The Reinvention Game

Another day, another celebrity linked with serious sex offences.  The celebrity sex offenders are obviously in season right now.  On this side of the Atlantic, at least.  In the US they elect them as president.  I see that the usual BBC response to such things is in full swing, as they attempt to expunge David Walliams from existence by removing anything he ever appeared in on the BBC from the archives. Still, I guess this latest development rules Walliams out of contention to be the next James Bond.  (I'm just trying to arbitrarily tie together two entirely unconnected stories, tabloid-style).  I mean, he must surely have been on one of those hypothetical casting lists the media have been bandying about.  Personally, I say to Hell with all this talk of Robert Pattinson et al, they just need to get on with it and announce Jason Statham as the new, working class Bond.  'Martini and caviar, sir?' 'Fuck that, just get me a pint and a packet of pork scratchings.'   There's all this talk about how Bond 'needs' to be re-invented by Amazon, now that they have creative control, so what better way than to throw all that class pretension and supposed 'sophistication' out of the window and just go for a more down-to-earth approach, reflecting the low-budget nature of today's Secret Intelligence Service.  

After all, you could well imagine that a Bond played by Jason Statham would work for far lower pay than Daniel Craig or Roger Moore and instead of using expensive gadgets to kill enemies he'd probably be happy using a bent teaspoon or some similar kitchen utensil.  You could have a whole backstory where he'd attained his double-o status, his 'licence to kill, (which, according to Ian Fleming, required an agent to have killed at least twice in the line of duty), in a bar-room brawl, fatally glassing some drunken Scouser who'd spilled his beer, who was really a Russian agent in disguise.  The second kill could have been during a ruck between rival football hooligans, kicking to death a Millwall thug who is actually an undercover Muslim fundamentalist terrorist.  Instead of the Casino Royale, this Bond could hang out at some dodgy gambling den in Streatham, or maybe even his local branch of Ladbrokes.  See - it just writes itself, once you get the casting right!  Of course, nobody out there is asking for a rough and ready, working class Bond movie.  But neither was anyone asking for a reinterpretation of The Great Gatsby as a weekly police procedural series, but right now, that's exactly what one streaming outfit has in development.  Right now, the entertainment industry seems to be full of people who have no confidence in original concepts - unless they can somehow be expressed in terms of an already popular format or characters, regardless of how inappropriate a vehicle these existing concepts might be for the new stuff.  

Celebrity UFO Bollocks

There are some things you just can't seem to escape.  In my case, it seems to be UFO bollocks and Nick Pope.  I thought that, when he died earlier this year, we might see some abatement of the whole UFOlogy nonsense of which he was a key figure.  But, the other evening I caught a bit of The One Show on the BBC, with Bradley Walsh promoting (yet another) TV series he is fronting, this time about UFOs.  Now, I have nothing against Walsh, he seems a nice enough bloke (and difficult to avoid on TV these days), but my heart sank when he described Pope as one his 'heroes' and enthused over the fact that this new series would include one of the last interviews given by him.  All the usual cobblers about Nick Pope was trotted out: how he was part of the MoD's 'X-Files' and investigated UFO sightings in the UK, how he knew all about the cover ups and had access to those secret files.  As I've pointed out here before, this is all just so much horse shit.  The MoD has no 'X-Files', Pope did not investigate anything.  He was simply posted, for a couple of years, to the section to which public reports of UFOs were referred.  I once spoke to his successor on the desk, who told me that there were no investigations, simply a form letter of response sent out thanking the individual for contacting the MoD, but pointing out that the Ministry had no interest in investigating reports of UFOs unless they posed a clear threat to national defence.  The original letter would then be filed (more often than not in the bin if was really crazy).  Now, this guy had no reason to lie to me and we both held the same security clearances, (I met him on a training course when I worked for the MoD), so he had no need to withhold anything from me.

The security clearances are an important issue here, as, like myself and his successor, Pope was subject to the Official Secrets Act, which means that if he had ever used anything he had come across in his work which had been classified in any of his books or TV appearances, he would have been prosecuted under the Act.  As he wasn't, I think that we can safely assume that everything he wrote and said publicly about UFOs was utter bollocks. Because folks - and I can't emphasise this enough - Nick Pope was a bullshitter.  A charlatan.  A grifter who used his short time at that desk in the MoD to build a huge confabulation with which to exploit the gullible and weak-minded.  I've said all of this before and it is depressing that I feel the need to repeat it, but the cult of Nick Pope doesn't seem to have died with him.  Now, if it was just his usual followers - cranks and crackpots - still worshipping at his altar of falsehood and regurgitating his cobblers, I wouldn't really care, but when I encounter it on prime time TV - prime time BBC for which I pay a licence fee, at that - complete with celebrity endorsement, then I object.  I found the whole episode extraordinary, with Walsh declaring that it carried more weight when celebrities like him talked about UFOs than when 'ordinary' people reported sightings.  I'd say the opposite was true: celebrities are generally self-seeking egotists desperate for publicity of any kind, making me less likely to believe anything they say.  By contrast, if a regular, non-celebrity, person was to tell me about how they'd seen a UFO, then I'd be far more inclined to believe that they'd seen something, (something that could probably be easily explained by rational means).  None of this about whether UFOs or aliens exist, its about the fact that the whole field is riven with utter falsehood driven by greed and avarice.  I'm sure that people do see things that they can't identify.  But that doesn't mean that they are alien spaceships - in fact, I'd say that was the least likely explanation.  Nor do I exclude the possibility of alien life elsewhere in the universe - but I don't think that they are regularly visiting the earth giving anal probes to sad, lonely people.  That's just someone's sad sexual fantasy.

Branded!

Apparently, ITV are planning to revive the dating show 'Take Me Out', although Paddy McGuinness  won't be presenting this time around.  Unfortunately for the search for a replacement, Russel Brand has become suddenly unavailable.  Which is a pity, as surely a dating show with lots of single women looking for love/sex would be the perfect vehicle for a Russel Brand comeback.  But, hey, he's now at His Majesty's Pleasure - perhaps it will give him time to write another book.  Something autobiographical: My Rapey Wapey, maybe.  (See, that works on more than one level - one for the smartarses out there who like to think they are sophisticated).  Incredibly, despite his conviction, Brand still has supporters out there, mainly on Twitter, granted, but supporters nonetheless.  Even more incredibly, some of them are women.  It's all the usual stuff about 'two tier' justice and 'them' conspiring to put away brave teller of the truth Russel Brand.  Even more unpalatable has been the right-wing press' attempts to politicise the conviction by playing up Brand's previous links to the left, with one repugnant headline even accusing the left of having 'enabled' his sex offending.  All of which ignores the fact that it has been a long time since Brand had any association with 'the left', he has instead spent the last decade or so drifting ever rightward, into the land of paranoid conspiracy theories and, most recently, right-wing Christianity.  This drift has accompanied his retreat from mainstream fame. As I've noted before, as he found his schtick falling out of favour and TV gigs more difficult to come by, he turned to the web and instead courted the crackpot audience: anti-vaxxers, extreme right-wing fringe conspiracies, crystals and mysticism.  It's a well trodden path that can bring you lots of clicks (which can translate into money) on platforms like You Tube.

