Bastardisation of the East

Broken Home

2010-03-15T19:20:00.001Z

"Today, 65% of children live with both birth parents, almost 25% live in lone parent families, and 10% live within a stepfamily."

- Life in the United Kingdom (Home Office publication)

Hooray sanctity of marriage! The figures above were quoted in a 2007 publication by the Home Office (which I'm currently reading for my permanent residence exam) for children and young adults under the age of 20.

Britain's result of failed marriages and/or broken homes has stared at me for the last 10 years in the form of tracksuits, pram-pushing teenagers, drunk asbos, and mini-skirt wearing 12-year olds. But sometimes the figures speak for themselves and although not necessarily a direct factor in misguided youths of today, is indicative of this country's general attitude towards marriage and family.

65% is a shocking number, to think that over 3 in 10 youths do not live with both their biological parents any longer. And that 1 in 5 live with only 1 parent. With such fantastic role models, it's no wonder they grow up with noble aspirations and a better sense than to perpetuate family dysfunction...not. It is sometimes with great dispairity to feel that marriage has been diluted to nothing more than an impulse decision that takes little more thought than what pair of expensive shoes to buy. Like a fashion statement that you think will last forever. But the harsh reality is it doesn't.

New from Birds Eye...

2010-03-14T20:53:00.003Z

...Crispy Chicken Dippers. They'll have you pissing fireballs in no time.

Holiday Photos...from Afghanistan!

2010-03-12T22:16:00.005Z

Sorry for the misleading title. I couldn't help myself. But here's a few snaps I took on a sleepy flight heading westbound back to the UK. Obviously when I awoke to the GPS map flashing on my in-flight entertainment system, I was shocked! But once all fears had subsided of missile attacks (mostly friendly fire from American planes I suppose), I began to appreciate the awesome landscape of Afghanistan. So here's a little tidbit. At 33,000ft.

Martyr of the skies: Melanie Phillips' video nasties

2010-02-22T22:01:00.004Z

Hey, do you enjoy those silly little personality tests? You know, “What kind of biscuit are you?” Well here’s a theoretical question to test your mental state: You have a daughter with a fear of tarantulas. Not common or garden spiders but exotic tarantulas that you’d have to go and search for, ones that she wouldn’t have a hope in hell of accidentaly stumbling upon. So, she has this fear and as a good parent you don’t want her getting all scared. So do you:

A. Keep her away from tarantulas and maybe skip the arachnids section at the zoo?

B. Decide you are going to eliminate, if not 'ban' all tarantulas, wherever they may be, by whatever means?

C. Bring one of these massive spiders home, summon your daughter and then mercilessly dangle the damn thing over her terrified face while describing in detail how poisonous it is and how it would kill her if it ever got within biting range of her, but it won’t because you are such a good parent and would never let that happen?

If you write for the Daily Mail the answer appears to be a combination of B and C. You will declare your intention to rid the world of these tarantulas and wipe them off the Earth while simultaneously running through all the reasons we should be shitting ourselves in fear over them, inflating their potency to a level where they seem more like twenty foot talk monsters that not even bomb shelters would stop. I suppose if the readers get too panicky you can always calm them with news of Michael McIntyre’s continued existence, but the key objective really is to keep the readers upset, scared and defensive with pent up feelings of dread and impotence.*

I’ve been ignoring Melanie Phillips lately – she’s hardly worth the effort of reading unless you want to read arguments which try to compensate for a deficit in evidence by overloading on adjectives pilfered from the Daily Mail thesaurus. But her rant in the Mail today is well worth the effort, simply to see her step on a rake and smack herself square in the face. You see, Melanie, who on a good day is a shrill, paranoid fantasist, is a little more distressed than usual. Something on a flight back home, she claims, had such horrific effects on her psyche that “in addition to the jet lag, I'm now having nightmares.”

Now then, what on earth do you think a Melanie Phillips nightmare even looks like? A burkha-clad Prime Minister forcing up to pray towards Mecca? An independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, with East Jerusalem as its capital and Jewish settlements under its custody? A throng of gays prancing around being gay and getting married together before adopting kids, who might in turn catch gay? Being ignored? No, strangely enough this apologist for the Gaza massacre and advocate of attacks on Iran, who maintains that the price of all the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq is worth it, doesn’t like extreme violence. Not when it’s up close and personal, anyway. And not when it’s fictional. That disqualifies carpet bombings and errant missiles crashing into civilian homes that kill real flesh and blood people, but not Hollywood films where blood is generated by CGI or condoms filled fake blood. For reasons that one might initially consider perverse in the extreme, she decided that, having sat through Inglorious Basterds and been shaken by its bloody violence, she was then going to take a look at Law Abiding Citizen.

In a way these whingey columns about indecency are most suited to Phillips and her lack of talent. During the Bush years she was a cheerleader for its abuses of power, but having seen her team lose the US election she has been reduced to parroting boring teabagger conspiracy theories about Obama’s background. And given that she is a second rate internet cut and paste merchant when it comes to research it is hardly worth the effort to read her crackpot ideas about global warming, MMR or global politics. Generally the only field where Melanie Phillips can be guaranteed to note down the details with assiduous attention to detail is when it comes to informing her readers about all the latest indecency that has shaken her world. But that’s not to say that the reasoning underpinning this diligence is any more sane than usual. I wrote above that her viewing of these two films might seem perverse in the extreme, but that of course overlooks the overriding mentality of a Daily Mail hack – outrage is a gift. Like other Daily Mail writers she immerses herself in the filth and immorality of these films because it spurs her and her readers on, generating hysteria. It also allows them to bask in a collective glow of self righteous superiority, reassuring each other that their traditional family values, nostalgia for more innocent times and biblical-based morality puts them firmly on the right track. Never mind that the most depraved, callous, inhuman thoughts about celebrities’ private lives, immigrants dying on the way to Britain’s shores and victims of imperial aggression can be found in the comments at the bottom of each story on the Daily Mail website. Examples are all too easy to come by on the website, so let’s instead look at some samples from Melanie’s risible column:

“[W]e are shown a scalp being sliced off to make quite sure we get the point.”

“Brad Pitt character and his band of killers […] beat heads to pulp and twist fingers in open wounds”

“[W]hat makes it so repellent is the extreme sadism of the murders that the vengeful 'victim' carries out, slowly dismembering his family's attacker in order to inflict upon him as much agony as possible - and in which the perpetrator of this torture, the supposed victim of injustice, takes a psychopathic pleasure.”

Wow, that’s quite a lot of detail. She also took time to jot down what she had heard about another film that hasn’t even been released yet:

“Michael Winterbottom has defended scenes in his film The Killer Inside Me that portray extreme violence against women. This, apparently, depicts brutal scenes of rough sex and murder; the violence, carried out to a soundtrack of classical music, is depicted in close-up shots that leave little to the imagination.”

Well why would we need to use our imaginations when we have Melanie Phillips at hand to go through each violent scene in gory detail? And Melanie doesn’t just want to shield us from violence. She also popped up on Question Time a few weeks ago to tell us why John Terry was such a bad man. While most of us were content in the knowledge that footballers have no use as role models and that it was the chance of infighting in the England squad that led to Terry losing the England captaincy, Phillips thought a list of additional naughty things might help us form a murkier mental picture. According to Martin Kelner her list of reasons disqualifying him were summed up in this neat litany:

"[M]ass public debauchery, public brawling, public drunkenness, urinating into a beer glass, and having sex with a 17-year-old fan in his Bentley".

There’s something unseemly about this detailed point by point audit of Terry’s transgressions, which crosses the line of things the public ought to care about. Her newspaper, the tabloid equivalent of a pious high priest prone to bouts of sodomy with the altar boys, was even worse, tearing through the murky history of John Terry’s mistress while also moralising about their indiscretions. Here’s a map of her home, courtesy of the Mail, maybe so that if readers want to avoid John Terry’s fate and get snared by this harlot they can give it a wide berth. And the Mail provides photos of her in skimpy outfits too. Thank you Daily Mail, if you hadn’t pointed out what she looked like with very few clothes on I might have succumbed to her too. What a service you provide the public. And here we can see a picture of John Terry’s wife’s arse. It’s a funny kind of morality that this paper promotes. Maybe it’s just trying to immunise us against this filth so we will all stop caring.

I have my limits too, but if I think something is going to offend me I don’t watch it, or I stop watching it. I don’t feel this pressing need to launch a broad crusade for the cause of decency. I assume that those that do enjoy these violent works of fiction can handle it. I can bear in mind that, while nobody can comprehensively stop young people getting their hands on material that is not intended for them, the system of classifications for strong content is as good as we’re going to get. At the Daily Mail they struggle to comprehend this and, along with their loyal readers, closely resemble a litter of shivering kids at a sleepover, hiding under the duvet and shining torches in their faces while they recount slivers of gory details they have gleaned that may or may not be true depending on what their mates at school told them. These huddled, goose pimpled kids would be sharing second hand information on things like horror films, but in the world of the Mail this activity extends from everything from violent computer games to the latest pronouncements from tasteless comedy acts. After the Brand-Ross scandal several Daily Mail writers slapped on their tin hats and went over the top to assault a whole host of comedians, seeking out jokes in settings as obscure as year-old repeats of Mock the Week and far flung stand-up gigs that their readers wouldn’t have even heard of if detailed accounts weren’t reproduced on the pages of their paper. Unfortunately these crusaders would have found that beyond their hardcore base, few other members of the silent majority would have heeded the call to leave the trenches and charge over the top because most reasonable people have a moral framework that allows them to distinguish between the effects of an offensive crank call, basically harassment, on an unwilling participant, and a rude joke. They can work out where the line is themselves and understand that if a film comes with warnings of violence then it might be best avoided by those unable to handle it. Meanwhile, the broader crusade that the Mail attempted to launch against the BBC, in which tasteless, but ultimately harmless jokes contained within TV shows were filed alongside the harassment and humiliation of Andrew Sachs in the real world demonstrated that the Mail didn’t actually understand just why the phone calls to Sachs differed from these other jokes or why they had crossed the line and generated such anger.

Back to the plane, and maybe, in her particular case, Phillips deserves some sympathy. After all, she claims that the violence in these films was unexpected to her, that she was a “hapless passenger” and “captive” to films that presumably were so powerful that they had the ability to override the off switch, not just once but twice. And she couldn’t run away and hide or jump out of the plane to escape these nasty films. And it’s not like there was any warning from the airline entertainment guide:

“True, they had a 'V' for violence warning in the airline entertainment guide. But this also suggested that these were high-quality, well-reviewed films. There was no indication of quite how disturbing were the images I was about to see.”

Okay - firstly, she’s an idiot. Secondly, that’s a rubbish sentence, because it reads as if the ‘V’ for violence suggested these films were high quality, whereas she surely meant the airline entertainment guide. Thirdly, if she was expecting the airline entertainment guide to tell her which of its films were rubbish then she should give up her last tenuous claims of living in the real world. My in-flight guide on the way back from Venezuela last year claimed that Transformers 2 was an exciting film for fuck’s sake. But finally, there is this preposterous suggestion that a film can be high-quality, or violent, but not both. Terrible commentator that she is, Melanie is an even worse film reviewer, failing to grasp the most basic principles of film making. “What else is a film like this supposed to be if not entertainment?” she asks, ignoring that films are made for a range of reasons, not just to entertain but also to inform and provoke. Sometimes violence is necessary to add realism or shed light on a character’s background. And yes, sometimes violence is there for escapism, irony or to shock. This is reflected in the classification, which for both of her nightmarish films was ‘18’. I didn’t find much to appreciate in Funny Games by Michael Hanecke, but I understood that it was intended as a thought experiment and an irritating lecture on film violence, not as entertainment. And while I struggle with the lack of empathy and vacuous use of violence in Tarantino films or the way human bodies are treated like pieces of plasticine to be fed through rusty machinery in the Final Destination series, I can keep my contempt for Kill Bill in perspective. I don’t see others appreciating it as symptomatic of a wider problem. The same goes for Law Abiding Citizen. It’s a film with a misguided idea at its core, just like all revenge dramas, which despite any contention from Melanie Phillips, are certainly not a new development. The average Tony Martin supporting DM reader could have told her this. But you don’t ban the idea, you challenge it, and remind yourself that if this happened in real life the average man on the street would be disgusted. Have a little faith in humanity.

“As people come to tolerate the ever-more intolerable, the violence has to be ratcheted up another few notches in order to shock audiences and censors whose moral sense is being progressively dulled."

I personally find tipping white phosphorous on civilian houses to be intolerable, but then again, that only happens in the real world, and who gives a damn about that? Anyone who is familiar with Phillip’s writing will recognise the casual insertion of the word ‘moral’ in front of any old noun, but a cursory glance at her writings shows Phillips knows nothing of morality; she lacks a moral framework that stretches beyond her own prejudices and self-preservation, leading to her weird opinions about gays, Palestinians, Muslims and anyone deemed to be a terror suspect, whether there is evidence for their detention without charge or not. She closes her argument by claiming that everyone who watches and enjoys violent films is degrading and brutalising themselves, while also once again showing that the barrier between fiction and reality has become indistinguishable to her:

“It is striking that, with torture now elevated to the ultimate crime of crimes so that scarcely a day passes without some fresh attempt to arraign British or American forces for colluding in the mistreatment of terrorism suspects, some of the most fashionable movies have been labelled 'torture porn'. If torture is held to degrade and brutalise those who carry it out, then torture and sadism in even Bafta or Oscar-garlanded films degrade and brutalise those who watch them.”

That’s right, the torturers of terrorism suspects at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the real world can be filed alongside fans of video nasties. Phillips neglects to mention that some British and American personnel have not only colluded in torture but have also been found to have carried it out themselves. Her attempts to be ironic about the torture of other members of our species being “now [sic] elevated” to the status of a serious crime is the giveaway. On the one hand Phillips wants to shield us from the evil of fictional torture, on the other she reveals she has no idea why exactly torture is so evil or for how long it has been recognised internationally, universally, as being evil.

“Next time I fly, I'll stick to a book.”

Good idea Melanie. Why not read American Psycho and the Torture Garden back to back and then save your jittery flock of sheep the trauma of stumbling upon and accidentally reading them cover to cover by noting down all the violent parts and then recounting them in methodical detail.

Seeing the latest Daily Mail at home is always a weird experience for me. Seeing it unopened on the table, alongside the shopping, is not so different from learning that there is a dead body in the cellar. At some point curiosity is going to overpower me, I have to check and predictably the results are so appalling that it sends me reeling and I need time to convalesce. The racism, sexism, prurience and volcanic concentrations of spite inside don’t come accompanied by a certificate indicating that this newspaper is designed to whip up rage in its readers. But it does come with a bold warning across the front saying “DAILY MAIL”. So when I do pick it up and get offended I can’t claim I wasn’t warned.

*I quite like Michael McIntyre

Two ways to learn languages

2010-02-13T20:02:00.002Z

Learning languages is awesome. Both of these fascinating videos could inspire you to learn another one. I'm not sure which of these two I'd rather have as a teacher:

The 'other' c-word

2010-02-07T21:10:00.006Z

Further tidying up at home has unearthed a few more relics from my past. Today for show and tell I present a cutting I extracted from the 14 July 2007 edition of Britain’s leading serialised Diana obituary, The Daily Express*.

The most appropriate long-term home for this particular exhibit is in a shiny, white time capsule alongside some Jim Davidson DVDs, Prince Harry’s swastika armband and the attempt by the Daily Mail cartoonist ‘Gary’ to emulate Der Stuermer from July last year**. But for now the Internet will have to sustain the memory of this little beauty from the games and puzzles page, the only part of the Express worth paying attention to. If the circle I drew around it isn’t a big enough hint, you need to level your eyes at the previous week’s answers. The ‘c’ word in question is the ultra-offensive BNP shibboleth, rather than the name that Nick Griffin goes by when he appears in public.

I know, I know, they didn't mean it like that. After all, 'coon' can have other meanings. It just happens that none of them are used around here. It was a sort of Freudian slip. I'm sure that back in 2007, as they jotted down those four letters to raise their score by one word, Express readers thought to themselves "Coon? Ah yes, racoon!"

*Or as it’s known in my godforsaken little town – the newspaper you buy when the Daily Mail runs out.

**If they ever find that home recording of Richard Littlejohn and Gary Bushell oiled up and stripped down to what look like thongs to the untrained eye but are actually loincloths, in which they wrestle in a slimy vat of baked beans for David Yelland’s pleasure, then they can sling that in there too. It seems no less real or distressing for having just been made up in my head.

Anti-War Protest Washington DC

2010-02-07T16:08:00.001Z

A short and playful video shot in March 2008 by Marion Toruno, when the US Administration was still very much in the firm grasps of Bush and Cheney. It doesn't say much, but I've always had an interest in videography and this one is beautifully edited together with music and seems to capture a mood of dancing hippies and patriotism that you will rarely see on any of your news networks, cabled or non-cabled.

An Ode to Shannon Lowry

2010-02-07T15:47:00.002Z

For a not-so-unusual reason, I always believed the "1 Follower" icon on my Blogger dashboard was always a reference to the Leech. That's why whilst updating my profile and curiously clicking on this for the first time, I was quite surprised to see that we do actually have a following of 1.

And since this icon has been on my dashboard for quite a long time, I think we owe it to Shannon a special commemoration of sorts. Because most people don't really read banner-less blogs.

We don't have much really. So please accept the gift of song.

Rage Against the Cuisine

2010-02-02T18:45:00.002Z

The cheapness-motivated genius of this concept here reminded me of Leech:

"A nice little success story comes out of England today, about a group of aspirant restauranteurs with little means or previous experience, who opened up a popular new eatery thanks to hard work, determination, and a mutual hatred of "the man." The restaurant you see, is a pop-up run by an anarchist collective, and operates illegally in an undisclosed squat in Bristol. The place has proved to be so popular that the collective won't even reveal its name to the press for fear that the crowds would be too overwhelming.

The Set-Up, The Menu, "Lady Hop" >>>

The cooking, bartending, and front of house duties are all shared by collective members, and the set-up shifts from night to night. Says one of the group members, who goes by "Lady Hop":

Kitchens and the service industry are very hierarchical set ups. The classic image is of the head chef barking orders. We organise horizontally, there's no leaders amongst us...I think it's more about everyone taking a lead in doing certain stuff. This is a shared dream of many people.

What's the menu like? Mostly South American fare, but the menu changes nightly, because the chefs change nightly as well. Also, in true anarchist spirit, smoking is totally allowed in the spot, all electricity is stolen from a nearby source and piped in via a long electrical cord, and, the entire meal is "pay what you will." The restaurant is closing soon, but the group has future plans for another pop-up in another squat. Says "Lady Hop":

Each building has a different character, each time of year is different, it's nice not to be constrained to open all the time."

If your rice is served slightly undercooked/inedible, you know that you've just been served by a fellow blogger here at Bastardisation of the East.

My next exhibit: The Football Atlas, 1997-1999 edition

2010-02-01T14:27:00.016Z

Thank heavens for the internet. Where else can I file my youthful creativity for safe-keeping? Our exhibit today is my football atlas, which has lived for the past few years in a carrier bag under my bed. Several hundred A4 pages of hand-drawn maps, club badges and football shirts with hand-written histories of the game in almost every FIFA member between 1997 and 1999 can be found here. While it all looks like a waste of youth now, my current geographical knowledge, interest in travelling and foreign languages and opinions on self-appointed experts, patriotism and chauvanistic nationalism formed throughout this period, slap bang in the middle of my angsty teenage years.

The atlas (and yes, I will continue to call it that) is divided into continents, and then into countries. Some countries contain profiles of prominent teams, stadiums and historical annecdotes that I would generally have read about rather than seen. Being a teenage boy the countries were arranged in the order of the strength of their football leagues, because ranking things was important. Important enough to get angry with those of lesser knowledge. Italy's Serie A came first, followed by La Liga in Spain, which is on the left here. Well, the map sort of looks like Spain. All the points correspond to cities where the more significant teams played.

Below are maps of Russia and Greece. Not only two of the more accurate maps but also two of my favourite international sides. A fantastic snob I was back then, and very passionate about footballing nations that I felt were good but did not get the attention they deserved, usually because they repeatedly let themselves down.

My opinions on global affairs hadn't crystalised just yet. Here we see a map of Israel with both the West Bank and Gaza incorporated into it. This would have made me eligible for membership of Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud party, but would have seen me chased out of many of the social circles I hang out in nowadays. I didn't bother with a Palestine entry, even though Palestine became a member of FIFA in 1998.

Spain, Russia, Greece and Israel are all handy European footballing powers, to varying degrees. Things got a little more obsessive further on in the atlas. Below are country profiles for Liechtenstein and San Marino, and a profile of the Ta' Qali National Stadium in Malta. Does this sound like the work of a nerd? We're just getting started...

On the right is a profile of Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin. I profiled players the greatest players from each continent too. These are arranged alphabetically rather than in order of who was best. What do you take me for, some kind of geek? Yashin was the greatest goalkeeper in the history of the game, though.

The maps of South America are ridiculously small and generally pretty awful in terms of accuracy, so let's skip to Africa. Here we have Eritrea, the Gambia and Sierra Leone. Putting things in order of bestedness permitted me to bunch three geographically distant nations onto one page. There are fewer arrows pointing to these more obscure footballing nations, largely because sources were scarce. Back then the internet meant nothing to me beyond some mythical device paedophiles utilised to masquerade as young children (not exactly joking here, but be considerate and bear in mind which alarmist newspaper I grew up with). Instead I used World Soccer magazine, some esoteric football books and late night football shows from Channel 5 (remember, in its infancy C5 offered a cornucopia of sport, softcore pornography, Nazi documentaries and little else).

On to Asia now, with a wonky photo of Iran celebrating qualification for the 1998 World Cup. The leading Asian footballing powers were all pretty easy to research. The J League received good international coverage, while Channel 4 went through a strange period where it broadcast Chinese football highlights very early in the morning (at seriously antisocial hours. And on school nights too, the bastards). But I didn't just stick with the big Asian nations. Below, on the right, are 'maps' of Guam, Maldives and Singapore. Green blobs with arrows pointing to the capital cities rather than maps, if we're being honest. Channel 5 sometimes showed The Asian Football Show, so I got my fill of S-League action.

The final two football conderations were CONCACAF (comprising North and Central America, along with the Caribbean) and the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). Apart from Australia and New Zealand the OFC was a real pain in the ass to research. Here are maps of Tonga and French Caledonia, complete with a picture of Christian Karembeau, who was born in French Caledonia but who played with relatively little distinction for France. Tenuous. Tonga doesn't appear to have any teams listed next to it. I probably just wanted to draw the map.

So despite my hostility towards it at the time, the internet is now a fine nursing home for this ageing piece of youthful creativity. This is only a tiny sample of a work that is so eccelctic that even I now wonder what I was thinking back then. It includes team profiles of the now defunct J-League team Verdy Kawasaki and Kaiser Chiefs from South Africa (nearly a decade before they became better known as a band), footballing maps of the Seychelles and Madagascar and player profiles of Wagner Lopes from Japan, Jürgen Sparwasser from East Germany, Marco Antonio Etcheverry from Bolivia and Lefter Küçükandonyadis from Turkey. Wikipedia does it all so much more thoroughly now, although I'm willing to bet there are several things here that slipped through its clinical filters.

