Picture of a judge's wigRants Archive 2009Picture of a judge's wig

Date: 22/12/09

This Week's Non-ARRIVAls!

The return of an old favourite(?). I've already lost fifty minutes working time this week because of these incompetents, and it's only Tuesday afternoon.

Day Date Service Direction Time
Monday 21/12/09 12 Brymbo-Wrexham 07:33 No show
Tuesday 22/12/09 12 Brymbo-Wrexham 07:33 No show
Tuesday 22/12/08 12 Wrexham-Brymbo 13:55 No show

Arriva logo changed to read 'Non-arrival'

Date: 17/12/09

Welcome To Corporistan

If anyone had still been sufficiently deluded in thinking that the power structures of those who formulate, enforce and administer the laws of this increasingly baffled and baffling island (*) were in any way impartial in their decisions, just a couple of cases from the last few days should be enough to make the scales fall from their eyes.

Firstly, coming hot on the heels of their attempts to gag not only The Guardian newspaper but also parliament itself, the noted shysters Carter-Ruck (known to the cognoscenti as Carter Fuck, or possibly as Farther Crook) succeeded in gagging the BBC regarding a report on the Corporation's flagship news programme Newsnight. The report showed clearly that Farter-Cock's clients, the oil trading company Trafigura, had allowed its toxic waste to be dumped in Côte d'Ivoire by one of its subcontractors, and that that waste had had severe - even lethal - effects on many of those living in the vicinity. Trafigura denied that they had known that their hirelings had done any such thing, although internal e-mails showed that Trafigura were aware of the dangers of the waste and the need to dispose of it very carefully indeed.

In an act of cravenness which has become a hallmark of the BBC under its current inept management, the Broadcorping Castration climbed down, withdrew the allegations that the dumped waste had caused deaths (despite the fact that a special UN rapporteur had shown strong prima facie evidence that this was the case), and agreed to pay a five-figure sum of licence-payers' money to a charity.

The report, along with a radio feature on the same issue broadcast on the BBC's World Service, has been removed from the BBC's websites. For the moment at least, the 'offending' TV report is here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). One hopes that YouTube don't turn chicken as well. Wikileaks almost certainly won't, and they have not only a transcript of the Newsnight report (here), but also audio of the World Service report here.

The Corporation, in a desperate attempt to avoid looking like a bunch of pussies, issued what The Guardian risibly described as a 'combative' statement, which did nothing more than raise the question why, if the BBC were so sure of the veracity of the report, they had buckled under the first threat of a writ.

In its defence, the reasons are not difficult to discern. Firstly, Blarter-Crock would have deliberately run up massive costs on behalf of its client which the BBC might - win or lose - have to end up paying. Secondly, any full hearing would almost certainly have been heard in front of David Eady, possibly the greatest danger to freedom of speech in the UK today, and the man who granted a certain American ______ a wide-ranging injunction preventing the country's media from publishing certain pictures of Mr _____ _____ which apparently show him in the ____, although any such photographs would almost certainly be fakes; or so Mr _____' lawyers claim (see the Rant immediately preceding this one).

Once again, we see the lethal libel laws of England being used as a means of preventing the freedom of journalists to report on the misdeeds of wealthy corporations. Just as with the notorious crook Robert Maxwell, Trafigura are attempting to prevent their criminal incompetence from being exposed by using the rich-man's casino of Eady's court.

The truly worrying thing is that this now in effect means that any well-backed corporation - or individual - who wishes their activities to be kept from public view will know that all they have to do is threaten the BBC with Eady and all shall be well (hidden). As the BBC is the only broadcaster, indeed one of the very few media outlets tout court in the UK which still 'does' investigative journalism of any depth at all (with the occasional exception from Channel 4 News), its capitulation to Further-Cluck sets a disturbing precedent.

The second illustration of how the law is frequently misused in order to protect the interests of those with power, money or other influence came this week in the field of industrial relations.

British Airways, a company which had been very profitable until the Irish 'entrepreneur' Willie Walsh took control of it, and which has since - quite coincidentally, I'm sure - suffered substantial losses and other difficulties, mostly of the management's own making; BA, then, having earlier this year cajoled its employees into working a whole month without pay, engineered a strike by its cabin crews. 'Engineered' in the sense that the management sought to impose staffing cuts and other changes to the crews' conditions, and made that announcement at such a time as to guarantee that any strike action would take place during the sensitive Christmas and New Year period.

Predictably enough, the members of Unite who were balloted voted for an all-out strike with a majority of more than 92% on an 80% turnout - both remarkably high figures for such a ballot in recent times.

Walsh didn't seem to be fazed by this. Instead, his company went to court to try to get the ballot declared void. BA's claim was that, as about 800 of the 10 000 or so who voted had been accepted for voluntary redundancy and were deemed by law not eligible to vote, the whole ballot was invalid.

The case came to court and the judge duly ruled that the strike would be illegal.

Under the vicious anti-Trade Union laws passed by the extreme-right governments of the 1980s (and, curiously, never repealed by New Labour in its twelve-and-a-half-year-long period in office; Blair, indeed, saw them as something to be proud of rather than a disgrace against democracy), the process of taking industrial action of any sort legally has become a grotesque obstacle course, with all of the fences and pits provided to the employers to place as they will. One of the penalties for holding an 'illegal' strike is for the courts to seize all of a union's assets, thus rendering that union unable either to campaign or even to ensure strike pay to its members. This is one of the ways in which the miners were defeated in 1985.

Let's look at this logically: over 10 000 members voted, a turnout of eighty per cent. Of those, 92.4% (well over 9 000) voted for strike action. Even with the exclusion of those whom BA and the court said should not have been allowed to vote, there would still have been a massive mandate for action. Even BA weren't so stupid as to claim that the 800 'invalid' ballots would have swung the vote the other way. So what was the point of rendering the whole vote unlawful?

Perhaps we get a clue from the remarks of the judge, Laura Cox:

"A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year."

With respect, dearie, how damaging it may - putatively - be to the company or the public is none of your bloody business! You're supposed to be making judgements in law, not editorialising for the Daily Telegraph. But your words do give a clear indication that your decision was at least as much political as legal. Given that, even with the 'invalid' ballots, the result would still have been an overwhelming one for strike action, what other excuse, apart from nit-picking, can there be for the overturning of the result?

Some might say that it was the fault of Unite for not ensuring that those ineligible to vote were excluded. That discounts the fact that BA's staffing was in a state of flux at the time, and that the only people who knew the names of those who were to be granted voluntary redundancy in the period between the ballot papers being sent out and the closing date for voting were the personnel/human resources/people function (delete MBA-Bollocksese term as appropriate) at BA, who would not give that information to the union, who therefore had to do the best they could with the information that they held. So it seems to have been BA itself which prevented the running of a totally clean and legally valid ballot.

The double standard regarding the validity of ballots can be illustrated by reference to the widespread fraud reported in a number of constituencies in the 2005 General Election, much of it involving the postal voting system which the government had put in place for it. This, no doubt by another of those happy chances, benefitted - amongst others - Jack Straw in Blackburn, where nearly a third of all votes cast were done postally, many of them from Muslim families with close ties to Straw's electoral machine. There were also serious irregularities in other areas, again with positive electoral consequences for the Labour Party (the Lib Dems have also been caught out in some places).

Even when the claims of fraud have been proven in parliamentary elections, there has not been any attempt by the judiciary to force those contests to be re-run, even though the fraud may have led to candidates being elected who otherwise would not have been. And yet, with a completely cut-and-dried result in a ballot for employees to defend themselves against far-reaching unilateral decisions imposed by management without negotiation, somehow the presence of 8% of 'invalid' ballots which would have made no difference at all to the outcome means that the whole process is deemed illegal.

If it hasn't been clear to anyone for a long time, it should be bloodily obvious now that the laws are framed and operated by, and on behalf of, the same section of society; what J B Preistley called 'Topside', the so-called 'great and the good'. In short, those who own things (like a big corporation, for example, or most of Worcestershire). We, hoi polloi, are expected time after time meekly to assume the position and take the regular shaftings which, due to our passivity and our willingness to be fobbed-off for the sake of what we believe to be 'a quiet life', is probably no more and no less than we deserve.

(*) Baffling Island - a mysterious landmass in the north of Canada.

Date: 11/12/09

_____ _____ - More ___________!

It is JudgeCo™'s duty to report that Mr _____ _____, the noted American ______, has today obtained an injunction from the ____ _____ in ______ preventing UK media from reporting _______ on Mr _____' current difficulties.

The alleged ___________, which has already been reported in the media in the ______ _____ Of America, cannot be disclosed for legal reasons. However, it is thought by those in the know that the stories relate to how Mr _____ (33) ________ ______ bleeding _____ _ rear-end _________, and had to be _______ by his wife, who used a golf club to _____ his ______.

Further reports subsequently alleged that __ _____ (__) had had a __________ with _____ ______, a ________ from another woman, and erotic ____ ________ from ___ _______.

Mr _____, who has been left acutely ___________ by these revelations, has since gone to _____, but instructed lawyers to obtain the __________ to prevent any further _____________ to him and to his _____.

We'll bring you more news as soon as the potty and dangerous libel laws of England are reformed and multi-millionaires and corporations can no longer use them to prevent their ________, their ____________ and even their ___________ from being exposed to the public.

Date: 05/12/09

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.?    P.I.S.S.O.F.F.!

Or, "Suffer The Children (again)"

As I was saying a few weeks ago, these are not easy times in which to be an atheist, if only from the point of view of keeping our blood pressure within safe limits.

Following on from that earlier example of the inherent evil (and I can find no more nuanced word for it than that) of people allowing their own child to die rather than to admit that their 'faith' does not provide a practical solution for illness, we have had since a substantial revelation of what else can easily happen to children once you let organised superstition hold sway over you as an individual, or over the society of which you are a member.

I refer, of course, to the Murphy Report on the widespread abuse - physical, psychological and sexual - committed by priests of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin over a period of nearly thirty years (and probably for much longer than that, although those times were beyond the enquiry's remit).

That the Report's findings have not caused a great seismic shock amongst the Irish is, one hopes, solely because anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see would have known much, if not all, of what it makes public for a very long time. Anyone who had passed through the system of State-approved indoctrination which has comprised almost the whole of public education in Ireland since the establishment of the Free State would be able to tell of the practice of brutality-as-policy which has reigned over the children of that country.

And yet, the abuse continued and was allowed to be hidden by its perpetrators. How come? Because, basically, the Irish Free State and its successor Republic were set up as nothing much more than theocracies. Look at the Constitution of the Republic in its 1937 guise. More to the point, look at its Preamble:

"In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial...

...Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution."

Indeed, until its repeal in 1973, Article 44 of this document contained the following:

"The State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens."

As far as successive governments of the Republic were concerned, "special position" meant nothing other than the total control of Irish politics and society by one sect of Christianity. The fact that said sect was notorious for its thoroughgoing and uncompromising authoritarianism was of small concern to the political, social and economic élites of the land - after all, they were all graduates of that system, and after a period of great upheaval during the war of liberation and the ensuing civil war, having an organisation which would keep the population docile under the threat of hell-fire and purgatory for disobedience was, to say the least, useful.

The main consequence of this was that, during the rule of De Valera and for many years thereafter, Ireland stagnated politically, socially and economically, and the God-fearing peasantry ensured that the grip of the church remained unchallenged.

Which is certainly why, when rumours began to circulate about the extent and seriousness of the abuse of children in the care of the church itself, or of the many institutions it controlled in the fields of education, welfare and judicial matters, the immediate reaction of the church itself was to seek to cover it up in whatever way they thought necessary, knowing that they would get away with it, at least for long enough; and which is equally certainly why, when the victims of the church's callousness and indifference tried to report their concerns to the civilian authorities or to the media, those authorities not only did nothing to aid the victims, but connived - either actively or by indolence - to assist the Hierarchy in hiding what was going on.

And so it was that the abusers were simply moved from parish to parish, or were sent out of the country to continue their perverted conduct elsewhere, thus making it Somebody Else's Problem. The Gardaí made no move seriously to investigate the accusations; indeed, it spent four years in the mid-1990s supposedly inquiring into the allegations, but mysteriously found 'insufficient evidence' to prosecute any senior figure within the church. So it was also that senior politicians, although almost certainly aware of at least some of what was going on, sat on their hands for fear of transgressing against the de facto immunity which their State had granted the church. The victims could therefore safely be ignored by those who had sheltered (and continue to shelter) the perpetrators, or be bought off with a tiny proportion of the church's wealth should they insist on trying to get justice done and seen to be done.

Now, all we hear from the priests, the Polis and the pols is a litany of insincere apologies for their own sins of commission and omission (although I don't think we've heard that fine old British cliché "lessons will be learned" yet; but give them time), along with some quite bizarre attempts not so much at apology as apologia, whereby one senior cleric stated that the vast majority of his fellow priests were innocent of "unwarranted physical or sexual abuse" (which brings into being the possibility of there being such a fantastic concept as warranted physical or sexual abuse); and where a columnist in the Daily Telegraph, seeking to be plus Catholique que le Pape, claimed that there was no problem with the Catholic Church as such, only with the 'trendies' who had taken control of it since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. Under the old style, what one might call classic Catholicism (that's like Classic Coke, except it gets even further up your nose) none of this would have happened. Or, at least, no-one would ever have dared reveal it for fear of excommunication or sulphurus ad eternem.

What this all exposes is twofold: firstly, what can happen (and usually does) when you allow your society, your polity, to be dominated by any institution founded on irrationality, especially when that institution cannot even keep to what it claims to be its own underlying principles. Whilst condemning to penance any of its lay adherents for the slightest transgression against those stated principles (although, as far as I'm aware, Jesus had nothing to say on the subject of masturbation; although neither did he say, "Suffer the little children to come unto me. I will then bugger them senseless, deny everything and buy off the police and the legislators"), the Catholic church, seemingly as a matter of routine, sought to cover up the sheer criminality of some of its priesthood, or to smear the names of their victims. In which aim they have largely succeeded, mostly because they were allowed to succeed.

Secondly, that the demands of religious groups (of whatever stamp) to special treatment, inordinate privilege under, over and within the law of the land is an abomination to any notion of running our societies on just or equitable lines. And yet, that it precisely what they do demand, and not merely in priest-ridden societies such as Ireland has been until very recent times. Indeed, the UK government's Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, John Denham, recently announced the setting up of a special group of religious leaders to advise the government on such matters spiritual as...erm...the economy...and discrimination...and the treatment of gays...and the treatment of women. Given that such a group does not represent more than ten per cent of the UK's population, and that its members could hardly be said to come to the table with open minds, one wonders whether this is an early example of the opposite of 'blue-skies thinking'; what we might term, 'scorched-earth thinking', perhaps?

Add to this the privileged position of one religion in the (largely undocumented) constitution of the UK, and the position of extreme privilege accorded to one small sect of that religion, whereby for example, a couple of dozen of its senior clerics - past and present - are allotted permanent residence in the legislature; and the fact that that one sect is - in England at least - the 'official' church, and you can see the dangers.

Which is why those with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are have become uneasy with the increasing unwillingness of we atheists (or is it 'us atheists'? Is there a grammarian in the house?) to remain silent, and our increasingly regrettable tendency to say what we think in public.

