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There’s a small but significant difference between the transcript of the speech Gordon Brown made to the Knesset today and what he actually said.

Here’s what the transcript says:

We stand ready to lead in taking firmer sanctions and ask the whole international community to join us. Iran has a clear choice to make: suspend its nuclear programme and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but of many nations.

Here’s what the Prime Minister actually said:

We stand ready to lead in taking firmer sanctions and ask the whole international community to join us. Iran has a clear choice to make: suspend its nuclear weapons programme and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but of many nations.

Did you spot it? Can anybody produce any proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme?

The nuclear industry attempts to communicate the nature of its legacy to future generations:

A couple of years ago the US Congress established an expert commission to develop a language or symbolism capable of warning against the threats posed by American nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now. The problem to be solved was: how must concepts and symbols be designed in order to convey a message to future generations, millennia from now? The commission included physicists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, molecular biologists, classical scholars, artists, and so on.

The experts looked for models among the oldest symbols of humanity. They studied the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids and examined the historical reception of Homer and the Bible. But these reached back at most a couple of thousand years, not 10,000. The anthropologists recommended the symbol of the skull and crossbones. However, a historian reminded the commission that the skull and crossbones symbolised resurrection for the alchemists, and a psychologist conducted an experiment with three-year-olds: if the symbol was affixed to a bottle they anxiously shouted “poison!”, but if it was placed on a wall they enthusiastically yelled “pirates!”

There you have it. Nuclear waste will be one of humanity’s longest lasting cultural artifacts. Let’s hope that’s not lost on future archaeologists when they’re killed by horrible tumours after misreading the ancient runes. It’s going to be a disaster. We can barely communicate with each other let alone a civilization 10,000 years away.

Gordon Brown has expressed the hope that all UK family cars will be electrically powered by 2020.

A laudable pipe dream but at the current speed of movement on climate change, he might as well have said he wants all family cars to fly.

Time for an Apocalypsewatch roundup after further evidence that a new dark age is upon us drops into our lap.

Hot on the heels on Gordon Brown’s announcement that soup is good food and that eventually we’ll get used to the taste of powdered egg, we hear that quaint British crime of the austerity era of nicking lead off the church roof is back. That along with pilfering manhole covers and railway signal covers. Makes you wonder why people bother going to university when they could be a (albeit muscular and daring) Steptoe and Son.

Next up we find that inarticulacy is heriditary with the news that up to 40,000 children starting school cannot speak properly. Now, I’m not sure I see a need to panic here. The state of the British job market being what it is, do the people really need spoken English? Did serfs need to be erudite?

Our servile caste, doomed to shelf stacking and soul-crushing menial drudgery, could probably get by with a series of grunts, couldn’t they? With a bit of pointing thrown in, perhaps. How articulate do you have to be to serve a city broker his dinner? Sure, you need decent English to work in a call centre but it seems residents of Mumbai do a better job of it.

When one of the country’s most popular television programmes consists entirely of people trying to guess what’s in a series of boxes, surely it’s time to admit that the age of the ordinary British citizen needing to be able to communicate complex ideas is well and truly over.

Can instructions on how to wipe your bottom properly be very far away?

Britons must stop wasting food in an effort to help combat rising living costs, Gordon Brown has said as he travelled to the G8 summit in Japan.

One does have real sympathy with the argument (anybody else here old enough to remember bubble and squeak on a Monday?) but Brown seems to underestimate the entrenched self-centred wankerdom he’s going to have to beat to get his message across let alone acted on.

Hell, it’s so much easier scraping that half tin of beans into the bin than putting them in a bowl covered with clingfilm and into the fridge, isn’t it? You can imagine some people opening a fresh tin and emptying it straight into the bin just for spite.

The PM said “unnecessary” purchases were contributing to price rises, and urged people to plan meals in advance and store food properly.

The thing is, in effect, it’s been Brown who’s told us up until now to be so wasteful. It’s all the money we’ve been squittering for the last ten years that’s propped up his so-called economic miracle. And now he’s telling us to ignore his previous advice and get used to the good times being over. No return to boom and bust, eh Gordon?

