News Category
Madeleine McCann: Gerry’s tears, Pope is religious and Maddie is missing
Did you tune in to BBC Radio 4 show on fathers and daughters to hear Madeleine McCann’s father, Gerry McCann, as he “weeps uncontrollably”, as the Daily Star says he did? TV loves tears, from cake baking shows to pro-celebrity dance contests, no broadcast is complete without a close up of someone crying. But does it work for radio? In “MADDIE DAD BREAKDOWN” the Star leads with Gerry McCann saying how he “believed in heaven”. The man who along with his wife, Kate McCann, met the Pope when the hunt for his daughter was in full cry, is religious. Want more news?
The front-page story continues on Page 5. The Star’s editorial says “Gerry McCann’s heartbreak over missing Madeleine must touch every parent’s heart… Listeners will have sobbed along with Gerry as his tears flowed.” All of them? Having spent 11 years watching the parents and now listening to them, many people will be interested in the actual investigation and what happened to an innocent child? Well, the Star says the Metropolitan Police should get more cash because “we may be looking for a serial offender” and “it could be money well spent”. May. Could. Reporting on the disappearance of a missing child continues to be sensationalist and speculative.
The Mirror also leads with Madeleine McCann, and news that Gerry “dreams of hugging” her again. Over pages 4 and 5, we’re told Gerry McCann wholeheartedly believes his daughter is alive – “a view backed up up by Scotland Yard’s plea for more funds to probe the mystery.” What plea? There has been some newspaper talk of funds running low and police considering applying for more. Indeed, the Star says there is a “debate” over whether police will request more funds or not. If there is a plea for money – and does Scotland Yard plea or merely ‘apply’? – the Mirror has no details about it. It would be useful to know what progress police think will be made with more fund.
Daily Star
The Sun picks up the radio broadcast, and pretty much transcribes the whole thing:
“I couldn’t get the darkest thoughts out of our minds, that somebody had taken her and abused her. I remember just being in the bedroom – the two of us just completely distraught. It was almost feral, the reaction and the pain, feeling helpless, alone.”
And amid the pain and the emotion, the Sun surmises the story so far:
“A number of potential leads have emerged since the little girl vanished, but none amounted to anything and no arrests have ever been made.”
Can you arrest anyone when all you know is that a child vanished?
This is the BBC’s story, and it’s useful to see their take on it:
Madeleine, then aged three, disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007, sparking a worldwide search for her whereabouts.
A search stoked by a media feeding frenzy.
Mr McCann was speaking to BBC Radio 4 for a programme about the relationship between fathers and daughters. He said that he was sure immediately that his daughter had been abducted.
After being told by his wife Kate that their daughter was missing, Mr McCann said “automation kicked in” and he began searching the apartment.
“We started searching more widely really quickly and then very quickly raised the alarm,” he said.
“You’re in this quiet little holiday resort – that seemed idyllic – out of season and I certainly didn’t speak Portuguese so I asked [our friend] Matt to go to reception and ask them to call the police.”
…
“I couldn’t get the darkest thoughts out of our minds, that somebody had taken her and abused her,” he continued.
“I felt that every moment that we couldn’t find her was worse.
“I remember being slumped on the floor and starting to call some of my family members and just saying: ‘Pray for her.'”
And the “plea” for money:
The Home Office said last week it is currently considering a police request for an extra six months’ funding for Operation Grange.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 30th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann, News, Tabloids | Comment
The youth hungry Labour Party really is a cult to an old white man
Ever wondered how a society gets to the stage where they erect statues to the esteemed leader in every town and every city? Persecuting Jews is good. Starving people, also good. How about voting for Labour? You might not get a statue straight away – it takes time to nationalise the cement and industries – but there will be a puppet in place of a wilful MP. The Corbyn cultists have staged a vote of no confidence in Labour MP Chris Leslie. On Friday, activists at the Labour MP’s Nottingham East constituency party voted to pass a no-confidence motion for what they said were Leslie’s “repeated attempts … to undermine the leadership”. Members of the Mapperley branch of Nottingham East pointed to the former shadow chancellor’s “disloyalty and deceit”.
Louise Regan, chairwoman of the Nottingham East Labour party, guffed: “We overwhelmingly passed a motion of no confidence in our MP Chris Leslie. It was agreed that this information would be shared with the press, but that we would also make clear that members of the CLP [constituency Labour party] would be out campaigning on the national day of action, building support for Labour policies and a Labour government.”
The Labour policy seems to be ‘crush dissent and build a party of singular talent’. (Odd, no, that for a Party so keen on urban youth, and chucking out the ‘pale, male and stale’, the top team is so very old, privately educated, provincial, middle-class and white.) And cultists can play no small part in shaping what is still called the Labour Party. They’re able to force the sitting Labour MPs to compete for selection as a general election candidate.
“Sadly, differing opinions are no longer tolerated in some parts of the Labour party,” Leslie told the BBC. “But I have to weigh the views of a few dozen people at this meeting with the thousands who voted for me at the last election.” But it’s all about the party, Chris. Loyalty to zer party ist alles.
Anti-Corbyn Labour MP Chuka Umunna did what he does best and, er, tweeted: “Real unity is based on the freedom to disagree and debate… So we need to foster a much greater culture of tolerance… We must learn to listen a bit more, and shout a lot less. To focus on what unites us.” Us? You’re not with “us”, mate, say the Corbyn cultists. Your in yesterday’s Labour Party. And if you attack our beloved leader, we will attack you.
So at least Leslie is not totally alone. Labour MPs Gavin Shuker, Kate Hoey, Joan Ryan and Frank Field have been hit with no-confidence votes from their local party members. And here’s the thing. Labour must win 64 more seats at the next general election to form a majority government. But it won’t just be Labour Party members on the Far Left who get to vote for a Corbyn loyalist. The cultists can put one up for election, but the voters can knock them down.
Posted: 29th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Hate crime: Julia Hartley-Brewer defiled sacred safe space at Labour conference
You don’t have to like Julia Hartley-Brewer to be on her side in a story about safe spaces. Disability News Service (DNS) says Labour Party members want the LBC presenter disciplined by her employers and banned from future events because she criticised safe spaces. Labour says Julia Hartley-Brewer’s opinion that safe spaces are for “snowflakes” “caused considerable distress” to Labour delegates. She posted a video of her sat in a safe space “put aside for disabled people and others who need a quiet area for impairment-related and other reasons”. She said “boo” when a colleague with a camera entered the room. Hartley-Brewer then tweeted: “Comrades, if you’re feeling triggered at the Labour Party conference, don’t worry, we’ve found the official #SafeSpace…”
Comrades, if you’re feeling triggered at the Labour Party conference, don’t worry, we’ve found the official #SafeSpace… #Lab2018 @talkRADIO pic.twitter.com/ssoJRpfvrJ
— Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) September 24, 2018
This mocking of safe spaces – places for contemplation that used to be called the toilet cubicle, stationery cupboard, library or car – left one delegate feeling “humiliated and violated”. She approached the Disability Labour stand and “just burst into tears, shaking with anger and rage”. She intends to report the incident to the police “as a potential disability hate crime”. A campaigner calls it “nothing less than a hate crime against disabled people”. Disabled people who have fought hard to be seen as resilient, spirited and capable might recoil at this portrayal of them as needy and fragile, reliant on the police and censors to counter different opinions. Another says Hartley-Brewer defiled the safe space, which can no longer be called a safe space, presumably because infidels have touched the sacred ground.
