It's time?

John Redwood’s Diary - The treatment of Scotland and England

Alex Salmond has reason to feel pleased with his work. He has found a series of issues where Scotland can be given better treatment than England, based on the more favourable financial settlement. His intention is to use these issues to make English voters angry about the injustice of the Union settlement, so there is pressure for English - and therefore by definition for Scottish - independence from south of the border. It is beginning to have an impact.

As irritating as I generally find Redwood, this is a pretty good post on 'the Scottish question'. Salmond is going down well up here in Scotland even amongst people strongly opposed to independence. He's a canny Scot and is going to give Gordon Brown some sleepless nights over the next year or two.

I like Salmond. He's straight talking and a skilled operator. His experience in Westminster puts him head and shoulders above most of the Holyrood crowd and he has a superb deputy in Nicola Sturgeon. Politics this side of the border is far more interesting than down south and the general level of political debate is superior. Whatever happens in the end there can be no doubt that Salmond and the SNP are going to be good for Scottish political life and very probably Scottish life in general.

PaperRound w/e 27/10/2007

Don't forget the Weekend PaperRound !

Only one in fifteen BBC employees 'liberal' shock!

ConservativeHome's ToryDiary: There are eleven times more 'liberals' at the BBC than 'conservatives'

This is a great piece of work. It's clear proof that the BBC is liberal and all self-declared. This research (sic) will be quoted for years to come. (sic)
Well done Conservativehome.
Anthony Broderick

My first response was, so what? But of course this piece isn't about BBC employees it's about BBC employees who have posted a profile on Facebook and who have specified their political stance as 'liberal, moderate or conservative'.

Leaving aside the fact that Facebook is a US run site and the words 'liberal' and 'conservative' mean entirely different things over there which may well deter people from calling themselves 'conservative' (or 'liberal' come to that - I'm not sure what a 'moderate' is exactly) we find that 1,340 employees on Facebook refer to themselves as 'liberal'. That's just under 13% of BBC Facebook members and about 6.7% of all BBC employees. Which proves what exactly? Sweet fuck all.

How the mighty have fallen

Robin Good - Google PageRank Devalued: What Is Really Happening

It's been buzzing around the techyblogosphere for a couple of days now.

After a crackdown a couple of weeks ago on PageRank 'selling' Google has decided to further penalize websites and blogs which use " text links sales, strong link exchange behaviour, link farming and excessive internal or intra-blog linking". 

Some major sites have seen their pagerank drop by 3 and they're not happy about it. Indeed Robin Good's own MasterNewsMedia site now shares the same PageRank as my insignificant little site. (My PageRank has, of course, remained unaffected).

But Robin Good points out that these changes are not affecting traffic or search engine results and goes on to explain just what's happening:

To the detached eye, what emerges quite clearly, at least with the data in our hands now, is that Google is voluntarily devaluing PageRank for those very sites that have benefited or could benefit most from converting the perceived "authoritative" value provided by PageRank so as to make it practically useless.

What must also be strongly remarked is that it appears quite evident though that Google is not penalizing these sites inside its search engine result pages, but it is only lowering their assigned PageRank value...What this would appear to indicate is a clear strategy to fight not only sites selling paid text links but also strong link exchange behaviour, link farming and excessive internal or intra-blog linking.

By significantly lowering PageRank without affecting search engine result rankings, Google sends out a very clear message: "PageRank has only a very limited value, and you cannot use it to make more friends or money by handing out "favour" links or even by selling them on your site."

That's cheered me right up.

Bourn to schmooze

Channel 4 - News - Sir John Bourn to retire early

Comptroller and Auditor General Sir John Bourn is to retire on 31 January next year, the National Audit Office said today. Sir John Bourn is stepping down ahead of schedule as the head of the National Audit Office.

He's been embroiled in controversy over his expenses, after racking up hundreds of thousands of pounds on globetrotting trips. Although charged with guarding the public purse, Bourne has managed to run up bills of £365k on travel and £27k on meals, not to mention a host of not entirely run-of-the-mill leisure pursuits.

Good old Private Eye have been banging away at this for months with yesterday's edition adding another page of juicy epicurean details. What is really shocking about this isn't just the high-spending and the lavish entertaining it's the fact that we are not able to find out exactly who was entertained and for what purpose. Sir John's guest are simply listed as 'senior government officials', 'representatives of suppliers to government', suppliers to the NAO' , 'parliamentarians' and 'others'.

