Category Archives: idiocy

Don’t frighten the horses.

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It’s not even been out 24 hours yet and I’m already bored to tears with hearing about the Leveson report.

Is Cameron right to stand up for ‘press freedom’ attracting the ire of the victims of hacking, etc and supposedly flying in the face of public opinion, and keep the dead tree press and his own supposed ‘right wingers’ onside?

Well, firstly, let’s look at one of the labels in that question. What the hell is a right winger? Left and right are names that are slung around with great ease, but what do they actually mean? I’m going to show some sympathy for those who would consider themselves on the left. Which party speaks for them? The easy reflex action is to say Labour. But they are no more a leftist party than the Conservatives. The party lost its soul somewhere between Foot and Blair. The Conservatives are no more a right wing party than Labour. They are cut from identical cloth. There are no significant differences between the two.

The BNP are decried as being ‘far-right’, but I see a party that is obsessed, apart from the obvious, with centralist authority and exerting control over a population they wish to mold to fit their own world view. Well the same can be said of Respect, yet no-one would claim they are ‘far-right’. Indeed I would say the same of the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems as well. These labels are unhelpful.

Right and left is dead, what I think people mean is liberty versus authority. So do we read that Cameron doesn’t want to upset the portion of his party who believe in liberty? If you look at it like that, you suddenly view the vast majority of people sat in parliament in a very different light indeed.

The issue of press freedom is something of a red herring as well. Charlotte Church on QT last night made a very good point when she named the publishing of newspapers as corporate free speech rather than individual free speech. This was not a consideration when the presses were freed in the 17th century.

But it is irrelevant, this is an enquiry into the ethics of the mainstream paper media. Well, who decides what is ethical or moral? Sure, we can agree on the big stuff, journalists shouldn’t be hacking peoples’ mobile phones to find out which soap actor has been screwing which footballer behind which pop star’s back. But let us suppose that this method uncovers a conspiracy to blackmail and depose the Monarch. Would it be justified then?

This is the problem with legislation, especially that which is enacted in haste. Unfortunately we live in an age where most legislation is the result of a hasty, knee-jerk reaction. I am not confident that any legislation will be forthcoming that does not have politicians as the ultimate arbiter of what can and cannot be printed.

Furthermore, the papers are dying. With the internet we have the biggest free press in the world. Legislation has yet to catch up, thankfully. But the fact that you are sat here reading this means there has been the most amazing ground shift in the way that media works in the last fifteen years. In 1997 the effect of any blog would have been limited in the extreme. Four years previous to that the means of doing this blogging lark just wouldn’t have existed. Today in Guido Fawkes, we have a blogger with no paper behind him (excepting a guest spot in the Star once a week, a reaction from the dead tree press engaging with the blogger, rather than the blogger going cap in hand to the press) who is regularly referenced and interviewed on television. The days of going down the shop to buy a paper to get the news are over, the days of going down the shop to buy a paper to get opinion or editorial are fading fast. The internet will be king.

‘But it’s like the wild west’, is the complaint, ‘it must be subject to regulation’. Well, it is. If I were to run an article saying that politician ‘x’ puts kittens in microwaves and interferes with the kids who live next door and it wasn’t true, I’d be up in court defending a libel suit. If I got the material for a story by breaking into someone’s house, I’d be on a charge of burglary. The laws already exist.

Let us not forget that Leveson is all about press ethics, not any criminality. And we’re supposed to be shocked to discover that some journalists act in a despicable fashion?

The public blame the press for being shits. They point at the cosy relationships between the party big boys and the paper owners. They talk about how the police have been corrupted by the press. Leveson has given the public and victims a platform to air their grievances.

The victims from the general public I have a large degree of sympathy for. Those slebs who have a PR agent that calls a paper to say ‘oh, X is coming out of restaurant Y or nightclub Z in half an hour’ in an effort to get their client in the paper can have no complaint when their desire to be in the glare of publicity sees their attempts at covert affairs or other bad behaviour splashed large across the page.

However, the politicians, the slebs, the paper owners and the corrupted police officers are not to blame for the actions for these slimeball journos.

The people who need to bear the blame have been ignored, they will not be referenced by Leveson, and I suspect will not be referenced with any degree of importance in the coming debates in the House.

Who are these people? They are the biggest hypocrites of all; the British public.

The same people who moan about the shoddy activities of the press are the same people who go out and buy the papers. People will pretend they are upset about it, but they’ll still go down to buy the rag to see who is shagging who, what dress that pop star is wearing, or to see the teenage actress on the beach in a bikini whilst the paper rails against paedos and porn. It’s just so wonderfully exciting isn’t it? You want to know who is screwing who, it’s none of your business, but you can’t help but wallowing in the prurient details. Kiddie porn, bad. Phwoar! Look at the knockers on that seventeen year old soap starlet!