Hartley-Brewer adds in a tweet: “I’m told that this ‘safe space’ at Labour conference is meant for people with autism and other disabilities. The sign doesn’t say that. For the avoidance of doubt, there was no intention to upset disabled people, but every intention to upset snowflakes. Hope that clarifies.”
All it clarifies is that a woman voiced an opinion some other people don’t like, and now seek to turn into a crime – an actual criminal offence as dictated by a society defined by a desire to find and coset the victim in each of us.
Posted: 28th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment
The newspapers: unpack your prejudices for Christine Blasey Ford v Brett Kavanaugh
Who do you led with – Christine Blasey Ford, the blonde, white women who stood before the massed ranks of the US Senate Judiciary Committee and the TV cameras as she accused supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago or the white, grey man who says he “never sexually assaulted anyone”? No contest for the newspapers, which leads with Dr Ford. She claims that at a 1980s high school party, she believed Judge Kavanaugh “was going to rape me” and “was accidentally going to kill me”. Kavanaugh then appeared before the same committee. He denied allegations of sexual assault. At home and on Twitter, we tuned in, unpacked out prejudices and picked a side we knew – just knew – was right. Our morals are sound. The other side is most probably evil:
Posted: 28th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Cold War Steve: Steve McFadden stars in an exhibition by Twitter’s greatest artist
The art of Cold War Steve is to feature in an exhibition at The Social, London. Called A Brief History of the World (1953 – 2018), the show’s running thread is the presence of British actor Steve McFadden, famed for playing tough nut Phil Mitchell on the BBBC dystopian soap opera, EastEnders. There’s fun to be had in spotting famous faces from the world stage and British telly. Personal favourites are poleaxed TalkSport DJ Alan Brazil and the late Cilla Black offering a quizzical look to us from the montage – a look that says ‘Who invited you?’ and ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here?’
Christopher Spencer, the talent behind @ColdWarSteve explains it simply: ” The more incongruous they were, the funnier.” And, boy, are they funny:
More from @ColdWarSteve on Twitter. A Brief History of the World (1953 – 2018) is at The Social from October 15.
Posted: 27th, September 2018 | In: Celebrities, News, The Consumer, TV & Radio | Comment
They might be Her-oes: the trans debate is valid
Being a woman is easy. All that suffrage stuff was bunkum. The penis and the womb make no impact on our life experiences. You just need a dress, some heels, a wig and the mantra “I am a woman” to be one of them. That’s it. It’s why Philip Bunce, a married father of two and a director at Credit Suisse appears on the list topped ‘Top 100 Women in Business’. He is, according to the list compiled by the Financial Times as one of the “Her-oes” doing their bit for gender equality. Philip is one of those “female executives who have made a difference to women’s careers”
Philip, who alternates between Pippa, his female alter-ego, says he is “gender fluid” and “non-binary.”
All the newspapers focus on the upset caused by Mr Bunce making the cut. There is “outrage” (Mirror, Sun) and “anger” (Times). Let’s all agree, good for Mr Bunce. He can dress how he likes and call himself what he pleases. He’s evidently talented, reasoned, authentic and bright, and his gender fluidity has no impact on his ability to do a demanding job. In 2015, he wrote in the FT:
… there is a real value in allowing employees to bring their authentic selves to work, whether they be gender variant, gay, women, Sikh or simply eccentric. Companies are beginning to understand such openness increases employee engagement, discretionary effort and productivity while developing an inclusive culture within the workplace that benefits retention and recruitment… As Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
Of course, if he’s in the Top 100, it means the woman at 101 isn’t. And that’s the root of all that “anger”. The anger is good because it’s form of free speech and actual open debate. And the people who are angry are also erudite and considered. Kiri Tunks, co-founder of Woman’s Place UK, tells the Times: “This makes a mockery of women and their achievements and begs the question does Bunce simultaneously feature in top 100 male executives and if not, what were his particular achievements as a woman to merit inclusion in the female list?” And:
Kristina Harrison, an LGBT activist who was born male but transitioned 20 years said ago, she would never accept a place on an all-women shortlist as it was “insulting” to women who faced different challenges. “Being a woman is not a costume you can put on, on some days and not on others. The idea that you can become a woman by donning a wig and a dress is deeply sexist.”
All good points well made. What if Mr Bunce wanted to appear on the Credit Suisse sports teams as Pippa? sports?” People born biologically male are physically stronger than biological women. Is it fair and safe for a sportsperson born biologically male and still in possession of all the tackle, to play women’s rugby? Credit Suisse sponsors the Credit Suisse Sports Awards. Sportswoman of the Year 2017 was Wendy Holdener, the Apline skier. She represented Switzerland at the 2018 Alpine Ski World Cup. She was slower than all the men in the team. So what if Luca Aerni or Mauro Caviezel wanted to compete as women? Could they her ‘Her-oes”?
How about the opinion of Professor Rosa Freedman, of the University of Reading, who says biological males should not have access to women’s refuges? Freedman tells The Times of the reaction to that: “We are talking about the aggressive trolling of women who are experts. I have received penis pictures telling me to ‘suck my girl cock’.” It’s not an isolated example. In recent times, arguing over such things has seen people accused of hate speech and transphobia.
In one notable instance, a poster put up on a billboard in Liverpool featuring the legend “Woman, women, noun, adult human female” – the dictionary definition of woman – has been removed after someone complained that it made transgender people feel unsafe. Facts are not facts. Truth can be whatever you decide it is. “We’re in a new realm of misogyny when the word ‘woman’ becomes hate speech,” said Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who organised the poster. “I wanted it to be a conversation starter but this is a new level of absurd.”
Surely gender is worth a debate? If we want to be ourselves – resilient, complex, questioning, contrary and open – it must be.
Posted: 27th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment
British Jew who Jeremy Corbyn accused of not getting English irony sues Labour leader
Richard Millett is suing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for defamation, reports the Mail. Millett is the British blogger Corbyn was addressing when he accused British Zionists of not understanding “English irony”. Many, including the Labour Party supporting Daily Mirror newspaper, thought Corbyn meant Jews. Manhy Jews thought Corbyn’s comment anti-Semitic. Millett instructed solicitors to act after Corbyn talked about him to Andrew Marr on the journalist’s Sunday morning BBC 1 show. The Mail reports:
During an interview with Andrew Marr on BBC One, the Labour leader painted a picture of Mr Millett as ‘incredibly disruptive’, claiming that the police wanted to throw him out of Parliament until Mr Corbyn said he could stay.
Mr Millett, whose father fought for Britain in WWII, says that the allegations are entirely untrue and have caused lasting damage to his reputation. He is suing Corbyn for £100,000.
Millett tells the website:
“Jeremy Corbyn has constantly been trying to paint me as some aggressive traitor who has brushes with police. Listening to his interview, you’d have thought that the police were on the verge of hauling me out of parliamentary events and it was only saintly Corbyn who stopped that happening. It’s totally untrue. It’s preposterous. I think he just said it on the hoof, under questioning on the BBC on Sunday. He can’t actually back it up.”
The anti-semitism chatter begins just after 9 minutes.
As for those so-called British Jews, well, they’ve looked up ‘irony’ in the English dictionary:
Jeremy Corbyn even said that we British Jews don’t understand British irony. And yet he says he’s opposed to all forms of racism – how’s that for irony?
