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

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......

....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

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...

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.

ASI Blogger's Bash

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. :)

Crushed

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"

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

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

The song you should hear whenever they speak

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?

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'

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

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.....

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

"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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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!