One thing is for sure: it makes for a series of interesting public debates. Another thing is equally certain: in the public mind, the ranks of the faithful are losing. One reason is because the advocates of superstition have very little to offer in a proper debate; if they are too genteel to resort to the sort of name-calling and threat-making beloved of the more extreme adherents, then they are left to fall back either onto woolly thinking ("Like fuzzy logic, only more so" - Terry Pratchett) and claiming that either we do not understand the intricacies of theology (the theologians are, apparently, thinking of hiring the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to finally sort out the question which has bedevilled them down the ages, namely how many angels can dance on the head of a pin); or that we are so hung up on the notion of evidence that we discount the richness of human experience (old hands will recognise this as being a small step away from the commonly-implied and thoroughly nasty suggestion that to be without a religion is to be without any viable sense of ethics too).

The other reason that the goddists have such trouble in convincing is that they seem seldom able to put up advocates in these debates who appear to be capable of being insightful and persuasive, preferring instead to send into the fray those who invoke the nebulous as a catch-all for all doubts, or those who argue that it is so because it is so because it is so, and so forth.

Two recent examples may suffice to show what I mean. Firstly there was this debate from a month ago in which Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry were set against the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja (Nigeria) and the increasingly absurd figure of Ann Widdecombe MP to debate the motion, "Is the Catholic church a force for good in the world?". It is fair to say that a certain amount of floor-wiping went on, what with having a vacuous cleric and a shrill right-wing politician up against two people who use words for a living and use them very well. The highlights were Hitchens' description of the Catholic hierarchy as "a clutch of hysterical sinister virgins", and the passionate intensity of Fry in his winding-up (we have since discovered that Fry was on his way into one of his depressive episodes, from which one hopes he is ascending nicely).

The second such debate in recent weeks, hosted by the same organisation, Intelligence2, spoke to the notion that "Atheism Is The New Fundamentalism". For the 'ayes', we had yet another cleric, the former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries, and Charles Moore, former editor of the right-wing rags The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. Opposing them were the philosopher A C Grayling and the scientist Richard Dawkins.

Harries was not much more convincing than his Catholic counterpart had been before him, reduced to variants of the argumentum ad auctoritatem, such as that as T S Eliot was (in his view) a great poet and a very public Christian, then that proved (somehow) that Christianity was valid. Moore, however, as befits his position as former chief of some increasingly nasty publications, spent most of his time making ad hominem attacks on Dawkins (happily unaware, it seems, of the existence of Godwin's Law), and ended with a peroration which managed to combine the histrionic and the hysterical in roughly equal proportions.

By contrast, Dawkins and Grayling were calm, cogent and much to the point in the question being debated (I would say that, wouldn't I? But look at the way the vote swung after the debate and tell me I'm wrong).

One finds oneself wondering if this is really the best religion can do? Are Harries and the Archbishop of Abuja, are Widdecombe and Moore, really the pinnacle of religious debating talent? Are their edifices built not on rock but on sand after all?

The point is that religion insists on demanding 'respect' from everyone. But what its adherents really mean by the word 'respect' is actually deference. In the case of Christianity in the British Isles, for example, it has had a position of not merely de facto but de jure dominance for so long that it has grown to accept this as the natural state of being. So when some uppity natives start not merely to question that position but actively begin to challenge it, they become uneasy and defensive, and that defensiveness begins to express itself as offensiveness. So it is that writers in newspaper and magazine columns start to rant about something they call 'The New Atheism' (by which they mean atheism which is no longer prepared to be passively silent), and about how the fundementals of society are being undermined by people who have the audacity to question established Authority. They grind on about, for example, how Richard Dawkins is 'strident', when anyone who has ever heard him speak and converse know that he is almost invariably calm and measured, reserving any real anger for those who still insist that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is just simply wrong because their myths-scratched-on-parchment of choice say so.

They fight back in other ways as well. In the UK, having long had far too many of our schools under the control of churches (I was educated in one), we now have the scourge of 'faith schools', institutions set up and run primarily for the benefit of cliques of the pushy, and which are allowed to discriminate in their pupil intake, before committing such crimes against their developing young minds as trying to assert that creationism is a scientifically valid position. And this is all paid for by our taxes.

Come here, there's more, and in our end is our beginning, so to speak. In Ireland, an eejit Justice Minister has just shoved through a new law criminalising 'blasphemy' (which the novelist Robert A Heinlein described as one of the two stupidest offenses ever created by the mind of man, 'obscenity' being the other) with fines of up to €25 000. "Blasphemous matter" is defined in the new statute as:

"...if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage."

(And this is at a time when anti-'blasphemy' statutes in the UK have been allowed to wither and die through a combination of disuse and a growing sense of the absurd).

So, once again, 'respect for religion' means in effect 'protection from ever being offended by someone being rude enough to say something you disagree with'. Including, presumably, pointing out that the main instiutions of religion in Ireland have connived at the most appalling criminal acts against children. Again, this is not respect, it is seeking to silence criticism.

If 'respect' is to allowed to retain any meaning at all, it must surely be this: people have the right to believe what they choose to believe (and, by extension, the right to not have to believe something), and think what they choose to think. They also have the right to express those beliefs or thoughts, so long as that expression is done peacefully and without intention towards violence or encouraging others to violence. It most emphatically does not mean immunity from being offended for anyone, religious or otherwise. That way lies oppression, and the sort of fearful silence which leads to such appalling behaviour as that made manifest by the Murphy Report (amongst others) to be covered up, and to its perpetrators escaping even the slightest justice.

Actually, the whole reason for my spending the whole of my Saturday evening writing this was in order for me to republish this cartoon, by the American cartoonist Don Addis, whose work featured in the St Petersburg Times in Florida for some forty years (archive here). It is the cartoon referred to by A C Grayling is his contribution to the debate at Wellington College (which was, of course, named after that famous warrior the Duke of College):

Cartoon about the religious demanding respect from those they attack

Footnote: by one of those strange coincidences which cause the godless to smile ruefully and the god-smitten to jump up and down proclaiming that this proves something-or-other about God, Don Addis died on the very day that Grayling referenced his work.

Date: 25/10/09

Watching You

Are you a domestic extremist?

By that, I don't mean that you leave your lawn uncut for two years, or fire catapults loaded with dog-shit at your neighbours' washing, or even that you have committed the heinous offence of having a dado rail and being proud of it.

Have you ever taken part in any protest, however peaceful, against - say - government plans to replace school meals with a handful of rice and a bowl of gruel per child per week? Or against a supermarket chain wishing to bulldoze your high street and replace it with a 'shopping experience'? Or just against the general fuckwittery of those who hold power over us?

You have? Well, in that case, it's likely that you are a 'domestic extremist', at least in the eyes of the bizzies.

See this article in The Guardian for the sordid details of how our fundamental right to peaceful protest is now overshadowed by the reality that - should we decide to exercise that right - we will end up on one of several interconnected databases run by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO); a private corporation.

And feel the chill from this quote from someone rejoicing in the name of Anton Setchell, who is styled 'national co-ordinator for domestic extremism' (I would have hoped he would have been 'national co-ordinator against domestic extremism', but nowadays you simply can't be sure):

"Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police," he said. "Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once."

Guilty until able to prove ourselves innocent yet again. It is time - more than time - to rid ourselves of these usurpers of our liberty.

Date: 18/10/09

Deliverance

The postal workers are on strike later this week.

If you believe Adam Crozier, the multi-millionaire Thief Executive of Royal Mail when he says that the strike is an "appalling and unjustified attack on customers",

If you believe the serial crook Mandelson when he says that he is "beyond anger" at the thought of the postal workers trying to defend themselves from management thuggery and deceit,

If you think this is about a bunch of backward Luddites trying to stop the necessary 'modernisation' (yes, that word again) of a public service,

If you believe that mail volume really is declining in an age of increasing deliveries of online purchases, and

If you really think that the rights of people working for a public services should be trampled over - and the experienced workforce replaced by temping scabs recruited from the ever-lengthening dole queues - simply to avoid a temporary and very minor inconvenience to you, the consumer,

Then I think you need to read this.

I, for one, will be supporting the postal workers this week, whilst wishing that there was more that I could do, but am prevented from doing by the vicious anti-worker legislation passed twenty-odd years ago by an extreme right-wing government and - disgracefully - never repealed by its supposed ever-so-slightly left-of-centre successor.

Update: Victoria Coren nails it, too.

Date: 07/10/09

Suffer The Children...

These are not easy times in which to be an atheist.

I don't mean that we're oppressed or anything. It's just that every day the world provides us with further news which could lead some of us to an aneurysm-inducing spasm of rage.

Take this story as just one example:

Prayer-reliant US parents jailed

"A central Wisconsin couple who prayed rather than seeking medical care for their 11-year-old dying daughter were sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years probation in the girl's death."

Read it and fucking weep!

Here we have two people - supposedly intelligent adults - who, when their eleven-year-old daughter fell ill, didn't bother taking her to a doctor or even to the emergency room of their nearest hospital. Instead, they prayed over her, and got their friends in to do likewise...

...even to the point where their child was lying obviously dying on the carpet!

"...the parents said they believe healing comes from God and that they never expected their daughter to die as they prayed for her and summoned others to do the same"

Well, how do they feel now? You know, now that their daughter is in the local cemetery? Forever?

"I do not regret trusting truly in the Lord for my daughter's health," [the mother] said."

"I am guilty of trusting my Lord's wisdom completely ... Guilty of asking for heavenly intervention. Guilty of following Jesus Christ when the whole world does not understand. Guilty of obeying my God," [the father] said."

Listen, you shit: what the whole world most definitely does not understand is how the fuck you would be willing to let your kid die rather than moderate your pathetic prejudices!

As for regrets, remorse or guilt, forget it:

"During the sentencing, Leilani Neumann, 41, told the judge her family is loving and forgiving and has wrongly been portrayed as religious zealots."

"Wrongly"?! And what cause, you stupid, ignorant homicidal bitch, do you have for letting your daughter die on your living-room floor because of your sick and twisted 'faith'? You should be begging us for forgiveness: your other children, the rest of your family, your neighbours and friends, your whole society!

There's worse, if you can imagine it possible; in a country which will nail your arse for life for stealing a pizza, what was the sentence for these killers-by-neglect?

"The judge ordered the couple to serve one month in jail each year for six years..."

Whoa, judge! That's Maximum Bob territory! But then, the judge seems also to be one of America's legion of god-botherers, judging by the rest of his sentence:

"...so that the parents can "think about Kara and what God wants you to learn from this"."

And:

"Marathon county circuit court Judge Vincent Howard told the Neumanns they were "very good people, raising their family who made a bad decision, a reckless decision"."

Reckless? It's absolutely cuckoo! How long would a crack-whore be sentenced for for allowing her kid to die rather than seek medical treatment? Ten years? Twenty-five to life? Would she get The Chair?

And this all happened, not in some inbred, deep-South hell-hole, but in Wisconsin, which has a reputation for being one of the more enlightened parts of the United States!

The only thing I can hope for is that, while doing their brief stints in the pen, they have intimate meetings with Bubba and the Bull-dyke, if you see what I mean. It might be the only way of getting some sense into them.

And the next time someone tells you that 'the West' has to invade and bomb large parts of Asia in order to bring 'civilisation' to the benighted natives thereof, tell them that it might be more productive if they started on Marathon County, Wisconsin first. What was that about motes and beams?

Date: 26/09/09

Long To Gain Over Us?

As a follow-up to this piece yesterday, cop a load of this:

"No Spending Cuts For The Windsors"

"Deal struck in 1972 means Royal Family is to be exempt from any cuts in public spending next year"

This after their income outstripped inflation for two decades, that the civil list account is currently massively in surplus, and that our 'democratically-elected' parliament is not permitted ('permitted', if you bloody please!) to revise the civil list downwards!

A man who may have been one of my distant ancestors was a signatory to the death sentence on Charles I. I think that I'd sign any valid successor document at any time, just to get rid of these bloated spongers and all the corruption they bring into our social, legal and economic arrangements.

Date: 11/08/09

Pucker Off!

Why does a large internet retailer (hint: they're a 'one-off') think I want to buy anti-wrinkle cream?

Cheeky sods.

Date: 08/08/09

From The Head Down

"A fish rots from its head down" (proverb)

If you want to know why the vast majority of the population now has a deep mistrust of those who rule them, and why those who rule them are desperate to monitor the movements, deeds, even thoughts of the entire population of this island, chew on this.

"Investigators decided there was no evidence of police wrongdoing in the death of Ian Tomlinson just three days after he collapsed at the G20 protests, it has emerged tonight."

This was the statement due to be issued by the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission less than three days after Mr Ian Tomlinson was dealt fatal injuries by a uniformed thug:

"Mr Tomlinson died of a heart attack after being caught up among protesters dressed entirely in black who were charging police."

"It was during this charge and retreat that Mr Tomlinson has seemed to have been caught up in the crowds and a number of people describe seeing him 'collapse and fall to the ground'."

The 'I'PCC then went on to say that they had examined CCTV footage (presumably of the type we the public were told didn't exist because of mysteriously unfortunate 'technical malfunctions' or 'routine maintenance', or 'someone stole the camera'), police records (it's not clear if these were pre-canteen conference or post-canteen conference) and statements from 'independent witnesses', and were satisfied that:

"...no evidence that the actions of those officers present on Cornhill contributed in any way to the sudden and untimely death of an innocent bystander".

As Billy Connolly would say, "Oh, d'ye bloody think so?"

Let's see that again in super slo-mo, shall we?

"Mr Tomlinson died of a heart attack..."

LIE. He died of internal bleeding.

"...after being caught up among protesters..."

LIE. There were no protestors anywhere near him.

"...protesters dressed entirely in black who were charging police."

LIE. There were no protestors, however sinisterly they may have been dressed, charging police.

"It was during this charge and retreat..."

LIE x2. As there was no 'charge', there could have been no retreat either.

"...that Mr Tomlinson has seemed to have been caught up in the crowds...

LIE. There weren't any crowds to be caught up in, except for a gaggle of men dressed in sinister, unmarked uniforms, one of whom had just belted Mr Tomlinson with his baton.

"...and a number of people describe seeing him 'collapse and fall to the ground'."

'A number of people' also saw him being struck by the robocop. Did the 'I'PCC take their evidence into account?

OK, so here's how it is: we have a public body, charged with investigating complaints of misconduct against the police, who were going to release a statement which contained at least four blatant untruths, most of them provided by the police force ostensibly being investigated (including the farcical first post mortem, carried out by a police pathologist with a history of sub-standard professional conduct); a statement which completely exonerated the police, and put the death of Mr Tomlinson down to one of those tragic accidents which quite often befall those who get in the way of the constabulary performing its allotted function as a goon-squad for the powerful. No doubt it would have gone on to say that lessons would be learned.

And do you know what the most terrifying thing about all this is? That, but for an American tourist who filmed what actually happened, they would have got away with their rank dishonesty. The police, the 'I'PCC, the politicians and the tame corporate media would have closed ranks, and the whole criminal conspiracy would have been buried as permanently as its victim.

Apparently, the 'I'PCC have sent a file to the prosecuting authorities with a recommendation. We are not yet privy (if we ever shall be) to what that recommendation may be, but given that the 'I'PCC's first act on finding that The Guardian had put the tourist's footage up on its website was to go around to the newspaper's offices with an officer of the very police force which was being investigated in order to demand the clip's removal, one cannot be hopeful that any of the officers involved in the killing of Ian Tomlinson will ever be held liable.