WATCH: @BoDPres speech at the #SayNoToAntisemitism rally in Manchester. pic.twitter.com/1Mkd3vzSWI
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) September 16, 2018
Posted: 25th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Ohio bar accepts food stamps for lap dances and drugs
This is a rather joyous affirmation of everything the right thinks is true about welfare more generally. That the amount people gain in welfare is vastly too high, that the rest of us are taxed at heinous rates so that the welfare queens can live in the lap of luxury without having to do a damn thing. That it might only be true at the margin doesn’t make it less true as a story:
Ohio bar loses alcohol licence after accepting food stamps for lap-dances – Undercover agents bought heroine, cocaine and lap-dances during 5-month investigation
Ah, no, that’s the well known reality curvature at The Independent which confuses strong independent women with a street drug that kills. Easy enough mistake to make, obviously.
An Ohio bar has been forced to shut down after authorities discovered they were allowing customers to buy drugs and lap dances using food stamps.
Allowing customers to buy drugs isn’t normally on the list of things a bar should do anyway:
Over nearly a half-year span, police say, undercover agents from the Ohio Investigative Unit were able use nearly US$2,500 worth of food stamps to buy dances and drugs, including heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamines, from Sharkey’s, an adult entertainment lounge in a neighbourhood north of downtown.
And isn’t that cool? It took half a year of observing the naked ladies and consuming the booze ‘n’ drugs before it was possible to bring the investigation to an end?
But just to explain. In the American system instead of getting child tax credits and the like you get food stamps. This is a card, charged up with near money, which can only be used to buy food at certain stores. And what sort of food you can buy is pretty strictly controlled. They’re not like Green Shield stamps any more, the shop needs a special card reader.
So, the bar had to have the card reader. So it’s not just buying all these things, it’s buying them on a debit card, a special one that supposedly only works to buy food. They must have been properly set up to do this, not just some occasional possibility.
Making that 5 months to investigate rather interesting, no? I wonder how much the investigators had to pay their boss to get assigned to the case?
Posted: 25th, September 2018 | In: Money, News, Strange But True | Comment
There is no transgender row: women can have a penis
This week we learned that you can be booted out of a job for saying: “Women don’t have penises.” Angelos Sofocleous, a postgraduate philosophy and psychology student student at Durham University, retweeted those words and found himself sacked as editor of the university’s online magazine, Bubble, and his assistant editor role at its philosophy journal – called with no little irony Critique – in what the Times called a “transphobia row”. But there was no row because for that you need two sides to argue with passion. Any heated debate happened only in the media after Sofocleous was banned. This was a retweet, an article he wrote called Keingenderism, Truth, and Where the Transgender Movement Gets it Wrong and a command to get thee hence.
His retweet of a Spectator column headlined “Is it a crime to say women don’t have penises?” was to “belittle trans experiences” and leaving “no room for, or to promote, any fair discussions”.
Good to know philosophy leaves no room for discussion.
And before we go on: anyone can call themselves what they like. But others should also have the right to say ‘No, you’re not.’ That goes for women who think womenhood comes after the experiences of being a girl in society. “Is it because I is black?’ asked Ali G, who walked the walk and talked the talk but lacked the actual skin tones, biology, genes and depth to be black. How we laughed.
But on the upside, Sofocleous did get a job: he was hired to write a story for The Spectator. He writes:
On campus, the subject of gender is now off limits for those who fail to fall into line with the new orthodoxy: that being a man or a woman is fluid. Anyone who says otherwise is liable to find themselves hounded into silence…
Or pushed towards a magazine with a larger readership with the misnomered Critique and correctly named Bubble, or Echo as might be a more fitting title. He continues:
It won’t come as much of a surprise that the National Union of Students is leading the charge on this front. Today, the NUS announced its response to the government’s consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Among the NUS’s more barmy proposals was calling for an end to ‘coercively assigning gender at birth’. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? In future, it seems we might have to wait to ask the child itself when it grows up.
In the meanwhile, if you see a woman with a penis in the women-only changing rooms, at the rape-crisis centres, at the refuge centre for abused mothers, in a women-only train carriage, in a women’s prison, in the women’s football team or running the Women’s Institute don’t point and say, ‘You sure you’re in the right room?” because to do so is be bigoted and very possibly misogynist.
Posted: 23rd, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment
Gertcha! The trite and lazy journalism of ‘battling cancer’ with Chas and Dave
Farewell Chas Hodges, aka Charles Nicholas Hodges (28 December 1943 – 22 September 2018), the piano-playing half of the brilliant Chas and Dave. Even Arsenal fans enjoyed his hymn to Tottenham Hotspur, Ossie’s Dream, when the little Argentine hoped to “win the Cup for Tott-ing-Ham”.
The songs were brilliant, like this love song:
But Chas Hodges did not die because he lost a “battle” with cancer. The Mirror’s trite take that the Chas and Dave star died because he lost a fight with a deadly disease is the worst of journalism.
Deeper into the cut-and-paste Wikipedia balls on the career of a very talented musicians, the Mirror adds: “He and Joan – an original Playboy bunny and actress – put up a united front as they battled cancer together, along with their children and two grandchildren.” No. She did not battle cancer. The children did not battle cancer. Chas did not battle cancer.
So entrenched is that hackneyed balls about ‘battling cancer’ that the Sun commissioned a feature published yesterday. Deborah James told Sun readers: “I hate ‘battle chat’ when it comes to cancer…”
We don’t lose people, friends don’t succumb to it, loved ones weren’t too weak and they certainly didn’t lose their battle. It’s clear, you can’t fight your OWN cancer. It’s not something we win or lose, it’s out of our control.
Even suggesting to people they can is unhelpful and naive.
One day one and in the very same Sun:
More battles with ‘cancer battles’ soon. In the meantime, here’s a message from Chas to anyone using the dread phrase ‘battle with cancer’…
Posted: 22nd, September 2018 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
Brexit: tabloids react to EU bombing May’s Brexit plan
‘Chequers’, the half-backed ‘Remain by another name’ plan for the UK’s departure from the EU, is dead. The result, says the Mirror, is a Government “in crisis”. The message is clear: it’s us, not them.
European Council boss Donald Tusk (who voted for him – you?) told a meeting of EU politicos in Salzburg, Austria, “It will not work.” Over pages 4 and 5, we’re told “Europe turns its back”. We learn that May had a “row” with Tusk. You get an inkling of how easy that might be when you see a photo he posted on Instagram in which we see the wonk mansplaining some cakes (surely offering Mrs May a slice of sponge – ed) and adding the “barb”: “A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.” We then hear the condescending one say: “In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks, and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise a deal.”
You know that guff about ‘taking back control’ – wasn’t all guff was it?
Remainers of the day in the Star
Over in the Star, on page 3, we see a bit of kissing. May “winces” as Jean-Claude Juncker (you vote for him?) greets May. But she’s not wincing. She’s smiling. Maybe it’s the fumes?
The Sun sits on the fence and calls the EU a bunch of “two-bit mobsters”. French PM Emanuel Macron and Tusk are dressed up like mafioso. Rather than a defeat for May, we’re told the EU enforcers “ambushed” her with a “cack-handed attempt to sign-up to Brussels unacceptable terms there and then”. But May “refused to budge”.
By page 10, the Sun’s front-page news has morphed into the paper’s editorial. The EU is a “protection racket”. The EU has “refused to compromise”, “insulted the Prime Minister”. The EU “ignores their own citizens”. All the EU wants is to “punish us” for standing jp to them. But the country should ready itself for a “clean-break Brexit” – what other papers might call a “no-deal Brexit”.
