected". Oh great, that makes me feel better. It is purposefully soft language re: NATO; the language specifying obligations to the Union and Member States is significantly stronger.

- If you were in any doubt that the EU intends to become a cohesive and large military power, consider this clause: (Article 42, Section 3) "Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities". This is to be overseen by the European Defence Agency (an entity already in existence, and a long way ahead in its future planning by the way....).

Foreign Policy

- Article 33 gives the Foreign Secretary the ability to create "special representatives" to carry out their work. So, like the Council president, they can create their own Morlocks.

It is far more interesting from Article 35 onwards (plus other scattered references, earlier and in amendments to the Rome Treaty) however:

- Diplomatic and Consular missions are now expected to effectively harmonise their activities and policies. If there was *any* doubt left that an EU wide diplomatic service was to replace the national ones, this should clear it up:

- All Member State foreign services are now expected to renegotiate their agreements with foreign states to the effect that any member state embassy must now be able to represent citizens from *any* of the member states. This is a fucking huge diplomatic change!! And again, confirmation that national missions will essentially be replaced - its going to work like McDonalds franchises.

Amendments to the treaty and Getting out

- Turns out that Cameron can't practically do any of the things he said he would. That is to say - technically he could - but the provisions in the treaty make it clear that what he is proposing would be exceptionally difficult.

- Proposals can be made by any member state to increase OR reduce the competencies conferred on the Union (for what competencies it has already been awarded, see later). Going on the basis of history, I expect the trend to be almost completely in the direction of increasing competency.

- Unfortunately just to agree to discuss such a change - every branch of the EU governing infrastructure has to be involved - the Council, the Parliament AND the Commission (COREPER will probably be in there slithering around by default also, but this is not explicitly specified).

- "Recommendations" regarding proposed changes have to be adopted by consensus - i.e. not even the change itself, just recommendations regarding it!!!!!!

- The Council has the option, with permission of the Parliament, to avoid convening everyone (i.e. Council, Commission, Parliament), in which case the Council is the only body that discusses it. I really can't see this happening with regard to *anything* involving Britain "renegotiating", not that it makes much of a difference as the assault course is just then all the other heads of state.

- Here's the first super-giant killer clause for everything Dave proposed: Article 47, Section 2, subparagraph 6/7: "The amendments shall enter into force after being ratified by all the member states in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements". Remember Dave's "referendum lock"? The problem is *all* the member states have such a lock on any changes that might be proposed for Britain. Fantastic. It also means Dave wasn't promising anything new at all. This was already in the treaty.

- For general changes to the treaty involving Part Three of the Treaty of Rome (covering the internal workings of the union) that do not include new competencies, an Inter-governmental conference is not required - this is the often described 'self-amending' part of the treaty. Amendments however do still have to be approved by all member states. This is one part where Dave's proposals *could* hold the show up, though not necessarily to the UK's benefit (and this also explains the hostile reaction to his proposals) as any future UK government could use it to hold up progress in the EU machinery.

- If I've understood Article 48 correctly, national parliaments DO have a veto when it comes to new competencies, but not for the 'self-amending' treaty section (as long as proposed changes do not include competencies, obviously). So again, Dave was being disingenuous. His proposals for clawing *back* power for the UK however are up a certain creek for the reasons already outlined above - it really does require consent of all the other Member States for any significant change (and a change to the UK's terms and conditions *would* be an alteration of competencies).

- Requirements in the Treaty of Rome that require the council to act in unanimity, can instead be decided by qualified majority (except for defense).

For actual withdrawal, here's the second super giant-killer for Davy Boy:

- Withdrawal requires a qualified majority in the Council (currently 72%) and the consent of the Parliament (though the latter, as usual is more like an afterthought than an actual obstacle). In other words, everyone else gets to vote on whether or not we leave, moreover, any discussions of the conditions of our leaving we are *not* party to (Article 50, section 4). Looking at the charts put up by Wat Tyler on the UK's net contribution, I can't see this agreement being reached any time soon. Can you?

