bullshit detectors

You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you *reckon* something. So why not tell us what you reckon? Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uniformed, ad-hoc reckon.

Having open-access comments on websites is technically very democratic, except that it allows the quickiest to be heard loudest, and discourages people who don't like being insulted.

George Monbiot lamented the way this fouls discussion, saying that the Guardian environment site is especially bad. I beg to differ. On reading that I went to a random Guardian news article - it was about Michael Jackson's funeral - and found the same level of brazen ignorance and vitriolic venom there. I think perhaps we think comments are worst at the place we read them most.

But the prevalence of climate deniers at the Guardian site made me realise why, conversely, the Daily Mail site often has surprisingly good comments. People go to where they can beat their chests. It is far easier and more pleasing to talk at length about things you dislike than things you like. So, pick the newspaper or columnist most opposed to your perspective and you'll likely be welcomed into the warm bosom of sympathetic commenters there.

Nicholson Baker's fascinating article about Wikipedia talks about vandalism on the site, which is surprisingly low compared to other high-volume open-access sites. Partly it's due to the fact that lots of people are patrolling Wikipedia, but there's something else at work.

Wikipedia's a reference tool, the Guardian is a news site. If you manage to skew the first wave of comments on a news article, you've effectively neutered the ability to debate. Who goes back to a four month old news article to start a discussion? Thus, it's worth the climate deniers while setting up Google news alerts and then rushing to blather loud and long and unintelligibly when something in their sphere of interest is published.

There's no such rush to read a Wikipedia article. Your stupid comment will probably be wiped before many people have seen it, and certainly it won't stand there attracting responses and making you feel important. So, even though Wikipedia is such a popular site, the news services are the main focus for the hard of thinking.

As seekers of knowledge we have a relatively new task. Before the 20th century - arguably up until the internet age - the problem with getting good information was finding where it was. These days, it's right there in front of you, but getting it is about filtering it out from the bullshit.

So, whilst it may appear a bit of an obvious fish/barrel/firearms jamboree to have a blog devoted to stupid things said on the BBC's Have Your Say pages, there's a very profound point being made. It keeps your mind sharp, it reminds you that just because lots of people say something online doesn't mean many people actually think it at all. The blog - newly added to my sidebar - is called Speak You're Branes, named after the segment in the priceless Day Today where a member of the public gives an idiotic vox-pop.

I'm finding that blogs like Speak You're Branes, and the ones like Enemies of Reason and Five Chinese Crackers that take apart newspaper bias and made-upness, are forming a key component of my reading these days. It's almost as if I've got to get some of that attitude on as armour before wading into the news media.

Being able to discern between the various calibres of information presented is the only way we'll make sense of the world. A finely-tuned bullshit detector is the most essential tool of the 21st century.

mootopia is nigh

Bovine terrorism continues. As I mentioned at the time, in June David Blunkett was nearly killed by a cow. The cow chose to do it on his birthday for extra symbolic and media value.

This week, Question Time chairperson David Dimbleby missed the programme for the first time ever after being attacked by a bullock, possibly in retribution for having Nick Griffin on his show.

According to the Health and Safety Executive figures cited in a report about the Blunkett attack, cattle kill about four people a year and injure a further 75. This is far more than any other terrorist group in the UK. Furthermore, they've proven they are better at targeted attacks on prominent political figures than any other terrorists.

I reckon this is just the warm-up, there'll be a mass stampede on parliament just before the Christmas recess, ushering in a great cow revolution and new year mootopia.

fluidity of language, dilution of meaning

For any global climate deal to be meaningful, China has to be on board. This straining, gagging desire makes people praise anything that looks like them signing up. Even when it's meaningless.

The world inched closer to an elusive deal to combat climate change yesterday, when China, the world's biggest polluter, made its most substantial commitment yet to curb its carbon emissions and invest in clean energy.

It was not a commitment in the sense of having any measurable element. More importantly, nor was it about reducing carbon emissions.

It was actually

the promise of a "notable" decrease in the carbon intensity of China's economy

Not even any ballpark numbers there, just 'notable'. As slip-through-the-fingers as Gordon Brown's assurance that the EU will - sting me with your numbers, Captain Prudence - pay its 'fair share' of funds to poorer countries suffering on the climate front line.

But the real bad boy is not the lack of solid figures, it's the phrase 'carbon intensity'. Just as industry uses 'emissions reduction' to mean not 'reduction' but 'a smaller increase than we might otherwise have had', so China and India are shifting our language from 'carbon emissions' to 'carbon intensity'.

