Why Julian Assange is really a sweetie

This morning, the Washington Post has run a story claiming that Wikileaks founder is about to be charged with espionage. But first of all, they have to find the real Julian Assange.

I have only two questions in relation to the Wikileaks saga – and they’re the same two questions I had at the outset: first, are many people surprised by what’s been revealed? And second, is Julian Assange just a self-aggrandising exhibitionist, or something more sinister?

I have to say that, based on the evidence to hand, there’s not a great deal in the Wikileaks incontinence that isn’t already either known or assumed.

This from a Ukrainian site in 2008 on the subject of Gadaffi:

‘When the leader sleeps, the soldier stays awake, and it’s the women who do the fighting. Gaddafi trusts his security to ladies only. The head of the Libyan Jamahiriya has a total of 300-400 girls on his security detail. According to the official story, all of them are virgins. Selection is done by Gaddafi himself. This whim has an explanation for it: In ancient times, they believed that the best guards were either virgins or lesbians, the underlying belief being that they could sense threats, the so-called “wind of death.”’

Similarly, the Assange revelations tell us that Bonker Berlusconi is feckless and vain with a penchant for partying. This is not news. For stuff on the madness of Kim Jong-il of North Korea, see this site on numerous occasions. We had the story long before Wikileaks. Hamid Karzai is ‘extremely weak’, Sarkozy is ‘thin-skinned and authoritarian’, Robert Mugabe is ‘a crazy old man’. Presenting any of these stories as exclusives to an Editor could get a person fired very quickly.

Traditional Arab States are worried about Ahmadinnejhad? Geddaway. The Saudis want the US to bomb the Iranian nuclear facility? Amazing. Mahmoud himself is ‘unstable, possibly unbalanced’? You’re kidding me!

The other main ‘finding’ to come out of these wicked leaks is that most countries think other countries are full of it, and their leaders a subject for ridicule. Well knock me down with a TGV.

Were I Hillary Clinton, I suspect I would regard Wikileaks as an excellent conduit for things I wanted to get into the public domain, thereafter to be denied as the misinformation of an organisation whose motives really must be in doubt.

Which brings us to the second question: what is Mr Assange really about? Well, the ‘mission for transparency’ doesn’t include Assange’s own parents: we have no names, and nobody seems to know anything beyond what they did….which was, on the whole, pretty kookie.

Julian Paul Assange was born in Queensland, Australia in 1971. He has variously been a mathematics student and hacker. His anonymous parents ran a travelling theatre group, but divorced when he was seven. In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was ‘a theatre producer and musician’ (we don’t know who he was either) who belonged to a seriously weird New Age group led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne.

Hamilton-Byrne

Ms Hamilton-Byrne founded The Santiniketan Park Association, a kind of cross between the Moonies and the Nazis. She acquired fourteen infants and young children between about 1968 and 1975. Some were the natural children of Santiniketan members, and others had been obtained through irregular adoptions arranged by lawyers, doctors and social workers within the group who could bypass the normal processes. The children’s identities were changed using false birth certificates or deed-poll entries. All the kids were given the surname ‘Hamilton-Byrne’, and dressed alike even to the extent of their hair being dyed uniformly blonde:

Hamilton-Byrne’s Midwitch Cuckoos

Assange’s mother seems to have decided that her second husband’s friends were a tad controlling. She took both him and his half-brother into hiding for five years, as a means of avoiding legal action by the stepfather and discovery by the Moonazis. Traumatised by this, Julian eventually left home at the age of 16, and fathered a child two years later. He became a computer hacker, belonging to a group called “International Subversives”. And then he had a breakdown.

Did this odd childhood influence his personality? There are tell-tale clues in some of the behavioural data we have about Assange to suggest that yes, of course it did. Friends consistently talk of a man who needs “only five hours sleep”, who “is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport….”

Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist and hacker, explains of Assange’s time in Iceland:

“Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was stretching himself…. I decided to come out and make things sane again.”

You don’t have to be Freud to see these as classic symptoms of an obsessively manic personality. These have, I would surmise, been exacerbated by an upbringing where suspicion of discovery alongside parental absences and conflict led him to fear enemies and expect desertion. From his own mouth in 2008 we have this exact reflection of such a background:

“I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me.”  (My italics)

Equally, no PhD in social anthropology is required to grasp why a man brought up with hiding and secrecy feels the need to reveal the secrets of others. There is an incipient paranoia in Assange’s outlook. Everyone, it seems – Kenyans, Russians, the CIA, the Pentagon – are out to get him. Given his track record, this may indeed by true; but the problem goes deeper than that.

Icelandic parliamentarian and enthusiastic supporter of Assange, Birgitta Jonsdottir says, “We are all paranoid schizophrenics.” She gestured at Assange during a 2010 interview …he was wearing a snowsuit. “Just look at how he dresses.” At this point in the conversation, Julian peeks through his curtained window to monitor events outside.

“It’s the camera van,” he deadpanned. “The brain-manipulation van. One of them has a weapon, see all those people standing out there…..”

Hmm. Do we perceive a selfless seeker after truth here? Or do we suspect that Julian Assange is a weirdo with a compulsive need to expose others, whatever the price?

And do we perhaps see bizarre delusions of grandeur? He has, he claims, changed the direction of the Kenyan election and transformed the Mideast peace process. When interrupted at work earlier this month, he snarled, “Look, I’m trying to stop two wars here”. He was working with North Korean leaks at the time.

It is common for contemporaryAmerica to assume some malign sovereign influence in play against all their problems. Statements coming out of the US over the last few days have consistently stressed ‘the anti-American element’. I think this is bollocks: the revelations have been far more damaging to the Arabs (remember, their citizens assume they’re not a bunch of cynical twisters) and North Korea. And the priceless bitchiness about the Putin/Medvedev thing can’t have done their image much good either.

