Beauty beyond belief

This ^ is a truly wondrous thing. How to convey the sense of a new president overcoming his difficulties, being scrutinised by one of the most brilliant political minds of our time? It's a tough job, I'll give you that, but the graphics guys at Sky have really pulled out all the stops for this one.

For a start, how to represent the United States of America? That's not easy. How to convey the idea of such a vast country, from Alaska to Florida, from Hawaii to Maine? Many of us would just give up the ghost right there and then, but not Sky. No, they've gone for the 'wobbly bit of green grass with a couple of trees here and there' representation. Beautiful. I think you have to take your hat off to them.

How, then, to get across the fact that the weak, powerless, struggling president has plenty of things to concern him, while the colossus of television politics towers over him in judgement? Brilliantly - by selecting a photo of Obama looking down at something we can't even see (presumably signing something or scribbling "What the hell is that Boulton guy up to? He's at least three times as big as me. Is he a giant?" on a post-it and frantically waving it under the nose of his closest adviser), thereby conveying pensiveness at the impending verdict, and a super-smug "Yes, yes, it's me all right" pose from Our Hero, his lovely face gazing out at us, the viewer, while that shifty Obama character - is his mind on higher things, or is he just unable to look us in the eye? - can only sheepishly look downwards.

Hmm. A lot of us would have marvelled at such a brilliantly iconic piece of art and left it at that. Oh no. Not for the rococo designers of Sky, and good on them for carrying on and keeping going long after most people would have left it at that. Because there's not just two giant men - one more giant and important than the other, of course - on the wobbly White House lawn. No, there are TANKS! A POWER STATION! FOR SALE SIGNS THAT MAKE IT LOOK LIKE THE WHITE HOUSE IS UP FOR GRABS! A BLOODY GREAT BIG AMERICAN FLAG! And there, up in the Sky, TWO SOCKING MASSIVE PLANES!

All that said, the logo is the best thing about Obama 100, given that it's written by Boulton. Random quote:

Obama is marking Earth Day today by visiting a rust belt plant in Newton Iowa which has now been converted to manufacturing towers for wind turbines.

More - much more - is available on the website.

Your fun links for the day

I've been meaning to write about something else, but I've not got around to it. So in the meantime here are some nice links to other places where you can read interesting stuff.

Blogging The Mail on our favourite paper's rather embarrassing attempts to portray Labour as the spectral 1970s bogeyman.
Bloggerheads with a forensic analysis of whether one eyewitness was telling the whole truth about G20.
On a similar theme, Nick Davies on the days of misinformation about the protest and whether journalists can really trust the police to tell the truth when they're in the spotlight.
Rhetorically Speaking on the 'abyss of stupidity' over sex education.
Ben Six with the Harry Phibbs de-arser. Very useful, but we need more de-arsers when it comes to our favourite daily paper.
Lenin on the threat of the BNP.
David Neiwert on blind eyes being turned in the US when it comes to violence perpetrated by former service personnel.
Craig Murray on giving his evidence of British complicity in torture.
Claude Carpentieri at Liberal Conspiracy on panic over swine flu.
Michael O'Leary (warning: links to Mail) has shown all his usual charm and desire to shrink away from publicity as he cements his position as most loathsome toad in the world. And his airline's fucking shit as well.
Who's worth following on Twitter? Here's a rough guide. Though to be honest I've not heard of all of them.
Here's a marvellous story - surely it can't be true? - of a chihuahua that got blown away by a strong gust of wind. But there's a happy ending.
And if you've not been there yet, here's my new favourite website - the secret life of Richard Madeley. I love it.

Cough in my face Pedro

As a reaction to the kind of "Aaaargh! We're all gonna die!" stuff about pig flu comes this kind of cock from people like Simon Jenkins, who sees this whole business as a big murky opportunity for government to steer people's attentions away from the FACT IT'S KILLING ITS OWN PEOPLE and for the WHO to justify an enormous budget. But is he right? Is the right reaction to this problem not to bury yourself in a bunker but to laugh in the face of a sniffling man under a sombrero and wipe his germs all over your eyes?

What amuses me is the way in which Twitter, for example, has been blamed for whipping up fears about swine flu. Yes, there's a lot of rubbish on Twitter, but then again there's a lot of rubbish in real life, and a damn sight more in the mainstream media. (And what the hell is that website anyway? It looks to me like the online version of one of those suspiciously ever-present English-language newspapers you see everywhere when you're in a developing country, which, when you read them, contain eight billion billion articles on how great US foreign policy is and how everything would be better if only it all got privatised.)

Anyway, Twitter is supposedly the agent of misinformation about swine flu. It shows a new way of easy lazy churnalism from the mainstream media, whereby you simply go onto Twitter, find something as madly insane as you can, and then use it to represent the entirety of Twitter's output. Whereas the press, well they've been completely responsible, haven't they?







Mm. Jenkins is correct to point out that while the screamsheets are mentioning 150 deaths, only 20-odd of these are directly attributable to swine flu; and that no-one has so far died outside of Mexico. But it's what he goes on to say next that sees him veer off the rails:

We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.

Ah. Here we go. While others are blaming Twitter, Jenkins is blaming blogs and, rather bizarrely, the 'national curriculum'. Er, what? Well I've looked through the rest of the article and there's nothing to stand that up at all. I guess Jenkins just wants to have a bit of mystery... it's the national curriculum - but why? Ah, you'll have to work that out for yourselves!

I do agree with Jenkins when he points out that avian flu was a lot of fuss that turned out to be about nothing, and there's an element of crying wolf about the whole affair. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean that avian flu is the same thing as swine flu, nor that there's nothing to worry about. The crying wolf, I think, is all the more dangerous because it might induce a sense of shrugged shoulders seen-it-all-before about the public, who've been lied to one too many times - at a time when swine flu might actually be really dangerous. There's no way of knowing. So Jenkins closes his eyes and sticks his betting slip under the window, hoping that he's right. But is that good enough?

