News Category
Japan: woman ordered to stop saving man’s life and leave the ‘holy’ sumo ring
To Japan, where Kyoto Mayor Ryozo Tatami is addressing a crowd from the sumo ring. Lumme! He’s only gone and keeled over. It looks a lot like a subarachnoid hemorrhage. People dash to help. A woman administers CPR. But hold on. The sumo announcer has hold of the mic. “Ladies, please leave the dojo,” he orders. Better that the man die than some female sully the sacred canvas.
The Asahi Shimbun explains:
At least two women climbed into the dohyo and administered cardiac massage to Tatami. During the emergency, the women were ordered to leave at least three times in announcements made over the public address system.
The gyoji also said, “Gentlemen, please climb up (to the dohyo),” according to municipal government sources and others.
The Japan Sumo Association chairman says the referee failed to understand the rule about human life being more sacred than a roped-off mat, offering: We would like to offer a profound apology. This instruction was inappropriate under such life-and-death circumstances. The gyoji did it because he was upset.” Yeah, by the presence of a woman.
The mayor is now “conscious and talking”. The rest of us are speechless.
Posted: 5th, April 2018 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Raheem Sterling v The Sun: Manchester City and England star attacked
Manchester City and England forward Raheem Sterling is “obscene”. Well, so the Sun told us. The same paper wants us to know: “RAHEEM STERLING has urged England fans to ‘give love’ and cut out the negativity.” England fans, like, the Sun?
The plea for unity continues: “The Manchester City star was battered by Three Lions fans at Euro 2016 – there was even an internet hate campaign to bring him home early from the tournament.” And it wasn’t just on the Internet where the former Liverpool player was getting attacked.
To the Sun, Raheem Sterling was a”hate figure”. The paper went studs up on the young athlete. “England failure steps off plane and insults fans by showing off blinging house,” thundered the paper.” Leave House & Garden and Hello! stuff for the newspaper editors end media barons, Sterling. Know thy place! And unnamed “source” opined: “Any normal person would hang their heads in shame after how they performed in France but these guys come home and show off about how rich they are.” He’s abnormal.
A “friend of Sterling” told the MEN newspaper:
“Raheem and his family are really upset that the fact he’s bought a nice house for his mum is being used to hammer him by the media and make him the scapegoat for England’s failure… He bought her the house as a thank you for all her support and help. Now to have his mum’s private life and house being mocked and thrown into the public spotlight has left him furious and frustrated.”
Law-abiding, tough, resilient, hard-working, talented athlete buys mum hard times who knew house. The basta…
And it got worse. Much worse. In 2016, the Sun – yep – told readers:
FOOTIE DRUG DEALER Semi-professional footballer turned to drug dealing so he could match the salaries of Prem stars
Which Premier League star do you think the Sun used to illustrate the story of an idiot, who lives in Bristol? We’ll give you a clue: the player is not mentioned once in the story. Yep, it’s Raheem Sterling.
Spot the obscenity
What is it about Raheem Sterling that annoys them so?
Here’s what Sterling told BBC Radio 5 Live:
“I feel sometimes there is too much negativity. I’d love to hear some positive notes coming in, just to let the boys know everyone is behind them. Make the boys go off to the World Cup with a clear head knowing everyone is behind them and, trust me, you would see a better England. If we get behind those players, give them love, you wouldn’t know how much that would boost their confidence. It’s disappointing when you put on a shirt and get negative feedback but it’s what the fans want — to see you perform well.”
He’s right.
Posted: 3rd, April 2018 | In: Back pages, Key Posts, Manchester City, News, Sports, Tabloids | Comment
Stoke City’s Xherdan Shaqiri blames his team-mates for relegation woes
With relegation looming, Stoke City need a galvanising force to stir team. Stoke are currently 19th in Premier League. They are circling the Premier League plug hole. So step forward, Stoke’s Swiss international Xherdan Shaqiri to tell his team-amter how rubbish they are. The 26-year-old (!) attacking midfielder told Swiss magazine Sport:
The feeling that even a Ronaldinho could do little in this team is sobering.
I had to realise that it’s a bit different when you have players like (Franck) Ribery and Thiago (Alcantara) at Bayern or (Mauro) Icardi and (Mateo) Kovacic at Inter.
Here at Stoke I can not exert too much influence, simply because there is a lack of quality around me.
I can not just Löffel verwerfen (down tools) but it would take something extreme for Stoke in the transfer market this summer to revive my enthusiasm.
It’s not me. It’s them. What a great bloke.
Some stats on the player’s PL season to date:
Matches played: 29
Goals: 7
Shooting accuracy: 47%
Big chances missed: 2
Passes Per Match: 29.93
Duels Won: 93
Duels Lost: 124
Aerial Battles Won: 5
Aerial Battles Lost: 14
Shaqiri the Legend – the movie will be great.
Ray Wilkins: Chelsea to the core
Ray Wilkins, the former England captain who played for Manchester United, AC Milan, Paris Saint Germain, Ranger, QPR, Crystal Palace and Chelsea (debut at 17 and club captain a year later; assistant manager at Chelsea under no fewer than four different managers; two terms as caretaker manager), is unwell. Wilkins is in a London hospital. He is critically ill. His wife says things are “very bad” with the 61-year-old.
‘Butch’ Wilkins, a media mainstay, has been a favourite ever since when he explained his love for football as being payed to do his hobby.
Until his sacking in 2013, Wilkins represented continuity at Chelsea, a rare quality for club that treat staff as sundries.
And not forgetting this:
Get well soon, Ray.
Posted: 31st, March 2018 | In: Chelsea, News, Sports | Comment
Indy journalist on anti-Semitism: ‘Why do some groups have so much power’?
Have we forgotten about the Holocaust? You might think it’d be hard to. It’s taught in schools and there are some movies entertaining enough to keep industrial mass murder palpable, even humorous. But the mood has changed. The oldest story is back. Antisemitism is rife and mainstream.
Why?