No: Julian Assange is a sweetie. By that, I mean there’s a nut at the centre, covered in eugenic fruitcake of mother, and wrapped in the brittle paper of paranoia. He is Norman Bates reborn, but being a megalomaniac (despite what the flimsy ‘expose’ of Murdoch’s New York Post suggested) the bloke wants to kill countries, not pretty girls. We need protection from his more destructive forms of nihilism; but as for the gossip, I say let’s keep it coming….especially as his next target, we hear, is to be an American bank.

‘ESM’ should stand for ‘European Simplistic Machinations’.

As the key EU players come up with yet another vain attempt to mollify the markets, the Slog asks why our Government is simply going along for the ride.

(don’t think he knows)

There’s a new set of initials on the EU block, to go with most members’ necks: ESM. The European Stabilisation Mechanism.

Last Thursday on this blog, I wrote ‘…the European Union will be left with two less than desirable options. The first would be a full fiscal union under which everyone would be severally and separately responsible for all EU Sovereign debt. Not only does that have absolutely no chance of being accepted by member States, it would (a) be contrary to existing European Union treaties, and (b) be almost certainly unconstitutional in the Bundesrepublik. The second – far more likely option – would be letting member states default.’

As I predicted, the Franco-German Axis of Feeble has denied any possibility of doing the second, and watered down the first. Just like the euro itself, the ESM will be a mechanism without a driver.

But the flaws in this new ESM don’t end there.

First, its timescales are on a par with setting out a critical path analysis just after the Dambusters have flooded the Rhine.

“The message to the markets is that it will only come into effect in 2013, and there is nothing in there that the markets do not already know about,” a senior German official told the FT over the weekend, adding “Collective action clauses are already used in the US and UK.” Yes indeed they are, and a fat lot that has to do with the relative bond stability there: the trust in ourselves and the USA is based on the length of our bond debts going outwards, and our track-record of paying folks back.

Worse still, although in theory it addresses the issue of what happens when the current arrangements come to an end, anything to be phased in after 2013 would take six to eight years before even a majority of sovereign debt was covered by the scheme. This is pure Disneyland thinking.

As to the mechanics of the ESM, the proposal suggests that for future borrowing by eurozone members (ie, post 2013) there should be collective action clauses included in the contracts warning bondholders that they’ll be coughing up for some of the default, should it ever happen.

I applaud this in theory – it makes bankers responsible for the consequences of their aggressive credit marketing – but the equally obvious outcome is that lenders would make the yield demands higher in order to protect their margins. (The markets don’t do shared social responsibility). The Greeks, Portuguese and Irish debtors will be privately cursing the idea; but then it’s not for them….it’s to protect major banks in France, Germany, Holland and the UK from suddenly finding all their lent funds disappearing in a puff of smoke.

“The clauses make it easier to reach agreements between creditors and debtors to change the terms of a bond,” said one affably beaming German official. Do the creditors want it to be easier? Of course they don’t. Why lend money at crewcut rates to basket-cases when you can extend credit with more safety at a reasonable yield elsewhere? In the current environment, the answer is obvious. But not to the Eurocrats.

Much of that lending elsewhere will be to Anglo-Saxon and more stable South American countries. And some of it (stupidly) will head towards Russia. But we shouldn’t rub our hands with glee in the UK: our Irish exposure is the biggest in the EU, and we are up their with the idiots when it comes to the Latin member State debt exposure.

Perceptive German financial journalist Wolfgang Munchau continues to see Europe ‘edging towards the unthinkable’ – ie, eurozone collapse. I think he’s right: and the ESM is just another episode in the blasé smugness that began with the clueless observation of France’s Christine Lagarde last August: “There will be a stress test and after that all anxieties will cease”.

Behind it lies the cold thinking of bureaucratic bean-counters: the bail-out funds come to €925bn, and the risk is €1,070bn – so we need only find €145bn to fill the gap. Hurrah! It pays no regard at all to the fact that the cost of borrowing is heading for the ozone layer, or that one day soon no amount of yield will tempt the bond markets back. Or that by the time it comes into force, the EU as we know it may be a distant memory.

Above all, it shows the dumb ignorance of EU officials in a changing world: the bond market as we’ve known it is finished. This is not business as usual, it’s the beginning of the end of anything usual.

But if ineptitude and fantasy still rule in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, I’m at a loss for any words to describe the British performance to date. The Franco-German alliance is getting in the way of everything that needs to be done on many levels in Europe. Far from applying diplomatic pressure to supercede it with more UK presence, George Osborne and William Hague sit quietly by and watch as we are dragged into a mess that goes beyond self-infliction. What are they supposed to be doing?

Hague….eyes too fixed on the US

The Foreign Secretary is truly turning into William Vague. Last week at the NATO summit he said:

“Ah, er, well…I hope the eurozone survives, but who knows?”

Somewhere William, there’s a job for you as a surveyor. But until that happy day, the guy’s meant to be looking after our interests. He has spent more time over the last two weeks getting bankers out of Bahrain and bombers out of Guantanamo than everything else put together. In terms of market trustworthiness, the UK is holding all the cards: but the last time Hague spoke about the EU was November 11^th, when he laughably ‘pledged’:

“We will give the public more confidence that they cannot have powers taken from them without a referendum.”

I’m afraid the elector confidence bank on resisting sovereignty losses to the EU is about as empty as RBS. And that’s also a problem for Draper Osborne, the man waving our flag in Brussels with great resolve. The only problem is that it’s whiter than white.

