Brave New Rant

So I suddenly found myself ranting on Facebook. Looking back, I concluded that I was slightly proud of this particular rant, so I've decided to put it here too.

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It would make a difference if some UK govt (any govt) would take a look at what the people of the UK can do for a living. There has been complete inaction by all sides on this score ever since WW2.

Basically, the left has believed in state subsidies for individuals left without meaningful employment, while the right has believed that market forces will provide a new gold dream to replace industry. Neither works - market forces drove the working classes into unemployment in the first place. What market will provide without an incentive?

Now, an incentive could have been a workforce willing to work for next to nothing, but with our cost of living, that's not going to happen. Current Osbornism suggests we should go down this route anyway. Consequently, our Govt is proposing a return to 19th Century social mores in a form way more acute than any accusation thrown at The Blessed Marge.

Stick and stick.

(TBH, though, this has been happening for a while. We are expected to live poorly in a very expensive country. Remove opportunity (because it costs) but leave high taxation. This is not a model that you'll find being advocated in many other countries. Of course, our politicians tend to suggest this is a modern dilemma that is an unsolvable balancing act. Only if you allow it to be. And they do. And we let them.)

And, worst of all, this current infantile yearning for creating a cheap whore of a country completely misses out on our actual advantages. Sure, we don't absolutely NEED comprehensive free healthcare and a complex and expensive welfare system. But we decided that we WANTED and DESERVED it, and history has shown that 'mature democracies' include these ideas because it takes these societies into areas where they can SHINE, like education, research, new technology, creative industry, and so on. And to do this, you need to subsidise the poor so that they have time to re-educate and adopt new skills for the future.

This, apparently, is a recipe no UK govt has been willing to follow properly, and some, as at present, find it ideologically impossible.

So we turn our education sysytem into a money-grabbing free for all and watch universities that ought to have remained colleges go bankrupt, while kids sink under the millionth curriculum change in a system still dedicated to top-down teaching for providing imperial cannon fodder, while we argue about whether private companies should be directly paid taxpayer's money for doing a public service we pay others to do anyway, while people who are primarily the casualities of this very political malaise have their subsidy made conditional on doing pointless tasks.

We, the people, need our governments to lead properly on forming the sort of society we want. Isn't it time we sorted this all out?

You Read It Here First

Well, not entirely. Maybe not at all. But then you won't be reading this either, so... well...

A couple of quickies for you. We all like a nice quickie, don't we? I know I do. Oh yes...

Prince Harry. Sorry to do this to you, but I just wanted to point something out that seems to have been overlooked: no one in their right mind would pretend to imagine that they could brief the world news media on a story and then succeed in keeping it embargoed for months. This story was as bound to leak a the Sun (not the tabloid) is bound to run out of hydrogen. It was just a matter of time.

Consequently, while the British press congratulates itself and looks down its dirty nose at those terrible untrustworthy foreigners, we must assume that the Palace and the MoD and the Army all had a contingency plan worked out on the basis that the news WOULD come out. And then Harry WOULD come home. And it WOULD be more newsworthy that way. And very, very positive. Do you see?

I feel quite sorry for The Drudge. After all, they just picked up on what an Australian magazine did in early January. I wonder who was primed to get excited and spread the word once a more worthy source had gone public?

Meanwhile, you might recall I had a lot to say about the shambles that is the Department for Work and Pensions the other day. Would you know it, in the same week that the Gov. announces the advent of it's ludicrous 'kick the beggar' plans for welfare reform, the DWP is to have another 12,000 redundancies on top of the 30,000 previously announced. That would be 12,000 less people to do all the work HMG will need done on getting people off welfare. Presumably by ensuring that no-one is there to take your obligatory application phone call.

Unless, of course, they were thinking of farming the whole process out to, ohhh, I dunno, a 'financial services' based call-centre operation... i.e. a debt collection agency. Watch this space. Please. I want to have more 'I told you so' experiences.

Katie Bloody Melua

What do Tony Blair and Katie Melua have in common? Well, you never see them in the same place at the same time, do you? Also, they are both highly successful in their chosen spheres despite having nothing to say. Given that one of them is a celebrity psychopath and one an 'artist' (and I'll leave you to figure out the which), you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but it's true.