'Carbon emissions' is the amount of carbon emitted. 'Carbon intensity' is the amount emitted per item manufactured or unit of economic activity.

Producing 10% less CO2 per thneed manufactured is fine until you ramp up production. Make twice as many thneeds and, even though emissions per thneed might have come down, total emissions go up.

The climate isn't looking at emissions per unit of GDP, it only looks at total emissions, so that's the only number that counts.

But we so desperately want China to be on side that we're accepting this bollocksy redefinition. In the same way, we're accept the American shift of language, talking of an agreement that will be 'politically binding' instead of 'legally binding' (as if there had been any agreement on what 'legally binding' was going to mean anyway).

It's rather like the way George Monbiot unpicked India's announcement that it will rapidly build 20GW of solar power cpapcity, equivalent to about a quarter of the UK's electricity production. It got praised as India taking climate change seriously, but, Monbiot noted,

India is also in the middle of a programme to increase coal capacity by 79GW – equivalent to the entire UK power sector – by 2012. The new solar plant will supplement, not substitute, its other forms of power generation.

An economy based on growth will increase total consumption and so rapidly eat up any carbon savings from reducing 'carbon intensity'. Basing any agreements on carbon intensity is a guarantee that we will not reduce carbon emissions.

It means we're more likely to get a deal everyone can sign up to, but when it's effectively designed to fail, what's the point? Making our deals palatable to the people who wish to exacerbate the problem we're trying to rein in is utterly insane.

simon mann: the toff gets off

Simon Mann - a person who'd fit any decent working definition of 'international terrorist' - has been pardoned and released from jail in Equatorial Guinea, 16 months into a 34 year sentence for his attempted coup in the oil-rich nation.

To recap,

Neo-colonialist mercenary leader Mann was caught with a planeload of weapons and ex-apartheid South African special forces on their way to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea...

Mann certainly wasn't going there on any humanitarian mission. As with his previous campaigns, it was about clearing out one group so a grateful government - irrespective of its attitude to human rights - would bestow lucrative mineral rights upon him.

For a more detailed account of the activities of Mann and his friends around the world, check out my article Simon Mann: A Very English Killer.

During his trial in Equatorial Guinea, Mann sang like the proverbial canary and implicated 'Sir' Mark Thatcher (who pleaded guilty to involvement in a South African court) and plot-chief Ely Calil.

On his release, Mann said

I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others, should face justice.

I'm relishing the thought of it happening - oh please let plot-funder Jeffrey Archer have another spell in jail - but I cannot muster any faith that it'll come to pass. The establishment insulates its members well.

Indeed, this was shown in Mann's favour by Guernsey courts' refusal to allow the Equatorial Guinea government access to Mann's account records and safe deposit boxes, despite strong evidence that these contain hard and damning evidence of the plot.

Meanwhile, a vicious mercenary is now free to enjoy his millionaire's lifestyle and work on his book deal and film options.

= = = = = = = = =

UPDATE 11 NOV 09: Over at The Quiet Road, Jim's post on Simon Mann (and the comments) include specific discussion of my post here.

sacrilege

The phenomenon of the one-hit wonder is often talked of in terms that imply they had only a single moment of talent, as if commercial success is somehow a measure of creative worth. Sometimes that's true but often it's not.

Poor old Jeff Beck. He spends years being one of the foremost guitarists of his generation, fusing white backbeat pop-rock with real searing blues, yet what's the only track of his that everyone knows? Hi Ho Silver Lining.

Other one-hit wonders leave you amazed that anyone wanted to listen to anything they ever did in the first place. In the 1980s there was a swathe of blokey guys with guitars, the sort of sub-Bryan Adamsers who were clearly surrounded by an entourage of coked-up yesmen telling them they were some kind of Springsteen.

One of these was Rick Springfield. If you're 40ish in the UK, you may vaguely remember his only half-hit here, Jessie's Girl.

For those of you who don't, and indeed those of you who do but could do with a reminder about why you have no clear memory, here's the video. It's a great piece of unintentional comedy, just look at how this negligible tosser takes himself soooo seriously.



And if that was where we could leave him, well, what's the harm? I'll tell you the fucking harm. To explain the damage and my personal grudge, let's go on another one almost-hit wonder detour.

