[boris] don't forget the name, folks

"I want to be a Mayor for all Londoners, from Zone 6 to Zone 1. A Mayor that will listen, will learn and will lead."

"King Newt's days are numbered".

He has pledged to scrap "cyclist-killing" bendy buses and return the iconic Routemaster to the capital's roads if he topples Mr Livingstone, as well as eradicating the culture of "casual theft and incivility''.

Also included are developing a plan for 24-hour policing, securing a firm commitment to Crossrail and making the congestion charge "fairer and more flexible".

I think taking on Ken would be the kind of 'big beast' challenge that would be very attractive to Boris

- Ed Vaizey, Tory MP

If you can't have characters standing who are willing to speak their mind, then it would be a sadder place

- Simon Hughes, Ex-Lib Dem candidate

Boris Johnson is going to run for Mayor of London! I for one have already pledged my support. Despite my mildly left-leaning inclinations, I have always been fond of Boris, with his boyish good looks and his mop of Teutonic blond hair (although his ancestry is anything but Teutonic). I think he would make a jolly good Mayor of London.

And here's a lovely post on the frazzle-haired breath of fresh air himself.

[common purpose] rhetoric of the quisling

 
You are the Chosen, the voice of the New Age, the Leader of the Future. The Rules are not for such as you...

Though not directly concerning our North American and Antipodaean friends, this actually does concern them very much because they are very much part of the thrust for:

Common Purpose

And what exactly is this common purpose? They state it themselves:

Leading beyond Authority

As Ian Parker-Joseph says:

It began in the UK in 1988, where it has some 45 offices, but has now taken its sun symbol logo into many countries as Common Purpose International.

The real issue is the craziness coming out of Bavaria, Zurich, Paris and New York, not to mention London.

Very easy to spot - diffuse light blues blending into diffuse yellows in their headers, sun symbols, meaningless drivel as taglines, e.g. securing the future today and other balderdash like that. Their pages are slick and businesslike and they use feelgood terminology about "bringing people together" and so on. Second Life, the U.N. and Common Purpose are examples.

On the surface, it's all about management, leadership and the new technological revolution but the rhetoric behind it is exactly the same which Agatha Christie wrote of in N or M [Dodd, Mead & Co., 1941]. It's the same old story - pinpointing likely people in positions of authority or who are likely to be, tweaking their egos by associating them with snippets of the elite which controls the government of the nations, how they'll be part of the crack leadership group sweeping away mismanagement and inefficiency and so on and so on.

An example of one of these Brave New Worlders:

Common Purpose graduate Cressida Dick issued the 'shoot-to-kill' order to police officers that led to an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes [being shot].

It is eugenics and Nietzsche and Zarathustra and things the average pub drinker knows next to nothing of. But I know of it because I was once a possible bright light in the firmament until I showed myself to be "unfit" for purpose and I'm proud of it. But my ego's still there for all to see.

Do read the whole post and follow the links if you were still in any doubt of the common purpose for which this group is simply one small tentacle.

That's the end of this post but there is the text from N or M, by Agatha Christie, Chapter 14:

Do believe me when I say I really admire both you and your husband immensely. You've got grit and pluck. It's people like you who will be needed in the new State — the State that will arise in this country when your present imbecile Government is vanquished. We want to turn some of our enemies into friends — those that are worth while.

Let me impress upon you what so few people in this country seem to understand. Our Leader does not intend to conquer this country in the sense that you all think. He aims at creating a new Britain — a Britain strong in its own power — ruled over, not by Germans, but by Englishmen. And the best type of Englishmen — Englishmen with brains and breeding and courage. A brave new world, as Shakespeare puts it.

We want to do away with muddle and inefficiency. With bribery and corruption. With self-seeking and money-grubbing — and in this new state we want people like you and your husband — brave and resourceful — enemies that that have been, friends to be. You would be surprised if you knew how many there are in this country, as in others, who have sympathy with and belief in our aims.