Katie Melua's songs are dreadful - largely without reason and bereft of rhyme, they talk of the inconsequential on a Brunellian scale. Also, she can't sing. At all. She can't even hold a note. Or a key. Utterly appalling and hugely appealing to... er.... well... to devotees of the world's most inept radio DJ, Sarah Kennedy, whose show I use as an alarm clock mainly because listening to her amoebic drivel coming out of a loudspeaker makes it impossible to stay in bed. She drives me to the toilet, and ensures I start the day furious.

Why, then is Melua the weapon of choice of so many? Is her bland incompetence what we savour as our benchmark? Is she taken as an aural Valium? Secretly, I hope that people buy her recordings because they like not to listen to her. This, I am sure, is the answer.

Jamie Cullum in in the same galaxy. Exec pt he's a nice chap with obvious talent - but not that much. Anyone listening to his version of the lounge standards must surely have thought - 'Yeah, nice, but not great.' Well, no they didn't. What they actually said was, 'This man is the most amazing artist I've heard of!'

I don't understand. I don't understand. But I suspect.

And that brings me back to Tony Blair. Well... it's not all his fault, unfortunately. John Major had a lot to do with it. And The Blessed Margaret, so Beloved of Brown, laid the foundations. (Well, actually, maybe Clement Atlee laid the first stone, but I don't really want to blame him... he was such a nice guy.)

Meritocracy.

What does it mean? Rule by those who deserve to rule you. Put another way, advancement in society by means of your abilities. That sounds much nicer, although it still rather leaves us with the standing order that thou shalt advance to prosper. Not much socialism there then.

It's very popular as a one-word concept, though, because it sounds cool and fair to all, and it's advertised as what it isn't - narcissist, old boy's club, establishment, masonic, secretive, aristocratic, unfair, undemocratic etc etc.

What it means in the real world is anyone's guess (and who judges the judges of merit?), but it has come to be synonymous with mediocrity, and that's where Katie comes in. We have become obsessively happy as a society with 'bigging it up' - hyping up our lives, our businesses, our country and our politics, whereas the 'it' is most always an old chipolata in reality.

We have swallowed our own crap, I fear. Think call centres. Think 'a job well done'. Think Peter Mandelson. Think Millennium Dome. Think Holyrood. Think Iraq and Afghanistan. Think domestic debt. Think Northern Rock. Think Katie Melua.

Lest you feel I'm just being a miserable old arse, a positive plea: isn't it time we stopped living in other people's ideas of life, and just did our own thing? I'm sure we'd be good at it, if only we would try.

Maybe that's what I'm annoyed about.

How Do I Scan?

Hello.

Today, I'm going to burble about three completely different things in a way that is like 'stream of consciousness' but not sufficiently for me to want to use what has now become a terrible cliche... Everyone is emitting SOC these days - the papers say so; so does the TV; it enters into casual conversation ('Would you like a drink?' 'No thanks - I just put one out' 'My, that's very stream-of-consciousness' 'Erm... sorry, I wasn't listening'). Russell Brand is said to be a SOC comic. I think he's actually just a prurient arsehole who has 'arrived' at a time when everyone who is anyone is wearing the Emperor's New Clothes.

Are we becoming consciousness-incontinent? Obviously, to paraphrase your GP, we need to get out of it a bit more. Or maybe just shut up. Yet here I am...

So, today I had an MRI scan.

It was jolly interesting, too. All in the name of research, I hasten to add - some chap at Glasgow University wants to find out if loonies' brains light up differently to squares' brains when subjected to the same stimuli.

Consequently, I spent an hour pushing the same button over and over while stuck in a helmet not unlike Richard Chamberlain's in The Man in the Iron Mask, lying in a very narrow tube and having extremely loud, Frankenstein-like noises made by a bloody enormous electro-magnet. Encouragingly, I was told that I was also surrounded by LOADS of liquid nitrogen, which explained why the place was so fecking cold.

In the end, and bizarrely, I nearly fell asleep. The technician greeted me with the news that (a) he always falls asleep inside the thing and (b) (very tiredly) I do, indeed, have a brain.

