Why Dont You Blog?

I will applogise for the last few posts here being a bit morose and screaming about the doom and gloom of our crazy world. To try and make things better (and to shamelessly get more hits on my flickr stream ) I want you to have a look at these four castle pictures and let me know which one you think is the best - comments on flickr would be preferred but here will do

Thanks for your patience and the normal miserable service will resume tomorrow.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

Well, sadly, the craven government of the United Kingdom has surrendered to terrorism and taken yet another step in dismantling the fundamental liberties we have enjoyed for centuries. A basic principle enshrined in Medieval law was that the State should not deprive a person of their liberty without a trial. In practice this amounted to about 24 hours between detention and charging. In my lifetime this has increased to four weeks and now looks set to become six weeks.

Well done Terrorists.

If you are able, please try to find a clip of the BBC News 24 interview with Tony Benn. What ever your opinions on the man as a politician may be (for example, mine aren’t great), he pretty much summarises what people should be feeling about this travesty of justice.

Sadly, people don’t seem to be feeling this. If the statistics are to be believed 65% of the UK population supports 42 days detention of innocent people (which means the pop-survey I carried out at work this morning massively fails to reflect the UK population). I can only assume they all think the detainees will be some one else so the thought of suffering is alien to them. Even more worryingly, listening to the BBC Radio 1 street interviews in the run up to the vote showed me that 65% of the population do support it - but that is because they are beyond stupid.

One person who called in said 42 wasn’t enough and people should be detained “until they can prove they are not guilty.” Oh sweet Thor. Another said “there is no smoke without fire.” Lots of it was about putting the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Yes, I did just want to cry but I was driving at the time.

It seems we are reaping the rewards of a generation of bad teaching, dishonest politicians, media dominance and uncontrolled spin. People are no longer equipped to see when they are being led down the garden path and a total lack of civic understanding means that when they do suspect it, they no longer care.

If I could find a suitable country, I’d emigrate.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Just a taste of what happens when elected representatives start fuelling anti-immigrant hysteria….. A masked group, armed with sticks rampaged around a district of Rome, smashing up shops owned by Indians and Bangladeshis and disappearing before the police arrived.

The assault comes as Silvio Berlusconi’s administration launches a crackdown on illegal immigration, and days after a mob firebombed Gypsy camps in Naples. Last month crowds at Rome’s town hall welcomed newly-elected mayor Gianni Alemanno with fascist salutes..

(With my limited understanding of Italian, I translate that as “German Johnny”, a mite ironic to be the name of an Italian neo-fascist. )

Here’s a link to that story, with a disturbing picture and some pretty disturbing content. For instance Berlusconi reportedly greeted this unpleasant manifestation with the claim “We are the new falange”

As I mentioned recently, anti-gypsy feeling is so extreme in parts of Italy, that the church associated with St Francis of Assisi hired armed guards to keep gypsies away.

Tobia Jones, in a 2 may Guardian article suggested that the apparent re-emergent fascism was mainly a presentation issue and made possible by well-meaning attempts to bring together the still-warring Italian left and right. And, and according to Jones, Berlusconi is just a populist “bread and circuses” magnate, allegedly. (Together with Jones’ references to the “Italian character,” it looks like an almost “‘Allo,’allo”- level of resort to national stereotypes.)

I hope it is just my own unfounded pessimism. Maybe fascists salutes and shouts of “Il Duce!” aren’t really as terrifying as they seem. But I am left thinking “Control of mass media, populist appeal, use of emotionally charged nationalist motifs, and a convenient ethnically-different scapegoat sub-population? Sounds as close to fascism as dammit to me.”

Popularity: 15% [?]

Popularity: 15% [?]

(Hat tip Pharyngula)

For all those sensible people infuriated by the claims that Hitler was an atheist…

The text reads:

“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life” (’My New Order‘, Adolf Hitler, Proclamation of the German Nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933)

The Nazis burned books trying to teach evolution.

