Crooked Tories

The government backed down this afternoon on the idea of making MPs' expenses exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

It looks like Gordon Brown had done a deal with some of the less salubrious Tory backbenchers to force the changes through, but was undone when Cameron made it a whipped vote against. Who was involved? I guess we'll find out when the expenses start to be published.

Update on Jan 21, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Update: The deal may have been done with Sir Michael Spicer, chairman of the 1922 committee. That would mean that it was potentially the majority of the Tory troops.

Solar cycle 24

In the post: David Archibald's book about the solar theory of climate change, Solar Cycle 24. It looks very interesting and features an introduction by David Bellamy and an appendix by one "Bishop Hill" esq. (I said David A could reuse Caspar & the Jesus Paper, and the proceeds all go to charity too, so you should probably all go and buy a copy).

More info here.

The end of free speech

A Dutch court is going to allow the prosecution of a politician for having unpleasant views. This looks pretty serious to me.

Bandit accounting

In the comments to the last thread, Jonathan Pearce pointed out that the Guardian is a supplicant of the state whose income is largely derived from its position as the state's advertising agency for government jobs.

This reminded me of a suggestion of a few years back which the Tories made, namely that the government should set up a dedicated website for all state positions, saving huge sums of money and doing away with the inbuilt political bias of the current situation.

In response to this, John Band wrote a dismissive artice here, in which he pointed out that the costs were likely to be far more than the Tories anticipated.

For starters, the £5m a year cost is a gross understatement. In the private sector, market leading online job site Monster.com spends $187m on non-marketing non-wage costs to offer 12 million jobs a year. The civil service site would offer about 1.2 million jobs a year (20%ish turnover on 5.5ish million public sector workers); even assuming Monster’s size generates no economies of scale, then this takes the cost up to $19m (£10m).

Now, given that it costs the government £40,000 a year to run a blog, and given that Monster.com’s original setup costs have been written off, do we think that the real cost will be in the £5m bracket, the £50m bracket, or the £500m bracket...?

Now, it's hard to argue with the idea that the cost is likely to be higher than anticipated, but take a look at those Monster figures. $187m to offer 12m jobs a year. So each job is costing $15 or so to process, plus wages!!?! What does he think they are spending all this money on. It's simply not possible.

If you follow the press release, you will find that the actual figure is $187,204. There's no £000 in the column heading. John is out by a factor of 1000. Whoops.

To be fair, JB goes on to make some fairer points about access to the internet for some poor people, and as I've said I agree with his position that the state would cock it up. My solution would be to use Monster.com. It's free, it's widely used already, and there would be no question of political bias either way.

Guardian fantasy land

Iain Dale points out that the US state now employs more people than manufacturing.

Meanwhile, over at the Graun, Jonathan Freedland gushes in the general direction of Barack Obama and welcomes the end of what he calls the 30-year grip of the notion of limited government.

It seems clear then that Freedland is living in la-la land, like so many of his colleagues. Is there actually anyone at the Guardian with even the slightest idea of what happens in the real world?

Fake charities

Here's a smashing new site. In fact it's so good, I was actually thinking of doing something like it myself, except I don't have the time or technical savvy to do it well.

fakecharities.org bills itself as "a directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments".

There is no doubt that the British state is much much larger than is thought. Usually you only see the big parasites - the government departments, local authorities, quangos. But lurking under stones everywhere there are legions of bloodsucking civil servants masquerading as Mother Theresas and Mahatma Gandhis.

Here's an example of one of their entries: Alcohol Concern, which had income of half a million pounds, and raised just £5 grand in donations.

Update on Jan 19, 2009 by Bishop Hill

I've just submitted the Royal Society to the database. 68% of its income comes from government. Why don't you have a go too?

Reforming the public services

I have a new post up at Labour Home. (Yup, you read that right).

EDM on MPs expenses

A LibDem MP has proposed an early day motion against the idea that MPs' expenses should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. There's a letter writing campaign being initiated, but it needs to start soon!!! Really, if you're against violence, get writing now, because if this goes through I'm going to strangle some of the buggers myself!

Via Quaequam.

They are crooks

Yes, the politicians have their noses in the trough...again.

Pests funded by EU

Interesting fact for today: The Pesticide Action Network, who were interviewed by the BBC yesterday, welcoming the EU's decision to ban a range of pesticides, are funded by...the EU.

The GMC on data archiving

Medical science is a long way ahead of climatology on ethics, and the area of data archiving is no exception. Here is a quote from the UK General Medical Council's Standards Section.

Doug Altman, Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group: ‘‘Misconduct is the tip of a large problem.We shouldn’t forget that we should see this as part of a general effort to improve the quality and relevance of research, and arguably reduce the body of it.’’

But he said one of the factors hampering investigations was the lack of raw data and relevant documentation, the archiving of which should be mandatory for researchers. Employers should take on this responsibility, he said. There were also valid research reasons for the preservation of data. ‘‘It seems to me unbelievable and completely unacceptable that people can do research using public money and yet throw away the data. We could consider a failure to keep the data as research misconduct.’

(Emphasis added)

Internet watch bans Wayback machine

The madmen at the Internet Watch Foundation have done it again. Not happy with banning Wikipedia, they are now banning the whole of the Wayback machine. The full story is here at the Reg.

Sorry, but this time heads have got to roll.

Killing environmentalists?

From a caption at the BBC

Elliot Kannel from the Pestercide Action Network says the ruling will take some time to have any effect, while farmer and Ulster Farmer's Union Vegetable Committee member Robin McKee says food production will be more difficult.

Pestercide eh? Sounds good to me.

New face, same old story

Here's a name that's new to me at the BBC - Tanya Syed. In fact I can find almost nothing about Tanya on the web at all, apart from a couple of articles she'd already written for BBC News, so I guess it's fair to say she's the new girl. Trainee perhaps. Straight out of her media studies degree.

Welcome aboard Tanya.

Tanya has been diligent and has paid careful attention to her training course. In fact she catches on very quickly indeed. Today's contribution to the news effort is about a report issued by a political pressure group called the Worldwatch Institute (good girl Tanya, box ticked there), calling for drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions (tick). Our Tanya carefully omits to mention that they are a political pressure group of course (tick). And then she dutifully provides some balance by quoting a different opinion on the report (careful!).

Well...sort of different. It's by somebody different anyway. Yup, balance is provided by quoting another political pressure group called the Australian Conservation Foundation (tick! tick! tick!). They think the Worldwatch report is just great. (I think we knew that though.)

Tanya, you will go far.

Is the GISS temperature index fraudulent?

David Stockwell is an Australian statistical expert who has written a book covering, among other things, statistical tests for detecting datasets which have been manipulated in some way. He also has a blog called Niche Modelling which is well worth a visit.

His latest post outlines the results of running one of these fraud-busting tests on NASA GISS's global temperature index, and the results were rather interesting....

RESULT: Significant management detected.

David is quick to point out that he's in exploratory mode and hasn't actually drawn any conclusions yet, but this is definitely going to be one to watch.

Update on Jan 15, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Lubos Motls has picked up on Stockwell's story and taken it a bit further by running the test over the satellite data from UAH. No sign of any manipulation there.

What fun!