Hitchens the Good - Peter, that is - has been charged with leading the Daily Mail’s attempt to join the blogging revolution.  All the dailies are at it now, following the Guardian’s percipient lead.  They are singing along with the late Lionel Bart’s prince of cunning, desperately reviewing the situation.

The situation is this ...

The print media has managed to survive the depredations of news broadcast by radio and then television by offering the reader a special relationship.  Newspapers stand or fall according to the loyalty of the reader.  So the deal is: the paper plays on his bias, however crude that may be and, from a journalistic point of view, however much disingenuity that entails.  And in exchange the reader gives them his undivided attention.  Week in, week out.  “You gettum titillated, me gettum rich … and powerful.”

None are more rich nor more powerful than Rupert Murdoch.  In his speech to The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers in London a fortnight ago he identified “reasoned comment” (though God knows its mostly just comment) as the diamond and pearl encrusted centre-piece of this arrangement.  But is it beginning to prove inadequate to its task?  Murdoch may think so.  Certainly, he thinks that the internet revolution, with blogging at its heart, will be the death of newsprint.

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Yesterday, the Agora blog posted the considered judgement of UN Special Rapporteur Doudou Diéne on the cartoon wars.  The Danes, it seems, are racists and xenophobes.

To get away with saying this sort of thing Doudou must be - or consider himself to be - one of the global great and the good.  No stain of racism, no smear of xenophobia attaches to his international personna.  Or his Armani.

He is not, however, a very deep Doudou.  His UN report, incredibly vital and influential though it doubtless is, has the title, “Situation des populations musulmanes et arabes dans diverses régions du monde - Rapport soumis par le Rapporteur spécial sur les formes contemporaines de racisme, de discrimination raciale, de xénophobie et de l’intolérance qui y est associée.”  Pity it’s not more pithy.  Some of it has been translated into English by Agora and can be read here, if you have run out of sleeping pills.

I can’t work myself up into much of a lather of indignation at this sort of thing.  It’s a rigged game.  Can one really expect the UN to pronounce that the Danish constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, must be upheld?  Or that it’s high time Muslims around the world learned to accept mild criticism with humility and a willingness to learn why they are perceived negatively?

Pigs, of course, might fly.  But never in the Dar al-Islam.  And never in the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Nick Griffin broke his long silence on the Jewish Question today with a lengthy article you can read here.

He seems to have been goaded into action by criticism from American WN’s, presumably occasioned at the Amren Conference at which he was a speaker.  He makes an interesting case - the right case for Britain, no doubt.

In it he pays some respect, at least, to ethnic genetic interests, which is the first time I have heard these three promising words from any leading BNP official.  He acknowledges the well-known negative aspects of the Jewish philosophical contribution to Western politics.  He stresses very few potential positives to be got from engagement with Jews, so I wouldn’t necessarily put him in the “Taylor camp”.  The attraction seems to be conflict avoidance ... don’t start a war on two fronts.  One of them, against Jewry, you can never win.  And losing that will lose you the other war as well - the war you must win.

My only real criticism of this article is that he directs his fire at obvious and easy targets but declines the most serious and interesting.  Conspiracy theorists and “activists of German descent” come in for most of it.  I am not sure how much he gains by bearding these guys while leaving the MacDonald thesis unaddressed.  He acknowledges that highly intelligent Ashkenazics take leading roles in every political-philosophical argument, not merely those of the left.  This is true, and he cites TBC and the great Richard Hernnstein, for example.  But, Hernnstein was still acting out of his perceived ethnic interests, a factor which Griffin prefers not to mention.

So, if Jewish activism in toto is indeed doggedly ethnocentric and as such a survival strategy, as MacDonald contends, then what possible change can be effected through rapprochement?  The answer seems simply to be “None but it does not matter - it is realpolitik.”

Have you heard the one about the blonde girl who gave birth to twins?  She searched the whole town looking for the other Dad.

OK, it’s not the best joke in the world.  It’s not even the best blond girl joke in the world (in English: Essex girl).  But is it the most offensive?  Or even just a teeny bit offensive?  Sufficient, say, for the purposes of a press complaint under the race hate code?

