In Which The Telegraph Smears Tor

Been a long time since I talked about the Telegraph here.  But yesterday, I came across this particular piece of bullshit reporting from that 'journalistic' organisation, and felt compelled to say something.

That headline above, is frankly...a lie.  First off, Tor is a network, or a technology, not a browser, even if the browser download is the way in which most users will experience Tor these days.  The browser download, being a simplified bundle of the core Tor & proxying software with a modified version of Firefox.  Secondly, the study in question doesn't in any way speak to to the 'overwhelming use' of the Tor browser, but specifically to the use of the so-called Dark Web.  Back to the Telegraph...

There is an "overwhelming" amount of illicit and illegal content on the dark web, a new study shows.

That statement might seem self-evident. But the Tor browser - also known as the dark web or deep web - was created to protect the anonymity of vulnerable people online. It is a web browser just like Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, but it masks the identity of who is browsing and what they're looking at.

The Tor browser is perhaps known as 'the dark web or deep web' -- by fucking idiots !  The so-called 'dark web' is a fear-mongering slur utilised by the government for any services over the internet that in any way bypass conventional IP/HTTP routing, and thus implicitly threaten governmental control and surveillance thereof.  Tor is one of many services that can be used for such means, in this case, via the use of .onion addresses, that are only routeable via the Tor network.  It is not the only technology providing such hidden services, the hidden services are not the primary purpose of the Tor network, and in fact, the hidden services component was a much later addition to Tor.

Don't believe me, that the hidden services, the 'dark web' are not the primary purpose of the Tor network ?  Well, let's look at the study in question, shall we ?

The Tor architecture provides two services – anonymous browsing (property 3), and hosting of anonymous information exchanges (property 5) – through one piece of software, the so-called ‘Tor Browser’. Although distinct, both services employ roughly the same protocols and rely on the same distributed infrastructure. But that is where their mutual dependency ends. There is no technical requirement for anonymous browsing and anonymous hosting to be bundled. Indeed, browsing is overwhelmingly more popular than hosting. Most Tor users have never visited any hidden website at a *.onion address; hidden services account for around 3–6% of overall Tor traffic.²⁷ Most users instead use the software merely to browse the internet's conventional address space more securely or anonymously. An analogy illustrates the significance of anonymous browsing. Alice, who lives in a small town, wants to buy a pregnancy test, but doesn't want to be seen doing so by the shop owner, Bob, a friend of Alice's father. Rather than simply going to the store, Alice wears a mask, walks a detour, and pays in cash. Bob will not be able to identify her or trace her. Alice's privacy and anonymity are assured. Anonymous browsing is not part of the ‘dark web’; it is a legitimate and laudable service that Tor provides.

This is from the very study upon which the Telegraph's scary misleading headline is based.  It says right there that most users have never visited any .onion 'dark web' sites at all, and that hidden services account for around 3–6% of overall Tor traffic.  Three to fucking six percent !  Hell, I've been familiar with Tor since long before there was such a thing as a 'Tor Browser', and I don't think I've ever visited or had reason to visit any hidden 'dark web' sites via Tor myself.  Because...why the fuck would I ?  Tor's primary purpose is, and always has been, simply to provide a modicum of anonymity in browsing the Internet, and the vast majority of users are most likely using Tor in entirely legitimate ways, in entirely legitimate pursuits.

In fact, the US government has repeatedly promoted the use of Tor for such purposes as enabling dissidents and human rights-activists living in authoritarian regimes, to communicate freely, bypassing restrictive governmental policies and controls, to promote liberal Western-style values.  The US government continues to this very day to provide a vast amount of the funding for the Tor project, and to utilise the network itself, and the Tor software was originally in fact invented by the United States Naval Research Laboratory & DARPA.

That's right, this evil evil 'dark web' software, the users of which the Telegraph apparently wishes to smear, was created by, and continues to be funded by the government of the United States of America.

So, in case you're not familiar with how Tor works, and is used by, as noted above, the vast vast majority of its users, here are some illustrations from the EFF.

