It's not over - by Richard... Tuesday, January 18, 2011

It's not over - by Richard... Tuesday, January 18, 2011

I was not expecting to be writing about the Okhotsk Sea today, but in yesterday's account there were warnings that the crisis was not quite over. And indeed that is the case, with Voice of Russiaobserving that the rescue operation "will not be over today". Conditions appear to have deteriorated sharply and, last night, the four-ship convoy covered "no more than three miles". A helicopter is out reconnoitring the ice situation today.

Once again, we are left to piece together the story from diverse sources (with no input from the Western media). From TASS we learn the intriguing detail that the Bereg Nadezhdy fish carrier needed refuelling, an operation that appears to have been been completed. She now "stays on the ice waiting for her turn for the pilotage", we are told. We also get an idea of the weather, said to be "favourable" with the wind about 20 miles per hour and the air temperature at -10°C.

But there is also the detail, then added, that "further movement is impossible due to the engine malfunction on the Bereg Nadezhdy ship and the lack of fuel".

It is then to Ria Novosti that we turn, finding that strong winds and heavy ice floe in the area are making difficulties. Weather conditions in the area are normal, but strong winds are "causing quick shifting and thickening of ice floe", which has "seriously hampered" the rescue efforts. This seems to be the 1983 shipping crisis all over again, when wind-driven ice-floes also thickened suddenly, causing ice to close round the ships, too fast for them to escape.

There is this still no indication when the ships will be totally in the clear, and you get some hint also that this is creating political stresses, with a report that Putin has "serious problems" in controlling his self-serving bureaucratic machine. He "may pretend to be in charge of the rescue operation in the Sea of Okhotsk," the report says, "but in fact it is directed through the bargaining between the company owning the fishing fleet and the company that owns the ice-breakers."

Oblivious to all this then comes Roger Howard in The Daily Telegraph telling us that "regional sea ice is retreating fast, threatening to raise global sea levels, destroy traditional habitats and ways of life, and accelerate the rate at which the planet as a whole is warming up".

Notwithstanding the flash of scientific illiteracy (since when does melting sea ice raise sea levels, global or otherwise?), the sailors trapped in the Okhotsk Sea would be surprised to learn that "regional sea ice is retreating fast." While Howard points to the "silver lining" to come out of global warming, causing an ice retreat which allows exploitation of oil, gas and mineral reserves, this current crisis underlines the fickle nature of the ice.

There are very great dangers in working in this region, as today's events demonstrate. Nature still has the capacity to surprise.

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Forum - by Richard...

The forum is back open for new applicants, and will be for the next 24 hours. As before, please lodge with me an e-mail immediately after you have registered, advising me of the username you have chosen, so that I can pick it out from the mass of spam applications and activate you account.

Please do not bother registering if you do not intend to take an active part in the forum discussion. If there is no activity on your account, it will be deleted anyway, so you will have wasted your time and mine.

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The new politics - by Richard...

You would think that, after the enforced Irish bailout, Taoiseach Brian Cowen would show either shame or remorse, bowing to the demands of his people to resign, and calling a general election.

But not a bit of it. Faced with a challenge from his own minister for foreign affairs, Micheál Martin, Cowan pulls a blinder, announcing that he was to tabling a motion of confidence - in himself, thereby catching his opponent off-balance, and giving himself a tactical advantage.

Yet he leads a party, Fianna Fáil, which may not even be able to muster enough MPs to form a decent opposition, never mind taking part in government, if Cowen leads it into the general election, so unpopular is the man.

What it has come down to though, is power and personal ambition. The job, the wishes of the people, the party and even the welfare of the nation come a poor second. And what makes this of special concern is that this is the politicians' disease throughout Europe.

Cowan is the model for the "new politics". No wonder the rats are out and about in Downing Street.

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Managing the webspace - by Richard... Monday, January 17, 2011

I had intended to ignore the latest Boris Johnson effluvia - not unusual for me, as most readers know I am not a fan. His much vaunted "intelligence" is, I believe, grossly over-rated. Too many people, in my view, mistake low cunning, honed by years in a political environment, for intelligence.