Very soon somebody’s going to evoke ‘austerity’ and ‘rationing’ in connection with Brown’s calls for thrift. As if what he needed was to be portrayed even more as a dour, fun-sucking killjoy. The skies are grey, we’re being told we’ll have to work till we drop and now, as the spin will have it, the miserable bastard is telling us to eat leftovers.

And then a reporter is going to find out just how much food Parliament throws away each week. Or how much Number 10 chucks. Or how much was tossed at the last state banquet. And then Gordon will be made to look like a jackass. Again.

Reaching out to the universe with crisps…

Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

read the rest

Mmmmmm. Is there a daintier dish than jerked right-wing knee? The Bishop of Stafford writes an article about climate change and rather unwisely uses Joseph Fritzl as an example of human selfishness. Watch the right-wingers hitch up their skirts and squeal like the housekeeper in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

It could be argued what the Bishop said took the argument to the acceptable limits of taste. So. without further ado, let he who is without sin cast the first stone…

Here’s Andrew Ian Dodge getting high and mighty. Is it only a year since Andrew was calling supporters of the EU ‘federasts’? You know I rather think it is.

Here’s poor widdle Wonko, he of measured and tasteful Labour = Nazis logo fame, parading his bruised sensibilities exhorting us to join his letter writing campaign of complaint.

Here’s the never knowingly out-outraged Iain Dale, past master of the mass murder and Dachau jokes, getting uppity.

Here’s Devil’s Kitchen momentarily setting aside his not-at-all-disproportionate ’socialists are evil/Nazis/cunts’ schtick to direct his Anglo-Saxon bludgeon at the Bishop. Poor Devil, whatever happened to ‘it is always fun being offensive to deeply unpleasant, vicious people’? It’s only fun if you’re not on the receiving end, that’s what.

The fact is they all think beyond-the-pale insults are fun for all the family until they’re turned on their own apparently delicate and so very easily bruised sensibilities. What’s the matter, lads? Cat got your swastika, death camp and federast/pederast jokes? Tell us another one about how us lefties are just like those blokes who murdered the Jews. Go on.

(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy)

By complete coincidence, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been employing very similar tactics as Charlie Brooker:

Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other. You know: Cash in the Attic, something like that. To help sustain the illusion, imagine a cheapo theme tune playing each morning when you wake up, and again each night before you go to bed. Before long, the day in between will feel like zero-consequence schedule-filling fluff, thereby lifting an almighty weight from your shoulders.

It’s surprisingly easy to do, ignoring the news, digging out the dusty old PlayStation, wallowing in a bean bag blinking dumbly at the telly. Finding yourself less informed on the issues of the day than just about anybody else around you comes as a slight shock to begin with but after a while you start to enjoy it in a fuzzy, stupid kind of way.

Ignorance isn’t just a state of mind. It’s a place you can visit. It’s very nice there and you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.

As Shell and BP both reported a sharp increase in first quarter earnings, industry experts said drivers who are currently sitting in a queue outside a petrol station in Scotland waiting to pay £1.25 a litre would soon work out the connection.

Read the rest

The socialist Nazi haters of liberty and freedom at the Food Standard Agency have declared war on food additives and one of Britain’s bright-blazing beacons:

Most of the foods affected, the agency assured us, could easily be made without the offending additives; most, note, but not all. Heading the list of foodstuffs at risk of going down with the colouring-laden ship was – you guessed it – good old Captain Battenberg.

This will not stand. As a child it was my fervent wish to, as a grown up, eat this delicacy every day. A lofty ambition, I’m sure you’ll agree, but one crushed by the vagaries of the thin, pale pseudo-reality that is adult life. Damn you, pancreas.

This will not stand. Where is Gordon Brown now with his flag waving and his ‘British jobs for British workers’? What about British cakes for British porkers? The man’s a traitor.

Speaking of which. The nannying Nazi’s at ths FSA should be marched to the Tower and their heads be put on spikes for the sport of crows. Along with anyone else declaring they do not care for our sweet, sweet heritage. Forget citizenship tests. Anyone who can’t cram down half a bar of Battenberg with a mug of sugary tea should be deported immediately. And that includes UK citizens.

It’s time to draw a line in the marzipan. Here and no further. I’m laying in stocks of Battenberg for when the inevitable shortages and desperate conflict come. Fifty-gallon drums of pink food colouring are now stored at a secret laboratory where production will continue when the final battle is over.