Tor doesn't provide uncrackable security, certainly not for the likes of the NSA or other US govt. security agencies, and that much more certainly not when they have been involved in its creation and funding of its development from day one.  It simply obfuscates the path of traffic through a random series of nodes, making it difficult for a would-be adversary to monitor the traffic, without control of, and therefore the ability to monitor traffic through, all the nodes in question.  It isn't that inherently secure, even if you trust that the US government hasn't inserted its own backdoors into the system, and any one relying solely on Tor to run, say an international drug-smuggling operation, without detection, would be very stupid indeed.  Of course, the vast majority of users aren't doing anything of the sort.

Back to the Telegraph...

In the first study of its kind, researchers at King's College London found that 57 per cent of sites on Tor facilitate criminal activity, including drugs, illicit finance, and extreme pornography.

The findings are not unexpected - if anything that figure is lower than expected. Tor has been associated with child pornography, gun trading and murder long before now. 

"We expected something along these lines," said Thomas Rid, professor of Security Studies at King's College London and co-author of the study. "Previous studies have established that it's a pretty nasty place."  

Scary, scary fucking stuff indeed !  Child pornography, murder, drugs, extreme pornography !  Sounds pretty nasty huh ?

Did we mention that the 'dark web' sites in question were a product of a secondary (and not inherently illegitimate*) function of Tor, not even utilised by the vast majority of Tor users ?

Tor offers anonymous browsing to people across the world. Users in countries with strict censorship laws, like China or Iran, can use it to access mainstream sites - like Facebook - securely. Rid and Moore found that the vast majority of material on Tor was not just illegal in places like China or Iran, but in more liberal jurisdictions too.

Here, in the same fucking paragraph, the Telegraph conflates the anonymous browsing (such as use of fucking Facebook), which is the sole usage of the vast majority of users with the hosting of illegal materials on so-called 'dark web' sites.

The sites included marketplaces for drugs, fire arms and weapons, and explicit, illegal pornography. The study found a "near-absence" of Islamic extremist sites on Tor.

"Militants and extremists don't seem to find the Tor hidden services infrastructure very useful. So there are few jihadis and militants in the darknet," said Rid. "It's used for criminal services, fraud, extreme, illegal pornography, cyber attacks and computer crime."

Know why that is ?  Because, they're not fucking stupid !  Because they know full well, that if the US government wants to find them on an US-govt-designed and funded network of mild anonymity, it can, and will.  The US government could crush the Tor network any time it wanted to, but insofar as a) Tor isn't any meaningful threat to security-services, b) Dissidents in foreign competitor states utilise Tor, and c) Agents of the US govt. itself utilise Tor, it has no compelling reason to do so.

What the US government, and its proxy poodle in Westminster, would like to do, is utilise fearmongering rhetoric about 'terror' attacks, to convince the public, and technology-companies, that it is in the public interest that the privacy of Western citizens be intentionally compromised, via the dilution of encryption technology, and the building of government-accessible backdoors into common security software.  The sort of breathless hyperbole in which right-wing publications such as the Telegraph specialise is perfect for such a purpose.

Rid and Moore commend Tor for offering vulnerable people access to anonymous browsing. But they said Tor needs to work harder to encourage its community to build a safe and legitimate browsing experience.

Did they say that ?  I must have missed it...

"The developers made Tor for a different purpose - they wanted security, not crime. It's up to them to change the direction," said Rid. "It's up to them to have a sensible discussion about ways to reduce crime, to get more legitimate users in." 

Now here, I can only assume the quotation is the result of an interview (what, the Telegraph doing actual reporting...like actual journalists ?), as I don't see such language in the report.  Regardless, this is shit.  We've already established that the vast majority of usage is merely anonymous browsing (which is, in the authors' words, 'a legitimate and laudable service that Tor provides'), and how the hell can Tor's developers be held responsible for the content provided by the 'hidden services' on their network, without fundamentally compromising the relative anonymity that is the whole raison d'etre of the Tor network to begin with ?

Is the argument that as the functionality of hidden services could theoretically be used for ill purposes, that it should be removed ?  The same is true of the anonymous browsing functionality, innocent as the vast majority of usage may be/probably is.  The same is true of all technology.  Hell, in the US, special constitutional protections are given to the ownership of tools (i.e. guns, firearms), whose primary if not sole purpose is to murder living beings.  But the fact that a subset of the functionality of a mildly anonymising technology might be used for illicit purposes, that...that is a reason for ripping apart what little guarantee of privacy is currently available to us on the internet ?

Tor's example will no doubt be used in the encryption debate that is circulating around the snoopers' charter, according to Rid and Moore. 