Does all this sound familiar?

Popularity: 43% [?]

Popularity: 43% [?]

Martin Allen, a “historian”, is found to have based the claims in his three books on 29 amateurishly forged documents planted in the National Archives.

I googled for the author and found a blameless historian from the Fitzwilliam Museum and a lot of football managers but no mention of him in the first 5 pages of results.

The investigation found an almost amateurish level of forgery: telegrams and memos contained factual inaccuracies; letterheads had been added using a laser printer; forged signatures were pencilled beneath the ink; and the text of the 29 documents - occasionally in conspicuously modern language - was typed on just four typewriters. (From the Guardian report)

A laser printer?

This cautionary tale against taking historical “evidence” on faith led me to the other Guardian pieces on the National Archives. This little gem from the 1970s does have the ring of truth:

The US politician who was America’s youngest ever secretary of defence - Donald Rumsfeld - attempted to influence British military policy in the mid-1970s, newly released government archives showed today.
Nearly 30 years before the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld wrote to his UK counterpart, Roy Mason, and the prime minister, James Callaghan, opposing plans for large-scale defence cuts.
The message, marked “Secret” and dated July 19 1976, is a mixture of anxiety and flattery - mingled with the hint of a threat. (From the Guardian, 28 December 2007)

I don’t know how successful he was then - when UK Labour governments were a little more resistant to US pressure - but can we see a career theme developing?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

A while ago (19 Mar), I made a post here looking at the search terms most people used to get here. At the time we were comfortably getting 400 hits a day and the huge majority of them were people searching for Bodiam Castle.

Well, nothing has changed. We are still hovering around 400-450 hits a day, although there was a spike to 600 when a previous post got Stumbled. These are still around 80% first time hits, so we need to think about why people aren’t coming back. Of the first time hits, 80% (slight increase) are from search engines but still nearly all are from Google searches. Shame really, as I now prefer Yahoo search…

Anyway, the odd part is that the search terms haven’t changed either. Depending on your source (firestats differs from Feedburner and google analytics) the most searched for term is either “Fine Art” or “Bodiam Castle.” This terms are supplemented by such relevant terms as “castle” “castle with moat” “bodiam” “fairytale castle” and “art.” In all 60% of the top ten search terms through which people find our wonderful blog are castle ones. The remaining four are “McCann Blog”, “Obama” and the very odd “wtf” & “there.” I feel sorry for the people who arrive from some of these terms - no wonder we dont get repeat visitors.

I can live with two of them… It is strange, given the well thought out social commentary Heather posts that nearly all the searches people use to find our sites are for castle pictures. Is this a sign that more people search for castles than (say) Surveillance state or that our blog is just better ranked for castles…?

Still beggars cant be choosers, so as you can see I have pandered to the masses once more with another picture of the gorgeous Bodiam Castle, it really is an artistic castle picture (:-) ). If you are in the south west of England, you really should visit.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Popularity: 40% [?]

It’s the 15th birthday of the release of the source code for the World Wide Web, according to the BBC.

Just 15 years. And it’s already almost impossible to remember how we lived before tinterweb.

The first ever web site was http://info.cern.ch. It’s still there (the site not the same web page…) It is pretty rubbish, which is oddly comforting. (No reasonable menu, you can only find the other pages by going to the sitemap, elements don’t fit exactly, in IE6, and they use style attributes in tags instead of the class definition ) There’s some screenshots of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browsers, which could give present-day browsers some serious competition.

It links to CERN’s proper site which is brilliant, although most of it is so far over my head that i might as well be reading an umbrella.

The web itself has become indispensable. Especially for finding out anything you want to know - instantly. It’s true that much of what you get is spurious, but the more of us that develop a built-in bullshit detector the better.

And mostly, it’s great that the web has grown so fast precisely because it was designed to be free and open and collaborative The BBC reported Robert Cailliau:

“We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn’t very much in favour of that.” ………
“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

(Maybe someone should tell the DRM fanatics.)