He was so convinced of the latter that he let me have a look at myself, and a very odd specimen I was too, with my spherical eyeballs sitting on stalks looking like they weren't attached to much at all. It was, I concluded, a bizarre and amazing experience and I vaguely considered that maybe the NHS should charge people to have a go for fun. I recommend it.

With a mighty leap - ebay. Or is it Ebay? Or eBay? Bugger it, I hate this playing about with the rules.

Ebay has put its prices up again, and, staggeringly, they are trying to make out that this is a price CUT!

Once upon a time, ebay was the world's greatest online car boot sale. That was the whole idea. Ever since then, the company has been ceaseless in its mission to push out the hobbyists and make the place an Internet High Street.

The latest wheeze involves cutting insertion fees for a listing by 33% (for most of us, from 15p to 10p - by the way, these reductions mean that it is proportionately much cheaper to have a high starting bid, which is supposed to be unwelcome). The flip side is that they are increasing their commission on sales from 5% to 7.5%, which means that anyone who doesn't operate a shop, basically, is going to pay loads more for every sale.

The jolly anchorites have the gall to advertise this as a price cut because they've brought out a discount scheme where you can get from 20 to 40% off your commission charges. How do you qualify? By being a high volume seller of course!

And so another great idea bites the dust - watch as everyone but the sellers of CDs, edible underwear and office equipment drifts away to find something else to do. Like going to a car boot sale maybe. Anyone who wants to compete with ebay, now is your time, people!

So, the Department of Work and Pensions then.

I've had quite a bit to do with these guys over the past year and a half, as a recipient of state aid, and while I can say that claiming benefit has never been fun, it has now been reduced to some kind of (I don't want to say it... ooooh...) Kafka-esque (bugger) farce.

There are Jobcentres and benefit offices - but the latter also call themselves Jobcentres... but you can't go in them. You can go in the former, but they can't deal with your claim because they aren't allowed to. And they aren't allowed to talk to the benefit office either... but they are nevertheless the place where you have to sign on, go for interviews and what not. But not if you want to make a new claim. No. In that event you have to phone up a special number and speak to a call centre, who put you through the whole application process over the phone... and you are encouraged to do this in public, at the Jobcentre.... but all they actually do is (a) tell you if the computer says 'no' and (b) send you a form, which carries all the wrong details, for you to give to the Jobcentre, who then ask you all the same questions again... and then send it to the benefit office because it's not up to them... who then ask you the same questions... who call you to be interviewed at the Jobcentre by someone who says they are your case worker, but who can't answer any questions because that's the job of the benefit office... who take the traditional bloody ages to do anything, and then don't tell you what they've done.

One of the main reasons why none of this works, asides from the normal organisational lunacy involved, is that Government ministers have been unable to stop fiddling with the system (in the same way as we now have a shambolic education system thanks to a couple of generations of non-stop tinkering for tinkerings sake) and won't put in the funding to support their brave new initiatives.

If HMG really wants to reduce the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants, I strongly suggest that they spend some money on letting DWP staff do their jobs. My local friendly IB Adviser has a caseload of nearly 100 claimants and is so over-worked she can't service them (that means 'work on getting them off benefit'). If you look around the offices of any Jobcentre these days, what you will see is a bunch of desperate people, and they are all the staff members.

Which is why I was so pleased to hear that Caroline Flint MP, having just moved on from the DWP, is keen to try out some of her great ideas from her former role on public housing - like getting people to work for their homes. Asides from the moral issues, how in ****'s name does she think this will work?

I, for one, am getting sick and tired of junior politicians using their postings to trumpet ridiculous schemes in order to get themselves noticed. Once upon a time, civil servants were able to squash these before any damage was done. Now that the CS is merely the politicians' whipping boy, we are all suffering the results, across the board.

It doesn't really matter what shade of voting belief you hold - the fact is we are drowning in unnecessary law and regulation, much of it badly composed and often actually illegal.

NB: Check out how many times the present administration has broken the law and ignored court rulings.

They're Not Playing My Song...

We are living in interesting times.

Here in Scotland (that 'dark land populated by homosexuals' as humorous U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson once had it) now that the excitement summed up in the declaration 'they may take our airport doors, but they'll never take our freedom' has all died down, we are left with Wendy Alexander.

There is probably no-one better qualified to lead Scottish Labour in this troubled and perplexing time for the monolithic Scottish party establishment. There was no other choice, actually. What will happen next is anyone's guess.