We will be the Battenberg Martyrs. Rally to my banner. They can have our cake when they pry it from our cold, dead, chubby hands. ‘Bergers unite! You have nothing to lose but your teeth!

This traitorous nonsense needs to be stopped right now. How is this kind of thing allowed to happen?

How To Be Happy: Ask yourself if you really need what you buy
‘I am spending too much, to the point where I am waking up at night worrying about my credit-card debt. What can I do?’ H.

The suggested solutions of ‘avoidance strategies’ and ’self-sabotaging over-consumption’ are nothing short of sedition. Shouldn’t these people be in camps or something?

My advice to ‘H’ would be to avoid this filthy fifth-columnist samizdat and stick to the cardinal maxim of our society:

With open wallet and closed mind,
You’ll be more accepting of the daily grind.
Turn that frown upside down,
It’s all for the good of Gordon Brown.

Spend till you’re spent.

We all love capitalism, don’t we? Who couldn’t? Just think of all the crap you don’t need that you bought with money you don’t have to temporarily fill the void you feel inside. It’s like a caressing, velvet glove. Almost sensual.

Now meet the iron fist.

Personal debt is at a record high of £1.4 trillion, averaging £29,684 for every adult in the country. And people now face the possibility of bailiffs being able to break into their homes and take possessions by force. The sweeping new powers will be outlined by the Government in May, when it publishes details of how a new Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act will work in practice.

‘Sweeping new powers’. Just be careful you aren’t one of the those being swept up:

In a statement to the Independent of Sunday, a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesperson claimed that the new powers for forcing entry will be used only “as a last resort… in strictly controlled circumstances”, and only “once full independent regulation of all private-sector bailiffs has been implemented”. But it emerged last night that, despite bailiffs remaining unregulated, MoJ officials are proposing that they be allowed “to use reasonable force, restraint or violence against debtors thwarting the bailiff’s seizure of their goods”.

Define ‘reasonable force’, ‘restraint’ and ‘violence’. Define ‘thwarting’. I bet a debt collector’s lawyers are better at doing it than the poor schlub with the debts.

Define ‘desperation’.

I imagine most people reading that newspaper report will be white, educated and middle class. They’ll read it and think ‘these strong arm tactics aren’t for the likes of me’. I hope they’re right.

The thing is, it only takes a turn of misfortune here, a wrong decision or two there, to send you plummeting with dizzying rapidity. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. And you don’t have to be a stupid or bad person to end up there either.

The seats in the stalls aren’t reserved exclusively for the feckless lower classes of popular imagination. The banks will and do pull the plug at the first sniff of trouble and you can end up in the hands of a debt collector pretty damn quick.

As a slogan appealing to another brand of hope over experience once put it: ‘It could be you’:

Owen James, managing director of Interim Justicia, a debt collection firm that has almost a million “customers” in Britain, and which had group profits of £37m in 2007, told the IoS: “We are looking forward to controlled sustainable growth… there’s a lot of potential in this market.”

Think on. Don’t realise your ‘potential’.

(Via RickB.)

Jane Garvey, the new presenter of Women’s Hour says Radio 4 has ‘a massively middle class bent‘. Now, Garvey came to her new job from Five Live’s Drive, an execrable programme where she exchanged inanities with the woeful Peter Allen over a platudinous presentation of the day’s events*. On that form, I’m left thinking that Garvey’s definition of middle class starts with people who get out of the bath to go to the toilet.

You know, I’m not a particularly well-educated or well-read person. I’m not what you’d describe as an intellectual. But one thing I am, in my own way, is a self-improver, an auto-didact. The government wants us to be drones, repeating our allotted task in order to service the economy until we die. You want to smell the roses? You’re going to have to grow them yourself.

I listen to Radio 4 not because I’m middle class – I’ll kill any man who describes me as such – but because it’s didactic. And massively entertaining. Five Live is rotting my mind. Five of the sweetest words in the English language are ‘Victoria Derbyshire is on holiday’. Garvey’s suggestion seems to be that instead of elevating the lower classes, Radio 4 should sink to their level. She can fuck right off, frankly. And the mouth-breathers she rode in on.

