Syntagma Digital
Editor, John Evans
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Saturday Ramble: Pre-Budget frog spawn

Tree Frog There are two things every school child should be taught as the basis of their education:

1. Learn to do something
2. Learn to do nothing

Learning to do something is obviously important since most students will have to earn a living. Doing something well is a prerequisite of wealth at all times.

As far as I’m aware, learning to do nothing is not in the National Curriculum. It should be. I’ve spent most of my life perfecting the art of doing nothing, which is probably why I ended up as a writer. When you do nothing, you enter mysterious depths where the real treasure is to be found.

The Pre-Budget Report was so obviously written by someone who can only do “something”. If Gordon Brown had learned as a lad to do nothing, he wouldn’t have got us into this mess in the first place.

It’s like the phrase, “He thinks out of the box”, implying that most people are forever confined to their boxes — the Undead, perhaps. Well, Gordon Brown has given us a vivid impression of a vampire over the past decade, syphoning off the country’s life blood.

Only those who have learned how to do nothing, know there’s a third way. For them, there is no box. They can see far beyond the current consensus to a world of infinite possibilities.

Meanwhile, the climate change hysterics are trapped in their nightmare of tsunamis and things that go “crump” in the dark. Anything can happen, and probably will. They live in constant dread and feel impelled to force the rest of us to comply with the rules of their savage, preternatural world. Their antics could well draw down other kinds of disaster, but not the ones they fear.

There’s an old tale about the frog who lives in a well and his cousin who lives by the sea in the sand dunes. One day, the sea frog visits his relative in the well and, as happens on these occasions, the conversation turns to philosophy.

“The universe is infinite,” says the sea frog, “surrounded by blue seas and topped by a wonderful blue sky.”

“Don’t be daft,” replies the well frog. “The universe is tubular, about 10 feet across and bounded by a slimy brick wall.”

The difference between them is that the well frog is forever busying about making up for the deficiencies of the dank, slippery well, while the sea frog is quite happy to saunter about his magical landscape contemplating his good fortune. Eventually, however, the well frog’s activities will undermine the foundations of the well, causing it to collapse, depriving everyone in the neighbourhood of fresh water.

The Pre-Budget Report and all its predecessors after 1997 were made by a denizen of a deep, dark well. He is forever “in the box” unable to see how illusory it is and always destined to do “something” rather than nothing.

Learning to do nothing is just as important as learning to do something.

John Evans

HURRY: Last Chance to buy The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face by John Evans in time for Christmas.

Buy now by clicking on the discount button at the top of the sidebar, or from Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com.

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DIARY: Cameron’s follies, Darling is our darling, Annoyment, Cult of truthlessness, History programmes, Photography is a dead duck

Green Snake David Cameron is an unpredictable chap. Just when you think he’s shaping up to be a fine, transformative Prime Minister, he does something straight out of the Tony Blair Manual of Initiativitis.

Examples:
1. Asking prospective parliamentary candidate, Annunziata Rees-Mogg to change her name to Nancy Mogg to show she’s not a toff — even if she is. She refused, thankfully. Courting rebuffs with insulting requests is not good leadership. What on earth possessed him?

2. Having tarnished his famous cast-iron guarantee through a lack of candour about its sell-by date, it’s emerged that he turned down a most generous offer from UKIP which would have restored his honour on the Lisbon issue.

UKIP’s new leader, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, reveals he approached Lord Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, with an offer from Nigel Farage to disband UKIP if Cameron would hold a referendum on the issue come what may.

Of course, there would be no point in having a plebiscite on a ratified treaty, but using the moment to launch one on a Norway-Switzerland type arrangement for Britain would have yielded the result a large majority of the electorate wants.

Bringing it up fresh at a later date would only sever the connection between the promise and the policy, and hence put the EU collectariat on the front foot.

Recognizing that the new Prime Minister will have a Matterhorn of issues to deal with on day one, I have suggested The Syntagma Compromise (third outing):

Embed into the manifesto now an offer of a referendum three years into the next Parliament. It ticks all the boxes, gives the party a breathing space to prepare and allows it to sort out the financial and economic mess left by Labour.