He then goes on to mention MRSA and C-diff as being diseases 'for which the government is to blame'. Who knew? People all over the world are dying of MRSA and c-diff, but in fact it's the British Government that's to blame for all those deaths! No wonder the Brits are hated abroad! We're killing thousands of people because our Government is creating these terrible diseases! The Government is forcing - at gunpoint, forcing - people not to wash their hands in hospitals. Can you imagine? Why, that really is a scandal! Isn't it awful that no-one's doing anything about it?

Well, come off it. I'm fed up with the whole "Government is killing people" bollocks that people like to trot out when it comes to c-diff and MRSA as well. It's becoming something of a right-wing meme nowadays - everything ever can be swiftly dismissed with a "Well, thousands are being killed in hospitals every day BY THE GOVERNMENT and those evil bastard nurses, and no-one's doing anything about it". No, they're not. A simple point: if you don't wash your hands when you're in a hospital and you come into contact with someone with a weakened immune system, then you're much more likely to be killing someone than the Government or a hospital worker. But no. Let's pretend it's 'dirty hospitals' and 'the medical profession' that are somehow doing it, all those patients licking the floors somehow creating these deaths, because then we can put Gordon Brown behind it all, the big old Churchill-dog Aunt Sally that he is, and then it's all OK.

As for swine flu, the jury's still out. The real answers will appear in the mainstream media as well as on twitter and blogs, and as with all these things, it'll take a bit of sifting to find out the truth. But we'll find out soon enough. Who knows - maybe Jenkins will be proved right about the whole thing. Maybe he won't.

Eek! Gay people! Ooh!

For those of you in a comfortable metropolitan cosmopolitan metrosexual tolerant nice kind of place in the fluffy clouds where people are nice to other people and being gay isn't seen as being the mark of Satan himself, can I just remind you of the British press.

I mean, you may well live in the kind of urban or suburban community where gay people, far from being reviled and driven into shameful obscurity, are quite openly accepted as being equal human beings, despite not being in the majority. Who knows. Where you live may even be creeping into the latter part of the 20th century, where homosexuality is legal, gayness is understood as being something quite normal and people are allowed to be open about their proclivities. But one thing's for sure: the British press don't live there.

They live in a world that is forever the 1950s, where it's always winter and people are always happy, despite their families having been wiped out in the war, despite their houses having been turned into rubble, despite rationing and being half-starving, because there aren't any black or Asian people around, men are allowed to beat and rape their wives and, for one thing, gay people certainly aren't allowed to be open about it, for fear of having the shit beaten out of them.

Ally Ross of the Sun has the ability to be funny and clever. He is neither in this piece of sub-Garry-Bushell shit where he slags off John Barrowman - not for being shit, but for being gay:

There are side-splitters from the moment Barrowman — “The man who can do everything”, except impersonate a heterosexual — opens the show singing I’m So Excited by The Pointer Sisters.

Hoho, Ally. Top skills there, pal. Keep going though. Let's see if we can really find something funny in there:

Pelvis thrusting, capped teeth a-rattling, he rocks it like Val Doonican, in an iron lung, and I’d urge anyone who missed it to watch the routine on The BBC’s iPlayer. You’ll witness something “special”.

Do you mean 'special needs'? Bonus points for a disability jibe on top of a gay sneer, though, if you do. I mean, that's really quite excellently done. And so hilariously great, as well.

The [show] they eventually settled for was a camp twist on Jimmy Savile’s old format. It’s Hom’ll Fix It. “The show that makes your performance dreams come true.” Except they’re not your dreams and they don’t come true.

Oh Ally! Stop! That's far too clever for me! Instead of Jim'll Fix It, it's, heh, and this is great, Hom'll Fix It. Haha! Do you see? Do you see? Isn't it funny though? Isn't it? Eh? Isn't it? See, it's funny because he's gay and so therefore he's a Homo! Hoho! Eh! Eh!

The cause, however, was definitely John Barrowman. A man who, for box-ticking reasons, I assume, is allowed to run amok at the Barrowman Broadcasting Corporation.

And there's the nastiness behind the smile on Ally Ross's pigshit-ugly photo byline. Barrowman must have got his job, not because people like him but simply because he's gay. Because this is the BBC and that's what they do - they ignore their entire viewership to give a job to someone who's not good enough but who is gay. According to Ross. Mind you I wonder if the same box-ticking is at work at the Sun? Maybe Ross ticks the one marked 'unfunny cunt'...? Who knows.

This is the same Sun, of course, who unhilariously called Derren Brown a 'mind bender' and couldn't help chuckling away with sub-playground insults. It's as if they haven't even grown up and can't be bothered to. Which I suppose is fine unless you're a national newspaper. Which they kind of are.

Not that it's just the Sun, though. The Mail is even more vitriolic in is hatred of otherness, especially gayness, and roars against the very idea that children might be told that it exists - for fear that they might experiment and become teh evil gayz themselves.

What the Mail would like, I think, is a return to the cosy world of Section 28, where teachers were banned from 'normalising' gayness. Not that it killed off homosexuality, mind, which somehow still managed to exist despite children not having been told about it - why, it's almost as if people might be naturally gay and not conditioned into being so by evil sex education... but no, surely not - but that establishes the good/bad dynamic to make sure the 'normal' people are straight and the 'abnormal' people are gay. They wheel in an idiot, who says:

Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, said that 'pressing the virtues of homosexuality' could lead to more experimentation, which could be 'harmful' to children.
He said: 'What we don't want to see is vulnerable young people being exploited by outside groups which want to normalise homosexuality.

It's a classic example where a quote has been found to say a certain thing. Of all the people they could have quoted - all the Christians they could have quoted, for that matter - they find someone who's dead-set against 11-year-olds being told something that in all probability they're pretty much aware of already: gayness happens.

