This video, the one people suspected probably existed somewhere, should go through the proper channels and the police officers in question should be sanctioned in accordance with the law. I’ve got no real beef with the police in general on this matter (although I do with the coppers in the footage), partly because many police officers do at least agree with me in principle on the matter, partly because they’re just the enforcement arm of a state that’s gone nuts with authoritarian legislation over recent years so it’s hard to fault them for doing their job, and partly because “the police is all bastards” is a pretty unhelpful generalisation.

Where my main ire stays is the shoddy work of just about every other news organ in believing the police press release rather than doing any reporting. We know the political arm of the police, particularly the Met, massage the truth about these things – the De Menzes case showed that in full media spotlight but it was hardly an isolated case – so to engage in chinese whispers based on official press releases and hearsay from other people and then publish the results across two pages of the Evening Standard is absolutely shockingly bad journalism – churnalism, to be precise. While it’s arguable the precise details of Mr Tomlinson’s unfortunate demise weren’t known, the heavy-handed nature of police action during them was hardly a secret, nor restricted to the socialist press or leftist blogosphere. To ignore a story about masses of police inciting violence during a protest on the streets of London in favour of the simpler narrative that the protesters were all violent thugs is simply not what the press should be for.

Of course, we can apply Hanlon’s Razor and say that this is simply the result of people trying to do a job they’re simply no good at and ballsing it up, but it seems at least plausible that there might be some element of an agenda here. What have you got to say, people of The Sun?

Widow rips down G20 yobs’ tributes!

Right on!

Now, of course Mrs Tomlinson has every right to object to mischaracterisations of her husband as being one of the protesters rather than someone trying to make his way home. But I rather think that calling people putting up messages of condolence ‘yobs’ is perhaps laying the Currant’s not-so-secret agenda out there for everyone to see. Went to the protest? Got some long hair? Maybe sympathise with the plight of the downtrodden in a slightly idealistic way? YOB! Not very good at nuanced points of view, the editors of that rag. Which is, of course, the best selling newspaper in the UK.

So far, the Groan’s video hasn’t made a splash on any of the other newspaper’s websites. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Sun has to say about it. “If he hadn’t looked so much like a yob the police wouldn’t have pushed him from behind,” perhaps? Admissions of crap journalism less than a week ago will, I presume, be stunningly unforthcoming.

Some people may have been following the story of Ian Tomlinson, the man who died while caught up in the violence at the G20 protests last week. Back Towards the Locus has probably the best summary of what we know about what happened, derived as it is from that old fashioned technique of relying on reports from the scene, eyewitnesses and corroborating evidence.

In the meantime, the Dead Tree Media covered the full range from wanton exaggeration to making shit up to reading stuff other people had made up and expressing faux outrage.

It’s possible to laugh this kind of nonsense off sometimes, like when The Sun gets caught with its pants round its ankles for believing any old alarmist cobblers about Islamic terrorists in the UK rather than investigating whether their sole source for a front page story was, in fact, making it all up. In this case though it seems that there are some rather more serious and pernicious issues at hand than good old fashioned tabloid racism. Rather than suddenly collapsing and then being helped by police who suffered bravely under an onslaught of bottles and imaginary bricks, it turns out that various witnesses are claiming the man – who seems to have been on his way home and had nothing to do with the protests – was first attacked by police and then helped by protesters when he collapsed for the second time.

Couple this with reports from the “climate camp” sub-protest, which range from police being free and easy with the laws applying to themselves to deliberately covering their ID numbers during clashes and you have a rather problematic indictment of the vast majority of the right wing press in this country (which is more-or-less all of it). It’s not that the police are always and forever the bad guys, but rather it is the case that the role of the press should be to offer us mere mortals some protection against the excesses of the state by shining a light onto its behaviour. If, through complicity or simple incompetence, the media presents the standard authoritarian narratives that the crusties deserved to get beaten like animals, it is an abdication of the trust the fourth estate holds. It has got to the stage where we might as well not bother with private ownership of some newspapers, because no reporting gets done between the official press release and publication of the paper itself, unless there’s a chance someone got their tits out during the story.

