Peter Nolan

Old Friends

In the meantime, some old friends are making an appearance in the comments over at Irish Eagle. The dogs may bark but the car drives on. 

Irrational Equanimity Revisited

The VIX, the Chicago Board's index of implied volatility of equity options, which provides a handy guage of market expectations for short-term volatility in the S&P 500, touched 19 during the disorderly tumble in global markets yesterday.  This is being ascribed to the fall in Shanghai, a fenced-in market.  It doesn't make any sense to be, but then neither has the  behaviour of the markets in the last few  months.  Still, I'm feeling somewhat vindicated.

The New New Republic

The New Republic has had an injection of capital and is beefing up its already considerable web presence.  Of all the American political opinion magazines, The National Interest, American Interest, Commentary, Nation, National Review and Weekly Standard, TNR is still the best-written and most open-minded. 

Along with articles on the web, the magazine has made a major push into blogging, The Plank, Open University and now even one for its editor, The Spine, written by the indomitable Martin Peretz.  According to the New York Times story by Katharine Seelye,

Mr. Peretz, 67, has himself become a blogger. He said he was “not enjoying it exactly,” but that he had found it addictive.

“When I used to see something irritating, I would typically call a friend,” he said. “Now I just go to the blog.” He said he is often surprised at how quickly readers will post a response. “It’s as if they’re waiting for something,” he said. “Then they say, ‘Ah, here he is. I’m going to pounce.’ ”

On the Frontline

In the last six months, I've been spending a lot of my time at the Frontline Club in Paddington. 

I've always been a news junkie, so being at Frontline is the equivalent of setting up home in the Golden Triangle, in the heart of the raw supply. 

It's run by Vaughan Smith, a legendary British TV cameraman, perhaps most famous for spending several months wandering around amidst the British and American forces in Saudi Arabia before the launch of  Desert Storm, the operation to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, in 1991.  While pretending to be a British officer, with the aid of an ID card produced using the laminating machine of the British Embassy tennis club in Bahrain, he surreptitiously took footage outside the restrictions imposed by the military's pooling system for journalists. 

Back in the eighties and nineties, the logistical difficulties of getting into dangerous and remote places created an opening for Smith and his freelance colleagues at what was then the Frontline agency to provide pictures to national broadcasters.  Although the BBC's mantra was that no story was worth a life, many of Frontline's associates did indeed give their lives to get the stories - in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Africa and, in the case ofthe larger than life Anglo-Irishman Rory Peck, Moscow during the 1993 parliamentary coup against Yeltsin.   Their story is told in the book Frontline by ITN's David Loyn, which I took with me on my trip to the Mid East over the new year.  You won't find a better collection of tales of the most perilous adventures and colourful characters to be found anywhere in the last quarter century anywhere else.

One facile assumption the book overturns is that there'll always be someone on hand to record the news.  The story of Frontline shows just how difficult is was to collect the stories that, even now, never having seen them since they first aired nearly twenty years ago, I still remember vividly - like John Simpson driving into Kabul just after the Russians left, in the company of two mujahadeen double agents in the secret police.

Nowadays journalists routinely targeted by insurgents and terrorists.  One day in suburban Riyadh in 2004, the bulk of the members of the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda were driving past when they noticed another Irish freelancer, the Irish freelance cameraman Simon Cumbers filming with the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardiner.  They shot the pair, killing Cumbers and crippling Gardiner, who remains in a wheelchair.  Gardiner is still doing the same job for the BBC.  Cumbers is buried in Wicklow and is memorialised in an annual request funded by his friends and admirers among the Irish and international press.

The Frontline Club membership includes many such war correspondents, both old and the new generation, along with admen, assorted journalists, photographers and another old Iraq hand, a gentlemen listed on the membership roll as  "Mr Andrew McNab".   

The costs of security for foreign staff is making news-gathering in dangerous places the most economic function to hand off to low-paid and disposable locals or third-world staff or else encouraged the battleship effect of overprotection and huge entourages of security people.  Ironically, the growing dominance of a few global networks, especially the BBC, is increasingly making freelance TV work uneconomic.  Frontline stands as a monument to these men and women and the sacrifices that they made.

Poll Position

If Frank Luntz was a bit more modest, maybe he'd be completely perfect.  Luntz, "the world's top pollster" according to this week's Spectator cover story, has been active in promoting himself and his new book, Words that Win, supposedly the lessons for success from his experience in crafting messages for the Republicans, in the British media.  He's also been appearing quite regularly on British TV, most famously being the first to highlight the potential appeal of David Cameron in a televised focus group for Newsnight and then repeating the exercise a year after Cameron's election as leader. 