"Tor's ugly example should loom large in technology debates," Rid and Moore conclude. "The line between utopia and dystopia can be disturbingly thin."

This is just...WTF ?  Wait, why am I still quoting the fucking Telegraph ?

The other quandary is how to deal with darknets. Hidden services have already damaged Tor, and trust in the internet as a whole. To save Tor – and certainly to save Tor's reputation – it may be necessary to kill hidden services, at least in their present form. Were the Tor Project to discontinue hidden services voluntarily, perhaps to improve the reputation of Tor browsing, other darknets would become more popular. But these Tor alternatives would lack something precious: a large user base. In today's anonymisation networks, the security of a single user is a direct function of the number of overall users. Small darknets are easier to attack, and easier to de-anonymise. The Tor founders, though exceedingly idealistic in other ways, clearly appreciate this reality: a better reputation leads to better security.⁸⁵ They therefore understand that the popularity of Tor browsing is making the bundled-in, and predominantly illicit, hidden services more secure than they could be on their own. Darknets are not illegal in free countries and they probably should not be. Yet these widely abused platforms – in sharp contrast to the wider public-key infrastructure – are and should be fair game for the most aggressive intelligence and law-enforcement techniques, as well as for invasive academic research. Indeed, having such clearly cordoned-off, free-fire zones is perhaps even useful for the state, because, conversely, a bad reputation leads to bad security. Either way, Tor's ugly example should loom large in technology debates. Refusing to confront tough, inevitable political choices is simply irresponsible. The line between utopia and dystopia can be disturbingly thin.

Less oblique, less misleading, less blatantly crass government-propaganda.  Still crap.

But, now I'm getting into the realm of disputing the report's findings & conclusions, which wasn't where I started, with the Telegraph's blatantly misleading headline.  So, let's step back a bit...

See those results above, from Google News ?  The bottom three accurately characterise the report's findings, and the subject thereof.  Only the one at the top from the Telegraph manages, unintentionally or not, to completely conflate the lesser functionality of 'hidden services' with the wholly legitimate purpose of 'anonymous browsing', and to smear the vast majority of Tor users as a result.  Fuck, I hate the Telegraph...


* Imagine say Iranian or Chinese dissidents, wanting to not merely communicate freely over Tor, without detection of government authorities, but also wanting to provide a stable hosting source of shared documentation within their groups.

A Reminder from the Telegraph to Turn Back the Clocks

Gave me a chuckle.  And actually works on multiple levels really, considering Cameron's Britain.

This Seems About Right

Love that Gideon haz a sad.

Left Luggage

Come across this sort of crap all the time, and never post anything either because a) I don't have any particular take, and/or b) it's a few days or maybe even weeks old, and thus not technically still news ? *

Alternet: Which Advanced Country Has the Most Climate Skeptics ?  (Hint, their PM is an arsehole)
BBC: Engineers create emergency origami bridge
Telegraph: Has Kim Kardashian just fixed Twitter? (Actually about the ability to re-edit Tweets)
Occupy.com: The U.K. Is Privatizing Aid to the Developing World As Corporations Seek Their Cut
BBC: Aircraft 'bomb bag' limits on board explosion impact

Don't really like lists of links, but seems a waste to just let this shit evaporate unused.**  Dunno.


* Never mind the shitty browser crashing and taking all my tabs with it.  Technology sucks.
** And never, the demon Twitter.  Crosses self twice.

£3

That's the price the idiots in Labour came up with for random shits to vote in their leadership-election.  And every Tory-leaning publication online or off has been encouraging the faithful to interfere with Labour's choices for the cost of a cup of coffee.

Were the future of non-fascist humanity not arguably hanging on their choices, I'd laugh in their faces.  As is, I'd like to think that the next generation or two could enjoy a habitable planet for the seven-ish decades G-d or fate might grant them.

Always...Priorities

Around the world, children are starving, children are dying of preventable diseases.  Children are being forced into child-labour, into slavery, even being forced to fight as soldiers.

Meanwhile, in the west, a certain toddler from an ever-so privileged family goes on an outing with his parents...and it's front-page fucking news (in mainstream publications no less).