With jobs vanishing and wages frozen, it’s hardly the fault of individual journalists that they can’t be everywhere or see everything. Rather what we’re seeing is a continuation of a trend where newspaper owners try and squeeze 20% profit margins out of companies not designed for that level of return, and in doing so continually gut the industry they own of anything that would continue to justify its existence. The expansion of independent reporting in independent, online venues isn’t at a stage yet where it can replace the traditional media’s reach. We are thus left with a very troubling gap in government accountability which nobody seems able to fill. Interesting times.

At least, that was at first.  Where it really seemed to catch on, and where the majority of its two-million-plus hits came from, was the good old US of A.  No less a dignitary than Matt Drudge himself helped to spray links to Hannan’s videos all over the right wing of the American blogosphere, prompting many people to say things like “where’s the American version of Daniel Hannan who’s willing to stand up to the Obama administration?!?”  Now, again, the crazy facts of the matter aside (Brown was chancellor from 1997, making him the political contemporary of George Bush Jr, and is a pretty committed centrist capitalist despite the Labour label), it seems that the thing that caught people’s attention wasn’t what he said but that he used big words and flowery rhetoric.  After all, the USA is hardly starved for people slagging off Barack Obama for ruining the country already.  It seems that what they want is someone who can do it without sounding like a complete half wit.  Queue a bunch of right wingers in the US media jumping on this latest phenomenon and bringing Hannan over to dance for them

Good news for Mr Hannan, certainly, and theoretically good news for the Conservative Party, which has always been strongly Atlanticist. There are always questions about whether this particular incarnation of the Republican Circular Firing Squad is the one they want to hitch their wagon to given how popular the image of Obama is around the world, but they could play the long game on this and wait for the inevitable backlash.

The problem is, though, there’s a reason Hannan was able to make that speech at all.   Hannan only got the opportunity to address the PM at all because he’s left the federalist EPP grouping of centre-right parties ahead of the planned departure by the UK Conservative Party, placing him quite firmly on the more radical and obstructionist wing of Cameron’s new Cuddly Conservatives. And with his new found fame and a receptive audience in the States, Mr Hannan didn’t take long to remind his bosses why, no matter his new international YouTube credibility, he would be a bad choice to become the fact of the Tories as they’re expecting a win: he’s started slagging off the NHS.

Now, to explain, slagging off the NHS is a national pastime over here.  The newspapers are full of reasons why it’s failing and why people don’t get the right treatment.  The Labour government has poured money into it since their first election in 1997 but it’s widely considered to have been mis-spent on “bureaucracy” and an obsession with targets and league tables, or to have merely kept the service afloat rather than improving it.  But there’s a big difference between saying “the government has ruined the NHS!” and claiming, as Hannan did on Sean Hannity’s show, that the NHS is “a 60 year mistake”.  Most people in England want the NHS made better, not eradicated.  They have a good idea that while it is certainly not without its problems that private-sector replacements are rarely if ever a viable alternative.  Not only do we have decades of experience of our government making a pigs ear out of strategies to privatise other sections of our infrastructure to inform our own collective Theory of Second Best Solutions in this matter, we also have a pretty good idea about the problems faced in the US health care system.  More people in the UK are inclined to sympathise with the millions of uninsured or the middle classes who find their health insurance eating up larger proportions of their paychecks every year than with the wealthier sections of society who can get access to the top-drawer cancer treatment and not have to worry about bankruptcy while they are doing so.

The European Parliament is elected on a list based system, and Hannan represents the South East – where the rich people live – so he can be a self regarding objectivist and still keep his seat quite handily.  But this is not true of the Tories in general.  The Labour government in the UK is well on the way to self-immolation and Cameron’s ideas about rejuvenating the Tories with a kinder and more compassionate worldview stand a very good chance of securing them a majority at the next election.  But they are in no way on course for a landslide, and people like Hannan poking these third rails of British politics is just the kind of thing that would remind people that behind David Cameron there remains a party full of Thatcherites and old-school Tories who hate the government provision of services they rely on, simply because the government’s providing them and government is de facto bad.

