It’s a debate about the future survival of newspapers. Rupert Murdoch believes peope will eventually pay to read the news online. I resist doing that, for now…but Imight get behind a paywall if the journalism there was as good as this.

Rebuilding Parkersburg after the tornado http://bit.ly/clCjcv

They were assisted by the Plunkett Foundation, whose founder Horace Plunkett’s philosophy is summed up as:

We seek economic solutions to create social change

We seek solutions that enrich rural community life

We see self-help as the most effective way to tackle rural needs…

Sounds like a big piece of the Big Society right there.

Which makes the whole argument another profoundly annoying example of politicians either not understanding what they are talking about or believing that we are too stupid to tell the difference. Business leaders were never deceived into backing the Tory policy but they should have been more scrupulous in making certain the argument was couched properly. It’s not a tax a on jobs but it most certainly is an example of the difference between two competing philosophies: Labour’s, which says the state knows best how to manage the economy and the Tories, which says we as individuals know best how to spend money, invest in jobs etc etc

Why can’t they talk about big ideas? Cooking up phoney battles is demeaning and insulting.

As for Gordon Brown claiming 2.5 million jobs have been created under a Labout government…do not get me started. There is so much that is deceitful and dishonest about his style of politics, repeating lies until everyone is too exhausted to challenge them…what fun the next few weeks are going to be.

Where I get frustrated is at the inability of the Tories to articulate the core point behind this issue and to expose Labour’s grotesque appropriation of the word ‘economy’ to mean ‘the state’.

Gordon Brown says the NI cuts will ‘take £6bn out of the economy’, which is arrant nonsense. As we know it will actually leave £6bn IN the economy.

But David Cameron must explain this to voters properly. It’s quite simple, here’s the script:

“The economy is not the state, it is us, and the decisions every single one of us makes on how to spend our earnings. The state is our servant, not our master – it is our money, not the state’s. Reducing taxes leaves money in the economy, to invest, to grow. Giving it to the state is a waste.”

He and his team are dancing around this theme but they must find a way to ram it home.

Below is your starter for ten…go to http://tiny.cc/gnt7V for the full Monty.

Mixed reviews for new release

(Davos, Canton of Graubünden, Switzerland – February 1.)

With their customary flourish, western governments unveiled their widely anticipated new vapour-ware product yesterday, dubbed the mi-God.
Arriving with actually no new content or special features whatsoever despite months of hype, the twelve-foot thick tablet looks like a giant lead balloon and met with hesitant reviews from the twitterati.
But the mi-God’s co-founder and visionary chief architect, Gordon Brown, called it a “revolutionary product” that would enable users, and bankers in particular, to carry on living and thriving in their imaginary worlds, free from the constraints of a normal economy, any kind of ethics, or a competitive open market … more at http://tiny.cc/gnt7V

- The sterling/Euro exchange rate is a shocker. Notionally £1.11 to the Euro, by the time those rapacious sods at Gatwick had consumed their pound (or euro??) of flesh, it was to all intents and purposes at parity. Prices that would, 2 years ago, have appeared appealing therefore appeared atrocious. I feel for the Spanish. Tourists will stay away in droves. Locals seemed very happy to be paying the prices in restaurants, but shops were ominously devoid of customers. OK, this is a tourist-magnet capital city so prices are inflated, but so is pay. They’re unhappy in Greece. How long before they’re unhappy in Spain? It feels like something has to break in Euro-land. Or maybe achieving parity was the aim all along. Time to say goodbye to sterling perhaps?

- Still on the subject of the current exchange rate, we’re told it is wonderful for UK exporters. This is supposed to be our consolation for the collapse in sterling. Yet I read in The Times that, according to the manufacturers’ federation the EEF, the supposed advantage is working only for a selected slice or two of British exporters, that in general the rush you would expect of deal-hungry businesses to root out beneficial new overseas contracts has not happened. The article blamed it on the lack of knowledge among companies about how to export. Rubbish. The government-backed export agency UKTI exists, very publicly, to help anyone who wants to export. I can’t help thinking it is, yet again, down to lazy, unimaginitive British business people who think that mere survival is as good as winning. Survive? They don’t deserve to.