Look at the little boy rolling down a hill.  Marvel in wonder as he kicks a ball !  See him running with his little toy-car in his chubby little fists...  But it's newsworthy, because one day, if our species hasn't completely destroyed itself before then, the adult this child may one day become could get to wear fancy-dress and pretend-rule over the people of a portion of a couple of small islands in the North Sea.

I will give the Telegraph & Times credit for one thing though: Not being the Daily Mail.  Because they apparently felt this particular combination to be appropriate:

There's a certain .gif out there on the 'ole Internetz that I could post here, that to put it mildly, starts with someone banging their head against a desk.  I'm going to refrain...this time.

Revealed: The true scale of Tony Blair's global business empire (per The Telegraph)

I'm not sure how much there there really is in the Telegraph's latest piece on Tony Blair, but...

...fuck that guy.  Anyways, here's their take.

That Tax-Haven Trolling in the Telegraph

Far be it from me to suggest the central paradox of leftism, but the recent election campaign seemed to highlight it better than ever. If you believe so passionately in the redistribution of wealth, shouldn’t you also believe in the creation of some wealth to redistribute? But Labour knows that would defeat its fundamental object of building a client state that would obediently vote for it. If you have policies that encourage wealth creation, you encourage job creation, and a rise in real earnings. Then you don’t need a massive welfare state, and you end up with a clientele too small to be politically effective. Simples, as the meerkat says.

...

Even the Tory party believes in redistribution of wealth – if it didn’t it would be unable to fund the NHS, state schools, care services and welfare provision that a civilised society requires....

Erm, there's honest ideological purity, and then there's just blatant lying.

...And you only raise the money to fund those services by having successful businesses that pay taxes and put millions of people in work.

It is time to become aggressive about this point, even though the election is won, because it is fundamental to the difference between conservatism and socialism; and it is not appreciated enough by a public for whom the narcotic spell of the welfare state has yet to be thoroughly broken. Again, it is simple. You don’t tax a loss. You only tax a profit. If you want to raise revenue, business has to be profitable. If you want to cut public spending, business has to be profitable too, because when it is making money it adds people to its payroll.

...

Mr Osborne should raise the 40 per cent tax threshold considerably this year, and every year of this parliament. Currently 4.6m people pay 40p in the pound, and the present threshold is £41,900. HM Revenue and Customs forecast that even if the threshold reached £50,000 by 2020 an additional 900,000 people would be paying it. This is a brake on aspiration and enterprise. It is also a brake on incentive and therefore on productivity, and low productivity is the most poisonous problem in our economy today. He should also abolish the 45p rate, which raises hardly any extra revenue but gives enormous amounts of work to accountants, and take as many low-paid people out of taxation as possible, to encourage their aspiration.

Some public spending is always necessary. But it is not a good in itself. The state has fundamental responsibilities, but providing employment for the masses is not one of them.

...

Indeed, I can’t see what is wrong with making the whole country a tax haven: for I have yet to visit a tax haven where the people are mired in poverty. If Mr Osborne makes that his aim for July 8, he won’t go far wrong.

This piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph is fairly blatant Tory Trolling, complete with all the expected requisite buzzwords.  But it does rather beg the question: What if the City, the part of the economy with which Heffer is presumably most enamoured, were itself, alone to become a separate country ?  It already acts virtually as a haven from tax, law, and decency, with the inconvenience of having to drag the long tails of regular England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland behind it.

The new tax-haven city-state would lose guaranteed access to the outside workforce, infrastructure, and so on, but might soon be attracting ever more criminal plutocratic elements away from places such as Switzerland and the far-east.  And the remaining UK, (with or without Scotland, and minus the all-destroying black-hole that is central London, why not, with ?) would have to get over the short-term tax-losses from the City, in so far as such taxes were being paid in the first place, but might learn again what it is to build a real economy -- One based upon the creation & sale of actual physical goods and real (legal) services, rather than the manipulation by corrupt bankers & traders of mere digits in a database.  And one dedicated to the employment, the welfare, and betterment of all its citizens, and not just the get-ahead-at-any-costs City-strivers with the club tie, the firm handshake, and the knife always at the ready.*

It might be a better future for everyone in question.


* Pink Floyd, obvs.  http://www.metrolyrics.com/dogs-lyrics-pink-floyd.html  Although not also finding a way to mention the 'Pigs' in the same sentence rather spoils the metaphor perhaps.