Is it really something to be afraid of? Are our newspapers forever doomed to be stuck in that "see no evil" void of consciousness? Must we forever pretend these things don't happen, or sneer at people who are openly gay and claim that the only reason they got their jobs was for 'box-ticking' reasons? Well, if we're in the press we must. But the rest of the world is thankfully a little different. This isn't the village, and there isn't only the one gay in it. It's about time newspapers fucking well grew up and accepted it.

Aaaargh! We're all gonna die! Noooooooooooo!

Or, maybe not. But as this photo ^ shows, you can't be too careful, even if you've devoted your entire lifetime in faith that the Big Beardy Man will look after you. Not when there's Bird Swine Flu around to kill us all and make us all die.

Remember how Bird Flu was going to turn into a global pandemic that would destroy humanity as we knew it? Except it didn't. Thousands of words were wasted on how we'd all turn into a wheezing mass of zombies as the disease spread right around the world and there was nothing we could do about it. The BBC - poor, beloved BBC whom I defend on so many occasions - hired a bloody great helicopter to show the scene where a swan had been found with H5N1. So what? Did anyone keel over and die? Did the virus 'mutate', as so many 'experts' told us they thought it might if X, Y, Z and everything else combined in one set of improbable but just possible enough to be scary set of circumstances? No. All we got out of the whole scare story nonsense was "Canvey Island" by British Sea Power, which is something, but not really enough as far as I'm concerned.

And now to Swine Flu. You would hope, wouldn't you, that the tabloids will have learned from the experience of Avian Flu, and they would act in a responsible way, ensuring that they try and tell their readers the truth rather than scare them shitless. You wouldn't, you say? No, I suppose you wouldn't really.

Killer pig flu threat to UK: Fears grow of worldwide pandemic as 81 die in outbreak

yells the Mail, almost pissing itself with delight at the thought of scaring so many grannies into not leaving their homes for fear of contracting killer pig flu from some shady-looking character in a sombrero - probably an illegal - who happens to be passing.

Before we delve into the Mail's coverage, it's worth having a look at this Q&A over at the Beeb, which contains some salient points, notably:

The World Health Organization has warned that taken together the Mexican and US cases could potentially trigger a global pandemic, and stress that the situation is serious. However, it is stressed that it is still too early to accurately assess the situation fully.

So, yes, it's a big deal, but we don't know how much of a big deal yet. The trouble, of course, when you cry wolf all the time - as the Mail has done down the years with invasions, epidemics, impending doom, comets, MMR (although Paul Dacre pretended the other day that they hadn't) and so on - is that when something genuinely scary does happen, people won't realise the seriousness of it. Avian Flu didn't kill the thousands that newspapers claimed it very well might; is this any different? Or is there more to worry about this time? As the BBC reported, we just don't know yet. But you can be sure that the Mail will ramp up the shock factor:

The UK was also on alert last night after a British Airways cabin crew member complained of 'flu-like symptoms' midway through a flight to Heathrow from Mexico City, where the virus first surfaced.
The unnamed man, understood to be a British national, was put in isolation in a West London hospital and was being treated by staff trained in infectious disease controls.

Do you want to play a little game with me? Go on, let's. Guess what the next paragraph said. Go on, guess. Please. Just have a guess. The US was on alert after a cabin-crew person from Mexico to Heathrow complained of flu-like symptoms and was put in isolation. So what happened next, do you think?

But this morning it emerged that the patient did not in fact have the illness.

So essentially, a lot of panic over nothing, but with the panic emphasised rather than the nothing. Why might that be? Is there some sort of panic-porn that the Mail likes to spew out to its readers? Especially when the story has been hastily updated but this is still in it:

The Health Protection Agency said: ‘We are aware of a patient admitted to a London hospital with reported travel history to Mexico. As a precautionary measure the patient is being tested for a range of respiratory and other illnesses in line with UK health guidance. At present there have been no confirmed cases of human swine flu anywhere in Europe.’

As a precautionary measure, which is all well and good and correct, but ultimately in this case unnecessary. Look, I'm not saying that this isn't a big deal - it may well be a very big deal - but how are we going to be able to tell? The Mail says that someone who demonstrably hasn't got pig flu is a big deal - so how will we be able to tell the difference when someone really has and we really are in danger?

Anyway, reader wisdom time:

as our boarders are wide open i wouldnt be surprised if it reaches here
Click to rate Rating +182
- mat, london, 25/4/2009 0:40

Yes, unlike every other country in the world, we allow planes from foreign lands.

Perhaps some one should wake up gormless gordon and who is health secretary these days, that is if we have one, gormless needs to be woken now so that there may be a glimmer of hope maybe, that the UK will be prepared for it, as its coming up to the tourist season in the UK, and just to remind gormless and co who goes to the UK a lot in the summer, the americans, he might just have missed that whilst slumbering, he seems to have slept through every thing that has and is happening in the UK.
Click to rate Rating +61
- Bryan Caffyn, Mazarron, Spain., 25/4/2009 8:37

I love this kind of thing. I love the almost unintelligible gibbering and fear combined in a one-stop shop of a comment. Lovely.

A Thousand people a week die on Americas roads..
Click to rate Rating +50
- Mr Blonde, Afjiord Norway, 25/4/2009 11:03

A bit of context. See, they're not all hopeless simians banging away at keyboards to get onto the Mail's website.

This government should deal with this swine fever now. Close the borders NOW and look after the population. If they can't cope, then the military should form. New military government should take over and sort out all the problems the UK have. The Torries are certainly not up to the job either Act now or we mat regret nil or feeble action.
alex
Click to rate Rating - 9

Although yes, some of them are.