The Church are one of my favourite bands ever. For thirty years they've been making music of great beauty, mystery and intelligence, generating luscious opiate warmth yet with a tremendously potent sense of undefined unease and longing. Rich, soulful, beautiful.

In the late 1980s they had their fifteen minutes with a single called Under The Milky Way. Mercifully for them, their albatross-song isn't a Silver Liningesque anomalous novelty, it's actually pretty representative of their work.

If you're American you probably know it, but in Europe nobody has really heard of it unless they were into what we then called Alternative Music. I get genuinely surprised when I mention The Church to anyone and there's any kind of recognition at all. In the last couple of years there's been some sharper folks that at least know the song thanks to its use in Donnie Darko.

But anyway, Rick fucking Springfield. He just won't let it lie, he still makes albums, and guess what he's applied his one dimensional croak to?



And that's not actually the bad news. The song's had a sort of pincer movement performed on it.

We live in an age where any decent song is rapidly reduced to being just a corporate shill. Advertising, the most evil concept ever, debases anything you love in order to make you buy things you don't need from people you don't like.

The Cure's Pictures of You sells computer printers ('these pictures of you, I almost believe that they're real' - geddit? See what they did there?).

Stuart Maconie said of Frank Wilson's supreme northern soul belter Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy... and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish.

These days it's the soundtrack for fried chicken adverts.

And of course, everything you ever cared about, from The Jam's harsh description of urban deprivation Town Called Malice, to Nick Drake's magical gossamer Pink Moon to Led Zeppelin's frenzied Rock n Roll, sells fucking cars.

Here's the new ad for the Lincoln MKT.



I'm off to put my head in the oven.

anti-coal on a roll

I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants

- Al Gore

Good point, but why wait for the new-build? As Richard Bernard said a week ago outside Ratcliffe on Soar power station as a thousand people attacked the fences

With Kingsnorth now shelved the time is for us to look at existing coal-fired power stations and say that coal has no future, fossil fuels have no future, it's time to close them down.

And as Kingsnorth settles in the sidelines, it's also time for other prospective builders to step into the firing line and see that every attempt to build new stations will come with a bumper pack of activists.

At 4.30am today protesters occupied Npower's flagship coal station in the UK, Didcot in Oxfordshire. Splitting into two groups - one shutting down the coal conveyor belts, another scaling the chimneys and abseiling inside so they can't be used - they say they have supplies to last them 'weeks, not days'.

One of them explained

N-Power, the company that runs this power station, is now the foremost advocate for new coal in the country. They want to build 30 new coal power stations in Britain and Europe. They expect to get planning permission for Hunterston in the next few weeks. We’re saying to them that we won’t leave until they cancel all their plans for new coal.

Hunterston - like Kingsnorth, at a site where an old station's being decommissioned - lost its major investor only a week after Eon announced the Kingsnorth climbdown. The owners, the Peel Group, say they'll press ahead anyway, possibly with money from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Meanwhile, the fact that RBS is now in public ownership means that, as Mark Thomas pointed out, they should be compliant with the government's stated carbon objectives, and ditch their £16bn of carbon-extractive investments. Indeed, a bunch of NGOs are in the High Court right now trying to force that to happen.

But today's action isn't just at Didcot. It's been a very active day for the coal-focused domestic extremists elsewhere too.

As Npower's station forcibly powered down this morning, up at Shipley in Derbyshire protesters occupied an opencast coal mine producing coal for - it's them again - Ratcliffe on Soar power station.

Meanwhile at Mainshill in Scotland, where there's an ongoing protest camp defending woodland under threat from a proposed opencast coal mine, access roads were barricaded and people locked on, ensuring no logging work can be done.

The changes we need are only going to happen if we force them to. The burgeoning climate justice movement glows with bright potential, but time is short. Those activists Npower are going to get sick of? That's you, that is.

And this coming weekend there's a weekend of info, action and whatnot at Mainshill.

everyone move to leeds

David Cameron may bang on about Broken Britain, but there's clearly an oasis of Dock Greenesque peace and social harmony in West Yorkshire.

There is a complete absence of domestic violence, street robbery, rape, large scale tax evasion and drunk driving in Leeds. There is scarcely a dropped fag butt and no standing around looking shifty or visible flouting of building regulations. We can be certain of this.

Why else would their local CID take the time to call at houses this afternoon just to let the residents know that the police think some people at the address were planning on going on the Great Climate Swoop protest tomorrow?