Well, in The Spectator, Alistair Thomas outlines why Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party excuses alleged Holocaust denial, gives a safe space for members to deny and downplay “the reality of anti-Semitism” (the words of Christine Shawcroft, the head of the Labour Party’s disputes panel in her resignation apology for opposing the suspension of a council candidate accused of Holocaust denial); and can have in its ranks MP for Bradford West, Naz Shah, who a year before she won her Commons seat shared an image of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the US below the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict – relocate Israel into United States”, with the comment “problem solved”, compared Israel to the Nazis and stated “the Jews are rallying” – she said sorry and left her post as – get this – John McDonnell’s parliamentary private secretary. How does someone with such abhorrent views rise to high in Corbyn’s Labour? And there’s the mural, the Facebook Posts about “powerful” Jews and Corbyn’s “friends“. And Ken Livingstone. And… And…
For anyone unsure what anti-Semitism looks like, Andrew Neil has provided this handy guide:
“That, dear viewer, is anti-Semitism. At its deadliest and most depraved. Which is how it always ends up. Which is why it can’t be tolerated. Those still in doubt need to educate themselves. Fast.” @afneil opening #bbctwpic.twitter.com/MFi7pYorkB
— BBC This Week (@bbcthisweek) March 29, 2018
Thomas writes:
…for Corbynites of my age (early twenties), the whole issue remains just another attempt to delegitimise Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister. That’s why Twitter accounts were awash with the hashtag #PredictTheNextCorbynSmear, which mocked all accusations of anti–Semitism. It demonstrates the Corbyn faithful’s remarkable capacity for indifference…
It’s all a conspiracy. And like any good conspiracy, it feature the Jews. You can read all about it on The Protocols of the Elders of Facebook.
They’ve all studied the second world war at school; they know how much Jews suffered and how dangerous discrimination is. Surely they must have a problem with that blatantly anti-Semitic mural that Corbyn himself had endorsed?..
They find Israel, as a country, guilty of all kinds of crimes, and regard Jews, anywhere, as Zionist sympathisers. Within the far left, the de facto position is one of hostility and distrust, not just towards Zionists but towards Jewish communities wherever they are. This attitude infects the whole party, even my friends.
“Jews for Jez” – with a yellow star, to boot. These are Labour’s ‘Good Jews’.
Just Labour under Corbyn? The Labour Party supporting New Statesman had a question that might have been rhetorical.
The Jew can be a good Jew or a bad Jew. But being a Jew is what defines you totally. Jews are traduced and homogenised. Howard Jacobson understands, of course:
Christianity is key here…. Christianity’s had to leave [Judaism] behind, so it’s had to hate it, it’s had to say, we are not that, we are not that anymore, and then to say we were never that – so that’s a necessary hatred. And then out of that grew a sense of the possibility that all cultures have to have someone to hate. Not just a scapegoat. It’s more essential than that. Who am I, what am I? I am not that. To the degree you know that, you know who you are.
Today on Good Friday many Christians will utter their Prayer for the Jews. The third of the Solemn Collects in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England is as follows:
O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of any sinner, but rather that he be converted and live; Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Catholic Church’s Prayer for the Jews has been changed a little. This is the 1955 version (via):
Let us pray also for the faithless Jews: that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. (‘Amen’ is not responded, nor is said ‘Let us pray’, or ‘Let us kneel’, or ‘Arise’, but immediately is said:) Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The bigotry never vanished. The Jews continue to define what the righteous reject. And once again anti-Semitism is to the fore.
These are worrying times to be a British Jew. If you would not excuse any other form of racism, don’t excuse anti-Semitism.
Lead image:
This is a mainstream journalist. She doesn’t write for some obscure blog with Pepe the Frog in the comment threads. She has bylines at The Independent (https://t.co/GfKUwsrDKd). pic.twitter.com/PMPZ2y1zic
— Stephen Daisley (@JournoStephen) March 30, 2018
In response to her tweet the writer who, as Stephen Daisley notes, contributes to the Indy added on Twitter (before blocking us):
A response to the tweets.
Vote now and vote often.
Posted: 31st, March 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Superdrug’s racism – CCTV cameras on black hair products
The latest claim of racism is that Superdrug has, in a very racist manner indeed, put more CCTV cameras onto the section selling black hair products than onto that selling shampoos etc. for pinkish people. The claim is that this is an assumption by the company, that black people are more likely to shoplift. There’s something of a problem with this assumption. What if it is more likely that black hair products are stolen?
This is the old correlation is not causation point writ small. Yes, it’s entirely true that greater surveillance of the black products could be a racist assumption. But it’s also possible that such products are stolen more often. Just the observation of the correlation isn’t enough to tell us which way around this is going.
Superdrug has become embroiled in a racism row after apologising over claims it placed double the number of CCTV monitoring signs by black hair products.
Customer Xavy Wright complained that she saw twice the number of warnings at the store in Brighton compared to the rest of the aisle, which she claimed implied black people are more likely to steal.
We could certainly construct an argument to explain why more stealing is possible. Theft is, as some would tell us, driven by poverty. Black incomes are lower in the UK than those for pink people. We could, if we thought that poverty drives crime, therefore assume, reasonably enough, that there would be more lifting of such black products.
We might also recall back to the last time this was alleged, then it was cans of a Jamaican food – from memory, ackee – which were more protected than other goods from such theft.
I don’t say that’s a correct argument, only that it is internally logical and not racist at all – it’s the impositions of a racist society in the form of those lower incomes causing it.
Fortunately we don’t have to speculate fact free. For the stores will have excellent information – they do track this sort of stuff – on what does get stolen. And they’ll deploy their anti-stealing resources in the most cost effective manner. That we’re seeing the signs, perhaps the tags, on certain products is our evidence that those are those being stolen.
We are still all at sea over why those are the ones being stolen but it’s not racism to point out features of reality. That product x gets stolen more than product y is no more racism than is remarking upon the distinct lack of pink people in Olympic 100 metres finals. It just is.