Whoever decided May would wear red today (probably May!) against the backdrop of EU suits absolutely nailed it. pic.twitter.com/MXwq5tmACT
— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) September 20, 2018
“I won’t roll over on deal,” are May’s words on the Express‘ cover – which turn out to be words said by an unnamed source. She was “shaking with anger” as the EU “bullied” her. She was “furious”. We hear Macron “crow”: “Brexit is the choice of the British people, pushed by those who predicted easy solutions. Those people are liars.” But they’d be our liars, you French ****. Step away!
And then it arrives. The EU, the outfit created to control Germany and to help Germany keep its impulses in check, is given the full Nazi treatment. The paper notes on two pages that the venue for the May’s speech to EU leaders was used to film the Sound of Music’s song ‘So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.” The Von Trapps sing the song as they plot to escape Nazi persecution. A Mail writer evokes visions of Nazi stormtroopers at the Felsenreitschule theatre in Salzburg. He tells us the EU’s game plan is to get Britain to vote again in a second referendum and “zis time to vote ze right way”. The Mail’s message to Brussels: “Tell ’em to get stuffed.”
Or as the Sun once put it in those halcyon days before the referendum, “Up yours Delors!”
We’ve come a long way, baby….
Posted: 21st, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
Will honest Corbyn be brought down by Jews and MI5?
Jeremy Corbyn and his supported are far from convinced the Skrpials were poisoned by the Russians. The Labour leader thought it a good idea for Russia to be sent samples of the nerve agent to identify if it was their novichok that poisoned Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in spire-tastic Salisbury. Mindful of that, here’s Andrew Murray, chief of staff at Unite and an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, asking New Statesman readers: “Is the “deep state” trying to undermine Corbyn?”
The Labour Party supporting New Statesman had a question that might have been rhetorical.
The NS loves a conspiracy, so long as it think its readers will nod along with it. The highly plausible gets questioned, but the merely possible is accepted as likely. Only the other week, another Corbyn ally was just putting it out there that Israel had made Corbyn look like an anti-semite by, well, what, making him say things and hang out with Jew haters? “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” said Mark Serwotka, who leads the Public and Commercial Services union.
And neither, one supposes, is Murray, who rolls his eyes at MI5 and writes:
Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows? We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder…
Now, about that evidence…
Posted: 20th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Coca Cola cannabis and the volatile world of marijuana investing
Invest in cannabis? BNN Bloomberg says Coca Cola is looking at working with Canadian marijuana producer Aurora Cannabis to create drinks laced with marijuana. “Along with many others in the beverage industry, we are closely watching the growth of non-psychoactive cannabidiol as an ingredient in functional wellness beverages around the world,” said Coca-Cola in a statement. Unlike the cocaine Coca Cola used to put into its products, cannabidiol contains no psychoactive effect. But it can relieve pain.
It follows news that Constellation Brands (US-based producer of Corona beer and a raft of spirits and wines brands) is pumping lots of cash into Canada cannabis producer Canopy Growth.
Released in 1880, this is the very first publicly sold bottle of Coca-Cola. It contained around 3.5 grams of cocaine.
Why Canada? In June this year, the Canadian government pretty much legalised the use of recreational cannabis. Weed should go legal in Canada on October 17, 2018. You’ve got to feel for Mexico, which should fully legalise the drug exported illegally into the US via cartels. The market is there for the taking. And the money is huge.
Yesterday, shares in Canadian marijuana cultivator, distributor and producer Tilray – the first weed company to IPO in the US – reached an intraday high of $300, closing up 38.1 per cent on the day. The surge was based on news that America’s drugs regulator would allow loss-making Tilray to export a cannabis-based medicine to the US. Tilray shares have soared by – get this – 1,288 per cent since the company floating on the Nasdaq stock exchange two months ago. At one point Tilray was a bigger stock than 59 percent of S&P 500. Not too shabby for what is essentially a farming company – even if it does look absurdly overpriced and highly volatile.
But here’s the thing: no-one can be certain what form a legal market in marijuana will take once prohibition ends. Why would a consumer pay a big corporate farmer for their hit when they grow it themselves? Weed isn’t like moonshine – you really can grow a decent crop in your airing cupboard. And if the market for products gets huge and varied – cheap supermarket own-brand weed drinks? – won’t the price for weed fall? Marijuana is just commodity that grows in the ground.
Posted: 20th, September 2018 | In: Money, News, The Consumer | Comment
Russian Model says Putin poisoned her Prezzo meal deal
While the Mirror’s leads with a tale of a President’s boring sex with a porn star who failed to deliver on the laminated, pneumatic fantasy, the Sun’s lead story tells of another President trying to **** a model, this time with rat poison not boxcar mushrooms.
Russian model Anna Shapiro, 30, and husband Alex King, 43, were dining at Prezzo in Salisbury when he came seriously ill. The shiny suits “fear” it was a rat poison attack. And as they scour the world for more ghost-like, Russian steeple enthusiasts, a “terrified” Shapiro says he “believes” she was targeted by “Putin’s assassins”.
And there the story goes limp. Belief is not fact. Shapiro says she turned her back on her country and so Putin wants her dead. And then we read that “security sources believe Anna and Alex may have been attacked with strychnine.” Believe. May.
We don’t know what happened to the couple. But more photogenic visitors to Salisbury are advised to wrap up.
Look what the cat dragged In – a bag of cocaine and heroin
Cats can be useful creatures – clearing the barn of rats, the larder of mice perhaps. This over and above their providing companionship for ladies who don’t marry. But it’s rare for them to bring in the party supplies. Then again, it’s not everywhere that’s like parts of Bristol either:
A cat has apparently found and brought home a bag of what are suspected to be class A drugs.
Good Kitty, eh? And none of that M-cat or meow-meow rubbish. Assuming that those two are part of your normal party supplies, which being out-of-yer-brain, middle-class sorts they most probably are:.
Avon and Somerset Police said the bag was found in the cat’s bed at its home in St Pauls in Bristol, with the animal “curled up next to it”. It said the owner contacted officers immediately.
As the police themselves said, this might lead to a change in force tactics:
Forget police dogs, we should start training up cats 🐱👮♂️Apparently the owner found this in the cat’s bed, with the feline curled up next to it! https://t.co/0r8i8LMlQD
— Avon&Somerset Police (@ASPolice) September 17, 2018
This does sound rather more fun than the usual present we get – the gall bladder bits of a shrew that the cats don’t like eating. Carefully left as little presents on a pillow often enough.
There are about 30 wraps of what appears to be crack cocaine and heroin in the bag, which would have a street value of hundreds of pounds.
It might not quite work in all areas of the country, it should be said. Don’t go out and get a cat because you think it might lead to a party. The St Paul’s area of Bristol is really rather different to much of the rest of the country.
Actually, this is rather more to do with St Paul’s than it is a cat. That one took it home is surprising; that it was found in this area rather less so.
Posted: 18th, September 2018 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Madeleine McCann: Amaral wants his money and a final appeal
In “MADDIE HUNT CRISIS” Sun readers get the latest instalment in the tabloid saga that is the search for Madeleine McCann. After months of nothing, recent days have brought news that Operation Grange, the Metropolitan Police investigation into the disappearance of the three-year-old child in 2007, might need more funds, speculation about those funds and what it could all mean, and a chance to gawp at the child’s father, Gerry McCann, who features on a BBC Radio 4 show about mental health, loss and poetry.
