Mills vs. Mills

So long, darling, and don't let the hedge fund hit you on the way out. The ruthlessness of these people is still somehow surprising, but it makes sense. Berlusconi left him to twist in the wind, so did his alibi the shipowner, now Tessa.

The Blairite tradition of disgrace being a passing phase (see Blunkett) is clearly thriving, too.

"They hope that over time their relationship can be restored, but, given the current circumstances, they have agreed a period of separation."

Get out but come back after the local elections, eh.

Mice, Pigs, Chickens

The Kenya Standard is open for business once more. On that theme, a comment..

Kenyananalyst
to me
More options 2:45 pm (2 hours ago)
I find it inconceivable and foolhardy that:

1. The President hasn't still found it fit to comment
on something supposedly touching on our national, and
by extension, his own security.

2. That Hon. Michuki expects to win back public
opinion with his belated attempts to sell the new
angle to this incident. The Tuesday protests, if
allowed to proceed, could just be the turning point in
this saga (unless something gives between now and
then. I certainly expect some clergymen to counsel the
nation to be "patient" this Sunday).
Someone has sent me an e-mail concerning the current
affairs in our country, which I now take the liberty
to share with you and others:
******

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see
the farmer and his wife open a package.

"What food might this contain?" The mouse wondered -
he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the
warning.

"There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a
mousetrap in the house!"

The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head
and said, "Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave
concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I
cannot be bothered by it."

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, "There is
a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the
house!"

The pig sympathized, but said, "I am so very sorry,
Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but
pray. Be assured you are in my prayers."

The mouse turned to the cow and said "There is a
mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the
house!"

The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but
it's no skin off my nose."

So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and
dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the
house -- like the sound of a mousetrap catching its
prey.

The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In
the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake
whose tail the trap had caught.

The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her
to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken
soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard
for the soup's main ingredient.

But his wife's sickness continued, so friends and
neighbors came to sit with her around the clock.
To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.

The farmer's wife did not get well; she died. So many
people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow
slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.

The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the
wall with great sadness.

So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem
and think it doesn't concern you...., remember
-- when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life. We
must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra
effort to encourage one another.

--
Posted by Kenyananalyst to The Yorkshire Ranter at 3/04/2006 03:45:21 PM

Op. Firedump: 3C-QRF May Escape

Worrying news has reached me from various sources that the San Air General Trading BAC-111 s/n 61, 3C-QRF, formerly used to bring arms into the DRC, host secret meetings with Libyan spooks and ferry around the girls of Hustler magazine, may yet escape from Bucharest before being condemned under the UN freeze list.

The story does not yet seem entirely clear, but the concern is that the aircraft may be re-registered 5A-DKO and flown to Libya, there to join various other Jetline International veterans at a new firm called Libavia (or perhaps "Pyramid") for VIP tasks. Already there are 5A-DKR and 5A-DKT, the two Ilyushin-62 "VC10skis" formerly of blacklisted Boutcos Air Bas and Centrafrican Airlines (ex 3C-QQR and 3C-QQZ), one of which went from Air Bas to Jetline, then back to Air Bas on its way to Libya.

According to information received, a new engine has been shipped from Malta to Romania to put the plane in flying condition. There are reasons for doubt, though, as another Jetline International BAC-111 in VIP fit, VP-BBA, is at Bucharest. The sources claim that 3C-QRF is at Otopeni, the international airport, however Aerotransport.org lists it as stored at Baneasa with VP-BBA at Otopeni for delivery to Libya as 5A-DKO.

It goes without saying that Romania has an obligation to seize this aircraft in accordance with UNSCR 1532 (details here.)

We will bury you!

We will catch up with and outstrip America - Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

LunchCon

David "Stupid Network" Isenberg reflects on the common phenomenon that the only worthwhile thinking at a conference occurs during lunch. Very true. I'd go to a conference made up of a continuous lunch. Rather like this bunch of nutters, some of whose events I attended in Vienna.

The politics of dancing: 2006

Now there's a phrase from the 90s. Remember Michael Howard's Criminal Justice Act? Road protests? Setting Sun? Well, if you do you probably, like me, can't imagine how it came to this. It seems you are these days more likely to be the target of biometric surveillance if you are in a nightclub than anywhere else. This blog has charted this grim trend for some time, watching it spread from Barcelona to Glasgow and California. Being on the RFID guest list is bad enough - after all, it means you can be identified and tracked at any time without your knowledge.