I note a lot of people here thinking they are clever by use of wit!
This is real and it is happening folk, it is not a lie that Labour spin day by day, in fact we all know our Government will be useless in a crisis.
If this flu hits the UK, which it will, many will die. It is possible as much as 20% of the population if left unchecked.
Our borders are weak and people come and go all too easily.
Kids in this country have been wrapped in cotton wool too long, we already know many of their parents will outlive them. A pandemic will weed out the weak with brutal efficiency...is this what you want?
Every man woman and child should be taking this more seriously because the authorities only care about themselves...................
Click to rate Rating +18
- martin, UK, 26/4/2009 8:03

And there are a lot of sensible comments there too. Is it time to panic? No, not yet, I don't think so. I don't think 'closing the borders' is really an option either, but what do I know...?

One thing's for sure, finding out the real strength of any outbreak won't be done by reading the Mail's coverage.

Friday links list 24/4/09

Some lovely exchanges to kick off here between the BBC's Mark "Guns & Ammo" Urban and the mild-mannered assassins at Media Lens. I particularly enjoyed this:

You seem obsessed with the issue of victory and defeat. Do you think the Iraqi people care about the "prestige" of the British army in southern Iraq?

...

Your blog makes no mention of these victims of the war. We notice that one of several books by you on the military is titled "Big Boys' Rules: SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA." It seems to us that you are excessively focused on the "Big Boys" and their games, and far less interested in the civilian victims of war.

A Very Public Sociologist on the ethics of debate is a nice bit of John Stuart Mill for a Friday afternoon, always welcome.

Adam Bienkov on whether Boris's bluster over being Tory leader is just a preparation for a hasty exit. People are talking about the achievements of Barack Obama's first 100 days - Boris has had 365. Any Londoners care to venture a list of achievements?

Eric the Fish on the delights that Google Ads throw up. I say 'throw up' because one of mine had the bloody BNP on it the other day, even though I've blocked them twice already. The little weasels keep using new addresses. Naughty!

Rhetorically Speaking on the crassness of the BBC giving equal weight to a complete dillon who thinks homosexuality can be cured as the entire rest of the human race, who don't. Is it what you'd call 'balance'?

Chris Dillow on cheap (and pointless) shots at hate figures from Alistair Darling and DaveCam.

BenSix on yet more thinly veiled racism about immigration at the Daily Mail. It's getting to be quite a pattern, isn't it? No wonder their readers appear to be such big fans of Nick Griffin.

If you've not seen the marvellously crazed David Starkey's audition on Question Time for a part in panto this winter as an ugly sister, then here it is. Watch and marvel at the bonkersness of it all.

A splendid Family Guy song & dance about the joys of a bag 'o weed is over here thanks to D Notice.

Here's a wonderful selection of photos taken on a night out in Cardiff. Although when you look at them you'll see it could be any town anywhere in Britain on a Friday or Saturday night... beautiful images of everyday life.

Charlie Brooker responds cheerily to a request from multi-billion-dollar publishers to nick one of his tweets for a shitty Christmas book.

And if you've got a few hours to spare, you really must try this gorgeous little whimsy. Hypnotic.

The patriotism of St George's Day

Ah, what better way to spend St George's Day than buying paintings by one of the world's greatest racist murderers, who wanted to destroy England and everything it stood for? I suppose the timing of the auction may have been completely accidental, but it seems a touch on the clumsy side anyway. I mean, who in their right mind would even think such paintings had any merit at all?

Oh, hang on.



A bit of internet comment silliness, I grant you, but surely people complaining about Hitler - one of the world's most infamous hate-filled mass-murderers - wouldn't get voted down in the patriotic English Daily Mail, would they?

Oh, hang on.



And sticking the boot into Churchill as well! Goodness me. Maybe these Mail readers aren't as patriotic as they like to make out...? I mean, it's not as if they'd vote down comments attacking the hated racist idiot Nick Griffin in their dozens, is it?

Oh, hang on.



I don't know if the BNP leaflet and St George's Day are connected in any way either. I get the impression this has been knocking about for ages and isn't entirely new news. On the other hand, while it's not surprising to most of us that Nick Griffin is a tedious bigoted windbag who keeps his dark heart of hatred hidden behind a wafer-thin veneer of semi-respectability - while courting the usual mob of thugs, villains, nutjobs and out-and-out scum - it's still useful in the context of the 'we're not racist' crap that the BNP like to spout, generally unchallenged, whenever they have the chance. As Jamie points out, though, the Mail's article even helpfully agrees with the BNP's request to use the more respectable title of British National Party - and the commenters? Plenty of 'indigenous Britons' dog-whistles from the BNP bombarders voted up to the nines, and anything remotely liberal crucified by other commenters.

Is this what Daily Mail readers really think? I'm sure it isn't. Well, I'll put that another way. I'm pretty sure it isn't. Anyone who thinks immigration is 'genocide' is beyond help - and surely most Mail readers don't think that, do they? I would like to hope not. Mind you, I do remember Mail reporter James Slack's attempt to claim that second and third-generation immigrants didn't count as being properly British earlier this year - does that sound familiar to you? Yes, because Griffin's argument is that second and third-generation immigrants born and raised in Britain shouldn't be counted as British either and should be termed "racial foreigners". I'm sure Slacky wouldn't go that far - would he?

It's well documented how groups like the BNP can mobilise support on internet comments and messageboards to try and make their cause look more widely supported than it really is - and it would be foolish and misleading to say that the commenters on the Griffin story really do represent a cross-section of Daily Mail readers.

But then again, when a newspaper's own journalists, in supposedly factual pieces, are using almost exactly the same arguments as the BNP... what then?

Links and that

You have to admire Paul Dacre. In the sense that Victor and Battle comics used to print pages and pages about the Luftwaffe and Goering. You know, you have to be interested. I love the idea that Dacre is incensed that "rapacious, greedy, unscrupulous" libel lawyers are "ambulance-chasing rich clients" encouraging them to sue papers.

