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sanity excommunicated
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The football season has started! That is to say the season in the game where only one member of the team touches the ball with his hand, the ball is shaped like a ball not an egg, and the general principle is that you use your feet to kick the ball rather than your hands.. hence "foot"ball. Now that my incessant and typically English moaning in this instance is complete I shall proceed to my point (assuming I have one). Footballers, that is good ones, get paid obscene amounts of money. This is largely true in most professional sports but the obscenity of footballer pay (be it soccer or yank) is truly astounding. On both sides of the Atlantic it is also a general truism that the aforementioned overpaid sportsmen are - to put it bluntly - thick as pig shit. Were these people not good at their sport they would be doing a shitty manual job somewhere after dropping out of school early. Ok, I'm generalising, there are always a couple of exceptions to the rule, but for the most part they're all a sandwich short of a picnic in the brains department. The fact that they all get royally screwed for millions by their "agents" is evidence enough (although the phrase "more money than sense" may also be applicable in this case).
So where is all this leading to you may wonder. Well, now that the football season has started in earnest it means that the competition between the papers for the football review coverage begins. What does that mean? It means advertising. Shitloads of it. Television and radio telling what the best paper to buy on Sunday or Monday is should you want to know what happened over the glorious footballing weekend. “All the goals, all the analysis!” as the adverts say. Now, you can have all the fancy graphics and voxpop game clips in the world in your advert but nothing is going to beat official endorsement of your review as that of an overpaid footballer, and so we come to the national treasure that is The Sun. All the limeys know it, and most of the merkins do too. It's a redtop rag owned by Rupert Murdoch, the New York Post is modeled on it. The Sun – gawd bless'em – have a section on Monday called “Super Goals”. Now The Sun is not the most sophisticated of papers, it is targeted at the lowest common denominator and that is why it sells. Its hacks though are by no means stupid and it seems clear that they like to have a laugh at others expense as well. Why do I say this? Well the person they got to endorse “Super Goals” is none other than Frank Lampard of Chelsea. Nothing spectacular there I hear you say. He plays for England and is a big name. The advert takes the line of “Super Goals in the Sun with Super Frank”. Frank smiles and delivers his line wonderfully but for one tiny problem.........Frank Lampard has a seriously bad lisp.
What we actually get is “Thuper goals in the Thun with thuper Frank”
Now.... I'm sure somewhere in the marketing department of the Sun's Wapping office someone was watching “The Life of Brian”, saw the “welease woderwick” bit and then heard Bigus Dickus speak and exclaimed “I think I know how we can take pith and get away with it!”
Now you know why I rambled on about them being “thick as pigshit” and having “more money than sense”.
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A recent survey in Britain by Readers Digest found that whilst 64% of the population said they believed in God, only 48 per cent were able to correctly pinpoint the Resurrection of Christ (ergo Easter Sunday), and only 42 per cent could name Judas Iscariot as the man who betrayed Jesus. There were other somewhat shocking results relating to other religious knowledge (well shocking to me anyway), but the ones about Easter stuck in my head more than anything else. Easter in Britain is a popular holiday because it is a long one. We get Good Friday and the following Monday off work (a 4 day weekend), the reason for this is fundamentally and inextricably linked religious nature of Easter. True the actual weekend we celebrate Easter on is a pre-Christian celebration (the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox), however the fact that we encompass Maundy Thursday (day Christ was betrayed), Good Friday (day Christ was crucified), Holy Saturday (Christ's body laid to rest), Easter Sunday (Resurrection) and Easter Monday (witnesses of the resurrected Christ) into the entire celebration gives the weekend an overall religious theme. Given this I find it shocking that such ignorance about what Easter is about exists amongst my fellow countrymen.
This leads me on to the theme of hot cross buns. When I was child hot cross buns were available at Easter only (possibly during the whole of Lent if you were lucky). This was because there is a religious significance to them. Again the origins stem originally from pre-Christian traditions of having cakes as offerings, but the buns themselves now have a cross on them to signify the Easter holiday and their significance in relation to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. Today they are available all year round in Britain. I think that's interesting when placed next to the survey showing British ignorance toward the holiday weekend we are still in.