Jeremy Corbyn supporters call anti-Semitism protest the work of a ‘very powerful special interest group’
How goes the Labour Party’s response to accusations of anti-Semitism in the ranks? Party leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted to “pockets of anti-Semitism” within the Labour Party. He then went on to talk of “newer forms of anti-Semitism… woven into criticism of Israeli governments… Criticism of Israel, particularly in relation to the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people, cannot be avoided. Nevertheless, comparing Israel or the actions of Israeli governments to the Nazis, attributing criticisms of Israel to Jewish characteristics or to Jewish people in general and using abusive phraseology about supporters of Israel such as ‘Zio’ all constitute aspects of contemporary anti-Semitism.”
Is the anti-Semitism really that “new“.
On Facebook, around 2.000 users purporting to be Jeremy Corbyn supporters have reacted to an open letter saying Monday’s Jewish-organised protest against anti-Semitism was the work of a “very powerful special interest group” wielding its “immense strength” to “employ the full might of the BBC”. The open letter posted to a open group garnered 936 comments before the admin disabled commenting, writing:
…exaggerating the influence/power of Jewish groups is a form of antisemitism. Jewish groups have the right to lobby and influence the same as other religious or ethnic groups do. You do not specify what ‘special interest groups’ you are talking about. If you are talking about groups like JLM etc, phrases like “very powerful” are totally inappropriate. I would also suggest the reason why the BBC ran the story at the top of it’s headlines all Monday is down to the Westminster clique, _not_ because of any Jewish lobby groups!
I’m turning off comments. The reason I’m not deleting this post is because screenshots are all over twitter, and keeping the post will help us get to the bottom of what’s happening here. Please do not delete it without talking to us first…
I deeply question the motives of the person that took this screenshot to score political points, rather than reporting it to us. This group has about 400 posts a day and about 10,000 comments. We are unpaid volunteers. We rely on people to report any concerns, especially when overwhelmed by a tsunami of posts from the subject being top of the news agenda.
One twitter screenshot is here:
Not everyone “endorsed” the letter as the Indy claims they did. Many who did respond have have. But, as noted, there have been dissenting voices, not least of all the group’s “admin”.
The busy We Support Jeremy Corbyn group. Screenshot: 29/03/18
The open letter on the Facebook group “We Support Jeremy Corbyn” runs:
“Yesterday we witnessed the full onslaught of a very powerful special interest group mobilising its apparent, immense strength against you.
“It is clear this group can employ the full might of the BBC to make sure its voice is heard very loudly and clearly. It is a shame not every special interest group can get the same coverage…
“But, and it is a very big BUT, we live in a democracy, a one member one vote democracy and no special interest group, regardless of their history or influence, can be allowed to dictate who the rest of us can vote for or how we vote.
“I am writing this letter to say that I support you and I trust you, more than I would trust any politician, to do the right thing in terms of racism, antisemitism, and any hate mongering from anyone against anyone.
“We know that any politician who stands for the many and not the few will have very many powerful enemies and it is expecting an awful lot of a person to put up with the pressures that are put on you. But thank you, thank you, for your inspiration and steadfastness and be sure that you still have my support.”
As said, not all reactions have been supportive of the letter – the majority have been, but not all:
“Do people not realise how how absolutely ironic it is that in response to accusations of antisemitism that people accuse people of Jewish background of backroom organising and conspiracy?”
Beneath a link to the story on the letter published by the Indy, there is talk of conspiracy:
This is the first time ive actualy seen first hand how a smear starts from actually reading the letter in question when put on the group to how they have spun it in an almost villian like way
Anyone with an iota of common sense realises the anti semitic problem is an attempt to wreck the labour party. When it has the full support of the BBC it is patently obvious that there is collusion with the tory party, as we all know it is now totally controlled by these corrupt brigades who are up to their necks in corruption. The only way you would get an honest answer from them is if they were constantly wire up to a polygraph. We must bring them to account for the sake of all of our futures. Make no mistake we are being manipulated by pure evil…
And:
Just to alert you guys. There’s a journalist mole on this group who’s shared Frances Naggs letter.
Over on the BBC, the Jewish-organised anti-Semitism protest was followed by a new revelation. We meet Christine Shawcroft, 62, head of the Labour Party’s disputes panel who has “quit after it emerged she had opposed the suspension of a council candidate accused of Holocaust denial”. The accused Labour Party member denies any wrongdoing.
Are attitudes towards Jews finally changing within Corbyn’s Labour? Will Labour finally extend its self-aggrandised and self-hymned intolerance of all racism towards its members who attack, bait and demonise Jews with calls for them to be mass deported (that was from a serving Labour MP), monstering them as a people so uniquely barbaric that Jews are not worthy of the Holocaust – which, you know, might all be big ‘fake news’, a revolting and sneaky claim which makes liars of every survivor, their families and the murdered millions? Thankfully, we live in a democracy. So you can give two fingers to racism at the next election.
Vote now and vote often!
Posted: 29th, March 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
The racist Left, ‘Jews for Jez’ and Jeremy Corbyn’s inability to spot anti-Semitism
Only around a thousand people turned up on Parliament Square to protest against anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The polite request was that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn works to expose and confront the hatred of Jewish in his party’s membership – and that he stops acquiescing to anti-Semitism. Some Labour MPs did attend. And that’s great. But only about a dozen of them bothered to make the shot walk from the Commons to the grassy roundabout.
Accompanied by chants of “enough is enough”, the crowd heard from Haringey Council leader Claire Kober, and Labour MPs John Mann, Louise Ellman and Wes Streeting, Ian Austin, Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger, who said antisemitism is “very real” and “alive in the Labour Party”. Some Conservative MPs also turned up, including Priti Sushil Patel, and cabinet ministers Sajid Javid and Penny Mordaunt.
Mr Streeting told the throng: “To those Jewish members who felt enough is enough and cut up their membership cards and walked away, our commitment to you is to work with every ounce of strength to drain the cesspit of antisemitism in the Labour Party so you can come back. We know what needs to be done. We don’t need any more mealy-mouthed statements from the leader of the Labour Party, we need actions. The actions are very simple: Ken Livingstone should not be in the Labour Party. Antisemites need to be drummed out of the Labour Party. And that whitewash of a report – the Chakrabarti Report – can we at least implement every one of those recommendations. We had a wishy-washy report, it got someone a place in the House of Lords, but let’s at least make sure its delivers a genuine fight against antisemitism in our party.”
