Blogoir: April

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian writes about the Impotence of Might:

There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter of weeks with a couple of gunboats and a few battalions.

Today Somalia has been a collapsed state for nearly 20 years, in lawless confusion that no outside power can or will subdue. It harbours bands of men in light craft armed with rifles who can seize 50,000-tonne tankers flying the flags of western states. And there is almost nothing anyone can do, despite Sunday's escapade...

Nothing is more frightening to us than suicide bombing. It is indeed repugnant, but it also proves what the Roman philosopher Seneca said long ago: "The man who is not afraid to die will always be your master." That applies, above all, to prosperous, sybaritic, modern western societies, which no longer have any appetite for sacrifice and suffering. Is it any wonder we are mighty but weak at once?

A gloomy thought, although in fact it would be fairly easy to bottle up the Somali pirate problem through armed guards on sizeable vessels plus ruthless use of fast patrol boats and a busy shoot-to-kill no-questions-asked policy. Plus maybe one or two of these. All this might entail renouncing various human rights and other legal norms for this limited purpose.

Is the problem worth the cost and the likely progressive obloquy when some more or less innocent people get shot in the ensuing confrontations? A matter of Determination, not Might?

Nor does Mark Steyn cheer us up this time:

I doubt "Pirates of the Caribbean" would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going down to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of "Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad." From "Avast, me hearties!" to a vast welfare scam is not progress.

In a world of legalisms, resistance is futile. The Royal Navy sailors kidnapped by Iran two years ago and humiliated by the mullahs on TV were operating under rules of engagement that call for "de-escalation" in the event of a confrontation. Which is to say their rules of engagement are rules of nonengagement.

Likewise, merchant vessels equipped with cannon in the 18th century now sail unarmed. They contract with expensive private security firms, but those security teams do not carry guns: When the MV Biscaglia was seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden last year, the Indian and Bangladeshi crew were taken hostage but the three unarmed guards from "Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions" in London "escaped by jumping into the water." Some solution. When you make a lucrative activity low-risk, you get more of it.

... Unlovely as it is, Pyongyang nevertheless has friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund nonstate actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere nonstate actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

When all the world's a "distraction," maybe you're not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity.

Don't be surprised if "the civilized world" shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a "distraction" but a portent of the future.

Back to our old friend Negotiation.

Negotiation is partly about Might, but no less about Resolve to deploy it. Likewise it is about the Credibility of that Resolve - if you are ready to inflict pain/pressure on your adversary, does he think that his capacity to absorb that pain is greater than your willingness to sustain its application? Who's tougher than whom?

In the case of Cuba, President Obama is easing (somewhat) US measures on the worn-out Communist regime. A good move from a position of overwhelming strength - open the door a bit and let them see how impoverished they are. Cuba is inevitably part of the Western civilisational space and will end up reverting to a sort of quirky Miami Lite. Nothing much at stake, whatever Castrovian bluster might say.

But Somali pirates and North Korean rocketeers and Taleban murderers are different. They are confronting Western standards/values and (eventually) interests head-on: "We reject everything you stand for - and we are in your face, so whatcha gonna do about it, eh?"

Strategy Page helpfully gives us the broad policy options for dealing with pirates, which boil down to three: put up with and contain the problem, or attack it in a limited but tough way, or attack it in a much more ruthless way.

And broadly speaking those options apply to how we tackle other anti-civilisational forces too.

We are all the beneficiaries of the civilisational stability inherited from decades or centuries ago, when violent forces were quelled and order imposed using whatever methods it took. But that inherited capital is being drawn down, as various forces for reprimitivisation creep back and stake out claims to control parts of the earth's surface in the face of a bemused and uncertain international reaction.

Shooting a few pirate-terrorists and Talebanists is a good way to catch their attention. But probably not anything like enough to deter them. Just as sanctions against North Korea have no consequence - they look more like a sign of weakness than strength.

Maybe we'll just have to sigh and watch all such problems grow and grow until the costs of not squashing them are so obvious and pressing that our own public opinion compels the deployment of both Might - and Resolve - once again?

One problem with that is that an angry public opinion so aroused may make other demands which are not so easy to accept, but no less vociferous..?

Or maybe others such as China, Japan and India who see their key interests being challenged by such forces will step in and take resolute action, rather than wait for Western ditherers to stop dithering.

That will be a real turning-point as and when it happens. Egad, it may even call for an urgent EU high-level meeting.

For some bracing feminist-inclined fresh air after all this fetid Westminster stuff, swing by BBRU 217 hosted by Philobiblon.

Plenty of gripping links. Not least this startling account of the way Jersey is run these days.

And this angry but confused piece from Penny Red about why it's OK - nay essential - for women to be angry. She denounces 'society' which (she claims) says that angry women are 'ugly':

The only way society knows how to cope with angry women is to stereotype them as deranged, ridiculous and, worst of all, ugly...