Jesus, even an ill-educated prole like me can see the cultural desertification that’s creeping up on us. As Jim Bliss said about the reaction to Rowan William’s speech – it’s anti-intellectualism. And the frustrating thing is, it wouldn’t take much to reverse it. My life was improved forever when, as a student in Huddersfield, I found the second-hand bookshop in the town centre. The prices were cheap enough for speculative purchases and very soon I’d put down the James Herberts and the Frederick Forsyths and was reading Thomas Hardy, Joseph Heller, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene. The world suddenly seemed massive and inspirational.

I know life’s hard and day are long and people are knackered but just once I wish someone would put down that novel about the SAS and pick up Catch-22 (it’s about war ‘n’ shit). Or drop The Da Vinci Code and pick up Foucault’s Pendulum (it’s about conspiracies ‘n’ shit). Or Our Man in Havana (it’s a comedy spy thriller ‘n’ shit). They’re more of a challenge to read, granted, but then they don’t talk to you the way Five Live talks to you either.

Try an Elmore Leonard – they’re like crack. When I discovered his books I read a dozen on the trot. His plots, characters and writing are like nothing else. And he doesn’t sound like Patricia Hewitt sending you to bed without any supper.

If Robert Sharp’s right and we only get time to digest 624 books before we die, why not try a little chateaubriand between the burgers? Try Radio 4 between 6.30 and 7 pm on a weekday or on a Saturday morning (skip Fi Glover though, she’s from Five Live and shit as well). Turn off Victoria Derbyshire’s daily racist and yahoo magnet and go and smear yourself with your own faeces instead. Trust me, you’ll feel like an intellectual titan.

* In the run up to the Iraq war, I remember one day them going on and on about a dead badger than had been painted over by someone painting double yellow lines on a road. On and on and on and on and on and on they went about this sodding badger. I emailed in and said: ‘We might be at war soon and you keep going on about a badger? You’re at the cutting edge of the news agenda.’ And they read it out!

I’m in two minds about blogging and signing this:

We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.

Sure, if he gets the job thousands will very probably die and the continent will be finally arrive back in the Dark Ages, a time to where it is already hurtling.

But think of the time bloggers, writers, columnists, poets and other assorted tragedians would have. It’d be a golden age for world literature.

I’m not sure why there’s all this fuss about McDonald’s being given permission to offer ‘A-level style’ qualifications. I’m going to get myself one pretty damn quick.

I mean, look at the way our civilization’s going. We have an ascendant, under-educated and over confident aristocracy, a descendant under-educated and over confident underclass, institutionalised idiocy, and looming war, disease and financial meltdown. In the scattered ruins surviving the impending cataclysm, people with burger-flipping diplomas are going to be the philosopher-kings of our society. I want to be on that gravy train.

One thing that did go unreported when the announcement was made that a fast food corporation is going to be allowed to educate our children was that I’ve been given accreditation to award diplomas as well.

The first will be ‘Cynicism and Pessimism PgDip’. You too can be never disappointed but very, very occasionally surprised. The course will run over a number of months and consist of a series of questions about the issue of the day. The first exercise begins now.

You will require: A pen and paper, 10 minutes and 35 seconds of your time, and the patience of a saint. You may begin.

Listen to this interview with Jack Straw denying the charge that the UK prison system is at breaking point. He talks of the expanding prison population and the building of huge ‘Titan’ jails.

Question: How many times in the course of the interview does Straw use the word ‘rehabilitation’?

Take your time. Write down your answer and put it somewhere safe.

Pens down.

I know I keep saying it’s all over, but now it’s a little more all over.

(Via Warren Ellis)

Of course, criticising (or even straying slightly from the accepted wisdom of) world capitalism isn’t a sensible thing to do these day. At best you’ll be called a fool. At worst someone with the proper sense of perspective will lump you in with the Nazis. A right-wing libertarian, or one of those New Labour zealots who think you’re weird if you don’t want to turn everything for a profit, will happen along and use the word socialist in the same tone of voice as paedophile.

Still, here goes. Watching the global financial meltdown and people running hither and thither screaming about the end of the world, several voices popped into my head. The first was Ben Elton, before his plummet from grace, reading from his first novel Stark:

At the beginning of the day a factory full of jars of jam might be worth a thousand pounds. At the end of the day; a day of ‘good trading’; a day of ‘rallies’ and ‘confidence’, we might be told that the same factory is worth two thousand pounds.