When detectives are telling you that some of your friends might be going to go somewhere in another constabulary where some people might be engaging in peaceful direct action, surely they've already solved all the reported crime, polished all the Chief Constable's silver buttons, sharpened all the pencils, done the lotto syndicate and all that day's crosswords and are now just gormlessly drumming their fingers on their impeccably tidy desks dreaming up stuff up to do.

kingsnorth is cancelled

Despite the government's enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow, it's reported that Heathrow's owners have decided not to build it.

When the government said it would give the go ahead to the runway, I thought it might make it harder for them to say yes to the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. It didn't occur to me that, like BAA with Heathrow, E.On might lead the way themselves.

Tonight, Kingsnorth was effectively cancelled by E.On.

The decision by E.ON marks an end to one of the most bitterly fought environmental campaigns in British history. The admission, which emerged after an unplanned and off-the-cuff remark from one of the company’s German officials, will be greeted with delight by environmentalists

Too right it will.

"This development is extremely good news for the climate and in a stroke significantly reduces the chances of an unabated Kingsnorth plant ever being built," said Greenpeace executive director John Sauven.

"The case for new coal is crumbling, with even E.ON now accepting it's not currently economic to build new plants. The huge diverse coalition of people who have campaigned against Kingsnorth because of the threat it posed to the climate should take heart that emissions from new coal are now even less likely in Britain."

He added: "Ed Miliband [the environment secretary] now has a golden opportunity to rule out all emissions from new coal as a sign of Britain's leadership before the key Copenhagen climate meeting. With E.ON's announcement he's now got an open goal."

storks on a lamp post

george orwell titled

Not, of course that Orwell was titled in the ennobled sense of the word. He made clear that he had no time for that sort of thing, and as the establishment of the day was decades away from trying to garner any Cool Britannia relevance by giving honours to edgy people, they were unlikely to have offered him it in any case. Governments of the 1930s didn't suffer anything like the Benjamin Zephaniah OBE debacle.

I have a deep love of George Orwell's writing. His shining clarity of mind, his articulate bluntness, his fearless radical perspective, the way that most sentences of his journalism seem like they start with a silent, 'oh for fuck's sake, any idiot can see that...'.

The early novels are interesting, and there is much of his social analysis and commentary in ones like Coming Up for Air and Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but it's his non-fiction that really dings my bell, especially the essays and journalism.

It wasn't written for posterity but to make a clear topical point and it's that freshness and fire - so familiar to us in an age of broadcast media and blogging - that makes it really shine.

Additionally, he was a highly educated person who turned his attention not only to the highbrow topics but also to then-ignored areas, pioneering what we'd now call cultural criticism. His essays on boys comics and The Art of Donald McGill (about the norms and implications of scenes depicted in saucy seaside postcards) get the same incisive thought and illuminating opinion as his writing on Gissing.

So on the occasions when I've been asked where someone should start with Orwell, I recommend an anthology of his essays. But it recently occurred to me that there is a side of his writing that's pretty rubbish. His titles.

Early books have, at best, drab and uninspiring ones like A Clergyman's Daughter, Down and Out In Paris and London or Burmese Days. The title of his reportage of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is pretty odd when you think about it. Indeed, there's a letter from Orwell to his publishers conceding that he couldn't think of a title and at least that choice lets them put something on the cover.

The only ones that seem smart, intriguing and clever are Keep The Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Even late on, Animal Farm is another dull and functional one, whilst 1984 is such a potent book that any number of evocative superior titles readily suggest themselves in place of the peculiarly vague one he actually chose.

At least he did better picking a name for himself. He was born Eric Arthur Blair, and seemingly chose a pseudonym so he wouldn't be too closely associated with what he felt was his awful first book, the superb Down and Out In Paris and London. (I know someone who worked in a bookshop who was once asked for George Orwell's 'Dining Out in Paris and London', a very different image).

After rejecting publishing it under the name X, he had a shortlist of H. Lewis Allways (surely ludicrously stuffy even in the early 1930s), Kenneth Miles, PS Burton and George Orwell. Imagine if we were having to refer to Allwaysian ideas.

Worse still, imagine if he'd been proud of Down and Out in Paris and London and kept his legal name.

Britain has a quarter of the world's CCTV cameras. We have a government trying to get us used to ID culture by encouraging the absurd Challenge 25 policy for buying alcohol. It amounts to us blithely sleepwalking into, er, a Blairite nightmare.