Remortgage the house and...buy a bag

Handbagged

The latest bag to cause a sensation, the Nancy, has been created by Samantha Cameron, wife of the Tory leader, for posh stationery shop Smythson, where she is the creative director. The princely price tag of £950 is the equivalent to an average monthly mortgage repayment, and if you want the matching mirror (£85) or any of the other accessories to go with it (a keyring or a hanging photo frame to go on the handles, anyone?), it'll set you back well over £1,000.

There was a time when I spent a fair amount of my disposable income on suits, shirts, ties and other accessories. But then I reached a stage in life when I no longer needed to go out 'suited and booted' and I happily reverted to slob mode. I've worn a tie on two occasions in the last five years, both funerals. As for fashion...perleeze! I resent paying a penny extra for a named garment, in fact I hate labels full stop. If you want me to advertise your brand - pay me!

I've just ordered a new pair of shoes. I'm replacing the pair I wear 95% of the time and which I've had for about four years. They cost £23 back then. Today I paid £12.50 for a new pair from my catering suppliers, Nesbits. The shoes will withstand a small nuclear explosion. They have a steel toecap, are completely waterproof, acid proof and everything else proof and so non-slip that you can walk through hot oil with no danger of falling over.

A fashion item? No.

Do I give a shit?.....

Overarm, overkill

Woolmer murdered, expert insists

Admitting you got it wrong is never easy but I can't help feeling Dr Ere Shesiah is trying a little too hard here:

A Jamaican government pathologist who conducted Bob Woolmer's autopsy has maintained his view that the Pakistan cricket coach was murdered. Dr Ere Shesiah's findings prompted a global murder inquiry and speculation about corruption and match-fixing. But the inquiry was dropped after three independent experts (and MrP!) said Mr Woolmer died of natural causes.

"I stand by my findings that Mr Woolmer was strangled and, based upon additional information which I received, he was also poisoned," he said. He said the poison used was cypermethrin which caused "salivation, vomiting, diarrhoea and muscular incoordination" and that this may have explained the disarray in Woolmer's room when he was found.

Maybe...if his room had been covered in gob, puke and shit.

One forward and five reverse gears and all that

Plan to Shut Down the Internet

Apparently there are dastardly plans afoot to shut down the internet.
Who is behind them? Italy.

Italy!

Ha, ha, ha. Oh dear, I thought they were being serious for a minute.

And relax...

write the feem toon, sing the feem toon

Someone needed to say it

A new 'Dye' memorial?

Dye in Roman fountain may have been art

One day a vandal, the next an artist. That is the story of the baseball-capped culprit who dumped a bottle of dye into Rome's famed Trevi Fountain on Friday, turning the waters blood red.

No sooner was it determined that the 17th-century Baroque fountain had not been damaged than intellectuals and art critics began re-evaluating the gesture as something approaching genius. "Once the indignation had died down we rediscovered the Fountain of Trevi thanks to that liquid," said Roberto D'Agostino, a blogger who is the Italian Matt Drudge. "It's a resurrection of Andy Warhol, the act of highlighting an object of mass consumption."




Others made the connection between the red of the fountain and the red carpet at the Rome Film Fest, which had just begun. It's a lackluster festival, said the media critic Gianluca Nicoletti, having "no depth, no color. The real splash was the one made at a fountain."

Describing the gesture as a "dramatic representation of the decline of the country," Nicoletti said that photos of the red-watered fountain had made a global sensation. "It was a marvelous event" that put Rome in the spotlight - and "at practically zero cost."

Who needs art school? Buy a bottle of cochineal.

Shopping mum

Boy Calls for Help from Mother's Car

An eight-year-old boy called emergency services on his mobile phone while he and his younger sister were in a speeding car being driven by their drunken mother. The police located and stopped the vehicle using call tracking and information supplied by the boy. No one was hurt.

That's one sensible kid. Could well have saved someone's life, possibly his mother's.

It's Islamo-Fascism Week - have you donated yet?

Bin Laden and the Neocons Do a Mirror Dance (While Most Muslims Stay Invisible) - The Smirking Chimp

In one of those strange moments of symmetry that have marked their respective histories, Osama Bin Laden and the neocons are both kicking off the week with a renewed dedication to their shared cause: a worldwide war between the Western powers and all of Islam. No surprise, really. It's in their mutual interest to make sure the rest of the world's Muslims stay invisible.

Bin Laden released a new video - man, this guy kicks out more product than Ryan Adams - just as a shaky cabal of radical rightists was launching something called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." As Barbara Ehrenreich points out, this loosely affiliated group doesn't hesitate to draw anti-Semites into what it claims is a pro-Israel platform. They also bring out ardent anti-feminists to argue that their global war on Muslims would advance women's rights.