Fake Accusations Don't Work, Big Media!

We are now in a very powerful era where the corrupt, the manipulators and the rest of the global deceivers – including much of the big media – no longer have the absolute control that they had been so close to achieving.

Trump, Brexit, consequent shifts across Europe, and falling trust in the mainstream media – all of these and more have set alarm bells ringing in the globalists' collective minds.

In desperation, they are re-grouping and re-thinking their strategy, meanwhile pulling out all the stops to try to halt (or at least slow) the currently ongoing dissipation of their power and influence.

One of those desperate moves was their coordinated launch of the smear term 'fake news' to attempt to discredit real facts while they continued to purvey 'good facts' i.e. pseudo-facts that can be presented with seeming credibility but in pursuit of a propaganda exercise.

Anyone who has watched the Babylon 5 episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" will already be familiar with those two terms.

Unfortunately for its instigators, the likes of Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson – among others – turned it around by exposing much of the big media themselves as the originators of genuinely fake news, not their intended targets.

Thus we now have the interesting spectacle of the left-leaning Washington Post already seeking to 'retire' that expression – only because it now works against the dishonest, rather than for it as was intended, of course. One word in their Facebook link's strapline gives the game away: "Conservative" – that's the real reason for this move.

I wonder what they'll all devise next...

Draining the Swamp

It is pleasing that Stateside there will soon begin what is being termed 'draining the swamp' to get all the accumulated filth out of American 'power-offices' (as one might collectively label them, government and non-government positions that wield real power, together).

This is assuming that the corrupt elements in the Establishment don't succeed in arranging or aiding the President-elect's assassination in the meantime, or that Obama doesn't now succeed in starting WW3 as he has been unsuccessfully reportedly doing since April of last year, according to several informed sources. One way or another, their collective (and well-embedded) might will fight back hard in order to preserve their positions, perks & benefits, and ideology. It appears that some of them at least are Satanists, according to several reputable sources, so this is big stuff indeed!

The latter of the above two possibilities seems to have become much less likely as Mr Putin has already (just hours ago) publicly stated that he is "ready to restore relations with the United States" – a crucially important marker put down in the timeline at this precise moment. This pulls the rug out from under Obama, and leaves him little room now to foment that global nuclear conflict.

Thus the world is already considerably safer as a direct result of the Trump presidential election success: something I have been saying all along would be so, of course, as readers of my scribblings both here and elsewhere will no doubt recall.

Meanwhile, although America has been slowly waking up to the realities in their country – despite almost entirely one-sided media bias (even in places ostensibly on the opposite side) and slanted & faked-up opinion polls, among other methods of swaying public opinion – they are still a fair way behind where we are in Britain.

It was the advent of widely-read online media alternatives and other informed (and more open & honest) sources that has turned and continues to turn public awareness away from the slanted reporting and concealment of politically 'inconvenient' matters that made all this possible, of course – which, incidentally, is why corrupt institutions are trying to control and censor such sources.

The difference between the two sides of the Atlantic has, I think, been largely if not mostly down to the less one-sided nature of our own mainstream media here in Britain. People started to become aware of the differential reporting and treatment of the same topic, especially once they were easily able to check our various sources one after the other.

Of course, media can take whatever views they wish, as long as they are legal ones – but their credibility and thus readership (and the all-important advertising revenue) will be impacted if they are perceived as less than honest, accurate, fair or useful from their readerships' point of view.

This 'new media' change still took time to take effect, as our successive elections of various kinds have illustrated if one analyses enough of them, but the trend in Britain over the last decade and a half (or so) has been unmistakable. Although a number of factors have been in play, some media's attempted manipulation of public opinion had been perhaps the single biggest contributor for quite a while, and that has now diminished considerably – as sales of and subscriptions to the traditional media sources consistently dwindles in evidence.

Another source of indoctrination that hasn't yet changed much – but will, thanks to the new types of schools in Britain – is the socialist brainwashing being perpetrated upon our upcoming generation by so-called 'qualified' Lefty teachers and college/university lecturers. That's currently most of them. This, combined with the young's as-yet inexperience of life and learning in the real world over time, largely explains the generational political divide.

Yes, those of us who have 'been around the block' a fair few times have learned – in our own way and in our own time – what is real and what is cleverly dressed up falsehood or 'spin', and those of us with the wisdom and self-honesty to actually learn and truly grow up despite our earlier preconceptions tend to be on the political Right, even if with a degree of caution and broader realism tempering our outlooks to some extent.

