Tuesday, 31 May 2011

And we need the MSM why? - by Richard... Tuesday, May 31, 2011


This is the MSM's idea of a newsworthy item, carried by The Guardian, most of the national press and the BBC. The Daily Failygraph, normally so stingy when it comes to external links, this time offers an active link to the website.

And they wonder why this is a failing industry?

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Downsizing - by Richard...


It is encouraging to see some original thinking about the state of things, and how we should respond, setting our own agenda on the blogosphere rather than relying on the MSM or the politicians to tell us what to think. We need neither when we have our own fora.

Into the fray comes Old Holborn who advocates voluntarily reducing "money based economic activity". He is trying it and, as a consequence, reduces the amount of tax the state is legally able to extract from him, starving the beast and thereby reducing the power and reach of the state.

He tells us that he has belatedly reached the conclusion that planting a carrot is one of the most subversive things a citizen can do. And his return to the quasi Good Life had not made him poorer in any practical sense. Rather he is spending more time with his family and his food quality has greatly improved.

Interestingly, I was today discussing this concept, before reading the OH post, noting a former BBC programme-maker who had done exactly the same thing. It is an option adopted by the EUReferendum household as well, where downsizing has precisely the effect of – quite legally – cheating the taxman. As a political statement, it has much to commend it.

However, stepping off the treadmill is not entirely the answer, as long as there are three major imposts – energy bills, water and council tax. These are not income-related, and through them the state can reach out to extract increasing amounts. Then there is the increasing burden of VAT and, as others are driven by state taxation to increase their charges, we have inflationary pressure on a wide range of goods and services.
Retreating from the state, therefore, it not the whole answer – nor even a safe answer in the longer term. The old aphorism applies: either you take an interest in politics or it takes an interest in you. You cannot just apply passive resistance to the monster. We have to reach out and chain it down. Unless Old Holborn has a better idea, he also needs to look at Referism.

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Forum - by Richard...

The forum is back open for new applicants, and will remain so for the next 24 hours. If you wish to register, please lodge with me an e-mail immediately afterwards the username you have chosen, so that I can pick it out from the mass of spam applications and activate your account. Do not rely on the automatic systems - they have been disabled because of the spam problem.

Please do not register if you do not intend to take at least an occasional part in the forum discussion.

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Another day, another jailbird - by Richard...


So, Lord Taylor, the "token nigger" – as I heard him described by a very senior Tory MP (in whose party you can meet a degree of racism which would make the KKK blush) – is being banged up, with a sentence of 12 months. He will be out in three.

One cannot help but think that he is a token in more ways than one, other peers and MPs having been more adept at gaming the rules, without straying into overt criminality. On the other hand,Longrider brings us down to earth. "I am currently earning little more than minimum wage for a part time, dead-end job while I rebuild my life", he says. "I never forget that it is people like me who pay for these leeching bastards".

But the bigger problem is all those "leeching bastards" who rip us off and manage to remain within the law. We wouldn't even have enough prisons for them if we could bring them to book, and would have to make do with tumbrels and knitting. Now wouldn't that be a tragedy.

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Another dozen - by Richard...

To our collection of independent British political bloggers, Max Farquar has added a further twenty four. With another twelve below, we are well on our way to the first hundred-mark:
Over on the IPB site Max has also started up a five-a-day series, highlighting five posts of interest ... not my choice, but then he's not me. That is the delight of independent bloggers ... we don't all do the same thing. The invitation to join IPB stands - add your own selection.

The problem for all of us is the volume, and sorting the wheat from the chaff. You could easily spend the whole day touring the blogosphere and, while you would pick up some superb material, there would also be a lot of dross.

However, I am no great fan of the ranking system that Iain Dale used ... how do you rate one blog as better than another? But, I'm minded to look at grading, such as the star system, widely used elsewhere. Three criteria come to mind: writing (quality of); frequency; and presentation. A technical marking scheme should not be too hard to devise, with stars perhaps awarded by a panel of bloggers (peer approval?) on the basis of strict application of the agreed system.

Frequency seems easiest to rank, say: five stars for multiple entries per day; four stars for at least five daily entries in a week; three stars for at least weekly; two stars for at least monthly, and one star for less frequent.

Combine that with perhaps symbols to denote specialisms (economic; British party politics; Scottish politics; European politics; climate change; military ... etc., etc.), and there may be the germs of system that would help see off the likes of Huff-Puff and the MSM, which would like to take over the blogosphere, giving guidance to the readers who are, after all, the "customer".

What think you ... what say you? Forum is open for new registrations, or you can add a comment on the IPB site.

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And for my next trick - by Richard...


And what am I supposed to do after breakfast?

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Beware of Greek politics - by Richard...


As the situation in Greece comes to a head, Purple Scorpion is not impressed with the Greek protesters in Constitution Square. Rather than the start of a revolution against corrupt politicians, he ventures that we have "spoiled children" at play, imbued with an over-developed sense of entitlement.

With The Guardian weighing in to support them, one is inclined to agree, although I would like to think that we have both dynamics at play. And if the front ranks are spoiled children with their hands out for more (of our) money, well ... as was remarked recently by an anonymous cynic, someone has to soak up the bullets before the hard men get down to work.

Nevertheless, we are treated to a high-intensity "stream of consciousness" narrative from The Guardian, which notes a banner which has "flapped in the wind for almost a week surviving the rigours of sun and sudden downpour". Its "fading slogan" summed up the mood of the nation at the centre of Europe's debt crisis: "We want our life, we want our happiness, we want our dignity," it declared. "So out with the thieves and out with the IMF".