3. I won’t even get started on the “green” aspects of modernizing Toryism. Christopher Booker has covered all the bases.

What David Cameron requires now is some real edge, not girlie initiatives. He also needs the appearance of a substantial backbone. Tony Blair is off the menu for the voters. Blairish attention-seeking and cheeky side-steps will only turn them away from the Conservatives at the next election.

Step up to the plate, David, or miss out on the feast that should be yours for the taking.

* * * * *

Last week in this column I wrote this: “Alistair Darling should do the decent thing and write an honest Budget Report based on Treasury and Bank of England advice. He should deny Gordon Brown any input … Darling would then be the only participant in this rear-end shambles of a government who could leave office with his head held high.”

In today’s Sunday Telegraph, Political Editor, Patrick Hennessy reports that Darling is going to do just that:

“[He] will use next week’s Pre-Budget Report to paint a grim picture of severe spending cutbacks during the next four years, setting up a pre-election clash with Gordon Brown.” Brown is opposing any talk of big cuts.

Now, I have no idea whether the Chancellor took his cue from Syntagma, although it is a possibility — I find quite a number of our ideas thread their way into the public domain days or weeks later. Take this case:

On November 14, I wrote the following column: Saturday Ramble: Poor information is destroying the quality of our lives:

“In the 21st century, the terrors haven’t gone away. They have re-emerged in the form of phantoms arising from surges of narrowly-based information, largely created by computer-generated mathematical models, … [such as] the fantasies of catastrophic man-made climate change. When even the Prince of Wales claims ‘we have 90 days to save the world’, you know that a new psychological contagion is upon us, and spreading fast.”

A week later, these fantasies are all over the press, thanks to bloggers like James Delingpole spilling the legumes on Climategate — the falsification of climate data.

See if you can spot the story in this column which will make news next week.

Vanity, all is vanity.

* * * * *

Annoyment of the week
A Gordon Brown freeish zone

Gavin Essler’s Newsnight interview with Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, was a red-mist moment for this diarist.

Referring to the Beeb’s “competition” (ha!), Thompson sneered at their “commercial self-interest”.

It’s the “self-interest” bit that pings me, commerce being generally held respectable. To attack everyone in the wealth-creating sector, which pays his fat package, as primarily self interested is not only wrong, it’s a hell of a cheek.

Let’s see, Thommo’s BBC “remuneration package” includes a salary of more than £800,000, plus various perks and generous expenses reimbursements, including a piffling parking ticket.

No self interest there, then?

PS: a few readers have said that their annoyment of the week is this annoyment snippet. Why? Because the word annoyment doesn’t exist!

It does now.

* * * * *

False data is again in the public eye with the sickening story of filthy wards and poor nursing at Basildon NHS Trust.

This is one of 11, and possibly many more, NHS hospitals that were recently inspected and pronounced “very good or excellent”. Clearly something catastrophic has gone wrong with the data-capture systems at these State institutions. It has also emerged that “cause of death” is rarely investigated, thus removing inconvenient information from the public domain.

This is a Labour party culture that has been obvious from Year One of its period in office. It has contaminated whole areas of public concern by skewing conclusions to the benefit of the government.

It is crude, nasty, and despicable. Alas this cult of truthlessness has infected most of the nation, like veins in a blue cheese.

* * * * *

A reprise on the BBC’s two current history series: Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm BBC2), and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The History of Christianity (Thursdays, 9pm BBC4).

I gave them a bit of a hard time after their first episodes. Andrew was a mad Dervish, as I remember, while the Prof was fixated by his hat. Not what you might call deep journalistic critiques.

However, I’ve come to enjoy both programmes in the meantime, despite their quirks. I’m told that the Prof’s hat is not a white trilby, as I reported, but a Panama of an indeterminate straw colour. How wrong can you be?

AM meanwhile is still mucking about like a schoolboy — last week he plunged into a mud-dark sea in the kind of bathing costume last seen on Edward VII. Not a pretty sight.