Well, Vigrid, a bunch of Norwegian guys with a certain political affiliation - Godwin’s Law notwithstanding - may be about to find out.

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Our cool Prime Minister, yeah, is looking like, y’ know, a bit of a dead man walking.  A drip-drip of killer Nu-Labour financial factoids is escaping into the public domain.  It can’t be stopped.

The latest development is that the people’s Prime Minister’s own fund-raiser - a man named Levy who was somehow elevated to the House of Lords - is distancing himself from, y’know, Tony’s slow-motion accident.  Since nobody outside Downing Street y’knew anything at all about the Party’s loan-funding, Tony is all on his lonesome.  Though, obviously, God still is right there.  Standing beside him.  What a pity He’s not interested in ermine.

The latest loan-shark to come out with a belly-up admission of involvement in Blair’s scandal is a property squillionaire named Andrew Rosenfeld.

He follows in the wake of the four frustrated Lords appointees: Rosenfeld’s business partner, Sir David Garrard, curry magnate Sir Gulam Noon (who’s had a bit of bother with Nu-Labour before), Dr Chai Patel and someone who might - actually might - be English, stockbroker Barry Townsley.

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A fine example of wysteria-hysteria from the Guardian’s social engineering

education correspondent Matthew Taylor appears on-line today.  See if you can beat my count of the wall-climbers’ inflations, distortions and outright untruths this flapdoodle peddles.

The rules are simple even for average folks of 100 IQ.  A palpable but minor inflation of the facts scores an inferior one point; an old-fashioned, uncomplicated distortion scores a downlow two; but a rip-roaring, black-hearted lie gets the full, Billy Bragg house.  Clue: there is more than one of the latter.

I scored a niggardly eighteen points.

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It was too much even for the journalist from the Melbourne Age:

A Vietnamese choir and African dancers were on hand as Victoria signed a sister-state agreement with Scotland yesterday. Confused?

Confused? Well, yes. Were the Vietnamese choir and African dancers supposed to represent Victoria or Scotland or something else altogether? And what if Tanzania and Vietnam were to sign such an agreement. Would they mark the occasion with a bagpipe rendition of Waltzing Matilda?

My thanks go to Geoff for pointing me in the direction of this Guardian article.

Britain secretly supplied Israel with plutonium during the 1960s despite a warning from military intelligence that it could help the Israelis to develop a nuclear bomb, it was disclosed last night. The deal, made during Harold Wilson’s Labour government, is revealed in classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by BBC2’s Newsnight programme.

The documents also show how Britain made hundreds of shipments to Israel of material which could have helped in its nuclear weapons programme, including compounds of uranium, lithium, beryllium and tritium, as well as heavy water.

Israel asked Britain in 1966 to supply 10mg of plutonium. Israel would have required almost 5kg of plutonium to build an atomic bomb, but British defence intelligence officials warned that 10mg had “significant military value” and could enable the Jewish state to carry out important experimental work to speed up its nuclear weapons programme.

Documents show that the decision to sell plutonium to Israel in 1966 was blocked by officials in both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, who said: “It is HMG’s policy not to do anything which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear weapons.” But the deal was forced through by a Jewish civil servant, Michael Michaels, in Tony Benn’s Ministry of Technology, which was responsible for trade in nuclear material, according to Newsnight.

Peter Kelly, who was British defence intelligence’s expert on the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, knew Mr Michaels. He told Newsnight he believed Mr Michaels knew that Israel was trying to build an atomic bomb, but that he had dual loyalties to Britain and Israel.

Mr Benn told the programme that civil servants in his department kept the deals secret from him and his predecessor, Frank Cousins.

He had always suspected that civil servants were doing deals behind his back, but he never thought they would sell plutonium to Israel. He told Newsnight: “I’m not only surprised, I’m shocked. It never occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against the policy of the government.

“Michaels lied to me, I learned by bitter experience that the nuclear industry lied to me again and again.”

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