Nick Cohen was sceptical in an article in the Observer in December on the boy wonder - I'm not so sure whether this species of market research, used to such effect by (Lord) Philip Gould in the 1997 campaign is accurately portrayed in Luntz's work on British and Irish TV. 

Cameron came from nowhere because Newsnight commissioned a focus group run by American pollster Frank Luntz that appeared to prove that the young politician could become extraordinarily popular and the Conservatives believed him. The desperation of the Tories in 2005 produced an election without precedent. The findings of a focus group drove a hitherto obscure politician to the leadership of a major political party. Not a focus group hired by party managers anxious to uphold the best interests of their cause, but by a broadcaster as interested in entertainment as reputable market research.
...

But New York journalist Dante Chinni noted in 2000 that normal judgments of broadcasters never applied in Luntz’s case. He was part of ‘a new class of media personality, the celebrity pollster… [who] gets the heavy-hitter treatment, frequently getting called in by the networks to offer colour commentary on politics even when he has no poll to cite’. Producers feted Luntz because he gave television what it wanted: strong opinions expressed with absolute certainty in a populist style. Here, awestruck hacks have lapped up Luntz’s pronouncements on who should lead Labour and the Lib Dems ever since his Cameron gig.

But British pollsters tell me that Luntz’s work for Newsnight shouldn’t have been allowed to influence a parish council election, never mind the future of a great party. If you can’t follow their case against him, their overall explanation is easy to grasp: a well-run focus group could never fill 15 minutes of airtime. It would be too boring. To begin with, standard focus groups have six to eight members, but a handful of people isn’t an impressive sight on television, so Newsnight had Luntz meet 28 voters.

Focus groups are also meant to be focused. Market researchers want volunteers from a similar background so the guinea pigs will lose their inhibitions about speaking freely in front of strangers. But Newsnight mixed up people who had always voted Tory with people who had once voted Tory and people who had never voted Tory. The danger of a large and diverse group is that the loudest voices will dominate and a herd mentality will take over. Watch the footage that made Cameron leader and you will see that’s what happens as the dynamics of crowd psychology convert everyone in the room to his charms.

The standard way to stop easily impressed interviewees going along with the crowd is to have secret ballots. Luntz and Newsnight didn’t use them because a show of hands looks better on TV. After they hear Cameron saying he wants to appeal to people’s hopes rather than their fears, the reaction of the voters on dinky hand-held dials that measure their instant responses was overwhelmingly positive. But they would have been as pleased if you, I or our next-door neighbours had said the same, which is why serious researchers are wary of instant reactions. I could go on, but the big point is that Newsnight produced infotainment, not research.

My concern remains that Cameron's tacking to the left means that he is taking positions he himself doesn't believe in the slightest - which shows he's a character even more amoral than Bill Clinton - or he really believes this stuff, in which case we now have two Labour parties, the real one and the Tories.  Neither gives me much grounds for hope. 

The Morning After

Well, the Brit's are ecstatic over Helen Mirren taking the best actress Oscar - it takes the sting off the record-breaking win by Ireland at Croke Park on Saturday.  Also a plus, Peter O'Toole, like his fellow thespians Brenda Fricker and Daniel Day-Lewis, will lose the temporary British nationality bestowed on Oscar nominees by Fleet Street. 

As I'd expected, Al Gore took home an Oscar too.  Nice to see Al win an election for once in his life.  I demand a recount!

Europe's New Jewish Lobby?

Sara Wildman wrote recently in the New Republic - Guess Who's Coming to Seder? - on the further evolution of the European far-right.  Neo-nazis in Belgium, the inheritors of those parties which willingly collaborated with the Nazis, are dropping their traditional anti-semitism in favour of vocal support for "their" Jews and Israel against the supposed threat from Muslim immigrants.   She quotes one local far-right leader:

"We should stand with the Jewish community, and we should do everything possible to protect them," he says. "Jewish values are European values!" Then he launches into an earnest plea for Jews to come home to his extreme-right--"right-wing," he gently corrects--party.

Dewinter is at the forefront of Europe's new philosemitic far right. Along with his French homologue, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Holocaust minimizer and Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, Dewinter has spent the last few years proclaiming his support for Jews and championing their rights. No matter that Vlaams Belang's founders were Nazi collaborators or, simply, that the idea of the Jew as "European" is itself a novelty for his base constituency. Since 2003, Dewinter has loudly and consistently spoken out against attacks on Jews--calling Judaism a "pillar of European society" to Time magazine and condemning anti-Semitism and, very specifically, anti-Zionism, to Haaretz and New York Jewish Week. This fall, when elections fell on Sukkot and religious Jews would have missed going to the polls, it was Dewinter's party that helped collect their proxy ballots. In October, he promised the press he would bring in one-third of the Jewish vote on Election Day and told Haaretz that Jews were his "brothers in arms".

