Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:

Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.

But what's this?

A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.

Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...

More mega-comment web-factories are appearing, before our very eyes.

Here is Iain Dale's new Dale & Co. site, a self-styled current affairs mega-blog. I of course immediately click on World Affairs, and what do I find?

Not much, including this curious little piece by one James Chartlton (sic), a trainee journalist whose "proudest achievement to date is a 5th place finish in the 2006 ‘Christleton to Waverton’ fun run".

Mr Chartlton helpfully gives us his expert views on why the UK should admire Germany: football, Eurovision, federal system, timely trains and so on. Turbo-charged Fifth-form analysis.

Moving up a clear gear we find former Tribune Editor Mark Seddon arguing that the UK will have a major EU referendum in the next five years:

There will be a referendum on Britain’s whole relationship with the European Union within five years. I’m prepared to break the habit of a life time and go to the bookies to lay a bet to that effect. 

It is not that I am anti European, or a ‘little Englander ‘– far from it. But clearly the institution has grown and changed to such a degree and more importantly seeks to accrue yet more powers at a time when global recession means that it has not a great deal to offer in return, that popular will in this country may soon dictate that there has to be a referendum.

Will I be right? Who knows? The trouble is that once this out there there can be no rowing back. I hope that I am.

The Dale & Co. contributors en masse look like a very respectable, safe, mainly Westminstery insider, establishment-pundity group, with perhaps the distinguished exception of punchy Anna Raccoon, whose secret identity is at last revealed here.

Meanwhile another commentary behemoth but with added News has emerged, The Huffington Post UK.

This one looks bigger and intellectually heavier, but also more obviously left-liberal: it even has squeaks from Ed Miliband here and there.

And there's a contribution from HM Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald:

A Golden Welcome for Will and Kate

Their Royal Highnesses' visit to LA this week will bring to the fore some of the most important practical aspects of a relationship which the president, six weeks ago, rightly described as "essential" as well as "special." The Duke and Duchess will attend a job fair that is intended to help US military personnel to reintegrate into civilian life.

Hmm. Over lunch I was chatting to a former senior UK intelligence officer about the fact that the Americans had had to hold back from us key intelligence information for fear of it being the subject of legal challenge in UK courts.

Then there is The Commentator, an openly conservative-minded site primarily offering fresh perspectives on issues of civilisational importance. Growing nicely but not (yet) with the scale/ambition of the first two.

Basically, we are all sinking in a growing, sprawling swamp of Comment (to which this website contributes its own little portions, although I do at least try to attach some of what I write to operational experience and reliable information) which feeds on an ever-diminishing shared organised basis for Facts and what used to be called 'hard news'.

It's almost as though we all expect facts and news miraculously to appear on their own, perhaps from massed social networks such as Twitter (with whatever checking mechanisms they may or may not offer), so that everyone can then grandly pile in with ever-more noisy (and often simply ignorant but no less noisy) opinions.

All in all, a growing if not towering babbling incoherence on a scale which makes rational government and intelligent adult discussion almost impossible. In all this clamour the News of the World drama is merely another MSM death-spasm, a further example of a networked swarm effect abruptly devouring an established and hitherto formidable organisation which this time round happens to be a media force but in fact could be almost anything.

Back to the eighteenth century?

Check out this exchange where a Fletcher School graduate tries to correct a Reuters fact-blunder in a story, Reuters putting the School as part of Boston University (it in fact is part of Tufts University).

What's interesting is this part of their explanation:

Regarding your request, please see the resolution from our Editorial team:

After doing our research we got in touch with our correspondent and they (sic) informed us: There are always conflicting facts about people. We have just looked again at this and found a website ‘Global Business Leaders’ 

Three points here.

First, the reply from the Reuters 'correspondent' seems unable to distinguish between 'Boston' and 'Boston University'.

Second, Reuters is relying on this correspondent who by his/her own admission is relying on ... da-dah ... a website to produce definitive information!

In other words, Reuters is employing someone too stupid or too lazy to do some simple digging and cross-checking, and eg look at the FSLD or BU websites which might reasonably be taken as giving a clear steer here. Let alone make a telphone call or two.

Third, we all have no way of knowing whether this blithering idle chump is behind more Reuters stories.

Embarrassingly poor.