That is as true as ever, though not universal. Too many chips on shoulders and suchlike for that!

It is the targeting of our young,on both sides of the Atlantic, that starts it all off again with each successive generation – and it will be the eventual and essential draining of the education sector 'swamp' that will finally clean up the core of our society, but will probably be completed after the others have been cleansed. It will take many years.

Press Matters

Here and there over the past couple of years I have been encountering complaints by opposition councillors on Medway Council regarding the bi-monthly magazine that goes out to our households in the borough: Medway Matters. They have even referred it to the Secretary of State (SofS), claiming it is in breach of what is called the Publicity Code for Local Authorities.

Now, I am no expert on that code, but – although I have long-standing concerns with the publication – I doubt that it is actually in breach, and even if so, only marginally, which could be easily remedied with specific guidance from the SofS's office.

I do believe it to be, in parts, a little too close to being a Cabinet-dominated vehicle for that select band of councillors (just ten of the 55 elected members), as an inspection of a couple of recent years' worth of issues will reveal. For anyone with the time to spare and sufficient interest, I'd suggest going through all of the back issues for, say, the last five years for a more complete assessment.

However I do see that one charge thatis being made, if not strongly, is that because it takes in-house (i.e. the council's own) advertising – which helps fund it by the way – this is connected with the plight of our local press. This is specious, as the reason both local and national printed media are losing circulation is because more and more people are reading their news, sport and the rest of what appears in such publications not in print form, but on-line. This applies all around the country, not just here in Medway, where it has to be said all three such local news print outlets run busy websites themselves.

Although the graph at this page is a good year and a half out of date, the trend for all national UK newspapers is clear and has continued since, as Guido and others have periodically reported.

For example, the Kent on Sunday is still going strong, but it long ago dropped most of its YourMedway type publications, which were editorially identical to the Sunday product anyway, apart from pages 1 and 2 which were the only pages covering the specified area. I soon bored on reading mainly about what had happened in Maidstone or Ashford or Dover. The only other newspaper that was then still available was Your Tunbridge Wells(!)

The point here, though, is that almost all other areas in the county were similarly affected, thereby taking the Medway Matters element completely out of the equation: it is a red herring. Different, but not dissimilar in this core point, stories apply to the Messenger and News, the latter now publishing on-line only, and in a joint 'Medway and Maidstone' form.

If one looks at the amount the council 'spends' on its advertising in Medway Matters in a recent year, it's around £20,000 – which represents a drop in the ocean relative to even a local newspaper's annual advertising revenue. In fact, the council still advertises some things in the local press anyway (because it is more appropriate, for legal reasons, or something else that requires it), probably much more than the above amount, so the effect of 'Matters' is even less pronounced than might be assumed at first glance.

No: the real reason the opposition councillors don't like the council's magazine is because they don't have any editorial control over it. As we know from all left-wing régimes, and even many Labour-run councils, they are always dependent on propaganda in order to get any votes from outside their core activist and support base.

This is why, when the boot is on the other foot in such councils, there can be a much more serious issue with council publications and related matters (of which there are a fair number, by the way: it's not just magazines) and I have learned of quite a few of these. I might be quiet on this 'blog nowadays – though that might change soon, as we have local as well as national elections coming – but I am never idle, and my sources feed me all manner of solid evidence about what (usually) Labour-run councils are up to, in many ways.

Thus the months to come could again be very interesting on these pages – but I haven't yet decided how to play this January-to-May 2015 period of activity here, or even if I shall participate at all. By the end of the year I should have a clearer idea on that; but in the meantime this post is a reminder of my traditional myth-and-spin debunking style that many will well remember...

A Guide to Question Time

For years, the BBC's Question Time political programme has been scrutinised, ever since its apparent left-wing bias became sufficiently obvious to make the more attentive viewers sit up and take notice. It has been worsening ever since, and now considerably larger numbers are commenting on its ever-strengthening leftward slant.

Several people have not only been watching it all closely, but a few (most notably Beeb Bias Craig) have laboriously documented all manner of interesting statistics – such as numbers of interruptions of each panellist by the programme's host, David Dimbleby – and a whole range of other factors.