Make no mistake, predators like Brand, particularly if they have fame and influence, will latch onto any cause, any bandwagon, that they think can get them what they want.  In Brand's case, when he first hit the big-time, those left-wing causes he sidled up to helped him connect with a potential audience: young, educated, often idealistic and naive people.  More importantly, it gave him access to young women who would look up to him.  The left, especially at its more extreme ends, has long been a happy hunting ground for those seeking sex - I recall that when I was a student, the Student Socialist Workers Party (SSWP) was well known for the number of attractive posh girls who joined it, mainly as an act of rebellion against their middle class upbringings. (Indeed, there was one girl, a redhead, I remember vividly - it was said that her father promised to buy her a new car for her twenty first birthday if she left the SSWP.  Well, she turned twenty one and suddenly lost interest in the SSWP in favour of her new set of wheels).  It was something of a running joke that blokes would join the SSWP (and the full fledged Socialist Workers Party,) just to meet 'posh birds'.  Anyway, getting back to Brand, as he got older and less popular, he realised his demographic and hunting ground lay online, with the middle aged cranks and crazies.  Speaking personally, I can't say that I had any kind of insight or inside knowledge about Brand's activities, but, like Jimmy Savile before him, I just knew that I thought him incredibly creepy.  I really didn't like him.  I tried to like him - everyone kept telling me that he was some kind of comedic genius.  But I just couldn't.  There was just something about him that meant that, if someone had accused him of sex offences back then, I wouldn't have been surprised.  (In point of fact, I believe that there were complaints, but, like Savile, Brand was famous, wealthy and litigious and could make them go away through threats of counter legal action).  So, there you go, just some random thoughts about another celebrity rapist.

Smut Hunters

It could be a whole new TV format - buying abandoned storage containers and searching them for pornography.  The idea occurred to me when I was reading about the Daily Mail or the Daily Express, (they're utterly interchangeable hate rags I really can't tell apart, so it could have been either), tracking down a storage unit in Brazil, or wherever, which had been owned by Meghan Markle's estranged father (who is accused of possessing child pornography) buying it and finding the unit packed full of smut of the most reprehensible kind.  Allegedly.  It made me think, what if that had happened in an episode of Storage Wars?  Could you imagine it, superannuated sex pest Barry collapses clutching his chest after finding a stash of hardcore in the unit he's just overbid on, (doubtless wondering if he'd somehow bought his own storage unit)?  Or perennial pantomime villain and profiteer Dave Hester landing a container full of high quality smut setting up in business as a porn vendor after valuing it all?  He could have a regular adult shop to shift the regular stuff and a dark web-based site to sell the under-the-counter too-kinky-for-public-consumption magazines and videos.  Mind you, the best bit would probably be when they took the stuff to be valued by an 'expert' - the sight of these guys having to skulk around some grimy backstreet pornographer's photo studio, or attending a full-blown porn shoot, or maybe a brothel in order to consult the local working girls over the value and desirability of second hand sex toys, would be priceless.

But, getting back to the original concept, just how could the idea be formatted for TV?  Could it simply be a case of our intrepid smut hunters combing the records of storage facilities to find units abandoned by celebrities, politicians or other notables, try to buy them, then scour them for compromising porn.  Naked and sexual photos of the former owners would also count.  Then, if you really wanted to be 'edgy', then you could have them see what the original owners are willing to pay to get their filth back. Which could, of course, risk getting busted on blackmail charges.  A slightly less contentious format might have the smut hunters blindly buying units which the production team have already established are likely to have porn in them, (I know, the idea of rigging a show like this in such a way is, frankly, unbelievable - but, hey, it's entertainment, folks), then, once they've successfully bid on them, have them trying to find out whose porn it actually is, before trying to sell it, (the more famous the owner, the higher the prices it would command, moreover, wealthy celebrity porn collectors would be more likely to have real rarities amongst their collections).   Ultimately, though, the real entertainment value would lie, as it does in the shows involving regular storage hunters, in watching a bunch of money-hungry guys scrabbling through heaps of crap, desperately looking for stacks of high-quality pornography, then laughing at how crushed they are after finding that the unit they paid a couple of thousand dollars for contained nothing more than a couple of copies of Reader's Wives, (not even famous reader's wives, just regular ones).  Another great TV idea to hawk around the tinpot digital channels...

Losing the Zeitgeist

There are two stories with regard to Andy Burnham that the right-wing media persist with - it doesn't seem to matter to them that their constant efforts to create these 'issues' are rebuffed or ignored by the public, they just keep on trying to push them.  The first is their obsession with the idea of Burnham calling an early election, despite Burnham having ruled such a move out.  Indeed, why on earth would a prime Minister who has inherited a huge parliamentary majority and still has at least half of this parliament's term to go, want to call an election right now?   There is absolutely no reason to do so.  I know that there is the usual bleating about 'unelected Prime Ministers' and how they need to get their own mandate from the electorate, but this sort of nonsense is only a talking point for the politically ignorant on social media, (as ever, here in the UK we don't elect Prime Ministers - we elect parliaments, it is for parliament to form governments and decide on PMs).  But the media can't forget the fact that they tried to destabilise Gordon Brown by constantly running stories about how he was going to call an early election after he succeeded Blair, citing their phoney 'sources close to government', then, when he didn't, after they had woven a complex fantasy they reported as 'fact', branded him a 'coward' for having 'backed out' of this phantom election.  Unfortunately for them, it seems that Burnham remembers their plays as well as I do and moved very quickly to deny any plans for an early election, taking the wind out of their sails, somewhat.

The second thing they keep trying to make an issue out of are his alleged relationship with the owners of Manchester City, back when he was Mayor of Manchester, attempting to build a story about 'political interference' in City's legal fight with the FA.  This one is based around his remark that he hoped that the verdict going against City wouldn't drive its Middle Eastern owners (who had invested a lot in not just the club, but the city, out of the UK altogether.  Which isn't the same thing at all as saying that City shouldn't be punished by the FA.  Although you wouldn't know that from the reporting,  But again, this story seems to have failed to build up any momentum with the wider public - most see the Manchester City business as being simply a football story without political ramifications.  But again, like that early election story, they keep on trying to make it fly.  The fact they keep persisting with these stories simply underlines the desperation that the right-wing press seem to feeling.  It isn't just that they can't anything, so far, that will really stick against Burnham and his government, it's that they can begin to see that the whole zeitgeist is slipping away from them.   Just look at how increasingly strident and desperate their defences of Brexit are becoming - it is becoming increasingly apparent that, thanks both to demographic changes in the electorate and the manifest economic damage caused to the economy by Brexit. public opinion on the issue has firmly shifted against them and Brexit.  The right-wing press' courting of the far right, particularly Farage and Reform UK is also now backfiring badly, with revelations about their financing and racial attitudes of many of their candidates, sending Reform on a downward spiral in the polls.  They are on the wrong side of history and they know it.  They just don't want to accept it.

