News Category
This will strike some as remarkably disgusting, even perverse. A couple lost their son in a car crash so they “harvested” his sperm in order to create a grandson for themselves. Certainly we’d expect there to be calls that they can’t do that – despite the fact that they obviously can. What is meant of course is that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that but then perhaps they should. You see, to have grandchildren is to win.
Thus this is a story of someone winning:
A wealthy British couple have created a “designer grandson” using sperm taken from their dead son, it was claimed yesterday.
Yes, this is indeed winning. For details you could read the work of Charles Darwin and the like but it’s simple enough. The aim and purpose of life is to have children which go on to have children:
The couple were left devastated after their only child was killed in a motorcycle crash and seemingly ended their chance of becoming grandparents.
But the pair, who are in their 50s, were reportedly desperate for an heir decided to harvest the 26-year-old’s sperm, which was frozen and exported to the US, bypassing strict laws in the UK.
Their grandson is now three and is believed to be living with them in Britain in a case that highlights ethical and legal concerns.
Well, yes, ethical and legal concerns. That’s the voices of those who insist that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Who wish to, insist upon, imposing their own morality on the lives of others:
Professor Allan Pacey, a former chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: “If the son in this case wasn’t being treated by a clinic, and had not signed the necessary consent forms for the posthumous retrieval, storage and use of his sperm, then a criminal act has probably taken place.
“The clinician who extracted the sperm is in breach of the law as is the facility which stored and exported the sample.”
Well, yes, except for that winning by the grandparents. That aim and purpose of all life being exactly that, to reproduce in a manner that leads to the next generation doing so and thereby becoming those grandparents. So, despite the difficulties here they’ve done that, they’ve won that life lottery.
The only pity here being that British law, for some unknown reason, would deny them that ability to produce the life which carries them on into perpetuity.
Tim Worstall
Posted: 11th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Technology | Comment
Donald Trump is insisting that Apple should move its manufacturing over to the United States. The problem with this being that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand that Apple already does its manufacturing in the United States. Calling for Apple to do what Apple already does isn’t all that useful. What’s being missed is that Apple only assembles equipment in China. And that’s of trivial value so we don’t care where it is done:
Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that Apple should make products in the United States if it wants to avoid tariffs on Chinese imports.
The company told trade officials in a letter on Friday that the proposed tariffs would affect prices for a “wide range” of Apple products, including its watch.
Apple’s AirPods headphones, some of its Beats headphones and its new HomePod smart speaker would also face levies if the current package of $200bn in tariffs goes ahead as expected in the coming days.
The usual point of trade is to make us better off. So, if having tariffs to block trade makes us worse off – which is what price rises do – then why are we having tariffs? Well, the correct answer is because the President of the United States doesn’t understand this.
But why would we want to do that?
The thing is that Apple already, pretty much, makes things in the US. What it doesn’t do is assemble them there. So, take an iPhone, say it costs $800. About 40% of that – $320 – is pure profit to the company. That’s added in Cupertino in California – yes, the recent tax changes mean that it is, not Bermuda, not Ireland. The expensive parts of the kit itself are the processors and the screens. The screens are made in Taiwan or Japan and no one else in the world knows how to make them – not even Apple. The processors are made in Texas.
All that’s left is the cheap stuff – a few wires etc – and the assembly. And we know how much that costs, about $10 per iPhone. And that’s the bit that’s done in China too. In terms of who adds the value and where then Apple already manufactures in the US. The only bit that’s done in China is that $10 worth of sticking it altogether. And why would we care at all where $10 of an $800 piece of kit is done?
As we started out saying Donald Trump doesn’t understand trade. His ideas about Apple just show this.
Tim Worstall
Posted: 10th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Technology | Comment
News that Boris Johnson has been named an “adulterer” in divorce papers comes as a shock to anyone who wakes each day, quints at the sun and asks, ‘What the bloody hell is that?’ To the Sun Johnson’s penile adventures are an alliterative tale of of ‘Bonking Boris”, a “long-suffering wife” called Marina Wheeler and 30-year-old “Tory aide” Samira Mohammed. No, only joking. The alleged other woman is called Carrie Symonds, and she’s not wearing a burqa because we can see her face on the Mail’s front page.
In the Sun we see photos of Johnson in his garden. He’s drinking from a mug – a metaphor perhaps – and looking “grim-faced” at his phone. Both pictures are credited to Simon Jones, aka “Sun photographer Simon Jones”. Might they, you know, be staged? “Explosions aside, Boris is still The One,” states Trevor Kavanagh three pages on in the paper., not exactly discounting the idea that the Sun is presenting the philanderer in a good light.
