Taking Out The Trash

Oh Mr Porter

Marvellous - someone else is irritated by Henry Porter's egotistical ramblings in The Observer.
I've posted on Porter before  and yes I do go on, but he's awful. A highlight was the column he excreted last month where he extrapolated from his daughter's pleasant graduation that young people are generally, like, OK.
However, the headline from this piece shows the sheer bumptiousness of the man.
We need decent liberal writers in our few liberal newspapers - but Porter is in the irway.
Sadie: let's start a consign-Porter-to-the-memory-hole club.

Georgia on my mind

Don Paskini has a useful summary of how the right views events in Georgia at the moment.
The neo-cons are not short of confidence in putting their points across despite the fact that their foreign policy approach has been pretty lamentable and, in Iraq's case, an outright diaster.
There are differences on the right as to how to approach the issue (which is understandable; broad church and all that) but from the left the response generally appears to be a mixture of confusion and caution. Having read and enjoyed Shock Doctrine I'm waiting to see Naomi Klein's take on the issue.
Again, the right-wing commentators appear to have the confidence to put forward ideas and possible solutions however barking mad. (I liked Don's point about some Taxpayers Alliance spokesman who has suddenly found enthusiasm for state funding - as long as its to finance wars.)
So is my preamble a way of getting out of stating my own position on the battle between Russia and Georgia? I think Iain Dale got it right (and more importantly was honest) when he wrote initially:

Why haven't I blogged about the Russian invasion of Ossetia? Because unlike some I wanted to read up on it before formulating a view. It's a place I have frankly never heard of,

and then concludes

This has been an unusually long post for me and I am sorry it is going to conclude with a question which I have asked several times so far, but failed to come up with answer.

What. Do. We. Do?

I think this is about security of energy supply and about Russian pride and about buffers (Russia likes to have some distance between Moscow and any potential enemies) and about the assertiveness of small states and the chess games played by the West on Russia's borders.
If economic policies cripple a country then they are going to seek out other places to gain currency and security. Georgia is feeling the effects of Russian vulnerability. I think it's a bit rich for some in the West to have recommended the medicine and then condemn the side effects.
But Iain cuts the nub of it. In the short term; a UN-brokered ceasfire and a return to borders. In the long term I think a stable and engaged Russia is better than a wounded bear. That's not appeasement; it's treating countries how we expect to be treated ourselves.

PS: Still the confusion on the left is nothing to that in the Sky newsroom. As Journalism.co.uk points out; it's easy to mix up a former Russian republic and a southern US state. But then, Bush can't even hold his flag up the right way.

Forget prudence

In evidence to a Commission for Rural Communities inquiry some parish councillors noted with pride that their authority had not raised its precept in 25 years.

They would have had a heart attack if they’d been on our council. This year we agreed a precept rise of more than 30%.

You can read the rest of my lates post on Total Politics here.

Who breaks the news

The story of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and his affair has dominated media coverage in the US. Bloggers are picking the story apart with relish.
And why not: it's a great story, even if the media over here seem a little less bothered by it (OK, Edwards isn't running for anything now and he's American and the Olympics have started so fair enough).
I was intrigued by a snippet in a Guardian report that the National Enquirer, which broke the story, had been running to for ages. Since October year! They eventually set up Edwards after he outright denied it (aka lied).
It wasn't until he confessed to ABC that it became a mainstream story.
American journalists are even more sniffy about their tabloid compadres than we are - but 10 months to miss a story on a plate is pretty good going.
Am I posting this because I think we get it right over here? No. The Kennedy alcoholic story proves no-one is immune from missing what's right infront of them.

Orwell online

I posted about this previously but Orwell's diaries have now started as a daily blog post.

Everyone loves pocket guides

I thought it was just protestors who carried little guides around with them telling what to do if nicked on a march.
According to documents posted on Indymedia; now the police have their own mini-guides.
This guide was recovered from the climate chaneg camp in Kent which has been the seen of some pretty dodgy policing so far. The NUJ made this statement on it.

Pesticides report

Interesting study from the Centre for Public Integrity in the US about poisonings from household chemicals. It questions whether manufacturers are doing enough to make their products safe.
You would think this report would have a bearing over here.
Even with our FOI laws and some sterling efforts one wonders if we could a get access to similar data in this country.

And this is leave?

Since self-employed men don't get paid paternity leave I've still got some writing to do while I take a couple of weeks 'off' welcoming daughter #3 into the world.
So it's 1,200 words on a renewable energy research centre, 1,700 words on a firm which manufacturers bomb-proof glass, a feature on the future of wind power and one on the changing technology of making films.
But what I'm really excited about is a trip to Salisbury Plain next week to see half a dozen companies compete in a competition to design a robot for fighting urban warfare.
Sad? Purile? Unhealthy?
Quite possibly - but you've got to love that variety.

A Good Bunch

Like Gavin Whenman, I'd seen the reports on Tory PPC Ian Oakley who was convicted of a campaign of harassment against political opponents.

The issue of councillors out of control came up in the pub recently after one of our parish meetings. Some of us idly discussed if we were vulnerable to fraud.

It seems our local school has spent £75,000 on some new play equipment. It's nice equipment, but £75K is an eye-watering amount. Especially as it appears the money was spent by the outgoing headteacher without the governors properly authorising it.

Could one of our councillors access such money and not have to account for it?

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics site here.

It's all in the breeding

Just caught this little gem from David Willetts, Conservative Shadow Higher Education Secretary, who has been furrowing his brow about the problem of marriage and the working classes.

Of course, he thinks, young men need to become apprentices to help them attract women! Willetts explained that apprenticeships should be 'part of a far bigger ambition to produce more marriageable working-class men, more stable families and less crime.'

'Women,' he claimed are: 'not feeling that they need to marry men because men are not earning enough to support them.'

I could take this apart (the sexism, the patronising class attitude) but the fword does it so much better.

Suffice to say that this is another example of how the Today programme exists in a temporal bubble all of its own. Someone from the 1950s could tune in to the programme and (apart from a few references to mobile phones) would feel perfectly at ease with it all. The chancellor gets interviewed, there is a feature on bird song, something about a social issue inspired by a story in The Archers and a debate over whether modern classical music is any good.
It's not hard to do contemporary and intelligent: Newsnight manages that on a daily basis.