Hi all. It’s been over a year, and I keep getting asked when (or if) I’ll ever get around to blogging again. The answer is: I’m not blogging, but I am writing. This gives me little reason to blog and some good reasons not to.

Most Thursdays (and occasionally at other times) you can find a column on technology or telecommunications at ITWeb. Every Tuesday, my column on politics, economics and (anti-)environmentalism is published at the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Branko Brkic’s dearly departed Maverick magazine: The Daily Maverick. I also still write a monthly column for Brainstorm magazine, where the then-editor Brkic first convinced me to write opinion, and where current editor Samantha Perry continues to tolerate my invariably overdue mutterings.

Here’s what I’ve been up to since I stopped blogging, written while The Daily Maverick was still in pre-launch beta testing: Going cold turkey.

Since its launch, I’ve taken up one of my favourite cudgels: Too late to cool it? This week I penned a piece on the temerity of leftwingers who claim to oppose fascism: The irony of the left. I have many ideas lined up to fuel future arguments, so keep an eye on The Daily Maverick. Moreover, it is home to an eclectic group of brilliant reporters, photographers, analysts, commentators and columnists who offer some of the finest reading matter available on the South African internet. It is a pleasure and an honour to be published alongside them.

Elsewhere, this rant on power plugs for Brainstorm magazine elicited some vigorous nodding from readers, many of whom, unsurprisingly, share my pain.

Though a promising challenger has recently appeared (here’s to you, Duncan McLeod), ITWeb has for 15 years been the backbone and daily staple of the South African tech and telecoms scene. Among my recent ITWeb columns are an opinion about which commenters appeared to miss the point somewhat: Sure, fund the SABC with tax, an argument about who might be producing primary reporting in the future: Reviving the leisured classes, and a story about a man, The chief incompetence officer, which may yet have repercussions.

Discussion of or comments on my columns are best posted on the publishers’ respective sites, not only because they buy my bread and beer, but also because I’m more likely to read and respond there. I’ll post alerts of new articles and columns over here, however, so the many friends (and enemies) I’ve made here can follow me wherever I write. Speaking of following, I’m @IvoVegter.

Of course, the archives remain intact, and contain some 218 041 words in 520 posts, with 1 331 comments. Some of the topics I tackled, or responses I promised (but never wrote) will no doubt surface again on ITWeb, in Brainstorm or on The Daily Maverick.

Thank you all for reading and, most importantly, arguing with me. You’ve been a whetstone for my blade: sharpening my arguments, but innocent of how rashly I wield them. You rock — dangerous communists included.

I don’t fear global warming much, but since this would be a particularly disastrous impact, the BBC’s news yesterday was a relief: Great tits cope well with warming.

Those alarmist Beeb boobs¹ must feel a little deflated, though.

(Hat tip: Leon Jacobs.)

1. The word boob, unlike tit, is derived from booby. A booby is bigger than even a pair of great tits. [↩]

If there was any doubt about the mainstream media’s agenda, this piece from the BBC should lay them to rest. It cites ten global warming skeptic arguments, and provides counter-arguments. Note the image caption: Unravelling the skeptics, which links to an article by the BBC’s environment correspondent who claims he’s not entirely sure what the arguments against the political consensus on global warming actually are.

This is not reporting. This is nothing less than partisan advocacy.

For its rebuttals, it relies on information supplied by Gavin Schmidt, who calls a significant correction of the most relied-upon temperature data — maintained by the organisation that employs him — “another ado about nothing“, who is a co-contributor at RealClimate.org with Michael Mann (he of the broken hockey-stick), and who claims to welcome openness in the debate but refuses to admit Steve McIntyre to the same debate.

The arguments are notable only for their vagueness, and for the patchy nature (at best) of the rebuttals. Worse, it omits the biggest and best of the skeptics’ arguments: that the direct and indirect costs of government programmes to curb global warming will exceed any claimed benefits even if they were to accrue, alternatively that the cost-benefit of spending resources on climate change is considerably worse than the cost-benefit of directing those same resources towards any number of other global problems.

I’ve considered most of the specific arguments in previous posts on the subject. Check under the climate change category for a selection. One day, should I find myself casting about for some productive procrastination, I may fisk the “news” in this article in particular.

But whatever you do, whether or not the BBC is right, and whether or not you believe them, do not mistake it for “news”. It’s BBC News, which is a different animal altogether.