Except, perhaps, under Health And Safety laws.

Date: 06/08/09

Vexations

I really wish that I could go into detail about what is happening at work at the moment.

I have been in the Depratment long enough now that I thought that I had seen every possible way in which it could screw up.

It seems that I'm guilty of underestimating it.

So it is that a new computer system, which was intended to tie in to one big application the data previously held on a number of discrete databases, has been rolled out to the network when it still doesn't frigging well work. They'd already had to delay it for about eight months past its original target date because some bits of it weren't playing nicely with other bits, but this should have reassured us that they were trying to get it right before implementation.

Huh!

We are now in the fourth week after its introduction, and there are still massive amounts of work on hand - much (but by no means all) of which built up in the six week changeover period between systems - which we cannot deal with because the new system either cannot handle it at all, or can only handle it by the data-processing equivalent of travelling from London to Stockholm via Ouagadougou (with a toilet break in Dhaka). There are failings in quite fundamental areas of its operation; failings which are the inevitable consequence of having software designed and coded by people who have no experience of what it is supposed to be there to do. Even leaving aside the issue of staff familiarisation with it, it now takes about ten times longer to do something very straightforward compared to its predecessor.

The system it replaced was nearly twenty five years old, and was admittedly getting a bit creaky. But it worked, because it was designed and implemented totally in-house, by people who not only knew what they were doing, but also knew what the system was intended to achieve.

And yet we were assured that the new system had been thoroughly trialled and piloted. If it was, then it must have been trialled by Judge Jeffreys (although he would surely have condemned it), and piloted by surviving members of the Imperial Japanese Air Force circa 1944.

In short, it doesn't fscking work. And it may be at least next Spring before they iron the significant bugs out of it.

Of course, that's not the picture that the Depratment's senior managers wish the public to have. Indeed, it's not the picture that they want the staff to have, with messages on our intranet constantly telling us how well it's all going. And this to the thousands of people who are having to work with it, and who are facing daily, nay hourly frustrations at being prevented from doing their jobs properly because of yet another load of junk which should never have been made operational until they were sure it was - what's that phrase? Ah, yes! - 'fit for purpose'.

And the response from management to criticism? Either a) ignore it, or b) cudgel the messenger. One example may suffice. When a member of staff pointed out to his colleagues that the order in which entries in a certain category of data appeared was (and I hope you'll pardon my use of a technical term here) all to cock, and ended his e-mail with a light-hearted comment, he was censured by a senior manager, who ordered him to stick to 'strictly factual' content in future. This despite the fact that that particular member of staff would have won awards for effective communication for well over a decade had the Depratment bothered to have any, and that the same message which got into the hair of the senior manager had been praised for its effectiveness by at least two managers on the front line.

It's all show and bluster, and we know it. That's why - only a matter of a few weeks ago - the Depratment came last in a staff survey in more than a dozen Depratments of Stoat. Particularly low marks were given for job satisfaction and for confidence in the Depratment's senior managers.

And they wonder why we have higher than average sick-leave levels, and why experienced staff can't wait to find somewhere else to be, even if it's a Twilight Home For The Bewildered.

I just wish my lottery numbers would come up big, and soon.

Date: 13/07/09

It's Only Numbers

Here's today's entry for the much-coveted Deliberately Misleading Headline Of The Year award. It's from the fake liberals at The Guardian:

"Public support for war in Afghanistan is firm - survey"

However, what's this we see in paragraph four?

"Opposition to the war, at 47%, is just ahead of support, at 46%."

So, yermeantersay, the public don't actually support the war? Then why does the headline suggest the exact opposite?

Perhaps this 'survey' - conducted on behalf of that obsequious New Labour rag and a terminally-cowed BBC - was conducted under the ever-so-fair-and-not-distorting-at-all First Past The Post System. It would certainly explain why reality is so lamentably out of tune with what our warmongering régime knows with all its cankerous heart to be 'right'.

Date: 23/06/09

Hmmm....

There's something wrong with this, but I can't quite put my finger on it:

Obama Condemns 'Unjust' Violence

"The United States and the international community...strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost."

'Dozens dead' in US drone strike

"At least 45 people have died in a missile strike by a US drone aircraft in Pakistan, officials there have said."

Date: 08/06/09

Well Done! (Or So You Should Be...)

Well, I warned you, didn't I?

Compare and contrast:

Photo of a D-Day veteran

June 6 2009: veterans of the Normandy Campaign gather - possibly for the last time - to commemorate their fallen comrades-in-arms.

Photo of a man who denies the Holocaust ever happened

June 7 2009: it is announced that the people of North West England have just elected this racist, homophobic, Holocaust-denying Hitler-worshipper to represent them in the European Parliament, and that the people of Yorkshire and Humber have just voted in their tens of thousands for someone who has a history of racist violence going back forty years.

So you didn't see any point in voting "'cos they're all the same, ain't they?", eh?

Stupid bastards.

Date: 06/06/09

Colourblind, Or Just Blind?

Some of you may remember The Ricin Plot of a few years ago, where a number of Muslims were arrested, charged and tried on counts relating to a plan to release poison in public places.

If you do remember it, it's probably because of all the hoop-la from politicians, police and the punditocracy about "the Muslim threat to our way of life" (i.e., mindless violence, ovine consumption, out-of-control pissheadery and indiscriminate shagging), and about how the case was proof positive that we needed to bar-code everyone and stick CCTV cameras in everyone's living rooms 'just in case'.

To the great chagrin of the pols, pigs and pundits, the men in question were acquitted. This totally perverse and politically-motivated piece of judicial activism was occasioned by two inconvenient facts:

That didn't stop the p's, p's and p's behaving as if the acquitals were the result of 'political correctness gawn MA-A-A-A-AD!', or some such bollo.

Yesterday, the BBC News website had an item headed:

Suspected ricin found at property

The story included these quotes:

"Traces of what is thought to be the nerve poison ricin have been found by police..."

"Police said the suspected ricin was found in a jam jar at the property..."

"The substance was examined in tests by scientists in Scotland and is to be sent under escort to the Ministry of Defence's chemical biological warfare facility at Porton Down for further examination."

"The arrests followed a long-running intelligence-led operation."

Now, you would think that this story would have brought the p's, p's and p's running, desperately looking for the nearest camera, microphone or keyboard in order for them to give vent to the thoughts of 'all right-minded people'. Gordon Brown would give us another comedy turn in front of that unfeasibly large fireplace in the reception room at Number Ten; Jacqui Smith - in her last act before leaving to spend more time cleaning her husband's biological stains out of the carpet in their current home of choice - would staunchly maintain that the arrest totally justifies all the illiberal and hateful legislation her Department have put on the books these last seven and a half years; and Melanie Phillips would tap her talons on her specially-reinforced keyboard to insist that now was the time for Israel to bomb Tehran, Jeddah, Damascus and Luton, 'just in case'.

But no. Nada, zilch, sod all.

This may have something to do with the bits of the story I didn't quote you. Such as:

"Traces of what is thought to be the nerve poison ricin have been found by police at the County Durham home of a suspected white supremacist."

"Mr Davidson's son Nicky, 18, was arrested at Grampian Court, Annfield Plain, on suspicion of inciting racial hatred."

The story is currently here).

OK. I'm sufficiently broad-minded to believe that we should wait for any further proceedings and trial before casting nasturtiums on these two. Compare and contrast the response I referred to in the earlier case, and that from people whom - one would hope - would know better.

But this, if accurate, is hardly an isolated incident. It is well-enough known (though perhaps not well enough publicised) that the BNP and their ilk have 'form' for their members and supporters being dangerous, violent nut-jobs. Such as Robert Cottage, failed BNP election candidate, who was jailed two years ago for possession of chemicals designed to create explosions.

Was his picture plastered all over the front of the Daily Mewl or The Scum, along with lurid headlines about plots to bring down our tolerant, law-abiding society? Nope. Scarcely a mention anywhere in fact; and I suspect that this new case, even if it goes to trial, will register nary a blip on the radar of media which are obsessed with celebs and other prostitutes, and which do us a daily disservice with their monocular reporting of the real world.

Date: 09/05/09

Innocentish?

One of the most remarkable psychological phenomena of recent years has been the increasing tendency of a significant proportion of the public - and an overwhelming majority of our politicians and senior police officers - to forget some of the basic underpinnings of life in a free, democratic country under the rule of law.

One of the most fundamental principles of living in such a society is that people are innocent until proven guilty.

Despite this, successive governments - either from a desire to appease the yapping of the mongrel tabloids, or from a wish to be seen to be 'doing something' in response to a high-profile crime, or simply from wanting to obscure their own feelings of inadequacy - have spent a great deal of time in the last twenty years undermining such an important concept.

Whether it be the oleaginous Michael Howard effectively removing the right to silence, or a long succession of Labour Home Secretaries either watering down or removing altogether some of the most basic safeguards we as citizens/subjects have against overweening state power, the end result is the same; that the mindset of our legislators, police and punditocracy has been moulded to believe in a sort of efficiency expert's idea of a justice system, i.e. do whatever gets results you can display on a spreadsheet, irrespective of whether those results bear any relation to what normal people might call reality.

And so, gradually - sometimes by stealth but just as often by brazenly overt means - the notion that we are innocent unless convicted by a court of law after a trial conducted by due process has been eroded to the point where in many cases it scarcely exists anymore. So many summary offences have been created (whereby you're guilty if a policeman or other petty official says you are), so many alleged offences have been reclassified as 'arrestable' (i.e., just about all of them), so many measures have been introduced to imply guilt where none can be proven, that it's probably time that we dispensed with the fiction that we have the right to be innocent anymore.

I adduce just three examples out of the many I could have cited had I the time to go back and look:

If you think it can't happen to you, just wait a bit. It can and, if we allow the power-drunk control freaks who currently hold sway over our land the chance, it will.

Date: 29/04/09

Creating A Market In Torture...And Silence

I hope no-one reading this site would be sufficiently naïve or trusting to think that the corporate media will invariably tell the truth about what those with power (political, financial or otherwise) get up to. The wisest default position should always be to doubt until you get it corroborated from a good variety of sources. This enables us to see and point out where and how they are lying to us.

It's a bit difficult to do that if none of those sources reports on what has quite clearly actually happened.

Such is a case in point with the evidence given yesterday (Tuesday) to the UK Parliament's Joint Committee On Human Rights by Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, regarding the complicity of our own government in torture under that country's hideous régime, and the use of information obtained under torture to justify the UK Government's policies.

It is remarkable that it has taken so long for such an important committee to take so long before it deigns to hear Mr Murray's evidence, given that he has been providing it to the public since he was removed from his job (and his career) for clearly political motives some five years ago. Nevertheless, yesterday they finally heard officially what he had to say, including his very clear accusations of complicity by our government (and particularly by Jack Straw - Foreign Secretary at the time of the events described) in torture carried out by the Uzbek dictatorship against internal dissidents and torture carried out by the CIA, evidence of which has recently been published by the Obama administration.

I point all this out, because if you were to rely on the corporate media in the UK for information, you'd wait for ever. Apart from a small (but perfectly formed) piece tucked away in a sidebar link on the BBC News website, the coverage has been...well, totally non-existent. The Guardian, nowt (although that seems to be their general position on Mr Murray, as the editor has some undisclosed personal animus against him - Rusbridger is probably a chum of Jack Straw); The Independent doesn't seem to be on this issue as on many another; The Telegraph? Nada. Even The Times, one-time newspaper of record and gazette of the governing classes, can't bring itself to mention yesterday's hearings (which also involved evidence from Professor Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London). All these rags (and their tabloid kid brothers and sisters) much prefer to yab on about MPs' expenses, Gurkhas, and about how we're all about to die from flying pigs or whatnot.

So, as it falls to us private soldiers in the Bloggers' Army to do the job of 'real' journalists, here are the links to Craig Murray's evidence. The truth has come out, but it needs help if it is to overcome the inability of our embedded press to tell the truth not only to power, but the truth about power as well:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven



Date: 28/04/09

Lord Have Pity On The Rich

In one the few signs of any concession to economic justice in recent times, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Darling Alistair (he of the tarmac eyebrows) announced in his Budget that - from April 2010 - there will be a higher rate of income tax for those whose taxable income exceeds £150 000. This is the first increase in income tax on higher-rate payers for over twenty years, but you'd never guess from the way that many of those who will be subject to the change immediately started squealing about it. "This is Class War!!!", they yelled to any passing newspaper editor who would listen. Yes, the very same people who think that those at the bottom who didn't benefit from the so-called 'boom years' should just take the pain and carry on as before (inasmuch as they can having been deprived of their livelihoods and in all probability their homes, too) and don't presume to ask some of the architects of the economic collapse to pay a fairer share.

I haven't actually heard or seen anyone - not even Baby-Face Cameron or that living, breathing indictment of the corruption of our political process who goes under the code-name of 'Peter Mandelson' - use that dullard response "The Politics Of Envy" yet, but perhaps they're saving that one up.

I find that the phrase "squealing like stuck pigs" is particularly apposite at this time. For it is they - those who have had their snouts in the trough of two decades or more of 'funny money' - who are making most of the tra-la-la about what is, by any impartial yardstick, a very, very modest measure to ensure that those who benefitted the most from the good times should face their share of the burden when the sewage farm hits the windmill. It is particularly rich (if you'll pardon the phrase) in that the people whinging and pissing and moaning the most are those who were - either by direct involvement or by negligent inaction - responsible for the conditions which have led us to our present state.

Shameless hussies to a man (and occasional woman), however, they are leaving no stone un-crawled-out-from-under in order to articulate their pain to the masses who, flaming torches and pitchforks at the ready, are marching upon their Thames-side gothic mansions to exact their brutal revenge.

Some of these writers are just blatant about it, but most of them have just about enough nous to recognise that you can fool enough people into taking you seriously by trying to wrap your bleating in a veneer of concern for wider issues. So we have this piece by ex-banker and attempted novelist Tetsuya Ishikawa in The Guardian today, in which he warns that this new, horrendous burden upon our 'wealth creators' will drive them all to Dubai, Hong Kong or Zürich and we'd all be so much the poorer for this.

I'm delighted to say that the vast majority of the 276 (and rising) commenters on this piece of self-serving fish-wrapping tend strongly not to agree, and the poor boy has been given a right old rogering.

I won't go into where I agree or disagree with them, but there's something which always bugs me about how some people react to increases in income tax, especially for those who make most money. I've seen it again in this case (elsewhere) where people start screaming about "these Socialists" (by which they mean the Labour Party, somehow) "want to take FIFTY PER CENT of my income!!!!". This shows nothing other than a degree of ignorance as to how income tax in this country works. As it's my job to help operate that very system, I thought it would be a useful public service to give a couple of examples, using the proposed new tax band as an indication of how things wag.

Disclaimer! The following should not be taken as anything other than a general indication of the way of things.

First of all, not all of your income is taxed. Everyone has a Personal Allowance, which in 2009/10 stands at £6 475 (it's much higher for those over 65 years of age, unless their total income goes over a certain amount, at which point it starts to decrease proportionally). That sum is deducted from your total income before tax begins to operate upon it.

So you then have your Taxable Income. This is then taxed in one or more tax bands. For the most part, the lowest band (the Basic Rate) is 20% (there are exceptions for savings and dividend income). If your taxable income is above a certain point (£34 600 this tax year), then any taxable income above that point is taxed at 40% (the Higher Rate).

