I must admit to a twinge of schadenfreude on hearing the news this morning that former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been charged along with her husband Charlie and diverse others with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. This is a serious criminal allegation which could lead to a substantial prison sentence for those convicted.

How the mighty they do fall. Let us see how the Justice Department across the Pond fares with its inquiry into Rupert Murdoch and News International’s parent company, News Corp.

Mistress Brooks has done herself no favours in adopting the demure puritan look, as pictured above, for evry fule no that she is a nasty scheming witch, and her eviction from the Fourth Estate is most welcome within the journalistic trade. A few days ago, during a Newsnight roundsofa debate on the media phone-hacking scandal, celebrity lawyer Charlotte Harris noted…

“[W]ith the contrasting collar, it did look a little bit Salem.”

An accurate observation, if a bit rich coming from a woman known for her Fatal Attraction body language when on-camera. What the late great Arthur Miller would have made of this real-life drama one can only wonder.

Last week I was cycling around the London docklands, on the day that the passenger gondolas for the new Thames cable car were first being tested. I have followed with interest the construction of the so-called “Emirates Air Line”, which is recently re-elected Tory mayor Boris Johnson’s latest vanity project. Seeing the cars installed and moving swiftly along the cable brought home the hideous reality of the whole £60 million and largely taxpayer-funded scheme.

What struck me on seeing the passenger cars was how small they are. In fact, they are not much larger than ski lift gondolas, and I fail to see how cyclists will be able to transport their bikes across the river in this way, as has been promised by Transport for London. That is if cyclists can afford the ticket price in the first place.

Another thing that struck me was how unstable the cars are in the face of a stiff but not unusually hard wind blowing along the Thames. As I watched the diminutive gondolas make their way along the kilometre-long cable at breakneck speed, I noticed them swaying from side to side in a most alarming manner. Even when they were static, as viewed from the Albert Dock terminus, I felt physically sick as I followed their flapping motion. And that was with me on terra firma!

Tory nobs need no help in public portrayal as prats, but that hasn’t stopped former News of the Screws editor and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks stabbing her close friend David Cameron in the back with a reference today at the Leveson Inquiry to the prime minister’s understanding of ‘textspeak’.

Next, Rupert Murdoch uses a Times editorial to inform reggae fan Cameron that the phrase “Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side” has nothing to do with protocol in the presence of aristocracy.

English Jew, Second World War soldier, football fanatic and hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, co-founder of the Brownshirt-bashing 43 Group, is no more. A sad loss to humanity, following a life well lived.

It has been said by many, myself included, that blogs, pseudoblogs and other Internet discussion forums bring out the worst in people. That is, in an environment inhabited by vicious trolls with silly monikers, in which no-one knows you’re a dog, there is a tendency to unleash one’s inner wanker. The rest is good business for egotistical professional writers and their publishers.

No so, it seems, going by the results of some fascinating systems analysis research published today in Nature Scientific Reports. According to Zürich-based computational physicist Antonios Garas and his colleagues, online discussion is no different from other forms of communication. Detailed quantitative analysis of some 2.5 million forum posts from more than 20,000 users in 20 Internet Relay Chat channels, covering a wide range of topics from music and sport to politics, shows that users tend to follow social norms. Interweb chatters are found to be persistent in expressing positive or negative emotions, and there is a reluctance to provoke confrontation.

The authors do not discuss the origins of the patterns of emotional persistence found in forum contributors and topics discussed, but their agent-based model of emotional interaction can, they say, be used to test hypotheses concerning the interaction of agents against their outcome on a systemic level. This could in turn reveal the rules underlying the online behaviour of individuals who are otherwise hard to access.

Further reading

Garas et al., “Emotional persistence in online chatting communities”, Nature Scientific Reports 2:402 (2012)

Somebody at EUMETSAT in Darmstadt with too much time on their hands, and an overactive imagination straining under the crushing weight of an international civil service bureaucracy, this afternoon input the following search string into Google…

“francis sedgemore virtualised emperor penguin”

Peculiar, maybe, but at least they had the decency to use proper European spelling.

For some years now, medialand has been going downhill, at least in terms of remuneration for journalists. The principal qualifications for a media career today are wealthy and well-connected parents, and a willingness to work for free. The Huffington Post model now prevails in comment journalism, and staff positions within media companies are increasingly filled by unpaid interns.

This new media business model is rapidly extending from mainstream news media to specialist publications. Take, for example, the following editorial positions with the Christian missionary organisation WEC…

Each vacancy notice includes the line…

“This position is non-salaried as all WEC personnel look to God to provide their personal needs.”

What I want to know is, will the Big Man also pay my National Insurance stamp?