Next time you hear a journalist making snooty remarks about bloggers, remember that a journalist these days is just another drone peering at a computer screen - and even at Reuters a journalist may be too incompetent to get even basic things right - or (far worse) even to care whether they're right or wrong.

Oh, and talking of the high standards of modern journalism, the Johann Hari plagiarism saga is beyond magnificent. The gift that keeps on giving.

The Weinergate scandal soared to a spectacular new level yesterday in New York, when Congressman Weiner admitted to a press conference that he had lied about his obscene Twitterish activities.

Not that that made his situation much better. Pressed on what he knew about the young women with whom he'd been 'communicating' via the Internet, he said "to the best of my knowledge they were adults".

More! Before the Weiner press conference started, Andrew Breitbart took the stage for an impromptu press conference all of his own. For those of you wisely not following US political trench warfare, Breitbart is a conservative web journalist who specialises in exposing Left/progressive machinations and the way the 'liberal' US mainstream media cover up for them. Two for the price of one.

In this case, Breitbart had run with the Weiner Twitter story at the start, only to be howlingly denounced by assorted liberal pundits and bloggers. Yesterday Breitbart  directly confronted the New York press pack and the wider chattering left classes with their own hypocrisy. Worth watching in full - things like this don't come along very often.

Then Weiner himself appeared. It's all too rare to hear a politician saying "I lied", especially one as vain and obnoxious as Mr Weiner, so when it happens we must relish every precious moment

Yet admire the sheer ambition of those Weineristic lies. His aggressive denials, his attempt to bully the interviewer, the horrid intensity in his eyes as he deflects questions and boldly LIES to camera. A truly epic performance.

As Hot Air says:

The last 80 seconds of it will have you squirming in your seat — not only the way he claims to be the innocent target of a hoax but his insistence on lecturing the interviewer for assuming the worst, taking care to maintain accusatory eye contact the whole way. It’s genuinely disturbing.

What does it all mean? In such moments of psychic turbulence in the political stratosphere, we turn (where else?) to the one and only:

For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are emailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the in-box of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology.

Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN's Dana Bash, "You have statements that my office has put out... ."

Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A Congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than Tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an "office" with "staffers" to "put out" "statements" on the subject.

When Weiners have staffers, it's very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an "office" to issue "statements" about your Tweets, it's hardly surprising you're indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.

In the end, the Congressman was not so "distracted" that he wasn't able to vote to raise the debt limit. Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it's both.

What's the equivalent of this in UK terms?

Something like this.

David Miliband MP is a thrusting brash young Labourite carrying progressive hopes for the next generation of collectivists. He (of undiluted progressive Jewish descent) is married to a beautiful Muslim (hurrah!) woman who leads Jack Straw's office; Tony Blair himself presided over their wedding!

Despite his newly wedded condition, Miliband carries on an older habit of having lewd conversations with various young females via the Web. But he presses the wrong button and instead of Tweeting a picture of his groaning underpants by direct message 'privately' to woman A, he broadcasts it much more widely.

It's spotted. Aaargh. He takes down his Twitter account and feverishly tries to cover his e-traces. Too late. Conservative web denizens led by Guido are soon on the case. Miliband publicly lies, saying his Twitter account was hacked! But he won't ask the police to investigate...

A pack of lefty lofty media/blogger bigwigs and earwigs (Andrew Marr, Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari, Will Straw, Penny Red, Left Foot Forward) spring into action not to censure Miliband, but to lambast Guido for traducing Miliband. They invent elaborate conspiracy stories to show that it's all a Really Nasty Right-wing Set-up.

Then ... it falls to bits. Guido gets irrefutable photo evidence from other women with whom Miliband has been furtively communicating, including one 'X-rated' snap. Knowing that his credibility is shot to pieces, Miliband calls a press conference weepily to confess.

But Guido gets there first, and stands before the snivelling mainstraem media hordes asking them about their own dishonesty in the way they've covered this story and so many others.

Weiner eventually appears and, blathering and shuffling and sniffing, manages to blurt out that, yes, he apologises not only to his wife and supporters but also to Guido too!

The Guardian and Indy immediately explode. But a cool new breeze of honesty and transparency soon blows away the rancid smoke.

The difference between the US and UK is that here the MP concerned would be completely discredited and probably forced to step down. In the USA, the liberal media are already busily trying to 'move on' in the hope that Weiner survives a Congressional ethics investigation and it all gets forgotten.