Slippery and nuanced Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t there, of course. He never is. But he did address the Jews via a letter:
“I recognise that antisemitism has surfaced within the Labour Party, and has too often been dismissed as simply a matter of a few bad apples. This has caused pain and hurt to Jewish members of our party and to the wider Jewish community in Britain. I am sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused, and pledge to redouble my efforts to bring this anxiety to an end. I must make clear that I will never be anything other than a militant opponent of antisemitism.”
Not a single world on how he has contributed greatly to that “pain”. Not a single word from his supporters, those intolerant people who if this were a Tory or anyone else they did not like giving a big thumbs up to anti-Semitism would be demanding their resignation. They screamed in outrage when Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris said “nigger in the woodpile”. They howled for Toby Young’s removal because he’d tweeted about women’s looks and described wheelchair ramps as part of “ghastly” inclusivity in schools. They pilloried Tim Farron for his views on homosexuality (he called it a “sin”) – ubiquitous Corbyn fan Owen Jones called Farron’s comments “an absolute disgrace”.
To his supporters, Corbyn can do no wrong.
Some Corbyn fans are Jews. A small number arrived carrying signs that said “Jews for Jez”, the words written on a yellow star. If Brass Eye did protests:
“Jews for Jez” – with a yellow star, to boot. Some people, eh.
Instead of being upset by Corbyn’s links to anti-Semitism, his supporters tasked themselves with getting the hashtag #PredictTheNextCorbynSmear to trend on Twitter. Blessedly, not everyone thinks anti-Semitism is no big deal:
Nobody promoting #PredictTheNextCorbynSmear tonight (trending) can expect to be taken seriously as an opponent of anti-semitism; those doing so undermine any commitment or future effort to ensure that the Labour party does not tolerate anti-semitism.
— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) March 25, 2018
#predictthenextcorbynsmear just proves the point that people are making about Corbyn, his supporters and anti Semitism. Rather than address the issue they create a mocking hashtag that dismisses the concerns of the Jewish community & all those opposed to racism
— Eddie Marsan #FBPE (@eddiemarsan) March 25, 2018
5 stages of Corbynista:
1) Denial – It’s all Tory Smears
2) Anger – Blairites & Murdoch & the MSM are out to get him
3) Bargaining – He apologised (in a vague tweet)
4) Depression – Whatabouttery responses at the ready.
5) More anger – Create a #PredictTheNextCorbynSmear hashtag pic.twitter.com/EhN8EERQUI— Chris Rose (@ArchRose90) March 25, 2018
Corbyn did have more to say. And it, as ever, vague:
“Sometimes this evil takes familiar forms – the east London mural which has caused such understandable controversy is an example. The idea of Jewish bankers and capitalists exploiting the workers of the world is an old antisemitic conspiracy theory. This was long ago, and rightly, described as ‘the socialism of fools’. I am sorry for not having studied the content of the mural more closely before wrongly questioning its removal in 2012.”
Amazing, no, how Corbyn, a man who presents himself in public as highly sensitive to anti-Semitism can looks at the picture above and not realise its might be even a tad anti-Jewish without “study”. Is he blind to anti-Semitism or does he think it’s ok?
As Brendan O’Neill puts it: “Corbyn is in essence saying: ‘Ah, I didn’t notice the anti-Semitism.’ And that is precisely the problem. This section of the left never notices anti-Semitism. It always seems to pass them by. Or worse, they acquiesce to it in the belief that objecting to it might lose them support among some of their key bases, in particular the old left and young Muslims. I didn’t see it, they say, not realising that their failure to see anti-Semitism is the crux of the problem. It is a wilful blindness to hatred that they would treat as unforgivable in relation to any other racial or religious group.”
Anti-Semitism is a sickness. It’s been excused time and time again under Corbyn’s watch. You can look at Corbyn and his fans and ask yourself: if it looks like a duck, quack likes a duck and talks like a duck, what is it? And you can vote in the election.
Posted: 27th, March 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Steve Smith quits Australia cricket captaincy role
Smith Smith is no longer captain of the Australian cricket team. His deputy David Warner has also stepped down. Both players cheated and got found out. Smith admitted that the team’s “leadership group” had discussed a plot to tamper with the ball in the Test series against South Africa. Cameron Bancroft was caught on camera on the third day of the third Test between in Cape Town taking a yellow tape from his pocket before rubbing the ball. Aware he;d been spotted, he then stuffed the tape down his trousers.
“We had a discussion during the [lunch] break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from the rough patches on the wickets and change the condition,” said Bancroft. “It didn’t work. The umpires didn’t change the ball. Once I was sighted on the screen I panicked quite a lot and that’s why I shoved it [a piece of sticky tape] down my trousers.”
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was upset. “I am shocked and bitterly disappointed by the news from South Africa,” said Turnbull. “It seems beyond belief the Australian cricket team have been involved in cheating. Our cricketers are role models and cricket is synonymous with fair play. How can our team be engaged in cheating like this? It beggars belief.”
Role models. Haha. No. They’re not. But they are cheats.
Zlatan Ibrahimovich hails his move from Manchester United to LA Galaxy with full-page ad in LA Times newspaper
Zlatan Ibrahimovic has paid for a full-page advert in today’s LA Times newspaper to hail his arrival in the US of A. Earlier this week, Manchester United ripped up Zlatan’s contract, allowing him to sign a two-year deal with LA Galaxy. He’s still’s full of swagger, but is the 36-year-old Ibra worth it?
He might well be. With 33 top trophies in his cabinet, Ibrahimovic has aged well. Since his 30th birthday, Zlatan has scored – get his – 251 goals. Didier Drogba scored 141. Teddy Sheringham scored 124. Before turning 30, he scored 232. Ibrahimovic has scored ten or more league goals in every season from 2006/07 to 2016/17.
All hail, Zlatan, then.