Already under pressure here at home to explain what he believes the Irish debt crisis might do to EU growth (and our banks) George’s ventures to Belgium have so far produced defeat on the Hedge Fund legislation, defeat on proposals for higher taxes on UK banks, defeat on new banker bonus controls, and a fudge on the pre-examination of UK Budget proposals in future. Whether one agrees with these ideas or not, little Gideon’s Bible on EU matters seems to be largely about lying spread-eagled in the path of every Brussels yardbrush that comes his way.

 

The assumption of the Treasury, the FCO and 10 Downing Street is that the EU is a done deal, and won’t go away ever. The lack of willingness to see how doubtful that now looks (or to have any real plan for alternative trading partners) sums up the myopic sloppiness of this Government. Indeed, the only good news for the Tory Party of late has been the re-election of Farage to be UKIP’s leader: were somebody credible in charge over there, Conservative supporters would be flocking to that banner in terrifying numbers.

The ESM is, I’m afraid, just another ping-pong bat thrown at the deluge heading Europe’s way. That deluge will ultimately destroy a crazy, half-baked continental union with no commitment to democracy, and even less to the idea of well-ordered commercial dynamism. Perhaps we should be pleased about that: but nobody of stature is stepping forward to fill that vacuum and establish some reality….and the ‘team’ we should blame above all others for that is the Cameroons. They lost the Election, they are losing to Brussels, and they are lost in a maze of cuts and compromises with no idea as to how growth can be kick-started. We may well be witnessing the end of the Conservative Party as a serious political force.

How jet lag led me North by North West

Thrust back into a Europe where night falls at five o’clock and the air temperature is 30 degrees lower than that of the Pacific Ocean, I piled up the log burner this afternoon and looked around on the TV’s Channel finder for something that didn’t include Simon Cowell. I was in luck: on Film 4 was the Hitchcock classic starring Cary Grant, North by North West.

Made at the height of the Cold War, the movie represents Hitchcock at his peak of comedie noir, and Grant as the one male on the planet ahead of Frank Sinatra when it came to style. While the plot is a somewhat slight mistaken-identity-spy-thriller caper, the construction of suspense and twist is faultless, and the script blends acrid wit and languid urbanity in a way that would fly well above the heads of any contemporary audience. From a distance of over half a century in fact, the film resonates subtlety, idealistic struggle and cynical ruthlessness in almost equal measure.

Why is a bollocks-exposing site writing about this? Simply because so many modern cinemagoers insist that late 1950s/early 1960s films look horribly dated in 2010. But if this is so, why is Madmen such a hit, and Psycho still capable of terrifying people who’ve never seen it before? The period 1954-63 included High Society, Come Blow Your Horn, On the Beach, Dr Strangelove, and a memorable series of sophisticated cocktail romances starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day that will never be equalled. Seen today, they accuse our current culture of didacticism and idiocy, while examining human hypocrisy in a manner both timeless and sympathetic.

Several of the scenes from North by North West – the Kansan plane attack, and hanging off Mount Rushmore in particular- have become cinematic legends. The aerial attack on Cary Grant, for example, was pastiched in Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock homage High Anxiety, with a public park lawnmower hilariously replacing the biplane. But  the movie also has a cast of screen actors dating from the era when star quality was decided by the camera lens, not a phone-in.

James Mason

James Mason is wonderfully psychotic as the Soviet spymaster: he could inhale in a way to make Darth Vader a Shirley Temple by comparison. Grant’s love interest Eva-Marie Saint had played Marlon Brando’s Edie in On the Waterfront; she was more sexy with every stitch of clothing on than Katie Price could ever be buck naked. Leo G. Carroll played the emotion-free CIA boss so well, it almost certainly guaranteed his casting as the spy boss in the hit 1960s TV series The Man from Uncle. And Martin Landau’s fish-cold eyes stole many a scene in his role as James Mason’s profoundly nasty assistant Leonard.

Jet lag is an awful condition in which one’s mind is elsewhere, despite the obvious physicality of one’s body here: it may well be living proof of Einstein’s justified belief in the possibility of being in two places at once. But North by North West somehow defeated my body’s desire to dive onto every surface soft enough to enable sleep. The jump-cut towards the end where Cary Grant lifts Eva-Marie Saint off Washington’s nose and into his bed convinced me at the age of 11 that a role in film editing lay ahead of me. A career in advertising was as far as I got – but then Cary Grant’s feckless character Roger Thornhill was a Madison Avenue adman. This may explain a great deal.

The other thing about this site is that it’s supposed to have you leave the site learning stuff you didn’t know on arrival. So here are some facts about the movie and its cast.

North by North West does not exist as a compass direction. Hitchcock allegedly chose the title as a summary of Thornhill’s situation as an innocent Kafkaesque victim of East-West spy intrigue: as Thornhill himself says at one point, “I can’t make head nor tail of it”.

Eva-Marie Saint is still alive and kicking at the age of 84. She retired from movies in 1969, but had a cameo role in the 2006 adventure Superman Returns.

Cary Grant (real name Archibald Alexander Leach) was born in Bristol but emigrated to the US as a young man. He is chiefly famous for never becoming an old man, managing to play opposite female leads young enough be his children. He died in 1986, and left behind a cavalcade of wonderful movies. Once asked by telex ‘How old Cary Grant?’, he answered, ‘Old Cary Grant fine, how you?’ Told by an interviewer in the 1950s that “everyone wants to be Cary Grant”, he replied “So do I”.

James Mason was born in Yorkshire and died at the age of 75 in 1984. He got a 1st in Architecture at Cambridge, and was a conscientious objector during the Second World War. He was considered for the role of James Bond at the same time as Sean Connery, and may well have landed the role had he shown more enthusiasm for it.