A Lack of Restraint

It always perplexes me when I see industries or professional bodies asking governments institute regulatory frameworks for them.  I mean, why can't they do that for themselves?  Why are they apparently incapable of developing a series of ethical constraints upon themselves to guide their work?  I mean, it isn't difficult - most individuals are perfectly capable of defining an individual moral code by which they live, so why is it apparently so difficult of organisations?  Not that I'm saying that governments shouldn't be creating regulatory frameworks, it is, after all, one of the primary functions of government.   I'm just puzzled as to why these organisations can't make a start on such measures themselves.  Most recently, we've had various prominent figures in the AI industry making pleas for regulation of their work, in order to stop their creations from destroying humanity.  Which begs the obvious question: if you think that what you are doing is so dangerous, why don't you simply stop doing it yourselves?  The answer, of course, is because if they did that, then they wouldn't be getting all those billions of dollars of investment for their over-valued companies and they just can't bring themselves to forgo the prospect of all that cash and the prospect of future profits.  

In other words, like psychopaths, they have no moral constraints.  They just can't help themselves.  They are driven, primarily, by greed.  Which isn't just an indictment of them, but of modern capitalism in general - it promotes the idea that the profit motive outweighs all other considerations.  Even, apparently, the potential extinction of humanity.  If it isn't AI bosses creating potentially hazardous models in pursuit of profit, then it's the fossil fuel industry happily opposing green energy and encouraging the increased use of its toxic products regardless of the damage they are causing to the environment.  Because, Hell, who cares about the long-term?  In the long run, as Keynes observed, we're all dead, so it isn't going to be our problem.  (Which is precisely the mentality that lumbered us with Brexit - a bunch of superannuated old fogies voting to leave the EU without regard for the consequences because they wouldn't be around to see them.  They just wanted that quick victory so that they could shuffle off this mortal coil happy that they'd pissed on those bloody long haired, lefty, woke youngsters).  So, they all want to abdicate their responsibilities in favour of having regulation imposed upon them by government - which they can then rail against and blame for those falls in profits and/or lack of investment.  It gives them a 'Get Out of Jail Fee' card with regard to shareholders and investors, rather than being born of any real concerns about public safety.  Well, come the revolution, comrades...

Middle Class Whingers

You know the worst thing about this week's budget?  The fact that it has brought out in force the middle class do-gooder whingers.  You know what I mean.  'Oh, these measures will only reduce bills by £45 (or whatever) a year, this just isn't good enough. What use is that?'  OK, I won't deny that I've sometimes said similar things, but the fact is that we are saying them from a position of privilege.  Forty five quid (or whatever), might not sound like much of a saving to us, but, believe me, for those living on a shoestring, as the poorest people have no choice but to do, forty five quid can seem like a fortune.  Of course, those privileged, middle class 'socialists' who like to lecture the rest of us on 'how terrible poverty is', actually have little or no idea what not having any money is actually like.  As someone who was once down , quite literally, to their last few quid and came within a hairs breadth of defaulting on their mortgage, (I quite literally had enough in the bank for one more payment), I'd like to think that I do have some idea of what life is like living on the breadline.  OK, I was lucky, before I had to make that payment, I managed to get some work.  It was casual work with horrible hours and shitty pay, but it enabled me to keep a roof over my head.  Just.  The amount I had left over to buy food and pay bills was paltry and had to be very carefully managed.  Some tough choices had to be made.

Even when did get a full-time job, the pay was still shitty, so I had to keep on making those choices, learning how to like supermarket economy brands, where to find cheap clothes (and how to learn to put up with wearing socks with more holes than fabric and underpants with the arse out them for far longer than was comfortable), learning how to minimise the amount of heat I could live with in my house during the winter.  Any saving and I mean any saving, no matter how tiny, I could make was a Godsend.   So please, middle class whingers, don't patronise the poor by dismissing what you think are paltry savings that they might be able to make as a result of this week's budget.  In fact, please just fuck off.  These middle class wankers are a large part of what is wrong with the 'left' in this country.  It used to be that these middle class do-gooders were confined to the Liberal Party (or Lib Dems or whatever the fuck else it is that they call themselves).  You know the sort: always wringing their hands at the plight of those 'poor people' - not that they knew any themselves and they definitely wouldn't want them in their houses, but it helped salve their consciences to throw them a few scraps and congratulate themselves for their enlightened generosity.  What they definitely didn't want was for those oiks to get sufficient help to better themselves and - horror of horrors - get their own hands on the levers of power.  Which is why they identified as Liberals and decried the Labour Party.  But now they seem to surround every bloody proposed Labour policy, tut-tutting their disapproval whilst simultaneously claiming to be 'socialists'.  Jesus, just fuck off, will you? 

Peace Through Nudity

Going through my old files, I came across several fragments of an alternative version of the story 'Nudists From Outer Space' that ran on The Sleaze some years ago, (it was also the basis of a segment of the pilot for the 'After Hours' podcast).  I've pieced them together (with a couple of bridging sentences) to form a vaguely coherent whole.  So, in lieu of a proper post, (I just couldn't come up with anything today), here's an early, alternate take on 'Nudists From Outer Space': 

“Ten or twelve of them at a time were leaping onto the display beds and indulging in wild an energetic sex,” claims assistant store manager Ralph Milner, who suffered third degree friction burns to his groin when his polyester trousers were ripped off by a naked reveller.    “The springs just weren’t designed to take that kind of thing - they all collapsed!”  says Milner, who admits that he remains mystified by the whole incident.    “At first I thought it was some kind of performance art thing, where they get all those naked women to tun up.    Then I realised that there were blokes with this lot, and a lot of them, both male and female, were bloody ugly!    I don’t call that art!”    Police suspect that the Ikea store incident was another example of the so-called ‘Nude Mobbing’ craze.    “It’s like ‘Flash Mobbing’, where large groups of people would be organised by mobile phone to just turn up at a particular location for a few minutes,” says Inspector Tim Carling of Bucks Constabulary.    “This new activity seems to be aimed at creating an affront to decency through mass demonstrations of public nudity!”    

Carling himself has first hand experience of ‘Nude Mobbing’, having been caught in an earlier incident on London’s Westminster Bridge.    “I was driving to Scotland Yard for a police conference one Monday morning, when scores of pedestrian commuters suddenley tore their clothes off and started jumping all over vehicles,”    he says.    “They were pulling people off of buses and forcibly stripping them!    I found my car immobilised by some fellow sticking his todger up my exhaust!    When I got out of the car to remonstrate with him, I found myself overwhelmed by the mob and my uniform being pulled off!    Before I knew it one woman had my truncheon between her legs, whilst another one squatted over my blue helmet!    It was most humiliating!”    Like the Ikea riot, the Westminster Bridge incident ended as abruptly as it started, with the participants putting their clothes back on and melting back into the general populace.