Hat tip: The Media Blog

Londoners go to the polls tomorrow to elect a mayor whose realm stretches from Enfield and Romford in the north and east, to Biggin Hill and Uxbridge in the south and west. Greater London is a vast metropolitan area, home to some eight million souls. Also to be elected are 25 members of the London Assembly, who do little more than sit around a circular table in an odd-shaped building on the south bank of the River Thames, listening to the all-powerful mayor wibble on about various matters of greater and lesser import.

The mayoral contest is effectively between two ridiculous characters, one of whom cut his political teeth as London leader during the UK-wide reign of the Wicked Witch of Grantham, and the other a glorified after-dinner speaker who has his longer-term sights on the position currently occupied by fellow nob David Cameron. The names of the principal candidates are, respectively, Livingstone and Johnson, though in this age of personality politics they wish us to know them as “Ken” and “Boris”. So Livingstone and Johnson it is then.

While a man of the left, I cannot in all conscience vote for the Labour Party candidate Livingstone. It has been said by some of my comrades that one should, if unwilling to give Livingstone a first preference vote, give the newt fancier the second preference. This is the old ‘voting with a peg on the nose’ argument, and, while I feel for my comrades’ genuine angst, I am not at all convinced.

Ken Livingstone is an odious creature, and the charge list against him is as long as I am tall. I shall not go through Livingstone’s rap sheet here, but will mention his brazen and repeated use of antisemitic tropes for political purposes. For example, Livingstone hosts a show on the Iranian propaganda outlet Press TV, which should be enough to disqualify him from holding public office in a free country. But it isn’t, apparently. With the aid of Press TV, Livingstone can get away with slandering the Jews by accusing them of racism in their conversion policies…

“Is not the problem here that when Zionism was conceived of back in the 1880s, the world was one that accepted racial division… The Germans talked about anyone of German blood, even if it had been a thousand years since they left, able to come back. The world broadly accepted this racism at all levels, and that was the origin of Zionism – ‘every other group is racially selective, we will do it’.”

“[I]t’s very difficult to convert into Judaism. I think it’s a real problem, there’s this racial exclusiveness that has its origins in that dreadful time… 1880s, when all nations suffered from it.”

While those wishing to convert to Judaism are made by Orthodox rabbinic authorities to jump through a number of hoops, conversion is certainly not premised on race. To say otherwise is an outrageous slur, and not only when the words are uttered on the platform of what one could legitimately argue is a racist if not downright genocidal regime. It is a particularly sick irony.

This leaves me in a bit of a quandary. For whom should I vote, if not Livingstone, or a man whose soul is given to one of the most malevolent political entities in Christendom? I was minded to give my first preference vote to Green Party candidate Jenny Jones, but now I am not so sure. Jones has been exhorting her followers to give their second preferences to Livingstone, and on Monday responded thus to those who questioned her sanity…

“I trust Ken. I don’t trust Boris.”

Ah, that would be the promise from her friend “Ken” of the position of London Cycling Supremo following his coronation as mayor. Aim high, Ms Jones, aim high!

Never mind pegs and noses, I wouldn’t vote for Kenneth Robert Livingstone if I were wearing a nuclear, biological, chemical suit.

Judy K provides an informative Jewish perspective.

Since when has “fit and proper” been a necessary criterion for the leadership of an international company? I ask this in all seriousness, as there is no end of lying, cheating and goodness knows what else bastards running multinational concerns. And some of them are contributors to the coffers of Britain’s major political parties.

The sordid little row currently underway about the partisanship of the Labour majority on the House of Commons culture committee is pathetic. Bouncing controversial clauses at the last moment into select committee reports is standard political procedure across the board. No-one should feign shock or surprise at the sly reference to Rupert Murdoch’s unfitness for purpose, least of all the ambitious young Tory MP Louise Mensch.

As for the Labour Party and News International, it’s a bit rich for culture committee member Paul Farrelly and his colleagues to anathematise Rupert Murdoch after so many years with their collective tongue up the media baron’s arse.

Belated Beltane greetings!

Yesterday I was out in the heart of the Great Wen, and across the river in Southwark, with the Mayday procession of the Deptford Jack in the Green. It must be a bit of a shock for the business-suited toiling ants of the City of London to see all this primal greenery amongst the plate glass and brushed steel ultra-modernism, but they soon get into the swing of it, and expressions of surprise quickly turn to smiles.

The annual tour of the Deptford Jack takes in a number of City of London and Bankside hostelries, and in the middle includes a wobble over the wobbly bridge, with the gawky teenagers of the City of London school for the posh (founded originally as an educational charity for the poor) craning their necks out of upper floor windows on the north bank of the Thames, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the south. The Deptford Jack tour is a series of historical, architectural and cultural contrasts, and it is such good fun!