Martin Landau is still alive, aged 82. He began his working life as a newspaper cartoonist on the New York Daily News, and was the only actor along with Steve McQueen to be selected for the Actors’ Studio in 1955. He was a close friend of James Dean, for whom he acted as a mechanic on the star’s various cars and motor cycles. He was Gene Roddenberry’s first choice in the role of Mr Spock in Star Trek, but after this narrow escape eventually starred in the original TV series Mission Impossible. Ensnared by the ghastly TV series Space1999, he overcame this setback to secure the Best Supporting Oscar award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the 1994 movie Ed Wood, a performance that won him universally glowing reviews.

 

Our most pressing skills shortage is at Conservative HQ

The opposition to educational reform and immigration caps could’ve been easily routed by a more switched-on Government. The Coalition’s failure to do this is another indictment of the researchers around David Cameron.

The slick manner in which the Progressive battalions turn themselves inside out to create a debate is, I confess, a skill I grudgingly admire. Far from resenting the fact that they do it, I reserve my ire for those who wish to preserve what’s good about Britain, and yet fail miserably to interrogate the smug insanity of the Left’s logic. Indeed, I suspect that the Coalition in general and Cameron in particular are more than happy to accept that logic. It does, after all, lead to a quieter life.

Two huge debates have been created thus since we parted company with New Labour. One is about education, and the other is about immigration. The educational Establishment claims that the system is just fine. And the multicultural supporters fall back on “but we need to import the skills” whenever there is talk of capping immigrant arrivals.

Yet I’m not aware of anyone in or around the Government asking the Opposition, “So if the education system is working just fine, why do we need to import the skills?” It seems to me to represent a use of just seventeen words to collapse the resistance to radical change in migratory and educational reform….but nobody has employed them.

The CBI (which gets dafter every year) has gaily torpedoed the Coalition on immigrant ‘skills’, but also failed to torpedo the Left’s ‘education is tickerty-boo’ nonsense. (It failed, for example, to note that 362,000 people enter Britain every year as students, a burden we should abolish immediately after the start of business on Monday.)

I’ve also been left wondering in recent weeks – what with 1.4million Britons being unemployed – why employers can’t retrain them for the necessary skill requirements; and if our economy is so stagnant (and trust me, it is) why this need for skills is so desperately pressing. In fact, it would be nice if there was somebody bright enough around the Cabinet table to at least show how New Labour’s education and immigration policies hugely exacerbated our long-term economic problems. As far as I can see to date, there isn’t. But that the previous Government screwed up royally in these areas is (as we shall see) undeniable.

In a nutshell, New Labour’s obsession with University targets created millions of young workers with the wrong skills for much of the work done by immigrants – and equally important, the wrong attitude.

A report by LSC (the Learning & Skills Council) of 2008 on the impact of migrant workers in the West Midlands records this in damning detail. The LSC was yet another quango dumped by Draper Osborne, but on the evidence of the above report, this might have been a mistake.

Over 85% of the immigrants were under 28, and over 90% of them had more apposite skills for the jobs on offer versus British applicants.

Employer reasons for preferring them (over and above their skill-lead versus British counterparts) were highly significant:

Better work ethic (64%), will consider job and will work harder (42%), more reliable (20%).

But here is a telling gem of data which begins to tug the rug from under those who insist that most job shortages are commercial – ie, required for economic/export health: 48% of all the immigrant workers went into care assistant jobs in the aged and mental care sectors. (In my father’s care home, there are rarely more than three British-born helpers at any given time).

This huge bias led me to investigate further exactly where in our economy these skill shortages are alleged to lie. As ever, this meant delving into the dark world of pc-spin as practised by government departments – everyone who comes here these days is a migrant: immigrants have been abolished – but starting here and then moving onto commercial employment sites was again revealing.

There is a list – yes, there is a list – of these skill shortages, but none of the government search engines point you at them, because it is called the UK shortage occupation list. Don’t ask me why, it’s another pointless strangulation of plain English.

A good deal of the clear information I gleaned came from the site GetUKjobs.com, a private sector outfit attracting foreign workers here. It quotes a survey of European CIOs by IDC, which found that ‘demand for people with certain skills is likely to outstrip availability by about 40,000 people in the UK’.

Note that figure: 40,000. It’s not what you’d call a massive skill shortage is it? I mean, it wouldn’t make much of a dent in the 28% of UK citizens deemed to be ‘economically inactive’.

In fact, another portal run by IT placement specialists ContractorUK suggests that in IT, there will be a skill shortage in its sector by 2018 ‘if this is not addressed’. Which kind of makes one wonder why the only way of addressing it is to import the skills: why not open vocational courses for our myriad unemployed graduates right now? There is, after all, no shortage of them.

But the argument for importing skill shortages gets weaker bordering on farcical when one studies the official list in detail. Here are the highlights:

There are severe shortages of ballet dancers, musicians, sheep-shearers, chefs, cooks and butchers.

There are shortages of care assistants and social workers (mainly Local Government, but the jobs have probably all been cut by now anyway).

There are shortages of every type of doctor, consultant, theatre technician, radiographer and medical researcher (90% of these are NHS).

And there’s a dearth of civil engineers to do with the UK built environment. But no shortage of lawyers.

Irony of final ironies, there is a chronic shortage of teachers in maths, physics, chemistry, and biology…but none at all for those teaching media studies. This lack of teaching staff in all the key commercial disciplines is of course a national disgrace of bad planning and target mania; but another reason why the DfE can’t attract them is the problem of both discipline and pc madness. (An Australian teacher we met in November, fresh back from teaching in Britain, told us “I finally gave up when the Head Teacher said we mustn’t mark in red ink, because that was redolent of failure”.)