A last word from Victor Davis Hanson who pulls it all together:

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others.

What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state...

Of course, we witness all these jarring disconnects amid a larger landscape of the collapse of southern European socialism, the tottering of the entire U.S. financial system as the Obamites trumped the Republican deficits and have piled up another $5 trillion in debt, the discrediting of the global warming fundamentalist religion, and the unsustainability of the redistributive welfare state.

What are we left with? The daily struggle to remember sumus homines, non dei — “we are just humans, not gods.” Whether Strauss-Kahn or Weiner or Gore, the common denominator is arrogance and a sense of exemption from the rules and protocols.

In a word, human nature as we understand it from the earliest observances of the Greeks. Be careful about lecturing others on their moral frailties. If one consumes well beyond what one needs, ensure that one pays one’s own tab and does not indulge on someone else’s money.

Beware of Nemesis, an omnipotent, all-seeing deity that marks in her scrolls every pontification, every sermon we make and then collates such professions with our deeds — so eager to note the discrepancy. She is an unforgiving goddess, and perhaps a cruel one as well

Quite so.

Update with added Daily Telegraph

A few days ago there was a flurry of gruesome media coverage of the appalling death in Crimea (Ukraine) of a local Muslim girl who had been a beauty queen, and stoned to death by an enraged boyfriend for breaching Islamic Law.

Only one problem. It wasn't true.

Apparently.

Read RFE/RL's story which has looked at it all in some detail, noting how media reports in different countries fed hungrily on each other's exaggerations and inventions. Much easier to do that than actually go to the trouble of checking and double-checking what actually happened.

It's just so difficult to know what and whom to believe these days.

We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away.

I cited an extract from this argument by Roy Greenslade, one among many good ones out there on the way English law is currently looking at these issues:

We want there to be a fair and reasonable balance between the right to privacy and the right to know. And the best criterion for judging between the two must be the public interest (and not merely interesting the public).

Is that really it (said I)? Boosting someone else's supposed right to privacy means diminishing someone else's free speech, someone else's right to blog or read or talk or sing. The High Court is not always the best place to 'weigh' the balance of advantage between an emotional plaintiff and an abstract principle such as 'freedom'. 

As Ian Hislop argued robustly on WHYS, the current state of the English law matched by the inclination of some judges is in effect allowing wealthy men to silence less powerful women - not much justice there. Once upon a time we had 'publish and be damned' - now we seem to have 'only publish if the court says so'.

The programme featured contributions from listeners, which together brought out perfectly that no set of laws can manage incompatible issues of principle or keep up with the racing advance of social networking and the access of hundreds of millions of people to sassy new small cameras and IT kit.

There is no clear right answer on Privacy, in theory or in practice, and crafty new ideas such as the so-called 'right to be forgotten' (also described as the right to have 'personal data' deleted from commercial databases) can end up being abused to extend state power - if I choose to shop at Tesco, why should any data held by Tesco on me which I chose to freely hand over be described as solely 'my' data? They paid for it to be collected. Should Tesco be denied the right to use the data represented by my DNA (fingerprints) as distributed round the store if they suspect me of shoplifting?

On the other hand, the myriad information about us all sloshing around out there can now be analysed to see big (and not so big) patterns of activity - and attitude. This does empower in various novel and not necessarily benign ways the people and organisations able to crunch all those numbers.

It's all about trade-offs, and maybe it's best to let consumers and companies come to workable and more or less transparent informal arrangements at their own pace than try to create too clever legal and regulatory frameworks which will be out of date as soon as they are drafted. 

In other words, we readily accept the risk that by driving a car we may have a horrible or even fatal crash at some point. Maybe we likewise should accept that we may have a reputation crash too at some point during life as part of the 'cost' of enjoying all these clever new IT toys, and insure as best we can against it.

My bottom line. If a rich footballer or entrepreneur cheats on his/her spouse, the law should not stop the spouse or the partner in cheating or someone else writing about it or discussing it in public. Mess around? Fine - but take the risks that your messing will be exposed. No-one should be stopped by the state from writing the truth.

Sure that will create some rough justice in some high-profile cases. But so does every other outcome in this fearsomely difficult area. Let's at least err on the side of 'truth will out'.  

How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations?

The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, though, went wrong with Libya?