From 2010/11 (so you rich bastards have got nearly a year to move your income source to the Cayman Islands or wherever), there will be a 50% Additional Rate on taxable income above £150 000. Please note that the 50% will only apply on the portion of taxable income above £150 000, not on the whole bloody lot as some would have you believe.

OK, those are the general principles, and if you want more info, try here.

Now, let's take two case studies as to the effect of the new 50% rate on a couple of typical, sorely-buffetted, feeling-the-pinch taxpayers (or 'customers' as we now have to call them):

Case Study No. 1 - Keith Frontbotham

Mr Frontbotham is a Finance Officer with a company which goes around repossessing peoples' three-piece suites at gunpoint. He is thirty-seven years old, married with two children, lives in a nice house, drives a nice car and has a nice build up of arterial plaque which should kill him before he's fifty. His total income from salary, bonuses and perks is £160 000 per annum.

So, under the current rates:

Gross Income 160 000  
Personal Allowance 6 475  
Taxable Income 153 525  
First £37 400 @ 20% 7 480  
Remaining £116 125 @ 40% 46 450  
Total tax 53 930  
Net Income 99 595 = £8299.58/month

Now, with the Additional Rate of 50%, and even assuming that the Personal Allowances and tax band limits don't change (which they almost always do):

Gross Income 160 000  
Personal Allowance 6 475  
Taxable Income 153 525  
First £37 400 @ 20% 7 480  
Next £112 600 @ 40% 45 040  
Remaining £3 525 @ 50% 1 762.50  
Total tax 54 282.50  
Net Income 99 242.50 = £8270.21/month
Reduction on year 352.50 = £29.37/month (0.35%)

So Mr Frontbotham probably wouldn't notice any change and, even if he did, it would be small change (geddit!)

Case Study No. 2 - Jeremy Shandie-Hand

Mr Shandie-Hand is a trader at the London Stock Exchange. He has been earning well in recent years, but is facing a sharp downturn in fortunes in the coming year. He suspects it had something to do with all those crates which he helped his manager load into the back of that Ford Galaxy to take down to the Essex Marshes one night in September 2008. Strangely, he hasn't been able to get in touch with his manager since. However, Mr Shandie-Hand is confident things will be OK in the end because of all that money they've been given by the Government.

He is married, with two children and a Latvian boyfriend, and lives in West London and Normandy. His total (legal) remuneration is £350 000 per annum.

So, first off under the current rates:

Gross Income 350 000  
Personal Allowance 6 475  
Taxable Income 343 525  
First £37 400 @ 20% 7 480  
Remaining £306 125 @ 40% 122 450  
Total tax 129 930  
Net Income 213 595 = £17799.58/month

Now, with the Additional Rate and making the same assumptions as before:

Gross Income 350 000  
Personal Allowance 6 475  
Taxable Income 343 525  
First £37 400 @ 20% 7 480  
Next £112 600 @ 40% 45 040  
Remaining £193 525 @ 50% 96762.50  
Total tax 149 282.50  
Net Income 194 242.50 = £16186.88/month
Reduction on year 19 532.50 = £1 612.71/month (9.06%)

Now, a reduction of over £1 600 per month looks immense from the point of view of those of us who can only dream of earning that much in a month, but look at it in the context of Mr Shandie-Hand's total income level, and then ask yourself this:

What the f*ck are these people WHINGING about? Is Jeremy going to have to take dear little Jake and darling little Anjelika out of their private schools and send them up chimneys to earn a living? Does the future hold nothing for them all but living in a cardboard box (Harrods, with gazebo, natch) somewhere round the back of Horse-Guards' Parade? If so, then he can't even handle his own finances properly, let alone be trusted with anyone else's wealth.

So all I can say to these poor, downtrodden victims of The Politics Of Envy is this: you helped cause all this, so it's right that you should shoulder some of the responsibility rather than have all of it lumped on those of us who never benefitted from your Casino Culture.

And if you can't face that, then piss off to Dubai - and mind the revolving door doesn't bruise your arse on the way out!

Date: 17/04/09

Triple Trouble

(Yes, things have been quiet here of late: it's Spring, you see, and I must take part in that annual test of creative tension between encouraging some things to grow whilst trying to prevent other things from growing at all. My War On Dandelions is of the attritional variety, and is taking up an inordinate amount of my free time)

Three items to remark upon, each linked - if somewhat tenuously - with the other in a way which describes the matrix into which our society has been squashed in recent years:

Item: the snotrag of lies woven by the police and their bureaucratic and media chums becomes more and more threadbare by the day. The latest (as I type this, at least) is that the all-too-quick-and-convenient opinion of a Home Office pathologist that Ian Tomlinson died of 'natural causes' has been dismissed by a pathologist engaged by the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission and by Mr Tomlinson's family. The re-examination finds that death was due to 'abdominal haemorrhage'.

The next step, of course, will be to find out why the bleeding occurred, and whether being shoved violently to the (concrete) ground whilst you have your hands in your pockets might constitute plausible cause. Either way, the still strangely-unidentified policeman who was responsible (can you imagine a demonstrator going unidentified by the media this long?) is now being questioned on a possible manslaughter charge.

Add to this the increasing evidence of further police thuggery around the G20 protests, and the fact that the latest conveniently-timed 'swoop' on 'Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' intent on launching a 'major atrocity over the Easter holidays' has turned out so far to be an embarrassment involving a few photographs of public buildings in Manchester, a few sachets of sugar and some Pakistani students who were here completely lawfully, and it's turning out to be A Bad Time for the securocrats and fear-spreaders.

Item: but never mind, you can always rely on a good cover-up from a committee of 'safe' people to ensure that things go on much as before.

Margaret Haywood was a nurse. She worked at Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton.

She became increasingly concerned at the neglect of elderly patients at the hospital. She raised the matter on at least two occasions with the hospital's management. They, typical of today's breed of self-regarding plastic samurai, sat on their fat salaries and did nothing to rectify the problems.

So what was a conscientious member of what are, I'm afraid, called nowadays the caring professions to do? Keep her gob shut and let the abuse continue? Keep banging her head against the wall of her managers' callous indifference? No, she went to the media. The BBC Panorama programme agreed to let her secretly film some of the things which went on.

The resulting programme was screened nearly four years ago and led, amongst other things, to a greater awareness of the awful treatment of the vulnerable in our society.

One would have thought that, in any sane and rational society, nurse Haywood would have been hailed for her courage in sticking to her guns and ensuring that the scandal became public knowledge in order that something positive might finally be done.

Unfortunately for her (and for us, and for the victims of the abuse she helped uncover), we live in an insane and irrational society, which is run by many of its most insane and irrational members. Which is why, on Wednesday of this week, Margaret Haywood was struck off the nursing register after twenty years.

In its judgement, the Nursing and Midwifery Council found her guilty of what it called 'misconduct' and 'breach of confidentiality'. Its spokesbeing, one Linda Read, said:

"A patient should be able to trust a nurse with his/her physical condition and psychological wellbeing...Although the conditions on the ward were dreadful, it was not necessary to breach confidentiality to seek to improve them...The registrant could have attempted to address shortcomings by other means. But this was never a course of action which she fully considered."

She did fully consider it, you jumped up little cunt! She told her managers about her concerns more than once, and she was ignored. What else more could she do before deciding that what was going on was so contrary to her medical ethics that more drastic means of bringing them to attention had to be tried?

(This is the same organisation which, less than six months ago, found that nurse Haywood had not broken the policy of the hospital 'Trust' (what a warped word that is to use in the context!) as regards to whistle-blowing)

And what has happened to the 'managers' at the Royal Sussex? Oh, they issued a bland apology under the LWBL system ("Lessons Will Be Learned"), but there's no evidence that I can find of any of them being removed from their jobs as a result of their arse-covering incompetence. Indeed, I'm sure any of them who have since left have been generously rewarded for their trauma.

In the same way that politicians and bureaucrats - state and local - use 'official secret' or 'data protection' or (increasingly in our monetised society) 'commercial confidentiality' to seek to cover up their incompetence, slovenliness or outright corruption, so too do the governing bodies of the 'professions' use these weaseloid terms to cover up their own self-serving, buttock-regarding cowardice. So it is that those in positions of power are effectively immune from the consequences of their actions (or lack of them). Most organisations in the public and commercial sphere have - supposedly - policies to enable wrongdoing to be reported. In practice, however, the procedures which are provided are nothing more than instruments of delay, obfuscation and for the identifying of those who refuse to go along with the consensus of silence which enables malfeasance to be committed in the first place and to continue unameliorated. To complain through those processes is usually to do nothing more than to mark you out for victimisation, bullying, and for being placed on one of those nod-and-a-wink blacklists whose existence is always denied but is evident from the experience of those who have tried to expose such problems. The powerful will, ultimately, continue to act to protect themselves rather than anyone or anything else. The system will always protect the system.

In such ways have stupidity, incompetence and corruption grown, and will continue to grow.

Item: Speaking of stupidity, incompetence and corruption brings me, naturally, to the recording industry.

It is well enough known now, I think, that the music biz is stuck in a timewarp and a state of total denial regarding the technological developments of the last ten to fifteen years. But then again, that's how they've been for far longer than that. The old methods of music distribution - whereby the companies signed someone up, loaned them the money to make recordings, then grabbed back the money (and much more) from the takings from sales, whilst tying the performer up in contracts which were often little more than legalised slavery - were never going to survive the coming of the Digital Age™. New media were available for disseminating the 'product', and new ways of taking advantage of them needed to be found.

Needless to say, the corporate bean-counters who have been running the show all these years didn't see any need to change. Having raked in billions from the mid-1980s when they managed to persuade people with collections of vinyl to fork out a second time (and at far higher prices) for the supposedly superior quality of the Compact Disc (although the technical quality of what was actually on the disc was seldom even equal to the original, let alone better than it), they clearly thought that - like the property bubble - it would just grow and grow, dosh without end, amen, and that people would be sufficiently gullible, docile or just plain dumb to hold still for it.

It didn't turn out that way, though. Nimbler, more technically aware people saw the possibilities and sought to capitalise on them. The coming of the mp3 and file-sharing applications meant that - at minimal cost of bandwidth - you could find that elusive single from the seventies you'd been scouring record fairs and auctions for for the previous twenty years; or serendipitously discover an artist or a style of music you hadn't been aware of; or get that one special track which, otherwise, you would have had to spend £15 for a CD otherwise full of dross to get hold of.

The record companies, not surprisingly, started shitting sticks when they realised that not only was this new distribution method very effective, it was totally beyond their control, largely because they had been too coccooned and coked-up to notice. Their old way of doing things had worked (for them) for nearly fifty years - why change?

And so, in screams of panic and in deference to the age-old Law of Crisis Management which states "When in danger or in doubt / Run in circles, scream and shout", these corporations started thrashing around in attempts not to join the new reality, but to attempt to beat it into submissive silence.

The first thing they did was to suborn the political process. In the US and - increasingly - Europe, their lobbying, accompanied by bleating about the threat to the viability of what they call 'the creative industries' (which makes it sound like a wood-carvers' co-op) and their naked bribery of influential legislators resulted in the passing of such abortions as the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the contemporaneous Copyright Term Extension Act (the handiwork of Sonny Bono, the hippy star who ended up as the ultimate tree-hugger), and in the implementation of cognate legislation elsewhere. These gave the 'rights owners' effective carte blanche to get their own way by bullying and threatening anyone - individual or collective - who dared try to usurp their position.

(That phrase 'rights owners' needs a little clarification. Although the authors of the recorded work - the songwriters, for example - are deemed to hold the 'moral rights' to that work, the real power is in the hands of those who own the recordings themselves; that is to say, the record companies. It is those in the latter category which all this legislation was designed to insulate)

And so we have had the sight of the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and their Hollywood equivalent the MPAA suing individuals left, right and centre in order to block methods of music distribution which do not bring profit to the 'rights holders' (in the second sense referred to above). Usually, just the threat of litigation has been enough - particularly in countries such the US where those of modest means simply cannot afford legal assistance - to extort thousands of dollars from people without the corporations ever even having to prove their case in court.

This way of behaving - along with the even more hysterical assertions from 'the biz' that 'piracy' is helping to fund everything from the drug trade to Al Qaeda (I can just see Osama touting unofficial copies of Britney's latest album, can't you?) has, not unnaturally, pissed off a good many people; so much so that the RIAA have now claimed that they're not doing that sort of thing any more (although the evidence points far more in the opposite direction).

And so, having finally realised that technology was the source of what they perceived to be their problem, the corporate cartels decided that they would use technology in order to try to stop people hearing music without paying their hyper-inflated prices for it. So they implemented so-called copy-protection programs or, to render it in the official Bollocksese, 'Digital Rights Management' (DRM). This basically entailed crippling the disc either with software which meant that you couldn't play a CD on your PC without it being reduced in quality and available only through a proprietary software media player (when you could get the bastard thing to play at all, of course. And heaven help you if you weren't running Windows - some DRM software actually destroyed Apple Macs); or, alternatively, by installing invasive and dangerous files on your computer - even down to the operating system level (put 'Sony Rootkit' into your search engine of choice for the most infamous instance of this).

The practical upshot of it all was that a CD which you had legally bought could often only be played properly (or at all) on a CD player (and sometimes not even then, or not without difficulty due to conflicts with the player's error-correction systems, as I once found to my cost). So, if you wanted to play the disc on your in-car machine, you couldn't. If you wanted to transfer the files to your portable mp3 player, you couldn't.

(The movie 'biz' has done something very similar with their diabolical 'regional encoding', which means that you are tied to one market (and hence, one price - the studios'), and if what you want hasn't been released in your 'region', then tough. Very few countries in the developed world have had the guts to say 'no' to this rip-off - Australia being one)

This, too, has been an ignoble failure, and DRM in all of its forms is effectively dead as far as music discs are concerned, although it lives on, zombie-like, in 'official' download files.

Finally, the 'biz' - through its international gang of enforcers, the 'International Federation of the Phonographic Industry' (IFPI) - went back to the courts again, with some success. Dozens of sites offering music have been shut down, either by legal action or the threat of it, and Usenet distribution is being targeted by some of the local stooges of IFPI (particularly in countries such as The Netherlands, whose corporate lobbyists belie that country's liberal image).

And then there are 'torrents'.

This piece is going to be long enough without me explaining what a 'torrent' is, so may I refer you to this Wikipedia piece first? Come back when you're ready, y'hear?

Y'all back? Good.

To get a file you want, you need the .torrent file. So, you'll need to know how to find the .torrent file. There are many indexing sites where they can be found. You have Mininova, for example; or Isohunt; or a number of others, some of which require subscription to use.

The most famous (or notorious depending on your views) is The Pirate Bay, based (nominally, at least) in Sweden. The people behind it have attitude, and it was probably that which led to the full force of the recording industry cartel to be brought against it in a recent court case in Stockholm.

The trial was marked by prosecutorial incompetence (the most serious charges were dropped on the second day, they twice tried to introduce evidence which had not been disclosed during pre-trial hearings, and their witness were often confused and unconvincing), and after nine days the hearings concluded, with the verdict of the court to be announced later.

It was announced this morning, in fact. Despite the prosecution being all over the place, the judge declared the four defendants - Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström - guilty of 'promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws', and sentenced each of them to one year in prison and a combined US$3.6million in fines (about a quarter of what the cartel demanded).