Hannan defends his critique as being something “everybody knows”, and that may well be true of his colleagues writing for The Telegraph and his fellow Tories.  But the reality is that while the NHS is hardly breaking any records, it hardly follows that socialised medicine as a concept is a failure or even that the general structure of the NHS in general is flawed.  For a start, the NHS is dirt cheap.  Per-capita healthcare spending in the UK is amongst the lowest of any developed nation, spending around 20% less than the European average and a staggering 60% less than the USA.  Hannan and Hannity might well be aware of the phrase “you get what you pay for” but, obviously, such figures would probably throw a spanner into the works of a simplistic analysis that said private markets were always better and providing services.  Further, while it’s true that heart disease and cancer survival rates are amongst the lowest in Europe, this has as much to do with treatment priorities as it does with structural problems.  For example, our childhood cancer survival rates are pretty similar, and our Infant, Under-5, Neo-Natal and Maternal Mortality rates (PDF) are all comparable or lower to that of the USA.  Like it or not, heart disease and cancer are diseases of the old.  Because of the way funding is structured, the USA tends to put more of its resources into keeping old people alive.  It’s arguable that the UK should put more money into doing the same thing, but the statistics Hannan quotes aren’t indicative of a general broad failure of the NHS.  Rather, they’re more or less what you’d expect from an ageing population with limited resources to spend on health care that prioritised in favour of preventative care and treatment of the young.

So the question is, given these figures, how would Hannan make sure the resources went to the “right” people?  If the problem is that we’re not spending enough, surely government can be relied upon to increase spending just as much as private enterprise.  If it’s that the resources are being misapplied, that would seem to indicate that Hannan is in favour of taking money out of preventative and early-life care and putting it into treatments for the elder and, generally, wealthier in society – again, good news for Telegraph readers but not really a vote winner.  Theoretically, of course, Randians and other Free Marketeers hold that private business can more efficiently allocate resources than government, but the numbers don’t seem to bear that out.  We spend less than half the USA’s money but we don’t get half the healthcare.  Other countries in Europe (not to mention Canada) spend less than the USA on their various incarnations of socialised medicine and achieve broadly similar results for cancers and heart disease and better results on the broad-population and early-life indicators.

It’s hard to work out where the facts and figures support Hannan’s belief, expressed on Hannity’s show, that the NHS has been our undoing and that the USA should resist the siren call of socialised medicine because their way is so much better.  It seems remniscent of those women who are wheeled out on similar shows to defend wife beaters because the bitch was asking for it – it must be true, look, even a European says so!  I’m not sure it’s either a noble calling for him personally or for the Tories in general to be Sean Hannity’s go-to European, on call to jump through hoops in exchange for biscuits.  I guess we’ll see when the election comes around whether or not he’s faded into the background or whether the Cameron wing will have an Objectivist live wire on their own side to muck everything up for them.

(Updated because of HTML craziness)

It all started with NBC.  Things often do, just because they’ve been slipping in the ratings so that now they’re sitting in the cellar among the big four networks.  This has led the network to start scheduling for margins rather than ratings, see what can get the most profits rather than the most eyeballs.  Of course, what advertisers pay for are the eyeballs, so this turns into a losing strategy.  This program-for-the-margins strategy has been taking to an extreme: elimination of the 10pm hour of prime time, replacing it with Jay Leno in a move to both make the time between 8pm and 11pm cheaper to create and to keep Leno from going to ABC.

NBC defended the move by saying that three of their primary competitors don’t program for the 10pm hour.  And while it’s true that Fox has always just been an 8-10 network, that also means that they are using the CW and MyNetworkTV to justify their decisions.

Now, CBS is making a trio of moves that show it is suffering as well.  First they’re requiring every primetime program to cut its budget, no matter how much of a money maker the show is, especially by shrinking writing departments.  Second they’ve announced they’re drastically cutting the number of pilots they’re ordering this season.  Third, they’re canceling the program Guiding Light.  This isn’t like canceling a show at the end of its first season, this is Guiding frigging Light, a show that has been on first radio and then television for 72 years, making it probably the longest running…anything…ever.

This is troubling from the point of view of someone trying to break into the industry.  There’s increasing competition for fewer and fewer spots.  Five less hours of primetime.  Fewer pilots being ordered.  Fewer writers employed.  But this also speaks to a continued decline in entertainment quality, as there will simply be less available, and what is available will be produced on less resources.

We’ll see if things in television rebound when the economy does, but there will be the question of whether or not the economy rebounds soon enough, or whether networks will even see an incentive to return to full strength.  Hard to say what broadcast television will even look like in five years with the changes that are coming down the pipes.

What is that logo, some kind of drugged-up frog?