However, numerous e-mails and other contacts, plus an analysis on Witterings from Witneypersuaded me to look at it, as it addresses the vexed question of the comments sections on The Daily Telegraph. It appears that the anarchy, ill-temper, and outright trollery that we experience is considered acceptable by Johnson, but approval of any such view should be tempered by several consideration.

Firstly, and rather unfortunately, Johnson displays his usual quotient of ignorance, confusing the "blogosphere" with the "commentariat". The man refers to the comments by the former and actually believes that the low-grade comment section to his articles is part of the "blogosphere". As an aside, the confusion, in itself, is so fundamental that it merely demonstrates why, as a commentator, Johnson is a waste of space - not worth the time spent reading him.

More crucially, Johnson might find the anarchy on his comments acceptable, but then he so rarely writes anything which merits a sensible comment that one can understand his relaxed attitude. But the fact of the matter is that the newspaper's comment sections are unmanaged space. Most of the postings are the equivalent of graffiti and litter found in an unloved council tower block in some inner city estate.

The management, unwilling to fund proper moderation, have outsourced the function, where they are subject to the lightest touch by contract staff who have neither the time nor the commitment to do anything effective.

That is not to say that we need to go down the route taken by The Guardian with its Komment Macht Frei and other web pages. In their own way, they have made just as big a mess as the others, applying excessive control. But there is a need to allow entertaining and readable comments, without their being drowned out by trolls, idiots and spammers. Intelligent and sensitive moderation is needed.

Strangely, on the blogosphere, we tend to manage things better – but the reason is probably thatThe Telegraph management wants it both ways. They want the traffic, to maximise their advertisement income, but they are not willing to plough some of the money back into managing and developing the space.

On the Booker column, however, it has left us near despair, as the trolls attempt to hijack the space and dominate the discussion, creating as we remarked earlier, a very significant problem. And, despite the buffoonery of Johnson, it is a problem and will remain so. Privately, The Telegraphmanagement – and especially their ever-so-clever website managers - have admitted defeat. They have waved their piece of paper and ceded the space to the trolls.

So, instead of action, they wheel out Boris Johnson as the apologist, to make a few inane comments, tempered with his usual brand of buffoonery – which does not conceal a higher intelligence – and then consider their readers well served. But look hard at the comments and you will see that, despite the massive numbers, the actual number of people posting is very small, with a large proportion being trolls.

And that is why the MSM is going downhill. They can't even manage their own webspace.

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Herod to investigate deaths of first-born - by Richard...

A report on the flood disaster and climate change will be undertaken by an expert on the federal government's multi-party committee which is investigating ways to price carbon. Professor Will Steffen, a member of the climate change committee set up by the Gillard government in September last year, told AAP he was working on a report covering the floods.

This is the man who already believes that "climate change" made the floods worse. Just the man to do a nice, impartial report.

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Joining a new ship? - by Richard...

Reported in the Daily Mail today, it's quite funny, in a way. With my former local government hat on, though, it's not at all funny. When I had to deal with them professionally, Westminster Council (who are responsible for pest control) were never very impressive, but now things have got worse. We used to say that, if you see one rat out in the open, you have a major infestation. That is undoubtedly the case here.



This is all part of the failure of invisible government. However, at least the rat was in good company ... unless, of course, it was reacting to the presence of the BBC, in which case its action was entirely logical.

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The icebreaker dance - by Richard...

Here we have it again, this curious "dance" by the Russian icebreakers, which we observed yeasterday. This time, the picture (above) accompanies the news that the Krasin and the Admiral Makarov have manged now to extract both the Sodruzhestvo factory ship and the Bereg Nadezhdyfish carrier out of thick ice in the Okhotsk Sea.

With a little more detail given, we learn that the icebreakers first towed the bigger factory ship to a safer area, and then returned for the Bereg Nadezdy, which they took to thinner ice. The report acknowledges a change of plan but it looks as if, in the final stages, the two ships were escorted out together.

The drama is not entirely over though. TASS reports that the ships have got through the "hardest 10 miles" with the highest ice pressure. The convoy will keep sailing northward to a safe area in the Okhotsk Sea, which "may take another few days".