Despite all the dire poll predictions, Jack McConnell spent his last days at Holyrood looking utterly dumbfounded and speaking as if he were somewhere else entirely. Perhaps never in British political history has a political leader been left so speechless for so long. He is off to Malawi I hear.

Poor Africa - I have never seen much in Mr McConnell beyond the adept slipperiness of the talented cad, and have yet to encounter anyone who thought he was a good maths teacher either. Certainly, only in Scotland could a man who looked in public as if he was about to leave the room having parked a bomb under the table be felt to be a charismatic leader.

So, Wendy then...

Well, good luck to her I say. I was always rather bemused by Jack's insistence on putting her on the subs bench. I suspect they hated each other - the 'get things done' woman of business versus the 'let's wait and see' man of cunning. Still, there's something about Wendy... and I think it's Lord Cardigan.

I am pursued by an image of Wendy Alexander charging into battle against the cannonade of the faux consensus politics of the Scottish Salmond Party, only to turn around at the last moment and find that no-one has followed her.

Particularly not George Foulkes, I suspect. This past week, George, now Lord Foulkes, has been having a go.

He lambasted hapless Henry McLeish for speaking out against some of the rather sillier aspects of Labour's failed election campaign. The former First Minister, who was forced to resign for cocking up his expenses, was described by Foulkes as a 'strange guy' who lacked 'any degree of statesmanship and diplomacy and understanding of politics' and who should 'shut up'.

That's not advice that George has ever been prone to follow, though. He's a veteran politician now, to be sure, but he is best remembered, perhaps, for talking a lot of tosh about anything that came his way. He was a bit like a 'good guy' version of John Reid.

The real subject of George's ire, however, was Wendy's press-man - Brian Lironi - whom George described, simply, as 'an idiot'.

Apparently, (and get the irony) George has a campaign underway to raise MSPs expenses allowances. Now, for all I know, there might be a case to be made, but I'm guessing that New Wendy Labour won't be taking up this particular flag and waving it around, not least because politicians expenses is one of the electorate's pet hates, and one that arguably went towards losing Labour the election.

It goes like this - the Scottish public are delighted to have a Scottish Parliament, but they are sick to death of Scottish politicians acting like they are in some kind of secret society that awards itself lots of goodies that the public has to pay for without so much as a 'by-your-leave'.

Consequently, I can think of no worse an idea for New Wendy than for George's great scheme to be given any oxygen. I suspect she'd rather encase Lord Foulkes in retardent foam to a great depth. So it came as no surprise to hear Lironi tell the press that Labour MSPs don't agree with Foulkes. I don't expect this will upset anyone else really.

What does upset me is that Alexander has only been in the job a few days and she's launched a new quango. It's called Ideas Scotland. Frankly, that was as far as I got. For all I know, this thing could be about to discover a cure for cancer, but I don't care. I DON'T CARE! IDEAS SCOTLAND!!

I swore recently that if I heard of one more stupid and meaningless branding I would scream and my head would explode. Well, my cat is now typing the rest of this article. Ideas Scotland.

My ultimatum was given on hearing that the Scottish Publishers Association had decided to rebrand itself as Publishing Scotland. Consequently, I threatened to rebrand myself, and suggested that everything in the country should be similarly altered (Bigotry Scotland for instance, or Smackheads Scotland, or Smug Scotland, or, in my case, Old Fat Mad Scotland).

Well, if Wendy thinks that entertaining the same old crap is going to make a difference, she can wave goodbye to being in my good books for a start. She's bound to notice my disapproval.

A Brief Rant and a Cup of Tea

For how much time should a government help a company to make a foreign sale of high-tech goods?

According to the EU, not very much time at all, really, and certainly with no subsidy.

The French, it goes without saying, have masterfully ignored all these rules pretty much forever, particularly when it comes to things that go bang. During the Falklands 'conflict', I was terribly unamused to find out that France was continuing to sell Exocet missiles to Argentina despite all declarations to the contrary.

First they posted them to Israel, where they were taken out of the box, put in another one and mailed to South Africa, from where they were forwarded to Comodoro Rivadavia, unloaded, plugged onto Aerospatiale Super Entendards (makers; French; users: France, South Africa, Argentina) and chucked at British ships, to some effect.