Weird use of the word 'warned'

2010-01-27T17:28:00.002Z

Not only does this Guardian article start off more like a Zen Buddhist koan than a news story, it also finds something new for us to be afraid about:

"Human beings are making it harder for extraterrestials to pick up our broadcasts and make contact, the world's leading expert on the search for alien life warned yesterday."

Oh no (..?)

The next mission

2010-01-25T22:30:00.003Z

So Clyde, that was a highly successful round of Modern Warfare 2 on Sunday morning. Ridiculously early on Sunday morning, I should add. And having checked out the competition I believe that our numerous successes, particularly in the Terminal stage, were quite an accomplishment. Certainly our tactics were far superior to those exhibited in this video:

Sure, he was playing solo, but I bet he had had a good night's sleep before playing through this stage, rather than a full day rushing around London followed by six hours of gaming powered by tea and Jaffa Cakes.

And so on to the next challenge. With the possibility of a rapidly increasing cash reward in mind, prepare yourself - to arrest Blair.

(This shouldn't be too hard - I don't think he sleeps so easily these days either).

Oooh, regulating sarcasm. What a useful idea...

2010-01-20T00:37:00.007Z

Where has this indispensible piece of punctuation been all my life? I can't for the life of me think how I survived without it:

A cartoon of a pierced ear designed to denote sarcasm - so useful, so necessary, so exquisite. I suppose the Nobel Prize for Literature is a forgone conclusion this year. And on a personal level, what a joy for me. After years of flailing in the dark for meaning my friends can now see when I'm being sarcastic and follow my instructions to act as I deem appropriate, ultimately allowing them to empty the storage space in their brains clogged up with data accumulated through them getting to know me. In truth, I would have preferred some kind of written disclaimer, maybe: ''The following sentence is a product of sarcasm, please do not take it literally; please do feel stung and diminished.'' But no, I'll take this accessible symbol and clasp it to my bosom. After all, where's the fun in making sarcastic statements if you cannot telegraph them in a nice, orderly, obvious manner.

This sainted device is intended for written sarcasm, but it shouldn't be limited to this medium, no sir. One can blunder with sarcasm and make faux pas in spoken conversation too. Perhaps I should print my very own Sarcmark, blow it up and make flashcards to hold up so I can draw on its powers in conversations in the real world too. I could even plaster it across my chest and rip my shirt open to reveal it, so that whenever someone asks me my opinion about the proposed Bad Boys III, I can reply ''yes, it will certainly be a work of genius to match the first two. A work of the High Renaissance'', and onlookers will comprehend that my thoughts belie my words and that in fact I am slightly less than favourably inclined towards another round of that crap. I could stamp the Sarcmark on my forehead. That certainly would aid communication. That would make me more likeable.

TV executives could use it too. A flashing Sarcmark could pop up in the corner during those snooty comedy shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office, where a studio audience has not been granted to viewers to signpost the laughy bits. Look, here's birthday boy Tim, evidently pleased with his new hat. He's even saying so. We should all feel really happy for him, despite that odd tone in his voice. But, uh-oh, with Sarcmark flashing in the bottom right corner of the screen you can see that...hehe...Tim is in fact, not pleased with his new hat. Audience, commence laughing now.

And look at me - being sarcastic about the Sarcmark, that's original. Pretending to overreact to generate meta-sarcasm. I trust no one else on the internet will do that. And I do hope nobody abuses the Sarcmark, attaching it to statements that are not intended to be sarcastic, therefore using the Sarcmark in a sarcastic manner. The multiple layers of sarcasm would build on each other and propel us into a black hole of sarcasm. But if used sincerely...well, the Sarcmark could raise our collective state of being, end wars and propel us to a brighter future. Oh thank you Sarcmark, thank you, THANK YOU. THAAAANNNKKK YOOOOUUUUU

(Seriously, thanks a lot...)

(Seriously, seriously, I really am very happy about this idea, and eagerly anticipating the first signs of it in my inbox)

(But seriously...)

These turtles aren't reptiles; they're am-fib-ians

2010-01-16T01:29:00.007Z

I don’t keep a diary, I don’t jot down all my inspired, important thoughts and I don’t have a hilarious sitcom to work them into, so this site will have to bear the responsibility of filing my random thoughts. This one concerns a theory that I recently put forward to a small group concerning the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And pizza. And how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn’t love pizza that much at all.

As one would predict, this bold thesis was initially shot down. The Turtles loved pizza! Remember? They couldn’t shut up about it. Yet my memory of how the Turtles behaved rather than what they said gave me cause to believe that there was something to this theory. Vague recollections from the show had given me cause to shoot my mouth off, but before doing so any further I needed proof. And, lo and behold, having checked the archives I think I was right. With an admittedly small data sample and research conducted by nothing more scientific than watching a few episodes of the cartoon and drawing the logical conclusions I can conclude that if anything, the turtles couldn’t stand pizza.

It doesn’t take long for the evidence to trickle in. In their first appearance in the very first episode one of them orders a pizza coated with ice cream while another goes for a jelly bean topping. Maybe they do like pizza. And maybe people that gorge on Terry’s Chocolate Oranges enjoy fruit. It doesn’t even look like pizza. It’s like alien roadkill. Look at that shimmering, sickly paste spread across the surface. What is it exactly? And why do they need salt, or whatever condiment is inside that salt-shaker, to accompany it?

Just as strange for would-be pizza obsessives, they repeatedly gorge on the pizzas, with their disgusting toppings, but leave the crusts. They never ate the crusts, but tossed them away with the box. So not content with adding extra ingredients to warp the concept of a pizza to a level that Willy Wonka would find disturbing, the turtles actually dispense with one of the fundamental parts of the original pizza. They want a dough-based product without the structural constraints of thick crusts or the flavour constraints of a cheese and tomato base. That’s a sandwich. Or a cake. The turtles liked sandwiches and cakes. They probably couldn’t have given a shit about pizzas.

Even in the later episodes, the really, awful ones, the implausible, nonsensical free for alls, we consistently see the turtles slavering over pizzas with overpowering, inhuman, anti-pizza toppings, hankering after them like a dog hankers over his worms medication provided that it’s buried deep in the centre of a rolled-up ball of tripe. Fast forward to 3:00 in this disappointlingly half-arsed installment to see what gets them excited. And at the start of this episode they reject free pizzas as a “punishment” because they are too small. Sure, a likely excuse. Coke addicts can snort it off the seats of public toilets, yet these picky bastards don’t want their free bite-sized pizzas? There’s obviously no pizza fixation here. Perhaps what none of them were prepared to admit is that they hated pizza. Perhaps the pressure of living up to their inappropriately selected Renaissance names and fitting in with New York City forced them to shovel pizzas down their throats, just like it compelled them to wear those unconvincing trench coats and spout their trendy catchphrases. They're living a lie, fibbing just to fit in. They’re not fooling me.

To finish, here is a special fruit pizza I endured in Colombia. No, of course it doesn’t work. I had to scrape the strawberries and blueberries off to enjoy it. That’s because I actually like pizza. The Turtles, on the other hand, liked cakes.

PS: Lots of Turtles episodes are available on YouTube

New Moon: If ever there was turd at the box office...

2010-01-13T18:47:00.000Z

... This one would be sinking right to the bottom.

Have you ever seen a poster for a movie promo and immediately thought "that looks like a shit film"? If not, there's always a first time and a poster for The Twilight Saga: New Moon might inspire just such thoughts. Here it is.

Ok, perhaps the poster does not fully sway your opinion without at least some idea of a synopsis. It is essentially a romance drama (I find the Rotten Tomatoes categorisation as "Action/Adventure" very, very unlikely.) that centers a love triangle between a young woman and two young men. One's a werewolf and the other a vampire.

Is it just me or do authors and movie writers nowadays love taking classic storylines and shitting all over them with their cheesy teeny romance... That's right, what young teenage girls need more of these days are movies and books about superficial relationships with superficial men in a romanticised take on the vampire and werewolf.

Hollywood took a big dump on the Terminator franchise with the Sarah Connor Chronicles with enough she-bots to make my iMac look inadequate. And Smallville, which I actually enjoyed for the first season or two before tiring of the teenage drama, also was responsible for possibly intiating this trend of heroes/villains regurgitated into something for the mass of hormonal teenagers.

And yes, if you have read all the books to the Twilight series, watched the movie and find yourself somehow infatuated with the idea of a love triangle between a woman, a bat and a dog, then you are a bestiality empathiser. It is what it is no matter how many tight fitted t-shirts you want to slap onto those once unruined concepts of werewolves and vampires.

No more lies

2010-01-12T18:34:00.005Z

It's a new year, and time to reassess some of our core beliefs. Having looked out of my window on several occasions, and having seen all those pictures of Britain on the news, something has jumped out at me, and as a result I have come to some pretty radical conclusions. These conclusions mean we must to rethink one of the most persistent theories propogated by the media, we must reassess our hysteria and all the money we have wasted on it. I know that the press, our elected officials and those bloody self-appointed experts have spent years rabbiting on about it, but the evidence from these pictures is irrefutable. So far only a brave few have spoken up, but the fact is we cannot fool ourselves and I for one refuse to be taken in any longer...

Well? Do you see terrorists in any of these pictures? Where are all these terrorists we keep hearing about? Don't give me any of your crap about context or what's going on elsewhere, I've looked out of my window and I can't see any terrorists. The War on Terrorism is OVER, ladies and gentlemen. WHY AREN'T WE CELEBRATING THIS?

Frosty Tumbleweed!

2010-01-11T19:03:00.002Z

Second only to its TV guide so far, is this week's article from the Daily Mail Online which reports a phenomenon occurring in Somerset amidst the freezing temperatures and iced up British islands.

"Frank Barrow, a lecturer in meteorology at the Met Office, described the exact science behind the formations and said it was nature's version of a snowman.

He said: 'They start off with a nice thick layer of snow, with the top snow just on the point of melting either because of general temperature or sunshine on the surface.

'The top snow layer becomes a bit sticky and you then need a fairly strong wind. The sticky layer can be peeled off the colder and more powdery snow underneath by the wind, forming a roll."

Postscript to Christmas 2

2010-01-05T15:47:00.007Z

I must say, The Daily Mail Christmas TV guide was as trusty as always this year, despite there being hardly anything decent on TV for it to guide me to. In a new year I should start on a positive note and proclaim that by a distance as far as the eye can see the TV guide the best thing about The Daily Mail.

One thing puzzled me, though. For a newspaper that wails on an on about the true meaning of Christmas, incessantly pretends its being banned or reined in by the PC brigade, actively seeks out heretics that deviate from religious worship and blows its top over attempts to make it a secular and enjoyable affair, some of the wording inside was a little, shall we say, sensible:

Why, Happy Holidays to you too, Daily Mail!!! And since today is the twelfth day of Christmas, and since my parents won't stop buying your shit newspaper, you should at least reward them with a gift. For my part, I want twelve columnists-a-walking. I'm thinking Melanie Phillips, Jan Moir, Richard and Georgina Littlejohn, William Rees-Mogg, Peter Hitchens, Amanda Platell, Quentin Letts, Piers Morgan, Max Hastings and that cowardly, anonymous scribe known only by the name 'Daily Mail Reporter', who normally reports on non-stories that are so embarassingly shite that their collected cringe factor could be harnessed to cure rigor mortis and maybe death itself. Stories such as this one, where the quotes are all pilfered from that week's TV guide. Daily Mail Editor and Director Paul Dacre should promote the TV guide staff to the actual paper and then make up the numbers of columnists-a-walking by sacking himself too.

Postscript to Christmas 1

2010-01-05T15:35:00.003Z

You should be familiar with the pre-Christmas order:

Well, here is the new order. It should take me a while to trash all these headphones.

I just had to take a picture of this too. It's A4 in size and I still don't have the heart to eat it.

Dear British MPs

2010-01-04T19:48:00.002Z

The end of 2009 marked a special ocassion. Not only was it the end of a dramatic and somewhat important year. We saw the end of Obama's first year in Office. We mourned the death of the King of Pop, leaving us with even less to watch on MTV that we can pass off as 'talent'. And we enjoyed the temporary delights like getting an extra 22p worth of credit with every £10 of credit top-up on your pre-pay phone because of the 2.5% reduction in VAT. Or Rage Against the Machine pwning the X Factor annual turd.

But more importantly, the 31st of December 2009 marked the end of a decade, some might say the end of an era. And so I find myself in the company of others marking this joyous occasion (because one can always remain moderately optimistic for the future when on alcohol no matter how bleak the future and past may be), watching the London Eye's exploding fireworks in its glory over the Thames accompanying Londoners in their transition into the new era.

You see, aside from the alcohol, it helps to forget and perhaps forgive a little, the wrong doings of assholes like Wall Street who have indenfinitely ruined lives everywhere, Israel bombing the shit out of schools in Lebanon and Palestine, the utter FAIL that came out of Copenhagen's recent climate change summit, British police kettling G8 protesters and persecuting citizens armed with cameras, bankers and CEOs earning way too much for the mistakes they made. And of course the complete embarassment of British nation when you and your fellow colleagues were exposed for the expense claims scandal. No, it wasn't because you liked to watch a bit of porn now and then when the wife was at work. Nor was it the fact that you charged the taxpayers for phantom mortgages. It was embarassing because now the whole wide world knows that there are people in England who still think that building a moat around your luxury house is the dog's bollocks.

But I forgive all this. Because every so often it's good to restore your faith in humanity and there is no better time than when we enter a new era and look to the future rather than behind us. Maybe it was inspired by Obama's conviction in 'change' that spills into every other corner of the sociopolitical world. Sure, I don't expect it overnight.

But then, a select few of you found yourselves unable to resist the urge to have your cake and eat it too. To think you are now safer and further away from the public eye but to resist paying for your sins:

"Three labour MPs are arguing they cannot be prosecuted over expenses claims because they are protected by parliamentary privilege.

The trio – Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine – are being represented by a legal firm that has acted as solicitor to the Labour Party since 1990.

Their lawyers are understood to maintain that the Bill of Rights of 1689 makes them immune to prosecution. Police have forwarded files relating to the expenses claims of six MPs and peers to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr Morley and Mr Chaytor both claimed thousands of pounds for "phantom" mortgages they had paid off. Mr Devine submitted invoices for electrical work worth £2,157 from a company with an allegedly false address and an invalid VAT number. Steel & Shamash, a London legal company, confirmed it had instructed two QCs to consider whether the MPs should be protected by parliamentary privilege."

- The Independent

Therefore, as a long-standing resident of this country, a taxpayer of considerable contribution and a law-abiding citizen of the middle class, I kindly request that you and and any of the approximately 400 MPs in breach of expense claim rules who may wish to follow in your footsteps and avoid giving us our money back for your moat, Scandinavian porn, pool boys, bell tower maintenence etc, to assemble at the cliffs of Dover at mid-day tomorrow. And then jump the fuck off. And hopefully the currents will flush your bodies onto the shores of France, because quite frankly this land as no room for your kind around here anymore. And neither does 2010.

Yours sincerely,
Clyde
Contributor @ Bastardisation of the East

When opinions are just plain WRONG

2009-12-31T14:55:00.008Z

First the Leech tried The Times list of the ‘best films of the decade’. But it was far too facile, so he disregarded it as being beneath him. So then he tried The New Yorker’s list of the ‘best films of the decade’. But it was far too pompous, so he disregarded it as being way over his head. Then he went to The Guardian list of the ‘best films of the decade’, numbers 100-11. And it was just right.

BUT THEN the numpties that wrote it determined that (pff) Fahrenheit 9/11 was the tenth best film of the decade. And that (sigh) Team America: World Police was the fourth best film of the decade. And that (NOOOOO) the smug feature length school-boy prank Borat was the SECOND BEST FILM OF THE DECADE.

And the Leech collapsed in the corner and bemoaned these juvenile bouts of attention seeking from The Guardian, this fawning over films where the methodology consists of throwing a bucket of slurry at a wall to see what sticks. He began wailing that the one remaining space could not accommodate Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation, The Lives of Others, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and that at this rate it was probably going to end up going to The Dark Knight. Or Ant and Dec’s Alien Autopsy. Or Transformers 2.

But then a voice guided the Leech to the dark side - The Telegraph, where its film critic determined, with exquisite taste, that Mulholland Drive was the film of the decade and that Donnie Darko should not be forced out of the Top 100 to make way for films like Zoolander. And even though the list itself was fairly pedestrian and contained nonsense like A.I. and King Kong, the Leech recognised that these lists are subjective and just someone else’s opinion. It just so happened that The Guardian's opinions were plain wrong. "Seriously", he said, "if they make Lord of the Rings number 1 tomorrow I'm going right wing".

 

Mulholland Drive. Enjoyable enough on its own terms, even better when you watch it with me and are gently encouraged (not forced, no no no) to listen to me trying to explain everything for the entire duration of the film.

There be no shelter here - Simon Cowell is everywhere

2009-12-21T20:09:00.005Z

Well that was smashing. 'Killing in the Name' tops the chart and Simon Cowell recedes for the time being. Mind you, I personally would have preferred a campaign in support of ‘Guerrilla Radio’. While less iconic, it’s a more dynamic song, its theme sits better with an attempt to sabotage the latest manufactured pop coronation, it contains the necessary expletives and it doesn’t come with lines that make you slap your forehead because they are fuel for ill-informed and lazy critics. Lines like ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’, for example. The naughty words are also more deeply integrated into the song – for performance purposes you can always chop the end of ‘Killing in the Name off’, with ‘Guerrilla Radio’ they’re in the chorus, so a bit of creativity is needed. ‘Lights out, Guerrilla Radio – do some sit-ups’, or perhaps, ‘Lights out, Guerrilla Radio – burn that witch up’..?

At least all involved avoided that gaping great pitfall that would have come with another great RATM song, ‘No Shelter’, which not only would have undermined the impressive charity donations the record sales generated for Shelter, but also contains the lyrics ‘Empty your pockets son; they got you thinking that. What you need is what they selling. Make you think that buying is rebelling’. Phew…

But (and how about this for a segueway...) from Simon Cowell there really seems to be no shelter. For while I savour this landmark musical victory, my twitchy mind senses new threats beyond the horizon. The worry is that if someone as slow as I can latch on to a grassroots Facebook campaign to combine entertainment with people power to effect change then it’s safe to say that the likes of Cowell are a million steps ahead, seeking ways to harness it from above. These last few weeks he has been pitching his latest grim vision in various interviews: a political version of The X Factor. In what is probably indicative of how ITV television is thrown together now, all we know about this proposed monstrosity is that it would be a political voting show with debates on hot issues like the war in Afghanistan and that the studio “would have a red telephone in the middle so that at any time someone from Number 10 could phone in.” Not, a black telephone, not a purple telephone, a RED telephone. That’s what we know so far: political show, red telephone. The faceless TV drones that work behind the scenes can erect the whole stupid marquee with these two poles, right? No doubt ITV could help prop it up with some silly money, while Cowell, in order to guarantee that he gets full credit for this new idea, could flesh out his vision with some other X Factor ingredients, such as importing its audience, whose impenetrable wall of ignorant, noisy, unbearable booing, cheering and shrieking in reaction to the comments from the judges’ panel actually made the moments where the contestants had to sing proportionately among the quietest of the show.

Of course, there’s no evidence Cowell cares about politics any more than he cares about music. He simply wants to coast his way through, rake in the money and form a lovely nest with it, atop his superior vantage point, while down below tabloid hype and reflex hysteria turn everything to shit. My paranoia is projecting horrid future visions of the damage this TV show would inflict if it ever came into existence. Debating, discussing and clarifying ideas, and interacting with MPs are not only useful processes, but vital for developing democracy and expanding the maximum level of freedom within the confines of strong protective safeguards. But that’s not what Simon Cowell is about – if given the chance he would auction those safeguards off to the highest bidder. It’s not what the tabloids are about either - we already know how the tabloids would get their foot in the door and drive us far away from human decency and rational discussion if, say, a debate were held on executing paedophiles. Nor prime time television – logical, considered exchanges of ideas don’t pull decent-sized audiences and can’t be tarted up without the content suffering. Ultimately this show would set us up for some shrill agenda setting from some of the most privileged and irresponsible people in Britain working outside of banking. And lurking in wait to answer the call of this agenda setting would be our new PM, David Cameron, the embodiment of uninspired emptiness, who in one of his typical vacuous soundbites, recently mused that there was “probably something we can learn” from his new friend Simon Cowell. He didn’t say what we could learn. But, you know, it’s a popular show, we can learn something. Probably. It really makes you think. About something or other. From the outset this ambitious man has latched onto the latest celebrity fads with the most fawning obsequiousness, devoting a section in his very first party conference speech as Tory leader in 2006 to an irrelevant set of platitudes aimed at reality TV heroes such as school dinner crusader Jamie Oliver and Jo 'Supernanny' Frost. “We need more of Supernanny, less of the nanny state”, he weasled, failing to notice what a contradictory statement this was and employing a cultural reference so out of place that I'm amazed it wasn't part of a 'Family Guy' flashback. There will be no engaging the public in this reality TV Armageddon, just the addition of politicians who think with greater clarity than they speak to the list of people Cowell can have us humiliate for entertainment purposes. Got bad eyesight and shit handwriting? Run and hide you losers.

This won’t happen; it can’t be allowed to happen. No matter how badly politics in this country stink, they cannot possibly be reinvigorated through armchair opinions and anyone even close to Number 10 being goaded into spitting out reflex answers to satisfy a mob that barely reaches Clarksonian levels of nuance and intellect. I’m being jittery at the moment, maybe unjustifiably so, but the rickety chain from populist politics on ITV to post apocalyptic dystopia now at least seems logical, if not inevitable. If there is one man you can trust to get his way in Britain today it’s Simon Cowell. Most of the time.

Fuck You, I'll do what some things you tell me

2009-12-20T18:58:00.003Z

Just over a year ago I held off gloating over Barack Obama’s election win, partly because I had nothing to do with it, but even more so because I knew what a useless shower of shite his incoming administration would be. But nothing can sully this sweet, sweet victory. I even put my money where my mouth was and got involved with my first Facebook campaign. There were some proper scares there, but ultimately we got the right result because this was a proper election with a proper winner.

FUCK The X Factor

FUCK limp cover versions

FUCK whinging Cheryl Cole

FUCK smarmy Simon Cowell

Christmas Number 1, 2009, Killing in the Name, Rage Against The Machine

A good excuse for tardiness

2009-12-20T02:42:00.004Z

Because amazing stuff like this is out to distract me...

riPod

2009-11-20T14:09:00.009Z

Story time. Since I moved back to the UK I have been doing most of my sleeping in an outdoor wooden house with all the creature comforts of a regular home but, as I discovered yesterday, with the added feature of a tiny hole in the ceiling. With the relatively good weather we had been enjoying up until now I had failed to notice this little crevice, let alone appreciate the implications of it being there. That was until I woke up this morning and discovered my iPod swimming in a small pool of cold water formed from the night's rainwater finding its way into a recess on the surface of a stuffed envelope that I hadn't thrown out but had instead left lying idle on a cabinet near to my bed - an all too common problem, no doubt. Needless to say, the device is not with us anymore, its cold, damp body having resisted various means of resuscitation. It now lies in a drawer with the only remaining hope coming from the same mysterious bullshit force that makes dead Transformers come back to life in Michael Bay films. Perhaps there is plot convenience in my iPod returning. The real kicker is that had I left the thing even a few millimetres in any direction away from its soon to be watery grave then it wouldn't have perished in such a stupid, wasteful manner and I wouldn't be contemplating going back to the cassette recorder that I had been content with less than two years ago but will now just looks like a plastic box of cogs waiting to chew up my tapes and piss me off.