It's an especially Daily Mail attitude, as you'd expect from Dacre of course. Instead of blaming his own newspaper for printing lies, he blames people for being annoyed by lies told about them. Instead of seeing that printing lies is wrong, he thinks that it's wrong that there's a system by which (some rich) people are able to get a form of redress against those lies. Instead of thinking that it's wrong to lie, he thinks it's wrong that people are able to complain about it. Instead of wondering that people can only sue if they have a case in law, and that perhaps to stop people having a case in law you could use the handy get-out clause of not printing lies about them, Dacre thinks the world would be better if people were just allowed to print lies without having to worry about any consequences whatsoever. And that, my friends, sums up everything about the Great British Press.

Elsewhere on the Street of Shame, the Telegraph and the Guardian are getting grumpy at each other over this week's Budget Tele Twitterfail. Aww bless. I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time. I mean, who knew that people would do that? It's not as if it's the case that if you point a camera at a group of people in the street, they start waving, gurning and generally behaving like sillybillies, is it? Oh hang on. And, as one of those sillybillies, I can assure you it was ruddy great. Epically childish but epically fun, as such things tend to be.

David Semple at Though Cowards Flinch takes a look at the implications of Kindle and how the likes of Murdoch might try and protect their precious media product by attempting to charge for it - and how that's almost certainly doomed to failure. It would be nice to think there might be some way of salvaging a newspaper industry who decided the best idea would be to give everything away for nothing, then scratched their heads and wondered why no-one bought papers any more, but I don't think it's going to be particularly easy. But we'll see.

One new blog you have to go and have a look at, if you haven't seen it already, is The Last Strawman. Those of us hoary old types who remember thinking in the black-and-white distant past that Jack Straw was something of a radical, a leftist, a - dare I say it? Dare, dare - socialist, have been dismayed to see his transformation into the British Donald Rumsfeld. There's even a bit where you can make your own Strawman in a Blue Peter stylee!

Eric the Fish examines the fallout from the "FOOTBALL BOMB TERROR THEY'RE GOING TO BLOW US ALL UP oh hang on we have no evidence at all" arrests. 12 men have been found guilty of being Pakistanis and will now be kicked out of the country. It makes you proud to be British doesn't it?

I don't know how accurate this is or whether it's an internet scare story, but if it's true it's a bit on the scary side. Supposedly there's a proposal to make organic farming illegal in the United States. Illegal? Illegal. I'm a bit sceptical, anyone know anything more about this?

Good news from the Orwell Prize for Blogging - Iain Dale lost. And someone else won. So that's delightful.

Rhetorically Speaking on how you can't always get your message across, no matter how hard you try. For once, I'm with the Express on this one.

Justin at Chicken Yoghurt reports on how Alastair Campbell chose the Budget to announce some important charidee work (but he doesn't like to talk about it, mate).

BenSix on the Sideshow Bob theory of political corruption. If only Jacqui Smith would walk into a few rakes...

The BNP has finally shown its true colours - the colours in question being "I'm not racist, but...". By classifying anyone not white as "racial foreigners" and refusing to call them British, Nick Griffin has made it pretty clear what he thinks. Good. I'm glad he has. No more rubbish from Daily Mail commenters and snorting Tories in the Telegraph about how politicians must listen to the BNP - no they mustn't. They're racists and they're proud of it. Let's stop pretending they're anything else.

Which is a perfect reason to read Nosemonkey's marvellous St George article, as we celebrate all that's great and English about our Turkish/Roman/Palestinian hero by drinking a cup of Great English Asian tea, eating a chicken tikka massala and watching American TV.

Finally, Parent Student says today is the day we should be nice to Daily Mail readers to make them happy about St George. Why not, I say. After all, it's not their fault they've been scared shitless all morning by what they've read. We should pity them, not hate them.

Yes. Good.

Click for bigger. Marvellous.



Yes. Childish. But it keeps me happy.

Budget Day drinking game

Inspired by this post of Justin's, I've decided to try and enliven the next couple of hours or so of our lives by pretending that the Budget is actually quite an interesting thing as opposed to a load of old cock we all knew about anyway with one minor surprise that turns out to be totally pointless but gets roared to the rafters anyway, endlessly analysed for impenetrably dull hours afterwards by inept gurning nitwits who wouldn't know one end of a shopping list from another, let alone actual important economic things, yet who somehow claim some spurious insight into the world of finance by dint of having stripey shirts.

How to make it interesting...? Well, now that the Telegraph Twitterfall has put up the barricades and stopped us having our childish fun, it must be alcohol of course. And with duty on booze set to rise almost probably within a few weeks or something, what better time to stock up your crescent-shaped stone-clad home bar with new goodies? So crack open a can of Tennents Super (it's the only thing we can afford under BrownandDarlingandNuLab, eh? Eh? Eh?) and let's see if we can't get through this whole mucky business.

Wide shot of 'panel of ordinary people' who look anything but ordinary, bored to be there if we're perfectly honest and sweating a bit under the lights, gazing off into the distance waiting to be asked a banal question about "What does it mean for you?" by an overenthusiastic Tristram in a regional studio - TAKE A DRINK

David Gray-esque noddy-headed politician in glasses and open-neck shirt mutters about how they'd have done it all better than what this lot have done - TAKE A DRINK

Someone makes pitiful pun on Darling's name, as if it's the first fucking time in history that anyone's even thought about doing that, as if the entirety of Blackadder Goes Forth never even fucking well got broadcast, as if it's original, or clever, or good, or anything other than a tired, glib, dirty little cliche that should be stamped to death and chopped up into little pieces before being fed to an army of angry ants - TAKE A DRINK

Whizzy-but-ultimately-pointless graphics that add nothing whatsoever to your understanding of what's going on but kept some overdrugged 12-year-old in gainful employment while you sit on your threadbare not-yet-paid-for DFS furniture, eating spaghetti hoops out of a tin, crying softly to yourself at the despair of it all, wondering where it all went wrong - TAKE A DRINK