Whilst the authorities suspect that militant naturists, determined to force a change in Britain’s public nudity laws, could be behind this new craze, there have been suggestions that the incidents are actually evidence of activity by alien nudists from outer space, citing the case of Eileen Starkey.  The housewife claimed to have been impregnated by an alien naturist purporting to be a man from her insurance company.  During her impregnation, Eileen was given visions of the peaceful space society her visitors represented: “They showed me these wonderful scenes of idyllic green valleys on the Moon, full of naked people cavorting peacefully! They said our leaders had lied to us when they said that the Moon was an airless, lifeless world - they were trying to suppress the truth.    In reality, space suits aren’t needed at all in space - everyone is naked there!”

Scary Stories

Sweet Jesus, why does everything have to be a scare story, these days?  I mean, I know that it's coming up to Halloween and therefore the 'scary season', but it is all year round now that we are being bombarded with stories and warnings by the media and governments clearly designed to scare us out of our wits.  If it isn't the constant 'World War Three fears' nonsense every time a conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, it is warnings that AI is going to murder us all in our beds.  None of these stories are actually authenticated in any way: just how, for instance, is AI going to kill us?  Exactly how?   Those perpetrating the stories can't actually tell us that, but that doesn't stop their constant scaremongering.  It's the same with their 'World Three' cobblers and all the current ramping up of the 'Russian Threat', in the face of which we need to spend billions on defence and face being called up for military service.  Here, there is a fundamental disconnect with the reality on the ground: Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ground to a standstill, with their supposed military might and technical superiority counting for nought on the battlefield.  With the incompetence they have shown in Ukraine, let alone the vast quantities of manpower and military resources they have expended (and can't easily replace), surely denudes any threat they might pose to the rest of Europe.  In reality, the sort of operations they are running against the West at the moment - cyber terrorism and sabotage - are the sort of thing that won't be deterred by a huge conventional military build-up on Europe's part.  Not to forget that the current conflicts in Ukraine and Iran show that modern warfare is a good deal less sophisticated than the military 'experts' have lead us to believe that it might be - any defence strengthening focused simply on building more ships, planes and tanks is unlikely to be particularly effective.

But it isn't just these specific hypothetical threats they're trying to scare us with - this week we've had the government telling us how we should all be preparing for some kind of vague possible future catastrophe by stocking up on tinned foods, as part of their 'National Resiliance Conversation'.   For fuck's sake!  Have we really reached the stage where they can't even be bothered to outline the threat they are trying to scare us with?  This is just the official equivalent of the government jumping out at us and shouting 'Boo!'  Still, they did come up with one fairly specific 'threat' this week, with which the media are now trying to instil panic into the  public consciousness - the PHP vulnerability.  As the media have been so laboriously explaining, PHP is the coding language which underpins much of the web, be it servers or webpages, so any vulnerability has the potential to be exploited by hackers.  Hence we have all those breathless reports of websites being taken offline while remedial action is being taken. A couple of points, though, which seem to have been glossed over, on the issue: firstly, it seems that though it has long existed, there is no record of this vulnerability - which was apparently discovered by AI - ever having been exploited.   Could it be that it is something so obscure that it is likely that no human hacker would ever have found it, so it is actually the media trumpeting the AI 'discovery' which has created the 'threat'?  Secondly, the fact is that it apparently affects only older versions of PHP, so those rushing to secure their sites and servers are actually admitting that they haven't been bothering to keep their software up to date.  Now, the PHP for The Sleaze is actually set by the hosting company's servers and, for quite some time now, my current host has only offered the latest versions.  So - and the site will probably crash and burn now - I'm not having to rush around in a panic thanks to this latest bit of media scaremongering.

Normalising Hate

Why is the fact that a political party whose entire existence is based upon opposition to immigration has members who are out-and-out racists treated by the UK's media as some kind of shocking revelation?  Perhaps the fact that, for the past few years, most of them have been trying to normalise Nigel Farage and Reform UK as if they are somehow a legitimate political leader and party, despite the sort of hate-speech they regularly engage in, might have something to do with it.  Of course, the upper, more visible, part of Reform (the above water bit of the iceberg, if you will), are always careful to couch their public bigotry in the sort of terms that make it easier for the media that fawns over them to present it as somehow falling within the 'norm' of political language, albeit at the 'tough' (ie extreme) end of the spectrum.  Hopefully, the recent ITV News investigation which revealed various Reform UK councillors and candidates using racist language and advocating all manner of repugnant, racially discriminatory policies, will make this normalisation of Reform UK by some sections of the media a bit more difficult.  But then again, let's not forget various of their MPs openly expressing racist sentiments - being 'sickened' by the number of non-white people being featured in TV ads, ring a bell? - which were quickly buried by the media.  Still, Farage and Reform UK seem to be on a downward spiral right now, the party dropping in the polls and Farage's personal standing with voters well down, following all the revelations about their funding, so maybe the media's love affair with them will wane.  After all, they only like to be associated with winners.

Speaking of that funding, this would  be an opportune time for a reminder that Reform UK isn't actually a political party in the normal sense.  It is, in reality, a limited company of which a  certain Nigel Farage is the majority shareholder.  Consequently, they don't have any semblance of a democratic internal structure, as do the other, legitimate, political parties, in one form or another.  Reform UK leaders aren't elected, but rather appointed by 'the board' - which, in practice, means Farage.  All of which means, of course, that any donations, memberships, etc aren't political donations or memberships in the usual sense.  They are, in effect,  gifts of money to a private company.  Not loans.  Gifts.  Which means that, if you are foolish enough to give money to Reform UK, you are, in effect, giving it to Nigel Farage.  I do wonder what will happen to all that money it has received from dodgy crypto billionaires if Nige finally gets fed up with Reform when he finds that it isn't going to get him into Number ten and decides to wind the company up?  I mean, it is all now a financial asset of Reform UK ltd and when a company is wound up, goes into voluntary liquidation, any assets that remain after outstanding debts are paid go to the company's owners. Which, in this case, would effectively be Farage as the majority shareholder.  Not, obviously, that I'd dare to suggest that good old Nige would ever contemplating such a thing.  God forbid!  He's as honest as the day is long, (barring, maybe, that five million quid 'personal gift' he forgot to declare upon becoming an MP).  But it makes you think, doesn't it?

Get Out of Jail Free?

One of the reasons I keep on posting here, in spite of the fact that, these days, only bots and AI seem to read it, is because I can't be interrupted, talked over or shouted down before I can properly develop an idea or construct an argument.  All of which behaviours are, in my opinion, reprehensible, demonstrating only the rudeness and ignorance of the guilty party.  Moreover, they represent the tactics of fascism - denying any opposing voices a platform.  When I taught, I certainly wouldn't tolerate any of these things in my classroom.  In the pub, unfortunately, there are a significant number of individuals who want only their own voices and opinions to be heard and are prepared to shout anyone expressing what might be something they disagree with down, refusing one the opportunity to unfold their ideas and arguments fully.  As you have, by now, doubtless guessed, I recently had just such an experience.  I perhaps wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't have been expounding my, not entirely serious, thesis that the US is a nation of psychopaths, obsessed with violence, and that the whole Trump circus that the entire world has to suffer through right now, is an inevitable consequence of this.  Which is why I find myself constantly exasperated by Americans of my acquaintance who simply shrug and say, 'Well I didn't vote for him' as if that somehow makes it all OK and means that they don't have to bear any responsibility for what is happening.  At which point I was rudely and angrily cut off by an unprovoked tirade about how ridiculous it was to try and hold people responsible for the actions of governments they might not have voted for, because it wasn't their fault, I was an idiot etc, etc.  