Basically, what happens once a decision is taken to plan for mass evacuation of British citizens? Roughly this.

First, people are urged to use commercial air flights or any other seemingly sensible route to leave the country. Hence in this latest one, even though many Brits were temporarily becalmed in the steaming filth of Tripoli airport waiting for the delayed FCO aircraft to appear, plenty of other Brits were quietly leaving Libya by land or otherwise as they could manage.

If commercial air-flights are suspended and/or insufficient, the FCO may decide to charter aircraft (using charter firms which DFID also use for getting emergency supplies round the world fast) to fly into the trouble-spot and airlift people out. If civilian flights are still flying, the FCO asks people to promise to pay a suitable economy fair payment to help cover the cost of this service.

If (exceptionally) commercial flights refuse to fly (maybe their insurance won't allow it in certain specific circumstances) then military options are considered. But having military planes flying in raises all sorts of new problems and may well not be welcome to the suspicious local authorities.

In short, the FCO has an 'escalating response' to consular crises. This worked well in Tunisia and Egypt.

It went wrong in Libya this week partly because of sheer bad luck (one aircraft broke down, one had concerns about flying to Libya), but also because (I gather) the FCO system did not seem to respond to these difficulties ruthlessly enough. Too much Nu-Labourish procedure to take fast and tough (and expensive) operational decisions outside existing parameters, and maybe not the right level of urgency and 'grip' lower down the operational food-chain?

Something to be sorted out in slower time, as is now happening. Plus a new look at urgent back-up arrangements if the agreed charter plane conks out?

In other words, whereas in some consular emergencies the media rubbish the Embassy concerned, here it was HQ in London where things seemed to get stuck for a short while.

But only for a short while. Almost all Brits in easily accessible places were taken out efficiently once the whole operation got into top gear. The Embassy in Tripoli (like its counterparts in Cairo and Tunis) will have done a terrific job in highly stressful conditions to help make this happen. If you listen very very carefully you won't hear the media praising their efforts.

As for vacuous observations like "Even the Turks did it quicker than we did", piffle.

One reason why the eg Turks can move so fast in a crisis like this one is that they are likely to have less stringent attitudes to and laws/rules about 'risk management' and 'health and safety' than we do.

Plus the risk to eg a Turkish aircraft in an Islamic society is objectively less than it is to a UK plane. In particular, what would the media be saying had the FCO somehow leant on a charter company to fly in quickly against its owners' judgement, and that plane was then shot down by lunatic mercenaries or the local army as it took off, packed with British citizens?

Conclusion?

Very difficult judgement calls are needed by the FCO people on the spot and back at HQ when mass evacuations are required in sharp-end situations in problematic countries.

There is no point the media making a silly noise (other than their fevered requirement to sell a few more copies) about the FCO getting a plane into a trouble-spot some hours later than might have been the case, and/or 'bribes' paid by British officials to corrupt local air traffic people to allow an aircraft to leave.  

The key thing is not that sometimes things go wrong in these emergencies - rather that so often so much is accomplished so effectively (and relatively cheaply for the taxpayer). 

As Tolstoy famously put it:

Happy consular emergencies are all alike. Every unhappy consular emergency is unhappy in its own way.

Deal with it.

Oh. And remember that while we have the luxury of wittering on in a self-absorbed about such supposed problems, Libya is going to have to come to terms with the truth about stunning horrors like this one.

Help!

Villagers are ordered by the police not to use wire to protect their sheds against burglars!

Outrage!

What actually happened here?

If you read the article it seems that some community police officers warned local residents that "there have been cases where criminals have sued for injuries they have suffered while committing a criminal act". The wire used to protect sheds might (said the police) be dangerous to thieves.

Hence this:

Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured.

Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded 'criminals' for protecting their property.

First, shame on the police for giving out idiotic warnings.

So what if some criminals have sued for damages for injuries sustained while being criminal? How many won their cases and in which circumstances? They must have had to prove a pretty hefty level of unreasonableness/negligence - something like using a powerful sharp man-trap or a shotgun to protect an allotment, where the level of 'force' deployed by the property owner was capable of being seen as wholly disproportionate.

This is yet another case of the evil Precautionary Principle run amok in the public sector. Something bad might happen even though it's unbelievably unlikely, so let's panic! If David Cameron wants us to have any Society, Big or Small, he needs to do something about this madness.