- Snow followed me from the UK like a faithful hound. First time in 10 years it had snowed in Madrid apparently. Odd, then, that local council cleaning crews were out gritting/salting pavements as if it were quite a matter of routine. I was stunned, having watched how completely crap we are in the UK at dealing with weather emergencies. Good old Madrilenos, I thought. I then spoke to a local who lives in the suburbs and he said they only do that where tourists can see them. Not so different after all, then…

- Cops. Lots of them. A younger me might have objected but now I feel very reassured. They don’t look hard and menacing – indeed many of them are young women who bring great dignity to the role. They are just there. What is not there? Any sign of feral youth sporting gangsta gear, frightening old ladies, and everyone else for that matter. Maybe they’re all in the Madrid suburbs, a friend said. Well, maybe. But the little buggers are all over Central London like a rash, they don’t stay away from the centre. The feeling grows that something has gone horribly wrong in Britain.

But this took my breath away. The version you will see requires some text entry, but when you forward it using their system, the recipient sees it cold. Wonderful. Heading for the wardrobe…

video.bigwarmup.com

Of course, I would not for one moment suggest that BT is a rotten, dirty, low-down lying bunch of scumbags. Nothing could be further from the truth as legions of satisfied customers will attest.

But twice in the past 9 months I have been obliged to have broadband installed in new premises. Each time it has been late/non-functional and each time the escalation of my complaint has received an eerily similar-sounding progression of explanations:

1. Five days later than promised, no service – order processing, takes time, don’t you know? And anyway, it was never supposed to be on before now, someone gave you the wrong date. (How????)
2. Two days later, still not on – well, it has been provisioned. We’ll check.
3. Five more days pass – ah, there’s a fault at the exchange.
4. Two more days – general network outage in your area, everyone’s been hit. (They hadn’t.)
5. Five more days, close to going postal – OK, OK, we’ll send an engineer.

Engineer arrives, problem solved in 5 minutes. Turns out some bozo had got the wires the wrong way round at the exchange. But you get the idea…a simple issue, but dressed in increasingly apocalyptic terms, all to keep one at bay.

Now, I repeat, it would be ludicrous, disrespectful and downright wrong to accuse BT of being anything other than a brilliant, fine and upstanding provider of communications services, and any similarity between the two experiences is just a coincidence.

Makes you think though, doesn’t it?

So do please check back on a regular basis, or if you Tweet, follow @scepticblog.

They are successful. And that makes them bad, apparently.

What should they have done? According to the chippy and increasingly swaggering Democrats in Congress, they should have done anything but make shedloads of cash and be disgustingly successful. Interesting. I would have thought success is something we should celebrate, no matter how squid-like the successful business is.

THE CITY’S FAVOURITE SHIRTMAKER, CHARLES TYRWHITT ’DEFIANTLY’ OPENS NEW STORE IN THE CITY – 30TH JULY 2009

The City of London’s Favourite Shirt Maker, Charles Tyrwhitt, is ’defiantly’ opening a new retail store in The City of London on Thursday, 30th July 2009.

The store will be located at 29 Canada Place, Canary Wharf, at the epi-centre of London’s financial district.

Charles Tyrwhitt was ’ringside’ in Manhatten, New York with its stores in Madison Avenue and 7th Avenue during the worst stages of the recession. Charles Tyrwhitt has stores in the same building as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, both casualties of the recession.

“We’ve cut £2 million of marketing costs, and as a result are now profitable,“ says Charles Tyrwhitt, Chairman Nick Wheeler.
………
Great shirts…hope the business thrives, I really do. But imagine any business saying they cut marketing by £2m…or maybe sacked all their staff…to become profitable!!!

Hope it works, like I said, but seems an odd way to run a business. How’s anyone going to find the shop if they’ve cut marketing???