Much like the deaths in the Final Destination films the circumstances surrounding the deceased were at once implausible but also predictable, with the foreshadowing coming from a particularly bad year for my headphones. Being a tall man with a long stride and quick pace, prone to the odd bout of heavy-handedness, I have always had a pretty destructive relationship with headphones, so much so that for reasons that not even I can account for I have been storing up expired pairs of them throughout the year. Here, hopefully to prove a point beyond my mental issues and attachment to junk, is a fairly complete roll call of the recent dead:

This monstrosity sums up my thrifty attitude quite nicely. Note the different heads, the adaptor, the cellotape and the point where an earpiece has very obviously been snipped off. That's right, two half broken sets of headphones have been shunted together here into one functional construction.

A close up so you can really take in the cellotape

I don't know if it's just me, but the three pairs of standard iPod headphones I have worked through have all developed the same problem - as time went by the volume level from the earpieces shrunk to ridiculous non-levels of non-noise, requiring me to turn the volume up full blast. Yet music would still pump out of the holes on the external side, allowing the mums and kids on the bus and metro to enjoy the Marilyn Manson and Slipknot songs that I was supposed to be listening to, and with far greater clarity. The only solution I found to this problem wass to balance the external sides in my ears with the speakers facing out, giving me back my music but making me look like a confused tit in the eyes of the public.

A garish pair of cheap headphones bought for emergency purposes from a street trader in Bogota, Colombia. The construction is appalling but they lasted for three weeks.

Note how the cover on one of the earpieces had come off. Those with eagle eyes might also notice damage from superglue. I always do everything I can for the patient before giving up hope.
A mass grave of some, but certainly not all, of the headphones lost in 2008-2009. Notably absent are the pairs that my dog chewed up and a pair that I chucked in a Madrid dustbin.
My latest pair. They're durable and function well, but are several inches too short for me to use when I want to go for a walk with my iPod. Oh yeah...

30 Republicans vote against Al Franken's anti-rape amendment

2009-10-20T18:49:00.002+01:00

From the HuffPost:

"When thirty Republicans lined up against an amendment that would have required defense contractors to allow their employees access to U.S. courts in cases of rape or sexual assault, Jon Stewart ripped them to pieces.

"I understand we're a divided country, some disagreements on health care. How is ANYONE against this?" he wondered.

It's a question, it turns out, best addressed to the White House.

The vote against the amendment has sparked outrage at the all-male, all-white bloc of thirty Republican senators. HuffPost readers have been particularly infuriated by the GOP opposition and have regularly posted the names of the offending thirty in the comment section of even unrelated stories. A mock website - www.republicansforrape.org -- has sprung up."

They do say not all Republicans have a dysfunctional moral compass, but most batshit Coulter-crazy politicians tend to be white, male Republicans. How bad could you possibly look voting against this one... In true GOP style, North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr took a simple vote that would provide rape victims greater access to legal action against their employers and those involved in sexual abuse, and painted it as a "cynical attempt by the trial lawyers to eliminate arbitration agreements, which limit their fees, behind the guise of protecting women."

Of course, Franken's amendment does not limit contracted companies' rights to use arbitration as so many of the 30 white, male Rebulicans make out. But rather provides employees the right to bring their case to an open court. It'd be lazy to simply believe the 30 men who voted against this amendment are morally corrupt as to condone rape. But the motivation behind their no-vote still remains elusive to me. But whatever their reasons, it had better be a damn good one because the price you pay is looking like a complete tool on TV.

And speaking of TV, it's most certainly well worth watching the Jon Stewart report on this story (Thursday episode. UK viewers only. Available only until tomorrow.)

FAQ: Will there be pork in my xmas dinner?

2009-10-17T00:04:00.000+01:00

From POLITICO:

"... there's a growing urban legend that he won't have a Christmas tree.

The White House Historical Association has been receiving calls and emails about an alleged Obama decree that the Christmas trees in the White House would now be known as "holiday trees." And artists submitting designs for ornaments on the Blue Room tree were not allowed to depict Christian themes.

"It's strange," said Maria Downs, the historical association's spokeswoman. "They're almost saying, 'Are you aware of this?'""

In other news, the White House Christmas planners are relieved to hear they had not accidently purchased Muslim trees. Damn those chain-emails! I'm still waiting for my ~~mail order bride~~ destined soul-mate to show up, MSN not to remove me for account inactivity, and AOL saving a dying baby by giving 5 cents for every email forward after forwarding those to 25 friends...

United States of Earth

2009-10-16T23:26:00.002+01:00

If you're really really really bored at work or something, how about a game of crazy? United States of Earth sees you fighting in a near-future second American Revolution where "patriots" fight to topple Obama's regime in this strategy game. Good ol' fashioned right-wing paranoia fused with redneck gun nuttery makes for an interesting fantasy exercise for the average Palin fan, where you can finally unleash all your Obama hatin' with other fellow gun tottin' Republicans!

If you're really really bored that is.

Stuff You Can't Make Up #153987

2009-10-13T19:08:00.003+01:00

So I thought I'd finally interrupt my brief hiatus to bring you some important news...!

ITEM #1
TRAMPOLINE CAUSES FREEWAY CRASH

"A FLYING trampoline has caused a crash between a car and a truck on a freeway in Melbourne's southeast.

Paramedics say the trampoline blew off the roof of a car transporting it along the Princes Freeway at Narre Warren shortly after 8pm (AEDT) yesterday.

The trampoline then flew into the windscreen of the car behind.

That car was then struck from behind by a semi-trailer.

Ambulance Victoria advanced life support paramedic Jamie Watkinson said a 29-year-old man suffered swelling, a cut on the forehead and pain in his eyes and chest from the collision.

He was taken to the Dandenong Hospital in a stable condition.

A 22-year-old woman from the same car suffered minor injuries and was also taken to Dandenong Hospital in a stable condition.

The truck driver was not injured. "

ITEM #2
MAN KILLED IN DRUNK GAME OF CHESS!

"According to police, the two men were drinking and playing chess when they began fighting. Christian apparently killed Steward by putting Steward's neck between Christian's legs and squeezing until Steward died, according to police.

Christian also received a fine of $1,000, which was suspended, and was ordered to pay $150,000 to Steward's estate or heirs.

"I am sick of myself and I am sorry I have caused so much hurt of those who loved Mike," Christian said. "I will carry my shame ... for my remaining days.""

I'm glad that Steward shows remorse for his actions. But did he ever think about the embarassment that Christian now has to carry into his after-life for having been killed in one of the slowest, most non-violent activities in the world? No, sir.

Another job for Mother Earth

2009-09-08T12:17:00.004+01:00

The cesspool that is Dubai should already be on a caution, what with its backwards legislation, de facto slave labour , world high levels of pollution, unmitigated ugliness and seedy underbelly spattered with sloppy wet kisses from showbiz hack Piers Morgan.

Lovely, isn't it? But it seems it is not just Dubai, but the UAE as a whole that is forsaking its humanity. According to Ma'an, via Norman G Finkelstein's website:

"The security authorities in the United Arab Emirates, since less than a month have informed thousands of Palestinians holders of Palestinian or Jordanian passports (two-Strip) and Egyptian documents to leave the country. The Palestinians were notified to complete their work and belongings and leave within two days, a week, two weeks, or one month maximum - which of course is not enough - without taking into account the period they have established themselves in the country which in some cases was up to 40 years. This has been done without giving them any reasons but deportation for security reasons and probably heard the words “guidance and orders from higher up” and taken the same footprint and pictures of all the criminals and displayed on the screen of black and white for all to see at the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior which in turn canceled his residence and demanded him to leave, and then deprived him also the six Gulf states, “even the Holy Land.” "

Iranians and Lebanese are reportedly affected too. These boys really want their country to look clean, but there is now plenty of evidence of what lies beneath.

It's no fun when the oil comes easily

2009-08-31T17:45:00.004+01:00

Here is Melanie Phillips' favourite pro-war stateside rag, The American Thinker, condemning this Labour administration, no Britain as a whole, for the fact that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi's delivery to Libya was carried out for cynical, oil-related reasons.

Here are the two leading hate-filled rags that she writes for declaring that the Labour government were engaging in a spot of Middle East realpolitik, first The Daily Mail, next The Spectator.

On to the Murdoch press. Here we have spunk-encrusted comic The Sun tearing into New Labour for oil-related immorality, as well as Faux News and the New York Post falling into line. And here is Pentagon blowhole The Wall Street Journal telling us how the British government can't hide the truth over its oily lies in the Middle East in this internet era.

Hell, let's jump back two years before this new internet era, back to 2007, and read a story from Conrad Black's now defunct New York Sun telling us that Anthony Blair might be preparing to betray families of Lockerbie victims and mail Megrahi back to Libya in exchange for the black stuff.

So that's the Melanie Phillips right, the Murdoch press and the ghost of Conrad Black's malevolent shit-blanket all taking a break from pressganging us into 'supporting the troops' to tell us that New Labour is quite prepared to lie to the public and misbehave in Arab lands to get at their oil. What's astounding is not just that they claim that oil was the motivating factor, but that it is blatantly obvious. Gee thanks guys, well over a million dead Iraqis could have benefitted from your laser sharp analysis. Maybe you can all shut up for a bit now.

Cartoon courtesy of The Independent, who had no problem reading the Iraq massacre correctly from the very start.

The edited truth

2009-08-30T14:41:00.002+01:00

Budget airlines - connecting Barnet with the Third World

2009-08-28T13:08:00.004+01:00

Is Barnet being used as a Petri dish for what is soon to become David Cameron’s Britain? Or do we have a not so subtle way of clearing out Barnet’s least useful and most expensive from the borough so that a Tory run council can claw back millions of pounds it lost through sheer ineptitude? Either way, we have a clear indication that however bad this current lot are, there’s worse waiting in the wings.

The Guardian has picked up on what looks like a Tory policy. The Tories haven't needed many of these until now as Cameron has been doing just fine sniping at the current circus and enunciating his cha-cha-chás with vacuous buzzwords like ‘choice’ and ‘change’. But over in Barnet we seem to have the blueprint for a local innovation that the future PM is "expected to look closely at", nicknamed ‘easyCouncil.’ It’s the brainchild of Barnet council leader Mike Freer, who has become sufficiently enamoured with the business plan of budget airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair to base distribution of council services on them. Well, partially - Freer isn’t really interested in the idea that the average Brit can fly to Malaga or Prague for vastly reduced prices, but rather more taken with the part where the airline does the very bare minimum and customers have to pay extra for basic services such as food on board, getting a seat or even booking and checking in to the flight they have already paid for.

Conservatives were at best slow off the mark and at worst outright Quislings during the clamour to defend the NHS from wingnut smears from across the Atlantic and it’s easy to see why. This new plan cuts services run by the council or outsources them to private companies that will no doubt maintain the levels of customer care previous privatisation efforts have brought. One example reported in the Guardian is the cutting of live-in wardens at sheltered housing for old people, replacing them with 'floating wardens' that work across the whole borough and may be privately funded. Another example is the 'priority boarding' given to those that can pay an extra charge to be fast-tracked for planning permission. Council services will effectively be run with extra benefits going to the highest bidders at the expense of those coughing up for the basic 'rates'. Yet another example of judging a society by how well the people at the top are doing rather than the nation’s least well off and yet another way of widening the gap between rich and poor.

By copying a model as hostile to users as Ryanair we can already work out that Mike Freer has no interest in public services, so how should we judge his ability to handle profits? Well, last year he was recognised by Private Eye for this very skill:

"One man who raised cluelessness to an art form was the Tory leader of the London borough of Barnet, Mike Freer. He told councillors that he couldn’t be blamed for the council losing £27.4m in dodgy Icelandic banks because he had never bothered to review the council’s investments. Ever. And in a former life he used to be, er, a banker. Quite.”

Useless in all the fields required of a modern day British council leader, what better inspiration could there possibly be? The Guardian has done well to look into this outrage, but the real test of how far the Conservatives would be pushing their luck remains The Daily Mail and its comments crypt. And even here we find many of its denizens are wailing and moaning in consternation:

"As we saw on Panorama, the way Barnet are dealing with elderly, frail people, who can't look after themselves, is by removing wardens from warden controlled, secure housing, and cutting back on housing benefits for the disabled, hoping they'll move out of the borough. Barnet council is penalising the weakest members of society BECAUSE they can't fight back. How's about Mr. Freer and his palsaccepting the blame for wasting £37 million in the Icelandic banks WITHOUT asking the council taxpers approval."
- Nannette, London, 28/8/2009

"Ludicrous. Why should people have to pay extra just to get councils to do the job they are supposed to be doing anyway?"
- Rosie, Slough, 28/8/2009

Paediatricians = paedos?

2009-08-26T21:29:00.006+01:00

Today's Daily Mail contains the headline 'Conservative Council embroiled in race row after discovery of document labelling schoolchildren 'Pakis' '

Pretty depressing, though at least the Mail had the discipline to report this astonishing piece of stupidity. Let's see if its notoriously sheep-like readers can be pure and whiter than white for the day, just like their favourite paper. At 21:30 today four comments posted in response to this story had reached over 100 approvals by fellow readers on the Mail website's YouTube-styled ratings system:

Where I live I am called a "Brit", short for British. Am I screaming "Racism?" No I am not. Stop making trouble where there is none.
james, dubai, uae +155

Paki is no worse than Brit.
Joe O'Neill, Pretoria,South Africa +148

Pakis, Brits, Scots, what's the difference?
Chris, Yorkshire +120

For Gods sake. get over it!!
Adam, London +116

Oh.

The Mail can claim that these moronic viewpoints don't reflect its views with the usual disclaimers, but the notice above the comments clearly reads "The comments below have been moderated in advance". I would hate to see what filth doesn't make it past the censors. In fact, there is still some of this sentiment lingering from Prince Harry's unfortunate bit of banter in January, as this semi-literate clutter demonstrates:

same as calling British citizens Brits; Canadians Canuks; Americans Yanks......
- j hodgins, edmonton, canada +1421

If someone calls me a Brit, short for British,can I make a big stink about racism? Its gone too far, leave the lad alone.
- Janet S, Sale, Cheshire +1341

It is simply an abreviation of Pakistan. I was born in Britain and do not take offence at being called a Brit!
- Malcolm Burn, Newcastle +1223

My my, what a stoical bunch. It's too easy to insult this pitiful, misguided swarm of cockroaches -cocks for short - so I'll just wish them a lifetime of candle-lit dinners and ham sandwiches.

¡anímame!

2009-08-25T17:52:00.009+01:00

It may seem like a random request, but Dear God, Dear Mother Earth, now summer is nearly over, please can you, ejem, 'deal' with this place..?

Algunos dicen que el fin está cerca.
Algunos dicen que veremos el armagedón muy pronto.
Por cierto espero que sí.
Qué bien me vendrían unas vacaciones de este…

…puesto mierdoso…
…en un circo de tres pistas…
...de fenómenos…

…aquí en POLARIS WORLD, este jodido, desesperado agujero
la única manera de arreglarlo es echarlo por el sumidero,
a cualquiera jodida hora, cualquier jodido día.
Aprende a nadar, te veré en el nuevo 'Lago Murcia'.

Preocúpate por tu bacon
y preocúpate por tu postura
y preocúpate por tu swing
y preocúpate por tu piscina
y preocúpate por tus vallas
y preocúpate por tus rociadores
y preocúpate por tu quitasol
[pero no te preocupes con el español... ]

Es un puesto mierdoso…
…en un circo de tres pistas…
…de fenómenos…

…aquí en POLARIS WORLD, este desalmado, jodido agujero
la única manera de arreglarlo es echarlo por el sumidero,
A cualquiera jodida hora, cualquier jodido día,
Aprende a nadar, te veré en el nuevo 'Lago Murcia'.

Algunos dicen que caerá un cometa desde el cielo,
Seguido de chaparrones y grandes maremotos,
Seguido de líneas de la falla descontrolados,
Seguido de millones de gilipollas atolondrados.

Y algunos dicen que el fin está cerca.
Algunos dicen que veremos el armagedón muy pronto.
Por cierto espero que sí.
Qué bien me vendrían unas vacaciones de esta…
…mierda gilipollas,
mierda estúpida,
mierda gilipollas...
Un gigante úlcera enconada y distractiva,
Tengo una sugerencia para manteneros ocupados: APRENDED A NADAR.
Mamá pronto lo arreglará todo.
Mamá vendrá para devolverlo a la forma que debe de ser.

APRENDED A NADAR, APRENDED A NADAR

Al carajo con José Luis Hernández y todos sus malditos anuncios
Al carajo con aquellos que creen que ‘chorizo’ es un futbolista italiano

APRENDED A NADAR
APRENDED A NADAR

Al carajo con los barcos yendo a Ibiza
Al carajo con los que se quejan de la comida
Al carajo con los que malgastan agua precioso
Al carajo con turistas borrachos y rojos

APRENDED A NADAR
APRENDED A NADAR

Al carajo con Jack Nicklaus y su ‘deporte’ aburrido
Al carajo con los empresarios que dejan el paisaje destruido

APRENDED A NADAR
APRENDED A NADAR

Estoy rezando por la lluvia,
Estoy rezando que vengan las olas gigantes,
Quiero ver la tierra derrumbando,
Quiero ver como se colapsa todo,
Mama por favor limpialo todo,
Quiero verlo hundirse,

Quiero verlo como baja,
Quiero ver como lo limpias todo.

Es hora de devolverlo todo de nuevo,
No me llaméis solo pesimista,
Intentad leer entre líneas,
No puedo imaginar por que no darias la bienvenida a un cambio.
Quiero ver como todo se derrumba,
Aspirado abajo,
Llevado por el agua.

With apologies to Tool,
and speakers of the generally beautiful Spanish language

Further fun activities for boys and girls but mostly boys

2009-08-24T18:39:00.004+01:00

I had good fun laying into 'Transformers 2: The Heretic', a few weeks ago, comparing it to a noisy, incomprehensible, oversexed snake-wrestling contest. However, any lingering thoughts that such a warped spectacle was an original idea have been blown out of the water. My latest read, 'The Life of the Spider', written by J. Henri Fabre in 1913, is as chilling a thing as I have ever read. It is the work of a man who enjoys his hobby to extents that regular social boundaries cannot restrain, crossing a line that Michael Bay's unholy shitefest stayed well away from since it literally revels in pain. It is the 'Cannibal Holocaust' of biology writing, as some of these choice cuts, beginning with a disturbingly sympathetic stating of the obvious, should confirm:

“[S]he is said to be poisonous and that is her crime and the primary cause of the repugnance wherewith she inspires us. Poisonous, I agree, if by that we understand that the animal is armed with two fangs which cause the immediate death of the little victims which it catches…”

“I make a Tarantula bite the leg of a young, well-fledged Sparrow, ready to leave the nest. A drop of blood flows; the wounded spot is surrounded by a reddish circle, changing to purple. The bird almost immediately loses the use of its leg, which drags, with the toes doubled in; it hops upon the other. Apart from this, the patient does not seem to trouble much about his hurt; his appetite is good. My daughters feed him on Flies, bread-crumb, apricot-pulp. He is sure to get well, he will recover his strength; the poor victim of the curiosity of science will be restored to liberty. This is the wish, the intention of us all. Twelve hours later, the hope of a cure increases; the invalid takes nourishment readily; he clamours for it, if we keep him waiting. But the leg still drags. I set this down to a temporary paralysis which will soon disappear. Two days after, he refuses his food. Wrapping himself in his stoicism and his rumpled feathers, the Sparrow hunches into a ball, now motionless, now twitching. My girls take him in the hollow of their hands and warm him with their breath. The spasms become more frequent. A gasp proclaims that all is over. The bird is dead. There was a certain coolness among us at the evening-meal. I read mute reproaches, because of my experiment, in the eyes of my home-circle; I read an unspoken accusation of cruelty all around me. The death of the unfortunate Sparrow had saddened the whole family. I myself was not without some remorse of conscience: the poor result achieved seemed to me too dearly bought. I am not made of the stuff of those who, without turning a hair, rip up live Dogs to find out nothing in particular. Nevertheless, I had the courage to start afresh, this time on a Mole caught ravaging a bed of lettuces…”

“The Grasshopper order supplied me with a second series of victims: Green Grasshoppers as long as one’s finger, large-headed Locusts, Ephippigerae. The same result follows when these are bitten in the neck: lightning death. When injured elsewhere, notably in the abdomen, the subject of the experiment resists for some time. I have seen a Grasshopper, bitten in the belly, cling firmly for fifteen hours to the smooth, upright wall of the glass bell that constituted his prison. At last, he dropped off and died. Where the Bee, that delicate organism, succumbs in less than half an hour, the Grasshopper, coarse ruminant that he is, resists for a whole day.”

“Besides, is it really a corpse that the Epeira wants, she who feeds on blood much more than on flesh? It were to her advantage to suck a live body, wherein the flow of the liquids, set in movement by the pulsation of the dorsal vessel, that rudimentary heart of insects, must act more freely than in a lifeless body, with its stagnant fluids. The game which the Spider means to suck dry might very well not be dead. This is easily ascertained.I place some Locusts of different species on the webs in my menagerie, one on this, another on that. The Spider comes rushing up, binds the prey, nibbles at it gently and withdraws, waiting for the bite to take effect. I then take the insect and carefully strip it of its silken shroud. The Locust is not dead, far from it; one would even think that he had suffered no harm. I examine the released prisoner through the lens in vain; I can see no trace of a wound.”

However, rather like 'Transformers 2: Cruise Control', 'The Life of the Spider' does seem to revel in the unnecessary and gratuitous. How in the name of Christ do you "make" a tarantula bite a bird's leg? And can they be trained to bite Shia LaBeouf?

A lesson on hypocrisy from Barack Obama

2009-08-12T19:09:00.003+01:00

My Prime Minister's boss - his real boss, is starting to get on my nerves. In the domestic sphere, no particular business of mine, Barack Obama still seems like someone genuinely interested in taking a stab at change and good luck to him with that. In the international arena there is a marked contrast that shows once again that the flow of global affairs should not be held hostage to several big powers, democratic or otherwise. The citizens of America's backyard know this all too well.

While in Mexico, where he was busy reversing his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA, Obama found the time to make some ill-tempered and suspiciously defensive remarks relating to the pathetic reaction his administration has given to the anti-democratic coup in Honduras launched by that country's business and political elites. Those remarks will follow this cursory introduction...