Second, shame on the home owners for being (according to this article) so stupid as to be unaware of the distinction between (a) civil and (b) criminal proceedings. If a criminal sues you, you are not a "criminal who only wanted to defend your property". Even if the criminal wins. Duh.

So to sum up.

This article makes no sense whatsoever, even on its face.

The villagers were not 'ordered' by the police to remove the wire protection.

They were not 'ordered' by the police not to protect their property.

They were given dim-witted advice which they appear dim-wittedly to have followed, allowing a dim-witted journalist (aka Daily Mail Reporter) a noisy facile non-story.

We are a nation of dim-wits.

Attentive readers recall that a year ago I joined a group of former British Ambassadors in setting up ADRg Ambassadors, a new panel selling professional diplomatic consulting, training and mediation skills to support 'corporate diplomacy'.

Here is what I wrote at the time.

Since then we have been busy 'building the brand' to good effect, to the point that we are now considering reorganising ourselves in a formal LLP format. Indeed, if you type 'corporate diplomacy' into Google on my Google settings at least, ADRg Ambassadors come out towards the top. Hurrah.

What, though, actually is 'corporate diplomacy'? The expression has been out there for a while without any clear understanding of what, if anything, it means.

Thus the University of Kent's Conflict Analysis Research Centre in 2009 offered a three-day course on it:

Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh.

The BBC is cutting some language services on the World Service:

The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year

Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota!

One of the few (but real) advantages of moving house to a smaller dwelling is that you are firmly confronted with your own nostalgic insecurity. All around you are possessions - books, furniture, pictures, records, stuff - acquired years ago which now just won't fit.

No-one wants these things. The hassle of selling them on eBay is way beyond you.

Yet ... how can you bear to get rid of them? They are part of what defines you!

Gulp. Sigh. Off to the recycling tip.

Gone.

And the funny thing is, once they're gone you don't miss them one bit.

In fact, you actually feel rather better with fewer newer lighter things around you.

The other day I heard Lord Coe on the radio talking about the Olympic Stadium. He pitched part of his argument against the Tottenham proposal to demolish much of the stadium after the 2012 Games in terms of a zany metaphysical loyalty to memories: it would be just awful if a famed medal winner from 2012 returned to the site of his/her triumph many years in the future, only to find the stadium ... gone!

Grotesque.

I have no idea whether it makes sense all things considered to favour the Tottenham bid over the West Ham bid. Insofar as I have any personal interest, it is that the Tottenham bid if successful would move the Spurs stadium even further from where I now live, although maybe the road network would make it marginally more accessible than the current squalid White Hart Lane area.

But what makes no sense in current economic circumstances is to have a huge stadium sitting largely unused, unsuitable for football and unfillable when there are the occasional athletics competitions. And to justify the endlessly escalating cost of that by appealing to nostalgic insecurity.

Thus to the new BBC World Service language services chainsaw massacre.

Out comes the regular army of people frothed up by the BBC to bewail the fact that end of civilisation now hurtles in our general direction as these language services are ruthlessly axed.

They conjure up images of heroic people huddled round a crackly radio in a dark Balkan mountain shack, the lights dimmed and the sound turned down lest the KGB hear the Enemy's voice. Out from the radio comes a BBC programme in the local language - a unique, precious lifeline to a Better World.

All very poignant. It's just that things have, hem, moved on.

Now, even in the benighted Balkans, people do have choices. Local media outlets proliferate, including some previously set up with UK taxpayers support. And there is the ready availability of the Internet - anyone wanting different views (and different British views) now has myriad choices including free Internet radio stations and other online services. That's where young people are now - we should be investing mainly in them.

As the FCO is now taking some painful cuts, so must the BBC too. Some things, such as the UK taxpayer coughing up so that some people can read the BBC news in Serbian/Albanian/Macedonian fall into the category of nice - but no longer affordable/necessary.

Lo!, even under the wicked Coalition's appalling cuts, the BBCWS will (I gather) be enjoying much the same proportion of the FCO budget as it did in 2007/08. Shocking brutality.

So let's do some spring-cleaning and this time accept without a phoney galama that a smaller, lighter, faster BBC World Service is maybe good enough for current requirements.

One personal memory of the BBC's Yugoslav service. Back in 1980 before my first posting to Belgrade I went to call on the Yugoslav service, headed by none other than one David Wedgwood Benn, brother of.