You may have heard of Boxee. It’s a neat little program that you can run on a Mac or Linux computer (including Apple TV), and soon on Windows, to stream content from the web to a TV hooked up to that computer. It’s gaining in popularity, it’s nifty, and it seems to herald the beginning of the era in which we’ll be getting our content on-demand from the Internet for free, rather than paying $100 or so a month for a couple hundred cable channels, only a handful of which we’ll ever actually watch.

And if you hadn’t heard of Hulu as of a few months ago, you probably have now since their recent ad blitz that was kicked off during the Super Bowl. In a nutshell, it’s a very cool service where you can go to watch lots of free TV shows right in your browser, in excellent quality. Usually there will be a few of the most recent episodes of new shows up, as well as entire runs of some older series. Interspersed in the episodes are short, unobtrusive ads. Someone finally got streaming commercial content on the web right! Hooray!

So Hulu, Boxee, seems like two great tastes that taste great together, right? Well, they were. After this week, they will be no longer. Hulu has asked Boxee to drop their support for Hulu, and the Boxee team will be complying. What’s really interesting is to take a look at the respective blog posts about the matter from Boxee and from Hulu. Clearly neither of them are happy about this, and Hulu makes it quite obvious that their hand is being forced by the content providers.

O’Reilly Radar has an interesting take on the whole situation over here. The author makes some great points about why this has likely happened.

Boxee was featured in an awesome New York Times article one month ago, with a picture of their product on a big-screen TV, and Hulu’s logo clearly visible in the upper right corner. I can almost hear some lawyer somewhere in Hollywood screaming, “I thought Hulu was a WEB SITE! I do NOT see a WEB BROWSER in this PHOTOGRAPH!” at the sight of it. Boxee’s blog post on the controversy says they heard from Hulu about this two weeks ago; I’d bet Hulu heard from that lawyer two weeks before that — the morning the article appeared. Those calls are fun.

He then goes on to postulate that the powers that be that so graciously allow Hulu to exist only do so because it’s streaming content to computers. They absolutely do not want it streaming things to TV and upsetting their happy little business model there. Sounds about right to me, especially the insane and stupid shortsightedness of such actions. Let’s cut off the people who want to come and consume our product and our advertising, and drive them into the arms of the pirates, who are apparently the only people willing to provide a solution to these consumers. Then we can bitch about how piracy is killing us and ignore the growing number of bullet holes in our feet.

So to sum up, once again the content providers have looked at the changing world around them and seen two options. They can either embrace this change, use their unique, powerful position to stand at the forefront of what’s inevitably coming, and set up an updated business model to take advantage of their new reality. Or they can lumber around like dinosaurs, lashing out at anything new and attempting to hold back technology so they can give people whatever they see fit to give them instead of what people actually want until they are eventually killed off because of their own stupidity. They have, once again, chosen the latter. They will not be missed.

They are the first ISP in Europe to so blatantly sell out their own customers – a worrying precedent.

This from what must already be one of the worst ISPs in the world. A little background horror: Eircom is the textbook example of how not to privatize a national utility. Once simply the branch of government that provided phones, it was edged in the ’80s into being what we call a “semi-state”, which meant it acted like a company (and was expected to make as much profit as it needed to re-invest in itself) but had the state as the sole or at least the controlling shareholder and was therefore steered in the general direction of public good. This can work fairly well; the best-known example is probably Aer Lingus, but things like electricity and trains are also run reasonably successfully as “semi-states”. Eircom was doing OK.

However, in the late ’90s we elected people who were worked up about liberal economics, who decided that any necessary investment in the telecom structure could best be done by the market. So Eircom was sold off. But get this – they sold the entire concern, services and infrastructure, as one thing. They forget to unbundle the local loop. So perhaps the single most strategic asset the state had was passed into private hands as a monopoly.

Could it be worse?

Yeah. They launched the company at a share price I can only describe as sexually aroused, right at the height of telco madness. Many excited citizen shareholders bought in on the launch date, only to find that their investment plunged in value instantly. In effect, government screwed the public.

Through a number of stages I am too embarrassed to detail, the entire national land-line infrastructure ended up in the hands of an Australian investment corporation, which naturally has no concern whatsoever for the interests of the Irish economy or consumer beyond taking what profit they can. They provide a substandard service, and there’s not a lot you can do. Thought they are supposed to be compelled by regulation to provide bandwidth to other ISPs, that has a serious loophole. If the line to your home isn’t capable of carrying ADSL they have little or no commercial interest in replacing it. If you can’t get their ADSL, then you also can’t get a rival’s. You are forced to use dial-up internet access, which (a) is abysmal, (b) is far more expensive than broadband and (c) is still monopolized by Eircom!