Posted: 23rd, March 2018 | In: manchester united, News, Sports | Comment
Craigslist closes personal ads as internet restrictions bite
You can no longer browse the personals section of Craigslist in the US. The owners of the online classified ads site have closed personal listings in reaction to Congress’s passage of a law that makes websites accountable for users who “misuse” personal ads. A click on the “casual encounters”, “strictly platonic” or any other romance-seeking connection tabs coughs up this message from San Francisco-based Craigslist:
US Congress just passed HR 1865, “FOSTA”, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.
To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!
Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) aims to curb online sex trafficking.
Electronic Frontier Foundation opposes the bill, stating last month:
“Facing the threat of extreme criminal and civil penalties, web platforms large and small would have little choice but to silence legitimate voices. Platforms would have to take extreme measures to remove a wide range of postings, especially those related to sex.”
The fear is that only the the most moneyed platforms will survive. Forced to err on the side of caution and view users as suspects, platform owners will shut down accounts.
You can still use the personal ads on the UK site. But the impact of the new riling is spreading. Reddit has switched off a raft of its community pages. On Reddit’s r/announcements we learn:
As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including:
- Firearms, ammunition, or explosives;
- Drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances (except advertisements placed in accordance with our advertising policy);
- Paid services involving physical sexual contact;
- Stolen goods;
- Personal information;
- Falsified official documents or currency
Gizmodo notes:
In the comments of the announcement, it was further clarified that relatively benign activities like beer trades and e-cigarette giveaways are also likely to fall under the purview of this rule, which encompasses not just purchases but transactions of any sort.
So much for freedom.
Posted: 23rd, March 2018 | In: News, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Liverpool: James Milner tweets his ironing
James Milner, the Liverpool player, has tweeted a photo of himself doing a very James Miler thing: he’s ironing a T-shirt. It really is James Milner and not the famous joke Twitter account “Boring James Milner” that updates its hundreds of thousands of followers with news of him sorting his cupboards, lining up his socks and, yep, ironing.
#TBT to yesterday…. when I wasn’t on Twitter! 👋🏻 pic.twitter.com/TJy4RxHZJx
— James Milner (@JamesMilner) March 22, 2018
Looks like Milner, the super-focused footballer has a sense of humour.
He’s also a lesson in now drive and ultra-professionalism can take a player to the top of the game. Here are few words from people who’ve worked with ‘boring” James Milner:
Roy Hodgson: ”We know what James will do. James isn’t and doesn’t pretend to be as exciting as some of the wingers we sometimes use these days.”
Steven Weeks, who taught Milner at school: ”James is still exactly the same really nice, calm, quiet, totally unassuming, popular lad he was at school but I always thought that, inside, he had the sort of controlled aggression that takes people to the very top.”
Glenn Roeder: “James can seem a goody two shoes but he deserves every bit of success going. Unlike the vast majority of professional footballers he works to his maximum and extracts every last ounce of ability.”
Posted: 23rd, March 2018 | In: Liverpool, News, Sports | Comment
30 police in 7 police vans arrest a toy trumpet player in Sheffield (video)
To Sheffield, where the Labour council has drawn up a list of 17,500 trees that must be killed. The trees, say the council, are dangerous. Many people disagree. But to prevent protestors saving healthy trees from the chop are lots and lots of police – as many as 30 officers can attend a single tree being felled.
And today the madness reached new heights.
@M_caveman tweets: “Here it is. 7 police vans, a CCTV van, 2 inspectors, 20-30 police – keeping our streets safe from a toy trumpet player. Unbelievable.’
It is.
Here it is. 7 police vans, a CCTV van, 2 inspectors, 20-30 police – keeping our streets safe from a toy trumpet player.
Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/nu0cZqDmAd— M (@M_caveman) March 21, 2018
What madness.
On 3 February 2018, this statement from Sheffield City Council was intended to make sense of the lunacy:
“We welcome todays statement by South Yorkshire Police’s Assistant Chief Constable, Dave Hartley, with regards to police support around our legitimate tree replacement works on the highway.
“Whilst we respect the right to campaign and protest peacefully, some members of the campaign group are now adopting increasingly violent tactics as well as breaching a high court injunction. This is simply not acceptable.”
See: plastic trumpet.
“It is disappointing that, on so many occasions, this unnecessary division in the city has led to on site activity shifting from peaceful protest to criminal behaviour and our priority must be to ensure the safety of the public and staff who are undertaking this work in increasingly dangerous and challenging situations.
“We once again ask that people respect the law to ensure this vital work, which will enable the upgrade of the city’s roads, pavements, street lights and bridges, can continue.”
The council is replacing mature trees of diverse species – cherry trees, lime trees and elm trees – with saplings. The existing trees are baring the brunt of a £2.2 billion plan to improve the city’s roads and pavements. But local residents are happy with the trees. And you can imagine the police are happy with getting paid to watch them. So why is his madness happening?
Man disguised as a bull attempted to burn down ex-lover’s home with pasta sauce
To Florida, where the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office claims Derrick Irving and John Silva, who was dressed as a bull, broke into their ex-boyfriend’s house and tried to burn the place down with spaghetti sauce. It’s alleged that Irving and Silva nicked several items and left pasta sauce boiling on the stove with a cloth close enough to catch light and start a fire. The alleged plot failed because the victim’s security system alerted him.
Police arrived at the peoperty in time to find Irving and Silva driving away. Silva was behind the wheel. Irving was in the passenger seat dressed as a bull. Police also noted in the car: a marijuana grinder, a vacuum, a window air conditioning unit, a flat-screen television, a heater in the back seat, and an empty jar of Ragu sauce.
Says the alleged victim: “He was trying to make it look like I left the stove on but who gets up 2am and fixes skett. It started out as a relationship, that lasted about a week. I’ve let him use my car for four months, maybe he’s angry about that. Or maybe he’s angry because I gave him $150 to fix his teeth.”
Both men have been charged with unarmed burglary, grand theft and arson.