The continued belittling and shouting down prevented me from my response, that, actually, you can hold people responsible not just what they do, but also for what they don't do.  The precedent, of course, being post-war Germany, where the German populace were held collectively responsible for the rise of Nazism.  A view actually shared by most of them, who understood that the Nazi regime didn't just happen, to some degree even those who didn't vote for Hitler and didn't actively support it, had allowed it to happen through their inaction.  They hadn't opposed it vigourously enough before inter-war German democracy was completely destroyed.  They saw what was happening but, through fear, through complacency, through the vague idea that all of us living in democracies have, that this is just a blip and that they system would eventually correct it, did nothing.  As long as the bad things weren't happening to them personally, it was easier to look away.  Now, this isn't something confined to either Trump's America or Nazi Germany.  All of us living in democracies and taking them for granted, are guilty of this complacency which allows evil to seep into the system and destroy it - by the time we react, it is often too late.  When I talk about 'opposing' these forces before they take root, I don't necessarily mean going out on the streets and beating them up or firebombing their offices, instead I mean simply pushing back at their poisonous narratives whenever we can, standing up for the minorities they seek to intimidate, simply having the courage to speak out.

But, more often than not, we don't do these things.  Certainly, I know that I haven't always done them: there have been times when I should have confronted individuals over their racist language, for instance, but I didn't because it would have drawn attention to myself, made me unpopular in the workplace, for instance, so it was easier not to do so.  I'm not proud of myself for these failures.  On the other hand, I did, on occasion, stand up for workers rights in my workplace, confronting management and making myself unpopular (and labelled an awkward bastard' by management and colleagues alike) in the process.  But I never regretted doing those things - doing the right thing won't make you popular, but at least you can have a clear conscience.  I've written before about the complete and utter shame as a Briton I felt while Boris 'The Fat Bastard' Johnson was Prime Minister, but back then I thought that just shrugging and saying 'Well, I didn't vote for him' was enough.  But, over time, I realised that it wasn't.  After all, how had we ever got to the situation where someone so manifestly unfit for office had been allowed to get so far?  Could it be that people like me, ordinary citizens, hadn't done enough to promote the opposing political narrative, to oppose and argue against the right wing at every opportunity?  Had we failed to win the battle of hearts and minds because we just couldn't be bothered and thought that someone else would do it for us?  So, despite not having voted for Boris, I had to bear my share of responsibility for allowing the political discourse that resulted in his ascension to go unopposed.  

Which leads, inevitably, to the not unreasonable question of what I'm doing right now to try and fight the rise of the right and their cohorts?  It's all very well preaching to people that they need to be more proactive in order to combat these people, but it means nothing if I'm just sitting on my arse complacently expecting others to respond to my call to arms.  Well, this is what I'm doing: writing stuff like this in the hope that it might inspire even one person to start actively getting involved in opposing the dark forces that seem to be gathering around Western democracies.  More than that, I'm still constantly churning out pieces for The Sleaze, satirising, parodying and ridiculing these people and their ideologies.  Satire is, I agree, a pretty weak weapon to wield, but these guys don't like to be ridiculed, it dents their egos, reveals them just to be flawed humans like the rest of us.  Besides, it is what I'm reasonably good at.  But on top of that, I try to be more vocal when it comes to opposing bigots and oafs, challenging their bigotry and ill behaviour whenever possible, (and whenever it is safe to do so).  Simply not voting for the likes of Trump or Farage isn't enough - you have to actively oppose them and their ideologies.  But, too many people, particularly middle class people, think that saying 'I didn't vote for them' is some kind of 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for their consciences.  Except that, in truth, there are no free passes in life.  No way to balance out your bad deeds by performing a few good ones - those celestial scales don't exist.  It's just a cop out to try and salve your conscience.  Hell, I've done plenty of discreditable things in my life, things of which I am deeply ashamed, things which have caused hurt to others.  But experience has told me that there is no way to take it all back, no way to truly repair the hurt and damage - I have to find a way to live with the fact that I've done these things, that I've caused this hurt, accept my flaws and wrong doing and learn from them, learn to behave better in future.  But I've digressed somewhat from my original point, which is simply that if we fail to act, if we are too complacent and think that voting alone is the only way to oppose extremism, then we allow them to triumph.

Future Shock

I read with interest the other day that story about the German dudes who had used a robot to grope a woman.  Not because I approve of such remote cybernetic sexual assault, but because it's yet another thing I predicted in a story over at The Sleaze coming true. Sometimes I astonish myself with my powers of foresight.  Most of my successful predictions involve the abuse of tech for sexual purposes, thereby reinforcing my thesis that most technological advances are actually linked to the advancement of pornography and sexual perversion.  I mean, the internet is clearly the ultimate manifestation of perfecting the delivery of pornography, following the development of cave paintings, the printing press, photography and moving pictures, with virtual reality as the next logical step.  The quest to develop humanoid robots is quite obviously all about creating submissive and responsive sex bots, while other forms of remote tech, be it drones or mechanical prosthetics and the like, are ways of enabling perversions like voyeurism and groping.  Anyway, in my version of cyber-groping it was Elon Musk developing these robots so as to facilitate him having sex with women without actually having to be intimate with them, because it is pretty obvious  that the idea  of actually having to deal directly with human beings is pretty repugnant to him.  He'd load his robots' brass balls up with his own semen and send them and their telescopic penises around to his victims prospective partners for sex.   

This latest prediction comes hot on the heels of my having successfully predicted, several years ago, the idea of 'nudifying' apps.  Of course, back then tech was less advanced so envisaged them as a set of filters for imaging software like Adobe, to turn photos of clothed women into nudes.  I imagined the user being given choices of nipple type and the like, but the advent of AI has made the concept not only real but far more sophisticated.  (But no less morally bankrupt).  So, I'm left pondering as to which of my other tech predictions is likely to come true next - could it be that Space X is about to launch a new space station which will include a film studio to facilitate the making of zero-G porno movies?  Or maybe Musk is planning to use his rockets to inseminate Mars with his own jism in an attempt to fertilise any bacteria there and create a super-race.  Not, of course, that I'm ever going to get credit for my astounding powers of prophecy.  You have to be some demented old crone who, two centuries ago, left some barely coherent ramblings, so vague that modern tabloids can interpret them as predictions of current world events.  Either that, or you have to have written gibberish like Nostradamus.  Not to forget that much vaunted ancient Mayan prediction about the world ending in 2010, or whenever it was - obviously I must have slept through that particular apocalypse.  The truth, of course, is that it is all bollocks - anyone can say that something is going to happen in x number of years and it might or might not happen.  It's all simply a matter of luck as to whether you get it right or not.  