This is not the end, however. The case was held in the Stockholm tingsrätt or district court, and was heard by one single judge. The defendants will appeal, especially as the judge seemed not to have taken any cognisance of the technical evidence he heard.

Consider this: The Pirate Bay has never hosted a copyrighted file. All they do is index .torrent trackers and offer links to these. Think of it as a search engine. Like Google, say. You go to Google's Advanced Search, type something in and then follow it by "file type:.torrent" and you'll get the same information as you would on The Pirate Bay. And yet IFPI and its fellow mobsters don't seem too keen to take on Google. I wonder why?

Consider this also: just because some entries in The Pirate Bay's index link to copyrighted items, it doesn't mean that they all do. In fact, open source software (such as Linux distributions) is widely disseminated via torrents because of their greater resilience in busy network conditions. Going after a torrent index for linking to some copyrighted material is therefore analogous to suing the Ford Motor Company for the fact that most Mondeo drivers are twats. All The Pirate Bay (and similar sites) do is to say to people, "There they are. What you do next is your responsibility".

There's also the issue of the nature of what is termed 'copyright infringement'. In most jurisdictions in the developed world, this is a matter for the civil courts, not the criminal ones, rightly recognising it as a contractual matter between two or more parties rather than something which needs to involve the police.

This is to leave out the issue of the very nature of 'copyright' itself, but I've detained you long enough as it is - perhaps some other Rant.

The four defendants are still at large, and The Pirate Bay endures (largely because most of it is now hosted in a decentralised fashion outside of Swedish jurisdiction). The record companies have won one small skirmish, but ultimately they will lose the war. They will lose it not solely because of their oafish conduct, or their inability to change; but because there are many countries in whose jurisdiction the writ of western corporations does not run. Many .torrent files are hosted in Russia or pseudo-communist China, for example. They will also lose because the tide of technological development is running completely against their discredited and outdated business model. They will lose because they missed the bus.

The success of individual artists in promoting and distributing their music in a way which completely by-passes the corporate dinosaurs (via their own websites, or MySpace, for example) shows the way ahead. Cutting out the middleman - especially when said middleman is obese, retarded, avaricious and corrupt - will always be preferable to giving a bunch of suits an indefinite free ride on the backs of genuinely creative people.

As a tiny shove in that direction, therefore, I have resolved that I will not from now on purchase any music 'product' issued by any corporation or label which is associated with the IFPI. There's a very useful list here which tells me who to avoid in future. Instead, I'll try to support genuinely independent artists.

And I'll carry on downloading, of course. Oh, come on! You didn't expect me to have gone on like this if I didn't download, did you?

animated smiley bouncing up and down and sticking its tongue out

Date: 09/04/09

Beyond All Conscience, Beyond All Control

I've not remarked upon the killing of an innocent man by the Metropolitan Police during the protests against the G20 last week, partly because:

  1. There's nothing I could say which hasn't been said better elsewhere
  2. I wanted as much information to come out as possible before I stuck my neck out
  3. I was too fucking angry to think straight.

For category 1, see (amongst others) here and here.

In category 2, see (again inter alia), here, here and here.

As for category 3...well words still continue almost to fail me.

I'm not shocked, however, as some commentators have claimed to be.

You see, I was introduced to the reality of the Police via-à-vis peaceful protest nearly thirty years ago when I was on the wrong end of some jollies on the part of the South Wales mob when we were protesting against Prince Big-Ears and Princess Clothes-Horse in Swansea. It was quite an eye-opener for a well-brought-up lad, that. And then, of course, we had the calculated thuggishness demonstrated (if you'll pardon the pun) during both the Miners' Strike and the Battle Of The Beanfield, in which the Police seemed to take the greatest delight in their role as heavies for the government of the day - a politicised paramilitary in all but name.

Of course, this was no news to anyone who was black, anti-Fascist, Irish or just young and working class. Those groups had already had many years experience of what it was like to live under a form of occupation force; Notting Hill, Blair Peach, Brixton and Toxteth, the fit-ups of those deemed to be "Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time". But, because this was all happening to people who - in the minds of the 'law-abiding' public - didn't matter, it was dismissed in so far as it was thought of at all. It was only wogs, Commies, Micks and punks - no-one we know, m'dear.

(Which is why there were such howls of anger from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells when the political wing of the Country Landowners' Association had one or two potato-heads cracked by the Met a few years ago - it wasn't supposed to happen to people who own things (like Gloucestershire), dammit! How very dare they!)

And so it continued; the Police asking for - and almost invariably getting - more and more power, and showing an increased willingness not only to use those powers, but to go one step or more beyond what was in theory permitted, or what those powers were ostensibly to be used against. Thus we have 'kettling', we have the threatening even of accredited press photographers, we have the automatic assumption of guilt.

All this was on show last week. One would have to have been naïve in the extreme to have been surprised by any of it; after all, a senior Met officer had gone on record saying that we should expect a 'Summer Of Rage', and that they - the Met - were ready for action.

They were, too. Whether there was any excuse for it or not, as you can see from the articles I linked to at the top of this piece. When peaceful protestors (and let's not be distracted by the suspiciously stage-managed-looking trashing of the RBS offices, where the 'demonstrators' and Police were outnumbered by the media crews) can be subjected to that sort of treatment and the perpetrators fully expect not only to be able to get away with it but be applauded for it by the 'right-minded', something is seriously wrong with the ethos of those who are supposed to be upholding the peace.

This time, however, was different. In the same way that governments have had grave difficulty catching up with technology, so it seems have the Police. The ease of use of still and video cameras have meant that The Watchers can become The Watched. The irony being, of course, that the Police and other State bodies insist that we must be photographed and filmed for our own safety, whereas a recently effected law means that turning the cameras back on the Police can leave you open to the possibility of a ten-year prison sentence. One can't help but wonder why such a law might be deemed necessary if those with 'nothing to hide' have 'nothing to fear'.

What - apart from the death of an innocent man, of course - really offends about the Met's conduct is that they were so instantly ready to lie about just about everything that happened. The man was 'a demonstrator', who died of 'natural causes', the Police being hampered in their attempts to save his life by protestors 'throwing bottles and bricks' and 'preventing an ambulance from reaching him'.

This was all bollocks, as became apparent in very short order. Ian Tomlinson was not part of the demonstration - he was trying to get home from work and was being prevented from doing so by Police blockades. Although a heart attack may be described as 'natural causes', one wonders how they were so certain of the cause of death after a cursory examination by a police pathologist. There was one (1) plastic bottle thrown at the Police, and the thrower was told to cut it out by all the other demonstrators. It was the demonstrators who tried to help Mr Tomlinson and who called the ambulance, and it was the Police who refused to speak to the ambulance control officer who was on the phone to one of the protestors and it was the Police who prevented the ambulance reaching the victim in a timely fashion. This much is now all in the realm of observed, verifiable fact. The Met's case - as it did in their murder of Jean Charles de Menezes nearly four years ago - unravelled in a matter of hours.

But that still doesn't seem to have prevented them from pushing their story in the first place. Did they really think - silly question, really; they quite obviously did - that the public would be so unutterably dumb as to fall for it?

If so, one can think why they might believe so. For, as with Brixton and Toxteth, as with the Miners' Strike and The Beanfield, as with de Menezes, they could be confident of having willing allies in the media. And so it has been shown (with a very few honourable exceptions).

All the major rags not only printed the police version of events verbatim but, as that version of events unravelled, we saw the same attempts at post mortem assassination of the character of the victim as we saw in the de Menezes case. So, we've had the "he was a protestor!" smear, we've had the "he was a drunk/alcoholic!" line, and we've even had the "he was being obstructive because he was walking slowly with his hands in his pocket!" gambit. All of this reminds me so much of the famous Constable Savage sketch from "Not The Nine O'Clock News", but the brazen-ness of the Met, the media, and the various right-wing and pro-government trolls on the blogs gives even that piece of classic comedy a much darker and more sinister hue. Savage is now probably of Assistant Commissioner rank.

Just to allay any doubts on this - whether he was a demonstrator or not, whether he was an alcoholic or not, whether he was walking slowly with his hands in his pockets or not does not fricking matter!. Unless, of course, you believe that the Police should be allowed to use any force, however lethal, on people who are demonstrators, or alcoholic, or just nonchalant (or - as Mr Tomlinson had already been attacked once by the Met a few minutes before - stunned) simply on any of those grounds alone. In which case, I don't think I want to be on the same land-mass as you.

The great sorrow in all this is that we know - as certainly as we know that the sun will rise tomorrow and The Sun will stink for evermore - that nothing of any substance will come of this. The so-called 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission has already had to back-pedal frantically from its own original parroting of the Met's line, back to asking the City of London Police Force (some of whose officers were actually involved in policing the protests, albeit under Met command, and some of whose senior officers seem to be rather cosy with the dangerous crooks of the Hubbardite cult) to investigate, back further to saying that they (that is the IPCC) will investigate it themselves (although, no doubt, with the help of some police force or another).

A file may be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions, who may decide to bring a case (unless a government minister interferes to prevent this). But what charges? And against whom? An inquest may be held. But when? In what circumstances? Will a jury be allowed to hear the evidence? Will they be allowed to hear all the evidence? And if they are, will the coroner allow them to make up their own minds, or will he/she tell them that the one verdict they cannot be permitted to return is the one verdict which fits the evidence? In short, are we looking at de Menezes II?

No doubt when it is all over, it will be found to have been the result of 'operational failures', 'no one individual' will be held to be at fault, and so no-one will ever be punished, and - naturally - 'lessons will be learned'.

Thirty years ago this month, Blair Peach was murdered by the Metropolitan Police's Special Patrol Group (SPG). Despite all the evidence, Peach was declared to have died by 'misadventure', the brutal weaponry and Nazi regalia found in the SPG members' lockers was disregarded, and no officer was ever prosecuted. We must not allow Ian Tomlinson's killing at the hands of the SPG's heirs and successors to be yet another collective arse-covering exercise.

It should also lead us to be increasingly wary of the official media. In the Miners' Strike, the BBC re-edited film of the disorder at Orgreave to deliberately make it look as though the miners attacked the police first; at the Beanfield, ITN removed their reporter's piece to camera describing the brutality he had witnessed and replaced it with an anodyne voice-over; in both cases, the press willingly carried out campaigns of misrepresentation and outright smears against the actual victims. In the Tomlinson case, BBC News (which, since the Hutton whitewash, has become nothing more than a collection of twittering eunuchs) refused The Guardian's offer of its film footage for its main news programme, saying that they weren't going to cover it because it might only be of interest to London viewers (ITN's Channel Four News, to its credit, covered the story in detail); and the scum press, such as the Evening Standard and The Sun, acted either as willing stenographers for the police, or concentrated on maligning the victim (although it must be said that even some right-wing rags expressed unease or even horror at what had happened).

I'm sorry if this piece appears to be disjointed. I've written it over a period of about four hours, and I'm still angry. And yet there are people who deny that we are living in what is - or what is moving precipitously towards - a police state in the historically-accepted meaning of the term; one where the supposed agents of law and order can break the former and ignore the latter and get away with it. If we listen to the soothing tones of those ostriches then we are really screwed.

Update (10/04/09): The above has been beautifully summarised in this letter in The Independent today:

"May I save the IPCC time and money in its inquiry into the death of Ian Tomlinson by providing in advance a summary of the police evidence?

"1. The officers policing the G20 summit were operating under conditions of great stress.

"2. By avoiding eye contact with the officers, Mr Tomlinson acted in a suspicious manner.

"3. The fact that Mr Tomlinson's hands were in his pockets suggested that he was texting other protesters concerning police operations and/or concealing weapons.

"4. The fact that Mr Tomlinson was walking away from the officers caused them to fear that he might suddenly turn and attack them with the concealed weapons.

"5. Throughout, the police acted in good faith.

"6. What happened is deeply regretted.

"7. Lessons have been learned."

Gordon Whitehead

Copt Hewick, North Yorkshire

Date: 27/03/09

Why, Why, Why?

I really don't know where to start.

OK, elections to the European Parliament are coming up in a few months, and the parties are beginning to gear up for the battle.

The Labour Party in Wales (LPIW) have launched a new website for their campaign.

I won't give you the link to it, for two reasons. One, I detest the LPIW almost as much as I hate the Conservative Party. No, wait: I detest them more, because of their hypocrisy, their arrogance and a long, disgraceful history of corruption and incompetence at parliamentary level and even more so in local government (where their definition of 'employee relations' was 'how many members of my family can I get jobs for on the Council?'). So I don't want to give the bastards any more publicity than the bare minimum.

The second reason is to spare you, my dear viewers (both of you). You see, the site contains the very, very worst video I have ever seen - from anybody.

So that you do not have to suffer, I sat through the whole, dreadful, cringeworthy two-hundred-and-six-second car-crash on your behalf. It contains a version of the famous song Delilah (perhaps 'a version' should be one word in this instance rather than two) with altered lyrics, allegedly penned by Eluned Morgan MEP. In the space of less than three and a half minutes, this wretched party hack manages to demolish forever the widespread perception that we are a poetic nation. The original lyricist should sue for slander. Morgan not only seems not to be able to rhyme or even scan, but seems never to have been made familiar with even the concepts of assonance and metre.

It's not just our national pretensions to being lyrical which are razed to the ground by this abortion: our reputation for being musical is put to the sword by some woman (possibly Morgan herself, who knows? It wouldn't need her to stoop much lower on the basis of her 'lyrics') attempting to sing over an artless midi file of the tune.

As to the matter of what the poor failure is singing, well sometimes words fail even me. Let me say that, back when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I fancied myself as a writer of lyrics. They were so bad that, when I rediscovered some of them years later, I held a ritual bonfire of them on a sacred site simply to exorcise the demons of mediocrity which lay coiled within them. Notwithstanding that, I would never, ever, even back in those days of innocent pretense, have admitted to having written words as bad as the ones on this video. It is one thing for the message they are promoting to be utterly risible and trumpery - how Labour saved Wales? As Billy Connolly would say, "Oh, d'ye bloody think so?" - but their sole tactic of 'debate' seems to be name-calling of its opponents (or at least of Plaid and the Conservatives; presumably the Lib Dems are either insignificant or beyond even the most witless parody - possibly both). So we have still images of Margaret Thatcher (note to Labourites; she's been out of power for nearly twenty years, buts, and she has had no greater acolyte since than one Blair - you remember, the 'pretty straight kinda guy' who led your party for twelve years?) with speech bubbles going "Boo!" and Hiss!" and a picture of John Redwood with Vulcan ears (oh, is it 1994 again?). We also have pictures of Plaid MEP Jill Evans, deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn and other party members wearing clown hats. Even I could do better with Photoshop than that, and I don't even have Photoshop.

(Incidentally, with the pictures and the music, I do hope the halfwits in LPIW got the permission of the copyright holders. After all, we can't have people who want to run the country being cavalier about the law, can we? Erm...)

All in all, I doubt if the video would get anyone a pass mark in GCSE Media Studies, although it might be in with a chance of getting a reasonably good mark in the GCSE Home Economics 'Dog's Dinner' module.