Either way, none of the above, I would contend, is going to do anything at all to drive British exports in the coming years. The one thing the Coalition has yet to get a steer on is where this growth will come from; but it’s unlikely to involve much in the way of sheep, violinists, and NHS surgeons.

So athough the slavish-as-ever BBCNews site insists that ‘the skills shortage is costing the UK billions of pounds’, these data do cast doubt on that assertion. Rather more to the point, they also suggest that much of the debate on education and immigration is self-serving, defensive tosh. Above all, it’s clear that the skill shortage is both less urgent than has been suggested – and entirely self-inflicted.

Accepting that conclusion, why has this Government once again been given the runaround by the forces of obfuscation? The answer, I’m afraid, is that the Conservative Party has a skill shortage of major proportions itself: and it’s called people with the thoroughness and insight to dig out the real data, and use them as a jawbone with which to smite the asses on the opposing side.

Nby and Slog veterans will be sick of hearing about this by now (as no doubt is ConservativeHome) but since the day of his accession, David Cameron’s research and information-gathering has been truly awful. I have to assume that he is surrounded by yet more people like him: fast-footwork merchants who unfortunately have their analytical skills in those same nimble feet.

As Opposition Leader, Cameron failed to land a single real blow on Brown, failed to counter a single myth about Britain’s economic outlook, and failed throughout the campaign to produce a single piece of media advertising to highlight huge holes in the Mandelsonian Brownshirt arguments. As a direct result of this (and far too much anodyne drivel on the EU question) he failed to get a clear majority – and thus finds himself in a Coalition that is getting in the way on the big issues.

The Prime Minister’s briefing system is unfit for purpose if – when faced with open goals like our risible education system and incontinent immigration policy – he can still wind up with street demos and facile arguments about ‘a dearth of skilled workers’….and lots of trimming in all directions. When things really turn unpleasant next year, the Coalition cannot afford to be outwitted at every turn by wreckers who have no real rationale for their opposition. He must get some talented and profound researchers round him, and fast. Failure to address the problem could easily hand victory to the other side – and that would, truly, be a final disaster for the United Kingdom.

PASSIVE SMOKING: WHY WE CAN’T TRUST THIS NEW WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION STUDY

James Enstrom….sacrificed on the altar of pc

REVEALED:

THE WEB OF UNTRUTH BEHIND THE PASSIVE SMOKING WARRIORS

The latest WHO report on passive smoking hides a world of pc skulduggery

The new World Health Organisation report ‘proving’ a damning link between passive smoking and early mortality has dominated much of the health pages of our media today. But its methodology is not as robust as earlier studies before 2005 – almost all of which showed little or no correlation.

And significantly, the one man whose massive 2003 study condemned the ‘passive smoking myth’ was hounded from his California research job just ten weeks ago. The hand of bad-science political correctness is obvious for anyone to see in this man’s dismissal. Eco-warrior (and UCLA ‘colleague’ of Professor James E. Enstrom) Beate Ritz told the US media at the time:

“…based on his 2003 findings that second-hand cigarette smoke doesn’t kill people, he has been allowing his interpretations go beyond the data and his personal biases to be strong enough to not allow for a balanced and appropriately cautious interpretation of the numbers.”

The British Medical Journal disagreed. It published Enstrom’s paper in full at the time, and has never rubbished it since. But UCLA backed Ms Ritz with this extraordinary statement on 17^th August this year:

“…his research is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department.”

This could very easily be interpreted as code for ‘the guy’s off-message’. And let’s be clear about this, Beate’s message about environmental pollution is consistent bordering on missionary. In recent years she has ‘discovered’ risk-factors between air pollution and infant children, Statin and Parkinson’s Disease, air pollution and congenital anomalies, and pesticides and birth defects. Every last one of her studies finds ‘a link’ which the media then catch onto, but very few of whom are ever interrogated. Ms Beate’s business is finding links between pollutants and nasty stuff.

Beate Ritz….determined link-finder

Beate Ritz is as feminist, pc and green-obsessed as it’s possible to be. She is a leading light of the Chemical Policy Reform Group. The website is the standard chest-prodding stuff even those of us who recognise global warming have come to loathe: all polemic and no contradictions, if you please. For the CRF, everything is a health-risk.

Parting shots: Beate Ritz ‘uses geographic information system (GIS) modelling of environmental exposures including pesticide use and traffic related air pollution’ in her research. Thus she is a modeller, not an empiricist. I am not a major fan of modellers: modellers told us that 2008’s financial meltdown was impossible.

Footnote: The Professor of Epidemiology at UCLA is now….Beate Ritz. Well well well.

________________________________________

An unknown humorist once said that “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.” I’ve studied more than my fair share over the years, because in the 1970s I had a tobacco client for many years. I resigned from the account in the end, because I could no longer square my own certainty of tobacco’s massive danger as a drug with helping the company market tobacco products.

But even then, I was convinced by several studies showing that passive smoking was only a danger at all in very high doses. Beyond that, the data were at best flakey.

As with all research, the agenda – who funded it and what the researcher wants to prove – are the key things to know. Enstrom’s research was UCLA funded, because it required little or no fieldwork: he was analysing 38 years of data from 1960-1998….data that had never been spliced together before. Not only did he therefore have a massive sample – nearly 120,000 Americans – he created genuine panel data – followed up all the respondents – and focused on one of the supposed greatest dangers of all: living with a spouse who smoked, when the respondent didn’t.