One day, I must also have a rant about the 'hidden' links between France, Russia, Israel and South Africa. Diamonds, anyone? Not to mention the world-wide failure of journalism to bother keeping track of such 'power lines', resulting in most of us having no idea how things happen. I wonder who benefits from that state of affairs?

Right... as to the initial question, here in Britain, the answer apparently is 'a generation'. That's how long the Ministry of Defence has been working on the Al Yamamah arms contract on behalf of British Aerospace. Seriously. A friend of mine was a civilian in the MoD in the 80s, and she was wholly devoted to this project, 365, from 1987 until the day I lost contact, 10 years later. And they're still doing it.

Leaving aside all the discussions we could have about selling arms at all, and who we DO sell arms to, and WHY, there is one point I want to make.

THOUSANDS of UK public employees have been working on this deal, and continue to do so, at the taxpayer's expense, to ensure that a UK-based multinational earns megabucks and thus stays in existence. The Government (and there's been several of them now) would probably argue that they are, in effect, supporting a national asset, and thus the nation's interest, by the back door.

This is balls.

Twenty-two years and counting. How many worker hours? How much money? That's far more important than whether or not BAe was given a slush fund in order to 'entertain' their Saudi clients at a cost of 100s of millions of pounds. And let's not get me started about the Tanzanian Air Traffic Control System.

Here's the point. We are all being hoodwinked by a bunch of morally rotten bureaucrats who are so convinced of our stupidity and antipathy that they are certain they can wave buckets of crap in our faces and we'll never even notice.

Pass the tortilla chips, there's another reality show on...

By the way, whenever you are grumbling about how utterly f****** awful an experience international departures from UK airports has become, you should remember that the business responsible, BAA, is one that thinks it's really cool to have a trading name that is a meaningless acronym. Yup, BAA USED to be the publicly owned organisation called the British Airports Authority, and, asides from allowing the flourishing of the hugely funny criminal organisation known as Heathrow baggage handlers, they didn't do too bad a job. Then they got privatised by The Blessed Margaret, and, in a marketing stroke of genius, decided that they would continue to be known as BAA, but that it wouldn't stand for anything. Believe it or not, they even commissioned a large advertising campaign to promote that message.

And they are still a bunch of twats.

Which takes me finally to another acronym. The SQA. The Scottish Qualifications Authority.

I worked there for a while as a 'consultant'. My work was funded by the European Social Fund. I was told to log my time by activity about a year after starting. I pointed out that I did this anyway on my invoices. No good. I pointed out that I couldn't guarantee that specific blocks of time were spent on specific documents (I was working on about 100 at any one time). Don't worry about it, I was told. Just make sure the time sheets were filled out. What about the backlog? Make it up, I was told. Make it all up. Then append your signature so that you are responsible for your spending statement. Up yours, I said.

I should have seen this coming. There had been warning enough in the matter of the Clingfilm.

It was against Health and Safety to carry hot liquids around the offices in open containers (i.e. mugs). we were, therefore, instructed to use Clingfilm to cover our mugs. Quite how effective a piece of preventative action this was, I couldn't really say. But we did as we were told.

Then the catering personnel (a contractor, naturally) complained that we were using all their Clingfilm up, and they didn't have a budget with the SQA for Clingfilm use. Well, responded, the SQA, we're not going to foot the bill, and you need the Clingfilm to cover the sandwiches you prepare for us, so...

So the contractor hid the Clingfilm, obliging us all to break H+S rules.

A meeting was arranged.

If you use our Clingfilm, explained the contractor, you break health and safety, because we use it to cover your sandwiches, and your employees are getting their filthy fingers all over it.

Oh, said the SQA.

Stuck in-between a rock and a hard place, they did what any quango would do - they refused to reach a decision.

Me? I brought in a camping mug.

Running Away with Style

It has been said that the history of the British Army is one of glorious defensiveness. Let them loose and they lose their heads AND the war (see Hastings, Battle of), but keep them on a tight rein and in one place and there's no better fighting force in the world.

