The white powder plot

When I posted yesterday about the police visiting the office of Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski, I hadn't picked up on what it was they were investigating. It seems that someone, maybe one of Mr K's constituents, had posted some white powder to a minister. The powder later turned out to be flour. At this point you might have expected the investigation to be dropped, there being no crime of "posting baking ingredients" to my knowledge, but our doughty protectors had the bit between their collective teeth and continued regardless. That's by the by.

However, perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye. Today, Instapundit reports

THE WHITE POWDER MAILED TO THE WSJ WAS FLOUR. Apparently there have been other such mailings targeting “conservative commentators.”

So there appears to be an ongoing campaign of posting bakery ingredients to the great and the good, a veritable conspiracy in fact. Whatever can it mean?

What's inconsistent

A warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both consistent with climate models it seems. Seems a bit like an unfalsifiable thesis to me.

Hello, what's all this...

According to El-Beeb, a Tory MP has complained that he was visited in his office by police demanding to see his correspondence.

BBC spliced Obama's speech

Harmless Sky notices the BBC splicing Obama's inauguration speech to interesting effect.

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)