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An article on Skwawkbox makes some eyebrow-raising claims about the validity of elections in Venezuela:

claims that Venezuela’s election was rigged and that right-winger Juan Guaido’s self-proclaimed presidency is therefore somehow valid, simply do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

source: https://skwawkbox.org/2019/01/28/video-neutral-election-observers-explain-venezuelas-world-class-election-system-is-unriggable/

This is what is known, in technical terms, as bollocks.

I’m dealing here with the narrow claims that Skwawkbox makes about the (I presume) presidential elections of 20th May 2018. None of that should detract from the appalling situation in Venezuela, or the Maduro regime’s culpability for the situation. The narrow claims that Skwawkbox makes about recent elections being legitimate are, I think, instructive.

The technical arrangements for elections in Venezuela are, indeed, impressive. The system is provided by Smartmatic. Smartmatic’s parent company is SGO, whose chair is none other than Mark Malloch-Brown, the former deputy secretary general of the UN and foreign minister in Gordon Brown’s government. Smartmatic are rightly proud of their achievements in Venezuela.

In a post linked to from the one at hand, Skwawkbox link to an article on the Forbes Leadership Forum setting out how good the Venezuelan election system is. Unfortunately, that article is from 2013. Things have changed since then.

Smartmatic are less happy with the 2017 Venezuelan elections.

It is, therefore, with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout figures on Sunday, 30 July, for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with. 

source: https://www.smartmatic.com/news/article/smartmatic-statement-on-the-recent-constituent-assembly-election-in-venezuela/

Indeed, thereafter, Smartmatic stopped working in Venezuela.

After 15 years of service and 14 elections assisted providing a secure and auditable voting system, Smartmatic closed its offices and ceased operations in Venezuela.

source: http://www.smartmatic.com/news/article/smartmatic-announces-cease-of-operations-in-venezuela/

Why did Smartmatic, after a long and successful history in Venezuela, stop working there?

The reasons for the closure are widely known. In August of 2017, after the elections to the National Constituency Assembly, Smartmatic publicly stated that the National Elections Council had announced results that were different from those reflected by the voting system. This episode lead to an immediate rupture of the client-provider relationship. 

source: http://www.smartmatic.com/news/article/smartmatic-announces-cease-of-operations-in-venezuela/

In short, despite the use of impressive election equipment, it was still possible for the elections to be rigged. The 2018 elections were not even conducted with Smartmatic there to audit the process; nor were the regional and municipal elections of the fourth quarter of 2017.

It took a few minutes on Google to find this information. I question why Skwawkbox has published an article claiming that the Venezuela electoral system has integrity – indeed, that “its mandate is far more foolproof than governments in the UK and US can currently claim” – without mentioning that the company providing the election machines has said that an election was rigged even though its kit was being used, and has pulled out of the country because the elections are manifestly unfair.

In case there is any doubt, the Venezuelan National Electoral Commission (CNE) currently says that they are using Smartmatic technology.^†

Who is maintaining and setting up these machines? Who is verifying that it’s all done properly? What are the audit procedures? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How do we know that the fraud, identified by Smartmatic, that was perpetrated at previous elections was not repeated?

In case it needs clarifying, the company that provides the election machines has said a previous election was rigged, and has pulled out of the country. However, the integrity of the democratic process relies on more than just counting votes, and the legitimacy of a regime relies on more than just having been elected.

I was going to put here a list of the various outrages against democracy and human rights committed by the Maduro regime – the fraudulent elections, the imprisoned opposition leaders, the abrogation of the National Assembly’s powers, the removal of government critics of Maduro, the prevention of opposition parties from contesting elections, the extra-judicial killings. The information, for anyone who cares to find it, is freely available. There is a useful briefing paper from the House of Commons library; I found the timeline of political developments particularly useful. You could follow what the UN OHCHR or Amnesty or Human Rights Watch say.

To put such a list would be pointless.

It’s pointless, because Skwawkbox either does not care about reality, or has chosen to ignore it in service of its political aims. It is perfectly reasonable to say that there should not be a military intervention by foreign powers, and particularly not the United States, in Venezuela. It is defensible to say that there should be no intervention of any sort, and, again, particularly not by the United States. You could even say that Juan Guaidó has acted wrongly.

That is not what Skwawkbox has said. In its final comment, the editor of Skwawkbox says

The evidence is clear that the Establishment is selling politically-motivated snake-oil.

Maduro’s government may be imperfect, but its democratic validity is beyond question – and the process that gave it its mandate is far more foolproof than governments in the UK and US can currently claim.

source: https://skwawkbox.org/2019/01/28/video-neutral-election-observers-explain-venezuelas-world-class-election-system-is-unriggable/

Maduro’s government is not ‘imperfect’. It is a dictatorship that has reduced its population into penury and hunger.