The study is far and away the most robust available, and the only major one based on empirical results rather than varietal (and thus dodgy) causal relationships between lifestyle and passively ‘caught’ smoking diseases. It concluded in 2003:

‘The results do not support a causal relationship between passive smoking and mortality. There is a positive correlation, but it is too small to be significant.’

Speaking on a US radio programme at the time, Enstrom said:

“Basically I found that there was no relationship in terms of increased risk between the spousal smoking history and the long-term risk of death from coronary heart disease and lung cancer. There’s a possibility for a slight increase for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but none of the results were statistically significant.”

The medical Establishment and its mother jumped on the study at the time, but last year James remained unrepentant, explaining:

“Not a single error was ever identified in that paper and I refuted all claims made against me and my research,” he said. “My work isn’t about being politically correct, it’s about honest research and being faithful to the science.”

But James Enstrom is not the first neutral researcher to cast doubt on the Health & Safety sector’s obsession with passive smoking. In February 2000, a team from Warwick University led by Professor John Copas and Dr Jian Qing Shi argued that findings from previous anti-smoking funded field studies were ‘unreliable’. Copas himself went on the record as a scientist to say that

“…research which suggests an increased risk is more likely to be published than research which does not…”

The team re-analysed 37 trials, concluding that most passive smoking risks were much lower than earlier findings suggested.

___________________________________________

 

Now let’s turn to today’s release of the WHO study. Like a surveyor employed by the purchaser to find something wrong in a prospective property, so too a massive group like The World Health Organisation is hardly going to find that there’s nothing to worry about: and the same applies to our own Health & Safety Executive.

On the BBC website this morning, nothing in the WHO report is questioned. One has become accustomed to this with the overwhelmingly conformist news culture that exists there. Its health page leads with ‘passive smoking kills 600,000 worldwide’. Other gems of rigorous analysis include:

‘….passive smoking is particularly dangerous for children, said to be at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome, pneumonia and asthma….Passive smoking causes heart disease, respiratory illness and lung cancer….. One-third of those killed are children, often exposed to smoke at home….’.

Neither the Enstrom study nor the Warwick reanalyses warranted a mention. Significantly, both categorically refute what the BBC presented as fact.

“This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco,” said Armando Peruga, of the WHO’s Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study, “the mix of infectious diseases and second-hand smoke is a deadly combination.”  The assertion is ex cathedra, and completely unsupported by even a reference to anything in the study.

In the same year that Enstrom’s UCLA research broke cover, Peruga was working for a ban on all smoking in public places in South America. The study he co-authored baldly stated:

‘Passive smoking is a significant but avoidable cause of premature death worldwide.’

But the study measured no such thing: this assertion was gratuitously thrown into the report as a taster for the converted. The study measured airborne nicotine in public places: it did not prove any harm from this, and yet reached this insane conclusion:

‘The finding of airborne nicotine in crucial locations provides a basis for enforcing smoke-free initiatives’.

But what did this latest WHO study – ‘carried out in 192 countries’ – actually use as its methodology? Well, you shouldn’t hold your breath trying to get an answer. The best you’ll manage is this jargonized gobbledygook from yesterday’s Lancet – note my italics:

‘The burden of disease from second-hand smoke was estimated as deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for children and adult non-smokers. The calculations were based on disease-specific relative risk estimates and area-specific estimates of the proportion of people exposed to second-hand smoke, by comparative risk assessment methods, with data from 192 countries during 2004.’

Now this is what I would regard as shit masquerading as putty. Why wait until now before revealing 2004 data – in the hope that Enstrom’s research has been forgotten? Plus, if you choose to use norms and estimates, then it would be possible to conclude anything that suited your book…and, dare I suggest such a thing, suppress everything that denies your hypothesis.

Don’t reject that accusation out of hand: the WHO has form when it comes to suppressing things detrimental to its aims. In a very early online edition of the Daily Telegraph in 1998, then Health Correspondent Victoria MacDonald revealed a cover-up at the heart of WHO’s passive smoking programme. She wrote:

‘THE world’s leading health organisation has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect. The World Health Organisation, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report….Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.

The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: “There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] exposure during childhood.”

In other words, entirely consistent with Enstrom’s findings….and therefore thrown in the off-message bin.

Yet despite all this evidence of exaggeration and cover-up, Wikipedia’s current page on the subject notes, ‘Currently, the health risks of secondhand smoke are a matter of scientific consensus, and these risks have been one of the major motivations smoking bans in workplaces and indoor public places, including restaurants, bars and night clubs.’

A whole group of people have been force-fitted into the role of social outcast – and a massive industry created – based on yet more ‘settled science’. But, it seems, the scientific reality of risk may well be negligible. Perhaps more to the point, the libertarian arguments against smoking bans suddenly begin to look much more solid.

I gave up smoking just short of thirty years ago, and I do not particularly like people smoking in my house. Tobacco smoking is a major killer, and no smoker anywhere on the planet can any longer be unaware of the grave health risks associated with the habit. However, on the Lockeian principle of self and other-regarding social actions, the foregoing evidence suggests that the public-places smoking-ban arguments may well be based on a fraud of gigantic proportions.

If doing no harm to others, all smokers have a right to kill themselves having enjoyed the habit. Looking at the data across the board, there is clearly a case to protect bar staff, stewards and entertainers in pubs and clubs….but no case I’ve seen to enforce a total ban. Both there and in restaurants, it seems to me, as a social researcher, that designated smoking areas (given that now only a dwindling minority smoke at all) would be more than sufficient to reduce the passive-inhalation risk to near-zero. And in that case, the personal liberty argument would hold sway.