The website this travesty appears on is a real hoot as well. For a start, they have called it 'Aneurin Glyndwr' (not 'Glyndŵr', note; they can't even be bother getting the spelling right), thus seeking not only to arrogate to themselves the names of two men who wouldn't have been seen dead in this rabble's political milieu, but also using an arrogant cynicism to link the great hero of the Valleys Labourites with someone who fought for this nation's independence (which is more than Bevan did, and which is - ironically - something that LPIW anathematised out of their ranks a full century ago). I suppose in their Students' Union, spin-doctorly way they think that they're 'covering all bases'; to me, it stinks of calculated insincerity. Particularly when the site describes itself as "an antidote to unthinking Nationalism" and yaps on about 'internationalism'; this last being standard LPIW-speak for the past fifty years or more, and meaning 'concern for the freedom of every country bar our own', i.e. Brit Unionism.

There are other chuckles to be had too, such as where the site is described as being "a modern platform for the politics of the progressive left". LPIW? Progressive? Left?. The bankers' friends and the wavers of the Union Jack? And what sort of 'platform' is it where there is no means by which visitors can post a comment on it? But then, LPIW's (and its London masters') idea of a debate is one where only they are allowed to speak - ask Walter Wolfgang.

Actually, at first I thought that the whole enterprise was some sort of attempt at a satire of the Labour Party's desperate attempts to get in on the on-line world in order to sell us more snake oil; I was sure that it had been put together by a group of smarties from, say, Conservative Central Office, or even the Daily Telegraph. But wait! The website is endorsed by, amongst others, First Minister Rhodri Morgan, the perpetually orange, twisting Saad Efrikan Peter Hain, and Paul Murphy, currently Secretary of State for Keeping The Colonials In Their Place and - and this I didn't know - 'Minister for Digital Inclusion', although Murphy's idea of 'digital inclusion' seems to be confined to keeping his digit up his ministerial arse rather than making more than the vaguest promises of genuinely high-speed broadband for most of Wales sometime around the year 2040 (BT shareholders permitting, natch).

So it's for real? One really doesn't know whether to laugh or weep. These are the people who claim some sort of natural right to rule us in perpetuity, and yet they come up with a website (and a video) which would have got the devisers thrown off their courses in any half-competent educational establishment. It can't be called 'sixth-form' or 'juvenile' without doing a serious discredit to the intelligence and ethics of all under the age of nineteen. All it speaks of is desperation and the same sort of rhetorical thuggishness to which we are long accustomed from LPIW.

They go so far as to claim that the launch of this wretched waste of data transfer will be their 'Obama Moment'. I think it's more likely to be their 'Custer Hour'. So much so, indeed, that I've changed my mind. If you really do have nothing better to spend your time on - feeding your pet woodlouse, for example, or counting the holes in your crocheted blankets - go to Aneurin Glyndwr (sic) and marvel at what passes for intelligence, cogency, reason and 'debate' in what is left of the Labour Party in Wales.

Update (28/03/09): Hen Ferchetan gives LBIW's (s)hit song a good old fisking here.

P.S. (29/03/09): Guess what? Those wonderfully well-balanced contributors to Devil's Kitchen have got hold of the story with - I fear - predictable results, such as:

"The Severn crossings can be either demolished or mined and a watch set on the Bristol Channel for any illegal immigrants trying to escape." ("Angry Exile")

"I always thought these weird Taffs were a self-regarding bunch of parasitic creeps." ("Anonymous")

"It's never been my favourite part of England anyway" ("JD")

"Visited the land of the long dark cloud a couple of weeks ago. Fucking terrible place." ("Captain Swing" - and we'd like to see you again soon, too - preferably in manacles)

"can we not dig a deep trench from wrexham to cardiff and just push it out into the irish sea?" ("Jules" - whose Caps Lock button isn't working)

"[I]f there was an earthquake, Wales cracked off GB along the border from Chepstow to Chester and sank below the waves, how long would it be before anyone even noticed?" ("David Gillies")

"At least it might win Eurovision, especially if the stage show had a bunch of semiclad Welsh tossers pursuing some very nervous sheep..." ("Willie" - by name and - clearly - by nature)

Further Update (30/03/09): They've now removed the video (both from their site and - apparently - from YouTube), whining that they'd had to because Plaid and the Tories had complained. What's the betting the real reason was because they were using copyrighted material without permission? Either way, they're trying to spin this as showing how wimpish the other parties are and how manly (sorry, personly) they are. It makes them sound like some zittoid adolescent trying to come over as The Big Man, which at least is in keeping with the way they've conducted themselves so far. Pathetic little wankers.

Date: 25/03/09

Ominous Signs

On the way home today, I saw this poster on a bus shelter:

Police poster saying 'You have the right NOT to remain silent'

A bit rich, I thought, particularly when you consider that we lost the right to be silent under the rule of that oily little twunt Michael Howard a decade and a half ago.

Sure enough, this is one of three posters currently being plastered around the place to 'reassure' us that the police are constantly watching over us (although I don't feel remotely reassured by the thought). The others are:

Police poster saying 'We'd like to give you a good talking to'

and:

Police poster saying 'Anything you say may be taken down and used as evidence'

The real sick joke about the last one is that the wording of the police caution (the equivalent of the 'Miranda' warning in the US) was changed from this in 1994. It now reads:

"You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

However, it is somehow highly appropriate that the police don't seem to know this. Nor do the Home Office, upon whose website the posters currently appear in perpetual animation.

Finding all of this depressingly sinister, in that it reminded me of the legendary TV mini-series V, and the posters the aliens and their collaborators put up everywhere to tell us that they were our friends (frustratingly, I can't find an on-line image of the one I want to show you to illustrate the effrontery of it all), I decided that the whole thing deserves some subversive ass-whooping, so here's what I think the underlying message really is:

Fake police poster saying 'You have the right to do as you're told'

And seeing as the official version is animated, I thought I'd do one as well. You can see it here.

Date: 08/03/09

Suffer The Children

A man sexually abuses his step-daughter from the age of six.

When she is nine years old, he gets her pregnant with twins.

He tries to scarper off, but is caught and placed in 'protective custody'.

The local Catholic archbishop is silent.

The child's mother, on being told that there is no way in which her daughter is capable of safely carrying one foetus let alone two, consents for the child to have an abortion.

The local Catholic archbishop is outraged. So much so that he excommunicates the child's mother and the doctors who carried out the termination, stating that - whatever the man may have done - the termination was "more serious". The sick pervert who repeatedly raped his step-daughter and - so it is claimed - her fourteen-year-old physically-handicapped sister will not be excluded from the sacraments.

However, with that depth of Christian spirit for which his church is rightly renowned, the archbishop said that the child would not herself be excluded from the church. Whether she would wish to attend a club which would willingly have her brute of a step-father as a member is another matter of course.

One of the senior managers for Pope Hitlerjugend I - the Vatican's answer to Kurt Waldheim in that he too claims that his time in the service of the Nazis was no more than the equivalent of being a point on a line, in that he had position but no magnitude - backed up the local cleric, saying that "Life must always be protected..." But not, it seems the innocence of a child subjected to the warped sexual drives of a no doubt devout believer.

(Full story here, and a tip of the wig to the estimable Mike Power for the link).

Add to this the story that the Brown régime in London is desperately trying to parachute Cormac Murphy-O'Connor - Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and a man who has shielded some pervos in his time - into the unelected portion of our legislature, there no doubt to pontificate on the importance of Christian morality in the framing of legislation affecting the sexual mores of others and the evils of contraception, and the fact that these ethically-retarded bastards are allowed - nay encouraged - to run schools up and down the land with our money, leaves only one thing which can possibly be said:

John 11:35!

Date: 03/03/09

Red NO Day

I'm aware before I even start that this is not going to go down well in many quarters. But bite me bum and call me Freda and see if I care.

I'll be brief. Friday 13 March is Comic Relief day.

This year, I will not be supporting it in any way, shape or form.

If the spineless cowards at the BBC refuse to screen a film appeal for the victims of Israel's murderous attack on Gaza, then I have no intention of contributing to a programme of events which will enable said pusillanimous putzes to bask in the glory of how wonderfully humanitarian they're all being.

It is just remotely possible that you feel the same. If so, please click on the image below, which will take you to the Disasters Emergency Committee's Gaza Appeal page, and donate to something which is untainted by association with what used to be a great broadcasting organisation, and the posturing third-rate celebs who work for it.

Badge saying 'Red NO Day'

Date: 16/02/09

...Andmoreagain...

I'm getting the impression someone's doing it on purpose.

Back to The Register again, and the comments following this article, describing how the Courts Service 'forgot' that their new, handy-dandy, £260m-over-budget computer system had to be able to handle documents in Welsh.

I think I can safely say that the comments were mostly predictable, although there were a few more fighting back than last time. A few snapshots from the Gallery of the Gormless:

"Am I the only one sitting here wondering why we're pandering to the Welsh over this? Nobody NEEDS their court documents in Welsh. What, because you have to speak and read English you're sullied by your saxon neighbours? Racist twats." (anonymous. Yep, he thinks we're being racist)

"...taking our money for prescriptions, and now so they can promote the use of their made up language.. typical sheep loving, lazy miner antics." (another anonymous)

"...no one in Wales uses Welsh as there primary language..." ("Allan Rutland")

"I don't mind what language people speak but I do mind what it costs and Welsh costs us all a fortune." ("Stuart", who claims to come from a Welsh family going back to the 17th century)

"If the Welsh want a system that can auto-translate documents into Welsh then they should bloody well pay for it. I for one, being English, don't think we should." ("RotaCyclic". We don't pay any taxes, apparently)

"There should be only one language used in the legal system, English." ("RotaCyclic" again, going around in circles)

I've saved the best until last. I include it in its entirety:

" I personnaly find its not necersarry to spend 4 million on makign sure everything is bi-lingual
"Would be much more cost effective to provide translators if needed.
"@all the ppl stating wales like its another bloody country
"YOUR IN ENGLAND SPEAK ENGLISH !!!! live with it !!!!
"We expect all the imigrants to learn english when in England although we dont ban their own language !
"So let me Recap
"Wales = England
"England speaks English
"Can sombody please explain to me the unbeleivable need to have it all bi-lingual
"I already know about the fact some bastards just want to be difficult and will ask for half in english and hal in wlesh."
(another anonymous. Have you ever noticed how those who brim and froth most about the primacy of England and the English so often seem to be the ones with the slenderest grasp on the grammar, spelling and punctuation of their own fucking language?)

If this is indicative of the standard of thought prevalent in the IT sector in the Untied Kondom, it's no wonder all these projects come in underperforming and way over budget.

Date: 15/02/09

And Yet More...

I swear I didn't deliberately go looking for it, but I've found further examples of what I was going on about last time.

This time it comes from the right and its self-styled 'libertarians' at a blog called Devil's Kitchen (no, I'm not going to provide a link - sod 'em).

First up is a translation of an article in the Welsh-language magazine Barn by one Rhys Williams. Williams is the Labour Party's candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in next year's imperial parliament elections. He's trying to overturn the substantial majority held by Plaid's Adam Price. As the election will be fought against the background of his party's catastrophic sucking-up to the rich and powerful and the increasing encroachment of the Secret State on every aspect of our lives, he hasn't really got a cat in hell's chance. Except that Carmarthen has long been - electorally - an odd place, and that Labour's tactics when they've been trying to regain it in the past have consisted solely of using the language issue to divide people. That this has worked more than once may be indicative of a fundamental flaw in the character of the people of that area; it's certainly indicative of a complete lack of scruple on the part of Labour, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Anyway, Williams follows on from the (ironic mode) noble (ironic mode off) traditions of his predecessors Roger 'The Cottager' Thomas and Dr Alan Wynne 'Irritating Squeak' Williams. So we have:

"I have...little patience for those who...mourn the decline of the Welsh language"

"...hypocritical self-pitying Welsh speakers."

"...small important people...use the language either to keep others out or to keep them in their place."

"...the ethos of the Freemasons is rampant..."

"...these Welsh people, collectively, use the Welsh language as a weapon...to make them second class citizens"

And so on, blah blah, yadda yadda. Nothing new here - just a Labour hack giving his prejudices free rein and waiting for people who actually do know what they're talking about to jump on him so he can proclaim his impending martyrdom.

The translation appears on Devil's Kitchen under the byline of one Simon Dyda (I'm sure it's not a pseudonym - his profile states that he has Polish ancestry), and is provided without any comment from him. That has not, as you would expect, precluded the regular readers of the blog (most if not all of whom are presumably on the libertarian right, otherwise they probably wouldn't be reading it) from remarking on it. A brief selection of their broad-minded musings follows:

"I regularly wonder why public money is wasted on supporting television and radio services for several languages (Welsh, the Gaelics, etc.) which have no utility as current mediums of communication..." ("Chris") [emphasis his]

"...petty minded, self-satisfied and self-righteous welsh nationals...you can't raise the money to run your little self-indulgence without financial input from the largest cash contributors - the English." (Anonymous)

"...smug hick children strutting and clucking 'round the Bay in a bubble of self satisfaction as they get their snouts in the trough of public sector non-jobs. Parasitic fucks feeding off the nipple of the English tax payer." ("pond life" - no, really)

"I am no supporter of this Elitism...the language is used as a stick against the 79% of the population who don't speak it - I don't see any future for it...I think the best thing that could happen to the Welsh language is that it is killed by an influx of business." (Deceangeli)

"Roll on 2013 when the EU grants to Wales disappear!" (Anonymous - presumably a different one)

A brief comment if you're in any doubt as to the viciousness of all this: replace the word 'Welsh' with the word 'Jew', the word 'black' or even the word 'homosexual', and see how comfortable you feel with that.

That's not the end of it, though. Following a link within the site, I find an article written by the pseudonymous 'Devil's Kitchen' itself. Things don't start promisingly, as the piece is entitled:

"Welsh is a piss poor language"

It doesn't improve, alas. The spark which set Mr/Ms Kitchen off was an interview with a Big Brother contestant. OK, hardly high-octane intellectual content, but Kitchen goes on to castigate the language on the grounds that the interviewee couldn't speak it very well and peppered her sentences with English words. How shocking! Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that she was trying to hold a conversation in her second language, Kitchie-poos nonetheless concludes:

"...what a piss-poor, half-arsed language Welsh is...[S]ee how many English words you can spot being lobbed in to make up for the deficiencies of Welsh."

It's not her native language, cunt! How's your French, Kitchy? Your German? Japanese? Navaho?

And then, of course, there are the comments. Sixty-odd of them. Most of them of the standard you would expect, viz.:

"Most welsh people I know think that this obstinate idea to make people learn welsh is silly, especially when people should be learning languages which will help them." ("Trixy")

"I thought it was just that the Welsh language didn't have words for modern things like 'lingerie'...and 'confidence'...and 'job'...." ("The Kusabi")

"Wales was never a country. Read your history books. It's just a county of England, like Yorkshire...I found myself wondering this morning whether it isn't the EU responsible in part for all this nationalism from worthless proto-countries which couldn't possibly support themselves. The EU gives money to regions with dead languages..." ("Soddball")

"...the giant fucking con that is the Welsh language. All designed to keep a small group of pointless cunts in jobs...a subsidized club for the children of Welsh language teachers." ("Brian Ashton")

"Welsh is kept alive by a fucking pathetic bunch of inbred cunts who use it as a bizarre sort of old boys club." ("Keatonmask", who goes on to say that he loves Wales and he's proud to be Welsh. Glad you put us straight, butt...)

"...the left's non-stop promotion of extreme nationalism in the Celtic nations...strains of victimhood mixed with attention-seeking hypersensitivity" (Anonymous) (The Left? See my opening remarks. But then, it's a long time since Brit Labour could call itself 'left' without having to use a fire blanket on its nether garments...)