The Mighty Robert Peston gargles into life, looking like Ray Reardon circa the 1979 World Snooker Championship and sounding like Chewbacca with a wasp in his throat, but actually says something quite interesting - TWO DRINKS

Some shit about 'what it means to the average family' who are not like your family in the slightest, and who appear to be a right smug bunch of bastards with four times as much money as you, who have about 58 cars between them, and a massive fuckoff kitchen the size of an aircraft carrier, and still somehow find some reason or other to complain about how they're on the verge of poverty and how on earth will little Tobias be able to go on a gap-decade now? - TAKE A DRINK

Some fat bald pub landlord, posing as 'ordinary businessman' but who is actually head of local UKIP/BNP, whines about how 'our masters in Brussels' are really to blame for everything and how 'SMEs' have been 'betrayed' by Darling and Brown - TAKE A DRINK

Nick Robinson chortles on like a pocket-sized slaphead version of that bear with the erection from Bo Selecta, but with less subtlety and wit, making you gradually lose all respect for the entire human race, changing you from a peace-loving vegan into a gone-postal sociopath taking potshots at grannies from the top of a bell tower - TWO DRINKS

Jowly overfed Tory with skin like boiled ham sneers and bellows about how taxing anyone ever is wrong and how this is 'class war from Labour' - TWO DRINKS

Shot of Chancellor with battered briefcase - THROW DRINK AT TV SET

Former Chancellor (esp Lawson) burbles on about how difficult it is to be Chancellor - RUN DOWN TO TV STUDIO AND THROW DRINK OVER HIM, SHOUTING ABUSE AS YOU GET DRAGGED AWAY BY SECURITY

Anyway, all suggestions welcome.

Finally, Littlejohn's crown has been taken

Yes, at last, dear friends, I've found someone more dismally ignorant, illiterate, venomous and vile than Littlecock. You don't believe me? Read on:

...After several minutes of this he snaps and slaps her with the back of his hand with the words: "Go away."
She doesn't and she continues to hurl abuse. At which point he draws his baton and belts her on the legs.
If anyone ever deserved a good slap, this woman certainly did.

Yes. A 5ft tall woman deserved to be slapped around the face and hit with a weapon by a police officer, because she said something he didn't like, according to the Yorkshire Post's Bill Carmichael.

Nice to see so many articulate takedowns of Carmichael's horrific nonsense underneath the story, by the way.

And some people still wonder why newspapers like the Yorkshire Post are haemorrhaging readers. Maybe because some of the people who write for them are nasty, unpleasant fuckers who offend those readers so they don't come back? Bonus Littlejohn points, by the way, for the use of

Poor love! She sounds a delicate flower, doesn't she?

to emphasise the misogyny. Why, it's as if the great man himself had hopped over from his Florida bolthole and taken up residence in Yorkshire, isn't it?

According to Carmichael, if someone says something you don't like, or annoys you, you should be allowed to hit them and strike them with a weapon. Lefty-Guardianista peacenik that I am, it would be nice to test that out by pulverising his stupid face into a bloody pulp to see how he liked it. Presumably he'd accept that he 'deserved a slap' and say no more about it? Lest he be called a 'delicate flower', of course.

Cunt.

Rhetorically Speaking has more.

The more it changes...

A few bits and bobs that I've noticed since I've come back to sunny old Blighty from The Foreign.

George Monbiot is surprised by the anti-police backlash in the right-wing press after the G20 protests over here:

If the police at the G20 protests were pumped-up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanding officers have spent years blurring the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked well: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they received ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.

But as Monbiot says, normal service will soon be resumed. How soon? Er, this soon, as Rhetorically Speaking points out, with police grumbling behind the scenes being gleefully and unquestioningly accepted by the churnalists at The Times:

McKeever's protest would be a lot more compelling (i.e. a little bit instead of not at all) if he could point to exactly when and where commentary and criticism based on misinformation had taken place. Some kind of evidence-based process for supporting charges, if you will. And the bandwagon isn't anti-police so much as anti-"getting smacked in the face by balaclava'd police who refuse to identify themselves."

Nothing like keeping the boys in blue on-side, is there? I mean, the last employee of the newspaper industry who turned his back and assumed he'd be all right got smacked down to the ground and died shortly afterwards. And it's nice to see the BBC talking about "alleged assaults" to make sure everything's completely nice and safe. When you've got a video of someone being smacked down to the ground by a copper, there could be a completely innocent explanation, couldn't there?

Speaking of the BBC, it's disappointing but entirely predictable that Jeremy Bowen should be on the receiving end of a similar kind of blindsiding, by his own employers, after daring to try and be anything other than nonsensically 'impartial' towards the Israel/Gaza issue. Presumably if Bowen had been covering the Holocaust for the BBC he would have had to have included a disclaimer from the Nazis: "Some people say the Holocaust is a bad thing, but on the other hand senior German Government sources say that Jews are sub-human vermin who should be destroyed. So, we can't make any judgement as to who's right and wrong on this one." Robert Fisk is enjoyable apopleptic over at the Indy:

The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war". Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war.

And here's Septicisle on how Monday at The Sun is MoD propaganda day:

... if we are to believe this isn't just an MoD stunt, desperate for some good news from Afghanistan, it isn't as rare as is being made out. Only last July a highly similar story was reported, without apparent MoD involvement, the soldier in that example being David Poderis, also shot through the helmet without being harmed. Secondly, another previous case, reported back in 2003 in Iraq, involving a soldier supposedly shot four times in the helmet and surviving, subsequently turned out to be a prank or hoax, depending on which you prefer, the Sun proudly reporting the soldiers' ingenuity. The author? One John Kay. Is history repeating itself? You decide...