Now readers are invited to wonder what it’d mean if the McCanns were to lose a “€850k case against [the] cop who claimed they were responsible for daughter’s death.” The copper is Goncalo Amaral, 58, of course, who led the search for Madeleine McCann. He later claimed in a book, The Truth of the Lie, that “Madeleine McCann died in Portugal and her parents Kate and Gerry McCann covered it up”. Amaral is the “disgraced cop” who “ludicrously claimed” and “shamefully claimed they were responsible for her death”. It’s hideous stuff. The single fact remains: child vanishes. There are no suspects. Everything is speculation. Innocence of any alleged crime must be presumed. The McCanns are innocent.
The Sun notes:
Kate and Gerry [McCann], both 50, won a 2015 libel case against him but it was later overturned and Amaral was awarded compo. The McCanns’ lawyers have now lodged final paperwork at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, with a hearing expected this year…
Amaral shamelessly repeated his allegations last week in a glossy magazine interview — and even claimed: “My family has suffered a lot.”
The issue is not about what he said, but his right to say it in Portugal. It was always a big risk to sue Amaral in a foreign country. Whoever took the risk assessment for the McCanns got it wrong. Amaral’s book might well be nasty and opportunistic, but he went in with his eyes open. He must have some nous to rise high in the ranks of the Portuguese police. And his publishers should know their field. The libel case against him was a costly misstep. An unnamed “source close to the McCanns” is quoted: “It seems you can say anything you like about someone in Portugal, no matter how awful, and get away with it.” Well, quite. They value free speech. “If the European Court rules against them the trustees will decide on how best to make any payments. It would be a blow but Kate and Gerry would keep their heads up and carry on searching.”
And the money?
The latest figures show £728,508, or around €819,400, is in Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned — mostly from public donations. That could all go if the decision to award Amaral €483,000 is upheld — with the McCanns paying costs on top.
Two more people are quoted:
Retired Det Chief Insp Mick Neville, who last year investigated the case, said: “It is tragic that funds to try to find her could be lost because of this legal action. There is every reason to believe she may be alive.”
The McCanns’ Portuguese lawyer Isabel Duarte said: “This will be our final appeal. The basis is the violation of my clients’ fundamental rights.”
Meanwhile, an innocent child is missing.
Posted: 18th, September 2018 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comment
Random chance: why a Brazilian town has a phenomenal number of twin births
The BBC wants us all to consider a real puzzler- why does one little town in Brazil have such a vast number of twins? The answer being, well, random chance actually. Not that we’d really expect the arts graduates at the Beeb to quite get such a thing. Reality is that somewhere is going to be like that so why not this town?
Cândido Godói is a village of 7,000 inhabitants in the south of Brazil that has a phenomenal number of twin births. The rate is ten times higher than the national average, and no one knows why.
It might strike you that they’re all looking a little Germanic rather than Brazilian and that’s fair enough – they are pretty much all descended from German and Polish immigrants. This also gives us one idea as to why it is happening:
A team of geneticists have been working with the community for a number of years, sampling DNA and learning about families, in an effort to solve the mystery.
A reasonable explanation of the why being that those immigrants generally came from an area where the twin rate is high already. And it’s a known phenomenon that such genetic attributes can be sharpened in a small population. So, that’s that then.
However, there’s a more prosaic explanation available which is that it was going to happen somewhere. The normal rate of twins is about 0.5% of all pregnancies. That rises a bit in certain communities. And all such occurrences are going to be distributed on a Bell or normal curve. Like with height or intelligence, similarly genetically determined things. The twinning rate here is that 10%, about 20 times that in the general population. But then there are 2.5 million or so towns and cities around the world. That’s a large enough number that we would be surprised if one of them didn’t have 20 times the twinning rate.
So, while we can search for the specific answer the general answer is that somewhere was going to do this and it just turns out to be this place in Brazil.
Posted: 17th, September 2018 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Middle-class drinkers should ignore advice on safe alcohol limits
Shocking to learn that the middle-classes take more drink and drugs than the poor. The Mail calls the report by the Social Metric Commission a “landmark” finding. Having discovered that people with more money and leisure time use more mind-altering substances than those with less money, we wonder what else the Mail has revealed?
In 2016, the Mail told readers: “Middle-class drinkers can get away with drinking MORE because their otherwise healthy lifestyles make up for it.” Adding: “Wealthier drinkers are less likely to smoke, be overweight and have a poor diet – traits more associated with the lower-income demographic.” Today Ian Duncan Smith, the Tory MP, says: “Part of impoverished adults drinking less is that they do not have the cash to spend on it.” The other part being, presumably, that huge taxes on drink affect the poor more than the wealthy. He doesn’t mention that. He also doesn’t mention why politicians of all stripes want to clamp down on cheap booze with minimum pricing (see: sin tax for people seen as too poor, too thick and too dependent to know what’s best for ’em). But he does say: “This is not in the report but my own experience is that where people are drinking or taking drugs in poverty, it is at a very serious addictive levels. For the middle-classes, they are holding down a job and doing what’s expected of them.” Which is to say: paying more taxes.
But the overriding message is that drinking in excess of the Government’s stated limits does you no harm at all. Indeed, in 2007, an insider said that the recommended weekly limit of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women decreed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1987 was a guess. Former panel member Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, revealed to the Times: “So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”
The Mail‘s readerships is very much middle-class. But having told the middle-classes that drinking more makes no impact on their health, the Mail also says that it is a huge problem for the kind of so-and-sos who say ‘wine ‘o’clock’:
The talk is of “problem” drinking. The middle-class “culture of drinking at home is driving the problem”. And you can narrow it down still further to educated women:
It’s hard to work out what the point of all this bilge is. Perhaps it’s just a prelude to tax rises, moves to hike the price of booze for our own good – even if it it’s not doing the biggest payers any harm.
Posted: 17th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids, The Consumer | Comment
Madeleine McCann: a bride of Christ, an old story and grief recast as a mental health issue
No word on Madeleine McCann in any of today’s printed tabloids. But there is is news on the web. Following the non-news that the Met might or might not seek money to continue Operation Grange, the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, the Express online delivers: “Madeleine McCann’s father reveals mental health battle in HEARTBREAKING interview.” As ever it was, the Press are watching the parents.
Madeleine McCann’s father will speak about the grief and depression he faced over losing his daughter in a heartbreaking interview on Radio 4, in a bid to remove the prejudice men face when talking about their feelings.
What prejudice? No TV or radio show is complete without a man crying, whether it be over a DNA test on mid-morning telly or a well-baked cake on prime time. “I decided it was a good opportunity to say something about the special bond between fathers and daughters,” says Gerry McCann, “thinking that speaking openly might help other men in similar positions. It feels like the right time.” Fir enough. But isn’t there is a special bond between men and their children, regardless of gender. The sane can surely sympathise with parent whose lost a child, but why is this news? Someone from the BBC explains:
“We look at Gerry’s experiences, his thoughts and feelings, and the wider context in society of mental health issues surrounding a loss. Susan Roberts, our producer, has already interviewed Gerry over the past few weeks, it has been recorded and we are now doing the final edit. It’s very emotional and helps get across the point of view of mental illness associated with a loss or bereavement of a family member or friend, that there is no stigma in men opening up and discussing emotions with someone is important. In our show there is a parallel between the poem of a father’s loss and the real life experience, reflecting the two.”
Eh? Grief and loss is now a form of mental illness? It’s not a human reaction to loss. It’s a treatable condition. As for the tosh about men not emoting and expressing themselves, how may poems has the producer ever read? What about books, films, music and art? Did women write them all? As for facts about the missing child, we’re told: “There have been 8,685 potential sightings of Madeleine in 101 countries, but all of them have been ruled out.”