Etheldreda Laing

Janet Laing in kimono c. 1914. Source: Getty

Iris Laing (left), aged around 11, and her sister Janet, aged around 16 c. 1914. Source: Getty

Iris Laing around age 7 c. 1910. Source: Getty

The Telegraph had a piece on Etheldreda Laing, an amateur photographer who started taking colour (Autochrome) photographs back in 1908.  Unfortunately, the Telegraph doesn't really do galleries...or full size images.*  These are excerpted instead from the slideshow (of 19) here: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/etheldreda-laing.  Not bad for a hundred years ago.


* One other thing the Telegraph doesn't do is check their links. 'www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk%29', Really DT ?  One-click, that's all it takes.

Well, It's the Weekend, So We Can Just Phone in any Random Crap, Right ?

Time to read the Telegraph...Referendum, booooring.  Global realignment of power between the US and China...pass.  Tom Cruise...ew.  What's that fourth item ?

But, but, surely that's...That's...The general election was just...

Why the hell am I looking at a photoshop of the former Deputy Prime Minister and former head of the LibDems with his wife & the Camerons over the caption "I'll be there for you..." ?

Is this some shit you had hanging around from before the elections, and you couldn't be bothered to update ?

Okay, okay, the 'content' will explain, right ?  <Reads the utterly unfunny pointless drivel that follows>

Nope.  What follows has nothing to do with Friends, nothing to do with the Cleggs, nothing to with 'SamCam', and is in fact nothing more than some cheap stereotypes and cliches seguing eventually into a bolted-on mention of Sepp fucking Blatter.  Please tell me you didn't pay Mister Thomas for this shit.

More importantly, please tell me you stole that image off the internet.  No, wait... Please tell me that your unpaid intern from Albania stole that image off the internet.

I mean, you do want to be taken seriously, don't you ?  You've only been running an online presence for over twenty years now.  You were fucking pioneers on the web !  We were still using the Mosaic web-browser when you launched the Electronic Telegraph FFS !

Aw, whadda I care ?  Go ahead, keep shitting all over yourselves Telegraph.  Think those cheques are going to keep coming in from the Tories indefinitely ?


Oh, in case you actually wanted to read this shit (their shit, not mine, not that my blather isn't that), and didn't believe me about how bad it is.  Well, sure: Don't say I didn't warn ya.

Revealed: The Real Unofficial Campaign Song of the Conservative Party

The Telegraph would have us believe that huddled away in their subterranean election HQ, in between passing furry koalas, the Tories had One World by Queen on repeat.  They had it almost right.  In fact, the song in question was of course, the far superior cover-version, Geburt einer Nation by Laibach:

It just makes so much sense now, doesn't it ?  Unconfirmed reports suggest that another popular track on the playlist was one 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' from some old musical.

Nicola Doesn't Owe You Shit, Mister 37%

And anyway, respect is earned.  If you ever had any claim to it, you lost it many times over in the last days of the election.  And when/if the union collapses, it will justly or not be primarily your name attached to the episode in the history-books.

The Telegraph's Princess 'Spare Tyre' Diana Mark II

Once she has a name, will we finally stop going on about the royal baby ?

I get it.  A lot of Americans and a certain percentage of Britons are obsessed with Royalty, and aristocratic systems generally.  And due to the insane obsession of like-minded idiots globally, there is money to be made in tourism, which thanks to the lunatic commitment of Anglo-Saxon countries to extremist capitalist free-market ideologies, is alongside banking and retail, one of the few meaningful sectors still standing in the British economy.  But the non-stop coverage in the media is ridiculous.

So a certain couple in a certain family, which was once known as the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas has had a second child.  A child, which if the increasingly symbolic institution of the monarchy still exists many many decades from now, could theoretically be queen, depending on the deaths, abdications, or other misfortunes of her nearest relatives.  So the fuck what ?

I'm no anti-royalist, but the monarchy is, whether one likes it or not, an institution of dwindling importance in the everyday lives of the monarch's supposed subjects, and increasingly the role the political elites want the monarchy to play would seem to be a combination of providing cover for unpopular political decisions by the ruling party (and really, the fact that the Queen is trotted out every year and forced to give what is increasingly little more than a party-political-broadcast on behalf of whatever party currently controls Number 10 is frankly disgusting) and serving as a shiny object to distract the gullible masses from the problems affecting their everyday lives, largely as a result of the decisions of those same political elites.  And boy, could those elites ever do with a distraction right now.  Which brings us to:

This shit, from the front page, online and print of the Telegraph.