Its democratic validity is not beyond question; the imprisoned opposition figures, the abuses of human rights, and the flood of refugees from Venezuela are testament to that.

The process that gave Maduro’s government mandate is held to be flawed by the company that set the system up.

None of this matters to Skwawkbox. The information is readily available, but they choose either not to look for it or to ignore it. Criticising the Maduro regime in Venezuela does not make one a neoconservative or liberal interventionist or even mean that you’re proposing a particular course of action. Skwawkbox are not criticising other people’s solutions to the crisis in Venezuela; they are acting as apologists for the Maduro regime by giving a false impression of the reliability of the process by which Maduro was most recently elected.

They are ‘selling politically-motivated snake-oil’.

† the first two paragraphs of the article read in English
“The voting system in Venezuela is totally automated and can be audited through all of its phases. In 2004, Venezuela became the first country in the world to hold a national election with machines that print the vote validation. Recently, in 2012, Venezuela returned to set the pace when it held the first national election with biometric authentication of voters before activating voting machines.
The electoral technology’s provider is the multinational, Smartmatic, which was chose in 2004 after having scored the highest results in system security and auditability compared to its competitors”.

I’ve seen a few people sharing the spreadsheet of allegations about sexual misconduct by various Conservative MPs. Some of the allegations are very serious indeed.

I would remind people of the Lord McAlpine case; McAlpine was falsely accused of child abuse and went on to threaten broad-ranging legal action. He dropped the cases against people on Twitter with less than five hundred followers who had retweeted the allegations if they made a donation of twenty-fine pounds to Children in Need: having a small footprint on social media isn’t a defence. It also led to McAlpine v Bercow, and to George Monbiot doing £25k worth of charity work, and the BBC (and, I think, others) paying hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages.

I’m sure that everyone publicly sharing the spreadsheet has taken the time to consider whether it might prejudice a fair trial in future.

Beyond that, some of the allegations that appear on the list are private matters that really shouldn’t be linked with some of the very serious allegations on the spreadsheet. One of the charges that appears on the spreadsheet is that an MP had a ‘workplace relationship’ with another MP; so what? One of the allegations that appears most often on the list is ‘inappropriate with…’. The list is apparently about sexual misconduct; if a workplace relationship or a male MP having sex with a man is ‘misconduct’, it does suggest that some of the ‘inappropriate with…’ charges could be veiled accusations of homosexuality, alcoholism, and so on.

Drinking too much, having consensual sex with colleagues, being gay, or having non-standard sexual preferences really aren’t anyone’s business. No-one – not even MPs, not even MPs from a different party – should be linked to allegations of making someone have an abortion just because they’re closeted.

Some years ago – I forget exactly when – I came across a game called Empire Attack. It was very simple: a grid of rectangles. You start with one grid square filled in and you can take over others by clicking on them. The longer you wait to click, the greater the population you put on the square. Coins would appear and clicking on them would cause an explosion onto four, eight, or twelve squares, putting your flag on them. You could sometimes find whole areas filled with coins, so that clicking on one coin could fill in thousands of squares at once. Other players were there, and you battled to take over other people’s empires and generally have the biggest.

It was a simple game, but it was a huge amount of fun. I played every variation of it (although, sadly, never completed one of the ten day games). I had a clan of one for the clan games, and reached sixteenth place overall in season 1. Sadly, Empire Attack has now closed. I suppose I want to say thanks to the people behind Empire Attack and all the players. It showed that a simple game with simple graphics could be endlessly fascinating and I’m sad it’s gone.

In a world exclusive, I can reveal that Huntingdon Constituency Labour Party uses Slack to stay in touch.

I presume this is newsworthy as Skwawkbox has run a couple of pieces [1, 2] about Lobby journalists using WhatsApp. Skwawkbox is trying to say that the Lobby is too cosy a set and is prone to groupthink. That is not an unreasonable position, and I talk below about how you could reasonably go about making the argument. What is unreasonable is the way that Skwawkbox makes its arguments. Fearless reader, accompany me up the garden path!

Skwawkbox’s first story starts with a post on Paul Staines’ Guido Fawkes blog that mentions, in passing, that ‘colleagues’ of Matt Chorley feel that he’s been on WhatsApp forever. This is Staines’ usual low-rent gossip. The story becomes bananas when Skwawkbox starts reading into ‘colleagues’ being in the post instead of ‘Times colleagues’. If it was just ‘Times colleagues’, hunky-dory; as it’s colleagues (and Skwawkbox doesn’t appear to even consider that Guido Fawkes may have meant ‘colleagues at Chorley’s newspaper’ by ‘colleagues’), we have to talk in hushed tones about conspiracy. Skwawkbox highlights that WhatsApp is more secure than email; again, it may just be that WhatsApp is convenient and they’re not thinking about security. They could also use PGP to encrypt their emails.