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Previously I have mentioned the persistent disingenuity of Blair and the Labour Party over so called "Tory cuts" which they keep banging on about. Well this week Labour decided, after being put on the back foot so much, that they were going to try and shape the agenda by releasing a poster that would link the words "Tory" and "cut" back into peoples' minds. This was one of the campaigning points back in 1997, that the Tories had cut the funding from public services. Largely this is true for the early 1990s. It was painful for a lot of people but it was totally necessary in order to get the UK economy moving back on track after the currency debacle, interest rates problems and rapid inflationary pressure. As a result of those cuts the Labour Party inherited a golden economic legacy from a party which at the time was imploding. Having said this, it was an excellent example of media management by the Labour Party that they so successfully created a myth around the Tory Party about what they did and stood for. So much so in fact that many of us receded into the shadows and dared not admit we were Tories for fear of chastisement as evil bigoted bastards that only want to make our rich selves richer. Of course, such a description is utter rubbish, but the Labour Party managed to create it all the same. The definition was made very clear, a Tory believed in cutting public services at the expense of the poor whilst rewarding the rich. After 18 years of Tory Government it's easy to see why the media let itself be manipulated into creating such a myth. It was time for a change, personally, I think it's time for a change again, but that remains to be seen. However I digress slightly, my point is that Labour successfully linked the word "cut" with "Tory" in 1997, and in 2005 they are trying to do it again with a new poster (yes another one).
During last week Labour released a poster which stated that the Tories would "cut" £35 billion from the public services budget. Now that sounds pretty fucking radical. £35 billion is a lot of money to be removing from a budget in one go doesn't it? But wait, it's not being removed from the budget in one go at all. In fact, in some sense it's not being removed from a budget at all because the money isn’t even there yet. When you strip away the spin from Labour's poster what you actually find is that the £35 billion is the difference between what Labour and the Tories would be spending in 2011-12 should they come to and remain in power from this year onwards. They're not even real figures; they’re just projections based on a set of assumptions about the economies performance over the next 7 years all things being equal. They do not factor in potential disasters, wars, global economy effects etc. The figures are, in themselves meaningless in that sense because they will obviously change anyway according to circumstance. However there is also something more important at play here. The actual figures of each party's projections to which the difference is calculated are massively higher than today's figures. In the case of the Labour Party’s total figure for 2011-12 it is based upon a 5% increase of the budget each year. In the case of the Tories it is based upon a 4% increase. There lies the true difference between the two parties for all to see. It is not some scare tactic figure of £35 billion that is being used by Labour because it holds the intelligence of the electorate in contempt, it's a 1% difference in an increase rate that are both over double the current inflation rate. To call that a cut would be intellectually bankrupt.
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As anyone reading some of my posts might have guessed, we in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are currently entering the election silly season. Right now we are in what is known as the pre-election campaign. Offically know one knows when the election is going to be, the joy of our system is such that the Prime Minister decides when to have an election so long as it happens before the end of the fifth Parliamentary session of his majoirty. When he decides, or more correctly, when he assesses that he has the greatest chance of winning, he will call an election by going to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and requesting that she dissolve Parliament and hold elections. When this announcement is made we have a two week election campaign and then we vote. Now, as it stands, Blair is in his fourth of a potential five Parliamentary sessions as Prime Minister. We have a general convention in the UK that general elections are held in the summer months to captialise on long daylight hours and "better" weather. We also have a general convention that the election be held on the first Thursday of the month. Given all this it is most likely - and considered pretty probable - that the next general election will be on Thursday May 5th this year. It doesn't have to be then but everyone is pretty sure that is when it is going to happen given the revving up of the Government's own party political campaign headquarters and pre-election posters etc. Basically everyone is getting off the starting blocks for the dissolution of Parliament in approximately three weeks time.