Save the Tiger

As is ever the case with right-wing media, The Spectator - that Nineteenth Century Gentleman's Club masquerading as a periodical -  seems to have its finger firmly on the pulse of the nation with its headlining story asking: 'why is a tiger's life worth more than a human's?'  I mean, yeah sure, energy bills are soaring, pushing the cost of living to new levels, there's a madman in the White House helping this crisis along with his Middle Eastern war, black clad gangs of racists are on the UK's streets trying to intimidate anyone trying stop immigrants from drowning, but The Spectator just knows that what we really want to know is why that tiger that mauled that guy to death hasn't, itself, been shot.  Yes indeed, it's the burning issue of the day.  Well, maybe it is the burning issue of the day for Spectator readers, who probably lament, as they sit in front of a roaring fire in their wing-backed leather chairs, the good old days when a chap could go over to India, saddle up an elephant and blast away at the local tiger population on the pretext that one of them might be a maneater.  But the incident in question, of course, is quite different.  For one thing, the tiger didn't actually eat anyone.  More significantly, the fact is that an individual chose to enter the tiger's enclosure at a wildlife park - the outcome was inevitable.  Big cats are very territorial and see any such incursion into their space as a threat to be chased off and/or eliminated.  Under such circumstances, why should the tiger be made to suffer because of the unfathomable decisions of an errant human?  

Obviously, we have no idea as to why this guy decided to do what he did and I'm not going to speculate as to his motivation, but, while acknowledging the tragedy of the situation, the fact is that he made a choice to enter that enclosure and provoke a confrontation.  It isn't like when an out-of-control dangerous dog makes an unprovoked attack on someone on the street, under such circumstances it is clear that the animal is a danger to the public.  But when the beast is confined behind bars with warnings to people not to enter the cage, then it can't be deemed a threat to the public at large.  I remember some years ago in the US, a small child somehow got into a gorilla enclosure.  Despite the gorilla showing absolutely no aggression toward the child and presenting no obvious threat, it was summarily executed by the authorities before they rescued the child.  I mean, I know that the Yanks are kill crazy and obsessed with public executions, but I can't help but feel that there had to a better way of dealing with the situation which didn't involve the murder of a primate.  Let's not forget that. like that tiger, the gorilla is an endangered species, for God's sake.  We can't afford to be knocking them off willy nilly on the slimmest of pretexts.  Still, I'm sure that The Spectator will frame the authorities' failure to shoot that tiger as some kind of leftist plot instigated directly from the office of Andy Burnham - once again a Labour government shows itself more interested in protecting the rights of Asian immigrants over those of true blue Brits...

Social Indifference

While alluding to on old movie in yesterday's post, it occurred to me that I used to talk a lot about old and obscure films here.  Indeed, at times, such posts dominated the content here.  But it my enthusiasm for writing up such films has waned.  In large part, I think, because of the dent my confidence in my movie reviewing abilities took after I joined Blue Sky.  In an attempt to reinvent myself social media-wise, I decided to focus on putting up my various articles there - such things seemed to be of interest to other users, judging by some of the accounts I followed.  But, I found my efforts met with utter indifference.  In fact, they elicited no reactions - positive or negative - whatsoever.  Which can get pretty confidence-sapping after a while.  I mean, I wasn't expecting to be awash with likes and re-posting, but my writings on the subject had always had a mild level of interest from readers when originally posted here, so I thought that, if nothing else, I might be able to reach a wider audience of those with similar interests.  After all, with web search apparently permanently buggered by Google and its AI obsession, I figured that I had to find some way of reaching a wider potential audience.  Blue Sky, though, apparently isn't it.  In fact, its indifference has killed my enthusiasm for writing about movies altogether.  (Interestingly, though, all of my previous movie posts seem to be of huge interest to the various AI bots swarming over the web at present).

I have to say that, overall, I've found using Blue Sky a desultory, soul-destroying even, experience.  There is a certain 'clique-ishness' to most social media platforms, often making it difficult for new users to gain traction, but Blue Sky is probably the worst I've ever encountered.  It feels as if there is a strict hierachy, with early adopters at the top, that rules the roost there - your job as a newcomer is simply to follow more established accounts and boost them with likes and re-postings.  Moreover, everyone there seems so concerned with being 'right-on' and displaying the 'right' attitudes, (it is the anti-Twitter, after all), that they frequently seem reluctant to like or re-post anything for fear it might be the 'wrong' thing to like.  Maybe I'm being oversensitive because Blue Sky doesn't want to recognise my obvious genius, but I'm not the only user that has noticed the cool indifference of Blue Sky - Hell, I get more responses to stuff I put on Threads and I barely have a presence there.  I suppose that it doesn't help that I keep disparaging the pretensions of those Blue Sky members who put stuff like 'working on my book' in their bios and like to casually repeat it in posts.  Look, if you've actually written a book, great, by all means brag about it.  But anyone can say they are 'working' on a book.  Plus, my embracing of AI for creative purposes doesn't help my cause, either.  I'm surprised that when I've posted links to the 'After Hours' podcast there, (I've actually given up doing so, as its utterly pointless), I haven't ended up facing the Blue Sky equivalent of a lynch mob, waving burning torches and accusing me of witchcraft.  This Luddite tendency is another deeply unappealing aspect of the platform.  Not that I intend shutting down my account there or returning to Twitter any time soon, I'll just stick around and be as indifferent as all the other buggers on there.

Was the Cosmic Man Right, After All?

I was just watching The Cosmic Man (1959), one of a number of cheaply made knock offs of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) that appeared in the fifties. (You can tell just how cheaply made it was by the fact that it top-lined John Carradine - who'd appear in anything for money in order to finance his stage work - and Bruce Bennett, one time serial and B-movie star.  Not that either were bad actors, they just tended to appear in movies featuring in the bottom half of double bills).  Like all of these movies, taking their cue from the original, the film features a lot of sermonising on the part of the title character on the subject of how potentially dangerous to the rest of the universe that mankind was, because his intellectual and moral maturity hadn't reached the same level as his technological achievements.  Humanity just couldn't be trusted not to abuse such things as nuclear power and rocketry in order to destroy each other, but also not to spread this irresponsibility into outer space, threatening any other civilisations they might encounter.  I remember that, as a kid, I always thought this sort of attitude, particularly when propounded as piously as it was in these films, as being incredibly patronising.  After all, juvenile me reasoned, we've had the bomb for thirty plus years, but have refrained from using it in anger since 1945, despite the number of regional conflicts in that time, not to mention the tensions of the Cold War.  Which, I thought, showed considerable responsibility and restraint on the part of our leaders.  Moreover, we were pushing out into space, not militarily, but in a spirit of exploration and discovery.