We get the papers we ask for.

Just as with our political parties, don’t vote for or buy the status quo and then start moaning that country is shit, our politicians useless and our papers out of control. You are giving them the green light.

We’ve come such cosseted little brats in this country though that we can’t stand to be shown the consequences of our actions, and not one politician in parliament has the guts to do it, it’s more than their seat is worth.

Like the battered wife who continually returns to her violent husband, fooling herself that the last smack in the mouth will be the last, because he’s promised he’s changed, we too vote for the same old people and buy the same old papers who have shown contrition for smacking us in the mouth and promised us that this time it will be different, we do it every time.

Like the battered wife, we believe our abuser when he tells us that no-one else will have us, or that life will be much worse without them. He tells us we deserved it, he doesn’t like doing it, but we leave him no option. And we keep going back for more.

We asked for it all, we got it all. There is no conspiracy. There is no NWO. There are no space lizards living in caves running the world. There is just the bovine stupidity of the general public, and the only person who can shake you out of it is you.

What more is there to say?

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Saw this just as I was preparing to retire to my pit last night, I understand it is the headline on the front page of the Telegraph this morning:

A couple had their three foster children taken away by a council on the grounds that their membership of the UK Independence Party meant that they supported “racist” policies.

This isn’t a story about UKIP, it’s a story about the sort of idiot who works in the public sector. The sort of idiot who is on a personal crusade (and I use that word in it’s most emotive sense) to forge the world in their own image. It is about the sort of idiot who gleefully tweets, facebooks and blogs about former senior Tories being paedos, not because it is true, but because they want it to be true. It is about the sort of idiot who is incapable of any rational thought. It is about the sort of bigot who stamps their feet, points and shouts with their face screwed up with hate, who like all bigots, fails to see the idiocy of their bigotry and harm their bigotry does.

It is also about the protectors of these bigoted idiots, who along with the bigoted idiots themselves, will never, ever, apologise or show any contrition for their actions. It is about the idiots, especially in an area like Rotherham, who will sweep vulnerable kids up from the bosom of a loving foster family, whilst standing back and doing the square root of bugger all when kids are being systematically groomed and raped by gangs of men, because their twisted ideology prevents them from offending someone because of the colour of their skin or their religion.

And we’re the racist ones? What is racism if not treating one race favourably to the detriment of another?

UKIP? Racist?

Let me tell you why I joined UKIP. I joined UKIP because I believe in the right of all nations to be in control of their destiny. I joined UKIP because I believe that not only do national parliaments have primacy over an organisation mis-sold as a trade bloc, but that the people in those nations have primacy over their national governments, I joined because I believe in democracy, freedom and the rights of the individual. I joined UKIP precisely because I love Europe for the wonderfully diverse place that it is, full of exciting differences  in method, philosophy, sight, sound, smell and taste. I joined because it is a source of great despair to me that the EU will not stop until the whole continent is homogenous in its grey, dreary misery.

Any arsehole that wants to come and call me a racist is going to get a knuckle punch to the throat.

UPDATE

This is a picture released by the hopelessly waaaaaaysist UKIP showing the team contesting the forthcoming Croydon North by-election.

What fresh blue hell is this?

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I’m just in from the pub.

No, don’t worry, I was the very model of temperance, it was a catch up with a few friends, and to drink I have to be in the mood to drink. Of the three big evil vices which threaten our very civilisation – smoking, meaty fatty foods and booze, I could give up the booze the easiest. I won’t though. My alcoholic libation was limited to a nice glass of merlot this evening.

Well, almost. There’s a brewer down this way called Shepherd-Neame. Britain’s oldest brewery. You’ve probably seen the very imaginative and not a little controversial advertising campaign promoting their Spitfire ale, their bottle conditioned beer is a staple of supermarkets nationwide.

They’ve just got the licence to start brewing Samuel Adams beer in the UK and this has now made its way to the pumps. Now, I’m not a big beer fan, I’m a Kentish lad and as a result my heart belongs to proper cider, Kent makes the best in the country and is second only in the world (in my opinion) to the Bretons, although the Breton stuff can be a little wine-like for some tastes. Don’t believe the Hereford, Somerset and Cornish hype, when it comes to English cider, Kentish is the business.

I digress. Despite not being a big beer fan I did remember quite liking Sam Adams when I visited Boston and took a sneaky little taster, very good it is too. But when tasting the beer I was told something by the barman that left me quite astonished. I had to ask him to repeat it, as I was certain that I’d misheard him.