What has happened? Only a few hours have passed. The factory has not changed. There is no more jam in it than there was. There has been no time for the new slogan ‘Let him dip his fingers into something fruity, Mum’ to take effect. The slimmers’ version still tastes bloody awful. Nothing has happened and yet the factory is ‘worth’ twice as much. Where has the extra cash come from? Nowhere, that’s where. It doesn’t exist. It is entirely theoretical and if people choose to dispute the theory, if they all choose at once to say ‘but that’s impossible. All right then, give me the cash…’, the money would instantly disappear, like the puff of smoke it is.

And then Guinan from Star Trek: The Next Generation piped up (yes, I’m using quotes from Ben Elton and Star Trek to illustrate what I see as the absurdity of global finance. Sue me, all the posh books you like to quote from were popular culture once):

When a man is convinced he’s going to die tomorrow, he will probably find a way to make it happen.

Then the voice of my mother, her wisdom floating in as if from years ago:

If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you?

Five Live’s financial correspondent Pauline McColl was on the Midday News yesterday spilling the beans on how ECONOGEDDON is down to nothing more than the hunches, guesswork and herd instinct of stockbrokers. That five minutes of the programme is mysteriously missing from the Listen Again option on the BBC website. No doubt an urgent meeting was held in a smoke-filled room somewhere and the message was sent to the BBC ordering them to expunge the dangerous intelligence that McColl had dared utter.

I think about this often. Far be it for a fascist like to me – hellbent, as I am, on the ultimate impoverishment of all – to question a system that has made so very many deserving souls so very rich for so very long, but our financial institutions are basically built on bollocks, aren’t they? It’s voodoo. I’ve lain on my bed on many, may occasions trying to make things happen by willing them to be but so far I’ve had no joy. It’s not fair.

I’m reminded of the Ron Suskind essay, Without a Doubt, about The War Against Terror, and the faith- versus reality-based ‘communities’. I can imagine a champion of capitalism sitting me down and giving the same pitying lecture:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’m not the first person to think like this – there’s probably an asylum for us all somewhere. There’ll be a knock on the door soon, I imagine.

But if you were to run your life on the basis of rumours you’d heard down the pub, you’d soon find yourself chased down the street by a man in a white coat with a big butterfly net. You’d be skint, divorced, homeless and dead in short order. And yet the guys with braces sold billions as quickly as they could and then bought billions as quickly as they could yesterday on information little stronger than gossip.

You don’t need to be Derren Brown – these people are some of the most suggestible on the planet. If any of them are reading this, send fifty pounds to my Paypal account (my email address is at the top of the page) and I’ll tell you which way the market’s going to go tomorrow.

Try going to Sainsbury’s and saying to the checkout person, ‘A hunch tells me that the price of Stella is going to fall. Here’s 37p for 4,000 cans’ and you’ll end up thirsty. But go to work in the City, say ‘I think the price of Global Megacorp shares are going to fall’, convince enough people of the same and KERSPLASH! Global Megacorp is in the toilet.

It’s not as if I’m entirely ignorant of the mechanics. My degree dissertation (for which I got a first) was an examination and evaluation of the various predictive methods you can employ in order to derive ‘buy’ and ’sell’ signals from stock market data. All of them rely on historic data in order to give a ‘hint’ of the future. All of them come with the health warning that, despite the cliche, history is not doomed to repeat itself.

Unless the methods have changed radically and new predictive systems have incorporated chaos theory in the last 15 years, I can’t see past how all this isn’t just one big faith-based initiative. That the future of every last one of us is in the hands of a small group of (mostly) men who are at the mercy of their moods and whims. Putting Prozac in the water coolers on the floors of the world’s stock exchanges is an idea I wouldn’t sniff at in the current climate.

Most people will say that that I’m unwilling or unable to face up to accepted reality. I would retort that they are merely slaves to a prevailing orthodoxy. Still, that’s just me. Must get back to polishing my jackboots in preparation for the ultimate triumph of world socialism.