Here, then is a guide to what is done and how it is done...

The Panel

Usually five members, the odd number so that it can be made lop-sided by including someone who has no relevance to the political scene at all, and is usually a Lefty comedian or similar showbiz figure (this week it's a 'poet and author').

The panel will nearly always have at least three members from the political left (or allied to it, as in the case of the comdian or whoever is in the fifth seat), and they try to specialise in hetting one of the more left-of-party Conservatives on the panel, as often as they can. The same names crop up repeatedly. There will often also be a journalist among the five.

The solitary exception (as far as I have been able to ascertain) is that, once per season, they have it round the other way, to 'prove' that they are 'unbiased' and 'even-handed'. No-one is fooled by this; but it makes it impossible to do anything about it. Smugly, they continue as ever.

The seating arrangement is planned to suit the programme-makers' agenda as well. For example, in this short clip, we see how Labour's Harriet Harman got David Dimbleby to interrupt Conservative Iain Duncan Smith, which was oh-so-easy to do because of how they were positioned...



The Questions

These are, of course, chosen by the BBC production people from the many submitted – which is why the topics they cover are so predictable that at least two websites run a regular contest for their visitors to predict what will come up. Typically the actual subjects will allow for maximum bashing of the Right, will play to the Labour/Green member(s) of the panel, and will echo the BBC's own agenda.

This is why important matters that don't suit their agenda are omitted, and less significant ones can be debated for an inordinately long time. It is not unusual for more than a third of the programme's air time to be taken up dealing just the first question. They always ensure they make time for the frivolous 'final question', which someone in the audience has conveniently provided, without fail every week.

It seems likely that it is either scripted by the producers, or guided by them, in advance. No-one in the audience is going to waste their one chance to ask a question on something lightweight and (often) trivial, after all.


The Audience

These are predominantly public sector workers and students. They are largely brought in on coaches from other areas – which explains why so many called to speak don't have local accents. Certain ones, vetted by (perhaps even invited as personally known to) the producers will be made known to David Dimbleby, who will make sure they are called.. Usually, despite many people indicating are not called at all, one, two or three of these will be called upon twice, though occasionally the second time follows their first speaking bit being to ask one of the chosen questions. Perhaps that's thought to be less blatant..

Somerimes there are a few seats right at the front of the audience seating area, in front of the longer rows, and these are for 'those who must be called'. I think they also provide an occasional steer to David D on something (via gestures or hand signals), off camera but plainly visible to him.


The Chairing

The chairman specialises in selective interruption, attempting to derail any Right-winger on the panel by butting in just after they've started, and repeatedly interrupting. This tends to be done to the Lefties much less. He doesn't usually dare do this too much ro the non-politicians, though, such as David Starkey, I have noticed.

There will also be cutting-off if a Right-wing replay is making too good a point, directly counter to the BBC's own preferred message, if he can get away with it.

Generally, there will be an obvious (i.e. it's easy to see it being set up) ambush, prepared in advance, on any Conservative MP (or equivalent) panellist. Sometimes there are two; but it's easy to spot what is going on, once you have watched a few of these programmes, and to work out how it was devised.


In Conclusion

There is a lot more, but the above gives the flavour, and some detail. It will certainly make some of the more puzzling aspects of the show (and it is a show, literally) more understandable, when one realises that the whole purpose of it is to promote the BBC's own political agenda, and that is its sole purpose. That includes helping Labour, Greens and the like look good, giving them a relatively friendly platform, 'Tory-bashing', and messages on such matters as public spending vs 'the cuts', Israel/Palestinians, and lots of others

It's all obvious when you pay attention to what they are trying to feed the viewing public. It works; so the formula has remained the same for years – though the degree of bias has continually intensified, as it has throughout the Corporation's news and politics departments, and probably elsewhere as well.

Weekly Political Digest – 11 October 2013

There has been so much going on this week that I have had to miss out a few of the less interesting topics; but there's plenty of good material available via the links below, and hopefully my accompanying notes will be useful too. I am doing this with a less-than-clear head, so it might not come out quite right in places, but I'll do my best...


Covering It Up

Probably the biggest story of the past week (and more) has been the ongoing revelations about just how much trouble within the National Health Service (NHS) was kept hidden by the then minister Andy Burnham, especially toward the end of the previous decade because of the electoral damage the truth might well do to Labour in the May 2010 General Election.