The photos also appear in the Mirror, but it’s main thrust is not into Carrie Symonds, but Johnson’s Mail on Sunday column in which he said Theresa May had “wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution” and handed the trigger to Brussels. A few Tory MPs are lined up to say how revolting that is. Amid the “fury” the Mirror says it asked one Tory MP “if Mr Johnson had put a bomb under Mrs May’s leadership”. I see Tory MP Tom Tugendhat’s horrific tale of a suicide bomber who maimed and murdered many in the courtyard of his office in Helmland, and notice the bomb detonated below then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which killed five Tories, including one MP, and permanently disfigured many more.
But what’s that? “Show us the totty!” Ok. The Mail obliges with five phots of Symonds – a “fun-loving blonde”. She is “glamorous” – and what more speaks of glamour than shagging Boris Johnson; maybe finding a pre-loved glamour magazine in a bush? – a “Tory party cheerleader”who tweeted as her name rode high on the news cycle: “Sea otters have the thickest fur of all animals.” To say nothing of their pockets – an otter’s pocket being something Johnson finds irresistible.
Anorak
Posted: 10th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
How a reporter from Jew-baiting, Israel hating, Iranian propaganda channel and Jeremy Corbyn’s former paymasters Press TV managed to live tweet Labour’s vote of no confidence in Jew friendly Joan Ryan, Enfield North MP and chair of Labour Friends of Israel is down to “infiltration” says the Telegraph.
You might suppose the story would mention not only the Press TV hacks in the Labour members-only room defying a ban on media reporting but also Yasmine Dar. She’s just been voted onto Labour’s NEC, the governing body of the Labour Party. Dar, a councillor in Manchester, came first in the vote with an impressive 88,176 votes. As reported, she’s attended an annual celebration of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in Manchester. One Times writer notes:
Her speech was followed by a Q&A in which a rather notorious British academic carefully explained, among other things, that Hillary Clinton was a Zionist warmonger and that “80 per cent of the American media is owned by the Zionists”. Dar seemed to be sitting in the front row for this and there was no sign of dissent.
But, no. The Telegraph makes no mention of her. Beneath the headline: “Iranian activists infiltrated Labour and were able to vote in pro-Israel MP’s no-confidence ballot” – this infiltration was presumably facilitated by the cunning plot of joining the Labour Party and voting democratically – we get the facts.
Ryan tells the Telegraph: “I’m horrified that they’ve infiltrated the Labour Party in this way and I think it needs to be investigated, because it is incredibly serious. I’m proud of my values, and I don’t expect to be the toast of the mouthpiece of the Iranian regime.”
‘Press TV – First for Jews’
Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, thinks it “impossible to fathom” how Press TV got in. “This disorder makes a farce of the proceedings and is not how the modern Labour Party should conduct its affairs.”
The proceedings were nasty. The farce comes from banning the media. When pretty much everyone smart phone and a Wi-Fi signal, why bother? Let them film. Why should only Iranians desperate for party political news from Enfield get to see the show? One source in Enfield said a few years ago only 15 or 20 people would have tuned up to such meeting; now it’s anything from 200 to 80million. She might not be famous in Edmonton, but Ryan is a mega star in Tehran. Allow for an ad break, and Enfield could be coining it in.
David Baddiel wonders what if Israeli media and not Press TV had been there:
Ha. Silly stuff. As Jeremy Corbyn knows, “Israeli media is always in the room.”
Anorak
Posted: 8th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
There was a time when to become the Archbishop of Canterbury one had to be a decent, if not good, religious philosopher. This clearly isn’t the case today as Justin Welby is a retired oil company executive among other things. And on current evidence not a good logician at all.
For he’s claiming that higher taxes will make us all happier. No, that’s really not the case at all:
Raising taxes will make people happier, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said at the launch of an IPPR report.
Speaking as the think-tank launched its report about finance and inequality on Wednesday, Archbishop Justin Welby said that prosperity was driven by wellbeing as well as income.
He suggested that higher taxes could fund the improvement of the environment and culture, which could improve overall happiness.
That’s an absolutely vital point being missed here.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a fundamental rethink of how the economy works, including more public spending and higher taxes on technology giants and the wealthy.
In an interview with the BBC to mark the launch of a major report by the Commission on Economic Justice, of which he is a leading member, Archbishop Justin Welby said the present economy was “unjust”.