But this kicks it up a notch. Someone is marketing a face recognition system for CCTV cameras called "BioBouncer." The pitch is that the machine will automatically recognise previous troublemakers and therefore permit them to be eighty-sixed without further drama. Funny, as a lad back in Leeds I remember there was something like that–it even threw them out too, and could (under ideal conditions) adapt its reactions to their mood, behaviour and degree of inebriation. It was called a bouncer.

Now, it was certainly far from ideal, but it sounds cheaper and less prone to errors. You may recall the Home Office's flawed ID card trial of 10,000 volunteers. On that occasion, digital fingerprinting, iris scanning and face recognition were tested. The results were dire. Iris scanning, the least hopeless of the three, failed 4 per cent of the time–enough to render any system based on it useless in a population of 44 million–but face recognition was useless to the point of absurdity, failing 30 per cent of the time.

That was under lab conditions, too. In the, ahem, field I would think results would be considerably worse. (After all, a non-trivial proportion of targets will have pupils the size of dinner plates...) The whole dire tale illustrates a couple of points about bad technology. The first is the speed of function creep. From the Barcelona club that allowed members to pay for drinks by RFID, we've already reached an application explicitly intended for control. The second is that you must beware the cool. (I think it's customary to link to this cartoon at Phil Hunt's at this point.) Is it too crazed to suggest someone's trying to manipulate people's associations? Probably, but a spoonful of novelty and insider cachet always goes a long way.

A Banker Writes..

Just received the following anonymous advice regarding Mrs. David Mills and her unfeasibly frequent mortgages.

Hambros is a past tense merchant bank of course; it bit one over the Co-Op takeover scandal and got taken over by Societe Generale of France. "SG Hambro" is now SocGen's UK private banking brand, and it would not be out of the ordinary run of things for a private (ie toff) bank to put together deals like this for a high-rolling lawyer. The fact that the loan is a mortgage is pretty irrelevant in this case; the mortgage on the house is there because the banker really doesn't want to be interested in the credit quality of the client, he wants a nice valuable asset that he can take a charge on. Everyone involved in this would be aware that this was a short term loan for a speculative transaction and would be paid back as soon as the investment paid off.

So far, so comprehensible. But then the next two deals are weird in the choice of banks. "Mortgage Express" is a brand of the Bradford & Bingley which does most of their "specialist" lending. They mainly do buy-to-let deals these days, although in 2002 they were also big in self-certification mortgages, which Mills would need because he doesn't have payslips. But they're high-margin players and they're not at all the kind of people that you would go to for a mortgage that you intended to pay back in any short time as the redemption charges on ME products are quite high (their business model in the old days was to lend money at high rates to people who other lenders didn't want, then make money out of the redemption charges when the customer remortgaged to a cheaper deal). The only product they sell which is remotely appropriate for this kind of application is Flex-Ability, and that can only be accessed through the IFA/mortgage broker channel - I wonder who the IFA was. (I am not even sure that Flex-Ability was available in 2002, as B&B was quite late to the mortgage price wars and I think was one of the last to give up on early redemption charges).

Then we have A&L and that is plain weird. I wouldn't even have thought that A&L would lend to Mills as they are in general positioned in the space where they're only interested in totally plain vanilla deals; notoriously, they still insist on checking three months of wage slips long after the rest of the sector has gone over to using the Experian and similar files for credit scoring. I remember them talking about this practice in 2003, so I am surprised that a lawyer working in a partnership got a mortgage out of them in 2002. I suppose Tessa Jowell gets payslips but Mills wouldn't; there are a few high street banks that have customer service teams which know how to deal with partners in law and accountancy firms and other types who have loads of money but no wages, but A&L isn't one of them. I can't see any A&L product at all that would be a good idea for a loan you intended to pay back in a short time - they all seem to have substantial early repayment charges apart from the Standard Variable Rate which is a bloody expensive way to borrow money. Looking at their website today the "5yr discount Fully Flexible" doesn't have repayment charges so maybe he took out one of those, though the A&L product range was much smaller in 2002 so I doubt that one was available then.