Also, No Sleep Til Brooklands applauds an incredibly insightful piece of journalism by the Mail, which has used alchemy and pure skill to link income tax to income, with astonishing results:

Mail readers, and the paper itself, love to talk about 'stealth taxes'. Originally this used to refer to idden charges in the tax system that most people didn't know about, whereby they'd be hit by unexpected levies, but now it seems it's become synonymous with tax itself. It's hard to think of a way income tax could be any less stealthy. Announced annually in the Budget, written about in the press, rates published for all to see, and the figure literally printed on your monthly payslip under the none-too-stealthy name of 'Income tax', it seems to me that Alastair Darling is not perhaps the most cunning of pickpockets in this regard.

Getting ready for the 'WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS' guff from the right-wing screamsheets when the Budget comes out? Oh yes!

Yay! It worked!

The Telegraph publishes anything you say about the budget in its Budget Twitterfall.

Which means (click for bigger):



and:



and even



Childish, I know. But pfffffffffft.

Bleurgh

I'm back, but I'm not entirely firing on all (or indeed any) cylinders at the moment, so I hope you can forgive me if I take a while before I get going back at this malarkey. I think you can also appreciate that in a delicate and jetlagged state I haven't been able to get up the courage to even venture onto the Mail's website yet. I just can't do it. Oh, I thought about it. But something was stopping me. It was as if the poison had been removed from my body, and I didn't want it back in there, not just yet anyway. So that will have to wait.

But in the meantime, I just have a couple of thoughts, which are linked in a way. The first concerns Ian Tomlinson, who died during the G20 protests.

The interesting aspect is that people - including journalists - seem unwilling to believe people's accounts of events nowadays, unless there is categoric and incontrovertible proof of their existence. Eyewitnesses can say he was struck from behind while walking away with his hands in his pockets, but so what? No-one will believe them. It's only the fact that we have a video that proves it that makes it into anything approaching a story - otherwise those in authority just deny, deny, deny and deny - and journalists bravely do nothing, shrug their shoulders and give up looking for the story. The police say they did nothing wrong, so that's the story. So what if a few much-denigrated protesters say something else happened - so what? Who's going to believe them?

Which makes it all the more vital that citizens are entitled to take photographs, both still and moving images, of police officers. And that police officers should not be able to seize cameras or recording equipment, nor destroy footage or photographs which may potentially incriminate them. But that's the situation we find ourselves in at the moment. And no-one seems to be willing to do anything about it.

Newspapers seem less interested in an innocent man being whacked by a copper and subsequently dying than they are in one of those spectacularly uninteresting political 'scandals' which mean nothing whatsoever to anyone outside Westminster yet which attracts billions upon billions of column-inches from snorting red-faced former public schoolboys who smell of wee. That's where the stories are - nice, safe things about goodies and baddies where we can pontificate and gossip like old battleaxes over a garden fence to our hearts' content about who's right and who's wrong, and whose careers are finished by Drapergate, or Sleazegate, or whatever fucking gate it is this time. Death by police... police lied about it... investigators denied access to postmortem results... who cares? Mr X says something naughty about Mr Y... ooh yes please!

Having just returned from Sri Lanka I am naturally interested in the protests taking place at the moment. And here's another example of where the MSM are so dismally ineffective. Right outside the big Gothic cock, in obvious view of all those Crispians and Tarquins so slavishly wanking themselves into a frenzy over email nastiness and frightful beastliness, are people who genuinely give a shit about something, and who are protesting. Shall we bother covering it? Or shall we just give up? Shall we care about other people who passionately care about something? Or shall we just fill our papers with tittle-tattle and the usual guff about politics, opinion polls and the usual drivel? Sadly, the answer's pretty obvious.

Anyway, look, there'll be more soon, and I'll get around to it.

A few links, and then I'll be off

There'll be a hiatus for a bit, after this post. It's quite annoying in some ways, given that the blog has taken off a bit recently, and I've been enjoying it a lot. On the other hand, I'm on holiday for two weeks, and it's going to be ruddy great. So don't feel too sorry for me. Not that you were, anyway.

Without wanting to gush, though, I would just like to say thanks to everyone for coming along and reading this little nonsensical blog. I know you don't have to, and you're not doing me a favour or anything, but thanks anyway. I may just be an insignificant failed writer steeped in mediocrity, stuck in a one-trick universe of swearing at the media all day - the literary equivalent of those alkie tramps you see yelling at pigeons outside the library - but I do like it. I like it a lot. So I'll see you in a couple of weeks, then.

You won't miss me. There are many more marvellous blogs out there fighting the good fight, and here are just some of them.

Angry Mob looks at the public-sector stories the Mail won't bring you. Over at the other place, Mailwatch, I've talked about public sector pay and the Mail's attitudes. For some reason they consider the public sector (which includes everything from the BBC to the NHS, but most importantly anyone with a 'gold-plated' pension) to be bad and everything else to be good. Why might that be?

Angry Mob makes the point that the Mail's narrative on this subject is that everyone in the public sector is overpaid, overprotected and living it up while poor small businesses and private-sector workers (including Mail journos, let's not forget) are enduring tough times. That narrative is spoiled by stories of public sector cutbacks, the kind that are happening right across the country and in all areas (and as a commenter to my Mailwatch article right pointed out, there are some public sector workers such as soldiers being sent off to Afghanistan and elsewhere, who are largely forgotten about), so it will be interesting to see whether stories will be covered by the screamsheets. It's news, after all, but it doesn't fit the narrative. I think we know the answer.

To the Express now, and No Sleep Til Brooklands looks at another textbook screamsheet story - the 'flood' of immigrants. This time it's those pesky Poles who are apparently pouring back into the country, having left for a bit. Really? Well, apparently - and this is rather incredible - the Express appear not to have been entirely honest about the figures, and the story itself seems to be almost a straight lift from another article in January. Can you believe it? Oh, you can. Fine, but have a look anyway.