Here we have, yet again, bogus research and bad science being used to support the nannying nature of Western governments. The passive-smoking ‘story’ now rivals those in favour of multiculturalism, State child-snatching, radical feminism, globalism, and the multinational business model as an idea ignoring the lessons of history, over-egging the pudding of research findings, and bending ‘informed’opinion to its will.

One is left asking whether the obsessive hubris of scientists with a mission can ever again be trusted. But this is an old lesson to be learned: never trust the findings of those who set out to find.

Why the rain in Spain is mainly about banking incontinence.

Today, the FT opined, ‘the debt crisis that forced Ireland into a multi-billion-

euro bail-out is spreading’. The Slog analyses why this is happening, and how we could stop it.

 

 

There were yawns of boredom across the world of currency and debt management yesterday as Eurocrats lined up to explain why Portugal was different to Ireland, and Spain was not only different to both, but also in much better shape. In all honesty, they needn’t have bothered: none of it washes any more among the market movers who matter.

Interestingly, Angela Merkel – still for many the villain of this piece, although a large part of me likes what she has to say – has dropped much of the upbeat bollocks since last weekend’s Irish bailout. She openly admitted to being “gravely concerned” about the outlook for the Eurozone –a braver and more enlightened response than I’d expected: perhaps she has more reality left in her tank than most politicians in 2010.

Even more telling was the statement made by Spain’s Central Bank chief Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez on Tuesday last. He told the media:

“The outlook for a gradual recovery is surrounded by uncertainties….in an environment where financing conditions must remain restrictive, and in which the public and the private sector have a pressing need to pay off huge debt, we can expect the pace of recovery in household consumption to slow versus the first half of the year.”

Coming from a banker, that’s as near as you’ll get to “It’s a fair cop Guv and I’ll come quiet like”. The statement is especially significant given one of the many realities overlooked by even very bright journalists: Eurozone bailout commitments, as things stand today, will not apply after Autumn 2013. After that date, Germany in particular is insisting that any future bond issues must contain burden-sharing provisions between the Sovereign and the lender.

But even in the most optimistic scenarios on offer, Greek and Irish debt ratios will be higher by 2013; so if Berlin’s ‘sharing’ demands bear fruit, these two countries at least will be treated as lepers by the lenders. My own view remains that long before then, the Spanish situation will have become one of crisis proportions – with (I still insist) Italy a wild card, simply because I don’t believe their figures any more than I believed those of the Greeks.

As and when Spain gets to the Irish stage of hitting the wall, two key factors will come into play:

1. Exposure to Spanish debt among EU banks is far higher than that to any other troubled EU Sovereign. There is around €460 billion (£390 billion) of bank assets tied up in Spain. Shoring up the banking system by giving financial aid to Spain on top of the €80-90 billion loan currently being negotiated with Ireland and around €50-75 billion that Portugal would need would easily polish off the €440 billion European Financial Stabilisation Facility set up following the Greek crisis..

2. Forgetting the banking exposure, the cost of bailing it out – a sum probably in excess of a trillion euros – is unaffordable under current arrangements….and unacceptable to Germany. Spain’s economy is bigger than Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined, representing in the region of 12% of the Eurozone’s GDP.

So the European Union will be left with two less than desirable options. The first would be a full fiscal union under which everyone would be severally and separately responsible for all EU Sovereign debt. Not only does that have absolutely no chance of being accepted by member States, it would (a) be contrary to existing European Union treaties, and (b) be almost certainly unconstitutional in the Bundesrepublik.

The second – far more likely option – would be letting member states default. This might well cause a much broader crisis, under which risk spreads would yawn ever wider between EU States. Its effect on the euro’s value would be catastrophic– on paper, exactly what the ‘peripheral’ member countries want – a cheap Euro via which to export. Individual country fiscal positions could however become dire very quickly. And an awful lot of Eurozone banks would be up a very tall gum tree. Once again, the banks turn out to be at the heart of the matter.

The banking exposure gets forgotten far too quickly by commentators on the EU scene. It is the central reason why the recent stress tests were so deliberately obfuscated by German, French and Dutch banks: the fact is, they are up to their necks in Spanish property junk. And protecting their viability is the chief motive behind the 24/7 lying in which every bureaucrat and banker in the region is currently engaged.

Sharp ears among you may have noticed Wee Georgie Osborne rushing to Ireland’s side as things got out of hand last week. This is not Old Etonian philanthropy, but rather a recognition that British banks could very easily be sucked under as the allegedly unsinkable Eurozone heads for the sea bed. RBS and Lloyds (who else would it be?) are hugely exposed to very bad property debts in the Irish Republic: if provisions against bad loans start to soar, both of these taxpayer-saved banks will be revisiting intensive care in short order.

What’s more, we are – it now emerges – quite high up the creditors list when it comes to Spain….as well as Italy, where Barclays in particular face some highly embarrassing losses.

All this gives our Chancellor the tricky tightrope-walk of explaining to a nervous bordering on truculent electorate why we need to stump up for whatever EU bailout schemes are on offer. You can almost hear it now: “Ah yes, well you see…erm, even though we stayed out of the euro, our banks – those fine pillars of respectable prudence – took full advantage of a market opportunity and lent lots of money to swarthy Iberian property developers…and of course, what happened next was completely unforeseen by everyone, especially me.”

If it wanted to, Labour could have a field day with this. But it won’t, because such an avowedly corporatist Party would much rather stir up national Trade Union problems for the Coalition than say anything against its beloved EUSSR. Instead, I suspect the grubby little men and women behind Mr Ed will portray the inevitably worsening UK debt situation as an indictment of The Cuts – rather than what it will really be: yet another dung heap left behind by Trichet’s ECB largesse, and greedy banker bonusing based on targets.