"the funding and supprt for the Welsh language ( and the Cornish language) comes from EU satellite organisations and is designed to assist in breaking up the UK." ("Newmania" - who is a notorious troll at Liberal Conspiracy as well)

"...and all my kids had to learn it at school - which was a complete waste of time." ("pedantic git")

"...i`ve figured the locals know when you can`t speak welsh because whenever english walk into a shop they change straight to welsh...sign of ignorance." (another Anonymous - and I was wondering how long we'd have to wait for that one to pop up again)

"...if Welsh is not your first language in school your treated like some second class citizen...when you`ve been treated as i have here in Wales it makes you kind of bitter." (anonymous - in fact, the same one as last time.)

So there we have it. The same load of old balls that we've had hurled at us by the 'intellectuals' of the so-called Left also comes our way from the hard right.

(I've long considered what passes for 'libertarianism' in the Anglo-Saxon world as being fundamentally risible. It is the obverse side of the same dud coin as anarchism, but whereas it is possible to be a peaceable anarchist, 'libertarianism' seems to be nothing more than a cover story by which people who are sufficiently deluded to believe not only that the world is 'every man for himself', but that that is how it should be, can hide the savagery behind that view. It's neo-con capitalism with extra assault rifles, that's all.)

OK, so that's the 'left' and the right who think that our native language and culture are useless and should be left to rot: the former because they think that national identity stands in the way of the one-world all-together (and, of course, English-speaking) utopia they wish for in their most febrile dreams; the latter because they perceive it to have 'no commercial potential' and some public money gets spent on it - money which could better be used on such life-enhancing projects such as bailing out crooked bankers and covering the south east of England with runways.

Now, are there any 'liberals' passing through who want to take a swing at it as well? After all, we might as well collect the whole set...

Date: 06/02/09

The Last Permitted Bigotry?

Warning! Long post ahead! Delays likely!

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a long time, but the time never seemed particularly apt for it.

Two things I've read online in the past three days have between them crystallised the issue, so I think it's time I got down to it.

We know that we live in a society where the sensitivities of all sorts of groups are better recognised than before. Some dismiss this under the standard John Littledick scream of "Poli'ical Correc'ness GAWN MAAAAAAD!!!", and there are times when it is taken to the giddy limit (although nowhere near as often as is supposed - many of the 'examples' cited by the meeja turn out either to be a deliberate misinterpretation of the facts or even outright fabrications), but I am very glad that I live in a country and at a time where - in the main - the doctrine of 'live and let live' seems to have penetrated deeper into the public consciousness than at any time in our history. Generally speaking (and, of course, all generalisations are potentially misleading - including this one), it is now no longer actively perilous to be, say, homosexual, or disabled, or non-white; and it's certainly now not thought in any way acceptable to discriminate against people in their daily lives on the basis of their 'difference'.

(This is not to say that the common thread of language should be carelessly pussy-footed about with in the name of sponsoring fluffiness. 'Diversity-speak' is, to put it kindly, uneuphonious, and creates weasling euphemisms ('differently abled') and confusion (I can't ever see 'LGBT' without thinking of a sandwich). What is worse, many of these terms are devised - and imposed upon the groups so denoted - by those who are actually outside those groups. That is why I approve of homosexuals reclaiming the word 'queer' for themselves in the same way that Afro-Caribbeans are in my view entitled to appropriate the word 'nigger' (or, rather, 'nigga') back to themselves. So long as it's understood that they are the only ones entitled to use it, of course. It will take until such time as 'the disabled' start banding together in organisations with names like 'The National Spazzes Union' before we know that we've cleared the air, however. Oh, and while we're at it, can we stop using the word 'community' in this context, please? Speaking as a member of the 'diabetic community', the 'not-a-television-owner community' and the 'doesn't-drive community', I find it disobliging to be reduced down to the most mere elements of myself just to fit into somebody else's categorisations).

There are still bigotries, prejudices and ignorance left, of course, and perhaps it's naïve to think that all such attributes will ever be fully dispelled. Everyone seems to feel the need to feel superior to someone (however unwarranted or unsupported by evidence such superiority may in fact be); it may be all some people have to bolster their sense of self. At the risk of indulging in dog-psychologising, was Carol Thatcher's 'golliwog' outburst this week evidence of the scars left on her psyche by being the not-very-talented daughter of a domineering high-profile mother? Such things tend to come out in drink, which is one reason why I don't drink very much. It's like pouring tomato sauce - at first, too little comes out, and then it all comes out without your being able to stop it.

But this piece isn't about that. It's about two articles published in respected (and possibly even respectable) journals this week.

On Wednesday last, The Register published an article about how Nia Griffiths, Labour MP for Llanelli, had called for the Régime's detested National Identity Card to include text in Welsh.

Now, I needn't go over my many and varied objections to the Card and the Database State which lurks behind it - they should be well enough known to regular readers. Nor need I go into any depth as to yet another Labour MP spectacularly missing the point about the whole thing - Griffiths is an avowed supporter of state snooping - and not realising that the card could be in Azeri or Venusian for all the difference that it would make to the sinister intent behind it all.

What I can draw your attention to, though, are the comments which followed the article. Now bear in mind that readers of The Register are supposedly intelligent and well-informed, if often narrowly so. The narrowness of it can be demonstrated by some of the comments:

"I understand some welsh speakers don't speak english. But surely both of them could learn? I mean it IS the official language..." (Anonymous)

"Wales isn't even a country [...] so why should it get any special treatment? ('Richard Harris')

"Of course Welsh doesn't have equal validity, especially not outside Wales. I don't want that on any card of mine, ID or otherwise. What a waste of space. I'm not keen on the French, but at least more than 10 people speak that." ('Anthony Chambers')

"What a waste of extra ink!" ('Ben Cross')

"Although I have no proof of knowledge on the subject, I am willing to bet that everybody who speaks Welsh also speaks English, making Welsh one big waste of money." (another Anonymous)

"Wales is no more a country that Yorkshire. Wales can no more afford to apply its regional accent on the rest of the country than can Norfolk." ('Mark Daniels')

"With all those L's, most people would mistake it for a bar code anyway." (yet another Anonymous)

"That language is just downright nuts, its like speaking Hobbit-ese!" ('Stu')

"Welsh - A dead language spoken only in Welsh schools, local government offices and the more remote regions of Patagonia. (Speaking AS a Welshman!)" ('WonkoTheSane' [sic])

"Instead of this, how about the 20 people in Wales who can only speak Welsh actually get off their arses and learn the fucking national language." ('Eddie Edwards')

"They want it, then let 'em pay for it. With pound notes printed only in English!" (one more Anonymous)

"you mean the welsh don't already have them? they're allowed to roam free? unchecked? unsupervised? oh the horror! will no-one think of the sheep?" ('Spider')

"...comedy made-up language, like Welsh..." ('Stef')

Well, OK, I know that the world of IT has its fair share of the de-socialised, but I have to say that I had expected better.

That, however, was light relief compared to what I had read the day before.

On Tuesday, Hywel Williams wrote in The Guardian about the proposal by the National Assembly for a Legislative Competence Order (LCO) which would require large, private-sector bodies (corporations, in short) to provide Welsh-language service for their customers in Wales in the same way that public sector bodies are already bound to do.

(An LCO is a request to the imperial parliament in London to grant the National Assembly the powers to legislate in a given area. Note: "request", "grant". We are not deemed to be sufficiently 'adult' a nation to be able to pass or amend laws without someone else's permission. As such a request would have to be passed by both houses of the British legislature, the odds against such an order - particularly in a contentious area - passing without being amended into uselessness are enormous in any case. But, I suppose that those who don't ask, don't get).

As Williams points out, the companies which will be affected by any such legislation are the large utilities, such as water, power and telecom providers. Most of them already provide some services in Welsh, if only because it is politic for them to do so. However, this provision is purely voluntary and if one or more of them decides, for whatever reasons, to stop providing it, then there is nothing short of having my duffle-coated former colleagues in the language campaign turning up mob handed and painting the company's vehicles green which can stop them; certainly there would be no legal measures which could discourage the companies from such a course of action. All that the LCO would do would be to put such provision on a legal footing and require the proper expansion of that provision into all areas of those companies' operations in our country.

There have been the usual distortions from the usual suspects, of course. The Home & Colonial Branches of the Confederation of British Industry (sic x2) and the Institute Of Directors have already started screaming about the terrible costs involved, and Labour's MPs in Wales (those perennial guardians of every nation's rights except their own) have already begun their customary threatening growling.

What I want to talk about here, though, is not Williams' article, but about the comments published below it. Here, in the pages of what is supposed to be a newspaper of the centre-left in British politics, we can find many remarkable examples of one of the many things wrong with the centre-left in British politics: its sheer brute ignorance of one of this island's native cultures.

Firstly, the "they can all speak English anyway, can't they?", argument:

"You're asking for companies to print things in a language which only a few people can read alongside a copy in a language almost everyone can read. If there was a significant section of the population which could only speak welsh then I'd understand, but as far as I know this is not the case." ('Sealion')

"(a) Three-quarters of the Welsh speak English by preference, most exclusively, knowing it's the world language of the future,.
(b) All the rest can speak English if they have to.
(c) Those who refuse to do so are mostly antiquarians, posturing pseuds or pressure groupies with a vested interest in obscurantism.
(d) Nearly every idea or concept dating from later than 1800 in this somewhat contrived tongue is straight from English...
(f) The burden on the public purse of bilingualism is incalculable..." ('EndaClarke')

Next up, we have the "you fucking Taffies are spending our hard-earned English dosh" ploy:

"The Welsh language would be fine if the Welsh were prepared to pay for it all. Until the English get free prescriptions, I suggest we save the cost of all such disposables as Welsh language TV, road signs and anything else that isn't sufficiently important that the Welsh themselves aren't prepared to pay for from their own pockets. What about my bloody rights for a change?" ('TPTFC')

"It's a good way of committing fincial suicide. If the Welsh want to do that, I have no issues at all. BUT I refuse to pay any more tax in England to support the increased costs of the Welsh unemployed as a result!" ('Madasafish')

"Wales is entirely welcome to exercise is rights as a country, principality, region or whatever it chooses to call itself - but without the benefit of money stolen without the consent of the occupants of other countries, thanks." ('TMAP')

This is followed by the time-honoured "middle-class fascist Taffia" argument, as presented by the Labour Party since about 1965:

"Who is it for anyway - a few Welsh language users who want to beat their chest in cultural 'victories' over the English - or so it seems from here." ('daddysgonecrazy')

"I am Welsh and I do not want this nor do the vast majority of Welsh people. This is thrust upon Wales by single issue fanatics in Plaid Cymru" ('bluebirds')

"More makework for the Taffia. What's not for the average Guardianista public sector parasite to like?" ('EndaClarke' - again)

"Great stuff. It's all the more well paid jobs for us boyos" ('Barpropper')

"...welsh school, i.e. where first language is Welsh means nice middle class enclave." ('555555')

"Seems to me this is really about providing key positions for the Welsh speaking minority and excluding all kinds of foreigners." ('david119')

"The majority of Welsh people couldn't give a monkey's toss one way or the other. Some bourgeois tossers here and there, and that's just about it. But, unfortunately, like the poor, such tossers will allways be with us." ('schlick')

And, finally, the dangerously ignorant, vacuous and vicious:

"Are we all mad in this nation? Regional languages are nothing but divisive...By all means practise your quaint customs at your own expense and where the economy will not be damaged as a result." ('TMAP' again)

"Legal welsh stopped in - was it 1497?, there was no word for most concepts. No problem that can't be fixed with lots of money [...] The Welshifying Nats are pushing all this dangerously far." ('555555' - recurring)

"We really should stop worrying overmuch about these unproductive and expensive [...] peripheral areas, just re-name thm England and cut the nonsense about regional languages." ('hertsman')

"Plaid [...] are, as was always the case, merely obsessed with pushing their myopic outdated view of Welsh culture onto the overwelming majority of the population who have already chosen to reject it." ('tish')

"Already West Cardiff is looking more and more like East Jerusalem with a humourless, supremacist master race moving in..." ('ragworm')

"...many Welsh language speaking middle class people are moving in [to Cardiff] and 'laying claim', as if speaking the Welsh language gives them a God given right." ('ragworm' redux)

"...outdated, nostalgic guff..........dangerous too. I'll give you an example of that...............an acquaintance says to me : 'I send my kids to a Welsh school........no Pakis'..........Charming......." ('ragworm' repeats)

These, let it be said, are the readers of one of the major liberal-left newspapers in Europe. It may be unfair to judge The Guardian by its readers - my late colleague Chris Brandon was a regular reader of the Daily Mail despite being as left-wing as one could be, on the unimpeachable grounds that for years it was the only daily rag which gave the sanctimonious Blair and his apostles the regular kicking they deserved. But the comments on Williams' article are - by a margin of about eight or nine to one - indicative of either wilful ignorance or sub-tabloid cultural hatred. Could you imagine comments like these being allowed by The Grauniad moderators if they had been about, say, Jews or Muslims? No, neither can I. So why should we have to take it?

The trouble, of course, is that we have very little visibility in England (my fingers started to type 'Elfland' there - goodness knows why). Perhaps as a result of being a colony for far longer than Scotland or Ireland and of having not had an autonomous political, educational or legal establishment, we have been considered as nothing much more than another undifferentiated 'region' of England - a sort of Dorset with peaks - which can be regarded as suitable for little more than allowing under-prepared tossers from Sutton Coldfield or Stevenage to come and fall off or into our landscape at monotonously regular intervals; or a ready place of refuge for those tired of very same 'rat race' upon which they built their own advantages over us rude colonials.

We don't exactly help ourselves, it must be said. Most of the population of the north regard Liverpool as their capital city (although, as about half of them seem to have been born there anyway, this may be an understandable longing for their Heimat), and Cardiff is the capital city most atypical of the country it is supposed to be the capital of that I can think of (although Canberra and Brasilia must be in with a shout in that contest - but then they started out as artificial creations) - it is still full of the terminally provincial who are constantly looking down the M4 to see what London is thinking. We have been divided not just by the way in which our country has been developed primarily for the benefit of the ruling state - the way in which the major road and rail routes all run east-west rather than north-south, for example; to go from Holyhead to Swansea on the train, you have to go via large parts of west-central England - but by our own mutual suspicions and our innate tendency to fall out with each other over trivial issues (we're far happier fighting against each other than alongside each other against a common opponent - except in unimportant matters such as games).

I'm quietly hopeful that things are changing, however slowly. The coming of the National Assembly, for all its shortcomings and impotence where it matters at present, has loosened the old bonds of party loyalty to such an extent that there are now only two local authorities under Labour control, Plaid has lost control of Gwynedd, and we have had coalition government for most of the last decade. A broader political avenue - bypassing the decaying old donkeys of the Westminster machine - is opening up, and now the only parties committed to reversing devolution are the lunatic fringe of UKIP and their soul brothers in the BNP.

This, however, still may not be enough to combat the ignorance and hate of people such as the ones I've quoted in this piece. But, of course, they would say that we had no sense of humour and that they think the world of us, really. In which case, I'm sure they'll laugh readily when I characterise their beloved Britain in the following way (based on an old Pepsi ad). Only jokin', mun!