Among us all we will create a new Europe — a Europe of peace and progress. Try and see it that way — because, I assure you — it is that way...

His voice was compelling, magnetic.

Later, in Chapter 15, the investigating officer concludes:

Amongst them were two chief Constables, an Air Vice-Marshal, two Generals, the Head of an Armaments Works, a Cabinet Minister, many Police Superintendents, Commanders of Local Volunteer Defense Organizations, and various military and naval lesser fry, as well as members of our own Intelligence Force."

Tommy and Tuppence stared. "Incredible!" said the former.

Grant shook his head. "You do not know the force of the ... propaganda. It appeals to something in man, some desire or lust for power. These people were ready to betray their country not for money, but in a kind of megalomaniacal pride in what they, they themselves, were going to achieve for that country. In every land it has been the same. It is the Cult of Lucifer — Lucifer, Son of the Morning. Pride and a desire for personal glory!"

Anyone with any knowledge of the 5th Column in WWII would understand that the leopard might have changed its spots but the snarl is still the same.

Good material on Common Purpose

UK Column
CP Exposed
Stop CP
Ken Craggs
BetweenMyths

Some of my own, based on material supplied

Common Purpose - more evidence
Common Purpose dishonesty
An oppressor by any other name
CP - the cancer spreads
OFSTED - the fish rots at the head
Common Purpose at work and play
More than corrupt
Groupthink spreads like a cancer through the UK
Is this how to run a country?
One ring to rule them all
Paradiso and the future of the internet
Demos, Common Purpose, Labour, Tories, security companies
Common Purpose - the disease spreads to the Netherlands
Common Purpose - meanwhile, in America
Groupthink - gentle art of persuasion
Citizens' juries and Common Purpose
Common Purpose - initially to have a coffee
Common Purpose - just the facts, ma'am
Common Purpose - rhetoric of the quisling

References to Common Purpose appear in many other posts.

[iain dale banner] would you like one

My first customer - PJC Journal

I don't know if Iain would kill me for this and I plan to write to him and then update this post accordingly but if you're somewhere on one of the lists and would like this banner to display in your sidebar, I'd be happy to personalize it for you [gratis naturally].

Matt Wardman has done some far better ones but I thought I'd go with this because of the neutral colours I need in my sidebar. The black and white is businesslike but could be seen as a little dull. Your choice.

jameshighamATmailDOTcom

If you would like, I can't do many all at once but I'd need to know these things:

a. how you'd like your name displayed;
b. if you'd like "Top 100 UK Blogs Right of Centre" [or whatever the category happened to be] above or below the pic;
c. if you'd like left, right or centre weighted [depending on your sidebar];
d. you to understand that the url embedded is to this site.

I need no link back to me - I'm happy to see it displayed as I travel round the sphere.

[than schwe] man behind the myanmar madness

It just takes one man such as this ...

General Than Shwe, 74, is the main force behind the bloodshed, forced labour, rapes and all the rest of it.

Like virtually all dictators, he's a sick man with impaired judgement, given to grandiose titles and lavish wealth, fearing his own people, escape routes in place for his spoilt family.

Let me put it another way - he is mad. Or yet another way - he is possessed and can't backtrack. Same thing.

...to produce a situation like this ...

How many times must we see the warring madness come into men's minds like this, consuming them? Why does this happen to leaders? The all-consuming desire for power and then, with it, the descent to madness and evil?

From where does this force for monumental indifference to humanity emanate? This blogger suspects he knows from whence it comes.

... which finally results in this.

[currency] and the system of credit

Paul Warburg, the European brought in to rewrite the current system of credit issuance - America, Britain and the Finance owe him a lot.

You might just possibly imagine Gordon Brown, George Bush or the Lizard Queen making this as a campaign speech but could you imagine them actively and genuinely pursuing these policies?

… We see that in many things … life … is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men.

But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.

With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

We have itemized the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items:

A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system … perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all its sides … limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country … watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine.