Popularity: 29% [?]

Popularity: 29% [?]

Over on the wonderful Grumpy Lion blog there is a predictably excellent post which examines how most of the Hawks in the US government are, in fact, war dodging cowards while most of the doves have actually served in combat. This is something of a truism, as generally speaking, old men who have seen combat are a lot more reluctant to send others into battle.

However this is only a generalisation and it is important to be aware that, no matter how much a person may wish otherwise, it will not hold true in all circumstances. There are people who have never seen war who are solidly opposed to it and there are people who have seen death and destruction first hand but have not been turned pacifist by the experience.

With this in mind, the comments from Steph and Roy are especially entertaining. These have largely descended into a string of ad hominems against me surrounded by a huge helping of equivocation, so I am no longer going to take up space on Grumpy Lion with my responses, but there are some issues from the (erm) debate which I think are worthy of further mention.

Both Steph and Roy, in the finest internet traditions, demand copious examples of “evidence” to disprove their anecdotes. In fact the only information provided by either of them for their argument is a comment by Steph’s “grandfather” and a some vague references to the writings of Roy Jenkins. The most they can produce is “all of Churchills biographers” which is an immediately falsifiable claim (as I know of three biographers who claim different things). When contrary writing is cited, they dismiss the source as not being a “historian of note” (neatly ignoring their own single source’s status in the process).

Interestingly it seems the concept that Churchill dipped in and out of military service is impossible. Here we see another example of how the drive to shout and insult has blinded Roy and Steph to what I wrote in that I agreed with them that all the sources had Churchill working as a Journalist in the run up to Ladysmith and then Roy writes this with apparent glee: (this is a bit about Churchill covering the Spanish-American war of 1898)

It proves Steph is right and you are wrong and runs a horse and carts through your argument that Churchill wasn’t a correspondent before Ladysmith and saw active service. He avoided active service by going to Cuba.

Madness. Real, painful madness. It was around this point I finally realised there was no room for actual debate with either Steph or Roy and both were so obsessed with their idea that every hawk has to be a shivering coward nothing I wrote - even when I agreed with them - would actually be read.

Another example of what I have come to see as standard internet arguments (where the person doesn’t really have anything to say but hates the topic so much they have to argue) is the constant rattling about trivial facts.

I wrote that the Regimental History of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (now a battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland) had references to Churchill being Commanding Officer of one of their Battalions and having led his men on 36 forays across no-mans-land. This really drew some irate hand waving. Now it is certainly very possible that he did not lead his battalion on exactly 36 missions, but is the balance of probabilities going to lean towards none or at least 1 being the most likely?

One of the odd arguments centred on Military records being useless for historians. I found this pretty odd, given that these are the records used by most historians - especially for Ancient and Medieval researchers. Still, I began to work out what the issues here were when I mentioned that a good starting point for WWI research were the MOD’s records. Steph responded with:

This is a bare faced lie, the MoD didn’t even exist then.

Well blow me down with a feather. It seems that Steph (and to an extent, Rob) are obsessed with stating the obvious as if it is an argument. Everyone knows the Ministry of Defence did not exist in WWI, it was called the Ministry of War. However, since the MOW became the MOD, guess where all the MOW’s records are stored…?

Throughout the debate (for want of a better word) is along these lines. For good measure Steph points to her having a Doctorate in Law as if it carries any weight in an argument about WWI. Amazing.

Please, anyone, take a look at the thread and its debate and let me know what you think. Was I being unclear? Are there issues I have missed out on? Did Steph and Rob provide solid evidence for their claims? Did they bother to pay the money to visit the Regimental Museums and see what was there?

Popularity: 60% [?]

Popularity: 60% [?]

I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.

Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine - nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.

Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.

Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!

If you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.

Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?