Just over a month ago the elected president, Manuel Zelaya was abducted at gunpoint, kicked out and prevented from returning to Honduras by the army with the flimsy pretext that he had broken the law by trying to open a nationwide discussion on a constitution that has kept the military in pre-eminent position ever since democratic rule was restored in 1982. The United Nations, Organisation of American States, World Bank and world governments of almost every political stance imaginable have declared that it was an illegal coup and suspensions of aid, trade and diplomatic relations have come thick and fast. The US, which currently accounts for 70 percent of the foreign trade of Honduras, should be a key player in pressuring this illegal regime. Yet despite some initial strong remarks from Obama and Hillary Clinton this administration took three weeks to catch up and impose sanctions, has kept the ambassador in place, has continued military aid and has increasingly eased the pressure on this occupying regime with statements that imply that the usurpers and the democratically elected President Zelaya have equal cases to make and that Zelaya had been acting provocatively before he went and got himself overthrown.

When questioned about such a lacklustre, no, counterproductive performance Obama got all tetchy:

"The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening, and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can't have it both ways."

"We have been very clear in our belief that President Zelaya was removed from office illegally, that it was a coup, and that he should return. We have cooperated with all the international bodies in sending that message. Now, if these critics think that it's appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is, is that maybe there's some hypocrisy involved in their approach to U.S.-Latin America relations that certainly is not going to guide my administration policies."

Hypocrisy, eh? Such straw man arguments and logical mutilations would make even the likes of Ann Coulter blush, and are certainly beneath the intellect someone who seems to have read more books than they have written. Nobody is asking Obama to send the marines in, sponsor counter-revolutionary bandits or to generally interfere more, just to stop toying with the idea of recognising a regime that is crushing pro-democracy protests and to follow the lead taken by the rest of the world and withdraw the ambassador and halt trade. In fact this proposal is the opposite of intervention - it is the extrication of the US government from a situation where it is feeding an embryonic autocracy. The current state of affairs is exacerbating a problem that Latin Americans would be more than happy to resolve among themselves. Here is a simple opportunity to support, if not stand to one side and permit, a focused, multilateral effort with a clear vision that is directed by the neighbouring countries around Honduras and he is completely ballsing it up for the entire region. Is muddling through without a plan really necessary here too?

Anyway, the idea of US non-intervention is a moot point, given that among the abusers are several graduates from WHINSEC, formerly the School of the Americas, a training camp for Latin American military personnel at Fort Benning, Georgia that somehow managed to unleash dictators like Panama's Noriega and Bolivia's Banzer, plus out and out terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles, onto the hemisphere after training them in commando tactics and counter-insurgency methods. The Honduran coup was led by one such graduate, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, and the ties of some of the plotters and apologists to WHINSEC have led some to claim this was Obama's first Latin American coup, virtually a rite of passage for occupants of the White House. Even for those of us who are dubious about this viewpoint should acknowledge that it's a little late for Obama to start scoffing at the idea of US military intervention when several of its graduates are already working on consolidating their putsch.

To be fair to Obama, a formidable lobby, composed of some rather rhetorically-gifted mudslingers has set up shop to try and preserve this elitist power grab. Lanny Davis, a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is proving to be one of the more vocal members of a horde that Obama would need to face down. And here is where the flow of international affairs is being held hostage. It is the voices of the Honduran people that Obama should be heeding, not business elites. Although it isn't the most conclusive polling data you'll ever see, a Gallup poll after the coup showed a clear preference among Hondurans for Zelaya over his succesor Roberto Micheletti and opposed his forcible removal. Curfews are repeatedly being imposed as mass demonstrations keep taking place against the coup in the largest cities.

All this seems so pitifully predictable. Before the election Obama talked about a tougher stance on unionist killings in Colombia, a rethinking of NAFTA, a greater sense of respect towards Latin America - it's not like these were easy things to say out loud and indeed he took considerable flack for them. But political office can enforce realism on any idealist, and long ago it seems to have been decreed that 'realism' should be the accelerated process of preserving strategic gains and expanding profits at all costs, even at the cost of filling up Third World cemeteries. Perhaps Obama really is an Emperor Hadrian to Bush junior's Emperor Nero, but that still makes him the latest Roman Emperor of our age, the most powerful leader on Earth with all the pressures, vices and violence the job entails. He should give what passes for 'idealism' these days a shot and stop bloody interfering.

I'm going to hold you to this Obama, Part II

2009-08-09T14:51:00.005+01:00

Well, I wanted a strong stance from Obama on Colombia but I didn’t expect him to send the military in. Oh…

Change you can believe in? As usual, it seems easier to stick to one’s principles out of office. While battling John McCain for his country‘s soul, Obama told Americans that he was opposed to a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia [FTA] that had been hovering around waiting approval since 2006 because the Colombian government, the third largest recipient of US aid after Israel and Egypt, was still not keeping the murders of trade unionists in check. Earlier that year, in March, he stated that "the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labour protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements." Heartening stuff, and a sharp contrast with the “virtually unconditional support” that Human Rights Watch saw during the Bush era. The response to Obama's brave stance was a tiresome and formulaic barrage of lies and distortions. [Checking out the comments for this one is an uplifting use of time].

The majority of these murders are carried out by paramilitary groups, sponsored by wealthy landowners, businessmen and drug traffickers. In theory their role is to kill off terrorist groups like the FARC-EP and ELN, but in practice their job consists of taking out 'collaborators', better known to the rest of us as unionists and members of civil society. Furthermore, these mass murderers frequently work in tandem with brigades of the Colombian armed forces and are even connected with politicians at the very top of Colombian politics. Punishment for the criminals and reparations for the victims are all too rare. This week the Inter-American Court of Human Rights demanded explanation from the Colombian government for still not responding adequately to the 1997 Mapiripan massacre, in which at least 49 members of a farming community were hacked to death by paramilitaries who had breezed to the scene of the crime via a military landing strip and several military checkpoints.

Obama’s stance towards the FTA is muddier now after he made conciliatory statements in a recent joint press conference with Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, noteworthy also for some somewhat patronising words from an American president on how many terms a democratically elected leader of another nation should be entitled to. Both leaders made totally unsubstantiated claims that things are getting better for unionists. Interesting. Murders may have been at triple figures at the start of the decade, but they are still at a level where Colombia remains the most dangerous place around to belong to a union or try to form one, with last year being one of many when assassinations of unionists in Colombian represented more than half the global total. Last year the number of unionist murders increased, from 39 to 49, and already this year we have reached the twenties. If 39 murders were too many for Obama in March 2008, how on earth does a total of 49 by the end of that year constitute an improvement? Those that aren't killed require bodyguards and regularly receive death threats. Uribe and his clique have been helpful, slandering them as "a bunch of criminals dressed up as trade unionists" and putting journalists and human rights activists at risk too with similar provocative smears, pronouncements that break Colombian laws designed to protect such individuals. Meanwhile the FTA is, as ever, up in the air, with significant pressure to get it moving from politicians and business elites from both nations and limited discussion about how much Colombian and American workers will be affected.

Much clearer is the issue of access to military bases, one thing the American empire has always depended on. After Ecuador’s Rafael Correa told “dimwit” Bush to clear out of his nation’s Manta base in hilariously bolshy fashion last year, US military presence in Latin America diminished. During his reign of terror Bush had alienated much of Latin America, prompting Obama to accuse him of “negligence” for allowing independently minded leaders to get elected that were unwilling lay down for the White House like they used to. Now Obama and Uribe have found the ideal solution, with Uribe leasing out air force and naval bases to the American military in order to facilitate Plan Colombia, the heavily militarised counter narcotics programme that the two nations have been working on for a decade that has seen military aid to Colombia skyrocket. Colombia’s neighbours are unhappy, knowing all about US intervention in a region that has long been to the White House what Eastern Europe was to the Kremlin. They are fearing the worst, and anyone concerned about Colombia’s most downtrodden should be too.

The main criticism of Plan Colombia, which even discourages Europe’s governments from getting too involved, is the undue emphasis on military support in relation to economic and social programmes. According to Colombia-based journalist Garry Leech, Obama’s request for aid in 2010 reduces the overall total figure but nevertheless increases the percentage of military aid, most notably military aid for counter insurgency. Military aid generally has negative connotations, but in Colombia today it could be the difference between life and death. Does Obama care for the well-being of Colombian civilians as much he seems to care about its unionists?

In recent years the Colombian military has been embroiled in a series of scandals that make it a cause for concern to rank alongside the paramilitaries and violent Leninists. The story is ‘false positives’, killings of civilians carried out by a military fixated with body counts. The victims are civilians in rural areas, lured by job prospects by strangers, who hand them over to bent soldiers. They are stripped of their IDs, murdered with military weapons and dressed up like guerrillas. Prosecutors are investigating some 1600 military personnel linked with over 800 extra-judicial executions, the most famous of which was the murders linked to the town of Soacha, near Bogota. These came to light when the morgue was found to be overflowing in Ocaña, a town where they were disappeared off to, 700 kilometres away from Soacha. It transpired that the enticement, transport and murder of these men was carried out by soldiers who initially tried to pass the victims off as combatants. In the aftermath 25 officials, including three generals were fired for the murders of 11 men, and heads continue to roll

Soldiers and commanders involved claim that they were pressured from above to show results, indicating that despite a military directive encouraging soldiers to capture guerrillas alive rather than rack up high body counts, a culture of piling up dead bodies for rewards such as pay rises and holidays still exists. This June the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, Philip Alston, confirmed that such killings were “systematic” and spread around the country.

Colombia needs assistance to deal with its internal strife, but not astronomical levels of military aid. Social problems need to be acknowledged, such as the massive numbers of internally displaced Colombians, as many as 4 million people, who are either driven into the wild or congregate in slums and rubbish tips around Bogota and other big cities like Cali, where young street kids are either picked off or primed as the next generation of thugs. One of the leading contributors to this displacement crisis has been the aggressive counter insurgency tactics employed, particularly under Uribe, in rolling back the FARC-EP. Again, only limited discussion about how Colombians are affected in all of this. So long as the voices of these victims continue unheeded there is no reason to expect a change in the attitudes of world leaders.

Fun activities for boys and girls

2009-08-08T14:05:00.019+01:00

A simple activity for those with those with simple pleasures. To start with we need a metal bucket.

Go into the garden and get some snakes. Worms are no use. If you don’t have snakes in your garden, scour the nearest forest. UK snakes are generally a big disappointment, but persevere anyway. Other nationalities will have fewer problems acquiring aggressive snakes. This activity works much better with angry snakes.

Found some snakes? Fantastic, fill the bucket up with them. Make sure you get a good amount. We want them writhing about inside the bucket. Allow them to get acquainted. These fellas are going to battle to the death. At this point scan the snakes for any traces of irony. Discard any that aren’t prepared to take this dead seriously.

Assign the snakes names. Give them dumb, punchy names that hint at meaning, but sound more like a range of electrical appliances that never were. Some can have more imperious names if you like. Think, if your blender was to be a Roman Emperor for the day, what would it call itself? ‘Optimus Prime’, perhaps? By now you will probably have a favourite snake. If not, just sit and stare at them for a minute or two. You need to pick a snake that you want to win the upcoming fight. When you have done so, arbitrarily designate the other snakes as evil.

In order to fight, these snakes are going to need 'energy'. Lower some meat in the bucket. Intriguingly, this is the prize they will fight over but simultaneously the source of energy that will enable them to keep fighting. Don’t think too hard about this, but just bear in mind that this implies a continuous, never-ending loop of war without end. Pretty sweet - this event can run and run forever. With all the basic elements in place, now is the time to drum up an audience. Perhaps you can run to the local videostore and tell everyone hanging out in the frat boy comedy club section that you have a bucket full of angry snakes and they’re going to have a scrap.

Found an audience? Good job. Hopefully by now the snakes will be suitably agitated and will start tearing each other apart to get at that meat. If not, whack the bucket with a shovel. Whack it good and hard. Whack your own head with the shovel too for good measure.

Along with fighting, the snakes may try other forms of diversion, such as shitting and pissing. Even better, they may try humping each other. Don’t be dismayed, these activities complement the fighting. Passing kids will enjoy the fighting while adults will lap up the humping. Fastening comedy testicles to the snakes might facilitate this. You might get the impression that the humping is unsuitable for young children, but in truth all kids want is to be treated like adults. The quickest way to let them feel like adults is to treat the adults like little children. Hence the pissing and shitting. And should one of the snakes have a comedy slip or bang its head against the bucket…well, lets just say it won’t just be the snakes soiling themselves. It will bring the effing house down. Anyway, with all these boxes ticked you should have little trouble getting kids and adults to gather around - the maximum demographic possible. Well, maybe the women won't be so interested, but numerous extensive Nuts magazine surveys clearly demonstrate that the only way that girls will watch robo- I mean snakes, fighting, is if they are bickering over shoes and wedding dresses. There's no room for any of that nonsense here. But to compensate you might want to consider corporate sponsorship, or perhaps even military aid...

After intensely banging the bucket the snakes will have whipped themselves into quite a melee. This is fine for a little while, but will soon get repetitive. You need music. Go get some rock music to agitate the snakes. If you can’t find any rock then get a Linkin Park record. Keep banging the bucket. Shake it too. Perhaps smash the bucket into nearby valuable objects like monuments and gravestones, just to show you are dead serious about this project and that everyone else should be too. Make the snakes fly about inside so that the audience can’t tell what’s a head and what’s a tail. They should not be able to tell what is going on. It’s more exciting this way. But beware marginalising your moron demographic. They will want further comic relief, so go fetch a tape recording of some self-hating slapstick racial minority comics - really thick comedians who are determined to set back the gains from struggle for minority rights and are so ignorant that they think that Rosa Parks sounds like a good place to walk the dog. Play it ear-bustingly loud so that the kids can hear it properly.

To really secure that adolescent audience, tip a sack of glossy softcore porn into the bucket. Haha, they’re not going anywhere now. In fact, if you’re sure that this audience is going to stay until the end, now is as good a time as any to really start trying their patience. Perhaps try spitting at them, gently at first but increasing in intensity. Swear at them, verbally and physically. Make animal noises at your human puppets, and wave your arse in their direction. They won’t be offended, on the contrary, they will roll around whooping and slapping their hands together like sea lions coated in fishpaste.

With latent sexism, racism, bodily fluids and lead-dicked militarism all in place, it’s time for the big finale. Put that angsty music back on, or better still, some gloomy military death march, and really pump it out at full blast this time. If your audience aren’t, like, totally blown away by all this then they clearly don’t understand the significance and gravity of what is happening, so play it even louder. Batter the bucket, absolutely pummel it, and don’t stop until there is only one snake standing (slithering). This brutal process should take at least an hour. Keep in mind at all times the golden rule: the audience should not be able to tell what is going on, I can't emphasise this enough: THEY SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO TELL WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. Dispose of the dead snakes, but don’t bury them too deep (I’ve got a funny feeling they’ll be back, umm, somehow…) and present the audience with your champion brawler. Was this the snake you selected at the start - your 'chosen one'? Well? What do you mean you couldn’t tell them apart? What do you mean you don’t have a clue what the hell just happened? What do you mean you’ve just wasted your time and everyone else’s on a crude, ineptly executed little freakshow? What do you mean you might as well have just shat in the bucket yourself? Don’t you see…

…you’ve basically created a Transformers movie

You’re a visionary

Some might even say - a hero

Ethnic cleansing

2009-08-07T20:24:00.001+01:00

Just in case anyone thought the West Bank was a fun place to a Palestinian...

"I'm going to swing my fists and walk towards you. Consider yourselves warned"

2009-08-07T17:50:00.009+01:00

From IPS:

"The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is taking new measures to warn Palestinian civilians about impending aerial attacks. [...]"

"Human rights groups have expressed concern that pamphlets dropped by the IDF before the attacks did not offer sufficient directions on where civilians should evacuate to or - in some cases - offered incorrect information telling civilians to "go to city centres" when the IDF subsequently attacked those very areas."

"Although over 200,000 phone calls were made to civilians in Gaza during ‘Operation Cast Lead’ the IDF has acknowledged that improvements in early warning technology would help prevent the deaths of civilians in future conflicts."

The saintly glow the IDF and its unconditional supporters bathe themselves in while informing critics that pamphlets were dropped and phone calls were made has never shone too brightly, given that in these punitive raids Palestinians always die in droves, that escape from Gaza by land, sea and air is impossible, that civilians might want to go home after the latest round of bombing has ended and that in the December massacre the first strikes were launched when Gaza City was at its most crowded. The sneaks working for the fabled Israeli intelligence services certainly would have known that at that time on Saturday children were coming home from school and the markets would be crowded, and that among the first victims were graduate traffic cops. When the IDF wants to assassinate a Hamas leader in a block of flats with a one tonne bomb the neighbours don't get any hints that their epitaph will be one of Mark Regev's excruciating toe curlers. Innovating new ways to assist the victims to "think fast!" or "duck!" as white phosphorus is raining down is beside the point here, and about as laudable as an assurance from ETA that the city centre might be unsafe between 12:10 and 12:11, especially around the car double parked by those government offices.

There is a better alternative. Cut out the aerial attacks altogether. The rockets from Hamas and Islamic Jihad are a legitimate concern that could be countered with a UN border force, much like the UNIFIL force preventing Hezbollah and the IDF coming to blows in the north. Yasser Arafat, the man Binyamin Netanyahu and his fellow travellers designated as the new Hitler in the window between Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tenure, the man they claimed wanted to destroy Israel by "launching" an intifada, in fact spent an entire decade unsuccessfully trying to convince the likes of Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak and James Baker that a UN force, even unarmed observers, should be dispatched to protect Palestinian civilians. It is a sad fact that a force like UNIFIL would only be accepted if the Israeli military and government genuinely believed Hamas represented the threat they so often claim it does.

Dear God, will you take out ALL the trash

2009-08-03T22:31:00.003+01:00

I'll ease my way back into the blogging fold with a recommendation, some food for thought from Juan Cole, entitled 'Sarah Palin, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - You two right-wing populists have a surprising amount in common'. Regrettably, political destruction is not one of these similarities.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys...

2009-06-24T17:52:00.003+01:00

Watcha gonna do when they come for you...! The Guardian recently published police footage of two women at a climate change camp who were arrested after asking one of the officers to provide his badge number and identify himself. What ensues most certainly isn't nearly as severe as something out of America's Wildest Police Videos, but perhaps just the reality of officers following procedures, maybe a demonstration of procedures written by idiots, or simply a symptom of a culture of policing that has lost the skill of communication many civil lawsuits ago. You decide if it's overkill.

It's not dissimilar to a previous story that the Guardian wrote not too long ago where two Austrian tourists had their holiday photos erased by a police officer in the name of anti-terrorism. The recent story surrounding the released footage at the climate camp seems to have initiated an interesting article hosted on the Guardian website as well in conjunction with lawyers from Liberty and readers who participated in real-time Q&A earlier today. The theme was obviously to educate public regarding their civil liberties and human rights in the recent spate of alleged bullying by certain members of the police. There are lots of good questions raised here and it's very useful for citizens to know their rights when approached by officers these days in public situations and lawful protests that are prone to heightened police surveillance.

Is a person entitled to decline a section 44 'stop and search' request/order?

The short answer is no. It is an offence under section 47 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to fail to stop when required to do so by a constable under section 44 or to "wilfully obstruct" a constable in the exercise of his or her powers under section 44. The same issue therefore arises as I mentioned in response to Dabby1, i.e. you will not be guilty of the offence if the officer is acting outside his or her powers. The problem is that section 44 is so broad - giving the police the power to stop and search for any reason or no reason as long as they are looking for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism - that it is almost impossible to challenge. See our related Liberty Clinic posts: Question 16: Section 44 data and Question one: Stop and search

Also, because there is no requirement for the police to publish section 44 authorisations, you can't even check at the time that the police officer who stops you under section 44 is lawfully entitled to do so. We have a case which is currently in the European Court in Strasbourg (Gillan & Quinton v UK) in which we argue that section 44 violates Articles 5 (right to liberty) and 8 (private life) of the European Convention, largely because of this lack of accountability.

- Corinna Ferguson, Liberty.

Richard Littlejohn: No comment

2009-06-20T17:37:00.004+01:00

Since we are on the topic of Daily Mail readers and Iran is in the news, I feel I can draw attention to the comments section on this typically boneheaded piece by Britain's Florida-based anti-asylum bouncer, Richard Littlejohn. It contains references to the "Islamic province of Luton" and the idea that the "burqa is now a common sight in British towns and cities". Yes, you really can't move for the burqas. Anyway, whatever your definition of a "common sight" is, this is a pretty unpleasant article that has a weird running joke of just shoving the word "ayatollah" in front of everyone's name. Given that the writer's name in his resident USA could be reinterpreted as 'Dick Little-toilet' (urinal?) he is on shaky ground by engaging in wordplay with other people's names.

Dick Urinal's muddled clutches at satire, which resonate with well-adjusted open minds with all the harmony of a crate of bricks being tipped onto a metal floor, somehow sound like sweet butterflies rimming the inside of the ear to a section of jittery middle Englanders. In fact, we can quantify exactly how well, since the Mail's comments system has the childish but instructive capacity to 'rate' comments on the piece, in much the same way as YouTube. So those that can't get enough of his hamfisted scrawlings and make comments reflecting a fear of British Troskyism and a tidal wave of Islamism will see their stock rising with lots of thumbs up, while those that dissent or even point out basic factual errors, such as the fact that Iranian towelheads speak a different language from Arab ragwearers and therefore do not greet each other with cries of "Allahu Akbar!", will find their comment's rating piledriven deep into the world of negative double digits.

He may call them fascist, but Littlejohn is a perennial BNP favourite, which is no doubt why the top rated comment bleats that:

"You forgot to mention that 2 of our elected representatives,who were voted in quite legitimately to curb immigration,get us out of Europe and clamp down hard on crime,were pelted with eggs whilst the police looked the other way !"

At the risk of sounding like one of the grimy caption weasels at Littlejohn's former employers, The Scum, I'd like to think the police had their eyes firmly on the butt of the yoke but chose to allow justice to prevail. Meanwhile, striking a blow for common sense helped this impostor amass a formidable score of -340 on the Mail's comments rateometer:

"Richard, if you were a frequenter of British towns and cities you would know that no reporter based here is likely to comment that the burqa is a common sight, because of course it isn't."

Aaah, he thinks Littlejohn is a reporter. But seriously, at least 340, possibly more, gave this fellow the thumbs down. All this just makes me even more satisfied when Mail attempts to poll the audience by asking us when immigrants stopped beating their wives and the whole process goes tits up. Ha, and indeed, ha.

I HELPED MAKE THIS HAPPEN

2009-06-20T17:13:00.003+01:00

Yesterday provided a beautiful moment of poetic justice as the Daily Mail was compelled to take one of its more ridiculous and frankly offensive reader polls down when the results were subverted. I was one of many that voted 'yes' to their poll entitled 'Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?', thanks to a link from The Independent, thus reducing a survey heavily stacked against a whole sector of society into a meaningless rubble.