D W Benn boasted to me that the Yugoslav service had a proud record of objectivity - it had never had an official complaint from the Yugoslav communist regime.

Great.

What a fine job it must have been doing in spreading Western values of freedom and democracy in that region of Europe. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of just how many Titoist UDBA agents sneaked in to work there over the years? 

New world records for drivel and shameful dishonest nonsense have been set following the Tucson shootings.

As far as I can see, the only thing President Obama wants to 'heal' is his own dismal ratings, and his speech to some extent may have done that - for a while. But the Left talking-point propaganda claim as amplified by the BBC/Guardian and others on this side of the pond that 'right-wing rhetoric' somehow contributed to the shootings is beyond grotesque.

Take Paul Krugman, whose literate analysis of the problems facing the Eurozone is overshadowed by some of the outlandish nonsense he's talked on this latest US shooting tragedy. Ann Althouse gives him the spanking he deserves:

Advocating violence is terrible, but it is also terrible to try to delegitimize vibrant criticism of the government, to have a biased view of where the least valuable speech is coming from, and to connect speech to violence when there is no connection. The truth is we should dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before. Why should we change because a madman shot people?

Ironically, saying that a massacre can change the course of American politics encourages massacres! Why would you put such a thought into the heads of madmen? Hell, sane men might put the pieces together and plan a massacre to disrupt the work of the politicians who won the last elections. We need to turn away from the bloody slaughter and go on as before.

And what about this bizarre piece by Simon Jenkins:

Freedom of speech, like freedom of traffic, can only be defined by the curbs and regulations that make it real...If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order.

It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains.

What?

There may be the glimmer of a point in there somewhere. But whatever it is pales into insignificance when compared to the wider point, namely that we hear a lot about the dangers supposedly posed by rhetoric of the 'toxic Right' but nothing is said about the rhetoric of the toxic Left. 

The good news is that US talk radio is about the only force on the planet which consistently confronts the Toxic Left. President Obama wisely has decided not to side with the Toxic Leftists who want to use the 'fairness doctrine' to shut down this truculent rival voice.

Implications of the Tucson shootings? None.

The USA is a big country, and by the law of averages among 300 million people a small few may contemplate assassinating politicians, a small number of them may actually try to do so and a tiny number will succeed.  

If anything the fact that these episodes are so rare shows just how 'civil' US politics are for 99.999% of normal purposes as compared to most cultures in human history. A ghastly tragedy for those involved, of course, but as Ann Althouse says the country as a whole should not start panicking. 

The supposedly liberal 'mainstream media' in the USA in this case have disgraced themselves over this obvious point by ranting against Sarah Palin for no reason whatsoever, thereby merely accelerating their own much-deserved collapse. 

Sorry, I was distracted from packing to spot this strange headline on the BBC web-page:

US 'revokes Venezuela envoy visa'

Why have they put most of that in inverted commas, as if it's not true or somehow qualified or in doubt?

The BBC's own article on the subject reports a State Department announcement saying that indeed this ambassador's visa has been revoked in respopnse to the Chavez regime's denying a visa to their new ambassador. A pretty reliable if not authoritative source?

New Year Quiz fun! Here are three more inverted comma BBC headlines from the current web-page, plus three where I have added the extra punctuation. See if you can guess which are the BBC ones and which mine:

• 'Slower fall' in Iraqi killings
• Sri Lanka 'bans BBC' again at panel
• N Korea 'steps up special forces'
• Perez burial dispute 'resolved'
• Spain to 'increase' minimum wages
• US worker 'freed' from Haitian jail

Sigh.

Back to the packing boxes...

Have been running around, including appearing on a live BBC World Service programme World, Have Your Say on Wednesday which spent the best part of an hour looking at different issues of secrecy/privacy and the limits or not thereof.

Here is the programme if you are interested - listen soon or it will vanish. For me it was a special pleasure to join in debate with famed US blogger Jeff Jarvis.

As usual in such programmes - more like a free-wheeling conversation than a structured analysis of the issues - it was hard to keep a focus on the heart of the issue. In this case, regardless of where you draw the line on 'openness' for public and private sector information, how do you then hold that line as a matter of law and practice?

The other point I made, largely lost in the ebb and flow, was a bigger one.