Led by the Krasin, there is an unintended irony here. The ship is named after Leonid Krasin, the Russian Kommisar who is credited with devising the refrigeration system which preserved Lenin's body. Having put his body in ice, so to speak, this icebreaker, the second to bear the name, is dedicated to getting bodies out of the ice, in a manner of speaking, which it has done so spectacularly this time.

With the crisis having started on 31 December, it has now taken 18 days to get these ships released, and mighty relieved they must be. Weather continues to deteriorate as global warming takes its malign grip of the region, with 50 mph winds and temperatures currently down to -20°C. Think how terrible it might have been had the world actually been cooling.

COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS

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They would kill us all - by Richard...

The great hope for energy is shale gas, one of the few ways we might loosen the grip of the greenies on energy policy. Needless to say, the greenies have seen the threat to themselves, and – with the help of Roger Harrabin - are calling for a moratorium on drilling.

Ministers, so far, aren't wearing it – but these are just the opening salvoes. The battle has just started and the greenies mean to kill us all. Nevertheless, over at The Register we learn that the government has been "blasted" for ignoring shale gas. And indeed it has, in common with the MSM which seems to be unaware of what is going on – and there's a surprise.

Is it time to decouple "Climate Change" from the Department of Energy and Climate Change? If it was the plain old "Department of Energy" again, it might spend more time researching new fuel sources, says Andrew Orlowski, effectively repeating a refrain that Booker has been singing for some time.

Anyhow, if the greenies don't finish us off, the Cleggerons will. The coalition has backtracked on a promise to bring in a stabiliser which would have ensured petrol tax was reduced if oil prices went too high. Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander says that Euroslime Dave's stabiliser idea was "complicated" and would be "difficult to achieve".

Ministers have also rejected calls to scrap the 1p rise in fuel duty due to come in on 1 April. So, while the political élites swan about in their chauffeur-driven cars at the taxpayers' expense, we pay through the nose for their privilege.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Ahead of the game - by Richard...

I don't recall the exact time, or even whether I made a conscious decision, but at some time fairly recently I resolved to distance this blog still further from the MSM and its attempts to dominate the news agenda. For long enough, we have argued that the poison of the MSM is as much in what it tells us is important, as what it actually tells us – the fact that it expects us to fall in with its values.

It has, therefore, been something of a delight to have followed the Okhotsk Sea crisis so closely, even adding to what the Russians were telling us, and anticipating some of their moves. This makes blogging fun, as well as important. We are adding value. Equally, it is encouraging to see other blogs take up the cudgels and cover issues, either in parallel or separately, and we are always very pleased to link to them, blogs like Autonomous Mind, Subrosa, Biased BBC andWitterings from Witney (who is doing extremely good work).

Here, though, there is one of the few agreements I had with Iain Dale. His dictum was: if you don't link to me, I don't link to you. It took some bloggers an inordinate amount of time to learn this lesson, and some still do not seem to be able to grasp the principle. But I have no time for theprima donnas or the "precious" bloggers who think they must "own" an issue in order to discuss it, and present themselves to their readers as the only toilers in the vineyard.

With that, one can only express an element of pride in the way bloggers, in Australia and here, have been leading the field in unravelling the events behind the tragic floods in Queensland. The essence was recorded by Booker yesterday, the first British MSM journalist to step outside the box, rehearsing events which the Australian media is only just beginning to look at.

As we, the bloggers, more and more frequently set our own agendas, this would be to no avail if the readers were not there. But, of late, those that do the work – this blog included – are experiencing healthy increases in readership numbers. Individually, our hit rate may be small but, collectively, we have a huge reach and those of us who work together (albeit informally) are reaping the benefit of such co-operation.

The MSM, on the other hand, become but shallow bulletin boards. With rare exceptions, they do not inform us any longer - merely they identify stories that we, the bloggers, can look at. We can then research them properly (there will always be bloggers who know more than the media about a given subject), and post without the (self-imposed) pressures and limitations of the dead tree press and their equally lame broadcasting counterparts.

Given the way MSM circulations are declining, we'll still be there when some of them have gone. By then, we hope, even the politicians will have woken up to where the action is ... although they may be gone too, judging from current performance. On the other hand, blogging is beginning to come of age. We are ahead of the game.