What did he tell me?

He told me that they were prohibited from serving it in pints. At first (re)hearing my mind went back to a pub of my youth in a beautiful little Kentish village called Biddenden. The village brews a superb cider (and makes a very nice wine as well), imaginatively named ‘Biddenden Cider’. This stuff is nectar, but it is rather potent, and this pub wouldn’t serve it in more than a half pint unless your face was known. But surely this beer, this American beer, couldn’t be as potent as the Kentish cider that gets you drunk from the feet up (don’t have a session on the Biddenden when sitting down, your head will be as clear as a bell, but your feet will not respond to any instruction you give them)?

No it isn’t as potent, and that isn’t the thinking. There has, I’m told, been a bit of legislation passed to prevent us looking like extras from Hogarth’s Gin Lane (and yes, I believe that Beer Street is more apposite). This in effect means that any new beer product launched onto the market will be limited to servings of a maximum of 2/3 of a pint.

I knew nothing of this, and was quite taken aback. Does anyone out there in blogland have any more information? It seems to me to be one of the most stupid items of legislation to have ever sprung forth from the prolapsed rectum that is Westminster. I’m also betting that the next step will be that any existing line that has even the merest alteration to its recipe will qualify as a ‘new product’.

First they came for the smokers. . .

Craven idiotic fools.

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Who?

The British public.

I have it on good authority that in my little city there are two Esso garages, a Total filling station and two supermarkets that are bereft of fuel.

Why?

Because the other day, the trade union that represents the majority of petrol/diesel tanker drivers announced that a ballot of members asking for a mandate to take industrial action, including a strike, was successful.

That doesn’t mean there will be a strike, and even if there is the law requires the union to give seven day’s notice of any action. As far as I am aware no such notice has been served. The normal trick is to ballot, get the mandate and then get the employers back to the table with that particular revolver sat on the desk in full view. This means that even if notice is served today, it will be Wednesday before any strike comes around.

And people are panic buying.

Not only that, but the politicians are stoking the flames by talking about filling baths and jugs and saucepans with petrol. Even more scarily, people are listening to them.

Scarier still, Milibrain is right, the government is overseeing a shambles. You see? Things have got so mad that I’m actually agreeing with the leader of the Labour party.

I could weep.

Well said, Comrade.

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Never let it be said that our lords and masters in Europe are adept at hiding their true colours.

Just take a look at that thing they call a flag. Yellow stars? On a blue background. Really? That’s the equivalent of writing your name backwards as a code so people can’t work out who wrote that secret note. What you’ve done is the colour version of that, we know you really wanted it to be red, and we know this because you say things like this:

Big talk from Olli Rehn, European Commissioner responsible for Economic and Monetary Affairs, who says that ratings agencies are the tools of “American financial capitalism”.

(Taken from the Torygraph’s debt crisis ticker, so probably way down the page now).

They really are barking, they honestly think the whole shabang is down to the evil American capitalist running dogs. It really, actually doesn’t occur to them that this ridiculous currency they’ve thrown together can be to blame, because it was their idea, and it was such a good one.

Never be under any illusion that these people are as red as red can be. Whilst watching Sky News from around six this evening, there was some line from some apparatchik (and I  paraphrase) who was saying that we need to learn to live without ratings agencies.

Oh yeah, because the markets are bound to take you at your word, aren’t they? I mean, why shouldn’t they when your organisation is the very model of financial probity?

It’ll not be long before we see the emergence of of ‘EUrorate’ or something similar, a ratings agency set up by the EU that can be trusted to give ‘real’ and ‘sensible’ credit risk analysis. I also forecast that their first actions will be to downgrade the US dollar, British pound and any other non-€zone EU national currency to junk status. Meanwhile the €uro will of course be rated at AAAA Double Plus Good.

Sky News is also reporting that S&P have downgraded the EFSF, they’ve downgraded the bloody rescue fund.

If this was a horse, you’d shoot it. If it was a relative on a life support machine, you’d pull the plug. But not the EU, their agenda must be followed no matter what the cost.

But of course there will be no cost, everyone will be joyously happy, everyday will be the first day of spring, we will produce record numbers of tractors to bring in bumper harvest after bumper harvest, because our great leaders will legislate and rate the weather to make sure it is perfect as planned, every day, and you’d better agree unless you want to find yourself living in a hut in Finland, shovelling snow all day at bayonet point while you atone for your lack of education.

Perhaps we can concentrate on him now.