Closing clauses in the modified Maastricht treaty:

Worthy of note:

- NO sunset, or even review, clause. "This treaty is concluded for an unlimited period."

- Protocols and Annexes are legally binding, "declarations" are not. I can see the protocols and annexes clearly, not sure what is meant by declarations though.

- Disputes over interpretation are expected to resolve issues in French, as the "language of the Court and the negotiations".

More of this anon as I work through the Rome amendments and the Protocols.......

By way of a final word for this section though, I'd like to leave you with the words of Professor R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University), and this was before Lisbon was close to being ratified:

"Unencumbered by the prejudice that the EU is sui generis and uncomparable, federalism scholars now regularly treat the EU as a case in their comparative studies (Friedman-Goldstein, 2001; Fillippov, Ordeshook, Shevtsova, 2004; Roden, 2005; Bednar, 2006). For the purposes of the present analysis, the EU has the necessary minimal attributes of a federal system and crucially the EU is riven with many of the same tensions that afflict federal systems."

Welcome, citizen, to the United States of Europe.

EXCLUSIVE - Nick Clegg says "we are not a sect" (and willing to drop liberal values to get votes....)

2009-10-22T19:26:00.019Z

Several hours ago I attended 'An Evening with the Liberal Democrats' at Sheffield University. Representing the Liberal Democrats were Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown and Paul Scriven (LD councillor and leader of Sheffield City Council). After a sickening propaganda video with various LD voters praising Clegg and the LDs (without identifying a single policy), the representatives got down to business. All three gave a brief polemical stint mostly involving slating Labour and the Tories and asking, rhetorically, "who do you trust".

After this the floor was opened for questions.

I managed to get in first and went straight for a salvo aimed at Clegg. I identified myself as a member of the Libertarian Party and said that there were many reasons I was a member of LPUK and not the LDs. This was because, I explained, they did not deserve the name 'Liberal' and should instead, as others have remarked, more accurately call themselves "social democrats". I pointed out numerous examples where they seemed willing to eject their liberal principles in the interests of (what they thought were) populist sentiments. I specified in particular their attitude to the EU and the fact that they no longer supported a referendum and ended by saying that the closer they got to power, the more they were willing to eject principles, pander to populism and therefore were just more of the same - the same political class as the 'big two'.

Clegg got very shirty with me. He got on a full head of steam, gesticulating boldy as he told me (and everyone else) that he passionately disagreed with everything I said. What was particularly amusing is that just prior to the questions starting he said that he was really pleased to see everyone attending, whatever their political background and said he welcomed disagreement and discussion.

According to Clegg, the Liberal Democrats are "not a sect" and "are intending to win an election" and therefore "need to make our [their] policies understandable." and "not preaching on matters of principle" I heckled back "so what are your principles?" he ignored me and continued his tirade, claiming that being in Europe was best for the country.

Now I don't know about you dear reader, however I interpreted that as a direct vindication of what I said: Clegg was admitting that he and his party were perfectly happy to jettison their principles in order to gain votes. I had to hold back the urge to respond with expletives.

Paddy also responded to me shortly after, though only on the issue of the Lisbon Treaty. According to Mr. Pantsdown - and see if you can get your head around this cognitive dissonance - "Lisbon is not a big shifting in power. It's a pooling of sovereignty." Unless we both have diametrically opposed understandings of the meaning of 'sovereignty', the compromising of it is - to me - about the largest shift of power I can imagine between states. He went on to claim "if it was a big shift in power, and not just tinkering around the edges, the Liberal Democrats would not be supporting it."

So there you have it folks - no answer to the question of a referendum, they know better than we do. And the pooling of sovereignty is "not a big shifting in power". Go back to sleep silly little people asking questions.

