New plans for Twigg newsletters

The Daily Twigg Vol. 1 No. 37  April 5, 2012

Newsletter will go on hiatus
while new format is created

By John Twigg

This will be the last issue of The Daily Twigg, at least for a while, and as I just heard said on the Masters broadcast, that may be a good thing.

I began publishing this title back in late December with the idea of trying it for three months to see if it would fly; it was intended to be similar to newsletters that I have issued thousands of times over the last 25 (!) years, focussed as usual on B.C. politics but also sometimes poking into other areas too, especially business, economics, sports and other matters that might be au courant in the hot media and/or befitting my move back to Vancouver.

What it evolved into was an opinion column broadcast to several hundred opinion leaders and occasionally republished by other media, and half way through those three months it also became a posted blog too, but its content evolved into a focus almost solely on politics in general and on the decline and disintegration of the B.C. Liberal Party government in particular (and deservedly so because that is a huge story which I deliberately encouraged).

It has been a tumultuous time in politics, not only provincially with John van Dongen's jump to the rising B.C. Conservative Party but also nationally with the revelation of the Pierre Poutine voter suppression conspiracy (which perhaps could or should invalidate the last federal election) and Thomas Mulcair's dramatic regime-changing win of the federal NDP leadership (which could grow into some kind of a hopefully-positive populist revolution in Canada).

Globally it has been a crazy time too, featuring the financial crisis in Europe, revolutions in Libya and Egypt, the U.S. Presidential primaries, an impending regime change in China and alas the perpetuation of unsolved conspiracies involving terrorism and massive financial crimes, the gross gory details of which are only just now beginning to leak out into the light of day, such as who held that bulge of financial puts placed in days shortly before 9/11 (which were [deliberately?] ignored by the official 9/11 commission but which have been revealed in a YouTube video and detailed in other online sources).

The criminal media manipulations by the Murdoch empire which were exposed in Britain are only the tip of one octopus's tentacle in a network of octopii buried inside governments and industries around the world, using such things as snuff porn to blackmail politicians and judges and other key people like bankers and police into overlooking or even doing evil deeds - and I regret that I have been unable so far to simplify and explain all that to my readers but those who care to can dare to look at the Abel Danger and waterwarcrimes websites, which are unrelated but which both contain some local aspects of what are obviously global conspiracies.

To try to put it briefly, there IS a global conspiracy of evil forces out there who are trying not only to enrich themselves and increase their political controls but also even to thwart God's plans for mankind, which strategies include using exaggerated scares about global warming in order to drive up oil prices, bankrupt national economies and drive the world down into a hellish third world war. (For example, you should know that Libya was the major supplier of oil to powerful Germany and to debt-burdened and corrupted Italy, which could make Europe more dangerously dependent on Iranian oil.)

And please don't assume that such things don't affect us much here in lovely British Columbia because as mentioned there are numerous local connections to it, and the previous and present provincial government regimes seem more intent on continuing to cover up possible links to it such as the real goings on around Piggy's Palace than in righting wrongs and truly governing in the public interest, such as by probing the crooked sale of B.C. Rail and the dubious dispositions of other Crown assets.

That of course is news you didn't read much about in your daily paper or see on the evening TV news, which is partly why I thought I should try to restart my newsletters. So when I return from a break I will have a new format in which a suite of blogs will each focus on different subjects. There also will be fewer broadcasts except to those who request direct deliveries, and one of those will be a revived B.C. Politics Trendwatch, which will carry a modest subscription price and will focus on opinion polls and other game-changers in the run-up to the 2013 provincial election. 

I learned some lessons in the last three months too, beginning with a newfound admiration for Vaughn Palmer's ability to turn out top-quality stuff five days a week, and featuring my recent discovery of the powers of Twitter, which proved to be a profound source of breaking news tips and links to other useful cutting-edge information, such as recently finding a link in #bcpoli to an Andrew Nikiforuk column in the Tyee on politics and religion which is essential to understanding the motivations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (his narrow religious beliefs appear to color his policy choices).

And my lessons ended with the difficult realization that I shouldn't do all-night working sessions to try to digest all of that information and still get a new issue out too, because that can produce some stupid brain-cramp errors.

In the first case I misread a statistical table and used a wrong set of numbers, which when it was pointed out caused me to quickly publish an abject apology to Premier Christy Clark for my allegation that she had deliberately used a misleading statistic in order to promote the supposed success of her job creation plans. But that apology turned out to have been premature because when I did dig further into the numbers I realized that that was in fact exactly what she had done, namely twist statistics to claim progress on job creation when it was not really true, but I had merely used the wrong data to prove it. So my first mistake was to use a wrong number and then that was compounded when I too-quickly apologized for it.

The second mistake was more troubling, because late one night after finishing a decent analysis of the political ramifications in and after the latest opinion poll I tossed in a paragraph about Clark's problems perhaps being compounded because her House Leader and cabinet enforcer Rich Coleman was supposedly being probed anew by the Auditor General over a land deal done when he was Minister of Forests. But alas I failed to notice that the news item I had found in a Google search (or was it a Twitter link?) was from 2008. Damn! Another apology.

That was all the more troubling to me because it lent credence to a very nasty criticism of me by prominent blogger Alex Tsakumis about my reporting of the John van Dongen jump, which criticism was somewhat unfair and exaggerated but in the circumstances of the Coleman mistake could not be rebutted. Briefly, he said I said that he had been the arranger of van Dongen's meeting with B.C. Conservative leader John Cummins which led to the jump but in fact I only said it was possible he was the go-between because his blog postings indicated he had been in close communications with both of them, but I subsequently learned the go-between was someone else (a mutual friend who played a minor role). Nonetheless Tsakumis was correct in complaining that I should have called him first to check on it before publishing his name, and I am sorry now that I didn't do that, but it too was another adverse result of late-night writing to a deadline that did not exist.

Subsequent to that I got blamed again for supposedly revealing that van Dongen was the alleged source of leaks from the B.C. Liberal caucus, which I never did report or even hint at, but in Coleman's post-jump rage he lashed out at everyone and especially at Tsakumis for which I wrongly caught some more blame. Stuff like that happens in political journalism, and that I can take. But I never alleged or even suggested that van Dongen had been a leaker.

Through all of those kerfuffles on very edgy issues I was pleased that several hundred people continued to receive my newsletters and in three months only about five people asked to be unsubscribed and only one of those was due to the Coleman mistake. And meanwhile several old colleagues kindly wrote to assure me that such mistakes happen to everyone and that the important thing is to quickly correct the record and move on.

Anyway, I am going to try now to take a break from publishing for a while, which will be very difficult for me because journalism and writing goes back at least three generations on both sides of my family and I've been doing it for about 50 years now, so if an urge does strike me to write something soon I'll post it on the blog and tweet an advisory.

If you'd like to ensure you continue receiving direct broadcasts of my new stuff, please send me an email. Meanwhile, have a happy holiday, which is about God's plans for mankind whether you observe it as Passover or Easter. If you'd like to study some scripture, look at Exodus 24:7 !