Mark Steel:

Even more confusing is why the livelihoods of most people on the planet seem to depend on the actions of share dealers. One day the traders spend all day selling instead of buying, and this means we could be on the edge of a global slump. How do they get to be so influential?

The Daily Mash:

Evan Davies, the BBC’s economics editor, said: “The world’s stock markets are like a finely tuned barrel of eels.

“As they plunge, sea levels rise, leading to a fall in the price of dogs. Even if cat prices remain stable a recession then occurs. No one knows why.”

Davies added: “People often ask me why they have to lose their job and their home because a man in an expensive shirt made some terrible decisions. I tell them no-one knows.”

And…

Meanwhile, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke urged people ‘to just buy shit and worry about it later’…

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about this:

An armada of robot submarines and marine sensors are to be deployed across the Atlantic, from Florida to the Canary Islands, to provide early warning that the Gulf Stream might be failing, an event that would trigger cataclysmic freezing in Britain for decades.

I’m not denying the technology isn’t clever and who can sniff at the amazingly cool idea of robot submarines patrolling the ocean floor? At least there’ll be someone left to tell visiting aliens what happened to our shagged-out planet.

Future generations will regard us as the selfish bastards who beat them to the bathroom and used all the hot water. The theory is O-Level Geography with a dash of eschatological sci-fi stirred in:

Without the Gulf Stream, the UK would be as cold as Canada in winter. Ports could freeze over and snowstorms and blizzards would paralyse the country. An extreme version of this meteorological mayhem provided the film The Day After Tomorrow with its plotline.

So far, so terrifying. I’m not looking forward to being chased to the library by a tidal wave, for starters. Although we might have end up being more competitive at the Winter Olympics.

But what’s the robot system’s practical application? The article doesn’t say if there are any plans to attempt to reverse any failure of the Gulf Stream that the system might flag up. No mention of asking Mexico to leave their hot taps running or anything.

It looks like Rapid Watch is going to be a warning system whose warnings we can’t or won’t act upon. Will there be a sliding scale of warnings, as the temperature plummets, like MI5’s terror alerts?

And like the terror alerts, just how useful to the general public will such information be? Maybe, unlike the terror alerts, the Rapid Watch alerts could offers practical advice as well as inform us how terrified we should be. How about…

Level 5: Put on a pullover
Level 4: Burn your furniture
Level 3: Watch the Kill it, Cook It, Eat It polar bear special
Level 2: Get your leaders to their helicopters
Level 1: Envy the dead

Wouldn’t the £16 million that Rapid Watch is going to cost be better spent on scotch and revolvers?

Maybe there is a reason to be cheerful at this time of year. We’ve been given a huge reason to celebrate this very week:

Planning an effective flood management strategy is as important as planning for terrorism or even preventing bird flu, an independent review by Sir Michael Pitt, who is the chairman of the South West Strategic Health Authority, has said.

“We’re all facing up to climate change and there are all sorts of implications for the country in terms of having to adapt to that change,” Sir Michael said.

Climate change and flooding are only as bad as terrorism and bird flu? Well, thank God for that. Maybe He exists after all. I mean, think of the rather small numbers of people who have been killed by terrorism or bird flu in the past few years.

If Sir Michael had likened the damage caused by climate change and flooding to the carnage wreaked by, say, cars, alcohol, botched invasions of Middle Eastern countries or those cancers that leave you screaming for death, I think we’d all have all been running round like Chicken Little this week.

But no, it’s all going to be all right. We can all relax this festive season and for many festive seasons to come. Hardly anybody is going to be killed by climate change. Except maybe quite a lot of brown people and most of those don’t celebrate Christmas anyway. Isn’t it always the way?

So, chin up. Happy Christmas!

Personally, I’m rather disappointed by this.

Greenpeace is making its first attempt to get lads to go eco-friendly with a risqué viral ad featuring men and women who literally have light shining out of their rear ends.

I know the climate change message is one that needs to be spread as widely as possible, but I was hoping that the demographic of wilfully ignorant, Nuts-buying, compulsive masturbaters would be some of the few victims of global warming.

Just think of the washing machines, electricity, detergent and other vital resources you wouldn’t need if these wankers were wiped out at a stroke. Maybe we should have at them before sea levels start to rise.

It’s all over, isn’t it?