Her evidence for Society's odious attitude? One silly YouTube vid. Earth to Penny: angry men are ugly too.

But read also this one from Mr Eugenides (picking up this one by James Graham on the lack of much analysis or sympathy from right-wing bloggers/pundits on aggressive police behaviour towards Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests):

Because "protest" has traditionally been a tool of the left - the average Tory does not go to many demos, no matter what government is in power - it is something that many on the right simply don't and can't identify with.

One of the most powerful factors that drives empathy for those whose civil liberties are being curtailed - "there, but for the grace of God, go I" - often doesn't apply to the same extent in these cases, because at some level there is an unspoken assumption that if you go to an anti-capitalism protest, given the violence we have seen over the last decade and more in cities from Genoa to Seattle, you are consciously putting yourself in harm's way and have to take your chances accordingly...

... Yes, it could have been me. It could have been anyone. In the event, it was Ian Tomlinson; and now he is dead. He deserves, and we should demand, a full inquiry into the circumstances of his death, and we need to have it now.

And no-one should ignore it, whatever side of the spectrum they write from; because if the state can beat one man to the ground for being in the wrong place, and do it with impunity, then we are all in the wrong place, and we are all on our knees already...

Well put. But is it true? Let me think about it and get back to you...

Former Ambassador Brian Barder has been trying to crank up the argument that Guido has to carry a sizeable share of the blame for spreading the odious contents of the McBride emails:

... virtually all the smear stories sent privately as possible blog material by McBride to Draper are now in the public domain — in the newspapers and on radio and television, not just on an obscure and scurrilous blog — and causing real pain and embarrassment to their victims, at least one of whom is threatening legal action (against whom?). 

And who was responsible for this widespread publication?  ‘Guido Fawkes’, who somehow got hold of copies of the e-mails, wrote about them on his blog and gave them to the newspapers (he denies having sold them), and the newspaper editors who have seen fit to reproduce the juiciest elements of them in extensive print while piously denouncing McBride and Draper for their wickedness in passing them from one to the other and daring to contemplate making them semi-public in a blog. 

The Conservative Party leadership and the other victims of the smears must be very grateful to Guido/Paul and his right-wing media contacts for so enthusiastically exposing this muck to public view.

See the ensuing to and fro in the Comments, including one from Guido himself.

Brian is wrong. The person directly responsible for leaking these documents and getting them published was not Guido but the person somewhere in the Labour elite who somehow made sure that they found their way to Guido, a high-profile writer/blogger/commentator. Everything else is a detail.

In my own notorious leaked email drama in 2005, someone senior in HM government leaked my email to the FCO/Treasury to stir up amusing trouble, who knows why. That person was responsible for the leak and disseminating the email's contents, not the Sunday Times which published the thing.

Bottom Line: as soon as you write anything controversial on a computer and press Send, you are in the moral position of the person who brings a stick of dynamite to a Fireworks Party and leaves it on the mantelpiece inside the house with a label attached saying Dangerous - Do Not Light.

If then someone takes the dynamite outside and lights the fuse, that person is in an opportunistic sort of way immediately responsible for the consequences - but surely the person who created the danger in the first place by bringing the explosives into the house is  most to blame?

Bang.

Wrinkled Weasel has been sharing some interesting ideas with me on the value or not of blogging as a propaganda tool.

He argues that blogging lacks 'semiotic subtlety/stability':

Unless you state your case unequivocally, the point tends to get missed. If one were to attempt a propaganda blog, the writer would need to be fairly obvious about it or the message would be skipped. People give the impression they skim read blogs or not at all, responding to key phrases and words, and accordingly, the blog comments often appear to bear little relation to what you might call “discourse”.

Semiotics can be said to relate to “interpretive communities”. In the blogosphere these interpretive communities form and change very quickly. Guido is a prime example of this. If you were to show the comments thread to an educated person of say 25 years ago, they would find it hard to follow the meaning because they would be searching with obsolete interpretive tools, such as a sense of linear narrative, inculcated by a classic style of education. Fisking would have been an alien concept.

The real life parallel of blogging is a bar room rant, not an exchange of letters on Basildon Bond notepaper ...

... If there is anything that could be described as “discourse” in the blog world, it moves very quickly and is non-linear, which is why a lot of it becomes reduced to swear bloggery and ranting, since you do not have the time and reflection to agree on the meanings of terms, and “arsehole” or “jerk” tends to sum things up wonderfully.

This all sounds right, especially the non-linear idea. There is a lot of literature now on how biological (non-linear) rather than machine-age (linear) metaphors are the right way to look at the way Internet attentions speedily and unpredictably ebb and flow. See eg this. And this.

Contrast that unruly world 'where orders emerge' with this old-style way of Getting the Message Out:

All of which goes a long way to show why the McBride idea for a Labourish attempt to copy Guido to get out Labour messages was so deeply stupid in itself, let along obnoxious in the way it was conceived.