There's something in this. Wellington, for instance, was scathing about the ill discipline of pretty much everyone else, but particularly his cavalry and his brother officers, who seemed to regard his orders as a form of advice. From the day he surveyed the carnage of his first battlefield in India, he resolved to ensure that caution, patience, and a good defence would win the day; and so it proved. His campaign in Iberia was a classic of offensive defence. As was Waterloo.

Mons, 1914, of course, is another outstanding example of the Brits running away with style. Who else could have extracted an army from such a disastrous situation as this? It was done extremely (actually, make that astoundingly) well, and under the aegis of some long-besmirched generals - Haig, Dorrien-Smith and French.

I doubt whether Monty could have achieved so much. The enormously over-rated little eccentric was hugely popular with his troops, but so were many bad generals. Monty was ingrained with caution, build-up, and concentration of force. His great failing was that he didn't really know what then to do other than make a frontal assault. Somehow he contrived only to have great leaps of imagination when it seemed likely he would gain public kudos by doing so (e.g. Arnhem). The rest of the time, he was a terrible killer. His breakout operations in Normandy in 1944 were utter failures, but Monty managed to make out that this was intended attrition, and to the annoyance of many, he got away with the canard.

But I digress.

The question now is, should we run away from Iraq, and, if so, can we hope to do it with style? I fear the answer is 'no' all round.

It is an impossible situation, of course. We shouldn't really be in Afghanistan and definitely not in Iraq, but there we are, so no point going on about it. There does, however, seem to be an acceptance in the British media (and perhaps in Westminster) that the troops are coming home, and I wonder if that is not a very stupid thing to garner.

Once in Iraq, for instance, we HAD to try and do the peace and democracy thing. The options for leaving would always have been:

• The Iraqis ask us to go (and that means their government)

OR

• The operation is seen to fail beyond repair

It looks like the latter is now the case, but are we exaggerating that simply to get out of an uncomfortable situation?

And what happens to Iraq when we all leave? Are we just going to say: "Gee, we messed that up - sorry guys" and leave them to their own devices? Or are we going to try and prop up a 'puppet' from afar? Or what exactly?

It's all very well admitting our faults, but running away might be the biggest mistake yet. Even though there might not be a winnable situation.

When Dubya talked about this being 'a different kind of conflict' in order to justify undeclared war, he was stating the blindingly obvious (as usual). It is, therefore, bizarre that the 'allies' have failed to fight a different kind of war. What they've actually done is try and crowbar their old-fashioned kind of war-making into the 'new', extra-territorial framework. It doesn't work. It never has.

We've seen this time and again since Korea, from Algeria to Vietnam to Bosnia to Iraq to Afghanistan. Very occasionally, there are 'successes' (e.g. Malaya, where the Brits played very very dirty), or at least a stalemate (Northern Ireland - Brits ditto), but, by and large, when faced with 'popular', guerrilla, or terrorist forces, the big countries tend to throw in military might, and add a bit more if that doesn't work, and so on.

Meanwhile, much of the current strategical and tactical analyses suggest a 19th Century imperial colonial combination of gunboat diplomacy, blackmail and unilateral force.

And in the capitalistic nature of that century, the most common reaction to the going getting difficult is to cut your losses and bug out.

I can't help but feel that we need to take a very different and very hard look at ourselves. I don't pretend to know the solution, but, really guys, we can't go on like this.

Life's a Gas!

Headline in today's paper:

Bush calls for action on greenhouse gases!

Missing subheader:

Vows silence and resigns!

Spare any change, mister?

There was an excellent article the other day featured in my newspaper of choice, the International Herald Tribune. (Actually, that's not entirely true - I get the e-mail version, as well as BBC news, and only sometimes do I deign to buy some newsprint.)

Anyway, it was all about the US and immigration. So here's a link. If it's gone, I'll just have to talk about it all later on.

Link

The thing that gets me is that, even when the US Government is getting all antsy about people crossing its borders, and the rest of the world gets upset about American hypocrisy etc etc, the US takes in huge numbers of people every year. More than 10 times what the UK takes in, so it's actually out of proportion on the positive side. Ain't that strange?

It's also a sobering reminder that we in Britain are anything but a multicultural society. Actually, we're a bunch of insecure isolationists who are only just nicer to foreigners than the rest of the Europeans. I think it's about time we were honest about this. Anyhow, how can we be multicultural when the sum total of people living here who are NOT of white North European extraction comes down to about 6% of the population?