Date: 02/02/09

Mapped Out

Multimap have gone and buggered about with their website again. This means that a lot of the links from the Gallery pages are up the chute. I'll have to ponder my next move. Grrr!!

Date: 26/01/09

Sky's The Limit

I can't say that it came as a surprise that Sky decided to chicken as well.

There's obviously some 'shared perspective' between them and the BBC as well, otherwise the head of Sky News would not have been able to come up with the following:

"The absolute impartiality of our output is fundamental to Sky News and its journalism."

Now, that's funny. Obviously Rupert has more money buried under the Mount Of Olives than we had suspected.

Oh, and Martin Rowson in The Guardian is on the money, as he so often is:

Cartoon about the BBC and Gaza Appeal

Update: And here's what the canting cnuts of BBC and Sky have been shitting a stick over:

Yeah, really controversial, huh? Arseholes...

Date: 24/01/09

The letter Blast The The letter Brazen The letter Cowards!

Since 1963, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) - a grouping of major humanitarian charities - has been given time on UK television to broadcast appeals for help and funding for activities in aid of alleviating suffering. The facility has been used not only for times of natural disasters (earthquakes, flooding and famine) but also for humanitarian work to relieve the consequences of human conflict.

The broadcasts have to be agreed by a committee representing all the terrestrial broadcasters and Sky. If one member of the panel says no, then by convention no channel screens the appeal.

Appeals have been screened for donations to help the victims of wars in Vietnam, the Gulf, the Balkans and Africa. The broadcasting corporations have seemingly had no qualms about this, and rightly so.

So why, when the DEC asked for airtime to broadcast an appeal for funds to help the people of Gaza suffering from not only the disproportionate and brutal actions of the Israeli military but from the effects of the illegal blockade which preceded the attack, did the BBC refuse to agree to giving the appeal a slot and thus - by convention - meaning that none of the other channels could broadcast it either?

The reasons given by the Director General, Mark Thompson and his sidekick Caroline Thomson (the 'Chief Operating Officer' - sheesh!) were, to put it kindly, unconvincing. Thompson said that to broadcast the appeal:

"...ran the risk of calling into question the public's confidence in the BBC's impartiality in its coverage of the story as a whole."

COO Thomson added that they were 'concerned' that any aid might not get through, but also:

"...it remains a matter of great, great controversy..."

Let's take this rampant bollo in reverse order.

Firstly, the aid is getting through already, although it must remain a matter of concern that Israel and Egypt might - singularly or severally - put that access in jeopardy for their own political and strategic reasons. But how can the existence of a humantarian catastrophe be in any way a "a matter of great, great controversy"? The only major figure to have claimed that Gaza is not in a state of humanitarian disaster has been the appalling Israeli foreign minster 'Zippy' Livni.

As for Thompson with a 'P', even if you allow his conceit that the public still has 'confidence' in the BBC's 'impartiality' - a moot point given that nearly all of the BBC's reports from the area were produced by their bureau in occupied Jerusalem or by reporters 'embedded' with the invading forces, the reproducing of Israeli government statements as if they were facts (i.e., the 'unilateral ceasefire'), and the soft-pedalling interviews with Israeli spokesbeings - one has to ask again what the hell that has to do with an appeal for humanitarian aid for civilians who have been maimed, made homeless or ground down into utter squalor by the conflict. Especially when even two government ministers (one of whom is a former BBC hack) say that the dear old Broadcorping Castration has got it completely wrong and should reverse their decision.

The decision of the Thom(p)son Twins is not only indefensibly unreasonable, it is evidence of something far deeper which is rotten in the BBC. No, I don't mean the conspiracy loons' claims of inherent pro-Israel bias in the corporation or pressure from our own 'Friends Of Israel' within governmental circles, but of the supine complaisance with power which has typified the Corporation since the havoc wreaked upon it by the Hutton Report, whereby a minor error by one BBC reporter was deliberately blown up into a storm which enabled a nobbled enquiry to provide the Régime with the opportunity to remove the last vestiges of genuine independence left in the BBC's governance. Ever since that tsunami of faux-outrage led to the removal of Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies from the two positions of leadership at the broadcaster, the BBC has been running scared of any involvement in anything which might bring it into conflict with the Régime and its obsessions. Genuine investigative reporting is at a premium, genuine journalism has been replaced by tabloidese celeb-whoring, and leadership in the whole edifice has been replaced by even more of a risk-averse, box-ticking managerialism that was seen during the nadir of John Birt's tenure in charge.

Developments during Saturday have been interesting, in that ITV, Channel Four and five have now broken ranks and said that they will screen the appeal after all. Sky is, apparently, still considering its position at the time of writing, and will no doubt need to check with Rupert to see if anything which might draw attention to what Israel has done to Gaza might possibly conflict with the Dirty Digger's business interests.

In the event that Sky does decide to broadcast DEC's appeal (and even if it doesn't), then further damage will have been done to the BBC. Not only would it have made itself seem cloddish and pusillanimous by its original decision, it would also hand a huge propaganda coup to its competitors and make the Corporation an even bigger target for those - amongst whom I do not count myself - who wish to dismantle not only the BBC but the whole concept of non-commercial public service broadcasting in this country; an act of cultural vandalism which could never be undone.

Whether the BBC now changes its mind is no longer important, then: the damage will have been done, and once again the wounds will have been self-inflicted. For this reason alone (leaving aside the 'rigged phone vote' scandals and the 'Ross/Brand affair'), Mark Thompson should either resign forthwith or that clique of trusties called the BBC Trust (sic) should try to generate a spinal column between them and remove this incompetent from his job before any further harm is done.

At a time like this, I wish I still had a television set so that I could refuse to pay the licence fee in protest at such blithering idiocy.

In the meantime, the Disasters Emergency Committee's appeal for Gaza can be found by clicking on the button below. Please give what you can.

DEC Gaza Appeal logo

Date: 21/01/09

Choice Language

You'll know by know that I operate almost exclusively in Pedant Mode, and am highly sensitive to the use of language, and more especially to its deliberate misuse to obscure, sanitise or simply bullshit those at the intended receiving end.

I got a little leaflet through the post from BT today. In it, they say that they are 'relaunching' their Friends & Family scheme. That word 'relaunching' is suspect enough: it's almost always code for "we're going to make our service worse, but hope that we can pull the wool over people's eyes by tying it up in a red silk ribbon and parading it behind the town band, and thus disguising that unmistakable sewage-farm aroma coming off it".

And so indeed it proves. For the 'relaunch' involves ending the current F&F scheme, and replacing it by no fewer than two new ones. One will only apply to calls made to mobiles, and the other only to international calls. The existing scheme will be wound up.

The upshot of this - for me as for many others, I suspect - is that I will now pay more for what few phone calls I actually make, which are to my family and to my place of work. The 'relaunched' scheme will be of no earthly use to me, as I seldom call mobiles and have never in all my years made an international call.

Having thus shafted me once, the leaflet goes on to tell me that BT are 'changing' their line rental price, and that they are also 'changing' their daytime UK call costs. Note that word 'changing'. Now, in the normal usage of the word, that could mean that the price could go up or it could go down. However, in the mouths of corporations - especially monopolies and near-monopolies, and those companies which operate what amounts de facto if not de jure to a cartel in their own field - 'changing' means only one thing: they're putting the price up. And so it proves with BT. The line rental will increase by £1 per month (an 8.7% increase) and the call charge by 0.59p per minute (up 15%). They are also increasing (sorry, changing) other charges, in some cases by up to 46%.

It's like our local near-monopoly bus service: they never increase their fares nowadays, they merely 'revise' them. Yet again, the revision is invariably upwards. In both cases, it's an example of how corporations think that we dear consumer units are so dense we won't spot it. Not that it makes any difference if we do: there's almost always naff all we can do about it except pay up.

"But oh!", I hear you cry, "you can always change to another supplier!" Yeah, sure. There are so many other suppliers, but they are all pretty much the same when it comes to their actual behaviour. Switch to another company, and within weeks they will do the same thing as the one you've just left. Switch again, and your next choice will follow suit. Look at what has happened with gas supply in the last two or three years for evidence if you don't believe me.

For all the yammering and simpering about 'consumer choice', the simple fact is that we don't have any, except to do without a service altogether. This is not only true in the general, but in the specific as well: BT, having delivered a multiple mugging of my finances, is the company which has the sheer bloody gall to charge me an extra £4.50 per quarter because I choose to pay my bills by cheque rather than in a manner which they find more convenient and profitable. I like to keep a tight control on what goes out of my finances, and handing over details of my bank account to a company with a reputation for ripping off its customers is simply not an acceptable option. OFCOM, the so-called 'regulator', wimped out as usual, deciding that there was nothing wrong with telecoms companies ripping us off, so long as they made it obvious that that is what they were doing. If we don't like it, they strongly implied, we can find some other gouging company - whom OFCOM will then allow to get away with doing it to us again.

Similarly with their increa...hmmmph...changed line rental charges. You can cut the cost, but only if you agree to 'paper-free billing'. On the face of it, this seems like good ecological sense, but I'd be more convinced if the company's activities in other areas were consistent with that. The fact is, it's cheaper for them, which is why they are...what's that lovely word?...ah yes, 'incentivising' their 'customer base' to...hold on, I think I'm going to puke....

So, you can have all this wonderful 'choice' they keep wanking on about, but if you dare exercise it in a way which is deemed disadvantageous to the company, you'll either pay extra for it or they'll withdraw the facility altogether.

It should be obvious by now that we are ruled not by governments, but by corporations. Indeed, judging by the revolving door between the boardroom and the Cabinet, those two pillars of rapacious Anglo-American-style late capitalism are in fact only one pillar, united not only by their mutual lust for power and control, but by an identical desire to pervert communication to their own ends (which is why politicians fear the Internet and corporations want to spam it into submission with advertising). Orwell foresaw that it would be the State which would debase language into meaninglessness. He was only half right.

And we're the poor sods who either have to shoulder the burden of keeping it up (Atlas Mode), or end up being crushed by it (Samson Mode). We can all just put up and shut up, or deceive ourselves that it doesn't matter.

Date: 11/01/09

Those All-Important Numbers

Chutzpah is a Hebrew word.

The formal definition is that of "cheek, nerve, brass-neckery". The informal illustration is that of the boy who kills both his parents and then asks the court for mercy because he's an orphan.

I thought of this again when reading the whole bewhoopah going on around the 'Israel Solidarity Rally' which took place in London this morning.

The 'rally' was called by The Board Of Deputies Of British Jews, an organisation which claims to represent the views of the Jews of the UK, but from which many of those 'represented' wish to distance themselves because they feel the body to be totally unrepresentative of anything other than a self-perpetuating clique of religious conservatives and hard-line Israel-Firsters.

The Board's Chief Executive (and why is it that even supposedly non-commerical organisations now have to have a 'Chief Executive'?) described the demo as "a call for peace". Which, presumably, is why the flyer for the event is headed (in large, friendly, blue letters), "END HAMAS TERROR!"

No, not a word about what the invading forces have been doing (especially during the last three weeks). Only 'the other side' are practising terror. 'Our' side (in which the Board no doubt includes the whole of Western civilisation) never commits acts of terror (all such actions are put down to 'mistakes' or 'technical failures' or 'they were asking for it anyway, being Arabs - or Brazilian electricians').

The organisers of this latest attempt to wave the Mogen David and pretend it to be a symbol of peace stated that:

"the number of Israeli deaths should not be considered disproportionate to the number of Palestinian deaths because Israelis were lucky enough to escape their houses before they were hit by Palestinian rockets."

(my emphasis)

So unlike the 'unlucky' people of Gaza, who were warned in leaflets dropped by the Israeli Air Force that if they didn't leave their homes they (the homes) would be bombed to bits with them (the people) still in them; told of a 'safe place' where they could assemble; went to that 'safe place'; which was then bombed by the Israelis, resulting in massive casualties.

As for 'not disproportionate'? Well, any killings are to be condemned, but examine the facts: in the three years since the Zionists 'withdrew' from Gaza (whilst maintaining an illegal blockade and other measures design to destroy civil society in the Strip), some eleven Israelis were killed by rockets fired from Gaza. In the same period, the Israeli military killed over 1200 Gazan Palestinians (over 200 of them children). That does not include the 800-plus (at least a third of them children) slaughtered by Israel in the last two and half weeks alone.

There are signs that even some die-hard Zionists are having qualms about what their Righteous State is doing - but not too much. A number of them have put their names to a letter published in today's Observer in which they ('they' being - amongst others - a former Chief Rabbi and 'Sir' Siggy Sternberg; in other words, the usual suspects) claim to:

"...look upon the increasing loss of life on both sides of the Gaza conflict with horror..."

(my emphasis again: this may be part of the cynical calculus of Zionism, in which a handful of Israeli deaths can be exactly equated with the deaths of hundreds of Arabs). However, they then show just how horrified they are by saying:

"We have no doubt that rocket attacks into southern Israel, by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups, are war crimes against Israel."

Which leaves one to wonder what words they would use to describe the deliberate targeting and killing of hundreds of unarmed people by one of the best-equipped and most ruthless military machines on the planet. Hey, Julia! Jeremy! Siggy! can you spell 'atrocity'?

They then go on to say:

"Israel had a right to respond and we support the Israeli government's decision to make stopping the rocket attacks an urgent priority."

Even, presumably, if it means mass murder, which may be why these worthies of British Zion have taken over a fortnight to say anything. There may be in their minds a trigger point, a number of dead Palestinians beyond which they suddenly feel the urge to express their 'concern'.

Having gone on to say that:

"[w]e stand alongside the people of Israel"

(presumably the Palestinians can go chase their Aunt Rachel round the gasworks), they conclude by urging negotiations aimed at:

"An immediate and permanent ceasefire entailing an end to all rocket attacks."

But not, note, an end to the Righteous State's various crimes against the Palestinians. After all, these people:

"...support the Israeli government...

Chutzpah writ large.

(Oh, and while we're on the subject of numbers, the police estimate that the pro-Zionist demonstrators in London today numbered 4 000 people. Bearing in mind how ridiculously wide of the mark they were in their stated figure for yesterday's pro-Palestine march, this could mean any number between 28 000 and scarcely enough to make a minyan.)

Date: 07/01/09

Massacres Upon Massacres

I have said nothing more on the subject of the horrendous atrocities being committed in Gaza. This is partly because even I have been rendered speechless with rage and disgust at the conduct we have seen from the Self-Righteous State, the cynical apologiae of its supporters and the twitching and shuffling of our spineless so-called leaders as they try hard not to stand by whatever sense of morality they may not have managed to excise from their wretched selves.

The other reason is that others have been better able to express my feelings than I can myself.

At this point, I would like to direct you to a piece by Septicisle (whose blog is one of my daily ports-of-call). However, the piece in question is headed by a photograph from the murderous onslaught on the people of Gaza which I know you will find deeply upsetting. I am therefore providing you with the link to the piece without any shouldering of responsibility for the consequences of your clicking on it. You're an intelligent adult; it is always, always your choice.

Here's the link: Obsolete: Massacres upon massacres.

If you feel that you'd rather not view that piece (and I emphasise again that no blame accrues to you for exercising your freedom to choose), then perhaps I can recommend an article by Professor Avi Shlaim of Oxford published on The Guardian's site earlier today. Once again, however, there is a photograph on it which is unsettling, although not as much so as the other one. Again, it's your call, but I think you should read one if not both of these pieces.

That link: Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.