The point I'm making here is that normal people's mortgage banks are set up for people who want to borrow money over twenty years, not three months. They set their businesses up to run like that and if you depart from this model they will usually charge you extra because they are selling a standardised product to a mass market. Private bankers who are tailoring a specific product to a specific customer and who know that the "mortgage" element is only incidental to a short term loan will usually give you a better deal; this is not a universal rule (and still less is it financial advice) but in general this is the case. I don't understand why Mills didn't use his private banker for the 2002 transactions (I surmise that given the investigations, they had politely asked him not to). I would be interested to know what the products used were in Mills' transactions and what sort of fees he paid, and I suspect the Italian investigators would be looking into that too; as you say this seems like a really expensive way of carrying out the transaction.

Note that everyone Mills spoke to has effectively dobbed him in on this series of transactions; this is a consequence of the status of UK money laundering law, which is one of the few laws which creates a specific (and very serious) offence of not grassing on a client who you have the slightest suspicion of being up to something; this is only an obligation of people carrying on relevant business so civilians who don't do compulsory ML training are often not aware of the fact that conversations with a banker are carried out under the diametric opposite of the secrecy of the confessional. Tragically, he may have gone on believing that these people were still his mates, since "tipping off" someone that you have grassed on them is also a serious offence; I think you can get seven years for it.

Kenyan Censorraid Pics

CCTV pictures of the assault on Kenya's Standard newspaper are here.

Update, I've been concerned about the status of Internet connectivity to/from Kenya, being aware that although it's one of the few African countries to have its own IX, all links to the outside world are by VSAT. However, looking up the back numbers of NANOG, I see that the Kenyans have been deploying small VSATs to post offices - so there may be more linkability than I thought.

Muß i denn, muß i denn...

Ah, time for the marching songs..

Sunnis said to be moving men and arms to Baghdad to "defend the mosques". Mobilisation time. The New-Old Iraqi Army is coming.

And - refugees are leaving, people are collecting, sleeping on their mosque floors. Going to the mattresses, you might say. I don't want to gloat, but...

Back through the Mills

Right, despite the Heaving Strangler's cluelessness, I bring you a brief timeline of Mr and Mrs David Mills's mortgages.

1979. House in Kentish Town bought in cash.

15th July, 1987. Kentish Town house mortgaged with Mortgage Fund Corporation Ltd.

18th March, 1991. Remortgage with Coutts & Co.

1993. Warwickshire house bought in cash.

17th May, 1996. Coutts mortgage paid off.

25th October, 1996. Warks house mortgaged with Guinness Mahon & Co.

January 1998. Warks mortgage paid off.

1999. £350,000 paid into offshore fund.

21st July, 2000. Warks house mortgaged with Hambros Bank.

14th August, 2000. Warks mortgage paid off - three weeks later

27th September, 2000. Kentish Town house mortgaged with Hambros.

1st December, 2000. KT mortgage paid off (with the Berluscash - three months later)

28th February, 2002. Both mortgaged with Mortgage Express.

19th March, 2002. Kentish Town house paid off. three weeks later

25th March, 2002. Warks house paid off. a few days later

9th July, 2002. Both mortgaged with the Alliance & Leicester. Still outstanding.

They did it three times. What were the other two transactions about? And who on earth refinances a mortgage at higher interest rates as they did in 1991?

After the fake policemen..

..some real policemen as fake unidentified gunmen. Goons in masks, brandishing AKs, invaded the printing plant of the Kenya Standard last night and set fire to several thousand copies of the paper, before carrying off several employees. The paper believes they were policemen for the simple reason that they took the detainees/abductees to the central police station (nothing like subtlety, eh?).

Following up on this, Kenyan TV and radio channels went off the air. But somebody at the KBC continued reporting the apparent coup-against-self on their website. Screenshots and a roundup are at Kath's. KBC is here and still reporting, but the site is very slow (likely due to load - the topographic centre of the African Internet is still the LINX, so the best way to demonstrate solidarity is probably not to follow that link).