Nowadays, though, the landscape has changed dramatically.  Not one, but two Trump pesidencies have amply demonstrated that, even in supposedly civilised democracies, utterly irresponsible, reckless, stupid and venal leaders can be put into office and allowed to rule without restraint, leaving us subject to their childish tantrums and whims.  Leaders who have no qualms about abusing the power they control.  It isn't just Trump, though.  He has been the herald of the rise of all manner of extreme right neo-Nazis across the globe, some of whom have also gained power, while others have grown in strength and influence, raising the spectre of yet more of the world's most dangerous technologies falling into the hands of the evil and immature.  These arseholes have a knock on effect - they are propelled into power, or near power, by the ultra-wealthy, who bankroll them with the expectation that they will do their bidding: lowering the taxes they pay, reducing the restrictions, such as health and safety for their workers and environmental protections,, that are placed upon them by responsible governments.  This sort of de-regulation results in the likes of Altman at OpenAI, who apparently thinks that their work should be unrestricted as a few 'bad' things happening as a result of them being allowed to do whatever they please, is a small price to pay for progress.  (Just so long as those 'bad' things don't happen to them, presumably).  This folks, is that unfettered capitalism which is much vaunted by the right.  All of which brings me to the inevitable conclusion that the likes of the Cosmic Man might have had a point.  Perhaps we really are too immature to be trusted to actually utilise our technologies responsibly.  Maybe reality has finally caught up with those old movies.  

Earlier and Earlier Every Year

I remember that years ago there was a Freeview channel called Great Classics which was basically the owners of the 'Great' channels equivalent to Talking Pictures TV, designed to exploit the Sony film library.  Except that it was only Great Classics for something like eight months of the year - the rest of the time it transmogrified into something called Great Christmas, which showed wall-to-wall crappy made-for-TV Christmas themed movies.  Now, I know what you are thinking - four months of Christmas movies, when the festival itself lasts only twelve days?  Yup, four months, kicking off in October and carrying on, right through Christmas into January.  I mean, who the fuck wants to have to endure four bloody months of those horrible movies and their cloying, utterly fake, sentiment?  Well, apparently there must be a few, as Great Christmas is still a thing - Great Classics long ago died a death and was replaced by Great Romance, (wall-to-wall horrible made-for-TV romance movies), but when October rolls around, it's back to Great Christmas for another four months.  In fact, this year, I think that it started even earlier.  Really, I just don't see the point - surely no sane person wants Christmas to be anywhen other than December, during the depths of Winter, from which it offers a brief respite.

But it isn't just Great Christmas.  Over the Summer, Pluto TV had a channel titled Christmas in July.  What the fuck?  What don't these people understand about the fact that Christmas is inextricably linked with Winter, in particular the Winter solstice?  Unless you live in Australia, where their seasons are arse about face, so that December is the height of Summer.  Arguably, for them it would make perfect sense to have Christmas in July, as that would place it back in mid-winter.  The fact is that the  version of Christmas that is peddled to us these days is essentially an invention of Northern Europe - hence its association with cold, snow and long dark nights.  It just isn't right to try and celebrate it any time else - especially not in Summer or Autumn.  Unless, of course, you are a TV company desperate to cash in on the 'season of goodwill' - to the extent that you are prepared to uproot it from its proper time and place.  Commercialism has no boundaries and certainly no shame.  But, to get back to one of my favourite refrains, the fact is that these constant attempts to start Christmas season early and artificially extend it, (for purely commercial purposes) simply serves to erode the sense of 'specialness' that the season is meant to have - if it happens every bloody day then it quickly becomes a bore.  Moreover, I find it particularly galling that these bastards want to extend the season in the name of profits and sales, yet, at the same time, when it finally arrives, they are then reluctant to allow us the traditional twelve day festival, trying to hustle back to work by 2 January at the latest, usually after Boxing Day.  Bastards. 

A Man's Messiah?

Sometimes I read some news item and think 'I could have written that for The Sleaze, in fact  I should have written it for The Sleaze'.  So it is with that story doing the rounds about that American dude who claims to have spent eighteen days with Jesus while he was in a coma for, well, eighteen days.  Which, in itself, isn't unusual - the media loves these sorts of near death experience tales of 'afterlife' experiences.  But what makes this one stand out is the guy's description of a 'macho Jesus', who stood nearly six feet tall and certainly wasn't woke.  This Jesus was a 'man's Messiah', apparently, bristling with anger toward sinners and injustice.  The physical descriptions of Jesus seem to place a lot of emphasis upon his manly physique and general masculinity.  Which leads me to suspect - on the basis of no supporting evidence, whatsoever, but that's never stopped me before - that the guy claiming to have had this experience is either now, or has been in the recent past, a hardcore MAGA supporter, probably a gun owner with strong views on race, women, homosexuals and transsexuals.  That said, he did describe his Jesus as being of a dark, Middle Eastern, complexion, so perhaps not quite as reactionary as one might assume.  Whatever the truth, his is a pretty conservative version of Jesus - certainly not the liberal, tolerant, do-gooder preaching love and understanding who tends to dominate modern interpretations.

I suppose that we should be thankful that this description of a 'masculine Messiah' didn't go further, with claims that he regularly shagged ten women a night with, miraculously, no sign of fatigue, for example.  Or even a description of a 'two-fisted Jesus', engaging the enemies of God with fisticuffs - a very Trumpian vision of Christ, standing up for the 'righteous' (who, of course, would all be Trump voters).  Obviously, we could be unkind and point to the homoerotic undertones of this version of Jesus, which rather undermine the non-woke overtones of the story, which clearly seeks to position this manly Jesus as a riposte to 'liberal' speculations about a non-gendered or, even worse, a female God.  Ideas which make the right and Christian traditionalists very uneasy.  But there's no doubt that a macho, muscle-bound Jesus does sound like some sort of homoerotic fantasy, (and let's not forget that, according to scripture, Jesus spent his time hanging out with twelve other guys and never married).  Ultimately, the story disappoints me - I was hoping for a tale of ascension to a heaven that looks like the saloon bar of a pub, where there is no closing time and the pumps never go dry.  I was also hoping for tales of this ripped Jesus engaging in barroom brawls with Satan, every time he tried to sneak in, despite having been barred an eternity ago.  But I guess that some people's imaginations have a limit...

When Executions Go Wrong

My money is still on it being some kind of criminal fuel scam, possibly involving siphoning red diesel from farm vehicles then selling it back at sky high prices.  Certainly the petrol in those vans seems to indicate something to do with under the counter fuel sales, but the authorities - probably to cover up their own incompetence - still seem determined to try and pin the whole Fairford debacle on Iran and somehow 'prove' that it was terror-related.  So, now they've arrested some Anglo-Iranian guy in London on terror-related charges and are trying to link him to the guys they've already had to bail because of a lack of evidence of them being terrorists. Still, the British police have always been good at fitting people up for crimes - whether they actually committed them or not, so I've no doubt that they'll eventually come up with some kind of dodgy 'evidence' that they foiled a major terror attack.  But enough of the nonsense going on here in the UK, what about the latest outrage in the US?  Two attempts at lethal injections and still they can't manage to kill a death row prisoner.  This debacle just goes to underline the barbarity of capital punishment - the fact that someone has been found guilty of a heinous killing doesn't justify killing, (or trying to kill), them in cruel and agonising ways, in front of an invited audience.  But what else do we expect from our blood-thirsty, violence-obsessed transatlantic cousins?  Frankly, I'm only surprised that their cable TV networks haven't invoked some kind of constitutional amendment in order to get their cameras in there and broadcast executions live - this one could have been featured in 'When Executions Go Wrong'.