The Standard has a useful item on Basildon and Thurrock hospitals, and of course we already knew of the mid-Staffs scandal. There are no doubt others, as the sheer numbers of reports of issues seems to keep growing by the day, from scores to hundreds, and now (apparently) thought to be somewhere around a thousand, plus or minus. In fact, no-one seems to have reached the end of the trail as yet, so that number is likely to continue to grow – unless it is suppressed, that is.

The whole contention that has inevitably been propounded is that the NHS was not safe with Labour, and certainly wasn't fit for purpose. Anecdotes from several trustworthy sources I know personally reveal a true catalogue of poor practice and, frankly, idiocy in many areas. It would be embarrassing to the decent NHS staff to have these revealed here, tempting though it is to use a few examples to show that this is all genuine.

I could provide at least another half-dozen links to good, useful articles on this topic; but I don't think they are needed at this time. If that should change, I'll post additional links (probably updated or new) in the weeks to come.

As I have mentioned before, the NHS model is not a good fit for today's world and its needs and capabilities, and the NHS is regarded by many with knowledge of other countries' medical services to be considerably inferior. That's why it needs a proper reform exercise, to bring it up to a standard fit for the twenty-first century. These issues are fundamental and can no longer be metaphorically swept under the carpet: they need to be tackled, and now.


It's A Gotcha!

As regular readers will by now have got the message I keep exemplifying, Lefties tend to be dishonest, manipulative and hypocritical. Indeed, I have never in my (fairly long) life met even one that hasn't been at least one of those, and most have repeatedly demonstrated at least two of those traits.

The truly ghastly Mehdi Hasan has been caught out in respect of his attitude toward the Daily Mail, switching around completely from one occasion he has reason to mention them to the next. See Mr Steerpike's post at The Spectator, complete with a short clip from BBC Question Time on which he appeared last week and where the hypocrisy became evident.

Now, there might be a little leeway one can allow, bearing in mind that a job application was one side of this picture and the first part of story dates to a couple of years or so ago; but this was way beyond what could be allowed for in that context. Read Mr Steerpike's post, also this by Guido and this at Trending Central, and then think about how it would be if you were in the same position. It's a good little exercise to try...

On the topic of Question Time, this from The Commentator illustrates yet again just how blatantly biased the BBC is, with yet another heavily-slanted programme in the series, as most of them are now. I have to confess I no longer bother with it: as I am no longer a moderator for the old LiveChat for the programme (because CoverItLive broke their 'it'll never cost you a penny' promise and made it untenable) there is no compelling reason for me to sit through all that carefully-engineered Socialist propaganda and manipulation – so I don't.


Press Freedom

Another big issue that is still rumbling around Westminster, because a Bill about it is coming up, is press freedom-vs-regulation post-Leveson. Lord Justice Leveson has this week appeared before Members, but gave bo answers, evading replying instead. The whole thing is in danger of more-or-less freewheeling into  something like how the old Soviet Union worked, with the government effectively dictating what could and could be said, and how it was to be presented.

We do not need a Pravda/Izvestia type of media scene in Britain! The criminal law as it exists already covers all angles, so there is no need for any new regulations. Perhaps Fraser Nelson has the best approach to tackling the issue once and for all: by enshrining media independence and freedom (within the law) in a Bill of Rights. Otherwise it's going to pop up again and again, whenever there is a media scandal, rather than correctly applying the relevant existing law or laws to deal with it properly and to most if not all people's satisfaction.


Shuffling the Deck

All three major parties have been having a re-shuffle of their ministers/shadows this past week. Labour's was most notable for keeping Andy Butnham, despite all the revelations as I mentioned above. A junior shadow minister for health has been moved instead. Either Burnham 'knows where the bodies are buried' as the saying goes, or Len McCluskey told Ed[ward] Miliband to keep him in post as shadow health secretary.

I can't think of any other likely reason; but it makes Ed-M look weak by not having what it takes to get him out of the shadow cabinet. Overall, it does look like a McCluskey-driven set of changes, as any Blairite members (such as Jim Murphy, Stephen Twigg and Liam Byrne) are now out, and hard Left types are in. It has been a true lurch to the left by Ed-M, as many pundits predicted and have also recognised once the news came out.