This was Woodrow Wilson at his inauguration on March 4th, 1913 and a fascinating aspect, now secretly hidden from the public eye was that in those days it was nakedly open for all to see and presidents concerned themselves with these issues - a time long past.

He went further, in his 2nd Address to Congress, June 23, 1913:

Our banking laws must mobilize reserves … And the control of the system of banking of issue … must be vested in the Government itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative.

Wilson was naïve. Elected on a platform of breaking big business [continuing the Roosevelt thrust] but in favour of expanding small businesses, he didn't think on further that small businesses would need finance and so, in terms of the total credits issued, the situation hardly altered.

The banking interests were more than happy to cajole him into signing the legislation setting up the Fed - a series of 12 banking houses who, far from being the "instruments", established the machinery for becoming the "masters".

It hardly mattered, for the ultimate goal was war and the profits that that entailed - not unlike the years 1929-45 and 2007-18.

One of today's exponents of the Warburg art

[blogrolls] unreciprocated visits and culling

There are three bloggers I've just noticed, with alarm, in the last 100 visitors, whom I haven't visited in return. As this is the first day I've really looked at referrals, it worries me.

In my case, the total blogging time is apportioned this way:

# Doing the mail, which includes comments to my sites and responding to those;

# Dealing with Blogpower issues;

# Following up MyBlogLog visitors who have recently come in;

# Preparing and posting, which takes a fair amount of time;

# Doing maintenance and updating things;

# Spending the remaining available time visiting one of the rolls - for example, today was Purple; yesterday was Blogpower and White; tomorrow is Maroon.

Visiting other sites, of course, takes up an inordinate amount of time. I have a total of 208 bloggers on my rolls but a breakdown of the last 100 visits here in the past few hours reveals:

# 33 Blogger visits [but about 20 returning multiple times]

# 23 Unknown or miscellaneous

# 19 Google Searches

# 15 Google Images

# 6 Blogger Navbar visits

# 4 Technorati

On a weekday it might be different but still - there are vastly more on the rolls than are visiting. I think almost noone would begrudge time spent when there is some sort of return on it. So posting interesting posts on a variety of topics seems productive, in terms of non-blogger visits.

Visiting other sites is where the problem is. What does it give back? Well, with a small proportion, it is friendship and camaraderie; with a wider circle it is learning new things and seeing new angles. But does visiting beget visiting?

The major bloggers are a mixed bag. With DK, Mr. E and some others, it is certainly friendship. But with many of the others, it seems highly unproductive. They're not saying anything DK or Mr. E aren't and yet they don't even acknowledge our existence.

One [now major] blogger told me a year ago that there was hardly any point being on a particular superstar's roll because he might have three referrals from there in the week - it was a bit like Google ads. People generally go to the Big Boys to see what they have to say, not to get into dialogue with fellow visitors or to hit the sidebar blogrolls. Generally.

I often look down 50 to 60 comments and am amazed that there is virtually no communication between the commenters themselves, except someone attacking the blogger and another commentator defending him. Eyes are generally lifted upwards and the commenter is seeking the attention of the major blogger or else just making his erudite point and going.

Is that an unfair summation?

Yet a sidebar link is a sidebar link and it helps with the Technorati. Again - is that ranking so important in the scheme of things? If I culled my blogrolls to a maximum of 50, excluding Blogpower, [and I don't intend to], it would kill many links back to me and therefore my "authority" with Technorati but would it kill my overall readership [including through a Reader] or linking from other sites?

How much do you use other people's sidebars, in other words?

Would it have that great an effect in any day - maybe a 40 to 50 drop in visits - and could the time saved visiting be used more productively in wider general reading, better posts and more quality visits to blogfriends, thereby resulting in more traffic anyway?

I suppose the chip on my shoulder is that I hate wasting time. I hate wastage of any kind but wasting someone else's time is a major crime in my book. Is it a waste of time running a big blogroll or is that the engine room of a blogger's blog?