The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:

• Schwarzenegger
• Nice Art
• Fine Houses
• Holy Wafer
• Jesus Toast (around 5 people a day come here using that search term… MADNESS)
• Future Castles

Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:

• HDR How To (use Photomatix)
• Cool Viking Names (well all of them)
• Bad Journalist (again, all of them)
• Firefox Memory Hog (it is)
• Pipex Download Speeds (almost non-existent)
• McCanns Blog (wrong place, I didn’t even know they had one)

One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” - I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.

Popularity: 83% [?]

Popularity: 83% [?]

“Binge drinking” is the fashionable moral panic topic for the UK media. The drunken excesses of youth in UK city centres are presented as evidence of social decline, the evils of youth culture, the dark side of feminism, even.

Agreed, drinking alcohol has some repellent effects. If legality really bore any relationship to social harm and if banning recreational substances didn’t lead to much worse problems than the substance ever caused, there would be a fair case for banning it completely.

As a predictable result of the current coverage of the evils of strong drink, Alistair Darling, the ironically-surnamed UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, greatly increased the taxes on alcohol today.

But experts said it was still not enough to make a “real difference”..(snipped)…
It comes at a time when more and more pressure is being placed on the government to use the lever of price to tackle binge-drinking Britain. (from the BBC)

Well, the media pressure might be recent but the increase in consumption and increase in collateral damage seem a mite illusory. The raising-price-to-deter issue remains unproven (and anyone can travel to mainland Europe and provision their neighbourhood with cheap booze.)

How new is this “issue” anyway? Think of Hogarth’s Gin Lane. Now that was an era with an alcohol problem.

A fantastic (and temporarily free) resource has lots of 19th century newspapers from the British Library, in a fully searchable online version. (The fact that some pages look as if they’ve been eaten by rats just adds to their charm.)

And, wow. Their news was much more action-packed and interesting than the stuff we get to read now. The political news tells you about things like the House of Commons reaction to Bradlaugh’s atheism. You can see the details of major historical events in a sort of reading-based real time. For instance, you can identify the start of the Irish Potato Famine. Even the shipping listings have whole columns devoted to casual lists of pirate attacks.

I mean, that’s what you call serious news. Which I will promptly ignore, of course, and go for the sensationalist stuff, being a true 21st century media consumer.

The biggest shock - for anyone seduced by a vision of the past as some sort of public order Utopia - is the nature and viciousness of the crimes reported in the local papers. Not to mention the often merciful nature of sentences, at a time when we assume that all “justice” was more than harsh.

Almost randomly mixed in with records of innocent Rose Grower’s Association fetes, you find some really bloodthirsty reports. I won’t retell a selection of 200-year-old crime stories, on the grounds that they would be as interesting as other people’s holiday snaps. Find your own stories by searching the database, if you’re interested.

Scores of knifings, battering, poisonings, drowning babies, muggings and gang robberies - one of which included an 86-year old woman, on the gang side. In one story, a remanded prisoner - whose imprisonment involved living as a guest in a detective’s house, ffs - managed to get a gun and shoot the two accomplices in the murder he was being charged with. (The detective’s wife gave evidence that he was very well behaved in their house and that the shooting was out of character…..)

The theme of alcoholic excess runs through many of these stories. 19th century binge-drinkers could drink today’s urban revellers under the table. For example, the London Examiner (July 7, 1817) reported the story of a soldier who was too drunk to remember having murdered his drinking companion.

The Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh, Scotland), Saturday, March 22, 1800 described the loss of a 64-gun royal navy ship, the Repulse, which had just recaptured a boat that had been taken by French privateers. Among the crew who died in the course of the shipwreck, there were two sailors who drowned “due to drunkenness” and four sailors who were so drunk that they couldn’t even leave the sinking ship.

Drinking to the point at which you become a serious danger to yourself and others is no new invention. It seems to be a centuries-old British tradition. I hope we don’t have to swear allegiance to that.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]