The Lib Dems' reshuffle was fairly low-key, and doesn't really warrant further mention. For the Conservatives, David Cameron made some interesting changes to some junior appointments, but (as expected) left the front-bench team untouched. There was no secret made of this plan, though it seems to have surprised one or two commentators...

Guido ran a rolling 'blog of the reshuffle details as they came in, and the completed record is here. I find it convenient because of its colour coding that makes it easy to concentrate on one party at a time if desired, or to simply go through it chronologically if that is preferred.


 Energy Price Fixing

?The Labour leader's big new populist policy is to rig (i,e fix, or dictate if you prefer that term) energy prices for 24 months if he should become Prime Minister in 2015.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, it was supposed to. Of course, those of us with experience of Labour governments trying this sort of stunt in the past well remember the blackouts because the power supply couldn't be maintained to all customers at all times.

With the decay in our own power station capability, EU directives closing down perfectly serviceable power stations and a lack of any proper energy provision for the future during Labour's previous thirteen years in government, the situation is likely to be a lot more severe this time than it was back in the 'seventies. I still have powerful and enduring memories of those times, and it was not good. Price fixing will mean insufficient funds to invest in whatever is required to meet future need.

The National Grid is already warning of blackout risk this winter, although that shouldn't happen in practice as other sources are available to us.

Not that Ed-M cares about that: all he wanted was something attractive that he could 'sell' to enough of the less alert sections of the electorate, simply to help him win the next election. That was and is his only consideration, and it is obvious with a couple of moments' thought. As this at Trending Central indicates, several major energy providers already offer fixed-price tariffs for even longer periods, as well as providing other information to show that this 'policy' is in reality essentially a con-trick – and it will cost us all a lot!.


Communism Kills

Actually, all forms of Leftward politics ends up killing people, as oppression and fear are the only way they can maintain their steely grip on the citizenry. The fabled New World Order of which James (a.k.a. Gordon) Brown spoke so often is to be a totalitarian dictatorship, and is largey in place in key chunks of the world.

Often the Left-wing régimes we have encountered during the last century or so have been mass-murderers as well, though trying to ascertain accurate numbers is difficult for various reasons, from lack of record-keeping  to artificial famine in areas without accurate census data, and suchlike.

I don't have all the information – though longer-term readers of this 'blog will recall that I have posted a table showing recorded and estimated numbers murdered, by date, country, régime and event. The middle column of that table seems to be borne out by a new book that seeks to document it all as authoritatively as possible. That number was around a hundred million.

The third column in the table I posted showed what it might have been in reality – more than founle that number – but this will almost certainly never be possible to verify or refute. The bottom line is that Communism (or Socialism, which is essentially the same thing, as the likes of Stalin and Lenin have both attested) is in that business and does not care how many it kills.

The iron grip, reinforced by fear, is all that counts with the evil that is all Leftism, without any exception. Those who claim otherwise are either being dishonest or just aren't bright enough to understand the overwhelming and unambiguous concrete evidence that is easily found in general terms. For the closest to accurate figures, though, Stephane Courtois' Black Book is probably the best source currently available.


The Cancer Called Labour

Not my words, but Sean Thomas in The Telegraph. Although he tends to lay it on a little thick, he is correct; and this also follows on neatly from my previous item in this digest. The contention is that the Blair/Brown government was 'the worst ever' – which is very much a judgment call, though I'd agree without hesitation that it was one of the very worst, and one of the most evil, too.

 Beyond that is hard to be definitive on, but Sean could well be right. Anyway, it's not all that long and worth going through, if only as a reminder of some things that might have slipped our minds with the passage of years. The section on education, toward the end, is a sobering reminder, expressed in stark terms, of just how bad we had become.


And that's it for now. I have some other quite usable material, but this is starting to become long again, so I shall stop here. I might do a supplementary digest after an overnight think: we shall see...

Tweet of the Day – 11 October 2013

I have been wondering whether to re-introduce this feature, and have missed several 'good 'uns' while making up my mind, so let's have a go and see what happens!

This was tweeted by Matk Wallace early this morning...

"149,632 out of 150,000 Royal Mail staff accepted shares. The Guardian reported this as 'hundreds of staff reject free allocation of shares' "

Now that's what I mean by slanted reporting, and it happens so often. Bearing in mind that it needed a conscious effort to misrepresent the real news, it just goes to show how corrupt (as in Pravda-in-the-eighties) The Guardian is.