I want to re-iterate this; Skwawkbox is hanging the entire story on the absence of the world ‘Times’ in an aside on a post on the Guido Fawkes blog.

One possibility is that Lobby journalists are plotting on a secret channel to distort what the public sees so that their overlords can take over the world*. Another is that it’s a bloody WhatsApp group, and they’re using it because everyone uses it and it’s convenient. Their messages might be about taking over the world, or whether you want to go for a beer after work.

Skwawkbox then responds to the MSM response to their original article (helpfully not linking to what those MSM responses were). Scorn was poured on the article because it was a bad article. The second Skwawkbox article bothers me more than the first in no small part because of this line

So the people who were eager to scoff at a brief article with some actual evidence in it were more than happy to promote a story for which there is not only no evidence, but for whose complete fallacy there is ample.

What evidence in the original article? The absence of the word ‘Times’? The suggestion that there must be something nefarious about a group of people who work together using a group messaging system that, in no small part because of concerns after PRISM and so on, offers encryption by default? I don’t know whether the writer of the post has incredibly low standards for evidence or just doesn’t care, but it irks me that people will read this and think that Skwawkbox was making a potentially reasonable point in a reasonable way.

If you wanted to make the argument that the Lobby is too cosy, you’d look at the structure of the Lobby – only certain journalists gain its privileged access – and its function – Lobby journalists have to report without attribution, so may want to make themselves look more important than they are and inflate stories. You would look at stories written by Lobby correspondents to see if there is herding; you might look at how, say, the White House Press Pool works, or compare with other democracies. You might see what Lobby journalists themselves say (I think I heard Laura Kuenssberg talking about it on the Today programme not too long ago). That, though, would have required some time and effort; much easier for Skwawkbox to run a story (if I can paraphrase the Tempest) based on air, based on thin air. Skawkbox’s editorial line is that everything is a conspiracy, and so it must see conspiracy everywhere. As I said of the Canary,

It’s not just stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism; it’s badly-written, stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism

A final thought: lobby journalists have to publish their interests. I wonder if Steve Walker, who runs Skwawkbox, will do the same.

* or are reptiles. I’ve had people on my YouTube channel say I’m a reptilian because the coating on a pair of my glasses would flash green on camera.

I wrote a little while ago about Virgin Trains East Coast’s first class menu*; it bothered me, partly because of its crap use of the English language but mostly because it said it was providing rare breed pork without saying the breed.

I like to think that someone at VTEC took my post to heart when ordering the new menus, as they have improved, but not by much. In the next instalment of my never-ending pettiness, I present to you the new Virgin Trains East Coast menu.

The rare breed sausages are now identified as ‘Yorkshire rare breed sausages’. The Yorkshire pig, also known as the Large White, is not a rare breed. Simply being raised, slaughtered, or butchered in Yorkshire, or any other region, does not count as being a rare breed. I’ll repeat what I said on my earlier post:

Gloucester Old Spot and British Saddleback may both be rare breeds, but they are not the same fucking thing. Pretending that they are the same thing is, frankly, an insult to the farmers who bust their guts looking after rare breeds.

I mention here that I find no mention online of the Laverstoke Farm black pudding that appears in your Great British breakfast. Laverstoke Park Farm is everywhere. If you’re making a point of the provenance of your food, get the provenance right.

The rest of this page (with the exception of the return of ‘Yorkshire rare breed’ bacon in the bacon roll is fine: it is clear, unpretentious, and direct† – until the penultimate word. The penultimate word is ‘tasty’, and it comes in a footnote indicating that the free-range egg in the fried breakfast and the bubble & squeak may, on some services, be replaced by ‘a tasty soufflé’. Is the egg not tasty? Does it not warrant this step on the gustatory cursus honorum? Are the rest of the ingredients on the menu mere shadows, where the soufflé is the very Platonic ideal of a baked egg dish?

You see, an adjective is used to indicate a particular quality of something and to mark it apart from others. If there are six trees in a line and I say that I have my kite stuck in the tall one, it is implicit that the other five trees are less tall. By highlighting – pay attention, Virgin Trains East Coast, because this is important – the tastiness of your soufflé, you are suggesting everything else is less than tasty. I know that’s not what you meant to do; you were veering logorrheic again. You are putting in words because you think it makes your menu funky, or some similar PR bullshit term. There are some descriptions on the menu that tell us about the good without this attempt to be cool with your use of language: ‘chicken in a paprika tomato-based sauce with onions, yellow peppers and spicy chorizo served with parsley potatoes’ makes the Mediterranean chicken sound really quite appetising. I’ll let the ‘rich and creamy’ description of the macaroni cheese pass.

I think the food on VTEC first class is actually pretty good. The mushroom rarebit on the previous breakfast menu was something I actually looked forward to and the current bubble and squeak is surprisingly enjoyable, too.