It is possible that a larger state will make us happier, that more government spending, more of the economy being disposed of by government, will make us happier. I think it’s unlikely, you might think it’s a great idea or not, but that’s not the same as saying that more tax will make us happier.
As it happens the taxation level is the highest, as a portion of the economy, that it has been for 49 years. If it were true that more taxes will make us happier you might think we’d have voted for them by now. But even that’s just an observation, not a failure of logic.
Taxes are, of course, the cost of gaining all those other lovely things. And we all prefer to have lower costs even while we’ll also argue for greater benefits. That’s why it’s always a shout for them over there to be taxed to pay for something nice for me over here, isn’t it? Further, we’ve even proof. Do all people pay all the taxes they should do because that makes them happier?
Err, no, there’s tax evasion and tax avoidance all over the place, isn’t there? Thus paying more tax doesn’t make us happier, does it? Given that at least some are willing to risk jail not to pay more tax we’d rather have to assume that more tax makes at least some people very unhappy indeed.
So, no, the Archbish fails basic logic, doesn’t he?
Tim Worstall
Posted: 8th, September 2018 | In: Money, News | Comment
The purge is underway. As Jeremy Corbyn is labeled an anti-semite and the party twists and turns over its attitude towards Jews, Labour Party members called for a vote of no confidence in Labour MP Joan Ryan, The Enfield North MP, who just so happens to chair Labour Friends of Israel. She has been a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism in the ranks.
She lost the vote. Ryan called the 94-92 result “hardly a decisive victory”, adding in a statement: “It never occurred to me that Trots Stalinists Communists and assorted hard left would have confidence in me. I have none in them.”
Later she tweeted: “I fought the hard left to a virtual draw… This was about anti-Semitism in the Labour party and those of us who have stood by the Jewish community and said ‘enough is enough’. I made no apologies last night for that and I make no apologies now.”
You can see the vote on Press TV, which filmed and live tweeted the vote. Press TV is the Iranian State broadcaster banned from broadcasting in the UK since 2012. On it you used to be able to watch such presenters as George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley (this might be her discussing an anti-semitic mural with Corbyn) and, of course, Corbyn, the Labour Party leader who reportedly received up to £20,000 for appearing.
Siddo Dwyer, chair of the Enfield North CLP, plans to lodge a complaint against Press TV. He says: “No press was allowed to be in that room, nor members of the public, or registered supporters, you had to be a fully paid up member of the Labour party. Photo ID was taken as well as Labour party cards. Everyone was checked and double-checked, but the process isn’t bullet proof.”
Perhaps the Press TV reporter is a Labour Party member? After all, it only cost £3 to join, and look at the mayhem you can cause.
And isn’t banning Press from political meetings foolish? It’s almost impossible to implement. But Labour HQ showsw us its clean hands and says: “Filming of local Labour Party meetings is not permitted, and Enfield North will be reminded of this fact.” Only a few days ago, Labour was stating its commitment to ‘free speech’. Admittedly, it was hard to hear the noble cry over Corbynistas calling for Israeli musicians, speakers, actors, artists, medics, scientists and politicians to be no platformed.
Meanwhile, here’s an argument for an uncensored media from Press TV. See if you can spot the lie:
Anorak
Posted: 7th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
If you can be an unwitting racist, is Jeremy Corbyn’s obsession with Jews and his friendships with those who want them dead a hate crime? Is Corbyn’s Labour Party institutional racist? In 1999, the Macpherson Report into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence by a racist gang and the botched police investigation left us with two legacies. First we got to know what is meant by ‘institutional racism’. Sir William Macpherson defined it:
“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”
And in that we got the second legacy: you could be an ‘unwitting racist’. If the injured party thinks it’s racist, then it is racist. Anything that happens to an Asian person, say, can be self-defined as racially motivated. Lord Macpherson demanded that police mark a crime as racist where the incident “is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person, rather than their own conclusion”. The result is that anything can be racially motivated if you think it is. You can have racism without racists.
If racism can be unwitting, perhaps we’re all racists and at some point become “infected” by racist thoughts? Racism was recast as no longer being about real power and police; it became subjective, a study in what lurked within individuals. The State was in the clear. Don’t look at the police. Look at yourself and investigate your fibre. Racism became a moral matter. Depressing stuff, for sure. To see racism everywhere and in everyone and everything was a low view of humanity. And it stuck.