Posted: 22nd, March 2018 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
One in ten are cocaine fiends
That’s not quite the result from the latest research into fun and tooting habits, that 1 in 10 of us are cocaine fiends. What is actually shown is that enough of us are into Bolivian marching powder that the entire environment is infested with traces of the stuff. Enough that fingerprint testing shows that 1 in 10 of us could be, if we’re not careful, adjudged to be users ourselves. That’s about 10 times what we think is the real level of usage in the country:
Cocaine is now so prevalent in society that one in 10 people who have never used the drug have traces on their hands, a new study has shown.
Researchers at the University Surrey tested the fingerprints of 50 drug free volunteers and 15 drug users who had taken cocaine or heroin in the past 24 hours.
Around 13 per cent of fingerprints of those who had never used the drugs were found to contain cocaine, while one per cent contained a metabolite of heroin.
There’re some technical bits here- it’s not just traces of the drugs, but also of what the human body turns drugs into when they’re used. As with just about everything else anyone ingests some parts of those “metabolites” end up in the sweat. That’s what’s being tested with these fingerprints and also how it all gets out into the environment.
The reason it’s all so prevalent is cash. OK, sure, we’ve that mental image of someone using a bank note (a £50 to show off) to snort coke but that’s not really it. There’re some 700,000 people who are thought to use cocaine and they’re not infesting enough bank notes for us all to be infected. And that certainly doesn’t explain the heroin – no one using heroin ever has any money, the drug’s quite famous for that.
What’s actually happening is that some small portion of notes are getting contaminated. In the normal course of things they get spent and sent off to the banks. Where they use money counting machines then stick the notes back in ATMs. And it’s the rollers on the counting machines and the ATMs which end up with traces of cocaine on them, spreading those traces over every note that passes through. This isn’t, therefore, really a story about how we’re all drug fiends. Rather, it’s one about how much better science has got. We can now check for such minute traces of things that we find them everywhere.
Presumably the whole story will go away at some point when we’re all using contactless payment cards. For at that point only the people actually using drugs will have them on their fingertips.
Arsenal told Jack Wilshere he could leave last summer
Jack Wilshere has still not committed his future to Arsenal, the club he joined at age nine. Wilshere, 26, will be out of contract at the end of the current season, in which he has made 31 appearances to date – the most in a season since 2013-14. The Gunners have offered him a new deal on reduced terms – he’ll have to accept a pay cut on his £120,000-a-week salary. He wants a better deal. And he wants to stay.
“I have got three months left on my contract,” he says. “Ideally, yes, I want it sorted as soon as possible. I want to go to the World Cup and enjoy it but we have three months until then and a lot can happen. Ideally from my point of view and the club’s point of view, they will probably want it sorted.”
He might have left the club last summer.
“He [Arsene Wenger] gave me the opportunity [to leave] with three or four weeks left in the transfer window,” says Wilshere from the England team base. It will be Wilshere’s first outing for England since that 1-0 defeat to Iceland in Euro 2016.
“I did not find anything that I wanted and at the same time I was not really fit, so I decided that I wanted to stay and build up my fitness. It was an honest conversation. We have known each other long enough where we can have that relationship where we are honest with each other. It was boiling up for a while because everybody knew I had a year left on my deal and I had been out on loan, got injured, and wasn’t really in his plans. He said, ‘I am going to be honest with you and at the moment we are not going to be offering you a contract, so if you can get a contract somewhere else, you can go’. Obviously I was not happy with that, but at the same time I was happy he was being honest.”
Determined and cock-sure, Wilshere is the kind of player Arsenal need more of.
Posted: 22nd, March 2018 | In: Arsenal, News, Sports | Comment
Alleged drink-driver Ant McPartlin has been banned before
It turns out that TV presenter Ant McPartlin might not be “squeaky clean” after all. To go with the story of alleged drug taking, Ant’s been charged with drink driving. McPartlin was, as you know, arrested following a car crash on Sunday. The 42-year-old will be at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court on 4 April.
And it’s serious. If found guilty, possible sentences include six months in prison, an unlimited fine and a minimum driving ban of a year.
And he’s been banned before. In 2002, McPartlin earned a 30-day driving ban for shifting at 127mph by an unmarked police car near Bowburn, County Durham. “It was silly and I have learnt my lesson,” said McPartlin after the hearing.
Or not..
Note: According to Government figures, drink-driving is all too common.
The second provisional estimates for 2015 show:
between 180 and 250 people were killed in Great Britain
at least 1 driver was over the drink drive limit
there has been a rise in overall drink drive casualties of all severities from 2014, a 3% increase to 8,480
there was an estimated 180 fatal drink drive accidents
the total number of drink drive accidents of all severities rose by 2% to 5,740
If he is guilty of drink-driving, Ant McPartlin should count himself lucky.
Posted: 21st, March 2018 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
The greatest dive in football: Jean Meneses hits invisible force field
To Chile, where Universidad de Concepcion forward Jean Meneses is taking an interesting tumble in the box, having encountered an invisible force field. He does not go to ground easily. He opts for complexity.
Let’s set the scene. The game between Universidad de Concepcion and Colo Colo is 1-1. Five minutes normal time. Meneses, 25, is inside the Colo Colo box. He has the ball. And then he does not. Here it is:
And the Oscar goes to ….. Jean Meneses of Universidad de Concepcion pic.twitter.com/wV1RXuVcoU
— Lrrr (@coldplague) March 21, 2018
Penalty! Seriously. The referee awarded a penalty kick. Fernando Manriquez scored it. Universidad de Concepcion win the match 2-1.
Says Jean Meneses: “One has to take advantage of the fact that the forwards can not touch attackers inside the area. So I played a little bit with the vividness and I let myself fall.”
File unser: when gravity attacks!
Liverpool will sell Salah for a fortune and Chelsea are the biggest losers
Spare a thought for Chelsea fans forced to look on as club rejects Kevin Bruyne and Mohamed Salah light up the Premier League for Manchester City and Liverpool, respectively. Both players sold under Jose Mourinho’s regime are shining. Given Mourinho’s narcissism, he’s most likely try to pass his errors off as part of a cunning ploy to leave his former employer’s pained. But if he had foresight, Mourinho would have sold them to Manchester United, pushing Old Trafford towards investment in the coming force rather than selfish Alexis Sanchez – made to look better than he was by playing for a palsied Arsenal team – and the vastly overrated Paul Pogba.