The whole point of the blogging/Internet world is its freedom, spontaneity and agility. An invented propaganda device carefully and discreetly (haha) steered from Downing Street can not possibly work in the same way.

Related to this is the drama we bloggers/writers all have of building a readership. This at best can be done only slowly, patiently and with a certain generosity of spirit if one is to do more than bring together a group of people who enjoy doses of trashy gossip and/or four-letter ranting and want little else.

Which is why Conservative Home works well - a political site whose overall style and content are 'owned' by its own community of readers, and therefore grows nicely.

All this said, maybe bloggers/writers of a generally like-minded view themselves create an 'interpretive community' of people who bounce ideas to and fro within their own ranks and end up locked in their own prejudices, much too unexposed to counter-arguments?

Thus the emergence of nerdy, boring political e-ghettoes. Is Twittering a way to end them, if ending them is thought to be a good idea?

Finally, bloggers love to bang on about the iniquities and incompetence of the mainstream media, whose journalists in turn uneasily bang on about the soaring irresponsibility and trivialisation brought about by blogging.

To use another biological metaphor, are the MSM a group of elderly and lazy sharks, while bloggers are the Remora fish who swim around their jaws and backends picking up decaying morsels for the mutual benefit of both species?

Thus:

The relationship between remoras and their hosts is most often taken to be one of commensalism, specifically phoresy. The host they attach to for transport gains nothing from the relationship, but also loses little. The remora benefits by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host.

There is some controversy over whether a remora's diet is primarily leftover fragments, or actually the feces of the host.

Which sounds about right to me.

When I saw the Prime Minister's letter to Sir Gus O'Donnell about the McBride affair I at first thought it was a spoof as it was so oddly drafted.

But it turns out to be real.

What's odd about it from a literary and substantive point of view? Various things.

First, it's curiously wordy:

I am writing about the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers, and the proposals I want to make to tighten this up (22 words). Why not instead: I am writing to make proposals to tighten up the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. (16 words)

Then there is this clunky sentence, weighing in at a massive 71 words:

I am assured that no Minister and no political adviser other than the person involved had any knowledge of or involvement in these private emails that are the subject of current discussion, and I have already taken responsibility for acting on this — first by accepting Mr McBride's resignation and by making it clear to all concerned that such actions have no part to play in the public life of our country.

The clunkitude of this aside, am I missing something? Since when in senior governance ethics has accepting the resignation of someone who has behaved disgracefully amounted to 'taking responsibility'? Does not taking responsibility involve taking the initiative and firing that person? Or having something to say about why he was brought into the team and by whom in the first place? Or indeed resigning too?

... Any activity such as this that affects the reputation of our politics is a matter of great regret to me and I am ready to take whatever action is necessary to improve our political system.

Really? Then why have you not brought in proposals for regularising the role of Special Advisers which (says Iain Dale) Labour promised to do in 1997?

Then there is this remarkable piece of prose (a puny 69 word sentence):

I would therefore now like a more explicit assurance included in the special advisers Code of Conduct that not only are the highest standards expected of political advisers but that the preparation or dissemination of inappropriate material or personal attacks have no part to play in the job of being a special adviser, just as it has no part to play in the conduct of all our public life.

The grammar and sense of this are all over the place: "... the preparation or dissemination of X or Y have no part to play in the job of being a special adviser, just as it has no part to play ..."  Aaaaargh.

I also think it right to make it a part of the special advisers contract by asking our political advisers to sign such an assurance and to recognise that if they are ever found to be preparing and disseminating inappropriate material they will automatically lose their jobs.

47 word sentence. Should that be special advisers' contract? Or is the expression special advisers somehow taking the form of an adjective here? What happens if they are not found doing these things? They stay in place! Better if they lose their jobs 'automatically' when they are found out - then no need to accept responsibility either for accepting their resignations or for firing them...

Like the overwhelming majority of figures in public life across the political spectrum, I entered politics because of a sense of public duty and to improve the lives and opportunities of those less fortunate than me. My undivided focus as Prime Minister is on acting to make Britain a fairer, safer and more prosperous nation and, in particular, on guiding the country through the current economic difficulties. The public would expect no less and would also expect the highest possible standards from all their politicians and all those who work for them.

I wonder whom he identifies as the small minority who entered politics for other less honourable reasons? Names?

Why the curious subjunctive-style phrasing in the final sentence (the public would expect no less and would also expect ...)? Why the highest possible standards? Why not the highest standards?

Which is worse?

The mediocrity of the language used by whichever surviving spin doctor drafted this, or the mediocrity of the Downing Street attitudes that have led us to this dismal state of affairs?

Here is another fine site looking at English words (HT Ken Buxton) - where they come from and where they are going: World Wide Words.

What should you say?

• He weaved his way through the traffic
• Or he wove his way through the traffic?

The answer and an elegant explanation is here.