Which brings us to anti-Semitism. Labour is all for unwitting racism – but not if you’re a Jew. Labour has after much agonising adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s international standard definition of antisemitism. Try not to call Zionists – people who believe in a Jewish homeland – Nazis (a conniving slight of the lowest stripe) or label Israel a “racist endeavour”. Labour noted that it’s decision must not “undermine freedom of expression on Israel or the rights of the Palestinians”. Labour loves freedom of expression so much it wants to make misogyny a hate crime, punishing people for what they think.
It’s odd, no, how racism has caveats when it’s about the world’s one Jewish state but for everything and everyone else it can be assumed. Corbyn had wanted to include a 500-word explainer to one and all – including you Jews – that it must not be “regarded as anti-Semitic to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact”. He’s never said that about any other country. Israel is exceptional. It’s backers – oh, those shadowy ‘Zionists’ who run the media and the banks (whoever can they be talking about? clue: ask the Jew haters) – are uniquely barbaric. Even after the Holocaust, Jews never learn.
So Corbyn sought a definition of antisemitism that allows people to be antisemitic and get away with it. While other minorities gets to see racism in everything, Jews are not allowed to see racism in anything – even when it’s staring them in the face.
Anorak
Posted: 6th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
“How do you deal with smartphone ‘zombies’?” asks the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. You mean people like Mhairi McFarlane (@MhairiMcF), who responds: “What’s wrong with looking at your phone? I have £500 worth of computer in my pocket containing all my friends and the sum of human knowledge but I’m supposed to prefer what, small talk with random johnnies?” Not talk. Listen. Sorry. LISTEN!
The Vine show’s judgemental man at large is Tim Johns who under his @timoncheese handle tweets: “Here is how I spent my morning: using a megaphone to heckle members of the public for having their heads buried in their phones.”
To which my response is: ever been punched?
Johns is wonderfully lacking in self awareness. He says the people with their faces “buried in their phones” are “completely oblivious to the fact I’m walking around with a big microphone”. Tim, mate, they’re not. They’ve seen you. It’s not the 1950s or Wrexham, when and where you’d cause quite a stir. To wit, the first pedestrian (only three are recorded – and one of them’s a Cabbie) he gets to speak with is an Australian woman. There will be emails home.
Johns is a middle-aged man in central London looking to annoy people minding their own business. He’s more in common with a chugger than a happening. He also has a megaphone slung from his neck “to keep them safe” lest they step out into the road and be killed, or not pay him a blind bit of notice. Give it up Instagram and Snapchat – real narcissists have old media credentials. “Life is more important than Facebook,” Johns chides one stranger. But Facebook might be more important than the BBC.
Anorak
Posted: 6th, September 2018 | In: News, Technology, TV & Radio | Comment
When not giving the ‘go‘ for an innocent man to be shot dead on the London Underground, Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick is on the PR trail. Last week Dick popped up on Good Morning Britain, the televised middle-class coffee morning, to discuss, among other things, Jed Mercurio’s BBC thriller Bodyguard.
Dick mistook fiction for fact, praising the show’s “senior” females as “role models”, who are, er, actors working to a script. A woman playing a top copper with five lines on the show is not the actual superior to the lower rank plod who plays the show’s star, the actual Bodyguard.
Cressida did, however, manage to say the show was “ridiculous”, turning off as soon as sexual signals were exchanged between the protector and the protected – in the show the Home Secretary and her Bodyguard shag. But is it so far fetched? No.
In 2011, the BBC reported on a real-life matter:
A police bodyguard to former Home Secretary Alan Johnson has been sacked after an inquiry into an alleged affair with the Labour MP’s wife.
PC Paul Rice, 45, was dismissed by the Metropolitan Police, which condemned him for damaging its reputation.
Mr Johnson quit as shadow chancellor in January as allegations surrounding the affair became public.
The Dick and Johnson Affair – not as ridiculous as it sounds.
Anorak
Posted: 5th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, TV & Radio | Comment
The suspects in the Salisbury Novichok poisoning case are two Russian nationals called Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. They are straight out of central casting. Theresa May says the mean are Russian spies.
The Met police says there is “sufficient evidence” to charge Petrov and Boshirov with the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal hi,s daughter Yulia and Det Sgt Nick Bailey in March. Although Petrov might not be Petrov and Boshirov might not be Boshirov – chances are the middle-aged men were using aliases.
If the men are in Russia, the UK will rely on good will and a sound sense of right and wrong for the Russian authorities to send the men here for questioning. The Russian foreign ministry has seen the news and responded by shrugging and saying the suspects “do not mean anything to Moscow”.