Luckily some of the other Mail surveys, complete with deranged responses form their more hardcore, zombified readers remain intact. This sample, which could have come just as easily from the filing cabinet of a North Korean apparatchik, is my particular favourite.

Ayatollah waves the red flag at bulls on parade

2009-06-20T10:22:00.003+01:00

This week, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, accused the UK government of being evil. Which doesn't make sense because there can only be one axis of evil, and Iran's already in it. Perhaps Gordon Brown did receive invitation to join the club... only to have it revoked for breaking the rules (The first rule of evil club is you do not speak about evil club). Still, it's nice to see British Foreign Office start kicking up a fuss in this school yard name-calling game.

What's more interesting though is Iran's democracy that is currently under the world's spotlight. The quasi-dictatorship, authoritarian control seems to be splitting at its ends as pressure from civilian protesters take to the streets marching like bulls on parade. This is something hardly even totalitarian nations like China would be able to shield from global eyes. The incumbent are pulling out all the stops now, signs of desperation, utilising everything under their sleeves like media censorship, propaganda, and tastiest of all, persecution against the people.

"Iranian TV Thursday night aired confessions from people who authorities say were paid to destabilize Iran. It aired remarks from some "terrorists" who said the United States paid them to enter from Iraq to committing terrorist acts against the Iranian leadership." - CNN

Those "terrorists" are of course Wikipedia, and social networking websites like... Facebook. So far there are no reports of "violent acts" comitted by the aforementioned organisations, thankfully. So it seems the biased Khamenei has got no qualms labelling people who participate in civil disobedience as "terrorists"... effectively labelling anyone promoting freedom of information as enemies of the state. Hmm, this seems all too familiar. US politician, Karl Rove, comes to mind. Afterall, his dirty tactics are often shared and favoured by authoritarian quasi-democratic governments. In the end, the flow of information and truth will prevail in a campaign of fear and smear. Your people will speak. And the world will be waiting to listen.

Jason Jones in Iran: Behind The Veil

2009-06-18T16:53:00.003+01:00

Daily Show correspondent, Jason Jones, proves once again why this show is king of political satire, in this 'on location' report in Iran.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Jason Jones in Iran: Behind the Veil - Minarets of Menace

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Jason Jones in Iran

Be afraid, and keep being afraid. Always afraid...

2009-06-13T20:16:00.010+01:00

It looks like the results of Iranian election are not going to be resolved just yet. The two leading competitors, alleged reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi and Kim Jong-il's jobshare partner for the role of enemy of mankind, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are both claiming victory and the former is claiming there were voting irregularities. Riots by irate Mousavi supporters have broken out in the streets and have prompted heavy handed police crackdowns.

But that’s enough on those Iranians - who should we in the West have been hoping for? Apparently we shouldn’t have given a toss either way, despite all those warnings we have received over the last four years about Ahmadinejad attacking Israel or getting his hands on bombs. Why? Because militant Americans and Israelis clearly think we are stupid and willing to switch our memories off as and when they request. For this election they wanted us to forget all the propaganda against President Ahmadinejad that they had been disseminating and instead accept that this same President has no power, that he defers to his superiors on policy and that the election was futile; no matter who won the situation with Iran wouldn‘t have got better and we all had to continue being scared.

Let’s go back and start with a grain of truth. On the eve of Iran’s 2005 election, fought between the then relatively unknown Ahmadinejad and the more palatable Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani, we were advised by a chattering swarm of experts, mostly self-appointed, that we were witness to a pointless charade, and that whoever was proclaimed the winner of this puppet show would not be the one with the final say on policies, be they foreign (i.e. terrorism) or domestic (i.e. oppression). That privilege, as ever, stayed with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In truth, the president does have a limited degree of domestic power, but the point still stood - the scary stuff like nuclear weapons and the armed forces stayed out of his hands. Over in America, another president who could sympathise with only nominally being in charge condemned the Iranian electoral process. Bush, more accurately Bush’s speechwriters, ignored Saudi Arabia and Egypt to more or less correctly state that in Iran "power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy." His soulmates agreed. One of the American Enterprise Institute’s top Spartan warriors (well, distant observers) Michael Ledeen, whose personal list of ‘100 things to do before you die’ seems to consist of a list of outlandish plans to grind designated enemy nations into dust, also spelt it out:

"There is no real power struggle, because all effective power is in the hands of the two main thugs: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchman Akhbar Rafsanjani. The others, most decidedly including the esteemed president, do not matter at all. They hold no power."

And as the election drew nearer he repeated these assertions that the Presidency of Iran was a role with no power, labelling it an "Iranian farce".

If one filters out the flagrant ignorance of these men about Iranian affairs, overlooks how cold-blooded they were in their invasion of neighbouring Iraq, and discards the hypocrisy and fabrications that accompany these above quotes when they are placed in the greater context of their originators’ scheming then we can tentatively accept this very basic analysis. But the problem is that we can‘t discard the scheming. Throughout his articles on the 2005 election and the preceding years Ledeen had never sought to provide a constructive angle on Iran, instead favouring shrill warnings geared towards precluding all the electoral candidates from any American diplomacy and underming Iranian politicians that had sought reform or reached out to America. All candidates, reformist, extremist, religious, those opposed to child executions, were not only subservient to the Supreme Leader, but had no discernable difference from each other.

The mainstream media also concurred with this analysis, albeit generally in more sober terms. The lowest common denominator among most analysts, from the most bellicose to the most conciliatory was reflected in a New York Times editorial that correctly portrayed Khamenei as “Iran's real ruler”, overseeing elections that were a “sham exercise” due to restrictions on which candidates could run. So far so unspectacular. After all, Khamenei was simply filling the seat of power that his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, had occupied from the Islamic Revolution until his death.

The utility of this explanation clearly began to peter out after the elections because it lasted for a matter of months before belligerent analysts became fully aware of the opportunity that the result had furnished them with. The newly elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s erratic behaviour and ridiculous rhetoric were perfect bogeyman material, a “godsend” according to one analyst. Khamenei may have oversaw this oppressive regime that Washington wanted rid of, but was essentially useless for propaganda purposes, skulking around in the shadows and occasionally explaining his position with dull, pragmatic statements. Take his stated view on resolving the Israel Palestine conflict:

“We hold a fair and logical stance on the issue of Palestine. Several decades ago, Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel Nasser stated in his slogans that the Egyptians would throw the Jewish usurpers of Palestine into the sea. Some years later, Saddam Hussein, the most hated Arab figure, said that he would set half of the Palestinian land on fire. We believe, according to our Islamic principles, that neither throwing the Jews into the sea nor setting the Palestinian land on fire is logical and reasonable. Our position is that the Palestinian people should regain their rights. Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people.”

He claimed that he supported the position of the Arab League on Israel and Palestine, a tacit acceptance of the Beirut initiative that Obama shown interest in.

The opportunities for propaganda based on nuclear Armageddon coming from the Supreme Leader were no better. Khamenei’s promises may be worth little, but still contrast significantly with the traditional narrative of Iranian policy being driven by mad mullahs, such as his appeal that "I've said it repeatedly that we are not seeking nuclear weapons" or claims that nuclear weapons are incompatible with Islam. Given that the statements made by enemy leaders are only taken at face value if they are sufficiently incriminating, these claims were hardly seen as worth reporting or considering.

President Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, was moved to the forefront as a new Hitler, and in his crazy way, the obvious successor to the first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. That is provided that one put aside his lack of executive power, which experts had rushed to exaggerate to us only months earlier. Khameini effectively vanished behind references to Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions and his baiting of Israel. Now AEI ‘scholars’ were pumping out now or never propaganda that speculated on what would happen “if Ahmadinejad [got] his finger on a nuclear trigger.” The Bush administration repeatedly referred to Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks and activities as proof that his country posed an existential threat to Israel. Binyamin Netanyahu, whose lack of direct connection to the Holocaust strangely has given him the authority and ability to invoke it with a complacent regularity that might be insulting to those actually involved, adde d Ahmadinejad to his list of new Hitlers, along with other two-bit operators like Saddam and Yasser Arafat, who could at least claim they had a decisive degree of power over their armed legions. Dore Gold, former ambassador to a United Nations that he vocally despised and now at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, invoked the Genocide Convention against Ahmadinejad, who he claimed was threatening “mass murder” in Israel with “nuclear tipped missiles“.

Having been force fed lies about Iraq not long before it was disheartening to see rational analysis once again taking such a heavy spanking as the same craven opinion leaders reached for their panic buttons. Neville Chamberlain may as well have been dug up and stuffed like a scarecrow to warn dissenters against ‘appeasement‘, for which most of us would read ‘searching for facts behind the rhetoric‘. So never mind that Ahmadinejad never actually claimed Israel should be wiped off the map, let alone threatened to do so. This mangled translation was seized upon and crowbarred into pro-war advocacy by people unconcerned that Farsi is one of the world‘s most common languages, that anyone who wanted to know what was actually said only needed to read it and that no amount of insistence on the part of stubborn pundits would force its words to take on different translations. Never mind that Iran’s attempts to gain regional influence would have been ruined if nuclear weapons were launched upon the Holy Land, which in Jerusalem has sites of the highest importance to every Muslim and in the Palestinians has the useful victims that can make or break a Middle Eastern ruler’s credentials. No, Ahmadinejad was crazed, zealous, fanatical, irrational, part of a “messianic apocalyptic cult” according to Netanyahu, and thus any motives could be imputed to him with little requirement of proof , incentive or precedent for them, such as Bernard Lewis’ risible prediction about what day the apocalypse would fall on or the bottomfeeders who unquestioningly swallowed and publicised the Star of David hoax. On the other hand, those with a disposition towards empirical evidence, who would have pointed out that Iran has the largest Jewish community in the region outside of Israel, and one which is reasonably well-integrated considering this is an Islamic theocracy, could be brushed aside because they failed to understand the fanatical nature of the regime.

Predictably the other big beneficiary of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric (the jewel in the crown being the thing he didn't say) being hooked up to Khamenei's nuclear programme (the jewel in the crown being the nuclear weapons he didn't have), along with Bush, was Israel’s military-political establishment. Israeli officials have long wanted the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah toppled and have desired a coordinated US-Israeli strike on military installations to further the work of the western-backed terrorist groups wreaking havoc in Iran. Unbelievably, the American National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 that stated that Tehran had abandoned efforts to pursue nuclear weapons caused consternation in the Israeli Knesset, with numerous members electing to panic and to warn of an impending war. As Norman Finkelstein pointed out, all over the world people breathed a sigh of relief over the announcement, with the exception of those Israeli hawks who saw another pretext for war thwarted. Whatever their stated fear, Israel’s hawks needed Ahmadinejad, and it appears he is their favoured candidate for the election due to his exemplary impersonation of a paper tiger.

Four years of feckless journalism and fear-mongering over Ahmadinejad’s regime was put on hiatus for the period around yesterday’s election, and once again we were reminded that it was Khamenei that had executive control and was the director of foreign, military, and nuclear policy, a handy piece of insurance just in case the more moderate Mousavi toppled Ahmadinejad and things started picking up for the Iranians. Dore Gold now claimed that 'the key decisions in the nuclear field are taken by the spiritual leader Khamenei, so it doesn’t matter who is elected president,’ raising the question about why he was so desperate to prevent Ahmadinejad committing genocide all this time. Meanwhile, the still babbling experts at AEI reverted to type and told us that “regardless of who wins the election, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be the true victor because the president is subservient to him.” In the run up to the election Israeli activists coordinated protests with mock executions of gays and women staged outside Iranian embassies to show what a horrible place Iran is, that it is no “western democracy”, as if anyone was claiming this. Yet their reported desire to keep hold of Ahmadinejad, whose domestic regime would almost certainly continue to be worse than the vision offered by the reformist advocate Mousavi of greater parity between the sexes, shows just how little interest the Israeli government has in ameliorating the conditions of these individuals. Mousavi was useless for propaganda. Mousavi, like Ahmadinejad’s reformist successor Khatami, accepts that the Holocaust happened.

Those with experience of fighting for change will tell you that you that there are factors you can control, factors you can influence and factors you can understand. With this in mind it pays to consider that while this election will not change Khamenei’s ability to coordinate nuclear and foreign policy, in short, the issues the west cares about, these elections do matter to the Iranians for several reasons. Iran’s economic and social situation under Ahmadinejad has deteriorated and could be rectified by a change of president, a message by the people can be sent to those blocking reform if it is seen that there is mass, quantifiable dissatisfaction with the way things are going. And if there are opportunities for a change in Iranian policy towards women over child executions, which was also a hot topic of debate, then these should not be sneered at or sabotaged.

Lectures on Iranian oppression from people who blatantly care little about its victims and on Nazi atrocities 70 years ago from people whose memory seemingly doesn’t stretch back two years are a bit hard to take and do Iranians struggling for greater freedom little good. Four torturous years of us banging our heads against the wall has proven once again the fact that speaking truth to power is no use. They knew all along, and if Ahmadinejad does win the most votes, I imagine than in less than a week we will be told to start quaking over his rhetoric and his nuclear weapons again.

Orientals on Guitars

2009-06-13T11:23:00.000+01:00

I have to apologise to the occasional reader who chances upon this small corner of cyberspace. Whether you were looking for the Leech's critique on Gordon Ramsay's beef wellington, or deep, thoughtful political debate, we always aim to please our customers (Yes, that's right. We are billing you right now with all that spyware we installed on your computer after you clicked x times on those "free porn" ads). So... without further pretentiousness, let's look at some awesome orientals on ~~guitars~~ ukuleles in this week's round-up.

Oh how those bedroom jams bring back memories... And the hippy hair too. Muchas marachas to this cover of this Weezer song.

This one's from 2006. But what the hell, I'll post it anyway just because Jake Shimabukuro is that awesome on this cover of George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Another hard week at work

2009-06-12T20:23:00.003+01:00

Die Eier von Satan

2009-06-09T17:41:00.004+01:00

That was Nick Griffin getting pelted with eggs by UAF protesters. An undemocratic reaction? I say pretty mild in comparison with what his rank and file get up to on the streets.

Interestingly, The Guardian reports that Griffin was saved when his "bodyguards" intervened to escort him to the safety to his flash car. BNP bodyguards? The BNP is made up of bouncers, both literally and figuratively. How hulkingly enormous must these BNP bodyguards be?

United Kingdom exports: fuels, manufactured goods, fascism

2009-06-08T20:46:00.006+01:00

If King Kong was played backwards it would be the story of a giant gorilla repairing New York and being rewarded with a holiday to an exotic island. If the Zion scenes from The Matrix were removed it would come across as rival gangs of lawyers having a scrap in the street after work. And if the symbols on the opening titles of Dad’s Army were switched around it would seem like British fascists were invading Europe.

Ha, just imagine...

65 years after the Normandy landings and the UK is this time exporting fascism. This election was an almighty balls up, and feels no better for having been so predictable. The left has taken such a hiding in the European elections that I have to look to a parliamentary win for the progressive opposition in Greenland for any cheer. Even Wales voted Conservative. With the UKIP also making a strong showing the outcome really would have been depressing enough without the BNP playing its own grisly part.

Nick Griffin being allowed to come indoors and sit on the furniture was bad, but even before his victory was confirmed we had been cursed with the news that neo-Nazi Andrew Brons, a genteel type chosen to provide a respectable face to the BNP but whose only scruple with Patrick Bateman would be that he was an American psycho, had become an MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside. Respectable indeed - as a teenager this man joined the National Socialist Movement, fraternising with burners of synagogues, before graduating to the big leagues of the National Front where he pontificated on scientific racism. There should be nowhere to hide in Britain for someone who sympathises with the ideology of Hitler and his party, yet 120,000 think we should be seeing more of him. Something has gone wrong here.

The most immediately unpleasant outcomes of this moderate level of success is that now the BNP will have access to the funding they need to peddle their evil in future elections, they can look forward to increased interaction with their equally charming foreign allies and they are in a position to generate the levels of media attention that, in capable hands, could help the party establish itself. I shudder to imagine Nick Griffin on a forum where he can take legitimate anxieties such as the expenses scandals, the war in Iraq and the economic crisis and preach to a mass audience about how his party is aligned with ordinary working people against a distant political elite when, as with all fascist parties, the working people would be among the first to suffer.

As with apparently everything these days, Gordon Brown and friends must shoulder some of the blame for this turn of events. Not only has his dismal party collapsed at the worst possible time, but his reckless slogan of ‘British jobs for British workers’, opportunistic enough before the BNP took the ball and ran with it, has become a centrepiece of the many scattershot appeals for votes launched by a strain of politicians imbued with the same cynicism of European fascists in the 1930s. It is a disgrace that a party as hostile to ordinary workers as the BNP, which opposed the right to strike of fire fighters back in 2003, wanted the army summoned to deal with striking miners in the 1980s and recently demanded that postmen unwilling to deliver their crummy day-glo leaflets should be sacked, should be in a position to represent ordinary British people. These men specialise in obfuscation and opportunism, being all things to all men. This rot is widespread in British politics, and will play a part in David Cameron ghosting in to replace New Labour next year, even though it is as unclear as ever what this guy stands for beyond an eagerness to perform reckless stunts with the British economy in a recession.

Mercifully this brief autopsy is not for a general election, where voter turnout will be higher, and the BNP remains on the fringes for now. It also pays to remember that the Green Party also got two MEPs in and increased their share of votes. But overall it is saddening that a crisis of capitalism and distrust of those in authority has driven voters to UKIP and BNP xenophobia rather than to the progressive parties. As has been the case throughout history, it will be those on the left that will need to continue doing the hard work at the local level day in day out to oppose this infant fascist virus spreading while the mainstream parties tut tut as usual and then resume covering their arses in wait of the next national day of box ticking.

Posts that are lists: Top Apprentice lines, 2009

2009-06-07T23:06:00.008+01:00

Well I feel satisfied. The Apprentice is done and dusted for another year, in Yasmina we have the right winner, and throughout the series we have been treated to some great quotes. Notably, very few of them were from Surallan, whose lines, surely prepared, were often cringeworthy. Whereas a few years ago we got spontaneous gems such as, “you should have been stuck to him like shit to a blanket”, this year his opening attempt to put the fear of God into his new puppies included the weird piece of logic that, "I know the words to 'Candle in the Wind' - that don't make me Elton John." Putting aside the fact that I think you'll find that it's Sir Elton John, this did not bode well. Fortunately it didn't take long for contestants and panel alike to pitch in and make this one of the more quotable series of the show. Here, for me, are the really memorable lines from the 2009 edition, a mix of arrogance, wit and ineptitude. And, naturally, they mainly come from one person, the real star of the series, who guaranteed that this year there were two winners.

"The slogan we've come up with is 'put your pants on the right way.' Not like a superhero, 'cos he's the only one allowed to get away with it. So basically, when you eat our cereal you won't dress up like Pantsman 'cos you're not Pantsman, only Pantsman gets away with his pants over his clothes" Mona makes a pathetic job of a pathetic campaign to a bewildered audience of industry experts

" 'Gateway' suggests that it's a gate to somewhere, do you know what I mean?" Ben, who must get a rush of excitement whenever he enters a supermarket

"Let me introduce to our cat playhouse, for, CATS" Lorraine spews nonsense in a sales pitch

"Tough and to the point, Sir Alan left school at 16, selling car aerials from the back of a van". The narrator details one of the more unconventional ways to graduate from school. I just did some exams

"Hello, Ignite Catering Services, Deborah speaking"
"This is Lorraine calling, from, um, Ignite Pet Accessories" Deborah and Lorraine, having to make do with their infernal team name

“When asked what you do for a living, you say 'you put a leash on people who spunk money up the wall” Claude Litner produces evidence that James has no place in his drab, humourless, uptight world

"Don't start banging on about bloody Sandhurst again. I was a trainee bugler in the Jewish Lad's Brigade, Stamford Hill Division [...] We had the Sandhurst group here before - and one of them couldn't cook sausages on a baked bean can" Surrallan, having blatantly set Ben up to mention Sandhurst for the umpteenth time, smacks him down with one of his few funny lines. One which I hope wasn't prepared.

"It's so nice to see something you started off with, a real crappy humming, turned into what i've just heard, so I'm delighted. I feel like a monkey learning to use tools" James, on his Treasure Flakes jingle

"Sir Alan, your wrong and I'll tell you why your wrong - the other lot are out there running around with horses and I'm sitting here having to look at you" James makes a blundering case for not getting fired

"I don't think the food is up to scratch. It looks like it's come from a funeral at a working man's club" Paula, on her team's awful canapes

"He was about to fire me, which is what I thought. I had my head down and I was just thinking, 'I can't believe I'm going home this soon. Everyone's gonna think I'm such a knob'. I stopped listening to what he said...I was there going, 'I've been fired'. I heard him say - 'But I'm going to give you another chance'. But I didn't know whether he just said I was fired or not and I didn't know whether to get up or not. But luckily, he didn't notice that had happened and he turned to Rocky and said something... and a little pee... cos I was tense and stressed and everything... everything just kinda relaxed... but unfortunately, the bit of pee that I'd been holding... it was only a little bit... it come out" James reflects on nearly getting the boot and literally pissing himself

"Well done girls! We're in budget" Anita entirely misses the point and feebly tells her team that them blowing all their allotted money on mops and sponges constitutes them staying in budget. Go team!!

"Now a multimillionaire running several companies and with a reputation for ruthlessness" The narrator stops rimming Surallan just enough to engage in some odd buildup over Sugar henchman Claude Litner. Let me guess, he's strong in hand to hand combat and has some powerful 'special moves' but is vulnerable to aerial attacks, right?

"It's really very strange, I must say. I'm only going to eat it because I haven't got anywhere to put it" An unnamed businesswoman reacts to the girl's team's mutant blinis in the catering task

"I think he's going to take me into the boardroom with him, and you know what, I feel bloody hurt...I honestly feel like my cat died" James

"It's still a brilliant idea - people didn't think that Pants Man was a good idea." "That's a shit example, Phil" Yasmina seals my vote and shuts Phil up, even if he was just trying to reassure her

Postman Twat

2009-06-01T18:45:00.004+01:00

Well I certainly got a surprise this morning...

OK, maybe not such a big surprise. It seems that there are fascists scuttling around in my town, and they've been at my letterbox. I probably shouldn't have ripped these comics up before I decided to photo them, but then again you could rearrange all the words and the message from these two bit losers would be just as coherent.

Nice tearing! I managed to rip up the adults and miss the innocent kids. Not bad for someone who was half asleep. In fact, I wonder if the kids in that family are actually aware of what they are participating in here. Let's hope they are "strong" and "productive" enough to sustain the future Reich. Or at least strong enough to overcome the social stigma of starring in fascist propaganda.

Celebrating a vintage week of coordinated movement

2009-05-31T12:53:00.002+01:00

Seeing a group of people thinking as one with almost telepathic understanding, moving in such a manner that the parts equal a greater whole is, at best, an astounding sight. For example, last Wednesday we were treated to wave after wave of stylish free flowing attacks from the geometrical passing of FC Barcelona as they tore Manchester United to shreds.

On Saturday one could witness the flawless movement that helped Diversity win ‘Britain's Got Talent’ ahead of favourite Susan Boyle.