In many ways, this is hardly surprising.  We something of the same evolution of hatred among the American extreme-right when American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell dropped prejudice against Catholics and southern Europeans in favour of a unified bloc of "white power" confronting the "black power" of the Black Panthers.  David Duke, the Louisiana KKK leader and one-time Republican candidate for governor, went further, ditching the hood or stormtrooper uniforms for business suits and sound bytes.  The Belgians now seem, unlike Duke, who's still an outspoken anti-Semite, to go further.  As a result, they seem to be succeeding in their quest for respectability, as the Italian neo-fascists did earlier before entering government. 

The British neo-nazis, in the shape of the BNP, seem to be the dimmer pupils in the class. In spite of the efforts of Cambridge law graduate Nick Griffin, the party is still the refuge of skinheads and neo-nazis, hiding behind an imperfect disguise.  One Irish guy I know was nearly killed in a random attack by a group of party activists who abducted and tried to murder him by throwing him off a bridge after asking him the time in an east London High Street.  The mask slipped again recently when a party candidate was convicted of stockpiling weapons for a race war after being turned in by his wife.   

The BNP seems to have a number of Jewish members, including some councilors, and an activist that I meet at Birkbeck College, who assured me that I would be welcome to co-operate as a "European".  I was and remain unconvinced. 

Still, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more British Jews in the BNP than in Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist religious extremists who got so much press for their visit, in the company of David Duke himself, to Tehran's Holocaust denial conference recently after being feted, bizarrely, by elements of the left as some sort of moral exemplars representing the true universalist spirit of Judaism, presumably for burning down video stores that rent DVDs of Free Willy. 

The slow uphill road to biofuel utopia

The FT reports - and what a surprise that is!- that the fall in crude oil prices from their summer highs of $80 a barrel during the Lebanon war to about $55 now, together with the rising costs of soft commodities that can also be processed into foodstuffs is catching the biodiesel industry in a tightening pincer movement:

In a week when ministers are expected publicly to emphasise the government's green credentials with the launch of consultation on implementing its Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), the Treasury will be told its fuel rebate scheme, meant to encourage uptake of "green" transport fuels, is not working.

UK biodiesel producers had expected now to be ramping up output and increasing production, ready for the introduction in April 2008 of the RTFO, which requires oil companies to include 2.5 per cent of renewables in transport fuel, rising to 5 per cent in 2010-11.

Instead, the producers are postponing expansion plans and running plants far below capacity because the rebate, fixed at 20p in 2002, is now too low to make biodiesel production economic at current prices. When the RTFO takes effect next April, there will be an additional incentive in the shape of a 15p-a-litre penalty for non-compliance for the amount by which an oil company's sales fall short of the 2.5 per cent figure.

But if the price of oil continues to fall and the price of biodiesel feedstock stays high or rises further, it could be cheaper for fuel suppliers to pay the penalty than to buy the biodiesel.

Not only are the greens and the new communities of "environmental entrepreneurs" i.e. hedge fund managers prowling Belgravia in chauffered black Range Rovers demanding more subsidies like the enormously lucrative Kyoto HFC scam, but a vital part of this new khmer vert is that most coddled social group of all, the farmers:

The Renewable Energy Association, the Environmental Industries Commission and National Farmers' Union representatives will meet John Healey, financial secretary to the Treasury, on Wednesday. They will stress that it is not only the future of the UK's biodiesel sector, and the supply prospects for UK agriculture, at stake.

My own personal view, regardless of the merits of biodiesel, which I expect will work, but not without the heavy use of genetic engineering for plants and enzymes, is that when it comes to dealing with farmers, Stalin was on the right track. 

Life imitates art

Iraqi reality imitates western nightmares.  Given the lethality and the potential panic, I'm sure that this will eventually become another little trick for every jihadi's toolbox. 

The plank in your eye

Somebody hasn't been thinking consistently:

A father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle, an inquest heard yesterday.

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages

On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home  in Accrington, Lancs, and set it alight.

Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to protect her three-year-old child, Hannah, who was sleeping with her, but was overcome by fumes. Her other daughters, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, 10, died elsewhere in the house.

Riaz, who had spent the evening drinking, set himself on fire and died two days later.

From today's Telegraph - a sad story of madness, alienation and alcohol, and probably nothing so grand as a desire to repress one's womenfolk.