Maybe I should work in some spamdexing?

Enter WWW at your peril - deeply addictive...

Michael White at the Guardian broods on the what the headline over his piece terms "... the rightwing dominance of political blogosphere".

Thus:

If I understand the situation correctly, McBride got mixed up with Labour blogger and psychotherapist, Derek Draper – not always a wise move – in trying to create a leftwing counterweight to the right's dominance of the political blogosphere.

Political addicts and anoraks love this frenzied world of attack and counter-attack, gossip and exposé, usually keener on malice and outraged opinion than the finer dilemmas of policy-making.

Most sensible citizens ignore it, concentrating on their own online interests (which can be just as vehement). Political bloggers such as Guido Fawkes, instigator of McBride's doom, tend to be rightwing, free market or libertarian Tories, the kind of people who want to blame governments rather than bankers for the global economic crisis.

Actually, both are at fault, but the blogosphere does not do shades of grey. The medium lends itself easily to shoot-from-the-hip outrage. That is why many enthusiasts love it.

And this curious thought:

The trouble comes when such fierce dogs bite the wrong person – invariably it is the wrong person – and has to be put down. That is what has just happened to Damian McBride.

He shouldn't have been dabbling in what sounds like squalid stuff, but it helps to understand why people like him do what they do. They do it to protect their boss and undermine opponents whom they think enjoy an unfair advantage in a corrupted media environment.

Hang on a minute.

What does the word 'dominate' mean when put in the same phrase as Blogosphere?

And is he suggesting that the blogosphere, an e-space where supposedly free citizens in a supposedly free country bang on about myriad issues as they see fit, is a corrupted media environment? Or, at least, that that is how the political flunkies round the Prime Minister see it?

Strewth. It really is very bad.

It's not easy to measure this sort of thing, but let's take the Total Politics Political Blog list, pulled together by Iain Dale with an eye on boldly creating a community space for British political blogs of all shapes and sizes. It has nearly 2000 blogs listed.

On this list the blogs which might be called 'Right Wing' (Conservative, Libertarian, Right Wing, UKIP and English Democrat) number some 579 in all.

Those which might be called 'Left Wing' (Labour, Lib Dem, Green, Left Wing) number some 665 in all.

So no sign of Right Wing Dominance if the sheer numbers of blogs on one side or other are anything to go by. On the contrary, Left Wing blogs are ahead. Nearly 500 blogs are said to be 'non-aligned'.

In terms of popularity at the top end, Conservative/Libertarian blogs are in a strong position if the TP 2008 Survey (itself not very scientific is anything to go by), with Guido and Iain Dale himself way out in front in terms of unique visitors as far as one can tell. But the fact that they have significant readership does not mean that all those readers are Right Wing or great fans of their views.

Moreover, the total readership of the UK political blogosphere can not be more than a few million people. So even if one tendency 'dominates' this space (which it doesn't), it has nothing remotely like the true domination enjoyed by the Centre-Left BBC which gets into almost every home in the country every day and which can use its huge publicly funded position in the media market to drive out competition.

So what in fact is striking about the Labour/McBride fiasco is that it was based on seriously incompetent analysis combined with vanity - an attempt in a crass top-down way to set up and control some sort of Leftist Guido lookalike, merely because Guido had been rooting out some painful stories about Labour machinations which otherwise might have been kept away from public scrutiny.

Why on earth did they think that this was necessary/desirable - and could work?

The point of the Guido phenomenon is that it is a sort of Internet-based one-man Private Eye - an outlet for the sort of credible stories and accusations sloshing around Westminster which the mainstream media outlets are loath to run with.

There is nothing really new in this, other than the speed and verve of Guido himself. But the very personal spontaneity and often vulgar style of Guido's site give it a quirkiness and credibility which no clunky Left-wing version cooked up by smirking senior Labourites in Downing Street was ever going to be able to emulate.

Hence the current debacle.

Tom Harris MP (Labour) gets it, even if the Guardian does not:

But this isn’t about positioning or spinning or misdirection or whatever. This is about standards of political activity, standards which have fallen far, far below what is remotely acceptable, especially for someone working at the very heart of government. 

We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves. The damage the Labour Party and the government have sustained this last 24 hours has been entirely self-inflicted.

And the people behind this sordid little mess owe everyone named in these emails a very public apology.

Alas for Labour, the self-inflicted opening of this squalid can of worms allows all sorts of new problems to buzz around: FOI requests, questions about the money McBride will get now he has left office, countless demands for apologies, maybe even a defamation lawsuit.

And then there is YouTube...

Many of the sort of things the blogosphere is good at promoting and publicising or both.

Ha.

What exactly was wrong with apartheid?

At root the act of defining people in arbitrary phoney 'racial' categories then allocating them special territories accordingly ('homelands').