Now, I know that we shouldn't, in any way, make light of something as inhuman and unpleasant as a botched execution, particularly when, instead of killing the condemned, it leaves them in a critical condition in hospital, but, I couldn't help but think that they were bloody lucky this wasn't a B-movie.  Because usually in such films, when someone survives an execution, they are usually revived as a blood-thirsty zombie.  At least the woman they were trying to execute didn't suddenly revive, tear off her restraints, leap up from the trolley she had been strapped to and start tearing out the throats of guards and officials with her teeth, before attacking the ghouls in the audience.  These zombies are always impervious to bullets, so there would just have been no stopping her - she could have gone on an orgy of revenge killings.  But at least it was only a lethal injection she survived - if they'd been trying to fry her in the electric chair and she survived, then she would have been electrically supercharged and been able to zap people with bolts of electricity from her hands - like an ICE agent wearing those gloves - as she burst out of the chair, glowing and crackling.  As for the gas chamber, well, she would probably just have sucked up all the gas, giving herself super powers in the process, then blown it out into the faces of everyone nearby as she broke out of the chamber, fatally gassing them.  So, I'd say that they all had a lucky escape - the prison authorities are probably only facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit, rather than a rampaging zombie hell-bent on revenge.  But, as I said, we really shouldn't be making light of any of this dreadful business.  You should be ashamed of yourselves...

Premature Publication

Once more, the media trumpet a dastardly foreign terror plot on British soil, only for the whole story to rapidly start unravelling.  This time around, the press were all slavering over the idea that the guys arrested near RAF Fairford might be Iranians Hell-bent on attacking vital defence assets.  After all, Fairford had been used by the USAF to launch bombing missions against Iran, so that aspect of the story seemed to be a shoe-in.  Except, except, it turns out that the suspects are all British nationals from London.  Just to add insult to injury, they've now all been released on bail.  Which tends to indicate that they most probably aren't dangerous terrorists.  Indeed, bearing in mind that the three vehicles they were using have been subject to 'extensive examination with the support of military assets and forensic experts', yet there has been no announcement of huge caches of explosives being found in them, it seems, right now, that the only thing that they are guilty of is driving white vans at night in the back of beyond.   It's probably going to turn out that they were driving around looking for a venue for an illegal rave.  Even the reasons behind their arrest seem confused.  On the one hand, we have some local biddy saying that she encountered these vans blocking the road and her driveway as she drove home and the five guys ran off when they saw her headlights, so she dialled '999', (having tried the MoD police first - they couldn't be bothered to answer, which is pretty much par for the course for them).  So, we have her crowing to anyone who will listen that it was her call that foiled a major terror attack, yet, on the other hand, we have the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, saying that it wasn't that simple and that there were other, unspecified, factors involved.  Then we have police sources telling us that the arrests weren't 'intelligence lead'.

Not to forget the 'Trump Factor', as we had the fat fuck deciding to 'comment' on the arrests, rambling on about how 'they' had been 'watching these guys' for time and 'now we've got them'.  Except, fat boy, you didn't gey them, we did.  Not that we know what exactly it is that we've 'got' them for.  While, taken at face value, Trump's burblings would seem to bolster the idea that the arrests were part of some large scale international counter-terror operation, foiling a major attack, I think that we can safely dismiss anything that he says.  He's clearly senile and spends much of his time fantasising - just look at his claims about being pulled from the rubble by firemen at 'Ground Zero' on 9/11.  Utter bollocks - he was in New York at the time, but nowhere near the Twin Towers.  We know this because he was actually phoning in to a local radio station bragging about how, with the World Trade Centre destroyed, he now owned the third tallest building in the city.  In fact, I'm surprised that he hasn't claimed that it was actually him, personally, who took down the five guys at Fairford - launching himself at them and bringing all five down with a flying football tackle.  But, getting back to the original point, this whole business just underlines (yet again) the perils of the media going off half-cocked with stories which quickly fall apart once some actual facts start to emerge.  They got so over-excited at the prospect of being able to indulge in a bit of xenophobic, Islamophobic panic-mongering, that they suffered the journalistic equivalent of 'premature ejaculation'.  Equally disappointed are the likes of Nigel Farage, desperate to distract from all that stuff about his finances, (which just won't go away), who thought that they could use this 'foreign terror plot' to whip up some more anti-immigrant hatred.  As ever, the moral here is that you really need to keep your powder dry until you are in possession of some actual facts.

Ginger Whinger

I'm genuinely distressed by the hate and bad vibes being directed at Ed Sheeran, just because he allowed his support act to be kicked off of his tour for expressing pro-Palestinian views.  The poor guy feels that everyone, including friends and family, have abandoned him - he's lost all of his support acts now and ticket sales for his concerts are falling.  Look, it is outrageous that people have turned on him over this issue - the fact is that you should already have hated him because he is patently shit.  I mean, everything about him is crap, his 'look', his attitudes, his music: it all epitomises the utter blandness and mediocrity that nowadays represents artistic endeavour.    Really, he and his music are completely and utterly bland - meaningless and instantly forgettable.  The fact that he has turned out to be a complete cipher with no apparent convictions, let alone loyalty, should come as no surprise.  Yet, the ginger whinger still expects us to feel sympathy for him and seems to think that a few tearful words about the situation in Gaza - which still manage to avoid establishing any actual moral position - are all that are needed for forgiveness.  But that seems to be par for the course these days where what pass for 'celebrities' are concerned: don't take a moral stance on anything, for fear that it might be the 'wrong' one.

Now, I know that there are plenty of big name celebrities who do take public positions on all manner of  issues, but these are generally those who are so big that they are going to get contracts and keep working regardless, (Hell, even Mel Gibson, whose drunken rantings revealed him as some kind of racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist religious extremist, still gets work in Hollywood).  I can also respect those who, like the late Dolly Parton, preferred to avoid overt political statements in order not to alienate sections of her audience who might disagree - but, like her, they often express a clear moral position through their charitable work and personally financed platforms.  What concerns me is that lower level of 'celebrity'.  Not just pub singers like Ed Sheeran who have inexplicably escaped onto the world stage, but those non-celebrity 'celebrities' who have sprung up, like fungi, thanks to the existence of the web - influencers.  You'd think that, as 'influencers', they might actually be interested in trying to influence opinion toward decent causes and values, in reality, of course, they are only really interested in influencing their followers to enrich them by clicking on their sponsored videos of them making cocks of themselves.  It scares me that these soulless non-entities are what pass for mass entertainment these days.  Sure, I'm well aware that ninety per cent, or so, of entertainment and entertainers in the pre-internet age were also shit - but generally, there was at least some quality bar they had to reach in order to get exposure on radio and TV networks.  Ed Sheeran is living proof that such standards no longer exist.