It is internet hell.

And now this… So what’s going to happen if Eircom cut off your net connection at the behest of EMI or Sony – will you be able to switch to a rival ISP, or will Eircom be able to prevent you doing that because they own your phone line?

In the end, it’s yet other example of the record industry flailing around in its death throes. It was built on the technology and logistics of distributing music on records, which is about as relevant now as delivering milk in churns. I think there is still a future for record companies; it won’t be the lucrative niche they once had, but they have skill they can still sell in the production and promotion of artists.

But not in controlling public access to information. They cannot be allowed to evolve into some kind of privately-owned internet police force. That is just bad and wrong, and ISPs should be made to suffer for selling their customers out to them. Everyone should now quit being an Eircom customer.

Everyone, that is, who can.

For a fuller exploration of the stupidity of this read Danny O’Brien, inventor of the term “Life Hacks” and my fellow contributor** to the Irish Times technology pages. He puts it so much better than I can.

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*The record companies claim they will make this decision according to standards “just as high as a court would demand”. When you think about it though, that’s only a way of saying that they will be judge and jury.

**Me once, him almost every week.

“This is a farewell kiss!” the man, identified as Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter with the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, yelled as he threw the shoes. Bush had to duck out of the way, and narrowly missed being hit, according to on-scene reports. Maliki reached out his hand to shield the president.

Zaidi started to yell “Dog, dog!” as he was surrounded by security agents, who tackled him to the floor and began to beat him. Zaidi was later removed from the ornate room where the press conference was taking place.

The Secret Service issued a statement informing the public that the weapons in question were technically classified as “size tens,” and could have done quite a bit of damage had they accurately hit their target. In the future security workers will not only screen for such dangerous contraband as nail clippers and pretzels, but will now confiscate all shoes and anything that could be used as a projectile before press conferences.

In the end, it was our President’s quick thinking and lightness on his feet that helped him to dodge the shoes in bullet time, quickly do a three-sixty, and redirect the leathery missiles back at his fiendish attacker, avoiding what could have been a national catastrophe of epic proportions.

Music wants to be free!

Kudos to Paul McCartney. His latest album for his side project, The Fireman, is called Electric Arguments, and it’s available as a “100% DRM free” digital download. It gets even better than that, though. You can buy just the digital download for $8.99, or you can purchase a CD, Vinyl, or Deluxe edition that includes access to the digital download. The download is available in 320 kbps MP3, Apple Lossless, and even FLAC!

The main page of the site also has a flash player that lets you listen to all the songs on the album from start to finish, so you can try before you buy. It’s so nice to see a professional musician not being crazy about this stuff, realizing that DRM only punishes your paying customers, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for people to want to listen to a CD before plunking down their hard-earned money for it. People are going to do that anyway, so why not let them do it through you, where you can keep track of how many people have checked it out, where they’re coming from, and if they go on to buy the CD. Good job to Paul for seeing digital delivery of content not as a crisis, but as an opportunity. Now if only his record label would get their heads out of their asses and let them put the Beatles catalog on iTunes.

CD Image by rebopper released under Creative Commons.

Why a movie critic, naturally.

The host in question is Ben Stein, the critic Roger Ebert. Stein made the mistake of expressing his rabid distortions of reality in the form of a film. Ebert hands Stein his ass on a fancy platter. Truth is distorted, tortured, and downright suppressed every day to fit in with personal prejudices, but rarely have I seen that dishonesty so well pointed out and demolished. It’s worth reading right through, not least for the great Tony Auth cartoon near the end about “teaching the debate”.

Why does Stein want the concept of a creator taught as science? Quite simple – he hates science and wants to destroy it. He blames the Holocaust on Darwin. Presumably, he blames Dresden on the Wright Brothers.

It is true of course that the Nazis cited ideas from Darwin to justify murdering millions of Jews. What he neglects to point out in his film is that they also cited ideas from Nordic mythology, from medicine, from the Romantic tradition, from innocent philosophers and, of course, from Christianity.

This is what evil does.