The story has progressed rapidly - first, the Ministry of Internal Security admitted the raid was its work with the twattish words "If you rattle a snake, you must be prepared to be bitten by it" - presumably the local equivalent of JUST FUCKING WATCH IT - and now, on a hopeful note, the chief of police has been summonsed to justify the detention of three journalists.

Contacts for the Kenyan High Commission in the UK:

THE KENYA HIGH COMMISSION

45 PORTLAND PLACE

LONDON W1B 1AS

TELEPHONE:020 7636 2371/5

FAX: 020 7323 6717

e-mail: consular@kenyahighcommission.net

Full list here.

Been through the Mills?

Well, aren't David Mills's explanations for that £350,000 getting creative? First up, he said the letter in which he fessed up to it was "purely hypothetical". Fine. So there was no money. Now, he says that the £350,000 came from his mate, the Neapolitan shipowner. (Shipping in Naples. Not likely to be any trace of corruption there...no sir.) So the money that doesn't exist (being purely hypothetical) was legit, so that's all right.

Meanwhile, yer man the shipowner denies that he paid the money over. He's got every reason to deny it, after all, because he was in jail at the time on a fraud rap. Let's get this straight - Jowell and Mills' defence is that they got the money from a Naples shipping magnate who was in jail at the time. When your defence sounds like that you're in trouble.

Not just that, but (unless I've missed something) Mills hasn't retracted the statement that there was no money. The car was never taken out of the driveway, he wasn't driving, and anyway he hadn't had a drink! Perhaps the statement was itself "purely hypothetical".

Then there's the mortgage, of course. The one that got paid off within the month. Now, what nobody seems to have picked up is that it's not the only mortgage the Millses have paid off with astonishing speed. According to yesterday's Evening Standard, they did the trick once before in 2000, and again in 2002, having bought both properties in cash in the first place. Now, it's very hard to imagine why anybody would use this weird procedure. It's hardly cost-free or simple. And why would anybody who bought a house in 1987 for cash on the nail mortgage it in 1991, when its value would have sunk substantially and the interest rate would have soared?

Now, I'd link to the original story. But I can't because the Evening Standard is too incompetent to update its website. Has anyone seen thisislondon.com lately? What an embarrassment that is. It looks for all the world like one of those dire spam sites that come up if you google for anything containing the word "hotel".

In further snark, was anyone else amused by Tessa Jowell being named as the Government's "champion" for equal pay on the same day that she told BBC Radio that she couldn't possibly have done anything wrong because her husband paid the mortgage and therefore she didn't worry about how the debt she guaranteed would be paid off? I think in future this blog will refer to her as Mrs. David Mills.

Update: Well, thank God for that. According to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, everything is all right. Interesting paragraph:

That refers to the apparent nub of the matter - that the disputed £350,000 that Mr Mills received in September 2000 was believed by Mr Mills to be a gift at the time - which would have required registering under the ministerial code. But he did not, apparently, tell his wife about it.

By the time he did, in August 2004 according to Ms Jowell, he had reclassified it as earnings, paid tax on it, and therefore it no longer fell liable to declaration under the code.

So - Mrs. David Mills signed the mortgage in August, 2000, which was then paid off in September, 2000 with the money, but didn't hear about it until August, 2004, by which time Mr. David Mills had decided that - fancy that! - it was actually legitimate income. Of course, presumably only she knows when she knew it, so Gus O'Donnell has to take her word for it.

It's eerily Aitkenesque. The Cabinet Secretary of the day (Butler?) was asked to investigate by John Major. He did this by asking Riyadh Jonny nicely if he'd lied to Parliament and believing his answer on the grounds that he was a gent. Aitken denied it (a lie), and got his free pass from the PM. History records the rest.

Bad Craziness!

A right-wing, American evangelical minister. Busted. In Uganda. In a hotel room full of guns and Congolese citizens. An excellent blog with the details.

Send lawyers, guns and money - the shit has hit the fan. Be interesting to see what develops.

Fake Police Watch

Over at Dave's, guess what do we find? Charles Clarke in a copper's hat. I didn't think it would spread quite that quickly.

DP World: My Two Cents

So far I haven't really engaged with the row about Dubai Ports World buying P&O. Frankly, I don't particularly care about grand icons of British industry changing hands - if you don't think they should be nationalised, it follows that you should welcome that the stock market decides on the allocation of capital between publicly held companies. I don't think P&O should be nationalised, so I really don't care who owns it so long as they are competent (which isn't up to me to decide as I don't own P&O stock).