Over in the Mail, where the BBC press release is an “exclusive”, we learn:
He will be interviewed by poet Simon Armitage on a special Radio 4 show: Pearl: Two Fathers Two Daughters. The show will weave together two voices of grief: Mr McCann’s and that of an anonymous poet from 600 years ago who laments the loss of his daughter in a poem entitled Pearl.
Mr Armitage, who wrote a poem to mark the 1,000 days of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, has written a new translation of Pearl. We don’t know who wrote the original version about the loss of a child and her father’s pain. The New Yorker reviewed the poem steeped in New Testament imagery and numerology in 2016. In one scene her father sees his lost daughter as the bride of Christ:
In the poem, the narrator visits the spot where a pearl once slipped from his grasp and got lost among “Gilofre, gyngure, & gromylyoune, / & pyonys powdered ay bytwene” (“ginger, gromwell, and gillyflower / with peonies scattered in between”). Swooning into unconsciousness, he comes to in a dream, in a place he has never been before, where cliffs split the sky (“ther klyfez cleven”). Across a river, he sees his pearl again, but now the “perle” is no mere thing—she is a young girl, richly arrayed in an elaborate outfit covered in pearls. Pearl also seems to be her name, or at least it is how the man addresses her: “ ‘O perle,’ quod I . . . ‘Art thou my perle?’ ” In reply, she calls him a jeweller, and he refers to her as a gem (“ ‘Jueler,’ sayde that gemme clene”).
Overcome with joy at finding his lost pearl, and unable fully to understand the complicated things she says to him, the dreamer plunges into the river to swim toward her. He is desperate to “swymme the remnaunt, thagh I ther swalte”—to swim across, or die trying. This angers the ruler of the celestial land, called the Prince: the dreamer does not belong there. He is flung out of his dream as punishment. He wakes up, and the poem ends with a short meditation on the glory of God, and then the words “Amen. Amen.”
The child in Pearl is dead. We do not know what happened to Madeleine McCann, save for her vanishing.
On a final note the Mail tells us:
The doctor’s new-found openness to help others cope with loss comes after Prince Harry, now Duke of Sussex, spoke about his struggles with mental health in a groundbreaking podcast interview on May 2017 with the Daily Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon for her revered ‘Mad World’ series. The young royal spoke openly about bottling up his emotions and being unable to grieve for years after the loss of his mother Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997.
From Princess Diana to Madeleine McCann. When private grief became celebrity mourning.
Posted: 17th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann, News | Comment
Police investigators need to be whiter than white in deciding if ‘whiter than white is racist’
Is “whiter than white” racist? Moreover, does saying “whiter than white” make you a racist? A senior Scotland Yard policeman who used the phrase “whiter than white” in an internal briefing to colleagues is being investigated. Surprisingly, the copper was not being sarcastic when he said police carrying out inquiries needed to be “whiter than white”. He did not tap his nose. But someone didn’t like it. They complained to the Met. And the Met being scalding hot on all kinds of thought crimes, passed it onto the police watchdog for investigation.
The senior copper is now on restricted duties while the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigates the matter. It can take anything up to 12 months. They should then investigate why Star Wars baddies are on the ‘Dark Side’, how Labour “whitewashed” it’s antisemitism and how Snow White was a bigot.
The IOPC states: “I can confirm that as part of Operation Embley into allegations of serious corruption and malpractice within the Directorate of Professional Standards a notice of investigation has been served on an officer informing them we are investigating the alleged use of language deliberately intended to offend and that had racist undertones. A notice is issued to inform an officer at the earliest opportunity following an allegation and to safeguard their interests. It in no way indicates that misconduct proceedings will take place.”
Operation Embley is being called the “largest police corruption inquiry since Operation Countryman in the late 1970s”, which wanted it so that the Met “catches more crooks than it employs”.
The Times explains:
Three Met whistleblowers have approached the IOPC to allege that the unit, known as the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), has shielded police officers who faced allegations of child abuse, grooming, fraud, physical assault, racism — and, in the case of one police officer, intentionally driving a motorcycle into a member of the public.
Senior Met sources said the DPS had long been suspected of covering up corruption in an attempt to protect colleagues and prevent reputational damage to the force.
The investigation, codenamed Operation Embley, will attempt to bring successful prosecutions in the murkiest area of policing, popularised in the BBC drama Line of Duty.
If we trust no-one and everyone is a suspect, are we pulling up an armchair and wondering why the “whiter than white” case is news now, when the investigation began in June? Is the aim to present us with the most absurd case and thereby ridicule the whole thing? If it is like Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty, whose writing the script..?
Millfield boys suspended for thrashing boys’ naked bottoms with a cricket bat
Is this why so many top cricketers have been to public school: they’re taught them to keep their eye on the balls from an early age? To Millfield school in Somerset, where two pupils have been suspended, accused of hitting younger boys in the boarding houses about their bare bottoms with a cricket bat and a belt. Teachers no longer engage in six-o-the-best caning. But many were sad to see the practice go, including, as is alleged, some of the student body.
Erica Charles, a mother of three sons from Berkshire, has removed one of her sons, Tok, just a week after he started at Millfield this month. “If this was a teenager who beat another with a bat on the streets of London,” she says “he would be heading for borstal. These are not rituals wealthy boys have to go through in boarding schools to become men. These are damaging and violent experiences.”
And the beating?
Tok allegedly recorded the assault. The Sunday Times, which has heard the recording, says the lads were offered a “choice”: “two lashes on the [boxer] shorts” or “one on the bare backside”. Tok is worried about being seen as a grass. So he left, and his mum and dad spoke to the papers.
“The door was closed in each year-10 bedroom, and several boys from older years crowded into the room to watch. One of the victims said he couldn’t sleep until 2am and another woke up with blood on his sheets. It seems to have been some sort of ‘initiation’ ceremony into the boarding house. Out of 12 year 10s, we believe nine were whipped, with three new boys left out [Tok was one of them].”
According to the school’s website, Millfield “has gained an international reputation for sport”, including, as is alleged, some blood sports.
PS: The school’s response: ‘thank **** it’s not about the drugs and what really goes on.’ No, only joking:
PPS: As for the sporting element to this story, Millfield was created in 1935 by Jack Meyer, a former Somerset cricketer. In the school’s early says, legends has it that pupils were admitted if they could catch a cricket ball thrown at them from behind his desk. Millfield is a school more tuned to brawn than brains.
Jeremy Corbyn sells Jews a dog covered in feathers
Just bought a new dog. It quacks a lot, waddles and is scared silly of pancakes and plum sauce. A Jewish neighbour popped over and said my dog was a duck. But the man at Jeremy Corbyn Dogs assured me it is a pedigree hound. And if Corbyn says the feathery quaker is a dog, it’s good enough for me. Which brings me to what else Corbyn says, chiefly that he’s not an antisemite and is, moreover, a “militant” enemy of Jew hatred. He knows what antisemitism is better than Jews. And there isn’t any in his Labour Party.