And if these examples are too low brow, or winners aren't your cup of tea, all week we have seen the GOP attack machine trying to assassinate the character of a Latina Supreme Court nominee that they feel threatened by, manufacturing doubts about how her ethnic background might not fit among the cogs driving their vision of the fatherland.

It seems at worst it can be a pretty astounding sight too.

Only in England: Council Taxes Well Spent

2009-05-30T12:16:00.002+01:00

Ruth Ducker takes a slapping in the face with her own tax money. Three times.

Ruth Ducker always legally parks her Volkswagen Golf around the corner from her house, so it came as a shock when she discovered it had disappeared from its spot - and in its place was double yellow lines.

Her confusion deepened when Lambeth council claimed to have no knowledge of where her car was.

It took three weeks for the council to admit its contractors were behind the disappearance, and then add insult to injury by telling the 44-year-old graphic designer she owed more than £800 in fines.

- From the Daily Mail

Hate to sound like a broken record, but... who the hell is paying for this?? Kudos again, to another local council for constantly re-defining the meaning of value-for-money. Even when forgiving a lack of any advanced notification to residents that new parking restrictions were being enforced, a lack of notification that her car had been towed, and even the fact that she had been offered a laughable £100 compensation for " lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience", an extra £50 worth of salt was rubbed into the wound when Ducker continued to challenge the council.

There is a cross junction on the Slough trading estate that I pass through on my way back from work everyday. In fact, it is right next to a familiar blue-ish building that was home to the original Office. Approaching this junction on a 30mph street from either direction, the single lane splits as you approach. There is a left lane which carries you either straight ahead or turns left. The right lane is a turn-right-only. One fine day whilst waiting one or two cars away at a traffic light at the said junction, the lights eventually turn amber-red. As cars start slowly reving forward, the car in the right lane floors it and swerves left, cutting across and heads straight across the junction without indicating.

Not a single beep was heard. No horn. No rude gesture. No cursing. The traffic ambled onwards as if nothing had happened. My startled moment was quickly followed with frustration and anger. I refrained from using my own horn since I thought it rude to horn if the object of your road rage was not directly in front of you, but instead an innocent driver was before me. But my anger soon fell more heavily towards the driver in front of me who had let the evasive culprit get away with it all. And in retrospect, I should have horned the asshole in front of me for not horning at him. I left the junction now, already cruising at 30mph dissapointed in myself for not being able to do anything by this time. The time had passed, and the remaining journey ahead required my attention.

You see, when I noticed this repetion of history and began to suspect that some motorists preferred to use the empty right lane to overtake a dozen cars at a traffic light, it greatly annoyed me that no one would make their feelings heard. Either that or British motorists are easy push-overs. But it summarises a known British culture of never complaining for not wanting to appear rude or making a scene. This culture menifests unknown to the citizen who thinks he/she is doing him/herself a civilised favour, and ultimately puts the citizen in deeper quicksand that encourages an almost bully-ish behaviour from those who think they can get away with it.

And decades of this twisted mentality later, a council believes that £150 is a price worthy of a graphics designer's time, lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience. And for everything else, there is Mastercard.

NB: I must digress, so let's all make ourselves feel better about living in Britain. In other news, a Mongolian-raised British contortionist sets a new Guiness World Record by supporting her entire body weight with just her teeth (picture included)! Round of applause everyone. Well done.

Only in America: Ammunition Wastage

2009-05-28T21:18:00.003+01:00

So America consumes the most oil in the world. They pollute the most in the world. And probably get the most in their super-sized meal for the dollar in the world. So here's this week's round up of silly stories about uneccessary deaths for reasons only obvious to the gun-totting redneck that will appear as "ammo waste" in these financially difficult times.

Story #1:

A 3-year-old California girl accidentally shot and killed her two year old brother after finding a pistol under her parents' bed.

Police said the children's mother was in another part of the apartment when the shooting took place Wednesday, and their father was at work. The boy, who was shot with a .45-calibre semi-automatic handgun, was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

According to the US centres for disease control, American children 14 or younger are nine times more likely to die in a gun accident than children in Britain and 24 other industrialised nations combined. In 2006, at least 32 American children three years old or younger were killed with firearms, according to the agency.

And the NRA wonder why activists want to take their precious guns away after Columbine. Yes, your constitution allows you to bear arms. It's too bad it didn't stipulate that you had to have an IQ high enough to think twice about leaving a loaded gun lying in places accessible to children. A responsible arms bearer never points a weapon at a person, even when unloaded. They also never leave a bullet in the chamber during storage. There's no disimilarity to knife crime statistics; your chances of getting stabbed are higher when you carry a knife yourself. If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword, like they say. Too bad in this case, their toddler paid the price, and his sister will possibly live with that self-inflicted guilt the rest of her life.

Only in America.

Story #2 (news video available):

LENOIR, N.C. -- The Caldwell County Sheriff's Office and state agents are investigating after five people were shot, one fatally, Wednesday night.

The shooting began around 11 p.m. at two homes on Grandin Road near Blue Creek Road in an area called Kings Creek, north of Lenoir.

Officials say it started as an argument when one man’s dog killed his neighbor’s cat. The neighbor then shot the dog, prompting the dog’s owner to shoot his 50-year-old neighbor and the neighbor’s 8-year-old daughter. They are in fair and good condition, respectively.

If there was any headline in the British newspaper that I would pick out instinctively as being American, it would be "Dog kills cat. Cat owner kills dog. Dog owner shoots cat owner and 8-yr old daughter. Cops arrive and kill dog owner." OK, so I can't summarise news into catchy 5-word headlines like the BBC but still, only in America.

Story #3:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma City pharmacist who shot and killed a 16-year-old would-be robber has been charged with first-degree murder.

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said Wednesday that 57-year-old Jerome Ersland was justified in shooting Antwun Parker once in the head on May 19. But Prater says Ersland went too far when he shot Parker five more times in the abdomen while Parker lay unconscious on the floor.

Ersland's attorney — Irven Box — says Ersland was protecting himself and two women inside the pharmacy.

Prater showed a security video in which two men burst into the pharmacy and one being shot. Ersland is seen chasing the second man outside before returning, walking past Parker to get a second gun then going back to Parker and opening fire.

Hmm, the headline at first seems like a morally justified albeit controversial killing; a pharmacist shooting some robbers to protect two female customers. The article does not report if the robbers were armed with guns. At least one of them was only 16 years old. Still, we can set aside doubt and sympathy, and assume these two men presented danger and intent to harm their lives, and still it makes my stomach churn when the fate of a kid already shot in the head is confirmed by 5 more 9mm rounds into the abdomen. The 5 bullets that pushed a man across a fine line between hero and zero is enough to push any debate around American gun culture to something that transcends gun control.

Michael Moore once tried to hunt down this answer in his documentary Bowling for Columbine. I believe the answer was, only in America.

Update (30 May 09): In other news, an European uses a swan (yes, a live swan) as a weapon.

Prissy Grammar Leech's newspaper headline laziness anger

2009-05-28T20:28:00.003+01:00

Are our streets awash with comic book villains? Are our headline writers engaged in a process of torturing the English language? Here comes a pet peeve.

An interesting element of certain languages, among them German, Turkish and our own English, is the allowance for compound nouns. We’re all aware that in English you can string some nouns together without modifying them to give more information about the nature, location or purpose of a the final noun. You know, spider monkey, fridge magnet, Ryanair customer complaints department. It makes for a more compact construction than, for example, the Romance languages like French or Spanish, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) translates back as the Organisation of the Treaty of the North Atlantic (um, OTAN). However, this construction is open to abuse, and the constraints of news headlines, where the optimal use of each word must be exploited, can twist good, respectable, hardworking words into some truly preposterous sentences. Take this example, from the BBC: ‘Dog fouling CCTV camera crackdown’ - five nouns shunted into a chaotic pile-up from which not even the most perpendicular minds in the English language could salvage anything; too nasty a crash for JG Ballard, too much junk for William Burroughs. Really, what on earth does it mean?

But the most conspicuous example of this abuse of the opportunities afforded by compound nouns , at least for me down the years (yes, seriously), has been the inadvertent fabrication by newspapers of a legion of inept supervillains, who, just like in the comics, either come to a sticky end or are arrested. The most recent example I noticed was when I was reading The Daily Expess(again, yes, seriously) and discovered that some fiend known as Crossbow Man had been taken off the streets. From the headline one could logically assume that this was his nom de guerre; it can’t be that much of a pain for headline writers to insert the word ‘with’ between ‘man’ and ‘crossbow’ to make it clear that the crossbow was the weapon of choice of a bog standard assailant rather than the Aristotelian essence of a veteran comic book nemesis. The same can be said of Sword Man, who should be easy to distinguish from a ‘swordsman’ or ‘man with sword’ by all but the laziest of headline writers, and so, must too be a bit special with a blade in his hands, and Hammer Man, who sounds like he should be lurking in wait for you behind floating platforms and lava pits at the end of his own Megaman level.

Some of these guys are too hot for Marvel or DC Comics to touch. Pure racist evil can be found in the ethnic hatred of ne’er do wells such as Swastika Attack Woman, Nazi Salute Man and the no-nonsense brigands styling themselves as the White Hate Death Threat Men. But fortunately other supervillains are unwilling to invoke genocide and tear the patchwork of mankind apart, and so occupy the other extreme, reaching outlandish levels of speciality and banality in their evil schemes. 50 Cent Onstage Necklace Theft Man, for example, must have had a pretty lame back-story, while the Soda Pop Theft Teen was never going to recruit loyal henchmen or acquire a hideout of her own with such a piddling little foray into the world of crime. Luckily for mankind, these two went down for their crimes with few problems. In fact, they both sound so lame that the regular police were probably able to handle them without summoning Batman, who is not to be confused with ‘man with bat’, or the risible Baseball Bat Man, so puny a criminal that the courts forced him back on the streets, no doubt to do some proper damage to our society.

More versatile baddies pose a greater threat and might require more than the police to halt their evil deeds. We are fortunate that Arson Man, not to be confused with Fire Man or a fireman, was undone by his voodoo obsession, thus joining his partner, Hijack Woman and his boy wonder sidekick, Theft Boy, in the slammer. The defiant Veil Row Woman might also take some pacifying before we see the back of her.

Unfortunately the most dangerous pyromaniac supervillain remains at large after all these years. When will they finally catch the Hell Fire Priest? As usual, it seems, the media is making our world seem even more terrifying than we ever had reason to imagine. And when the superheroes it provides are this lame, a bit of fear might be justified.

A higher class of criminal

2009-05-23T19:58:00.004+01:00

A perfect example of St Augustine's story of pirates and emperors here. Racist agitator Nick Griffin is barred by the mayor of London from accompanying one of his BNP friends to the Queen’s garden party, lest he cause "political controversy". Fine. The last thing we want is Griffin rising to a dangerous level of acceptability and making the air in central London turn yet more fetid. If we can prevent this squitty rotund shit from gaining any legitimacy then he will be a distant memory to future generations, a man whose hateful vision was never able to grow beyond some local concentrated centres of power to ravage a whole country and so starved in isolation.

This picture makes me want to take up archery as a hobby. I wish I knew why.

So it’s a beautiful thing when a man whose hateful vision extended to disfiguring a whole continent is rewarded with the eternal recognition that fleeting visits to garden parties cannot guarantee. Westminster City Council has granted planning permission to cast the likeness of war criminal, state terrorist and crucifier of Central America, Ronald Reagan, in bronze, possibly because wooden spoons make for rather rickety statues. It will be erected on Grosvenor Square outside an American Embassy that, the last time I heard, was moving location anyway. Maybe the nearby Canadian embassy will have some use for it. The council has even been prepared to waive established rules that normally delay such memorials until ten years has elapsed since the death of the selected hagiographical study so that his pal Margaret Thatcher can turn up for its unveiling. On that day irony will scream almost as loud as those in the torture chambers of the Saudis and Baathists he had for allies, as the statue of the man behind Star Wars is planted opposite one of Dwight D. Eisenhower, best known for leaving office with warnings about the military industrial complex.

Ranking evil is often a fatuous task, but the respective legacies that these two will leave on the world makes for a most one-sided comparison. Nick Griffin’s henchmen pass their time smashing windows, recreating '300' by wrestling Asians in car parks and daubing BNP slogans on the inside of toilet cubicles. A few corpulent BNPers literally fill seats on local councils but the party is small fry and its crimes small scale. The police can deal with them. As for Reagan, well he may not have been a beer-gutted street brawling xenophobe with an aura of piss and scotch eggs, but he was in much greater need of a spell in jail. Pick a lousy government outside the Soviet bloc on any continent and he was ready to support and fund their evils. Pinochet’s Chile, Mobotu’s ‘Zaire’, Saddam’s Iraq, Ceausescu’s Romania, Suharto’s Indonesia, the list is long. He also sought to undermine democracy if he didn’t like it, exposing Nicaraguans to a decade long terrorist insurgency until its revolutionary government’s social programmes caved in and a frightened population voted them out of power. As Libyan civilians found out, he was quite prepared to drop his own bombs too. And while Reagan was no BNP racist, his refusal to give up continued support of South Africa’s Apartheid government stank more than all the shit BNP activists have ever posted through the letterboxes of designated ethnic undesirables combined.

This guy was not a particularly great friend of Britain, only its wrecking ball Prime Minister. He backed the Argentine junta until they farted in the jacuzzi with their Falklands invasion. Only then was he forced to choose between prized allies, picking Thatcher’s Britain despite his prized ideologue, Jeane Kirkpatrick, recommending that they stay close to the mutilators and abductors in Buenos Aires. He even managed to ruffle his relationship with Thatcher by needlessly invading Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth. Never mind, Steve Summers, the chairman of Westminster City Council's planning applications subcommittee, believes that "Regardless of politics, nobody can dispute that President Reagan was a true ally of this country”, a defence that anyone in bed with the mafia might cleave to, but nobody in search of genuine justice.

While BNP members have beaten people black and blue, Reagan’s legacy is blood red. If you want a statue of Reagan because he contributed to the USSR buckling then you may as well stick an icon of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps brandishing a Stinger missile, outside the embassy. British soldiers are being dispatched to clean up and die for both men’s mess. Still, once it’s built we can re-enact the Cold War and tear the damn thing down.

Reagan and Suharto, who proved that you could get away with anything if you were anti-Communist

Work + boredom + Excel = The Matrix

2009-05-21T01:42:00.016+01:00

So Eurovision turned out OK in the end. Graham Norton did a fine job, although Norway won with a devastatingly rotten song. So bad I refuse to post a link to it, not that that will save Europe from its sickly embrace. That shot of saccharin and the unexpected glitz of this particular edition of the contest stand in sharp contrast with the daily drudge of work. And sometimes it can be a most repetitive drudge.

Lord spare me from these infernal spreadsheets. Just look at all these numbers. These soporific lines and lines of digits. They mean nothing to me, even less to you. They are ugly and there is nothing fun about them at all. Staring at this impenetrable wall of statistics only serves to amplify my hyperactivity and artistic urges. Could there be a way to harness them for a higher purpose (i.e. a cheap diversion)?

This is Microsoft Excel. At first glance not the most stimulating computer programme. Still, there is potential for some amusement here. We can find beauty everywhere if we look hard enough, and nothing about Excel is more visually pleasing, nay, life affirming, than the graphs, charts and diagrams. Or maybe that's just the hours and hours in an office doing the talking. In a cooped up environment, seeing those cold, pitiless numbers mutate into all those pretty colours becomes an emotionally charged experience, and if we bypass those turgid bar charts and line graphs, and turn to the relatively ignored surface diagrams that use colour, contours and surface to render data then we can make the Sistine Chapel look drab in comparison.

Yes, that is a graph, and those little diamonds and assorted shapes are combinations of numbers, each with its own distinctive value. Just like the atoms behind every object in the word, they form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That's right, I'm playing God. Playing God on Excel. Generating novelty bathroom tiles. But this is just the beginning. If we don’t consider the mid morning tea break that important, then we can get stupid with this kind of visual fuckery:

It looks a lot more hypnotic on my monitor. But it's still something, no? And just as we have sulphur and magma bubbling under our feet, hiding behind the beauty of our world, here we have sterile numbers holding these images in place, doing the hard work in an analogy that is certainly not at all contrived.

There’s a potential business plan here - an online Persian rug generator. Or I can take my designs to the masses, or get my local church retiled. It won’t cost much to print these off and blu tac them to those cold stone walls, and might attract some new converts if Muslims think they’re walking into an Iznik-tiled mosque.

The heart beats in a cage, and creativity in the workplace is vital. 7.7s and 3.2s and -0.1s may have begun to haunt me in my dreams, but those wretched numbers shall never enslave me, not so long as I can find ways to keep my five year old's brain occupied. Still, in the world of tiling I am a rank amateur. Here are some examples of how it looks when it's done properly:

The Alhambra in Granada

Iznik tiles in the Rüstem Paşa Mosque, Turkey

A tasteful fountain in Seville. Notice the painstaking diamond arrangement of the 0.6s and -1.8s to create an impressive overlapping effect that's clearly popular with the birds.

An appeal to Graham Norton: Don't get started on 'bloc voting'

2009-05-16T14:44:00.015+01:00

As the new commentator on Eurovision, Graham Norton is going to come under a great deal of scrutiny, what with him being required to fill the shoes of the institution that was Terry Wogan. Frankly I'm not thrilled about the prospect of listening to Norton and I would go so far as to claim that that hellish period a few years ago, when he seemed to be popping up on almost every TV show going, permanently burnt his voice into my cochlea. But I probably should leave the cock gags to him. Suffice to say, I know what to expect of him tonight, and I would advise any singers called Dick, Willy or Helmut to stay at home, especially if their surname is Kuntz.

Assuming I can steel myself for Norton’s barrage of double-entendres, I will be interested in one aspect of his commentary in particular, and that is how he copes with the fact that this is a song contest heavily skewed by factors other than the music. There is a slight political dimension to this contest, in much the same way that there is slight gangster dimension to The Godfather films. Politics and national rivalries are shamelessly plastered all over it. Norton can choose to accept this reality with a knowing laugh, or choke on it with awkward bouts of hysteria and a swell of patronising lectures. In recent years Wogan had increasingly tended towards the latter, coming across as a bitter old man before throwing in the towel when his fixation with how the people of Eastern Europe chose to use their phone votes gave him one dark night of the soul too many. Wogan’s contention, shared with many viewers and the British press, was that Western Europe would never again win the competition since Eastern European nations had closed ranks and formed some kind of cartel, voting for each other along friendly neighbour lines and depriving the minority Western nations from finishing in the higher reaches of the rankings. This seemed to become a hot topic a few years after 1994, when the contest expanded greatly to accommodate new members, once penned behine the Berlin Wall in the Eastern bloc or part of the USSR, eager to compete alongside their Western European neighbours. While some of us chose to see this as an opportunity for some fun cultures bringing their own novel eccentricities to proceedings, others interpreted it as a modern Red Peril, with one schoolmasterly Lib Dem MP getting so worked up that Eastern European nations weren't sitting at separate desks that he tabled a motion condemning the contest for, paradoxically, harming friendly ties between European nations. Others, including Wogan, called for the UK and maybe some of its Western friends like France and Germany to pull out of the competition until nations like Bosnia and Estonia learned how to use their freedom constructively.

The swirling paranoia over the honesty of these Eastern Europeans culminated in the results of last year’s competition, a lazy journalist's wet dream where Russia won with votes from, among others, Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine, despite their song being so underwhelming that it would have sent a sloth into a coma. We were told repeatedly that it was obvious all along that Russia would win because of all those ex-Warsaw Pact states floating about with votes to give and eyes only for their former prison warden. Absent from this modern Cold War story was the fact that this was Russia's first ever win and the song was sung by an established Russian star.

Voting for non-musical reasons, including bloc voting, does go on, but its effect on the final result is exaggerated and its critics are often guilty of hypocrisy and geo-political illiteracy in hyping up its importance, often squeezing countries that weren’t aware that they were best friends, at least not until a bunch of lazy Western pundits informed them, into contrived special relationships because it serves their obsession. Believe it or not, there could well be cultural and even musical reasons powering these seemingly unworthy winners to victory and this should always be the first aspect to examine when diagnosis on why the UK entry lost begins. With some lessons on what not to do from his predecessor, here are some reasons why Graham Norton shouldn’t even get started on these tedious accusations of bloc voting determining who wins, and should just stick to the knob jokes.

"Twelve points will go to Spain."
Terry Wogan on Andorra, 2007. Seconds before they gave twelve points to the Ukraine.

1. The outcome of bloc voting is only predictable in hindsight. Let’s do a roll-call of the impostor winners: Estonia 2001, Latvia 2002, Ukraine 2004, Serbia 2007, Russia 2008. What do these countries all have in common? They’re all Eastern European. What don’t they have in common? THEY’RE ALL F**KING DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER.

Russia was always going to win because of all its Warsaw Pact accomplices, we were told. After they won it that is. Beforehand we were inundated with news that some Eastern block nation would win but not who, perhaps because journalists weren’t invited to the 20+ meeting of these perfidious nations beforehand. Maybe if those who see only rigid predictability successfully named the impostor due to prevail before the contest began, or if the same nation was repeatedly exploiting the benefits of its neighbours’ charity then we could take their objections a bit more seriously.

The longevity of the bloc-voting theory is enhanced due to the good insurance it provides to those making the accusations. Think - if Serbian voters, for example, give 12 points to Bosnia, Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, Slovenia, Macedonia or even Hungary then it falls into the confines of the theory and is predictable. Proponents of the theory can't lose. For all the self-satisfied cries of I told you so, Russia actually won it for the first time last year, becoming the fourteenth different winner in as many years. The favourite, not only to win this year but also become the first country to win twice under the expanded format? Norway.

"Close enough - along the old Balkans."
Terry Wogan on Greece and Armenia, 2007

2. Bloc voting often ignores geographical and cultural realities. Who forms these blocs? Sure, Greece and Cyprus are in bed together, and Andorra is virtually guaranteed to help out either France or Spain, provided that the Ukraine doesn’t require its services. There are the Nordic countries too. But from over here in Western Europe anything East of the Reichstag is portrayed as a homogenous, confusing blob from Poland to Albania to Estonia to Azerbaijan, with geography collapsing into some seeminly endless kind of fuzzy black hole full of countries that Western commentators (wilfully) fail to place. Where's Armenia on the map? Does Tajikistan compete? What about Slavaturkistan, is that a real country? I think we all know who they'd vote for... Shoving Eastern, Central and, to be strictly honest, non-European nations into this nebulous mass reduces Western Europe to a third of the competitors, which suddenly makes the high number of winners outside their number seem less disproportionate.

Slotting countries into presumptuous blocs seems easy at first, but if we think for 00.1 of a second then things get complicated. Who is Finland closer to, Scandinavia or the Baltic nations? Poland could just as easily vote for Germany as for Russia. It neighbours both of them, and has been given a thorough going over by both their armies. Romania has little in common with its neighbours; does it form part of a bloc? Those same twits that casually proclaimed how obvious it was that the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would all vote for the Slavs of Russia are overlooking the fact that these three didn’t give full marks to each other, as one would expect in a bloc vote. Eastern Europe is absolutely not one bloc, but at most, sereval smaller ones with between two to six members at most in each. This leads to the more taxing question of why these blocs don’t cancel each other out.