I also don't think the security of US ports will change very much as a result. The US Customs only search 5 per cent of the containers, after all. But, still...it's fucking Dubai, after all, city of all the scams in the Middle East, next door to the Sharjah Airport Free Zone. And, as Larry Johnson points out, one of DP World's businesses is running the Dubai Free Zone, which is the location of a non-trivial number of firms associated with our, ahem, friend.

However, it's got jack shit to do with inspecting containers or managing the logistics of a big container terminal. It's also true that most of the really sick stuff goes in the other emirates, especially Sharjah, which Dubaians consider a hidebound ultraconservative dump run by Islamic puritans (ironically). It has everything to do with company law, corruption and impunity, which aren't DPW's business but that of the government. If there is a case to block the sale of P&O ports to DPW, it's entirely as a bargaining chip to force changes at home.

The Dreaded 36th!

Whilst we're in Iraq mode (is this blog ever in anything else? How will it ever return to civil life? Will it end up begging for hits by the roadside with a sign - Iraq Veteran, Please Give Generously Of Your Attention?), yet another of those reports on how many Iraqi army units can fight with US support is out. It's the same one that says the terrorists have failed to create and spread sectarian conflict, so salt is required.

Apparently there are more than ever who are at level 2, whatever that means, but still only one that can run its own show. Curiously, a few days ago, I saw an NYT report from a dog-and-pony show of the all-new Iraqi Special Forces and their mission to take the fight to the terrorists, helicopters against the sunset, fade. One thing, though - it turns out that the Special Forces used to be known as the 36th Battalion of the Ministry of the Interior, aka the Police Commandos, aka the Badr Corps religious torture boys.

It will surprise none that the one battalion is still them. It will also surprise no-one that members of this force are turning up dead all over Baghdad.

Update.. In comments, Dsquared asks for more information. A battalion is usually around 700 strong, organised in a headquarters company and three or four rifle companies, with its own support weapons (machine guns, mortars and such), transport, and quartermasters but without more integral comms, logistics or heavy equipment. To the point, which is whether the Iraqi-SF-36th-Whatever would be enough force to carry out a coup, I'd say that this really depends on what happens afterwards. With the rest of the Iraqi police/army/National Guard being either sympathetic or ineffective, and the government concentrated inside the Green Zone, there's obviously a chance. So long as the Americans don't intervene, or don't realise what's happening until too late.

This is where those tanks referred to below come in. If they were on the side of the original government or at least opposed to the coup they could crush it. If they were on the side of the coupsters, they would pretty much guarantee success (and force the Americans to treat with the coup.) Which reminds me..enter left, tanks (German link). Here they come.

Iraq: T72 Watch

Well, this is going to be a serious post about serious military issues, but first, some light relief. Danielle "Arik Sharon in Stockings" Pletka editorialises against the CIA's liberal agenda. Apparently they hate freedom so much they issued "inaccurate warnings of civil war in Iraq". This appeared the day before whoever-it-was blew up the mosque.

I suppose she might have meant warnings that were inaccurate in the sense that they didn't suggest that Ali al-Sistani would be turning into the most bellicose Shia leader, that Moqtada al-Sadr would have given his army a nationwide mission to "protect mosques throughout Iraq" (yeah, right - like that's not an excuse to deploy outside "Sumer"), that the Sunnis would have walked out of the government formation process and started killing "police commandos" in droves. But I doubt it. In other schadenfreude-related news today, a Pentagon report reassures us that "Terrorist attacks have failed ot create and spread sectarian conflict." Well, that's all right, then...until you look at the Reuters Alertnet Iraq wire. Seriously, I don't know why Reuters don't just rename it Reuters DeathWatch.

25 Feb 2006 12:59:01 GMT
Iraqi minister ready to put tanks on streets to impose order
BAGHDAD, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Iraq will not hesitate to dispatch tanks to the streets to end violence and impose security, the country's defence minister said on Saturday. "We are ready to fill ...