Just as happens in some bookshops these days (HT Ed Driscoll):

What a great idea! Putting all the novels about black people in a single section! Why didn’t I think of that? But wait—wait—how many of the characters have to be black before the novel does go into that section? Does just one black character make the whole novel black or is there a special section for mulatto novels with characters of both colors?

And if all the novels about black people are in the black section, does that make the Literature section the white section? Why don’t we call it that then? I’m confused.

And hey, what about The Adventures of Augie March—do I find that in the Jewish section? No, don’t be an idiot. Important novels about Jews trying to find their place in America go in the Literature section, of course. What are you, an anti-semite?

Only important novels about blacks trying to find their place in America go in a special section of their own. Anything else would be hateful. 

Got it now?

Ever-alert reader Ken Buxton picks up my posting about dying expressions and points us all to this excellent site about Eggcorns, words and phrases whose use is mutating mainly but not only through ignorance:

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???) an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping.

Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.

Here is a long list including strait/straight and ferment/foment and many other superb examples (a hare's breath, peak one's interest, right as reign, in lame man's terms and so on)

Magnificent in itself and as an example of the Internet delivering collaborative networked insight at a high pace. Read on if you are interested in words.

Why do positive things happen today?

In good part because previous generations have acted ruthlessly to suppress the forces of destruction - to establish the principle that for good behaviour to spread, really bad behaviour must have really bad consequences.

Hence for a long period piracy on the high seas was almost non-existent.

But now the idea seems to be that really bad behaviour has all sorts of consequences, some of which might be fairly bad but not all. Hence a strong re-emergence of bad behaviour, in this case piracy.

Two good articles about this.

The first at NRO by Andrew McCarthy achieves greatness by deploying the word straitjacket correctly and through this passage:

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away.

Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

He links to Bret Stephens who reviews the history of piracy and concludes:

Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we've regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy.

A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

The exam question for Western politicians:

"Either we fight the enemies of civilisation on their territory - and win - or they fight it on ours - and they win."  Discuss - but not for too long.

The BBC reports a ruling by a top Polish court that Poland's cyclists may face imprisonment for riding while intoxicated, as do drivers of motor vehicles.

This has to be the right answer, despite the ingenious but specious counter argument that cyclists should be treated as pedestrians who face lesser punishment for being drunk on public roads, as in both cases they are using their own muscle power to move along.

Unless you have seen it with your own eyes, it is hard to grasp just how blind drunk people on bicycles and indeed pedestrians can be in former Communist Europe, especially in rural areas (although the wide boulevards of Moscow late at night are also prone to appalling accidents involving drunk pedestrians reeling around aimlessly far from the pavement).

Once I was being driven by Embassy driving legend George (Jerzy) towards Poznan along a country road. We rounded a corner. There immediately ahead of us was a man on a bicycle wobbling precariously in our direction.

He had a zero chance of not falling off the bike. 

The 100% chance of falling off divided neatly: either a 50% chance of falling across the road and being flattened and maybe causing us to be seriously injured too; or a 50% chance of falling the other way into the ditch. 

Fate smiled on him as on us. Into the ditch he sprawled.

On a separate occasion when on the 2006 Marie Curie 500km bike ride across Poland our group of riders stopped for a breather. We watched the police appear from nowhere and apprehend a local yokel cyclist scarely able to stand, let alone ride. Later some of our riders watched an elderly intoxicated Polish woman cyclist wobble her way into a ditch. She got up, somehow managed to get back on her bike, and wobbled off down the road.

This Balkan YouTube clip gives the general idea of the law enforcement issues at stake (plenty more examples if you want to be depressed at the human condition): 

Take this story leading in the Telegraph this morning:

Downing Street is at the centre of a fresh security scare after it emerged that private emails written by one of Gordon Brown’s senior officials had ended up in the hands of one of Britain’s most controversial political bloggers.

The emails, which made a number of unfounded, innuendo-laden suggestions about the private lives of David Cameron, George Osborne and other Conservative MPs, came into the possession of Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes political blog.

The emails were sent by the unnamed adviser in January from a high-security Downing Street account and have been touted to newspapers, including this newspaper. The Daily Telegraph decided against purchasing the emails. However, it was understood that at least one Sunday newspaper was poised to publish the embarrassing details.

There seems something not quite right in this supposed news-story. It reads as if it is based squarely on one 'source close to Downing Street', with no attempt to dig around a bit into what might be going on (including the personal agenda of the 'source close to Downing Street).

Why does it have such prominence? What's this really all about?

Then check out Guido:

Guido has hard evidence that Tory MPs have been smeared, and that a particularly vicious concerted smear operation was mounted against George Osborne, smears that Damian McBride - a civil servant - knows and admits in writing are untrue, yet he was still instrumental in spreading.  Some well known lobby journalists have knowingly gone along with it.  This is a lot bigger than some minor bloggers spat.