Labour, as I've mentioned before have had a shit time of it in their early campaign. Not only have the Tories been better than them, but they have made some horrendous gaffs which is not like them when one considers the staunch professionalism of their media campaigns in the past. The first big gaff came with their proposals for posters. The party got members to vote on which posters they most wanted to see. Unfortunately these posters got leaked and the content of them caused a mild furore. You see, the leader of the Tory party Michael Howard is a jew, as too is his proposed Chancellor of the Exchequer Oliver Letwin. One of the proposed posters was a depiction of two flying pigs with the faces of Howard and Letwin superimposed on them. Now, the obvious intention of the poster was to draw inference to Tory financial policies with the age old adage "pig might fly". In other words the policies were unbelievable. Of course, no one seemed to notice that depicting two of the highest profile jewish politicians in Britain as pigs might cause a bit of a backlash. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think for a minute that the poster was being deliberately anti-semitic or anything of the sort, I honestly beleive that it was lacking in malice in that sense. However, for no one in the campaign team to pick this up during fielding of designs suggests a lapse in concentration. This is especially the case when the posters came to light in the same week as Holocaust Day. It seems highly likely that the leaking of the posters was politically motivated, but the poster itself was a political gaffe and misjudgment none the less. Labour's argument when some in the Jewish Community complained (including the Chief Rabbi) was that the poster was never meant to be anti-jewish it was meant to be anti-tory.
Sadly though it didn't end there. There was another poster that had been designed for Labour members to vote on. This time Oliver Letwin was the lone target of the poster. It superimposed his face on to a chaacter dressed like Fagin from Oliver Twist and had the by-line that Letwin would "pick a pocket or two" from the people. I think the intention was to refer to the the so-called "Tory cuts" that don't really exist. Of course, for those that might not have noticed, there is a minor problem with this poster as well. You see, the way Dickens describes Fagin in his book is such that the picture is drawn of a nasty evil man with a hook nose that is basically a more Victorian England version of Shylock (a la The Merchant of Venice). When you add the ethnic description to the fact that Fagin is a anagram of the Hebrew word "ganif" which means thief, you basicaly have a recipe for disaster... politically speaking I mean. Again though, as with the other poster, I do not beleive that the intent was one of anti-semitism. However what it does show is a lack of knowledge about history and literature in the Labour campaign team which has caused them two political headaches which could very well have been avoidable. If I were someone high up in Labour I would be firing people for not spotting the potential problems with my posters.
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Disclaimer: I'm not a chrsitian and I don't hold the view that a child is a human being from conception. As such I am not against abortion in the early months of pregnancy.
Yesterday in the UK, the Conservative Party leader Michael Howard put the abortion back onto the political agenda of Britain. In recent weeks the Tories have been doing very well at setting the agenda, this has been because of their demographic targetting software pruchased from one Karl Rove six months ago. It appears to be working. The abortion issue has not been put on to the agenda in terms of banning it however, it has been raised in relation to our time limits for abortion. In the UK you cannot have an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy. This has caused a bit of a storm amongst the Labour Party who care scared that Britain will go down the route of America and start to have abortion as a wedge issue. I personally don;t agree with that notion, but the Labour Party, and Tony Blair personally have said the argument should not be discussed and the law is fine. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that though.
As some of you know from the limeys at Asylum who have discussed abortion before, the reason that the abortion time limit was set at 24 weeks was because it was agreed (in Parliament and with the Church of England) that it was not until at least 24 weeeks that the child could exist independently of the mother. In other words it was based on the survival chance of the child outside the womb. That was back in the 1970s. Midwifery practice today states that they consider a child "viable" at 21 weeks (I have that straight from an NNS "Pregnancy" book) and there have now been cases of children born from 21 weeks on that have survived because of new technological and medical advances. Now, given that Britain quite rightly made this issue one of clincal viability in relation to the survival of the child when it drew up the law I am not quite sure why it is wrong to review the law on the same grounds now. If a child can be shown to be able to survive indepedently of the mother at an earlier date than the law currently sets then surely the law should be changed to take account of that.
There is no doubt of course that Howard is targeting a particular demographic for votes. He's a politician, what do you expect? Labour do it to. Opportunism is not the reserve of the Tory Party alone and to suggest otherwise would be intellectually bankrupt. However, there is also a logical argument for the reviewal of a law drawn up many years ago which is not now in date with current clinical thinking. I think the clincal argument is the key here. If the medical profession has evidence that a child can survive before 24 weeks then the law should reflect that (unless of course one refuses to acknowledge the underlying assumptions used in the drawing up of the current legislation, which I guess is one prerogative, although it would be a bit disingenuous).