But is the likelihood of Spanish rain that high? Well, Spain needs to refinance around €300 billion of borrowing by 2013 – and a whopping €192 billion in 2011 alone. And there remains that very odd self-fulfilling anxiety Sovereign lenders always display: ‘the interest rates we need to lend money safely to both Portugal and Spain have leapt in recent weeks. So of course we fear that these countries will not be able to stick to planned debt reduction targets, and may need international aid’. Er….yes well, I suppose if you push them into a tunnel, they will get claustrophobic.

One respected financial house pointed out that “this latest wave of the sovereign debt crisis has crippled the eurozone further. We expect at least one more wave in the coming months. It will test the political sustainability of austerity measures, and probably highlight the vulnerability of Spain.”

My own view is that it will render Spain’s financial nakedness public before next Spring. The markets will wear a bailout to Portugal, because of its tiny size in the greater EU scheme of things. They won’t feel that way about a Spanish insolvency. But by then, they will have begun to worry about the fate of at least five European banks.

The obvious conclusion from all this is that without bankers and markets, none of this would be happening.

Hold that thought.

Official: student demonstrators demonstrate where education has gone wrong

It’s good to be back, but it would be better if some things had changed.

“We are here demonstrating because our rights are being impeded on” said a student on the BBCNews channel last night. We then cut to a very 1970s scene of slogans and banners. ‘F**k fees’ said one. As ever, the ignorant are condemned by what they write, and the pretentious nature of what they say: it was all very Fred Kite rather than Tariq Ali. The dumbing down of radical erudition is indeed a matter for national shame.

“I mean,” added a breathless young man, “I mean look, this is what happens when you repress an important elite group like us”. Well, quite.

A recurrent feature of debate about policy direction in the UK today is that of the idiot with no case being given an aperture via which to complain by the Establishment’s moral failure. Just as the bankers have handed a free gift to UNITE, so too has the Coalition’s muddled Further Education policy given lots of agitprop to young Mrs Malaprops.

Nick Clegg was on Radio 4 wittering about compromise again this morning, just prior to the half-educated barbarian hordes moving on to trash his Party headquarters. ‘Compromise’ in this instance is, however, a euphemism for dilution.

Further Education funding is in crisis for one reason above all others: the substitution of merit with ‘equality’ as the criterion for University entrance. The simple answer is to go back to sending only the brightest and the best to University, and streaming the also-rans into more vocational learning institutions. This would, obviously, solve the entire Further Education funding ‘problem’ at a stroke.

DoE records suggest that, in 1950, only  5% of the learning population were doing a degree at any time. Given the courses took at least three years, then at best 2% of UK pupils became graduates each year. In 1963, the report of the Robbins committee on higher education proclaimed the ‘Robbins principle’, that university places should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment. (My italics). This represents the last sane piece of enlightened educational legislation in Britain.

I remember the Careers Officer at my Grammar School telling me, as my offer to study History & Politics at Liverpool was confirmed in July 1966, that I was “now part of the 2% elite”.  Eleven years later in 1977,  this meritocratic elite had reached 15%.

According to Robert Anderson’s British Universities Past and Present, in 1980 there were 47 universities in the UK with 282,960 students – probably an intake of about 80,000 undergraduates a year. Successive UK Governments then increased the proportion of 18 year olds going into degree courses over the following 30 years, until by 2009 481,854 students were given places to start reading for degrees. This in itself represented a rise of 5.5% in just one year.

The process of lowering entry standards was of course given a huge boost by the 1988 Education Act, which paved the way for the grant of university status to polytechnics in 1992. This was widely (and rightly) seen at the time as a dilution of academic excellence. And once the New Labour target-robots got into power after 1997, that casual award of elite status to dismal places like Aston ‘University’ was exacerbated by the increasingly alarming trend to having A-level pass quotas replace actual student performance.

The Slog has researched myriad examples of just how easy it is in 21st Century Britain to pass an A-Level – and how few University course options are in any way tied to professional relevance in later life. I’ve also looked at how some exam questions are not so much ‘education’ as naked social engineering propaganda. In 2007, Mary Beard wrote in The Times, “I know of at least one A level examiner who has given up because he was forced to mark down candidates who wrote really intelligently about a subject but didn’t give the points that were demanded by his ‘marking criteria’”. In 2009, Trevor Nunn’s wife Imogen Stubbs described how the couple’s encouragement of their daughter to think for herself when answering her Drama A-level questions led to her being failed. Thinking outside the box, do you see: that’s not allowed any more. Conform or die.

As The Slog insisted earlier this year, an educational revolution is necessary if we are to equip citizens with the right discernment tools to screen out government and commercial spin – and with the skills that both employers and householders need. Michael Gove finds it hard to face the reality that not only are kids woefully under-challenged by our education system, poor and politically biased teaching will not change until mediocre teachers are cleared out.

When it comes to education, radicalism is the new responsibility. But Coalitions are rarely radical.

In touch as ever, this was the Guardian view of what students look like today

Signs in Cairns, Nosh in Sydney, and the missing VIP lounge

The Sloginoz Saga draws inexorably towards a close

The Slog’s more permanent reincarnation will be revealed in due course.

Crocodile Daintree

The Sloginoz party goes in search of thrills on the Daintree River, and the towns that taste forgot

Live and let dive

Royals, reefs, blobs and bankers

The latest episode in the Sloginoz Saga.

When the chips are down in Europe, you’re better of eating Aussie-style

Professor Sloginoz continues to probe the mysteries of the British Army, the European Central Bank, and the Aussie chip.

Salty crocs, blobby Bruces and political wombats.

The further adventures of Team Sloginoz in Strilia.