Some will debate this, of course. But they cannot see that anti-Semitism is a mere distraction. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told a fringe event at the TUC conference that the weird accident of Corbyn finding himself stood alongside Holocaust deniers, Jew killers and Jew haters, gaining endorsements from Nick Griffin and David Duke, and his inability to notice that a massive mural he liked depicting hooked-nosed bankers sat on the backs of their myriad victims was anti-Semitic could be parts of an Israeli plot to smear the Labour leader. As Serwotka said: “One of the best forms of trying to hide from the atrocities that you are committing is to go on the offensive and actually create a story that does not exist for people on this platform, the trade union movement or, I have to say, for the leader of the Labour Party.” Not content with running the media and the banks, and embodying Nazism, those Jews are now after the moraliser-in-chief: Jeremy Corbyn.
Vote Jez, then! You’d be quackers to let the bigots win!
But author Howard Jacobson thinks “Jeremy Corbyn is Unfit to be Prime Minister”. This is the speech he gave to the debate organised by Intelligence Squared.
Something tells me you’re expecting me to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite. There’s been a bit about it in the press, and I… well, you know…
But I’m not going to call him anything. He says he isn’t an antisemite, Hamas says he isn’t an antisemite, the white supremacist David Duke says he isn’t an antisemite, and that’s good enough for me.
Am I being ironical? Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m incapable of irony.
We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken. Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn’t. Whether that’s because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say. And – and – he doesn’t deny the Holocaust…
Mind you, he knows a man who does. In fact he knows a surprising number of men who do. That he denies ever having been in their company – until photographs turn up of him rubbing noses with them at the gravesides of mass murderers, offering to show them his belief systems if they’ll show him theirs – ‘Gosh, they’re the same size!’ – should come as no surprise. You can’t spend your whole life in the company of blood-libellers and holocaust-deniers and expect to remember them all by name.
If I may quote from Oscar Wilde’s missing play The Self-Importance of Being Jeremy- ‘To associate with one antisemite you don’t know to be antisemitic, Mr Corbyn, may be regarded as a misfortune, to associate with antisemites on a regular basis looks like a predilection.’
Look – when I think of the scoundrels I’ve hung around with, I know how easy it is to get people wrong, even when they turn up to meet you wearing hoods and holding burning crosses. And Jeremy – is it OK if I call him Jeremy? – has never exactly been what you’d call observant.
Take that mural he championed, showing bankers playing Monopoly on the naked backs of the world’s oppressed. You and I, ladies and gentlemen, would look at those greedy, grasping, hooked-nosed, syphilitic, Zionistic financiers and recognize them at once as straight out of the Julius Streicher I-SPY BOOK OF JEWS. But so innocent of antisemitic caricature is Jeremy, that he didn’t see anything remotely offensive. “I didn’t look closely,” he explained later. How many times does he have to say it, for God’s sake! I might have been there but I don’t think I wasinvolved. I don’t remember… I didn’t look closely….
If this reminds you of those who lived downwind of the chimneys of Bergen Belsen claiming never to have smelt anything out of the ordinary, I say you have suspicious natures. Corbyn is a busy man. Busy men must take emotional shortcuts. There’s an image of a bloodsucking Jew. It’s identical to the image of the bloodsucking Jew I already carry in my head. Snap!
Could there, I wonder, be such a thing as an inadvertent antisemite? Jeremy claims to be a peace-maker. A peace-maker brings warring parties together. Why then do we only ever see him taking Palestinians to tea? Could it be that he just can’t remember to ask the Israelis? “Oh, bugger, I’ve forgotten to invite the Jews again.”
Unless – perish the thought – it isn’t peace he wants after all, but the triumph of those he calls comrades and the destruction of those he doesn’t.
According to his supporters, Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. Just a question, but what is racist bone and how do you know whether another person has one? There are 64 bones in the human arm alone. Can one be absolutely certain that Jeremy doesn’t feel even the tiniest twinge of bone ache, somewhere between the scapula and the humerus, when he sees an alien figure such as I am, coming towards him on Islington Green, carrying the collected speeches of Benjamin Disraeli and humming My Yiddishe Mama?
And what are we to make – speaking of Corbyn’s unconscious – of his inability ever to disavow antisemitism without reminding us of his lifelong opposition to all forms of racism? Which is like answering the question ‘Are you a wife-beater?’ with an assurance that you always buy The Big Issue.
Because antisemitism isn’t quite a racism. It’s closer to a superstition: embedded in theology, shrouded in medieval irrationality, updated to suit leftist economics, and exhumed whenever a single explanation for all the evils of the world is sought. To talk of antisemitism as a racism is a contradiction in terms for Jeremy Corbyn, since in his eyes Jews are neither downtrodden nor exploited but are – as usurers, colonialists and conspirators – the very source and fount of racism themselves. Once hold Jews to be racist, and Zionism a racist endeavour, then no antisemite can ever be a racist himself. And any definition that says otherwise must be amended.
That’s the psychology: now the science. Corbyn’s political life has been determined by Newton’s First Law of Inertia which states that an object at rest will stay at rest, forever, as long as nothing pushes or pulls on it. In physics the something that might push or pull at it is another object in motion; in socialist politics it is a view contradictory to your own. Corbyn averts his face whenever he hears the word Jew, and rolls his eyes whenever he is asked a question, because he fears the chaos, otherwise known as a change of mind, that might ensue from accepting there’s another way of looking at the world.
I will spend my remaining seconds – I don’t mean in life, I mean of this speech – telling you why it matters to everyone, not just Jews, that a man so spiteful, sanctimonious and obdurate should never be allowed to do to the country what he’s been doing to his party.
Those who revere Corbyn see it as a virtue that he has never changed his views. Mr Chairman, it is only a virtue to stay faithful to one’s views if those views are worth staying faithful to.
To persist in a small erroneousness is the mark of a fool. To persist in a great erroneousness is the mark of a dangerous fool. The ideology in which Corbyn has been pickled for half a century was outworn by the time it reached him. It oversaw the death of millions. That the ideologies he opposes have scarcely done any better is not an argument for his. You don’t have to love the West to refuse the embraces of those whose sole ambition is to blow the West apart … especially if you want to call yourself a pacifist.
This should have been a golden summer for Labour. The nightmare that is Brexit, the hell that is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the out-of-season pantomime that is Boris Johnson – from all these Labour ought to have delivered us. But Corbyn did as much as anyone to make Brexit happen with his feeble non-support for Remaining – “I’m seven, erm, seven-and-a-half per cent in favour.”
That was one to get us to the barricades. The wrong man – ladies and gentlemen – the wrong man at the wrong time espousing the wrong causes.
I am nothing if not fair: people who are limited in everything but the pleasure they take in themselves are ten a penny in all political parties; they haunt the peripheries, like ghosts-of-the-Christmases-they-don’t-believe-in-past, backing losing causes, throwing tea parties for murderers, and looking saintly. Mr Corbyn’s misfortune was to be lifted from those peripheries, and dumped haplessly in the centre.
Not just for our sake but for his, will someone please have pity and dump him back.
Or maybe you’re going to vote for Corbyn, reason that Jew hatred is no big deal. Really..? You’re going to do that?
Posted: 14th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Madeleine McCann: Could, May and Perhaps rejoin the hunt
Madeleine McCann is back in the news. And it’s all abut the money.
The Metro tells us that the “hunt for Maddie McCann has cost £11600000 so far”. Not quite. That’s what Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange has cost. The Met’s investigation into the vanishing of Madeleine McCann began in 2011. Before that Portuguese police were investigating the case of the British child who went missing on the Algarve in 2007. That wasn’t without cost. And there was the private investigation funded by well-wishers and run by Madeleine McCann’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann. The headline figure is wrong. But, then, the story isn’t about the missing child; it’s about us and if British readers can turn her into a talking point. Is she worth it?