The episode on the Great War was the turning point for me. Brilliantly put together, with extraordinary footage of the trenches, it caught the mood of the time perfectly. And the presenter kept his jokes to a minimum. Since then, it’s gone from strength to strength.

As for the Christianity series, it has become a majestic tramp through the long history of the “universal” church and its fragmentation into a myriad pieces — Protestantism alone is said to have more than 20,000 denominations. Unmissable compared to the rest of the Beeb’s output.

There, I hope that resets the balance after my scrappy start. I’m not right all the time, you know.

* * * * *

Like many law-abiding citizens, I carry a compact digital camera with me wherever I go. If something catches my eye, like the Monet pattern in the river you can see by scrolling down this page, I whip it out and train 8-megapixels on the subject matter.

Alas, I’ve known for some time that photography is another innocent pastime now demonized by the ‘elf ‘n’ safety tyrants. And not just them. Ever since the Madeleine McCann case the public has become jumpy if they spot a camera anywhere near their children. You can’t blame them, of course, but it’s yet another example of the innocuous becoming tarnished by a small number of evil men — and increasingly, women — in our age of intolerance and total exposure.

Predictably, a BBC cameraman was questioned last week under Section 44 of the Anti-terrorism Act for taking photographs of a sunset close to St Paul’s cathedral.

On this morning’s Marr programme he explained what happened. It seems two police officers were obliged to approach him over the “incident” and judge whether or not he was a terrorist casing the joint, if you can do that with a sunset.

Sounds like sunset for our culture and liberties to me.

John Evans

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Saturday Ramble: Rotten information – Part 2

Winter

In last week’s Saturday Ramble I castigated the so-called scientific community for spewing out baseless information across the board, especially in the area of supposed man-made global warming.

Today, I draw your attention to a fascinating post in Telegraph blogs by James Delingpole. His suggestions of blatant fraud at the Met Office’s weather lab are naturally hedged about by disclaimers, but worth reading in detail. No doubt we’ll be hearing more about this as days pass.

To add to that, this is what I wrote here on November 1, 2005:

* * * * *

It’s November the 1st, All Saints Day.

As I look out of my window here in southern England I can see girls going to work and college in T-shirts. Nobody’s wearing winter or, for that matter, autumn clothing. The temperature here is an almost balmy 67F (19C). So Global Warming is upon us.

Hah! All is never what it seems in this life. Summer has been particularly warm, though never hot. And it’s certainly nipped a whole month off winter … so far.

But, the long-range weather forecast predicts the bitterest winter since 1962/63 when the UK froze under 20ft snow drifts for three months from Christmas Day till March.

The word “predict” is relevant here. How different is this forecast from the Star Sign predictions in the tabloid newspapers? Well, it’s based on readings from scores of special submarine buoys out in the north Atlantic. Computer models show that the peculiar nature of this year’s data is only matched by those of 1962.

Except, the forecasters didn’t have the remarkable submarine buoys back then. So do the figures match as well as the meteorologists suppose? And, what if there are other factors not being looked at, and missed 40 years ago?

Humans make huge judgements based on narrow data and scattergun information. The wonderful intrusion of paradox is never taken into account by our boffins. Bless their cotton socks, but Syntagma predicts a remarkably warm and balmy winter here in northern Europe, and especially in southern England, where the girls will continue for some time to go to work and college in T-shirts. And an early spring will take us all by surprise. You heard it here first.

* * * * *

Was I right? Here’s the verdict from netweather.tv:

“This winter was widely close to average snow-wise … Not much snow to speak of during January and February (the late February ’06 easterly was even less potent than the Feb ’05 one) … A northerly airstream during first week March brought snow showers for many …”

In other words, a fairly typical British winter, with snowfall lasting only a day or two and with a late flurry in March. My early spring, though, was out by a week or two, but then I’m not paid out of the public purse to forecast the weather.

How long can we go on listening to authorities who seem always to get it wrong?

John Evans

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Global warming is cancelled folks

Fully Protected What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.

It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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