3. Diasporic voting, a more obvious flaw in the system, is overlooked. There is obviously a distinction between reflexively voting for your neighbour and voting for your own nation from abroad, where it’s nice and legal but arguably more unethical. Last year Romania didn’t benefit at all from votes from the Slavic countries in its neighbourhood and actually got its highest score from fellow Romantic nation Spain. Russia gets consistently high marks from Israel due to the Russian community there. So to win, Britain doesn’t need friends abroad, it actually needs to shift citizens abroad. I propose we start with the convicts, then progress through the celebrities, Z-list backwards.

Interestingly, living in Madrid I found none of the expats I knew were sufficiently motivated to vote for the UK’s drab entry, although diaspora voting is as accessible an option for Brits as anyone else. The massive German community in Spain could also have helped their nation (and equally hysterical media) from abroad but chose not to. If these nations can’t rely on their troops abroad, why should they fuss about their neighbours not giving them votes?

Anyway, how much this flaw really tilts the vote is unclear. To make a serious impact on the result a diaspora is going to have to invest a concentrated and widespread effort that is not easy to achieve. Certainly heavily mixed nations like those in the Balkans have an advantage here.

And assuming that a minority can amass significant numbers, is this an unethical strategy? It would be interesting to see those who answer ‘no’ are equally frustrated at the fact that friends and relatives of X Factor contestants can jam the switchboards of that strictly musical event, and part of me feels that if expats are willing to piss away so much money on texts and phone calls then so be it. If the Eurovision Song Contest is going to be puritanically just about the songs, then each household should get just one vote. If it's going to be just about a bit of fun and charming stupidity then keep it as it is; it's the moaning critics that need to change.

"[Since 2003] Turkey really aimed high, hoping to come away again with a first place prize, and sending a stream of famous singers to do so."
Zaman newspaper, 2009

4. Some countries outside these blocs regularly do well. Regular high-flyer Turkey may have Azerbaijan, and, at a pinch, its diaspora in Germany to depend on. But it is certainly not part of any bloc, and so needs to produce sufficiently appealing output to sway voters. A country with even fewer friends in Europe is Israel, who won in 1998 and has finished high on several other occasions.

"Ukraine want to be absolutely sure that the electricity and oil flows through."
Terry Wogan, 2008, after Ukraine gave 12 to Russia

5. It engenders cack-handed analysis. If Ukrainians want to be absolutely sure the electricity and oil comes through they could always accept who Putin dictates their leaders should be and stop edging towards NATO, rather than pacifying him in the rather less significant arena provided by a tacky singing competition. Weird remarks about Russia cutting off everyone’s gas if they don’t fall into line, made by potentially unhinged commentators who unsettle me because I don’t know whether or not they’re joking, are hardly going to impress anyone living in the real world, and given that the option of Ukraine or Estonia making an anti-Kremlin protest vote was just as plausible as a political manoeuvre it seems strange that they only mention this narrative of Eastern Europeans in their scripted role of energy hostages.

Whinging critics wishing to foist a geo-political subtext onto the competition shouldn’t pussyfoot around - they should do it properly. A focus on bloc voting bypasses far more interesting stories that Eurasian politics throws up. For example, this year it would be heartening to see some focus on the Israeli entry, a joint Arab and Jewish effort by two people who have put themselves in the firing line from their respective constituencies but believe that maintenance of dialogue between them is paramount for peace to grow. My suspicion is that this will go right over the heads of too many commentators, just as the 2007 competition results concerning Armenia and Turkey. This pair have no diplomatic relations and share a closed border due to their continued battle over the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide and Armenia’s bloody territorial war with Turkey’s best friend, Azerbaijan. Yet in 2007 Armenia got the full 12 points from Turkey, which should merit at least a raised eyebrow, if not a small fanfare. Well, to be fair, it got some analysis, provided by the David Icke Division of the European wing of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Such as this comment from the BBC message board:

"Turkey voting for Armenia had EVERYTHING to do with politics!...it was to make Armenia hush hush about the genocide."

Yeah, because nothing ends years of historic pain and pursuit for justice like fobbing a nation off in a campy music competition. But from such trenchant analysis one can develop the Eurovision formula of importance for the politically tone deaf:

Peaceful coexistance => Genocide => Eurovision votes

If an overlooked genocide went beneath the radar, the victor that year, Serbia, could have provided a nice redemption story from the state it was in a decade earlier. Instead our writers saw little beyond the free 50 points it was apparently guaranteed from the neighbours its army had spent all that time ravaging and ethnically cleansing.

Interestingly, now and then some bright spark floats the idea that Britain should enter four songs, under the guises of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Inevitably this is then shot down with the retort that the latter three all hate England and therefore wouldn’t vote for it. No doubt because England has never been as lovingly attentive as Russia has with its neighbours.

"You have to say that this is no longer a music contest"
Terry Wogan, 2008

6. Double standards for double Ds. There exists a quaint idea that Eurovision is a singing competition between competing songs and that is all that should matter. This would be incredible, as it would make this contest a musically pure haven from the weekly music charts, where publicity stunts, music videos and stage-managed interviews make or break artists. But if this is the case, perhaps someone can help me edge around the hypocrisy I keep running up against when acts fronted by nubile supermodel types rake in the points. Lest we forget, this lot were the early leaders last year:

Under the strictures of the 'music only' movement, votes for ironic entries must also be discouraged. Either we all have fun properly with suitable guidelines or we will all have to sit down and read the UK's Big Book of Proper Songs cover to cover before we can resume.

"Britain's votes plummeted with the invasion of Iraq and have stayed in the basement with the occupation."
DJ Paul Gambaccini, 2007

"It is the politically correct countries that get all the votes" Terry Wogan, 2003

7. It is yet another excuse to nurture a British victim complex. Wogan always seemed to career wildly from dismissing the competition as camp nonsense to treating it as a mirror to the stark reality of an unforgiving dog eat dog world, and appeared deadly serious when he claimed that Britain would never again win because nobody in Europe likes us. In yet another attempt to cast attention away from the sheer awfulness of everything Britain has submitted after Katrina and the Waves in 1997, some silly berks claim British military ventures abroad were the root of the problem. Would that it were so. If the price Britain has to pay to get its clutches on the Holy Grail, centre of the universe, genocide-defying accolade that success in Eurovision provides is to keep the foreign invasions to a minimum then I’m all for it. Wogan himself seems to think that the rest of Europe hates Britain because, unlike, say Serbia or Russia, it has attacked nearly everyone on the continent. So either these European victims had a gargantuan bout of collective amnesia in 1997, or I have missed out on a lot of fighting on the continent in the last 12 years. At least the UK always left its voting partner Ireland alone...

"The only way the UK will ever gain any respectability is if we get a major British star – Robbie Williams, Take That, God knows there are enough of them – to represent us, and then people will have to vote for us."
Terry Wogan, gets it right, 2008. World fails to notice due to flying pig sightings

8. Picking a decent act helps. Submitting the odd decent song certainly would be more use than wallowing in self-pity or recoiling in disbelief at any implication that Eastern Europeans might not like the recent British entries, great as they were to people with a diet of consisting only of cheese and who use Q-tips lined with tin for their ears. These people can designate political voting as the culprit if they want when someone not even considered good enough to win the X-Factor bombs in the contest, but they aren’t any use for building a winning strategy. My suspicion is that they'd just insist we send Susan Boyle next year. A better template is Finland’s win in 2006. They got the highest score of any nation in the competition’s history by rocking out, which qualifies as originality of the highest order in a contest held practically at gunpoint by awful synth pop. Longtime fans have also remarked on how consistently high-scoring Turkey have generally thrown themselves into the competition wholeheartedly, picking songs that they think the rest of Europe will enjoy rather than dumping any old crap onto Europe’s plate with the sour look and “like it or lump it” attitude of a disillusioned school canteen worker. Russia's song was sung by regional megastar Dima Bilan, well-known throughout Eastern Europe and with massive record sales that probably didn’t come about through orchestrated bloc-purchasing and blackmail. If this song sucked, it wasn’t for lack of trying, given that Timbaland, who knows the way to reach the top of the charts, also produced that song. Maybe if the UK worked with him they could perfect the art. God helps those who help themselves, and in 2007 when there was speculation that Morrissey was going to perform the UK entry, we instead packed this shower off to Helsinki on a wing and a prayer:

"[T]he former Eastern Bloc countries are not sufficiently versed in the ways of democracy to realise they are supposed to be voting for a song, not a next-door neighbour.",
Terry Wogan 2008

9. It’s an excuse for cheap bigotry. Strangely, although friendly countries exchanging votes is a European-wide phenomenon, it is only the untrained puppies responsible for East European bloc voting that raises any alarm. Expeditions to educate the natives there have not yet had the desired effect, but then again, when thinking for oneself has adverse side effects such as borderline racism then maybe it is better to stay shackled under regional thought slavery. "Goodnight western Europe", moaned Wogan at the climax of his last competition, shortly before drawing his iron curtains and storming off to a comfy bed in the retirement home. Later he bemoaned that “East of the Danube they won’t be voting for a black singer any day soon” when Britain’s black singer made little headway in 2007. On either side of that particular river, he should have added. People who decided to over indulge in the spirit of recent UK Eurovision entries and take up being losers as a fulltime occupation surpassed him, writing hate mongering filth such as this.

Britain and Ireland swapping votes is just fine by the way. We should do more of that.

"Less than a third of the total votes for the winning entry were ones which seemed to have been influenced by block voting" Eurovision statistician and fan, Derek Gatherer, 2007

10. Its effects are exaggerated. Serbia won with considerable Eastern support in 2007. Yet if the votes from those naïve upstarts in Eastern Europe were removed and only the West permitted to vote, the winner would have been…Serbia. It also got 12 marks from Switzerland, Austria and Finland. That’s an interesting bloc – countries with overlooked skiing facilities. Russia did benefit from the votes of a bunch of nearby states (that hate it’s current government and every one it ever had) last year, but someone needs to explain why they have never benefited like this before 2008. The idea that this insipid, dreary piss-dribble music might be popular in the East might be worth exploring, especially when it’s sung by a famous act that has invested significant effort into its performance. What is certain is that to amass winning scores of 200+, a country will have to appeal to others outside its bloc/ sphere of influence/ frightened empire.

“Anyone would think you wanted Ireland to lose the next Eurosong contest […] maybe because it was costing too much to stage”.
Father Dick Byrne, 1996

11. Our annual ration of sour grapes might taste a bit sweeter if we think about the responsibilities that success entails. Britain has the 2012 Olympics. It also has a financial crisis. We really want to host Eurovision too? Wogan should be willing Balkan nations to victory so that they all go under. Iceland might want to consider taking a hit this year too.

"Do we stand by quality or do we join in this rather tasteless lottery that Eurovision has become?" Phil Coulter, writer of Puppet on a String, 2008

12. It defies those with a functioning memory. From nostalgic types comes the accusation that bloc voting makes a mockery of the competition. Really? Maybe Estonia or Serbia haven’t yet reached the level of sophistication required to submit appallingly unprepared acts or songs about planes with blowjob jokes, but then again, they are too busy winning the damn thing to aspire to this just yet. I suspect that if I were to commandeer a time machine and request that it took me back to the years when Cyprus didn't vote for Greece it would reply 'does not compute'. And if I ordered it to travel back to the age when Eurovision was respectable and all about the music, it would shake frantically and blow up in my face.

Eurovision...
...has never...
...been about...
...respectability...
...or, for that matter,
just ability.

"This is a farce. I'm sorry . . . someone's got to stop this. The EBU's got to take this in hand"
Terry Wogan, 2004, after Cyprus voted for Ukraine, Serbia and Greece (who went on to finish first, second and third respectively)

Still, those shrill cries have already made some headway in weathering away common sense, because this year we have a dubious combination of telephone voting and a national jury imposed to regulate the fun and administer it in quantities deemed acceptable by the Western sphere, despite the fact that the votes of an entire population are harder to control than those of a panel, and the potential for panels to be so pressurised not to vote for their neighbours that they might actually vote for inferior songs from outside their region just to avoid these tiresome allegations. The real issue of expats voting will not be dealt with because there is no logical solution other than to accept that every nation has this option.

Deserving of consideration is the theory that maybe in this contest to find Europe’s most popular song… people in Eastern Europe are choosing Europe’s most popular song. Maybe it is not that the contest has not changed so much as that Europe itself has. Eastern Europe has regions of shared culture and language that gives any song alluding to them a significant advantage. It’s no coincidence that Russia’s and Serbia’s winning entries were in languages that their neighbours understood, while songs with traditioanl regional melodies were very possibly enough to compel Armenians and Turks to vote across political boundaries and enjoy each other’s music. Cries of bloc voting from the UK, itself in as peripheral a position in Europe as Turkey, Cyprus or Russia, drown out any attempt to understand that there might be, along with political ties, musical reasons for why people vote the way they do. These moronic keyboard driven dirges seem to go down well in these parts, and protests from us that this isn’t real music are as futile as those of a metal fan listeningh to the UK Top 40. The UK’s only route apart from forsaking its own musical identity and churning out these horrible songs itself is to think outside the box and release something different, with ab it of class and heart, and stop whining that it has been turfed out of its own contest.

The idea that the big four of France, Germany, Spain and the UK pull out in protest deserves little consideration. No one would notice. France may have had one of the coolest songs last year, but generally the presence of these four hardly lifts the quality or enjoyment of the competition. And if Eastern Europeans are happy to shell out so much to keep their nations high in the rankings then I’m sure they’ll be only too happy to continue funding it themselves. It would just be a bitter, unnecessary gesture.

I was in Helsinki in May 2006, on the night that Lordi won for Finland. The city errupted, like Finland had won the world cup. An act that was well put together, tried something different and genuinely charmed a diverse range of audiences showed that if everything clicks into place, it doesn’t matter what country your entry is from. So, if and when the UK’s latest reality TV selected effort tanks, I hope Norton will have some more interesting reasons to explain its failure than mere prejudice, and will choose not to dole out the blame on the unworthy two thirds of the continent. Bloc or no bloc, if there’s one thing all Eastern Europeans have in common it’s a hatred of being told who to vote for by outsiders.

Oedipus Wrecked: The tragedy of Michael Sophocles

2009-05-12T22:30:00.003+01:00

Is The Scum exploiting Michael Sophocles?

Remember Michael Sophocles from The Apprentice last year? That whiny man-shaped vessel of unfiltered git? That self-important windbag who, in the exact reverse of one of those puffer fish, would deflate from his usual cocksure self and cower sickeningly in front of would-be predators until they left him alone? That fecal-tongued, incompetent halfwit whose business acumen basically consisted of an ability to beg and grovel where other men with even a shred of dignity would take a bullet? Yeah, you do.

Most people had a field day with this sorry sample of instant karma in action, as he limped along the course of the competition, crashing into every obstacle and dragging down those with him. There’s always one contestant that manages to achieve the seemingly unachievable and give the world of business a worse name than even it deserves. Therefore even the papers that idolise Suralan Sugar were thoroughly disgusted with this Sideshow Bob character, and subjected him to the ridicule he deserved each time his misguided behaviour caused him additional setbacks.

The Scum had as much fun as anyone in adding insult to the self-inflicted injury of ‘Slimy’ Michael Sophocles, the 'horribly greasy spooner', in stories such as this one, which would have made ths skin of the residents of a morgue crawl. In the face of such insult there comes a time for redemption, there comes a time to prove the doubters wrong, there comes a time to strike out and…

…accept pay cheques from the very same paper that had such a leading role in degrading him. Hmm, it appears that Michael Sophocles really will plunge new depths for cash. He has been hired, albeit as an Apprentice critic, and each week we get his verdict on a bunch of contestants, who, while liberally peppered with useless individuals, still would have no space to waste among them on a male escort who doesn’t even know what religion he is. The semi-literate assessments are written with a clanging, virtually deafening deficit of irony that must have had copy editors sniggering behind his back. The assessments also have the charmless tendency resort to blugeoning, witless personal cruelty as a first resort (ahem). Here are some samples from a precious blink and you miss it artefact of our civilization, that guarantee that from this day forth I shall be reading The Scum for a whole minute every week.

Michael Sophocles on Yasmina Siadaten: "This lady needs to seriously look into buying some Clearasil. A small contribution to a dismal team performance saved her bacon.” (A timely lecture on personal appearance from Michael Sophocles here. Despite warning that irony would be absent here, even I remain flabbergasted at how it flees the room whenever this desperate jellyfish squelches his way in. Buy yourself a mirror, boy).

Michael Sophocles on Mona Lewis: "A great win for the project manager does not excuse her for having the most irritating voice I have heard since witnessing foxes mating.” (You watch foxes mating? Why? Do you keep a logbook of woodland creatures' reproductive habits? The Sun doesn’t even need to pay journalists to pry into this twisted man’s personal life anymore - he just admitted that he watches nocturnal animals mating).

Michael Sophocles on Philip Taylor: "An arrogant pillock who had one eye on the prize and the other on Ms Walsh. Needs to realise that he ain’t God’s gift to women.” (Given that Michael Sophocles stated quite clearly at the start of last year’s show that he was comfortable being arrogant and given that only the most throbbingly erectile of pillocks would chose the paper that derided him with such malice to next spring up, that assessment might be a thinly veiled compliment to the admittedly awful Philip Taylor).

Michael Sophocles on Lorraine Tighe: "This lady was lucky to stay alive this week. Needs to start winning friends and influencing people to survive.” (You can’t blame the boy for drawing on the ravages of personal experience for his column, although a lecture from an individual whose conspicuous lack of influence probably prevented him reaching stratospheric levels of unpopularity is of dubious value. His fellow contestants thought he was a tit as well).

Does this boy not see that he is building his own gallows while The Scum looks on with the same glee that Simon Cowell gets from transient X Factor contestants? Part of me hopes that this absolute trainwreck of a column makes it to the end of the series, and that the flimsy puppet on a stick that is Michael Sophocles doesn’t get savaged beyond repair until someone is about to get hired. Then The Scum should just cut his strings and let him fall flat on his face again. A hate-nourished, jizz-swilling sow of a rag will never quite match the nauseating qualities of those willing to crawl on all fours through the mud and prostitute their self respect to get at its milk. And in case you were wondering, pigs aren’t kosher either Sophocles, you serial milk-gargling pillock. I suppose I shouldn’t insult him too much, lest our punishment craving subject come crawling to this pit of shame for a job.

Bigotry in sequins. This what we want Eastern Europe to vote for?

2009-05-10T13:01:00.003+01:00

My favourite kitsch-fest, Eurovision, is but one week away and to avoid the jovial atmosphere being shot to pieces by the usual shrill accusations of ‘Eastern European’ bloc voting from sore losers across Britain, this song, this thing has to win:

The message from British voters is always the same: Vote for us or this contest is anti-Western and meaningless. So let's get the honesty in early: This song is a vortex of dross and if it sucked any harder then Europeans, Eastern and Western, would have to nail all their furniture to the floor. More on the myth of bloc voting later this week.

Hero of the Month: Canada Border Service Agency

2009-05-10T12:40:00.003+01:00

Thank you dear maple leafed friends in red suits and giant hats, for serving some syrupy-sweet welfare justice.

OWOSSO, Mich. (AP) - A mid-Michigan woman says she was denied entry into Canada because she is on welfare.

Rose Kelley of Owosso says she has filed a discrimination complaint with the Canada Border Services Agency over its refusal to let her and her two children cross the border via the Blue Water Bridge connecting Port Huron with Sarnia, Ontario.

The 25-year-old Kelley tells The Argus-Press of Owosso that she planned to visit friends and relatives when she arrived at the border May 1. She says she was told to furnish evidence of citizenship, financial support and other documentation, but was denied entry again on May 3.

Kelley says she was told she didn't make enough money and people on welfare shouldn't take vacations.

- via WLNS.com

Lists about PANDEMICS!

2009-05-07T20:30:00.003+01:00

Pardon the frivolous use of capital letters. But it seems only apt in these current times where swine flu is yesterday's avian flu was yesterweek's SARS was yesteryear's bovine spongiform encephalopathy aka mad cow disease. This week, TIME published on their website a top 10 list of panics! A few genuine, but most reflect the outright silliness of human paranoia. Those who aren't busy jumping on the bandwagon of a media-fuelled frenzy will surely by now have their fair share of email jokes that started pouring into inboxes everywhere sent by people who are employed solely to be at the ready in their parents' basement with a copy of Microsoft Paint to mass produce and fire away cheesy jokes, puns and parodies i.e. unemployed people.

Face mask or not, it's all right to take a deep breath and calm down a bit about swine flu. Despite the hyperventilating media reports of recent weeks odds are pretty good you're not going to be felled by the nasty but generally non-fatal H1N1 virus. This may come as a shock to, say, Egypt, which ordered all of its pigs slaughtered in a misguided attempt to stop the spread of the flu (which, reports indicate, is not transmitted from pig to person).

Infections are falling in Mexico, the country hardest-hit by the flu bug, and the World Health Organization said the virus has not yet created a sustained outbreak in Europe. Though new cases are popping up around the globe each day, it appears that a widespread global pandemic isn't forthcoming. Just like SARS and the avian flu before it, H1N1 probably will cause more damage through anxiety than actual infection.

- Continue at TIME (Top 10 Panics!)

We're all gonna DIE!! Whaaa?

Toe Jam

2009-05-01T21:13:00.000+01:00

If an infinite vacuole has been felt within the blogosphere because of my recent silence, I apologise profusely. I blame my YouTube-fuelled evenings filled with mindless videos like this one. Which may at first seem like a cheap excuse to put some nekkid people from the 70s on MTV. Still, I have to give credit for the brilliant display of censor strip choreography...

Dee dee dee deeee. Dee dee dee deeee. Get out of my head!!

Feeding time

2009-05-01T17:52:00.007+01:00

With all of Gordon Brown's problems it's heartening to see that his predecessor, the one with that grin and the illegal war under his belt, isn't missed much. Presenting himself to a Guardian audience to champion the benefits of neoliberalism in developing world countries like Sierra Leone was, to put it mildly, provocative on Mr Blair's part. So it's no surprise that this article soon had its comments section closed by exhausted moderators due to the rash of anti-Blair invectives from irate readers. Below are some of my favourites. Notice the conspicuous absence of references to economics and post-war development.

"Look what the cat dragged in." MarkKearney

"You may or may not be right about Sierra Leone but I just cant belive you" thatsonlyyouropinion

"Anyone remember that bit in Juraasic [sic] Park when they lower the cow into the forest full of Velociraptors at feeding time? This article is that cow." 13thDukeofWybourne

"The sight of Tony "rent a cause for $1m" Blair does not fill me with hope." jackoba

"This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted." Virtually everyone else

It's worth mentioning that a few comments engaged with the scrambled logic of Blair's article and highlighted the effects that neoliberal policies, enforced by international financial institutions like the IMF, had in exacerbating conflict in Sierra Leone by crippling public services and enraging its excluded youth. The British government went along with these policies in its usual slackjawed, complacent, presumptuous manner, so it is no surprise to see him recommending them again here.