[memo to the birds] winter cometh

Baht At is not enamoured of birds on a wire when they are sparrows [which birds are yours, Mattie Wardman?]:

Where are all the birds? Jumping up and down on my sodding phoneline it seems!

This feeder seems easy enough to construct ...

However, Mutterings and Meanderings notes, concerning swallows:

Swallows are, I think, my favourite birds. I love everything about them: their first appearance, swooping low over the fields, signalling that summer’s around the corner; their cream chests and rosy cheeks; the athleticism of the adults in their aerial arcs; the cherubic babies with their wide mouths in an ever-present grin.

But this ridiculous hotchpotch of weather has conned some couples into breeding again, leaving it dangerously late for their brood to build up the strength for their long journey to Africa.

... but I like this one a bit better and might construct it.

In the North, we had lots of bluetits and I loved putting the orange netting bags of nuts outside the window for them to come and peck at, even if they did peck the bag to bits and fight each other for a place.

Here's an account of someone else who likes them too.

Now, over here in the fSU, little birds often come to my balcony window and I'd dearly like to put a bag of nuts out there again or some sort of feeder but where to buy such things? Maybe I can make one.

[blogburst] and other remunerative schemes

Would you trust this man?

Longrider draws our attention to a worrying scheme:

If you are a blogger who is keen on getting more exposure, then you may well be interested … On the downside, some of the early criticisms still stand. The first is remuneration.

Intellectual property rights is next in the licensing scheme:

… you grant to Pluck and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display and disclose the Work …

Little bloggers, for whom this post is intended, are not into this stuff and may not fully understand it. They might see $1500 and think how good that looks. My comment at Longrider's was:

This needs to be read carefully. On the face of it, it’s a good idea but signing away intellectual property rights is self-actualizing, as they know.

If you’re not much chop as a blogger, it won’t matter all that much but if you are good, then you’ll get exposure and you’ve signed to them so they reap the benefit without any legal obligation to remunerate.

In short, it’s a wnak [excuse my French].

[sackerson] a little off theme

Sackerson, at Bearwatch, has to be one of the best bloggers around and how he's not in the Top 200 I don't know. Don't necessarily judge by this off-theme post. Here are some other posts to peruse:

A light post on how much money we need; but this one is far more his bread and butter.

Sackerson would be embarrassed by this slightly OTT rap, as you'll glean form his tone but I care not - I know a good blog when I read one.

[strange stats] referrals breakdowns

I wasn't going to post again tonight but something came up to make me question the essence of what I'm doing with my blog.

First of all, the chart you see on percentage breakdown of country visits is interesting because in the morning, these are roughly the percentages, with the U.S. N1 and the UK N2. However, in the evening, that is reversed.

That's not the really intriguing thing though.

Have you ever stopped and analysed your referrals, i.e. the sites each visitor has just come from, as distinct from the visitor him/herself?

I just did it for the first time and it is both intriguing and disappointing. Given that these are referrals only, it's possible to guestimate that within the last 100 uniques, only about 20 are from visiting fellow bloggers. A quick check of MyBlogLog, dividing the total faces by the number of hundred visitors in the day, shows that it's a fair figure.

So, extrapolating over the day, only about 30% of my blogroll is actually visiting me, which gives the lie to the notion that bloggers simply visit each other in some sort of incestuous society. This has implications for Blogpower.

If it's true, then most bloggers are not reciprocating visits, i.e. they're welcoming them but not returning themselves.

So if we say that 30 visits in each 100 come from fellow bloggers, where do the other 70 come from? An analysis shows that many come from Google searches, Technorati, Bloglines and the like - about 35%, which leaves 35% unaccounted for.

This evening I've noticed Google Images as a constant referrer - i.e. someone is following a keyword, then hitting an image which is heading a page on which my site appears. But here's the thing - one or two of those images are mine, from my own private stock, used in the post but not linked back to Google.

This suggests that Google is trawling through posts and then using images from that post to display on its front page. Not that I'm complaining, of course, Mr. Google.

Is that sort of thing happening to you?