No wonder the issues in the US election campaign are turning towards economic concerns. Not only are there some (economic concerns, that is), but the core Bush-bashing issue of his presidency is starting to look rather limp. MoveOn.org had to turn to vicious slander in its effort to discredit the Congressional testimony of General Petreaus as propaganda for the White House. The media has, in general, been fairly reliably opposed to the Iraq war. Reporters have consistently hedged good news with bad, and are usually skeptical of any news of progress. Some outright suppress it, revelling in predictions of the inglorious defeat of the US-led coalition.

Yet the orthodox view of Iraq as a disaster is under threat. Even the BBC is pointing to statistics that — across the board, it says — show the situation in Iraq is improving:

Is Iraq getting better? The statistics say so, across the board.

Over the past three months, there has been a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence. The figures for dead and wounded, military and civilian, have also greatly improved.

All across Baghdad, which has seen the worst of the violence, streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business.

People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes.

Everybody agrees that things are much better.

Except the BBC, of course:

But is the improvement only skin deep? And will it last once the American troops, whose “surge” has clearly made a difference, begin to scale down?

Several quotations in the article do support the view that security, progress and peace in Iraq remain dependent on coalition forces and reconstruction efforts. Which leads to only one conclusion: those calling for a rapid withdrawal (including presidential candidates that do) are willing to give up the gains made, condemn Iraq to rule by partisan or insurgent militias, and sacrifice the peace and prosperity of Iraqis on the altar of political expediency. Perversely, if that happens they’ll get to say, “I told you so,” instead of paying the price for their betrayal. I hope the American people won’t let that happen.

Russia ‘worried’ by Iran war risk — BBC News, 18 September 2007

Most people just don’t believe the environmentalists. They think they’re being had. And they might just be right.

Of the more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the last three years, less than half endorse, either explicitly or implicitly, the theory of anthropogenic global warming, a new survey has found. While few reject it out of hand, a plurality are neutral on the question.

Among the public, only four in ten Americans think there is evidence that humans cause climate change. and more than half of all Britons, says the BBC, believe politicians and scientists exaggerate global warming “to make money”.

And they’d be right. The very same BBC reports that a study by the UK Taxpayers’ Alliance finds that the government collects almost twice as much in green tax than is needed to pay for the “carbon footprint” those revenues are meant to “offset”. The change the government pocketed? More than £10 billion. Per household, that’s £400 pounds the greens and the bureaucrats are stealing.

Meanwhile, those “offsets” include such eco-friendly efforts as providing foot pumps to replace diesel-driven water pumps in the third world, so rural farmers can do long days of the sort of hard labour that a century ago was outlawed as too harsh for British prisoners.

You’d think that if British environuts are going to exploit third-world slave labour to salve your conscience, they’d at least figure out how to do it at a profit, so you can get a decent tax rebate too. Mind you, I guess someone has to pay for their fancy hybrids, solar panels, hemp fashions and organic artichokes.

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There’s a new service around, that’s going to cause some red faces. Built by Virgil Griffith, it’s called the WikiScanner. It tracks user edits to the online “encyclopedia” to the organisation or location where they originate.

For one, Diebold seems to be burnishing its image. At least, so it appears. A whole section about the criticisms on its voting machines disappeared because of an anonymous editor (Wikipedia permits anonymous edits?!) whose location has been traced to the organisation.

But they’re not the only culprits. There are more worrying (and spectacularly puerile) defacements that originate, among others, at the New York Times. Guess what? They don’t like Bush much over there, and don’t mind a little crudeness in describing Condoleezza Rice, either.

One can understand why companies and individuals might want to change what Wikipedia says about them. But why would an apparent journalist deface entries about others?

Update: Yup, it caused red faces, all right. The BBC ran a report hammering, amongst others, the CIA for its Wikipedia edits on the Iranian president. It should have thought to check, before someone else — the Biased BBC blog, no less — discovered that BBC staff had edited the entry on the American president. Granted, they changed only one letter, but it was a fairly important letter in his middle name, ‘Walker’. Tony Blair was a victim of immature insults too. Proving that it doesn’t buy this “do unto others” nonsense, a note about a BBC Trust report, which found ‘trendy left-wing bias’, was also whitewashed by a BBC staffer.