I don't really care personally that much what the couple in question (it's William isn't it, and one of the Middletons...Kate, I think ?) call their daughter, but in so far as I will engage with it, there's two ways of looking at this: a) They call their daughter what they want, without any consideration for the politics and optics thereof as representatives of the aforementioned political institution, or b) They take into account the politics and optics thereof, in which case, as a Christian name at least (nobody cares about middle names), calling the child Diana is one of the stupidest things they could possibly do.

The passage of time, the elevation of William over his father in the attention of the media and the public, and the marriage and subsequent children from said marriage of William & Kate have done a great deal to heal the wounds of that particular era of the British monarchy.  Why rip them open anew by giving the poor child the name of her grandmother, and reminding everybody of just how toxic that era was ?  And no, whatever you might think of Charles or the Queen, 'Saint Diana' wasn't exactly blameless in what went down all those years ago.  If as a purely personal matter, the couple want to name their child 'Diana', 'Elizabeth', or 'Mongo the Magnificent' for that matter, then hey, more power to them.  But if we must turn this into a symbolic political decision, then fer fuck's sake, just about the only stupider choice of name with which to burden the poor child would be probably 'Camilla.'

I mean, c'mon Telegraph, make up your mind what business you're in.  Is it providing consistently half-arsed tabloid-journalistic propaganda on behalf of the Tory party ?  Or is it just trolling the entire nation for shits and giggles ?

Oh, and lest you might be under any illusion that the Telegraph actually gives a shit about the actual female child who recently entered this world, contemplate this (complete with multiple pictures of seemingly far-more important older brother):

So, the poor child must not only be named Diana, but be Diana, as in some sort of symbolic re-incarnation of the now be-sainted and fictionalised princess of yesteryear.  Although, in the meantime, we'll unofficially just call her 'the spare.'  As in spare tyre.  As in disposable easily replaceable cog.  Wait...hey, the Telegraph finally found a way to make the monarchy relevant to the modern economy and the ordinary working experience.  Result !


Update: Charlotte Elizabeth Diana.  Fine.  Can we more on now ?

Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ

Be Afraid !

Very Afraid !

They're coming to take your jobswelfare ! (Cough)Bullshit(Cough)

Bomb.  Bomb.  Bomb !  Your City !  BOMB !

'Vengeance !' Your 'worst nightmare' !  Behold, the terrifying wee Scots warrior-queen practising her deadly martial arts in preparation to wiping out the Sassenach scourge !

Well, it was always really only a matter of time, wasn't it ?

...And the Telegraph Entertains

7 leaders answer 7 questions

6. Setting aside your differences, which one of your political rivals has impressed you most and why?

Natalie Bennett: It took some guts for Ed Miliband to stand up to Murdoch - most leaders wouldn’t have done that...

So looking for a seat (singular probably) in a Labour coalition are we Nat. ?

..., and David Cameron stood up to many in his own party on gay marriage.

Hedging yer bets much ?

Leanne Wood: Nicola Sturgeon. She is tenacious and determined and an advocate for her country.

Uh...

Nicola Sturgeon: Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru – she was fantastic in the debates, quite rightly putting Nigel Farage in his place.

...huh.

7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

David Cameron: I wish I’d worked harder at speaking another language.

Sure, Dave.

Ed Miliband: I would always like to spend more time with my wife, Justine, and our children Daniel and Sam.

Uh, then why the hell are you campaigning to be PM ?

Nigel Farage: I'm too tolerant, sometimes. When it comes to loyalty, I often offer too much, even to people who have let me down repeatedly. Maybe I need to be more cutthroat.

And there's the headline...

Nick Clegg: I’d be Prime Minister.

No comment.

Debate !

Is it just me, or is there not something really weird about seeing Ed on stage, debating the leaders of the nationalist parties (& Greens), while Nick & Dave are nowhere in sight ?  Not sure if the optics are good or bad for Labour, just strange and oddly unbalanced.


Update: And the Telegraph phones in their pre-scripted responses to the debate.

Uh, no.

In Which The Telegraph Trolls Scotland

Oh goody, an editorial by Bruce Anderson in the Telegraph.  This the same 'duty to use Torture', 'Torture the wife and children' Bruce Anderson ?