Suddenly, the newspaper achieves the impossible and has us rooting for the riot police, yearning for them to wade in and bloody a few of these Socialist wuzzies. This is not revolution but special pleading by a privileged minority.

"Openly we say that we have been inspired by the demonstrators in Spain," says arch beneficiary Simos Adamopoulos, an organiser who has spent three nights sleeping in a tent in the square. "Our motto is 'the battle that is never waged is never won.' We will stay here, and in squares up and down the country for as long as it takes".

Says Adamopoulos, "we're also really disgusted with the system, with the political establishment, with all those crooks and thieves. As we've got poorer they've got richer and that you could say is also spurring us".

Not least of Greece's problems, though – we are reliably informed – was an ill-considered period of electoral bribery during 2004-2009 when public finances fell apart after the government neglected to collect taxes to the tune of €93 billion. Chickens, as they say, are coming home to roost.

However, this does not stop a welter of accusations about the sale by prime minister Papandreou and members of his team of $1.3 billion-worth of credit default swap contracts (CDS on Greek sovereign debt) on or around December of 2009, shortly after coming to power.

The gist of the allegations rest on the charge that the insurance protecting against a Greek default was bought during the spring and summer of the same year, by the Hellenic Postbank, a public banking arm of the Greek government.

That insurance, it is charged, is today worth approximately $27 billion, which would go a long way towards preventing the privatisation and sale of the nation's assets.

Unfortunately, we are told, the Greek government sold the contracts in December of 2009, for a paltry 40 million dollar profit, to a private firm for "high net-worth individuals" founded in 2009, by the name of IJ Partners, the vice president of which shares board membership on a separate NGO with the prime minister's own brother, Andreas Papandreou Jr.

Thus we are pitched in to the minutia of Greek politics, without the information or background to understand what is going on, although with enough knowledge from our previous researches to know that the system is deeply and fundamentally corrupt. We are tempted to say a plague on all their houses, except that the UK is one of the IMF guarantors and we will have to pick up a large part of the bill - and the Greek prime minister is, of course, part of our government.

What one can observe from all of this, therefore, is that we need to be better informed of events which threaten to have profound repercussions, the nature of which we only dimly understand. If there is to be a revolution, we need to know which side to cheer.

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The cruellest fiction - by Richard...


Thrown in with great fanfare at the end of the budget was Boy Osborne's "clever" tax on the oil industry, to finance a marginal reduction in petrol tax. But now we see the consequences of this particular piece of economic vandalism.

According to an "activity survey" by UK Oil & Gas, the tax will cost the UK £50bn and 15,000 jobs, scuppering at least 25 projects, accounting for over 1 billion barrels of oil and gas and £12 billion of investments. It will shorten the lifespans of 20 producing fields by up to five years, while investment earmarked for projects considered likely to go ahead over the next 10 years has fallen by 30 percent to £23 billion.

Also in the energy field, we learn that world-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from the government's carbon reduction commitment (CRC) scheme, which imposes a tax on industrial electricity consumption.

Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire (pictured). It faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that".

The Prospect union is urging the government to exempt energy use where the focus of research contributes directly to public good and government policy. "This [tax] will have a negative impact on important research into low carbon energy sources and that cannot be the right consequence of a policy the government is pursuing to promote a low carbon economy," said Sue Ferns, head of research at Prospect.

Another Oxfordshire laboratory, the Diamond synchrotron light source, expects a £300,000 bill under the CRC. A spokesman said the lab hoped to offset the bill by investing in better climate control and motion-sensitive lighting.

At the Daresbury laboratory in Cheshire, the CRC bill will worsen financial woes that have forced managers to draft redundancy packages and consider cutting back on equipment. "Science is already struggling here and now we are being charged an additional premium to go about our everyday business while working to address the government's own stated grand challenges in science for the 21st century", said Lee Jones, an accelerator physicist at the laboratory.

Readers will also recall that last year the government bought £60,000,000-worth of "carbon credits" for Whitehall and other government offices in the UK, as well as British Nato bases in Europe – another facet of this insane system that is going to damage our energy research effort.

And thus do we have exposed the cruellest fiction of all, that the government actually knows what it is doing, and is capable in any respects of managing its affairs.

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First they came for the slaughterhouses - by Richard... Monday, May 30, 2011

Paul Tucker, the Bank's Deputy Governor for financial stability, and Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) who will become Deputy Governor for prudential regulation, told The Telegraph that the UK's proposed regulatory system risks becoming little more than a local police force applying a one-size-fits-all set of European rules.

They've done it for every other industry they've touched, so why should financial services be any different? And, for all those many years, what help have we had from the industry when, for instance, we were battling against one-size-fits-all rules for slaughterhouses?

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Over the top - by Richard...

Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, addressed the media in Zurich this afternoon and insisted that Fifa was not in a crisis. "Crisis? What is a crisis?" he said. "We're not in a crisis". And to make his point, he also emphasised that there would be no investigation into the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

And that took the first 20 minutes of the BBC main evening news. In fact, it was still going on when I turned off the TV. Even if this was vaguely important (international football corrupt, shock!), we see once again the MSM unable to act proportionately, obsessed by specific issues and unable to see the news in the round, much less report it.

Therein lies a serious problem for, while the media narrow down their focus, effectively handling only one issue at a time - of its choosing - many other things are happening that go unreported. The inability of the MSM to see this, and deal with the news agenda responsibly, is perhaps its greatest betrayal.

Any which way you look at it, the first 20 minutes of the main evening bulletin devoted to this subject is over the top. As if we did not already know it, the state broadcaster has lost the plot.

Pic by Anoneumouse.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 18:58