The Metro oozes: “Speculation is growing into whether UK police will stop the hunt when the funding ends as no request for more cash has yet been made.” Who is speculating? Hopefully you are. And hopefully tomorrow you’ll tune in for an update on the single thread story spun out of control by a voracious media.
No news on the money means the story has been kickstarted as far afield as New Zealand, where the Herald announces: “Hunt for Madeleine McCann may end within three weeks.” When the word “may” appears in a headline you know your story is in trouble. But she was spotted “in a New Zealand supermarket”, so maybe the story is local to New Zealand after all?
She’s also been spotted in:
Canada,Italy, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Majorca,Belgium, Bosnia, France, Australia, Brazil,Wales, Malta, Italy, Germany, Australia, France, India, Dubai, Dorset, USA and New Zealand (by boat).
In the Daily Record, readers are told: ‘Kate and Gerry McCann have vowed “the search will go on” for their missing girl amid reports police could shelve their hunt.’ Could. Or could not. An unnamed source tells us:
“They will never stop looking for Madeleine or hoping that one day she will be found. More than 11 years on there is still no evidence to suggest that she is dead or has been harmed. If the police search comes to an end, there are other avenues to explore. They have carefully managed the money in Madeleine’s Fund for that eventuality. Whether they choose to employ private investigators or go down another route is something for them to decide.”
To recap: There is no news.
Posted: 13th, September 2018 | In: Madeleine McCann, News, Tabloids | Comment
Madeleine McCann: more police, more PR and more money or else
Stories on Madeleine McCann stories can be divided into two files. There’a huge fat as a skyscraper file marked “Speculation”. And there’s another very slim file marked “Facts”. In this second file are two sections: a) ‘All We Know’ – which can be distilled into the single thread ‘child vanishes; and b) ‘Fees’. Today’s Star leads with news that “MADDIE COPS” are ‘demanding’ more cash in their hunt for the missing child. That police want money is less surprising than a puppy sat beside a pile of poo, but to the Star news that the police would like more cash (not less -shocker!) is a “reveal” – one right up with the reveal that Sooty did not grow Harry Corbett out of his arse.
We read the usual facts: the Met Police’s investigation into Madeleine McCann has cost “the taxpayer” £11m. We’re hard-pressed to think of any police investigation not funded by taxpayers, but the fact remains unchanged. The story continues on Page 9, where we are told “WE CANT GIVE UP NOW”. If not now, when? NEVER! Not until the mystery is solved. A spokesman for the police says “the investigation continues and we are in dialogue with the Home Office over more funding.”
Back on page 6, Miss McCann is the lead concern in the Star’s editorial column. Point one: does she still sell papers? Point 2: “Police must be given more funds in their search or Madeleine McCann.” Which brings us back to point one, which must be a big ‘YES’ or at least ‘Maddie outsells Brexit’. The paper reasons that the Met’s investigation has found “no definitive answers”. Isn’t an undefined answer just a guess? We are then invited to emphasise with Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann. The editorial ends: “Someone out there knows what happened to Madeleine and they must be tracked down.” Unless she wandered off and fell down a hole. Can anyone prove that she didn’t?
The only other national newspaper to deliver news on Madeleine McCann is the Express, which tells readers on page 7: “McCanns vow to keep hope alive as Madeleine hunt set to run out of cash.” The parents not the child are the story’s central thrust. They face the “daunting” prospect that the Met’s Operation Grange will end in three weeks – the last tranche of cash is said to run out on September 30. As readers try to work out why this is news – the Home Office tells the Star police have yet to appeal for any more cash – the Express quotes one Clarence Mitchell, the McCann’s spokesman. He talks about the money, which is “entirely” a matter for the Met and the Home office. He then says “Kate and Gerry will not be making any comment”. But he might. As might an unnamed “source” who says the investigation running out of cash is a “daunting prospect”.
Madeleine McCann is missing – and there is no news. There are no suspects. If you think you know what happened to her, don’t guess here. Call the police.
Posted: 12th, September 2018 | In: Madeleine McCann, News, Tabloids | Comment
Labour: When is it right to vandalize a Holocaust memorial?
When is it right to vandalize a Holocaust memorial? Having debated the meaning of anti-semitism and if calling Jews ‘Nazis’ is righteous, Labour Party delegates will most likely be debating Jews and the Holocaust when Ewa Jasiewicz, 40, addresses a meeting of pro-Corbyn group Momentum at this year’s Labour Party conference. She’s earmarked to speak about the future of trade unions at a festival organised alongside Labour’s AGM.
Jasiewicz is the Times‘ “Warsaw ghetto vandal”, a British anti-Israel activist who decorated the site where 92,000 Jews were corralled and killed and from where a further 300,000 were sent to death camps. In 2010 Jasiewicz and Yonatan Shapira thought it wise, considerate and fair to daub the words “Liberate all ghettos” and “Free Gaza and Palestine” on one of the Warsaw ghetto’s original walls. They are quoted as having said Israel had “co-opted” the Holocaust to serve “agendas of colonisation and repression”. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre, said the graffiti was “tainted with anti-semitism”. More condemnation follows. It is a “new low”. “This is exactly the kind of obsessive anti-Israel hatred and abuse of the Holocaust that is central to Labour’s problem of anti-semitism,” we read. A survivor of the ghetto, tells readers: “I too am critical of my government. Gaza is certainly not a likeable place. But to compare it to the Warsaw ghetto is the height of folly. I know .. I was there.” No word of support and praise for the graffiti is given. But Momentum clearly has no problem with it.
One day on and the Times has more Ewa Jasiewicz news: ‘In 2002 she called for “activists” to “do” the Israeli parliament or “a sophisticated politician bump-off” rather than targeting Israeli civilians. At the time Ms Jasiewicz was living in Jenin, in the West Bank.”
In a 2,700-word dispatch at the height of the second intifada, Ms Jasiewicz wrote that the son of the family she was staying with “went and opened fire on some Israeli civilians in a market somewhere a few months ago”, adding: “I don’t get why activists can’t go and do the Knesset [Israeli parliament] or something, or do a sophisticated politician bump-off like the PFLP?”
Ms Jasiewicz says her remarks were made “in a private email which ended up being published on the PalSolidarity website in 2002 as was the case at times with emailed reports on Israeli occupation activity back then”. Private emails are private. She calls her remarks “flippant”. And that’s an important thing: if you can’t say stupid, ugly things in private, when can you say them? She adds: “I do not and never have, advocated the harming of anybody and this was definitely not the intention of the comment in the email. I apologise for any harm or upset this has caused and I ask people to understand it in the context that it was written, both as a flippant comment in a private email and under conditions of a violent occupation.”
So how did the other big newspapers cover this story? The Guardian: not a word. Daily Telegraph: zippo. Daily Mail: nada. Is it because Ewa Jasiewicz doesn’t matter, her being just another social justice warrior with a media profile? One Times columnist offers a reason:
Where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour differs from almost all other major parties is that it now has supporters instead of spokesmen. The latter are diminishing, shrinking, dissolving away… The trouble, at least for Labour, is that their rise coincides with the near absolute evaporation of anybody else who might appear in public and make a coherent, Corbyn-friendly case about almost anything.
Which reminds me: anyone seen Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary? What is her view on Israel? Or is she just hoping nobody will have time to ask her if enough cheap to hire, mouthy and monocular pundits who aren’t standing to election can fill the media with their to-deadline chatter? that question to you, Owen Jonezzzzzzz…
Posted: 11th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