Last Thursday’s debate will have little impact in England. Scotland is another matter. Nicola Sturgeon’s performance has made it inevitable that there will be a constitutional crisis in North Britain and that we will be arguing about Scottish independence for the foreseeable future. Even the French ambassador’s (disputed) account of her apparent attempts to manipulate the balance of power at Westminster will not damage her.

La Sturgeon was effective: clear, confident, combative without being shrill. One could add a fourth “c” word: cold. It is less a question of a splinter of ice in her heart, as a few scraps of heart tissue clinging to an icicle. She has all the human warmth of a tricoteuse waiting for a tumbril. But that was not so apparent during the debate. There is an irony. If she had given such a display as a Labour politician, she would now be the strong favourite to succeed Ed Miliband. As it is, she has expunged any prospect of a Labour recovery in Scotland.... 

 Not shrill you say.  Just a cold-hearted bitch, huh ?  And...' "c" word'...hilarious !

The Scottish public mood is extraordinary. Over the past few months, millions of Scots have been baying at the moon. The most bizarre fantasies have not only circulated; otherwise sane people have given them credence. There are supposed to be massively valuable oilfields whose existence the English are concealing. Though that is about as plausible as Enoch Powell belonging to a satanic cult, it is now part of everyday discourse.

Wait, WTF ?  So The Telegraph, the paper you are currently writing for, reported some bullshit about UKIP & Enoch Powell, and what ?  UKIP are a 'satanic cult' ?  Is that what you're saying ?

The Nat rumour machine also claims that there are large new oilfields to the west of Shetland. But there are three problems with that. First, oil companies have been prospecting in that area, without success. Second, if oil was found, it would be in rough seas. At anything like current oil prices, extraction would not be economic. Third, if Scotland were to secede, Shetland might try to opt out. Those are easy points to make. Scottish friends of mine have been doing so on the doorstep – and getting nowhere.

See nothing to fault here.  And if I was...

How can this be happening? The Scottish Enlightenment represented the triumph of rationalism, always in a calm and restrained fashion. Its philosophers and economists believed in using reason to improve the human condition, not to reshape human nature. They virtually invented free enterprise; they elevated Scotland to the intellectual leadership of Europe. In a splendid setting, the Castle on one side, the sea on the other, their contemporaries laid out the New Town. Calm, rational and beautiful buildings: it is the Enlightenment as architecture.

While it would be absurd to claim that every Scot has read Adam Smith, there were grounds for believing that Enlightenment values had influenced the Scottish character...

Adam Smith.  Of course, Adam Smith, the famous free-market fundamentalist...  A man whose modern-day fictional avatar bears as much resemblance to the original as the Coca Cola Santa Claus to Nikolaos of Myra.

Scots came to think of themselves as shrewd, canny, hard-headed. They persuaded much of the world to accept them at that valuation: a nation of Dickson McCunns. Where is the canniness now?

It was undermined by three historical developments. First came the end of the British Empire. Not only was it often a job-creation scheme for Scots....

Trolling, trolling, trolling...

Once a Royal Duke lowered the final Union Flag, it was easier for malcontents to claim that Scotland was England’s last colony. (Those sentiments are expressed in characteristic language during the film Trainspotting, much the most depressing portrait of Scotland ever written or broadcast.)

There followed the inevitable decline of heavy industry. Two generations ago, most Scots lived within 50 miles of a steelworks, a shipyard, a coalfield – or all three. A lot of Scots regarded that as part of their economic birthright. This came to a rapid end. But it is unfortunate that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the final phase....

It was not her fault that globalisation had changed the terms of trade.

Wait, so Globalisation is a thing that...just happened ?  Spontaneously, out of thin air ?  An act of God ?  Something in which the political classes had no hand at all ?

Indeed, on any sensible audit of the Thatcher years, Scotland should regard her as a benefactor.

Still trolling...

Silicon glen, financial services, oil and gas: Thatcherism created the conditions in which the new industries could flourish. But no credit came her way. Her voice did not help; it set many Scottish teeth on edge. That was a childish reaction: there was a lot of childishness about, encouraged by both Labour and Nationalist politicians. It suited them to pour abuse on her and her party, to turn Toryism into political toxic waste.

How dare they ?!!