But there's more.....some of their answers to other questions were equally hilarious and/or disturbing:

"My home is on loan from the British taxpayer"
In response to a question about being caught out on expenses, Cleggs' response was hilarious. Apparently the reason he thought it was fine to land the taxpayer with the bill for his gardening was because he considered his home "on loan" from the British taxpayer and he wanted to make sure it was nice. He also said that as a result when he sold his home, any profit made would go straight back to the taxpayer.

Of course Nick, of course. (Incidentally, he also got very shirty with this questioner as he did with me).

All three representatives continually referenced the idea of handing power back down to local levels. I couldn't help thinking that what they actually mean by this is handing over to Brussels' plans for regionalisation.

Green Issues

This was fun. Clegg made some astonishing and worrying commitments here. Not only should 1st world taxpayers apparently pay for third world nations to "leapfrog" industrialization and use "sustainable" technologies instead, but - wait for it - Clegg wants to give legal force to the AWG consensus. Amusingly, after all this preaching, someone asked him if he would be in Copenhagen. His excuse? Apparently he's not going because his place is here in the UK harassing the government on these issues. Right.

As an extra, hilarious addendum, councillor Paul Scriven boasted how Sheffield City Council was now giving away green waste sacks for garden refuse. Apparently this is a "green" measure. No it isn't you twat. You're just giving away bags to people who a) have gardens to tend and b) have the time to tend them usefully. How does it reduce anyone's carbon footprint. He also claimed they were "free". The fact that political officials can still say this kind of thing with a straight face highlights the woeful financial literacy of the nation. Of course it isn't free. It's paid for by the Council, funded by Council Tax which is paid for by.....

Sheffield's finest

I've had quite a few interactions with Sheffield's LD councillors. I've watched them debate issues I've had an interest in also in the council chambers. They make lots of grand promises, then break them. The clearest thing to any observer is that what they care about most is giving the Labour Councillors a kicking and looking good to the electorate.

Imagine Mr. Scriven's response then, when a man suddenly stood up at the front and identified himself as a teacher and LD member who was having serious second thoughts about the party since they had taken control of Sheffield City Council. Apparently the council were closing his school down and he thought this was completely unjustified. I don't know the details of this one, but Scriven's response was very telling, especially after the teacher alleged that another councillor, one Andrew Sangar claimed that "whatever Clegg says doesn't matter, Sheffield City Council will still do what it wants."

Scriven went on to state how badly the school was failing, that most pupils came out with five GCSEs or less. A woman in the audience suddenly said "my daughter got thirteen GCSEs from that school". Scriven dismissed her, saying "well done", and continued his rant. He said that the LDs were not closing the school, but in "consultation", at which point I let out a loud belly laugh and everyone stopped to look at me, even Scriven. He went on to give a rousing case for making sure every kid had a fair chance blah blah blah. Unfortunately his delivery was good enough that he got a big round of applause.

So - in summary - the Lib Dems, from this performance, were far worse than I thought they were already. Top grade snake oil salesmen from Lord to MP to councillor. And they proved me right - all they offer is just more of the same.

Sibel reveals all! Time to take action

2009-09-23T11:53:00.007Z

Sibel Edmonds has finally revealed everything she knows, risking imprisonment or worse. The MSM will of course try to bury this story - I'd like to ask everyone to please circulate this story, especially as it has so many important British links (vis a vis The Griffins, Libya, BCCI and more). Remember, she is “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.” - for years now she has been silenced by the draconian state secrets privilege.

Despite the substantial british connections in the international web identified by Sibel, our own MSM has been missing in action (again). For anyone wondering why I have stuck with this story so doggedly, aside from wishing to support a woman of such integrity as Sibel, it is also because this is one of the fault lines of the British corporate-government-criminal nexus exposed for us to see - and one that we can attack with vigour. It packages together neatly all of the hypocrisy, lies and corruption at the heart of Her Majesty's Government and its organs.

Comment from Invictus on Sibel's blog: "We are forever in the debt of those of you endowed with morality, conscience and good soul, whom volunteer to work for civil services, only to have your native goodness used against you, by those entrenched in gvt, whose sole purpose is to maintain and retain power, and NOT serve us, the American Citizenry, their employers."