Five Chinese Crackers looks at the word 'NOW' being applied to stories, and what it means. In this particular case, it's the story of cultural sensitivities being applied to fire service uniforms (the pesky public sector again!) so that people of different religions can be comfortable in the service. OK... but why might the Mail only mention Muslim dress rules, and not Sikh ones, as if it's a measure that's been introduced only for Muslims? It's the same old agenda being wheeled out.

Tim at Bloggerheads has another story of cheap-shot lazy shit journalism in the Scottish press, but this time it's the Scottish Sun. A cancer patient has been writing about his experiences online, only for the Scottish Currant to come along and lift his story without asking him, take his quotes out of context, print it as if they've interviewed him, refuse to allow him the right of reply when he tried to comment on the story, then sheepishly offer a wodge of cash when he complained. Incredible? Sadly not. That's modern churnalism. If it's out there, nick it, and pretend you did it.

Feminazery is a new blog that's been started up this week, I think off the back of the Daily Mail Hating Feminazis From Hell group of Facebook. Go over there and have a look, as I'm sure there'll be plenty more good stuff over the coming weeks.

And finally to the protests yesterday. For months the police have been warning about riots. Politicians have grumbled about a possible 'summer of discontent'. The media have been hoping, almost saying "Come on Swampy, smash something up" - and finally, hooray, someone smashed something up. Sure, thousands of other people protested without smashing something up, but no, let's wheel out all the cliches, shall we? Ooh, they need a bath! Ooh, they don't even know what they're protesting about! Ooh, they're doing more harm than good! Ooh, they've done their cause a lot of damage! Ooh, the G20 are nice good people trying to fix the world and make lovely things happen, why are you complaining about it? And so on, and so on. I'm glad I'm leaving the country for a fortnight, so I can avoid the brunt of all this crap. But you need to read Justin, Septicisle, BenSix and Sunny for a bit of insight - more insight than you'll read in 95% of the national press this morning, anyway.

And with that, I'm off. But I'll be back.

Something's still bothering me, sir...

...as Columbo would say, shambling through the frame, scratching his head, puffing on his inexplicably green cigar and riffling through his notebook.

It's about yesterday's story - the "Google StreetView divorce" thingummy. I think it's clear now that the post by Idiot Forever, claiming to have hoaxed the Sun, was a hoax. But is the hoax hoax about something that isn't even real? Stay with me now; we can get through this.

Mark Stephens (the media lawyer quoted in The Times, not the man who claimed to have thought up 'Mark Stephens' from a random name generator) says this:

Talking about away games, my divorce department has just received its first instructions based on a wife who spotted her husband’s Range Rover at a lady friend’s house, when he said that he was away on a business trip. The putative ex-husband has a singular interest in pimped-up hub caps that were apparently the identifying feature. I suspect the husband’s lawyers will consider bringing in Google as a third party to indemnify against its invasion of privacy that has cost a marriage and will cost him his Range Rover.

Something's bothering me about this.

First, what on earth's going on? Would a lawyer really be able to talk about an ongoing case like this? Surely it would be a breach of confidence to do so - or at the very least unprofessional. Something strikes me as odd about this. I certainly would instruct a firm about a divorce case if I knew it'd be telling all and sundry through the press about the grubby details. Would you?

And is Stephens talking about seeing the Range Rover on Google Street View? Because that wouldn't appear to make any sense. GSV is done once, and then left on the internet. It's not as if the Google cars are patrolling the streets all the time, constantly updating the street views for our pleasure - not yet, anyway. So how did the woman in question know her husband's Range Rover was parked outside her friend's house on a day when he had claimed to be somewhere else, given that she couldn't possibly have known when the Google cars were going around?

Thirdly, surely there are quite a few Range Rovers which have blinged-up hubcaps? Surely that's not enough evidence?

I'm now beginning to wonder if this is a hoax about a hoax about a hoax. I wonder if Mark Stephens couldn't possibly talk about real ongoing cases at his law firm, and so decided to provide an example of the kind of thing they might be doing...? I'm not saying that's misleading, it's just not quite as accurate as it could be, is it?

I don't know. Perhaps as an experienced media lawyer he'll have his eye on the ball and be able to explain to us what's going on here...?

When churnalism meets laziness

*sigh* It's come to something, it really has. Time was when journalists sat around and chortled about coming up with a wizard wheeze for April Fool to try and trick unwary readers. It was the kind of jolly jape that went along with "You are the Mirrorman and I claim my 10 shillings" and that kind of thing. Simpler days, those, when journalists could concoct April Fool silliness or hide on Brighton beach rather than be sat at a desk ctrl+C and ctrl+Ving press releases.

No longer. It says something for the laziness, crapness and downright rubbishness of modern newspapers that journalists aren't even doing their own April Fool stuff but are having to had it forcefed to them by PR companies, like Robert Morley's dogs being stuffed down his gob in Theatre of Blood. I think it also says something about dwindling staff numbers. I'm sure there was a time when there were enough journalists to go around and make up fun stuff on their own. Now... no, we need oven-ready rubbish from PR companies.

Like this shit in the Mail today. Oh, ho ho, it's Jacqui Smith outside a naughty undies shop. Titter, innit?! Today's reading comprehension: how many changes did the desk-chained hack make to this Ann Summers press release?

In sober suit and clutching a bright carrier bag, could this really be the Home Secretary emerging from one of the saucier High Street stores?
In this week of all weeks, some might say she'd be a fool not to treat herself to a little retail therapy.
And considering her husband's rather adventurous viewing habits, Jacqui Smith would be perfectly justified in showing her own broad-minded streak. Ann Summers offers everything from naughty maid's outfits to fluffy handcuffs.

I'm guessing not a great deal. What do you think?

Then there's the new Flora Poli range for those really wanting to spice things up at home.

Do you see what they've done there? Apart from getting a free bit of advertising from a national newspaper, I mean.