No One Knows Everything

But you'd think that when specifically mocking presidential candidates for ignorance of the Middle East people ought to research basic facts. The Telegraph's Tim Stanley disagrees:

According to Perry, the US can’t deal with Iran in isolation. You see, “There is an area over there of all of them working together” [one might call it, "the Middle East"], and if we’re going to tackle Iran as a nuclear threat then “we need to bring Syria into the mix.” His logic seemed to be that the only way to safeguard the world against the Shiite theocracy of Iran was to launch a war against the Sunni-dominated secular dictatorship of Syria.

No, the Syrian regime is dominated by the Alawi sect. They are recognised as Shias by the Iranian mullahs although some would regard them as heretics. They certainly are not Sunnis though.

This matters because given the religious fanaticism of the Middle East and the Alawi's status as near-heretics to many fundamentalists, the recognition as being legitimate Muslims by the Iranian regime is extremely valuable to the Assad junta.

In A Pickle

"Let's Pickle a few more costly commissions"

I don't think that the Telegraph's leader writers understand what pickling does. Yes there is a minister called Pickles so naturally they want to make a pun on his name but pickling is a method of preserving something in it's current state for a long period of time, in other words by asking to pickle costly commissions the Telegraph is asking that we keep them going in perpetuity.

Yes I do realise that this is probably the most tedious and trivial post that I have ever written.

Expert Inflation

The best indicator that this is a non story the fact that the indignant expert they quote is "an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles". If they couldn't even find a full sociology professor to express disapproval doesn't this suggest that nobody really cares?

Quote Of The Day.

Today's Telegraph's editorial makes an important point:

Put bluntly, spending more in an area makes its inhabitants likelier to look to the state for their livelihood, which in turn makes them likelier to vote for the high-tax party. Higher expenditure rarely regenerates a region - on the contrary, it traps communities in the squalor of dependency - but that is not its purpose.

This is an important point, because taxations is not only bad for the people who are forced to hand over large chunks of their income, but it also harms the recipients of state largess, in the long run, as any semblance of self reliance is undermined.

Shami, Shami, Shami.

The Daily Telegraph has been plugging a Q & A with Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti and inviting readers to submit queries. So I submitted a question which was one of the ones that she answered which I'll reprint that part below:

Q: Liberty has long opposed the deportation of the likes of Abu Qatada and others with links to very dangerous groups on the grounds that there is a possibility that the poor dear might be tortured in Jordan. Is it the position of Liberty that if someone has entered this country from a another country with a poor human rights record, that they must be immune from deportation no matter how they behave once they are here or how they got here. Do their rights to remain here trump the right of everyone else to be able to get rid of terrorist sympathisers. Posted by Ross on December 4, 2007 3:55 AM

SC: Torture is wrong. This is an absolute principle that distinguishes democrats from both tyrants and terrorists who believe that human life is cheap. The rule against torture cannot just be about what you do with your own hand or it would be permissible to get others to perform your dirty work. If we say that it is fine to deport people to places of torture, why is extraordinary rendition (where people are sent for torture for the purpose of gaining intelligence) wrong? In civilised societies we bring criminals to justice rather than torturing them. If our so-called Middle-Eastern allies in the “War on Terror” clean up their act, there will be no problem with deporting their nationals.

So we only have to wait until Jordan turns into Switzerland before we can rid ourselves of psychopaths from that country. Yes Jordan tortures people and that is a reason for not deporting someone for say insulting their king or campaigning for democracy, however if asylum in the UK doesn't put the beneficiary under any obligation not to whip up violence against us or our allies then it is simply a suicide pact. To put it another way, if someone were being chased down the street by a mob it would be right to let him in your house for protection, however if he then starts setting fire to the curtains and molesting your dog then he has forfeited any right to be protected.

Olympic Costs Rise Faster, Higher, Stronger.

So Tessa Jowell, aka Mrs Shit-for-brains, has admitted that she doesn't have the foggiest idea how much the Olympics are costing us.

More than seven months after Jowell announced the project would cost £9.3 billion, she admitted in the House of Commons on Monday that "line by line" analysis of what she called the "baseline budget" was a work in progress.

Bearing in mind that the budget has already risen from £2.5 billion to £9.3 billion this is just taking the piss. Yet it misses the point, the real cost of the Olympic Games isn't merely the amount of taxpayers money the organisers pay out to get the facilities built but the economic ruination of a large part of London. The talk of regenerating London is nonsense for the simple reason that littering the landscape with large sporting facilities that will almost never be used to capacity ever again creates a black hole of economic activity. How many people will a Velodrome employ in years to come? A couple of dozen at most, but it will take up space that could be filled by productive businesses employing hundreds or even thousands of people.

I linked to the Telegraph's report of Jowell's admission but really they should bear some of the responsibility for this looming disaster too. They were by far the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the Games in the press and can in some ways take the credit for the London bid being launched in the first place. I even heard that they actually banned any of their journalists coming out against a games bid". This is from an article back in 2003:

The Daily Telegraph has unashamedly campaigned for London to bid for the 2012 Olympic Games for the last three months on the basis that it would be one of the best things to happen in sport for generations. Beyond sport, it would electrify the capital, its populace and the country as a whole.
....

Increasingly isolated, the sceptics have droned on about cost and past failures. Nothing else.

Those failures, including the Dome, Picketts Lock and Wembley, are beyond dispute, but it is time we left them behind. In this context they are easily dealt with. No one - politician or serial sports administrator - who had anything to do with any of those fiascos should be allowed within a marathon distance of an Olympic bid.

Cost - which has ranged between a possible profit according to the Arup report, and a deficit of £10 billion (Tony Banks!) - is a much more emotive subject, but the official report put the worst case scenario at less than £2 billion

Even Tony Banks had a better idea of what was likely to happen than the Olympics propagandists at the Daily Telegraph whose predictive abilities make Paul Ehrlich look like Nostradamus! So it cannot be argued that the problems could not have been forseen. Is it too late to withdraw?

24

So a major British newspaper gets an interview with one of the head honchos from the television series '24' and the reporter spends most of the interview denouncing them for being right wing. Which newspaper is it, the Guardian? The Independent? Nope, it's Britain's leading supposedly conservative paper, the Daily Telegraph! It is particularly annoying because the producers of '24' have real sins to atone for.