Description from Brad Friedman: "The exclusive interview lays out the details of what can be described as nothing short of a national security cancer that has metastasized throughout the U.S. government, to the covert monetary, military, and strategic intelligence benefit of our allies and enemies alike."

And Obama's stomping ground, where he's best connected? Chicago.

Turks break Obama's security bubble - http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/23/turkish-diplomats-cause-scuffle-around-obama/

Joe Lauria - interview - A.Q. Khan network is still active.
Freign minister of India & Ambassador - interviewed by Joe.

Our Guardians and Keepers - the Robot Revolution continues

2009-09-11T15:06:00.014Z

With a view to increasing the number of more positive posts on this blog, I wanted to share some recent developments in rescue robotics, including work I am directly involved with myself.

It is unfortunate that we in the West (and the Anglosophere in particular) have a perpetually negative relationship with technology generally and robots in particular. Whilst the narrative of a robot/AI takeover has taken deep roots in our culture and thinking, in places such as Japan and South Korea, robots are regarded primarily as friends (and this is despite producing and deploying some frightening capable fighting robots such as the Samsung sentry).

The field of robotics/AI has been advancing at an incredible pace recently - many practicioners in the field are now pointing out that their work is racing ahead of that produced by many science fiction authors. Whilst there is a substantial amount of controversy over how soon we might create a true AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), or whether it is even possible to do so, the other areas of robotics are racing ahead. And, despite the doom-mongers' views on robotic dictatorship, all of the important ethical questions still come down to politics - as in what uses technologies are put, who controls them and for what ends.

Unlike some technologies, such as genetically engineered food or nanoparticles, the important issues in robotics / AI don't particularly require the precautionary principle. Its an area we can forge ahead in with abandon and what will fuck people up isn't the technology itself, but the prevailing systems of power. The latest generation of fighting robots are frighteningly capable. Should we ever again see a massed land battle between two clearly demarcated opposing forces, those with the robots will wipe out any infantry force on the planet (and no, they won't take over, if the operators lose control, they'll just fall over - probably within days, if not hours without servicing). The decisions to kill will still rest with the humans - and this applies even to autonomous and semi-autonomous robots - if they are deployed and given a 'kill zone'; its still the humans giving the orders and occupies the same suspect moral space as dropping napalm or a nuke - a robot will kill just as indiscriminately.

CD & RI

Firemote
http://www.securobot.co.uk/Firemote%20Version%202%20Brochure.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRmWW_nDew8
For people terrified by Daleks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwqGdd2i8dw&feature=related

Or check out the Anna Konda (http://www.sintef.no/Home/Information-and-Communication-Technology-ICT/Applied-Cybernetics/Projects/Our-snake-robots/Anna-Konda--The-fire-fighting-snake-robot/) prototype:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kFpG_xfymg&feature=related

This will be able to work its way into collapsed areas and also - with the right sensors (currently a matter of debate what the most effective means of detecting human casualties is), find survivors.

Ole 'Pill bug' robot
Just a concept at the moment unfortunately - unfortunate because its a really good idea:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=881
- However, see our work on swarm robotics below:

The American Firerob (http://www.americancrane.com/Telerob/Firerob.htm)
(Look away again if you don't like Daleks...)

FFR-1
(http://www.inrobtech.com/ProductsSolutions_Cat1_Prd4.asp)
Particularly impressive is its heat resistance - 400 degrees C, up to 1000 C in short exposures.

Video:
http://inrobtech.com/UserFiles/FFR-1.wmv

Brazil's SACI
http://www.armtecbrasil.com.br/ingles/index.php?pagina=area&area=Defsecu&produto=saci

LUF60

Guardians

In fact - looking at the similarities between some of the fire-fighting robots and Daleks, the daleks do actually look like a good design for fire-fighting (on flat terrain). Who knew?