Downing Street are deliberately trying to make out that this is just another round in the Draper v Guido battle - that is why the Telegraph have slanted their story in the way they have.  It isn’t.  It is about a poisonous long term smear operation based in the heart of Downing Street and run by the prime minister’s press and political adviser, Damian McBride.  Names will be named and shamed…

Well might we sigh that the nation's affairs are reduced to this sort of thing, with people at the heart of policy playing idiotic games for scraps of political advantage.

More importantly, it shows why the 'mainstream media' are failing. Too many lazy senior journalists have sold themselves and their reputations for the sake of 'access' to inside information.

Senior politicians and advisers have busily cosied up to different journalists, offering them good stuff in return for an easier time (and not too many questions asked). This demeans all concerned, plus it tends to reduce newspapers to chickens rushing over to be fed as and when the government generously brings out small handfuls of bran.

The chickens of course all focus on the bran - why should one chicken peck too hard at the greed and humiliation of the others in this situation and thereby risk losing out on this cheap nourishment?

A situation which of course mightily suits the person with the bran, and ruins the way public affairs are conducted.

Luckily there are still plenty of people in the system with some honour who want these machinations to be revealed.

Plus we have blogs and other ways in which more of the truth can be put out (although here too the risk is that eventually bloggers themselves will get dragged in and manipulated as favoured targets by the bickering desperate spin-doctorate).

It all comes down to Standards in Public Life.

The whole point of Standards is that they set flexible but nonetheless real limits on behaviour which have to be respected, with consequences flowing from failing to respect them.

Whereas the whole point of Spin as practised for far too long in the UK is to avoid responsibility: to get away with what you can get away with. Upholding Standards is fine if it is convenient, and talking loudly about Upholding Standards is essential. But above all for the Spinners there is no sense that upholding Standards is an end in itself - part of what being in government means.

Memo to next government:

Be grown-up. Restore and respect Standards and the very idea of Standards - and then take the political hits you deserve when you fall below them.

And help the media grow up too, by not sitting senior journalists in a high chair and feeding them mush.

Here is a wannabe high-browish piece about Grand Theft Auto, a cleverly violent computer car-based game appealing to most boys of all ages.

The hero of the game is one Niko Bellic, a computerised Balkanite tough egg (Serb?). I suspect that no Serb/Balkan name has a double ll in it following the orthographic reforms of Serbian led by Vuk Karadzic well over a century ago - surely Belic would have been a better try?

Be that as it may, the review looks at the game in terms of its gritty depiction of the immigrant experience as our Balkan newcomer tries to grapple with the contradictions of New World Capitalism:

But he also betrays Mikhael in the name of capitalist production; Mikhael is dangerous, yes, but murder is the stock and trade of such men. The trouble is that his murderousness is no longer profitable; it has, in fact, gotten in the way of the mob’s profitability. His dedication to an outmoded form of production, more than anything else, leads to Mikhael’s destruction.

In the New World, blood loyalties are replaced with contracts, honor with rules, ritual revenge with law. It isn’t that the Old World mode is not just as arbitrary or dangerous; Mikhael is already self-destructing, and Niko, very much an Old World soul, is burdened by considerable misery. The difference is that the new mode is self-aware, and its subscribers can therefore self-modify in order to remain profitable.

If you say so.

What I spotted was this sentence:

The character is viewed from a third person perspective and has free reign over accessible regions.

It is an interesting example of one phrase morphing into another. The original idea is that someone shows or has or is given a 'free rein' - letting a horse gallop ahead where it will without hauling on the reins to steer/slow it.

As most people now have little if any dealings with the world of horses, the phrase is mutating into something which sounds and means the same but loses the original imagery while gaining a plausible replacement - hence the new form free reign.

Something similar is happening to expressions like 'sow confusion' or 'sow discontent'. Banal ignorance of both spelling and agricultural metaphor is bringing into the language the strange but maybe not totally inappropriate new metaphor of sew confusion, as I saw now and again in Foreign Office drafts.

Anyone has other examples?

Some Good Friday thoughts.

Most people (including until yesterday myself included) do not know that it is only quite recently that the USA established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, namely in 1984 under President Reagan.

The issue was controversial in US domestic terms and even provoked litigation. Did establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican somehow compromise the core US constitutional principle of the separation of State and Church? Was the USA recognising the Vatican as a political or religious authority? What about the USA's relations with the UK, HM The Queen being the Head of the Church of England?

Somehow it all settled down. But a tricky new issue may (or may not) be arising over the appointment by President Obama of the next US Ambassador and that person's views on abortion - will the Pope accept a 'pro-choice' candidate for that position? 

If 'informal' signals are being sent to the White House that certain candidates are best not put forward, what is President Obama to do, caught as he is between vociferous pro-choice anti-Catholic Left-Democrats and a large bloc of moderate Catholic voters and religiously inclined centrists who also voted for him?

Both President Obama and the Pope know that beneath this current skirmish lie rivalry between huge ideas and principles to do with God and Man echoing on down the decades and centuries. In this case the Vatican has the advantage that it was there long before the USA came along, and it expects to be there long after it has gone.