I really hate this sort of thing: the paper's job is to report the story that is, not try to make one up to suit a warped and twisted agenda of their own. If they can't or won't do that, they shouldn't be in the business. Fortunately, they are so hugely and chronically loss-making that they might not survive much longer anyway.

UPDATE: Guido has this easily-disproven smear from the same paper.

No-one with any integrity would take that publication on trust, especially from today, and anything quoted or referenced from it needs to be second-sourced from a more honest source. We already know it is hypocritical: just one example shows this, where they hound Conservatives for having offshore repositories for their funds but the Guardian's own parent company does exactly the same. There are other examples...

USA Today on Vocaloids

I saw this a day or so ago, but it didn't then have the embed code available (or I couldn't seem to find it), but now it has, so the clip appears below. Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to stop it auto-playing (and a thorough web search hasn't helped on this) so it might be advisable to pause it immediately, so that you can take the time to read these notes before playing the video.

 It's a good way to see how western media coverage of the Vocaloid phenomenon is going (I think they're getting better at it, through improved understanding of the subject) and it's fun to see the effect that delving into what is a whole new world to the reporters has and how they handle it.

The interviewees aren't the best or the brightest; and were I think picked for their costumes alone – but it's okay overall and worth watching once, at least...

Newspaper Circulation Figures for August 2013

All these have been relayed in separate tweets (one per title) by Political Betting's Mike Smithson in the last few minutes. My understanding is that they are always a simple mean average per day, derived by adding the number for every day in the month and dividing by how many days it was published in that month. The Sundays are probably included, though I don't know for certain whether this is so.

It is interesting to note not only the general continuing decline in print media since the same month last year, but also the differing amounts, which not a particularly wide spread of figures, it does show a significant variation. Here they are, in order of decreasing circulation...

• The Sun – 2,258,359 (-9·76%)
• Mail – 1,802,83 (-5·85%)
• Mirror – 1,045,971 (-3·93%)
• Telegraph – 557,536 (-4·55%)
• Express – 530,631 (-3·61%)
• The Times – 391,643 (-3·94%)
• Financial Times – 236,281 (-15·65%)
• The Guardian – 189,646 (-7·16%)
• The Independent – 68,696 (-16·0%)

It is very interesting to note that the Guardian and Independent are right at the bottom, the latter the only title to fail to even approach let alone reach the tenth-of-a-million mark, whereas the Mirror is still (just) exceeding the one million mark.

Unsurprisingly the Sun is comfortably out in front, but the Mail has a very respectable figure that isn't such a vast difference from the field leader.

The 'biggest losers' relative to the same month last year were the Indy with a one-sixth drop in print sales, followed very closely by the FT which has lost nearly as much (as a percentage) in the same period, despite their website being mostly behind a paywall so that route is not really an alternative for many potential readers.

Although the Sun comes in third on this measure, it and the remaining titles are all under ten percent drops, with the smallest reduction being experienced by the Express. It's a funny ol' paper, the Express: despite its ongoing (never-ending?) obsessions with Princess Diana and the latest health fad/pronouncement, it remains generally level-headed and informed – though that doesn't stop it going haywire from time to time.

When I worked nights at ASDA, one of the overnight tasks was receiving the newspaper delivery and putting out after checking the right numbers had been delivered. Thus I became familiar with what numbers of each title this particular (and fairly typical, I gather) store sold each day.

That was more than a decade ago, and I can state with a certain degree of authority that the pattern has changed quite a lot since then, but much remains the same. The biggest change is that the Express is now above several other titles that led it comfortably back in those days.

In the case of the Times, with its on-line paywall, this is especially surprising, but with the Guardian and Independent perhaps not to the same extent, as it is more the latter two's decline that has done this than the Express's ascendancy, although there has been that too.. In my days at the store, we'd have just over half as many copies of the Express delivered to us as Telegraphs: now they're almost level pegging.

All in all, these are interesting times for what might be termed the old media...

Miku on Canada's Daily Planet show

This appeared on Canada's Daily Planet programme on the Discovery Channel on 17 May 2013. Pity the uploader of this clip didn't pick a better image for the video (YouTube offers a choice of three); but the clip is actually quite good, and of course in English...