By most accounts Blair gets a good reception these days in Sierra Leone due to the role of British troops in routing a violent rebel insurgency that plauged the country throughout the 1990s, a fruitful outcome to a heavily improvised mission that had initially been a rescue operation for foreign nationals, not a humanitarian intervention. Pity that the saint-like glow that success with guns gave him in Africa didn't wear off quicker, though. We all could have been spared another dose of his dubious kindness.

Thanks Tony. Now fuck off

Neither a pack of lies nor a strict moderator can help little Timmy here.

Martha's Mania

2009-04-21T21:43:00.003+01:00

Once upon a time, two people who grew incredibly bored of life as postgraduate students came together with a similar distaste for very very silly things like glowsticks and whistles at a rave party. After many wasted hours, they decided to stop talking and start writing. Or typing. Whatever. So they started a blog together. And somewhere in between, the leech was born into this blog. But sooner or later, graduation came. Martha got a successful job, and Clyde got nothing. Clyde got needy and Martha got busy. So they divorced and Clyde got custody of the Leech. Not wanting to provide a broken home for the leech, the two moved to this very place.

Still, it's good to see our estranged blogger well and alive at Martha Mania. Martha, we are adopting you as our sister blog.

Please don't photograph shitty public transport

2009-04-16T20:11:00.006+01:00

The Guardian's been getting lots of references lately from your friendly bastards here at BoE. Not wanting this blog to be labelled as a "mirror" blog of the Guardian website, I can't help but credit the good ol' chaps there for receiving and posting lots of good clips lately particularly of police behaviour caught on civilian camera. Inverse surveillance as they say. Clearly the effects of this sudden online growth of documentation seems a distant relative to those observed moments before the death of Rovian politics.

Today the Guardian reports another peculiar case of the upstanding Met police deleting two tourists' holiday photos in London. Seriously, you can't make this sh*t up.

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

In a letter in today's Guardian, Matzka wrote: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists?"

The Metropolitan police said it was investigating the allegations.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

- From the Guardian

You can trust my experience when I say that tourists, who have any positive impression left of this country when passing through immigration's prozac'd officers, might usually be expected to take a number of photos whilst in their visiting country. Particularly outdoors. Particularly with some sort of infrastructure in the background. In fact, it may come as a shocker to the officer to discover EVERYTHING is on Google these days.

Of course now Klaus says he is turned off from ever returning to the UK. Just what the economy and tourism industry needs right now... fewer tourists! The offcers did a fantastic job at protecting the citizens from terrorism whilst proving what the best idiot fashion is as such.

It really depends on whether you value the physical integrity of your brain or your sense of hearing.

Dogs: A perfect defence

2009-04-15T00:09:00.021+01:00

At a time when journalists should be scrutinising whimsical matters such as Barack Obama’s hypocritical stance towards Guantanamo B - Bagram Airbase, the US President has taken his British critics out of the equation by purchasing a mutt. The rapturous attention generated by the unveiling of Bo followed on seamlessly from the well-deserved props Obama received for his handling of his first hostage crisis to make it a good few days for him and help sweep some of the more depressing news under the carpet.

In fact, judging from ITN’s fawning reaction to the important news in its broadcasts last night it seems this nation of pet lovers is going to give an even easier ride to the man carrying George W. Bush’s Pooper Scooper now that he has a dog-shaped shield. If the biggest bastards around can look vaguely endearing with a pet trailing them then I’m sure that our friend Barack could get away with the next wayward drone attack in Pakistan if he has Bo perched on his lap with a longing look to accompany his statement that the civilian deaths were an unfortunate but necessarily bearable element in the war on terrorism.

Megalomania? Polonium? Take your slander elsewhere, I only see good in this Russian bear’s soul.

Oi, Churchill. Britain might have considered calling off the war after seeing this charming image.

A pet walrus would have suited our Gordon and injected some much needed grey into his soul. But he didn’t buy one, and that’s why he’s struggling.

It's Barney!! Oh, President Bush, how could we possibly have disliked you?

Pity you couldn’t keep all your pets on a leash.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the dog is the one with all the self-control.

Dogs are so adorable that you just can't bear to lie to their faces, especially when they want to play. Just ask the guests in Abu Ghraib...

...or Bagram's detention centre:

"During his transfer to Bagram, Adel Hamad says that he was beaten at the airport and thrown to the ground. At Bagram, dogs were set upon him whilst watching soldiers laughed."

Who wouldn't laugh? Dogs are fun!

This gadfly is becoming an attack dog

2009-04-11T17:47:00.010+01:00

Repeating the ground rules for a post like this can’t hurt. I loathe the US Republican party. And I think that while Barack Obama is not going to oversee the sort of foreign policy I want my country to unquestioningly hitch a ride on, he is a standup guy with some common sense and a medium-sized broom to sweep away select fractions of the colossal mess his predecessors made. With that in mind, today’s query is why The Guardian is still giving so much prominence to someone who these days is serving as little more than Obama’s attack dog. Michael Tomasky provided a useful function in opposition to Bush’s legions of the undead, pointing out their callous stupidity in a likeable fashion. But now that these Republicans are vanquished and forced to sit and watch from the peanut gallery his new job doesn’t seem to extend beyond loyally shielding Obama from their sour booing and hissing – that is when he isn’t lording it over their scattered remains or seemingly settling scores with fellow commentators that have got on his wick. Wouldn’t readers benefit from at least a bit of constructive criticism of the new administration? Don’t expect too much of that. I might pine for the old Tomasky back, but he hasn't changed. Just the world around him.

Tomasky popped up on my radar in the run up to the election. He wanted Obama to win and he despised the tactics and policies of John McCain, not to mention his newly-hatched litter of self-harming sidekicks. It was evident he was a centre-left Democrat with many liberal principles and core values to his name, and therefore a fellow traveller in opposition to the horrors that the previous eight years had spawned. He remains a decent enough chap, with enlightened (i.e. correct) views on the environment and civil liberties and possesses a sensible take on the projection of American power abroad. But increasingly I find myself parting ways with him because of where we find ourselves after the election. His horse has crossed the finishing line, whereas I’m not entirely sure which one is my horse, let alone how well he or she is doing.

Where we can share joy is that the GOP horse has been roughly escorted from the track and shot. It is an oddity that, if you somehow managed to shut out the full extent of the horror of the world around you, being in opposition to Bush (Blair-bashing comes with nuances that make it a marginally more complicated pursuit) was an often warm, frequently unifying experience. By 2005, probably earlier, you could strike up a conversation with a stranger and be confident that there was a one in a million chance that you would offend them, even fail to endear yourself slightly to them, with a contemptuous remark at the expense of the blundering gangster chimp soiling the White House furniture. I would be handed yummy chocolate biscuits by nice folk I’d never met before at anti-war and global justice actions. Solace from the latest bout of sabre rattling against Iran or faffing about with people’s civil rights could be found in websites like Democratic Underground, whose hilariously spiteful sniping in its weekly ‘Top 10 Conservative Idiots’ knocked these cowboy Republicans off their horses so we could jump up and down on them and rub their faces in the mud with the vindictive spite they had all but been asking for. We knew that by next week these haughty bastards would have doggedly clambered back on the horse, but when one went down and stayed down, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz come to mind, it was a victory that the whole lot of us, the Democrats, Greens, anarchists, hippies, socialists, trade unionists, Quakers, non-interventionists, Bill Clinton supporters, John Edwards advocates, Chomsky readers, Michael Moore fans, Maoists, dwarves, ewoks, hobbits, even moderate Republicans, could savour together. If 4 November 2008 could have been played on a continuous loop then the bliss and harmony it radiated could have made us happy in our nirvana of collective triumph for all time.

The fractional distillation of this blob of anti-Bushism, as with any coalition of the dissatisfied and disgusted, came immediately as some of our celebrating collective were united with what they wanted. For Democrats the goal of the revolution was limited to a return to the status quo anti, also known as the Clinton years, also known as the decade that saw the bombing of four countries (Iraq and Afghanistan among them). The collective euphoria of the 2006 House election had already proved to be the departure point for many Democrats, who proceeded to do little or nothing with their new power to hold Bush and Cheney to account for their malfeasance and even aided GOP efforts to entrench the USA deeper into Iraq, thus alienating previous ally Ciny Sheehan. And in the 2008 electoral campaign Democratic Underground repeated its 2004 inclusion of Ralph Nader in their ‘Top 10 Conservative Idiots’ for having the nerve to run for President against their party. Er, ha...great guys, I laughed when you put Bill O'Reilly through the shredder, but this aint so funny... maybe I'm not your target audience after all. Never mind that Nader is a hero for more than just some fancy speeches and that great swathes of his principles have more in common with the aspirations of the majority of Americans than those of his Democratic counterparts, or that moving to escape a tightly regimented duopoly could further progressive politics. The blackmail from these chuckleheads was clear: vote for this man and America gets McCain.

There will no doubt be members of the left, further down the line than I, let alone Tomasky, that feel that Obama’s election halted the cause of progress in America and globally by killing stone dead the rage that motivated so many to get up do something. These people will hope I choke to death on those chocolate biscuits because I’m not totally convinced by such a view. I do believe, though, that the overwhelmingly positive reception he received, and the relief at who he isn't, could reduce the will of the public and press to hold him to account like they did Bush. It was therefore amazing to see one of Obama’s most vocal cheerleaders, Keith Olbermann, using his show to say this.

I demand the same from Tomasky. Smacking down Republicans that unduly criticise the president he admires so much still produces a bit of a buzz, and when these guys act the goat they still need egg on their faces. But this rather unproductive pursuit is almost a week-in week-out process for our Michael, with examples here, here, here, here and here. Not to mention here. And here. And this adorable yet ultimately pointless example here. It’s easy to beat Fox News or Dick Cheney from up high now that they are relegated to the status of yapping mutts biting the ankles of power, and while I still need to occasionally pinch myself to remind myself that these guys are out of power, Tomasky should bear in mind that all their angry rants in the Murdoch press put together aren’t going to bring the GOP back to power, at least for nearly two whole years. Keeping Obama on course is a much more pressing concern than paying those tipped onto history’s rubbish pile more attention than they deserve. By the way, here too.

But Tomasky won't be the guy I can rely on to keep those who now find themselves with the power think again before abusing it because he's coming from a totally different angle from the leftist Guardian readership and the more progressive American left. Two recent cringeworthy posts raised my attention to this fact. A few days ago Tomasky put the frankly weird question to his readers of whose view of the world is closer to reality. On the one hand, Noam Chomsky, who opposed the Afghan and Iraqi bombathons from the start, is highly critical of the poverty and inequalities unchecked capitalism brings, advocates an independent Palestinian state to stand alongside Israel, despised both Reagan and the USSR, supports the right of Latin Americans to pick their own leaders without external ‘guidance’, fears the effects of anthropogenic global warming, wants a ban on nuclear weapons and believes that the tactics in the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror’ are not only immoral, but are making both problems infinitely worse. And on the other hand, Dick Cheney. Positioning yourself dead centre between these two individuals surely places you in the centre-right bracket in America; expanding the sample of opinion to the whole world propels you beyond the status of unreasonable lunatic.

Then there was the rather startling question about why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, a baffling ‘let them eat cake moment’ from a journalist who had previously seemed a personable type to me, but who clearly has far less of a clue about the lives of blue collar Palestinians than he does blue collar Americans. It is one thing to recommend that Palestinian activists adopt a form of passive resistance against Israeli crimes, it is quite another to claim that this isn’t currently happening. Non-violent resistance, from rebuilding demolished homes to protesting the wall to exploring links between Palestinians and Israelis is going on up and down the West Bank and it is absolutely not their fault that the feckless media doesn’t pick this up. Maybe he means that one inspirational leader should come forward, like a Martin Luther King, a Nelson Mandela or a Rosa Parks. But these individuals all operated within a vast framework of activists and are only isolated from their cohorts for special distinction by those for whom people’s history is too complex and needs to be reduced to a few high profile individuals. Going to at-Tuwani or Bi’lin and reporting on the non-violent response to provocations that even I think justify a concentrated dose of force to stop would represent a good day’s work for a serious journalist.

Slightly off topic, it should be added that the passive resistance that has come from Palestinians is brave in another respect: time is running out for them. The West Bank is being eaten away by the construction of settlements that vastly reduce the scope for an independent Palestine, especially those building a ring around East Jerusalem, which is sought by Palestinians and the majority of the world’s population, the international consensus, as its future capital. The penalty for time lapsing without successful results in Gaza is mortal: malnourishment and sickness. The lack of reporting on this peaceful resistance therefore could be said to be assisting the criminal acts of an Israeli military command that relies on the demonisation of Palestinians for the success of its operations.

Mind you, like his presidential pick, Tomasky still comes out with the odd beauty and still makes the odd thought provoking post, plus his audience interaction is as good as any Guardianista. I hold his coverage of US reaction to other issues, like the financial crisis and the gay rights ruling in Iowa, in high regard because it has a strong degree of analysis accompanying it. But I think Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch would groan in dismay at this bout of strangeness.

To sustain productivity and my interest, die-hard Republican bashers who now find themselves peering down on their foes from the seat of US power would do well to explore the following, still relevant, avenues in their columns:

1. Investigating how criminal proceedings could be brought against Republicans from the Bush era for authorising torture.
2. Learning from mistakes made by the previous government that Obama and co. should avoid repeating (*cough* Afghanistan).
3. Exposing Republicans that actually are still in power and are abusing their office.
4. Shaming Republicans for any support of bloodthirsty soul mates that are in office, such as Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu, Colombia's Alvaro Uribe and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
5. Legitimising the more regular use of impeachment proceedings for abuse of office so we never get eight years of unchecked criminal behaviour again.
6. Facilitating Glenn Beck’s descent into total, utter meltdown. OK, maybe watching these unhinged little twerps squirm in the face of change is fun after all.

Come on Michael. You used to be cool. You could have been a contender. For god's sake stop feeding the animals.

Stinging the police

2009-04-11T00:42:00.005+01:00

Pretty much the definitive article on the talking points emerging from the police-assisted death of Ian Tomlinson from Guardian Jill-of-all-trades, Marina Hyde. It was this much sneered-at paper that first got hold of the breakthrough footage, thus burning a path through the thick fog of deferential nonsense that Britain's self-satisfied tabloids burped out, seemingly having learned nothing at all from the case of Jean Charles de Menezes. I flirted with the idea of concocting my own sluggish post on the matter, but when someone expresses themselves as exquisitely as the Anti-Phillips there really is little need.

Posts that are lists: Pirate radio

2009-04-09T00:13:00.012+01:00

Hostage crisis! Well not anymore, admittedly. But those Somali pirates did it again, temporarily snatching control of a container ship with American nationals on board. Yet another foreign policy challenge for Barack ‘some change, mostly the same’ Obama (zing…).

Somalia's universally despised pirates. Sure, you guys can steal, but who does your PR?

Piracy in Somalia initially seems like one of the clearer-cut issues in global affairs today: these guys are pirates, pirates are dangerous criminals, ergo these guys must be dangerous criminals. But those that have dug a bit deeper offer a different perspective, and I get the impression that the motives for piracy around Somalia are more numerous and multi-layered than just extortion. One might also question just how outraged the world’s superpowers, first degree blackmailers and plunderers of the resources of the developing world, are entitled to be about this locally-concentrated robbery.

Whatever their motivation, financial, environmental or otherwise, one thing that unites pirates is their campy yet endearing theme music. Heaven knows why we romanticise this bloodthirsty practice, but I bet these kickass tunes have something to do with it.

1. "Salty Dog" and "Seven Deadly Sins" by Flogging Molly
Professional that I am, I've stuck two songs in one entry. Shambolic Celtic punk, with extra points for the raucous use of traditional instruments and swearing. Authenticity counts here, and I have it on good authority that the pirates of yore used the word 'bollocks' quite liberally. These songs are also concise, a key factor in ‘Pirates’ by Emerson Lake and Palmer, longer than both of these put together, not getting into my list.

2. "You are a Pirate" by LazyTown
A bit unsettling, this. LazyTown is a kid’s show from Iceland, whose storylines revolve around some young girl, who dyes her hair for cutesy appeal rather than punk-rock reasons. While this isn’t the rugged, volcanic eruption of bloodthirst one might wish for from a seafaring nation with good death metal credentials, this is a charming ramshackle number, only spoilt by the jarring and excessively cutesy interjections of the unfortunately non-punk kid. No swearing or pillage in sight. It seems authenticity doesn't count here after all.

3. "The Trumpet Hornpipe"
Better know as the theme to Captain Pugwash, by Tom Edmundson and Philip Lane. I never watched this show until I saw a clip recently (immediately becoming despondent at the confirmation that there really was no ‘Master Bates’ or ‘Seaman Staines’). The only thing I did know beforehand was this jaunty accordion theme song, which would endear me even to a one-legged mass murderer attempting to gouge my eyes out.

Captain Pugwash: Somali pirates could benefit from learning the secret of this individual's inexplicable popularity. And if they have ridiculous comedy names they could even join his crew.

4. "Pirate song" by Mitch Benn

The only song in the list specifically about Somali pirates, this is from Radio 4’s satirical Now Show. The comedy lyrics are great but I will also admit that the cheesy guitar motif is a guilty pleasure. Mitch Benn has come up with the goods numerous times before and his anti-BNP number is a particular delight.

5. "Homo Pirates" by Matt Mulholland
Proving what I never thought I'd need to prove: pirates aren't just for kids. An edgy comedy number from New Zealand, this tackles the thorny dilemma that a hormonally-charged crew will inevitably need to confront when stuck in the middle of nowhere. The chorus goes: "Homo pirates, Homo pirates, Homo pirates, Trying to bury their treasure in your ass” and therefore requires no further comment. Despite absorbing the best/worst that 'South Park' has to offer, this short spurt of crudity is only the second most offensive song on this list from the Southern Hemisphere.

6. "Jolly Roger" by Adam and the Ants
Well why don’t YOU try compiling a list of pirate songs then? Not the most enjoyable song on the list, this is basically the same theme they would later churn out with ‘Stand and Deliver’. Except on water. Gives pirates a bad name...

7. "Pieces of 8ight" by Captain Bogg and Salty
Piracy meets education, with by now predictably bloodless results. Perhaps if Jack Black had been unavailable as a substitute teacher in the 'School of Rock' we would have got something like this instead. It really goes off the scale for camp and all in all is rather charming, if a bit creepy. In fact, a flotilla of Somali pirates edging up to my tanker with this song blaring out of their speakers would scare the hell out of me.

8. "Cat 'O Nine Tails" by L7
There’s no evidence at all that this is about pirates and the camp value is minimal, but it gets a mention for referencing the Royal Navy’s preferred form of punishment in its title. And L7’s, ahem, ‘alternative’, behaviour shows that they know more about raising hell than anyone else on this list, the bunch of fakers.

9. "Wolves of the Sea" by Pirates of the Sea
The Latvian entry for Eurovision last year, these guys were robbed by a remarkably dull Russian effort, the same Timbaland-produced sludge that the new Chris Cornell is now crucifying his fans with, in one of rock's weirdest career mutations. In stark contrast, 'Wolves of the Sea' is chirpy, energetic and, after a reworking by Scotland’s Alestorm, thoroughly metalled-up too.

10. "Hot Potato" by The Wiggles
Ugh. Watching pirates in action is never pretty, as demonstrated by Johnny Depp and, with considerably more brevity, here by this Aussie outfit. The plunder in question here is spaghetti and potatoes, yet the pirate villain just pussyfoots around and never grows the necessary balls to seize what he wants by force, in what should have been a bloodcurling, frenzied orgy of sticky red death. Truly hideous.

How Not to Be A Racist

2009-04-08T22:06:00.004+01:00

So, an Iranian, caucasian, black and asian walk into a sports store. The Iranian already has the black person to agree to pose for a poster ad for a sports product all four of them are selling, but wants a caucasian to model as well so their ad doesn't appear to come from an ethnic minority sportswear club. All hell ensues in a sudden influx of political correctness.

"How can we say that? I am gobsmacked we can say that. I am offended. If I had a child and someone said: 'Sorry, you can't go in my ad campaign because you're black,' I'd kick off,"" says the 24-year old horse-faced caucasian way up in her saddle on her politically correct high horse.

The Iranian replies, "I'm Iranian, so I can say whatever I want!".

Bitch fight ensues, wrecking havoc and chaos, causing thousands of pounds worth of damages to the store. Whilst the caucasian and Iranian woman pull at each other's hair and tear at each other's faces over the correct number of coloured persons that should be allowed in an advertisement, the black and asian apathetically watch on, but totally agreeing they would want at least one white person on their poster so their product does not look like it comes from the ethnic minority sportswear club (because the first rule of ethnic minority sportswear club is you do not speak about ethnic minority sportswear club.) The black woman expresses this 'racial consent', which of course goes unheeded in the midst of the now bloodlusted cat fight. Meeeow!

After permanently disfiguring and crippling the Iranian in front of horrified bystanders, the caucasian proudly says of her distaste for the Iranian's racial insensitivity, "What sort of place do you think this is?!! We're not in bloody Vietnam!"

Sometimes irony tastes so much better than racial equality.

Sacha Baron Cohen modelling one of the many products available from the ethnic minority sportswear club.

PS: If you're still wondering, this joke was adapted, only slightly, from a reality show on the BBC. The morals of the story however still remain very very much the same.

Religulous

2009-04-07T18:15:00.002+01:00

I've been listening to to Bill Maher's podcasts for some time now since last year. There's plenty of political commentary from a diverse range of guests on his show with some usually fantastic comedy/parody thrown in between. I managed to see one of Bill's latest offerings, this time on religion, a documentary called Religulous. It's an insightful and fresh take on religion; preaching an I-don't-know philosophy in contrast with Richard Dawkins' more militant approach. The agnostic message is delivered without snobbery and in the form of a man genuinely looking for answers, but still aggressively challenging the way religious people view their beliefs. It's the first that any take on the war against religion has been perfectly aligned with my own views. But the ultimate message; if there is one thing agnostics can agree with Dawkins on, is that there is little room left, and even less time, for religion's impact on the world today.

When religion was created, only God had the capacity to end the world. But now Man does to. Because unfortunately, before Man figured out how to be rational or peaceful, we figured out nuclear weapons, and how to pollute on a catastrophic scale. And if there's one thing I hate more than prophecy, it's self-fulfilling prophecy.

- Bill Maher, Religulous.

Child possibly reunited with father, media world despairs

2009-04-06T12:29:00.004+01:00

At least I know who I should be feeling sorry for now...

"Madonna faces heartbreak as Mercy's father is found. "

"The singer will be devastated to learn a man claiming to be the three-year-old Malawian child's father wants her to live with him after believing she was dead."

"[...] Madge, 50, suffered [a] devastating blow when a man claiming to be Mercy’s long-lost father came forward."

" If the court in Malawi accepts his paternity claim it is likely to be a major blow to Madonna's adoption bid."

"His determination to care for his daughter leaves Madonna’s hopes of adopting the child in tatters."