Diplomacy moves to a very different slow rhythm in Vatican Time. Issues are considered and mulled over and pronounced on laboriously within two titanic struggles: one against militant atheistic secularism as it evolved following the French Revolution; the other against the machinations of other religions striving for members and some sort of sustained moral and political supremacy.

On the first front, the Church scored a stunning philosophical victory in helping overthrow Communism through the witness of Pope John Paul II (with a little help from his friends). Another battleground is Evolution - how can any religion cope with all that science? Knowledge v Belief? The Vatican manoeuvres carefully. 

In the Catholic Church's relations with other faiths, things are trundling along.

The various Orthodox churches are too nationalistic and self-absorbed to have wider appeal. Catholic numbers are waning in Europe, but flourishing in Africa and Latin America and parts of Asia. China is a big prize. As seen from the balcony of St Paul's in Rome, the puny Church of England experiment falls into the category of nice try - but after 500 years they have not really pulled it off.

On the other hand, Islam's numbers and energy are impressive these days. Plus there are various Islamic strictures against apostasy. Such as death. So a more assertive position might be called for.

Hence the Pope's very public baptism of Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam during Easter a year ago - a powerful signal that Pope Benedict was ready openly - and actively - to welcome people who have renounced Islam into the Catholic fold. Strong meat (emphasis added):

Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".

Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an "Islamic reformation", or a "moderate Islam", or "Islamic democracy". None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims.

The use of the world "revolution" is Magdi Allam's:

His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear.

The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims. 

For Diplomacy on a Grand Scale, look at the Vatican.

Here is another heavy and pessimistic analysis of Russia's gloomy demographics:

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing...

The numbers are extraordinary. See eg this:

According to Human Rights Watch, over 100,000 children in Russia have been abandoned by their parents each year since 1996. If accurate, this number, compared to the annual tally of births for the Russian Federation, which averaged about 1.4 million a year for the 1996–2007 period, would suggest that in excess of 7 percent of Russia’s children are being discarded by their parents in this new era of steep sub-replacement fertility.

Or this:

Russia’s patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Or this:

On today’s mortality patterns, a Swiss man at 20 has about an 87 percent chance of making it to a notional retirement age of 65. His Russian counterpart at age 20 has less than even odds of reaching 65 ... Thus Russia’s health crisis may be even more generally subversive of human capital, and more powerfully corrosive of human resources, than might appear to be the case at first glance.

But let's recall the argument that maybe it all does it not matter that much, even under a worse case scenario? Thus:

Even the worst case scenario of only 80 million people on Russia’s territory by 2075 would still leave Russia with a greater population density than contemporary Canada.

Fewer but richer Russians in a hundred years' time? Maybe fine for those people, but will their claim to own quite so many time-zones be politically and militarily sustainable?

Former Ambassador turned Conspiracy Theoretician Craig Murray has written something really bizarre about the Bob Quick fiasco:

Yet in all the acres of coverage in the newspapers, and all the hype on TV, nobody seems to have noticed the real story.

It was an accident that Bob Quick had his secret document on display as he was photographed entering Downing St. But it was no accident that he was photographed entering Downing Street.

Craig in a fine example of the Law of the Excluded Middle claims that because he himself has been through the front door on No 10 only with a senior delegation or attending a party, no-one else can use that entrance for attending meetings. Thus:

The front door is for people the government wants to be seen – hence the permanent stand of photographers which captured Bob Quick. People arriving to brief on secret matters go in through the back door, or more likely through the Cabinet Office.

So why did the government want us to see that Bob Quick was entering No 10? The only possible answer is that, had things gone more smoothly in the arrest of the “Terror suspects”, the government would have paraded the footage of Quick entering no 10 as evidence that it was really Glorious Gordon and Genius Jacqui who had directed the operation and saved the world - again.

It is very, very wrong – it violates the whole spirit of the constitution – for politicians to be involved in arresting people.

To aid the dim-witted and short-sighted, he adds a passage in bold:

The photo leak – which could indeed have jeopardised a security operation which may or may not prove to have been vital - was caused directly by the excessive and completely unnecessary involvement of the politicians in policing detail.

What? What?

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site:

This is just too much. Are you being serious?

As an FCO official I have walked through the front door of No 10 on my own on numerous occasions to meet No 10 officials, watching with amusement the looks of the bored media folk on the other side of the street who no doubt were wondering who I was. So your whole thesis promptly collapses.

Maybe back in the days when you were a fairly junior official briefing Lady Thatcher (before they put up the elaborate railings and security barriers?) things were different, ie officials were expected to use a different entrance.

Now if you are on the No 10 visitors' list you just show up at the main police entrance to Downing Street and walk to the front door. You press the bell and a policeman opens the door, checks your name and rings the person you are visiting to come and collect you. 100% prosaic.