News across the media is that Real Madrid rather like Salah. Those Spanish talent spotters have noted that the Egyptian scores lots of goals and looks a joy to be around. So excited are they by their discovery in the Premier League backwaters that Real will invest up to £200m in Salah. But news from Anfield is that Liverpool will spurn any moves for their star turn. They won’t, of course. Every player has a price. And £200m for Salah is an absurd sum for a £34million summer signing from Roma.
The problem for Liverpool is that Salah is the star of a team which will probably win nothing.
Posted: 21st, March 2018 | In: Chelsea, Manchester City, manchester united, News, Sports | Comment
Spurs Harry Kane is worth more than Barcelona’s Messi
The CIES Football Observatory has crunched the data and concluded that Spurs striker Harry Kane is worth more in the transfer market than Barcelona’s Lionel Messi. Total balls.
No disrespect to Kane, but how many football fans will boast “I saw Harry Kane”? To see Messi in the flesh is to witness something extraordinary, a player who lifts the spirits. A friend from Napoli interjected a pub debate on which top player we’d all enjoyed watching live. Names poured out: Thierry Henry, Eric Cantona, Johan Cruyff, Franco Baresi, Ziendine Zidane and Franz Beckenbauer. He raised his hands and if spelling out a neon sign above the door to the star attraction, move them from left to right as he declared: “I saw Maradona.”
Messi is better. He is also, as one sports writer notes, the cure: “Some weeks especially we need to plunge head-first into the joys of sport after fretting about the contents of a Jiffy bag or whether England fans will be targeted by thugs in Russia or if a pundit should be sacked for gobbing at a fan…Messi is the best antidote to any creep of dissatisfaction.”
But away from the thrill of live action, in an office block in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the boffins at CIES have calculated not only Messi’s monetary value but how he ranks against other players in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. The challenge is to decide which player represents the best investment for their current club. Kane, who cost Spurs nothing to recruit, is worth £173m (€198.2m); Messi, who joined Barcelona as as child, is worth £172m (€196.8m).
CIES explains its method:
The estimated values are calculated using an exclusive algorithm conceived by the CIES Football Observatory research team. An increasing number of professional clubs and football intermediaries have recourse to the approach developed for transfer negotiations and litigation. The estimations for all big-5 league players are available here.
Here’s the list of talent;
So Kane is worth more than Messi – but only if you reduce football to a sport best watched via screens, accessed through a betting app and broken down to the raw data, reducing every aspect of humanity into quantifiable, anodyne chunks. One day they’ll bring all the greats back to their pomp with a new software package, and show us if Bobby Charlton and Pele were better than Ronaldo and Messi. The fans, meanwhile, should save up for something far more vital: a ticket to see Messi play live.
Posted: 20th, March 2018 | In: News, Sports, Spurs | Comment
British tourist jailed for Facebook ‘sex’ party
Daniel Jones has been on remand in a Cambodia prison for one month and 22 days. Today he received his sentence for using “pornographic” images to advertise a pool party: he will serve a one-year suspended prison sentence. That’s the maximum sentence.
A Cambodian police handout picture features people appearing to imitate lustful acts at a party. The accused claim the photo is years old and does not feature them.
Jones, 31, was one of 10 non-Cambodian nationals nicked during a police raid on a pool party and drinks do in Siem Reap on 25 January. The event was trailed on Facebook as “Let’s Get Wet”. Jones says the promotion featured no nudity – and given Facebook’s often arcane ‘Community Guidelines’, that’s easy to believe. Facebook can block users for all manner of ills, not least of all posting a drawing of a human hand. But Cambodian prosecutors said the photos were illegal and damaging to Cambodian culture.
Judge Um Chan Thol ruled that Jones had “unintentionally produced pornography that affects Khmer culture”. The other nine accused of offending Cambodian morals also denied any wrongdoing. They were deported after charges against them were dropped.
Cambodia is now made pure. Incidentally, this is what Human Rights Watch says of the place:
Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has been in power since 1985. His rule has relied on security force violence and politically motivated persecution of opposition members, activists, and human rights workers. Security forces commit killings and torture with impunity. Authorities regularly restrict the right to peaceful assembly by suppressing protests and banning nonviolent gatherings and processions. The politically powerful have carried out forced evictions and illegal land grabs for decades. Government officials and judges are mired in corruption. Garment industry workers, primarily women, are subject to sexual discrimination and other rights abuses.
But that’s alright. It’s that Facebook photo that really causes problems.
Message to holidaymakers: if you really want to get wet on holiday, try Blackpool in April.
Robot wars: driverless Uber kills pedestrian
To Arizona, where a pedestrian has become the world’s first person killed by an autonomous vehicle. A human was behind the wheel of the Uber cab but the vehicle was self-driving when it hit the walker, reports KNXV. Early news is that the victim was walking outside of the crosswalk. There were no passengers in the Uber. The make a of car? A super-safe Volvo.
Following up on my earlier tweet, Uber car was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver and it struck a woman (not a bicyclist) who walked into street. She has died. We think this is the first pedestrian killed by an autonomous vehicle. Uber is cooperating. Story coming
— Daisuke Wakabayashi (@daiwaka) March 19, 2018
Can it be right that experimental technology is operating heavy vehicles that can travel at speed on public roads? And like all accidents, doesn’t this one contains a deep vein of human error?
Would you be happy to ride in an automated car?
Be quick. Here come the robots.
Posted: 20th, March 2018 | In: News, Technology | Comment
Activists says PE and team sports are racist colonialism
The latest from the grievance studies industry is that team sports – those English things like football, rugby, cricket – are racist. Further, that we only let the rest of the world play them so they could beat us as an act of colonialism. The problem with this being not the basic facts at issue. For the English, perhaps the British, did indeed invent many of the sports which are now played globally. And there was most certainly an element of exporting the games as a part of civilising the savage natives of other lands. You know, like teaching the French rugby will make them gentlemen. Teaching the Welsh the game will make them something even if not gentlemen.