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So one of the great conspiracy theories of recent years has been laid to rest with the release of Obama’s full ‘long form’ birth certificate.

It was always a very lazy attack on a president which (at the risk of sounding like a Grauniadista) smacked a little of racism. There’s plenty of things to take Obama to task about, but this was never one of them. Perhaps the public can now turn their attentions to the man’s policies rather than his place of birth.

No doubt it will be decried as a forgery, counterfeit or some other sort of fraud now.

Meanwhile, what the hell is all this guff about Labour demanding an apology from Cameron over his ‘calm down, dear’ line to Angela Eagle?

Really? Really? Is that the biggest thing you have to worry about?

Stop being so bloody precious.

Or I’ll start demanding she apologise for this comment, when the House was warned about the financial bubble in 2008:

“Fortunately for all of us…that colourful and lurid fiction has no real bearing on the macro-economic reality.”

Policitians and conspiracy-theorists, I’m not sure which I have less time for, to be honest.

For The Death Of The Game.

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I’ve been a bit slack recently. I’ve been doing mental gymnastics for the last couple of weeks. The axe has finally fallen, thankfully I’ve been spared, this time. What does not make it comfortable for me is that some good people will lose their jobs and in close proximity for me. Whilst I’m relieved that my execution has been stayed for the present, it is tinged with the very real sadness that when the process is completed some people for whom I have a good deal of respect and admiration will be gone. It sucks, but that is the situation and nothing will change that, I say this in the knowledge that one day, and that day may come soon, I may be amongst their number. This is not sanctuary, it is merely temporary respite.

It is not bad news, however. My office has been reorganised and our remit and way of working completely overhauled. It is going to be challenging, and there’s a lot of new stuff to learn, but I’m looking forward to it.

I mention this to explain my recent silence on here. I’ve not had the drive to do anything for the last few days, all my mental energy has been taken up trying to understand the lie of the land in my Brave New World.

I’m directing my attention to the big story of the week, even if a number of you will reject it as an irrelevance. We’ve had a former MP pleading guilty and waiting to see what his future will be, another has been stripped of his seat and banned from standing for election, the students continue to demand that money be taken from other people and given to them and some odd people have decided to superglue themselves to a clothes store in London, because they don’t hand over more money than they have to. Probably because they’ll see it disappear into the pockets of students.

But let’s be frank, the big story has been the awarding of the world cup finals tournaments to Russia and Qatar.

The spilling of bile over this in the British media has been quite surprising, yet at the same time utterly predictable. My reaction has been to prickle at the lack of transparency and yet to remain stoic about the situation.

I can’t get too animated about it as FIFA are a private club, they do not take any of my cash. However I know corruption and injustice when I see it.

Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president has now done his job, he’s been the power in the game since he was FIFA Secretary General and playing nominal second fiddle to the equally repulsive Joao Havelange, the man whom he subsequently replaced as President. He is, without doubt, an Adidas placeman and has delivered on his promise to take the World Cup to places it has never been before. We only need to look at his record since his star began the rise to its zenith and where the World Cup has set up camp:

1994 – USA
1998 – France
2002 – Japan/South Korea
2006 – Germany
2010 – South Africa
2014 – Brazil
2018 – Russia
2022 – Qatar

He’s always been about taking the tournament to new territories, and with the exception of France (who had not hosted the tournament since 1938) and Germany (who hosted in ’74) the tournament is breaking new ground. Brazil may be an established footballing power, but it is a power base which has existed in the European leagues for the last 40 years, domestically the league is a disaster with crumbling stadia, poor attendence figures and last minute rule changes to the already labyrinthine relegation system to prevent the big names from suffering the drop. Brazil may have hosted the tournament in 1950, but it is a very different world now, and recent gun battles between a very eager police force and exceptionally violent drugs gangs highlight what a dicey place Brazil can be if you don’t have serious cash to hide behind. I have yet to see any evidence that Brazil has the infrastructure to host the tournament.

The tournaments held in the US and Japan/South Korea were logistically excellent tournaments. Football is the only show in town in Korea, as evidenced by their continued qualification since the 1986 tournaments, but one would hardly call them a powerhouse. Football is far from the sport of choice in the US and Japan, and yet both have stable, successful and credible leagues which hold their own. The legacy of the tournaments being held in those three countries can be reasonably called a success.