Let's put this in perspective for a minute though. 24 weeks pregnant is 6 months. The proposal of 20 weeks is therefore 5 month. Even if the law was changed to a middle ground option of 22 weeks, that is still a 5 months plus period after conception. Only an extermely small minority would not know they were pregnant at that sort of time, and one would assume that if one wanted an abortion they would not wait until they were over half way gone before they decided to have one.
The proposal being put forward are certainly designed to be vote catching, but they do also make logical sense in relation to the basis of our current laws.
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So, one of the arguments made by the British government in favour of their Prevention of Terrorism Bill that provides for the house areest of those suspected of terrorism-related activity is that they do not want to allow those people to be loose on the streets. Isn't Blair lovely, he cares. However, the funny thing is is that although Blair doesn't want them loose on the streets he is more than happy to let them have seats and offices in Parliament, and let them be in an Executive Cabinet that governs a nation of the Realm.
You see, according to Section 1, Article 1(a) of the Bill, a "control order" can be made when there is "reasonable grounds for suspecting that the individual is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity". Terrorism-related activity is then defined in Section 1, Article 8 of the Bill. Specifically in 8(d) it is defined as "conduct which gives support or assistance to individuals who are known or believed to be involved in terrorism-related activity". So.. this begs the question...
When are Gerry Adams MP (Sinn Fein) and Martin McGuinness MP (Sinn Fein) being put under house arrest? After all they clearly fall well within that definition of terrorism-related activity and the burden of proof against them is far far greater than mere grounds of suspicion.
If they are not placed under a control order then it makes an absolute mockery of the Bill and the Parliamentary ping pong we've had to witness in the past week between the House of Commons and the House of Lords (thank god for the Lords I say).
Prevention of Terrorism Bill
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so it seems many of the National Health Service Trusts in the country are pretty shabby at managing their finances. Specifically they are all heavily in the red. This in itself is not a funny thing, however a statement from a Health minister was (can't remember his name but it wasn't the Secretary of State it was one of his minions). When questioned about the fact that a multitude of hospitals across London (including Great Ormond Street) were in the red by so many millions that they have had to close wards in the past year because they do not have the necessary funds his reply was, and I freely admit I paraphrase, "it's perfectly normal for hospitals to be in the red by this much at the beginning of the year, we've put more money than anyone else ever into the NHS". First up, normal to be in the red at the beginning of the year? Has no one told this guy that in accounting the year is not based around the calender but is based around the tax cycle (April to April), which makes March the end of the year. Thus a hospital being in serious debt in March is not an acceptable thing at all. It's a very bad thing. Second, no one questioned whether Labour had put more money into the NHS, what they're questioning is where the hell has it gone if hospitals are millions in debt and cannot keep wards open? Classic Labour dodge and spin.
The second most funny thing I read yesterday was Gordon Brown's (Chancellor of the Exchequer) speech from Sunday. In that speech he said that we "have the lowest mortgage rates for 30 years". Errrr... mortgage rates have gone up four times in the last two years. We do not have the lowest mortgage rates for 30 years. We had the lowest mortgage rates for 30 years but that has now changed, rates are rising and have been for a while now. Another example of Labour disingenuity and misrepresentation of the facts for political purposes.
Finally are Labour's attack on the Tory Party. They've had to do this because they gave been caught totally on the back foot in campaign terms and the Tories have set the agenda. So what we had was the rolling out of the big Labour guns to scream about how the Tories would "cut billions from the budget". However, the use of the word "cut" is nothing more than disingenuous semantic bullshit. What is actually meant when Labour says "cut" is a reduction in the rate of a budget's increase. In other words the budget for say health this year will not be less next year if the Tories were to win the election. What would be different is the amount by which it would increase. Thus a "cut" in Labour terms is a reduction in money that is neither received or allocated yet.
Spin.. don't you just love it?
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