25 Feb 2006 12:35:23 GMT
Bombs, clashes as Iraq govt warns of "civil war"
(Adds Dulaimi, police killed, Sunni bloc, details, edits) By Michael Georgy and Lin Noueihed BAGHDAD, Feb 25 (Reuters) - A car bomb in a Shi'ite holy city and bloody battles around Sunni mosques ...

25 Feb 2006 12:33:33 GMT
FACTBOX-Developments in Iraq, Feb 25
Feb 25 (Reuters) - The following are security incidents and political developments in Iraq reported Saturday Feb. 25 as of 1145 GMT. U.S. and Iraqi forces are battling a largely Sunni Arab ...

Several killed in Baghdad funeral attack
25 Feb 2006 11:35:39 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Clarifies death toll, adds details) DUBAI, Feb 25 (Reuters) - At least three members of Iraq's security forces were killed on Saturday in an attack on the funeral procession of an Al Arabiya ... Full Article...

Car bomb kills eight in market in Iraq's Kerbala
25 Feb 2006 10:36:07 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Adds Kerbala police chief comment) KERBALA, Iraq, Feb 25 (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded in a crowded market in Iraq's southern Shi'ite Muslim city of Kerbala on Saturday, killing at least eight ... Full Article...

Several killed in Baghdad funeral attack
25 Feb 2006 10:19:58 GMT
Source: Reuters

Several security men killed at Iraq funeral attack
25 Feb 2006 09:50:56 GMT
Source: Reuters

EXPLOSION AT THE FUNERAL PROCESSION OF IRAQI JOURNALIST IN BAGHD
25 Feb 2006 09:30:04 GMT
Source: Reuters

Car bomb kills eight in market in Iraq's Kerbala
25 Feb 2006 09:29:17 GMT
Source: Reuters

Gunmen attack house of Sunni cleric in Iraq
25 Feb 2006 08:51:49 GMT..

It's just a pity it doesn't rattle off a machine with a satisfying clattter, really - when will someone devise a direct RSS printer? Anyway, let's get to the point.

Those tanks the Iraqi minister of defence is threatening to bring onto the streets. The only armour he has is the brigade's worth of T-72s provided by Hungary, which we've mentioned before as a very serious factor in a coup scenario. (There are also, I think, a few reconditioned T-54/55s.) Where these tanks are, and who controls them, is about to become a burning issue, because they will be in a position to force everyone else's hand. It's also especially interesting that the biggest owner of tanks in Iraq, the US Army, doesn't seem to be interested.

Have the Americans intimated to the Iraqi government that their forces are not available for crowd-crushing duty? And is anyone else horribly reminded of the 1953 East Berlin rising? That time, the Russians were trying to keep out of it until the SED realised that their own forces could not be relied on and begged the Red Army to do their dirty work, which they did with their usual gusto. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to warn Egon Krenz that no Soviet troops would be available for internal repression, effectively pulling the plug.

If the Defence Minister decides to use his own tanks, and they follow him, this will be as good as a SCIRI coup. If they don't, or he doesn't, it's going to be a question of whether we support the SCIRI in suppressing (and here's the rub) both Sadrists and the New-Old Iraqi Army in the face of Sistani, or whether we cave and let the Shia/Shia battles begin.

Update, the tanks are now on the streets - there's a picture of one. Someone called General Abdul-Aziz Mohamed apparently says his men will arrest all armed civilians irrespective of party or religion. Rather him than me.

FT Mag on Blogs

Not a bad article, except for...

1) straw-man argument - blogs are doomed to failure because
they can never replace big media! Who says we want to replace the Financial
Times? The argument is rubbish because the premise doesn't hold.

2) bizarre logic - we should be even more suspicious "because no-one is even
pretending to get rich", apparently. So being financially disinterested
makes you LESS credible? Wot?

3) false generalisation - apparently blogs do no reporting. Solution: read
some different blogs. I suspect he read Instapundit and Kos, and is now an
expert. Oh, and we all work for Gawker.

4) unrepresentative sample - yes, Ana Marie "Wonkette" Cox is pretty and she's a yank, that doesn't make her The Spokeswoman For Blog.
In fact, apart from the wildly overrated Instapundit, the only blogs he
appears to have read are the Gawker Media ones. Not only do none of these
really do reporting, and all of them are run by pros, they are also
commercial enterprises. Is it any coincidence that this covers all the bases
of his critique?