Namely if Western governments lurch or are lurched towards some radical form of openness/transparency, will that put us at a real-time operational disadvantage vis-a-vis regimes who do not believe in freedom at all?

Could the longer-term result be a huge set-back for freedom? Does civilisation itself depend upon some consensus about intelligent privacy arrangements applying to governments as to citizens, just to get things done in a reasonable way?

No such consensus, no civilisation? 

Is England not corrupt enough to survive?

Straight dealing in almost any international forum these days is utterly non-existant, says Simon Heffer

Simon Heffer regularly gets furious with his sub-editors' illiteracy* at the Telegraph. He can have another whack at them now. Thank goodness that Crawf Minor is battling on with A-level Latin as well as all that Maths, Physics and Chemistry - he won't make that howler.

Oh, and the article is a terrific read too:

Straight dealing in almost any international forum these days evaporates the moment that one country chooses to use money or other favours to get its own way, and given the nature of so many influential regimes around the world, that becomes rather inevitable.

... Life isn’t fair, and the way many other countries act towards us exemplifies the point. The choice we have is the traditional one: we either get mad, or we get even – preferably by honest means.

*  Earlier apostrophe disaster of my own pointed out by a reader with better eyesight than me. Apologies - now corrected.

Here's a depressing piece at Open Democracy by Turi Munthe, who summarises for us an analysis by Dr Martin Moore and the Media Standards Trust of the steep relative and absolute decline in foreign news coverage in the British newspapers:

The statistics make frightening reading. They compared foreign news coverage in a selection of the UK print media (Guardian, Telegraph, Mail and Mirror) between 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009 and found the following:

• 40% drop in foreign news coverage in absolute terms
• Today, international news only makes up 11% of news coverage (compared to 20% in 1979)
• 80% drop in foreign news stories within the first 10 pages...

The full report is here.

What's going on?

Far more British people travel overseas now than in 1979. Plus we have the Internet, so in theory we should be much better informed if we want to follow foreign stories and understand the wider world.

Yet we're not. I feel it in myself. I know quite a lot about the Balkans and Poland, and UK, US and European policy-making processes. Something about Russia and the CIS and South Africa. Little if anything about India, China, Brazil, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and everywhere else.

If I want to find out about these places I can in a few minutes pile up incredible quantities of news and information from the Internet. But why bother? It's there if I need it. Plus the sheer volume and complexity of it all is somehow ... intimidating. So I wallow in my ignorance. It just feels cosier.   

Meanwhile too much of what passes for today's Western news reporting is evident propaganda and/or the belligerent self-importance of the reporter concerned.

Coverage of European affairs is beyond hopeless. With the distinguished exceptions of the FT and European Voice (part of the Economist family), neither cheap if you want the full coverage, it is almost literally impossible to follow EU business and politics via the rest of the UK media.

Or even via UK blogs. How many of the Iain Dale Top 50 blogs regularly carry serious and informed analysis of foreign affairs?  

Plus foreign language teaching in the UK state education sector is an endangered species:

The fewer pupils learning languages, the fewer go into teaching, so fewer learn, so fewer teach, so the subject declines precipitously.

Maybe this is the Tower of Babel.

Infinite chattering and endless 'information-flow', but no context. No consensus on what matters.

Not even common sense. Because nothing any more is common.

It's not easy to get the BBC to apologise for making a major blunder, but it happens.

For example today:

The BBC has apologised over reports claiming millions of pounds raised by Band Aid was used to buy arms.

In March, World Service's Assignment said cash raised by charities to help Ethiopia had been diverted by rebels.

The BBC has admitted that Assignment gave the impression that Band Aid and Live Aid money had been diverted despite no evidence to back that up.

It apologised for further TV, radio and online reports which actually stated that Band Aid money had paid for arms.

The BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit found in its ruling that there was no evidence to support such statements and that "they should not have been broadcast".

"The BBC wishes to apologise unreservedly to the Band Aid Trust for the misleading and unfair impression which was created," it added.

As apologies go, this one is unusually full and self-flagellating and widely broadcast on many different BBC channels/prgrammes. Well done the BBC for not - at long last - pulling its punches on its own nose.