And it seems to me that the Americans have a much more honest approach to discussing the whole subject than the 'don't mention the war' attitude we tend to display here.

Which makes me all the more disturbed that, apparently, the Americans think the British press are much better at news than their domestic product. Excuse me while I pee. Apparently, it's all because the Americans are sick of US journos being deferential to politicians, and they are turning to the Brit Press because we are rude to people in power, stimulating informative reaction, and because we like to ask the questions others don't.

Well, maybe, but I'm not convinced that the result is more accurate information. That's mostly down to UK journos highly developed sense of poo detection, along with an excellent ability to read between the lines. The rude stuff actually makes for more spin and less respect, and we are suffering as a society for that. Democracy is visibly eroding away before our eyes. The public dislike and distrust the politicians; the politicians HATE the public.

I'm worried about this because I have huge respect for US journalism. Attention to detail; attempted objectivity (kinda); actual real investigative reporting; bullet-proof research; lack of pomposity - all of these qualities British journalism lacks, often because of editorial decisions to abandon them.

So, please, yanks, don't borrow from our experience - you'll be sorry.

*****

And now for something completely different:

Beware the Black Swan

Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan, is all the rage at the moment, and I can't help but feel the irony, given that his message is loud and clear - stop looking for stuff that isn't there. So we are being recommended a book that advises us not to adopt advice? This sounds like free money to me, and, as always, I wish I'd had the gall to write it first.

The other amusing aspect lies in how badly the newspaper reviewers cope with the concept. Mostly, they wither away under the sheer mass of their own lack of imagination. In The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman even kicked off with an eroneous criticism of Felix Dennis (for Dennis is well known to value luck above all else in explaining his 'arrival').

And luck, of course, is just another way of labelling the things that happen to us and what we do about them. If it works to our advantage, it is good; otherwise bad; unless it is neither one nor the other, in which case it becomes fate. Things happen to us pretty much entirely without reason, though that is not to say that they are inexplicable.

Being able to explain why things happen is comforting; not knowing is scary; finding out is paramount; making things up often does as well. So knowledge and belief are never that far apart, which is why, of course, Richard Dawkins is very comfortable as an anti-theist. It's his belief system and he's happy with it. Try believing in absolutely nothing and you get very glum, believe me. I've tried.

Nassim Taleb is an ex-Wall street trader and writer who points out the seemingly obvious: life is unpredictable. And he has made a financial killing from this tenet. Surely there is more to it? Well, yes and no - what Taled reminds us of is true and we know it, but he also points out the extent to which we try and ignore the fact, and that is interesting and funny, mostly because it all seems so blindingly obvious.

The idea is basically this - "Swans are white" seems like a true statement. Mostly, it is. But black swans DO exist, and imagine the surprise of those western explorers who first found one in Australia. The truth is overturned and people are taken aback.

Taleb takes this concept and applies it to our everyday world - we cannot predict the future. It's a popular theory now (see also D Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns). Taleb even used it to his advantage in playing the stock market, although no-one seems very clear how. Apparently he simply stopped trying to predict eventualities and bought entirely at random. I could see this working as well as, but how it actually allowed him to profit while others failed is not explained.

Neither does it seem very explicable to suggest, as Taleb does, that consuming news items actually reduces your knowledge because the information flow isn't filtered for irrelevance. Well, what does that matter? And where is the perfect knowledge set anyway?

The strength of Taleb's argument lies in his merciless attack on hindsight and faith masquerading as fact, and in his championing of us admitting our shortcomings and accepting that, actually, we have no idea what is going on a lot of the time, nor why. I guess that is why journos get excited by the subject.

The rest of it is hogwash, because, of course, we can, if we are careful, figure stuff out and even predict what will most likely happen next (that fire will almost certainly burn your hand if you stick it in there). And we also are very good at figuring stuff out and then forgetting about it. I wonder what Taleb would make of Jung's collective conscious? Or finches and milk bottles?

Finally, I was extremely entertained by the thought of the hideous historian Niall Ferguson having his Black Swannish approach to thinking about our past indirectly described as 'unhistorical shit' by EP Thompson. He was right, you know.