Then we come to South Africa. Thankfully the disasters which were predicted never materialised, (and they may not also materialise in Brazil), but one wonders what the legacy of the tournament will be. One may always associate South Africa with the money rich white sports of rugby union and cricket, but football is massive in South Africa, but the national team has a patchy to poor record and their club sides, whilst attracting enormous support, do not have the same pedigree as their rivals in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. It will always be the lot of African clubs to see their brightest talents head over to Europe at the first opportunity. I don’t see how the legacy of the tournament will change South African football in any meaningful sense. However, Blatter was elected on the back of a strong African vote, and having pretty much gone back on his promise to gift the finals to Africa in ’06, it would have been political suicide to have them go anywhere else, and to be fair, where else in Africa could they have gone?

Blatter had hitched his wagon to a World Cup world tour, and now the increasingly bizarre circus has to follow the pattern. This is how we find ourselves looking towards Russia in 2018, no world cup in Eastern Europe thus far, so off they go. Given that Russia has recently been (unsurprisingly) described as a mafia state in the wikileaks story, you can only imagine what happened behind closed doors and hotel bars (incidentally, IOC members can no longer even accept a drink from a campaign team following the reformation in light of the Salt Lake City vote rigging scandal) to secure the tournament’s journey eastwards. Abramovic was involved, and nothing he’s involved in can be described as transparent.

Then we have the utterly ridiculous decision to award the tournament to Qatar in 2022. Qatar, who have never qualified for a major tournament, who have a domestic league populated by a parade of creaking hasbeen superstars making one last massive payday, who have a landmass 100 miles by 50 miles and an average summer temperature that will fry an egg in three minutes. The options are, play at 6am, play at 10pm, play in nothing but air-conditioned indoor stadia, or as has been suggested, play the tournament in January and February.

Herein lies the very dangerous game Blatter and his 23 chums are playing with their own positions, let alone the future of the sport. By choosing Russia, they’ve ridden roughshod over not only the English, but also the Portuguese, Spanish, Belgians and Dutch. Granted the Sunday Times and Panorama stories did not help (but then would we moan if the papers had broken the story of MP’s expenses two days before the election? No, of course we wouldn’t), but there is only so much the established European powers will take. Suggesting holding the world cup in January and February, slap bang in the middle of the European season (when a number of the leagues will only just have come out of an inconvenient winter break) will cause uproar, and if Blatter is trying to annoy the national federations in Europe, then he’s going the right way about it.

Similar for the 2022 award, Australia had by far the best bid, and of course the world cup has never been to Oceania (yes, pedants, I know the Aussie federation is part of the Asian Confederation, but still, Australia is in Oceania), and one only has to look at Sydney’s handling of the Olympics, Melbourne’s Commonwealths and the regular rugby and cricket world cups to understand that the Aussies are probably the best in the world at putting this sort of thing on. To award the tournament to the Qataris in the face of this, and perfectly credible bids from the US, Japan and South Korea (bidding individually this time round) was a slap in the face to four of football’s most dynamic and fastest growing markets. There is no good reason, sporting, economic, logistical or in terms of intangible ‘legacy’ to award the tournament to Qatar, none whatsoever, and if anything this decision is more perverse than the decision to go to Russia. I am more angry for Australia’s injustice than I am for the one perpetuated against England, and get the impression that some serious money has changed hands.

So, if FIFA is so corrupt, and I believe it is (read Foul! by Andrew Jennings), and if they piss off the European powerhouses of England, Italy, Spain and Germany, and if they piss off the emerging markets of Australia, USA, Japan and South Korea, how much will it take for those federations to sit down around a table together? How difficult would it be for them to call Argentina and Brazil and form a footballing G10? How difficult would it be for them to say to FIFA ‘actually, we won’t be entering your world cup, we’re starting our own?’ How long would it take for pretty much every other federation to follow them? How long would it take for Nike, Pepsi and Burger King or Pizza Hut to come in and supplant the domination of Adidas, Coca Cola and McDonald’s in FIFA?

Of course FIFA would lash out, they’d ban players, not just at international level, but also at club level. Rebel? UEFA will ban you as well, no Champions League for you. Listen to the clubs revolt, look at the sponsors leaving UEFA in droves.

The result? The death of football. We’d go from a corrupt, money grabbing and unaccountable organisation, to a corrupt, money grabbing and unaccountable organisation which would be smaller and exclude all those who don’t bring anything to the table. Do you think Manchester United want to be playing Wigan, that Barcelona want to be playing Osasuna? Of course not. Do England want to play qualifiers against Montenegro? Do Brazil really want to go Peru? Not a bit of it.

They’ll organise their own show, and it’ll be skewed for them. It’ll be every two years. It’ll be on pay-per-view, and the revenues will be astronomical. The small clubs will die, the small nations will be excluded. And the death of the game will be complete.

It will all be down the corruption and self-serving attitude of those who claim to act ‘for the good of the game’.