In the Bob Quick case, he may have wanted to look important for vanity reasons. But to look at the quite uninteresting fact that he used the front door and then assert that 'the only possible answer' is that he arrived at that entrance for later TV management reasons (and/or that it shows that politicians are involved in deciding the timing of arrests) is beyond ridiculous.

You maybe should apologise for misleading your readers.

Regards,

I have no idea whether the police are briefing No 10 officials or even the Prime Minister on impending terrorist operations. There may be an operational or policy case for doing so. Or maybe something constitutionally improper was planned.

All I know is that nothing whatsover about any of this can be deduced from the fact that the hapless Bob Quick used the No 10 front door, rather than a back entrance so well trodden by Craig Murray and countless other more junior functionaries down the decades.

I have been quietly pestering the FCO about the spelling mistakes on their many websites. They have responded well to an FOI request about the rules/guidance they put round on website standards, sending me various papers. This guidance is pretty good, apart from one 100% incoherent sentence - just a pity the practice is less than satisfactory.

One of their documents told FCO staff that the guidance was not meant to impose a straight-jacket (sic) on them. The correct spelling of course is strait-jacket. How many people now know that? An untypically literate public school boy whom I met on the stairs at home this morning thought that it must be 'straight-jacket - "it keeps people straight, unable to move". Sigh.

Also today a proof of an article I have written came back to me. My expression fomenting unrest had been changed to fermenting unrest. Aaargh.

But who these days has heard of fomenting anything? Everyone knows what you mean, so who cares exactly how it's spelled? 

So strait and foment creep away sadly through the back door to die. And mentee and twonk brashly push their way in through the front door.

Decay? Or democracy?

Both?

Sorry readers. An exhausting couple of days clearing out the parental garage.

This old radio of mine emerged - a hefty but magnificent Pye Cambridge International. 

One of these cost a huge 42 guineas in 1954, the auspicious year of my birth. Not easy to say with any certainty what that price means nowadays, but one nifty website aids the calculation: either £789 (using retail price index) or £2,181 (using average earnings). So in any event a superb piece of kit.

This valve radio belonged to the Embassy in Belgrade and when new technology arrived it was no longer needed. So I bagged it, back in 1984.

I tried to start it today for the first time in twenty or so years. It came to life but wisps of smoke appeared - dust on the valves burning as they wheezed back into life?

So, off to be overhauled it goes. When I can find a box big enough to ship it...

Alas such marvellous engineering achievements are worth next to nothing now - almost certainly less than the cost of restoring it. They are just too big and clunky for modern houses. Just like my LP collection and the Linn LP12 system and huge heavy speakers which drive them, driven into obscurity by the iPod and its fit-in-your-pocket cleverness.

Which for no good reason reminds me of one of my first postings, musing on the awesome Khazzoom-Brookes postulate - the idea that the invention of more energy-saving devices makes it cheaper to save energy, so we use more of it overall.

Another radio memory from communist Yugoslavia. I visited a house in Vojvodina one day in 1982 or thereabouts, where they had an old working radio the size of a modern fridge if not bigger. The sound was magnificent: deep, rich, strong. I bet it's still there somewhere. 

President Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons.

But he accepts that it might not happen in his lifetime.

Why it is so difficult to scale back these systems once they are there?

Basically, nuclear weapons are ghastly because they can not be used on any scale that matters without evaporating huge numbers of civilians as well as some small military targets.

It is easy enough for Big Powers to edge away in embarrassment from the idea of annihilating millions of civilians, since they can afford expensive new networked systems which attack military targets with unerring precision and devastation.

But for some other regimes and extremist tendencies acquiring that very 'mass destruction' feature of nuclear weapons is their prime negotiating goal: mess with us and something Really Bad may happen to you.

Thus Iran wants to threaten Israel with a Very Final Solution, just as Israel wants to say that anyone trying that Solution will get a similar Pretty Final Solution in return. 

North Korea's communist tyranny wants to show that it can do what the hell it likes to increase its bargaining power and so help survive longer than it should.

Some Islamist extremists seemingly would like nothing better than to inflict mass destruction on a Western city, to show their power and demonstrate the End of the West for male chauvinist religious reasons.. 

And with undemocratic and/or weird people like that sneaking round the planet bent on buying or stealing top-end mass destructive technology, the Big Powers think that keeping a few score nuclear missiles handy 'just in case' is not such a bad idea.

Russia has a different problem. It is only Russia's sprawling nuclear weapon stockpiles which give Russia true 'superpower' status. How can it scale back its huge nuclear arsenal as the Americans propose while it can not afford anything like the new smart-weapon systems the USA deploys? For them Obama's proposal must be tricky news.

So, Obama wins some great headlines for being both cool and 'peaceful'. He knows that he is making this offer from a position of unassailable military strength built up by the Republicans - and that in practice nothing much will change very fast anyway. 

Good diplomacy.