The problem with the idea though is that it’s entirely missed the proper, Marxist, interpretation of what happened:
Analyses of curricula in a range of countries show how they tend to reinforce, rather than challenge, popular theories of racism. To date, we know little about the contribution of physical education (PE) curriculum policy to the overall policy landscape. This paper examines the construction of race and racism in two national contexts (Norway and England) as a means of putting race and anti-racism on the PE policy research agenda. It adopts a critical whiteness perspective to analyse how whiteness, as a system of privilege, contributes to the racialisation of valued knowledge in PE and asks, who potentially benefits and/or is marginalised within the learning spaces available in the texts? The discourse analysis reveals that two discursive techniques of whiteness combine to privilege white, Eurocentric knowledge content.
Yeah, yeah, we know how that ends, Whitey’s a Bad Boy and a colonialist to boot. Tsk.
But that is to use today’s unthinking Marxism – the identifying feature of which is not to think and not to use actual Marx – to explain matters, rather than actual Marx and or thinking.
Marx himself said two things which explains matters here. The first is that the mode of production determines social relations. How what is produced tells us a great deal about how the society is going to be organised. The second is that capitalism, as harnessed by the bourgeoisie, was the most productive economic system as yet used.
It’s not a big step and it’s most certainly a usefully Marxist one to go on to say that the much greater productivity of the capitalist economy was going to change the society. Which, of course, it did. One of the most obvious ways it did was to make the workers rich enough that they didn’t have to work every moment of every day in order to just stay alive. That Industrial Revolution is what brought us the concept of leisure. An example of which is why football matches start at 3 pm on a Saturday. Because it was still into hte working lives of those living today that Saturdays were a half day up in those Satanic Mills.
All of which tells us why it was those White Victorians who invented most of the games. They were the first people to live in a society which had the time – and thus the inclination – to actually have regular games. Either to play or to spectate. And that’s really it.
As to the exportation, we did export that Industrial Revolution which created that leisure. And the wealth which the industrialisation creates. It’s really not a surprise that as places got rich enough to have the time for sports then they adopted those sports that were already played in the richer places.
So, yes, many sports are British in origin. But not because of racism or even colonialism. Purely and simply because Britain was the first place to be rich enough to have large scale organised sports. As other places got richer they copied the sports as well as the methods of getting rich. No racism nor colonialism involved.
London House Prices Are Falling, Hurrah!
Or is is hurrah at all? For if London house prices are falling doesn’t that mean lots of people are going to get screwed by their mortgages? And thus we get to one of the great economic problems, there is no way to please everyone.
House prices in parts of London that were once at the epicentre of the UK property boom have fallen as much as 15% over the past year in fresh evidence of the impact of the EU referendum.
Figures from Your Move, one of the UK’s biggest estate agency chains, reveal that the average home in Wandsworth – which includes much of Clapham, Balham and Putney – fell by more than £100,000 in value over the last 12 months.
So, start from what we all would say is the largest housing problem we’ve got in Britain – no one can afford the damn houses. At least no one normal, on a normal income, can afford to buy a house. Therefore we’d really rather like the price of houses to fall.
So, we vote for Brexit, all those foreigners get cold feet about living here and house prices fall, Huzzah!
But we all know what happens next, don’t we? There will now be endless complaints about negative equity, about how people are being bankrupted because their houses are going down in value. Thus we’ll get all the more usual cries that government must do something to keep house prices up.
We could just say this proves you can’t please all the people all the time but that would be trite. We actually want to know what it is that government should be doing about all of this. The answer being nothing. They cannot win, there’s no right thing for them to be doing. Better by far if they simply retreat from the whole sector. Just leaving houses and their prices to the markets and when asked the government can just shrug and insist “Nowt to do with us, is it?”
No, really, what else can they do?
Manchester United are not getting rid of 10 players this summer
Fancy making a guess at how many players are heading out of Manchester United this summer? The BBC says it’s ’10’. the source for the Beeb’s news of this mass exodus of talent is the ever-trusty Daily Express. The Express, of course, is riding high on the back of its scoop that this winter would feature cold weather and snow. Sure enough, the UK was gipped by the ‘Beast from the East’. Yes, the paper forecasts bad weather on its front page around twice a week but this time it was right. It might well be right again – Madeleine McCann will be found; dementia will be cured with rhubarb; the summer will bring a heatwave; and ten footballers will leave Old Trafford at the end of the season.
The Express lists the players heading to the exit: Luke Shaw, Juan Mata, Ander Herrera, Chris Smalling, Phil Jones, Daley Blind, Matteo Darmian, Marouane Fellaini, Michael Carrick and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It then tells us that the ten will be replaced with just five: Gareth Bale, Toby Alderweireld, Danny Rose, Willian and Fred. Will that happen? Reason says no. But we did have that snow…
Of course, in the clickbait world of online journalism, pretty much any claim, however outlandish, can be countered by another outlandish claim, So here’s the Metro to tell us that Fred has already agreed to join Manchester City:
And if you don’t believe the Metro, well, you know who else told us Fred is on his way to City? Yep. The Express:
Daily Express, Feb 9 1018
The Express offers no source for its story of ten players leaving United. But over in the Sun, we read: “Manchester United reportedly set for summer clear out with Luke Shaw, Ander Herrera, Chris Smalling and Anthony Martial among NINE facing axe’”. The Sun does cite a source: the Daily Mail. And it reports:
Luke Shaw may as well start planning a joint leaving-do with Matteo Darmian and Daley Blind this summer…
Ander Herrera, Anthony Martial, Juan Mata and Chris Smalling are among those who cannot guarantee they will be at Old Trafford beyond this summer, when United will also have to replace Marouane Fellaini and Michael Carrick.
And from that the Express got its scoop of ten players leaving Manchester United.
Now… anyone know if it’s going to be sunny this July?
Posted: 19th, March 2018 | In: Back pages, manchester united, News, Sports, Tabloids | Comment