‘America’s Next Top Model 8′: Week Four: Crime Scene Victims

Sarah
Pushed Downstairs by a Model

Nigel: The look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead. (later) I think Sarah is the classic example of someone who isn’t typically pretty, but translates amazingly well on film.

Guest Judge Photographer Mike Rosenthal: I think you just put a little bit too much thought in the pose. I thought with the facial expressions, you did a great job.

Why no ‘Beaten to death with a huge porcelain phallus by a Model‘? The poverty of imagination on display is only too wearyingly familiar. Someone with real balls would have recreated the murder of Sharon Tate. If you hate women – or yourself for that matter – that much, put some bloody effort in. Misogyny as a creative driver is so 1970s.

The most shocking part about this is that the image aren’t really that shocking. Most models look dead inside anyway; that glassy stare looks out from a million magazine. What are the pictures trying to say? Anyone trying to make a real point would have hung their model from a hook in a meatlocker. Or given us ‘Anorexia-induced liver failure by a model‘.

As it is, the whole exercise is a moral vacuum, exquisite in its amoral vapidity; pointless. The pictures don’t fuel any sense of outrage but merely top up the resignation to the fact that the human race is slouching towards a tyranny of the mediocre and not giving much of a toss along on the way.

I give us ten years at the outside. By then we’ll be so emotionally stunted we’ll be eating our own young and rutting in the street like animals. Those of us escaping this psychic cataclysm will be regarded as latter-day Travis Bickles. We won’t be the lucky ones.

(Link via Rochenko)

News that Britain has witnessed its second pedal-by shooting in as many months should give cause for alarm, hand-wringing and hyperbole. Just not for the reason desperate politicians and newspaper editors with their eyes on the bottom line are spoon-feeding you.

No, the spate of knifings and shootings are less to do with absent fathers (code from both sides for single mothers are useless) or a blood-soaked society swirling down the plughole to Hell than to do with a significant minority’s ingrained stupidity in the face of eons of evolution and/or a rank cowardice pretending to be swaggering machismo. Those who, in the first instance, pick up a knife or a gun for offensive or defensive purposes are labouring under one or both of two deficiencies.

(more…)

After the knives and paedophiles of previous summers, this year’s sun-stroked moral panic is shaping up to be cheap alcohol.

Booze turns people into arseholes apparently. Let me say something. I’ve been drinking for the best part of twenty years. I love to drink, I love being drunk and – this is unintentional, shamefaced machismo, by the way – I drink like some people breathe. In all those years of being drunk, I never hit anybody; never slapped the missus or the kids. I never stabbed anyone, robbed anyone or raped anyone, intimidated anyone on the bus home or harassed women. Nor has anyone in my social circle or they wouldn’t be there.

If you ask me, it’s not alcohol (cheap or otherwise) that makes someone an arsehole. It’s being an arsehole that makes them an arsehole. Let’s address the societal factors that cause arseholism, shall we?

But no, they want to raise the drinking age and put up the price of cheap alcohol. That’s collective punishment, isn’t it? Creeping prohibition. The idea that you can price somebody out of drinking is ridiculous anyway. They’ll just look for cheaper ways to get pissed until they’re drinking god knows what.

It’s the same with cigarettes. I gave up smoking not because it was bankrupting me (although it slowly was) but because I read some truly terrifying articles about lung cancer and its survival rates in this country and decided I really didn’t fancy it.

Now all I need is to read in stark terms about what all this cheap Stella Artois is doing to me. I’ve looked, I really have, but nobody seems to want to talk me out of my bibulous lifestyle. Putting seven pence on a can really isn’t going to put me off. Or anybody else, I would have thought, other than the pocket money crowd who, if regulations were enforced, wouldn’t be drinking anyway.

(And if life in this country was less shitty, particularly for those trapped on the work-bed-work-weekend-pissed-work-bed-work treadmill, fewer people would feel the need to be arseholed at every opportunity.)

Update: As ever, John Band is the voice of reason.

It’s doubtful whether Live Aid would have taken off quite as much as it did, if the song had been: “The river banks burst / So the carpets went first / And one woman’s fridge / Is now under the bridge. / It’s a tale of endurance / But they should get most of it back / On the insurance.”

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