5) factual inaccuracy - contrary to his final thundering paragraph,
anthologies of blog have indeed been published in dead-tree form *right here
in London, and are available in bookshops within yards of FT headquarters!*
Apparently "the Gawker spirit" (see 4 above) is "wearing a little thin in
light of a seemingly endless bloody insurgency in Iraq..blah...Hurricane
Katrina...blah..corruption". It may be, I dunno because I think Gawker's
stuff is shit and don't read it. But blogs have repeatedly broken news
stories on Iraq (that includes me, btw), have even sent their own reporter
to Iraq (Chris Alliton of Back to Iraq, who went to Kurdistan in 2003 funded
by reader contributions - why didn't he interview him?), both reported live
on scene from Katrina and organised volunteer aid for refugees (I think I
missed the FT helping), and have led the news agenda on Capitol Hill
corruption (Josh Michua Marshall's Talking Points Memo is the place to go,
and it employs no less that two full-time reporters! But we don't do
reporting do we?)

6) Oh yes, and Marx was a cracking writer, but Instapundit obviously hasn't
read him

7) Cluelessness - OF COURSE the best way to report on a decentralised
Internet medium is to fly at once to Washington DC and talk to the only
blogger anyone at the FT can find in Who's Who! After all, if I just read
some blogs and asked questions, I wouldn't be able to milk my expense
account or have the yanks stroke my ego - and life would no longer be worth
living.

If I was responsible for this heap of facile crapola I'd throw in the towel and go into public relations.

Fighting the Brainrot

Nonsense never dies. On the Internet that's doubly true as - far from being more ephemeral as so many think - it doesn't sink to the bottom and die, but hangs around in search engines and obscure blogs, waiting to be dredged up. You may remember John Loftus, who claims to know more intelligence secrets than any man alive but not that Abu Hamza (one hand) and Omar Bakri Mohammed (two hands) aren't the same man.

Well, he dropped off my radar screen after that. But I see he's back, touting tapes supposedly suggesting that Saddam really like totally did have so many WMDs (the Armchair Generalist reports). And what a bunch he's with, too. Astonishingly, the best and most sceptical report is in, dear God, National Review Online, home of Jonah Goldberg and Co.

It seems his source is convinced that God told him where the weapons were, as well as the unconscious mind giving him a tip-off too.

Tierney's methods of ascertaining this location were rather unconventional. "I would ask God and just get a sense if something was valid or not, and then know if I needed to pursue it," he said. His assessments through prayer were then confirmed to him by a friend's clairvoyant dream, where he was able to find the location on a map. "Everything she said lined up. This place meets the criteria," Tierney said of the power generator plant near the Tigris River that he believes is actually a cover for a secret uranium facility.

Well, presumably no-one's found any uranium there - they would hardly have shut up about it - so I wonder how his faith is getting on. Read the whole thing.

Also at the "intelligence summit" - funded, NRO tells us, by a man barred from the US as a suspected Russian mafioso - was the risible Loftus and old TYR target John A. Shaw, a Bush official who popped up at the height of the great pre-election RDX furore to feed the Washington Times a cock-and-bull story about Russian special forces spiriting the stuff over the border to Syria and the US authorities blaming Israel in order to cover this up. Immediately afterwards, TV evidence appeared that the RDX had been right there when US forces passed by. But Shaw had kept the story off the front pages for a news cycle or so in the last week of a presidential election. (You may recall this post.)

His reward was to be quietly fired a couple of months later. Apparently, the poor fool actually believes the story, rather like the chap who quit wrestling when he found out it was rigged and was horrified because he thought he won some of the fights fair and square.

But however hard the initial debunking, you have to do it all again, and again, again...

Ministry of Link

Interesting blog on piracy and such, here. One to go next to Carlos in my "You're further right than Genghis Khan, but we can agree on at least one thing" file. BTW, anyone who reads down to the systempunkt-rockin' map of Nigerian oil infrastructure can certainly pride themselves on having breached the Terrorism Act by having information that "could be of use to a terrorist".

Worrying, it strikes me that this condition is a fairly good guide to what's worth reading in the blogosphere.