And lo, our good friend Brian Barder was Ambassador in Ethiopia in the 1980s and has been helping push to bring about this outcome:

Today Sir Brian Barder, the British ambassador to Ethiopia between 1982 and 1986, said: "I welcome the BBC's far-reaching apology to the Band Aid Trust for the seriously unfair and misleading impression given by the BBC World Service Assignment programme about alleged diversion of famine relief aid in limited rebel-held areas of the Ethiopian province of Tigray in the 1980s.

"The apology makes it absolutely clear that none of these allegations applied to the Band Aid relief effort."

For (very) full background have a look at Brian's analysis in March which analyses in detail all sorts of juicy - and it turns out simply wrong - swipes at Band Aid by the BBC. (Note: I have corrected this paragraph - my first version was badly written. See Brian Barder's excellent comment and further thoughts below) 

Mind you, this is interesting:

Some of the 20 or so comments appended to my blog post on the subject revealed a striking personal animus against Bob Geldof, as if dislike of his style or resentment of his fame constituted confirmation of the allegations supposedly made against Band Aid and Live Aid.

It's an odd feature of our times that so many people seem to have virulent views on issues they often know nothing at all about. Or is it just that they now have a lot of new ways to express themselves, and mainly the fanatics bubble up to the surface?

Not that that applies to the decorous and highly intelligent people who swing past this website, of course. 

Just read this from the BBC about Iran's dilemma over whether to stone women to death, or not:

The Iranian authorities like to portray an image of a country and a system misperceived and misrepresented in the West.

It is an image that plays well with some western liberals, who buy the argument that criticism of Iran's human rights record amounts to hypocritical double standards, or perhaps part of a wider campaign to "soften up" western public opinion in preparation for some future military action.

Hence the dilemma for the Iranian government about how to defend the practice of stoning - a punishment that offends those same western sympathisers.

Hmm. Sure must be tricky for the Iranians mulling (mullah-ing?) over that one. I can just see the policy submission going to the President:

Problem

If we stone adulterous women to death as they richly deserve, some Western Liberals may feel offended. How to proceed?

Recommendation

That we hang them instead and present that as a bold step towards modernisation - why take risks with the possible disappointment of Western Liberals?

Media Angles

CNN and BBC concur.

Cost Implications

Modest, stones are free but rope in the quantities needed is affordable.

Looks like the regime liked the idea:

It would seem from these latest events that she probably faces imminent execution, though most likely by hanging rather than stoning.

If that is the case then it will be seen as evidence of Iran taking itself one more step into international isolation.

It will also be a clear warning to western human rights campaigners and the media that pressure on Iran can sometimes be productive, and sometimes deeply counter-productive.

Yup. It sure was.

Had it not been for all that nasty 'pressure' she could have been stoned nicely away from the world's attention.

Our dilemma is simple. Do we abolish the BBC in its current form now, or later?

One of the key rules followed as closely as possible by the British Royal family is to be photographed as rarely as possible eating or drinking (especially eating).

Why?

Because it's next to impossible to look dignified when eating.

The more so when knives and forks are unavailable - or seen as 'too posh'.

Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes.

Here he was in October last year.

And now again today:

For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former.

Odd that here Nazi gets a Capital N whereas communist gets only a modest c. Plus, of course, in the Guardian that equation rarely entails an honest account of the latter.

This latest Freedland piece takes some odious examples of history-rewriting in Lithuania to try to establish this phoney syllogism:

• some Lithuanians dishonestly play down Lithuanians' role in historical atrocities and assert that Nazi and Communist crimes were equivalent
• all Lithuanian dishonesty invites us to question the motives of people who equate Nazi and Communist crimes
• therefore it is false and dishonest for anyone to equate Nazi and Communist crimes

The embarrassingly impoverished moral logic here is really striking.

I repeat what I said in August last year, as I think it nails this issue once and for ever:

It all boils down to a simple question.

Nazism's collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism's collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply 'had' to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way.

Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler's lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity - that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions.

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to to do it.

So, yes, any normal person has to 'equate' Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them.

If anything the very nihilistic 'rationality' of Communism makes it even worse.

A conclusion terrifying to today's Marxists-Lite such as Slavoj Zizek, who makes his position clear:

• Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism
• since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil.
• Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Indeed. A postwar Europe based on the biggest of all Stalinist Big Lies.

Truth will out.

Over at Business and Politics I peer at the BBC through a powerful microscope.

Droll opening paragraph, or at least I thought so.