Blogging Post-Leveson

It looks like the proposed Royal Charter – which in itself is probably the least bad of the "have to do something" options that became an unavoidable route to take in a coalition government situation – will include bloggers, as this highlighted extract from the Crime and Courts Bill shows...

I found the above at Cranmer's site, where he has gone into this matter to a fair degree. I suspect it's an unintended consequence as far as the Conservatives within government are concerned, but no doubt deliberately included by officials in this way, in furtherance of a different agenda (which is so easy for the Mandarins with a coalition government).

The 'in the course of a business' wording might exclude bloggers, but this will need definitive legal clarification. Otherwise a number of us are going to have to move the hosting of our 'blogs to an overseas server. I don't think we'll also need to physically leave the country, fortunately!

This really is a terrible way for our nation to go; though I can see that there wasn't a great deal of choice on this in practice, and it will have to do as a stopgap measure until wiser heads prevail and the whole thing can be dropped from statute, probably just a few years hence if we get a majority Conservative Government in 2015.

There are one or two other unknowns as well: if we stop writing about current affairs in England and/or Wales, does earlier material have to be taken down or can it stay on the new-direction 'blog? It can't go completely, of course, as it's all archived automatically at various locations around the world. Therefore there isn't any sense in practical terms in enforcing removal of earlier material if one doesn't join this scheme and thus agree to be bound by it.

That last bit is the key, of course; and already Guido has started a petition, which I have signed, to tell those who wish to censor on-line comment in general just where they can go...

For myself, this 'blog has a much wider remit than just current affairs, so I shall not need to cease blogging; and there are other ways to get material published and 'intell' fed out to others abroad where they can use it in much the same way as I do myself at present. Those whose 'blogs are entirely (say) politics-focused will not have that fall-back position, should it turn out to be a no-no to continue on their present path.

Anyway; we shall have to see what comes of the eventual Charter and its legal interpretation on the above points and (no doubt) numerous others. I shall, naturally enough, be monitoring all of that as it unfolds in the weeks and months to come...

Paper.lie

I have noticed for some time, as I have reported here before, my name appearing on Twitter as being a 'contributor' to on-line pseudo newspapers produced by the paper.li site. I am then credited within the linked on-line publication. It seems that all one has to do is sign up for this and it then automatically produces something that resembles a newspaper on a daily basis, and many of my followers have done so.

I see these 'dailies' mentioned every day when they are produced by for someone I follow on Twitter, and occasionally from others when I am listed as one of those (indirectly) responsible for one or more "top stories" in their edition-of-the-day. In practice, it is rare indeed that it is something I have written myself that is featured in the 'newspaper', but something I have re-tweeted and even then it's invariably from a link, as that's how the stories are garnered.

The problem is that this is in effect a lie: I did not write the material seemingly being attributed to me by association, nor does it necessarily mean I hold any views that are expressed in the linked material – I might have been pointing to it as a model example that makes a point.

For example, there are some pieces written by Lefties that are so obviously crass and ill-informed, not to mention often from a different planet, that they are amusing for the rest of us to read and a useful reminder of the warped way Lefties think. I don't tweet with the intention of having it picked up and re-used in this somewhat different way.

This example has two 'from' me of which one such extracted link I have not even visited: it merely copies to my followers a point that another was making and whose Tweet I re-tweeted – nothing more. The result at paper.li is at best misleading by having my Twitter ID (with its link) attached to it, and I can foresee similar scenarios arising that would be a lot worse than that. That just happens to be the most recent instance: there have been plenty of others.

The whole idea of these fake newspapers is no doubt flattering to the ego of someone who subscribes to them, and probably makes one feel important and significant by having these things in one's name – indeed, their site's 'sales pitch' is very much along those lines. However for those of us having our own efforts in effect misrepresented it is no fun at all. I wonder how many examples of my own have occurred but I haven't been aware of them...

The whole project is severely flawed and often misleading, also of doubtful worth as some of the ones I have seen have been nothing more than dead ends. One of 'my' own, over the weekend, led to a paywall barrier so that was all that appeared in the 'newspaper'.

If the subscriber were to have the ability to check the draft and delete or add to it before it is published, and did so every time, then perhaps there'd be very little potentially contentious and obvious dud material and attributions included. Whatever the get-out clause might be, and the excuses that can be made, in reality it is a poor facility and no-one who wishes to retain their integrity in the public perception should touch this facility with the proverbial barge-pole.