So there was a quarter of a century of demonisation, which drove economic common sense out of Scottish public debate.

More like a quarter-century of oil-revenues perhaps ?

By the end, many young Scots had come to believe that Scots’ values were superior. Scotland stood for social solidarity, and indeed socialism. It stood for the public sector, not for private enterprise. Mrs Thatcher and her English capitalist friends hated the Scottish ethos, which is why they had set out to destroy the Scottish economy. This brainwashing explains why Nicola Sturgeon will have earned huge applause in Scotland for attacking Ed Miliband from the Left. Scottish Labour helped to sow the dragons’ teeth, never expecting that the dragons would turn on them. They ken the noo.

And still trolling...

Not since the Thirties has a once great nation been in the grip of so many delusions. This is malign thraldom, and it is not clear how it can be ended. Nicola Sturgeon and her party are on the side of Trainspotting Scotland, not Enlightenment Scotland. Yet there is no sign of Scotland coming to its senses.

It's almost like the Tories want Scotland voting SNP, huh ?  And vice-versa ?  But I don't imagine the Telegraph would have any stories speculating upon that particular conspiracy-theory...

Your Daily Telegraph Fail

Sigh.  Because the Googlez iz so hardz work like.

<Clicks first link>

This one lookz gud.  <Publishes>

That Ole' Grauniad

I get The Times. I get The Daily Telegraph. I get the Daily Mail. I pretty much ignore The Independent, and the like, if only because they bore me to tears. And then...there's always...The Guardian. That bastion of privileged left-leaning mostly upper middle-class liberal guilt. I read it, I've read it for years, and yet somehow I've never liked it it, never identified with it. And to this date, I'm not sure who reads it, or what their business-model is. If Murdoch hadn't put The Times behind a paywall, I'm not sure that I'd bother much with The Guardian at all. It's almost like they're constantly competing to shorten the distance between the right-wing portrayals thereof as trendy lefty politically-correct bullshit and reality. If there were a meaningful alternative in the slightly-left-of-centre UK media to the Grauniad crowd, I wouldn't waste another second on their site. Sadly...there ain't.  And thus I keep reading, and on some level supporting shit like this.

The evil evil licence-fee didn't pay for this crap, but something did.  And this kinda garbage won't occasion anywhere near the outrage that the average project of the (nominally-)public broadcaster would.  In what kinda fuckin' world do we live ?

Male Preference for Optimal Lumbar Curvature, or...

Huh, this is interesting I guess.

A psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin sheds new light on today's standards of beauty, attributing modern men's preferences for women with a curvy backside to prehistoric influences.

The study, published online in Evolution and Human Behavior, investigated men's mate preference for women with a "theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature," a 45.5 degree curve from back to buttocks allowing ancestral women to better support, provide for, and carry out multiple pregnancies.

"What's fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology—in this case lumbar curvature—and an evolved standard of attractiveness," said the study's co-author David Buss, a UT Austin psychology professor. "This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or 'in the eyes of the beholder' as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic."

This research, led by UT Austin alumnus and Bilkent University psychologist David Lewis, consisted of two studies. The first looked at vertebral wedging, an underlying spinal feature that can influence the actual curve in women's lower backs.

About 100 men rated the attractiveness of several manipulated images displaying spinal curves ranging across the natural spectrum. Men were most attracted to images of women exhibiting the hypothesized optimum of 45 degrees of lumbar curvature.

"This spinal structure would have enabled pregnant women to balance their weight over the hips," Lewis said. "These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries. In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury."

The second study addressed the question of whether men prefer this angle because it reflects larger buttocks, or whether it really can be attributed to the angle in the spine itself.

Approximately 200 men were presented with groups of images of women with differing buttock size and vertebral wedging, but maintaining a 45.5-degree curve. Men consistently preferred women whose spinal curvature was closer to optimum regardless of buttock size.

Hmm, I wonder how this is being covered by other news outlets...

Really ?

Classy headline yo.

Business Insider Australia, huh.

That's...not...what they said.

'Better workers' ?  Well credit for least sexy picture, Telegraph.

Maybe I should just stick to the BBC.  Gah, and now I'm blinded by excessive whitespace, as the BBC push what was the mobile site onto the desktop.  And another site falls victim to the cult of flat design.  Well at least they've lost the hyper-pixelated pictures that used to plague the mobile site.