* If you book in advance, it’s often cheaper or only two or three pounds more expensive to travel first class.
† Before anyone says it, the opposite of me. I know.

This article originally appeared on my medium.com page.

I draw your attention to the disclosure note at the end of this article.

I wrote yesterday about a piece of drivel on the Canary purporting that the pre-arranged results of the US presidential election had accidentally been released by a television station in Tennessee. This morning, one Carlyn Harvey has published an article at the Canary titled “A launch date for the Corbyn coup 2.0 has just been fixed, and guess who’s leading the charge?”.

Harvey’s article isn’t as bad as Gay’s article yesterday, but it is still pretty poor. I do wonder, though, if the line being taken in this article — that there is another coup plot coming to a head against Jeremy Corbyn — is going to be received more favourably than yesterday’s suggestion that the presidential elections were being rigged in favour of Hillary Clinton.

Assume the brace position as we find out whether Marcus Brutus was invited to give the keynote at the Rome First conference in late 45 B.C. Continue reading “No, Canary, a launch date hasn’t been set for Labour Coup 2.0” →

This article originally appeared on my medium.com page.

A recent article on the Canary website has really got my proverbial goat. It’s not just stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism; it’s badly-written, stupid, paranoid, yellow journalism, and it bothers me.
It bothers me, because friends of mine read and share stuff by the Canary.

It bothers me, because people will just see the headline, and it will add to the drip-drip that assumes the elections are rigged.

It bothers me, because people will skim through it, and lines from it will sit in their memory, unquestioned, to be brought out in conversation.

It bothers me, because it’s so clearly bad.

Continue reading “No, Canary, the election results haven’t been leaked” →

Update at https://www.davidlandoncole.com/2017/07/yorkshire-pork-on-virgin-trains/

This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.

“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”

Christopher Hitchens often remarked on the bothersome masthead of the New York Times. I begin to understand how he felt when I look at the entirely more banal menu on Virgin Trains East Coast.

By way of preface, if you haven’t already been bored to tears, I travel weekly from Huntingdonshire to York. I can book well in advance, so it’s often actually cheaper to travel first class. Hence, I have the free food and drink, and so read the menu. Allow me, gentle reader, to give you a flavour:

Breakfast

Early risers, we salute you!

Start your morning just right, after all it is the most important meal of the day.

Fuck off. Just fuck off. When I am reading this, it’s about half past six in the morning and I have been up for an hour. I want coffee, not your upbeat fuckwittery. However, that is just the introit. I am then invited to order “one of our brilliant breakfast selections”:

Our truly great British breakfast…

I cannot be bothered to finish the entry. No matter how hard you try, the breakfast will have been prepared in a travelling kitchen. You cannot prepare a truly great anything in a galley moving in excess of one hundred miles per hour. This is compounded by the offering of “rare breed pork sausage”. So rare, it would seem, that they don’t know what breed of pig went into it. Gloucester Old Spot and British Saddleback may both be rare breeds, but they are not the same fucking thing. Pretending that they are the same thing is, frankly, an insult to the farmers who bust their guts looking after rare breeds.

I will save you from the porridge – apparently, “wonderfully warming” – and the “heavenly” smoked salmon. Put the thesaurus down.

The next entry that particularly offends me (there have been many minor offences in the meantime) is in the all-day section. I am offered a

“[t]ruly continental platter consisting of prosciutto, salami, Mozzarella, stuffed olives and sundried tomatoes served with mixed leaf salad and a bread roll”.

Not synthetically continental, but truly continental. Presumably, we have sufficient contempt for Virgin Trains East Coast that their mere assertion of continental origin is insufficient; they must assure us that they really fucking mean it. Why is mozzarella capitalised, but not prosciutto? I can see the case for neither or both, but not just one. How much was a Wykehamist paid to produce this codswollop?

I am later offered lemon and rosemary cake, which, I presume on the authority of Virgin Trains, is ‘luscious’, and not just alliterative. The Wensleydale is ‘cracking’, presumably latae sententiate.

While it is a minor thing, I object to this casual abuse of the English language. If it’s a fry-up, say it’s a fry-up. Stop beating the English language to make it sound like something greater, particularly when every-one knows that it’s a fucking fry-up. It’s a lump of cheese and, given its likely treatment and serving, is not wonderful.

It’s worth pointing out that, despite being a prematurely middle-aged wearer of corduroy, I am one of the least fuddy-duddy passengers in this compartment. I am not sure who they think the audience is, but neither the language nor the red and charcoal branding is going to convince anyone that you are anything other than a train company.

What particularly bothers me is that Virgin are in the process of refurbishing their trains. I suspect they have spent a considerable amount of money on changing the covering of the seats that were more than adequate, but they seem to have forgotten to do useful things like put it plug sockets, or handles on the inside of carriage doors, or toilets that reliably flush.

A hearty barley risotto? Get in the fucking sea.