Petrov
But they do mean something to the families of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, who fund a vial of ‘perfume’ in a charity bin around 8 miles from Salisbury and tried it on. The liquid in the perfume bottle labelled Nina Ricci Premier Jour perfume was Novichok. Ms Sturgess died. Mr Rowley was hospitalised.
The Metropolitan Police said the two men had arrived at Gatwick Airport from Moscow on 2 March and stayed at the City Stay Hotel in Bow Road, east London.
Both travelled on passports issued by the Russian government.
From there, they travelled to Salisbury on 4 March where Mr Skripal’s front door was contaminated with Novichok.
Officers believe a perfume bottle was used to spray the door.
And here’s an oddity:
Dame Sally Davies, the head of Public Health England, said that the wanted pair used the London Underground, Aeroflot flights and the South Western rail service.
Can you think of less reliable way to get around the UK if you’re on mission to assassinate someone? The Skripals were found poisoned on March 4 – a Sunday. Yeah, the caper rested on the getaway driver being a south-west trains operative. Daring stuff…
Timeline (via):
They arrived at Gatwick airport at 3pm on Friday 2 March, having flown from Moscow on an Aeroflot flight.
It is believed that they travelled by train into London, arriving at Victoria station at about 5.40pm.
They then travelled on public transport to Waterloo station and then travelled to the City Stay Hotel in Bow Road, east London, where they stayed the night.
On Saturday 3 March, the two men left the hotel and took the underground to Waterloo station, arriving at 11.45am. They then caught a train to Salisbury whey they arrived at 2.25pm.
Police believe this visit was for “reconnaissance of the Salisbury area”.
The two men left Salisbury at about 4.10pm and arrived back in Bow in east London at 8.05pm.
On Sunday 4 March, they made the same journey from the hotel, again using the underground from Bow to Waterloo station at about 8.05am, before continuing their journey by train to Salisbury.
CCTV shows them in the vicinity of Mr Skripal’s house and police believe that they contaminated the front door with novichok.
They left Salisbury and returned to Waterloo station where they arrived at about 4.45pm. They then boarded the London Underground to London Heathrow airport at 6.30pm.
From Heathrow airport, they returned to Moscow on an Aeroflot flight, departing at 10.30pm on Sunday 4 March.
One rail replacement service (aka: the bus) and the whole thing would have been scuppered.
Anorak
Posted: 5th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment
The Guardian’s cover is a thing of wonder – the wonder being did anyone read it before going to print? Having invited readers to “fight fatphobia – ten ways to do the right thing” (well, if it’s a phobia, you should seek therapy or avoid the fat let you feel physically ill), the Guardian tells readers that “unhealthy lifestyles put four out of five adults at risk of an early death”. You’ve got a problem that need fixing if you look at someone whose obese and think them unhealthy – but don’t worry because 80% of them should die before you.
True enough being fat was once a sign of being jolly; whereas now you’re a victim and scourge of the NHS. But the juxtaposition of those competing headlines is dire. An it’s underpinned by those ‘Ten Ways’, including: “A fat activist once said clothing was the alphabet we used to express ourselves – and fat people have fewer letters.” What about XXXXL?
Oh, read it all if you must. But the pick is people praising others for their weight loss:
Make it a rule not to use language that focuses on your own or others’ weight. We have no idea what someone is going through, whether they are dealing with body shame or trying to heal from an eating disorder. When we stop using this kind of language altogether, we create an environment in which people of all sizes can coexist without a sense of weight surveillance.
More evidence of abuse are restaurants which don’t offer “sturdy chairs without armrests”, undoing the myth that the “proximity to fatness bears the threat of contamination” and a medic dishing out “medical discrimination” who failed to spot a fat woman’s cancer (Note: I wasn’t fat when five doctors missed mine.)
Anorak
Posted: 4th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
This is David Remnick’s memo to New Yorker staffers about the decision not to interview Steve Bannon at the magazine’s yearly festival. Remnick is the magazine’s editor who intended to interview former Breitbart Media chairman, former Trump aide and former chief White House strategist Bannon before a live audience at a festival of ideas. Remnick had “every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation”. Even if thrice-divorced Bannon is yesterday’s man, it sounds great. I’d never heard of the Festival before now but count me in.
But other notable guests – Jim Carrey, John Mulaney, Patton Oswalt and Judd Apatow – said they’d withdraw unless Bannon was given the elbow. The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz tweeted: “I love working for [the New Yorker] but I’m beyond appalled by this … I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too.” She provided a New Yorker email address.
To which Remnick said: screw you. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let’s expose the enemy with our wit and democratic values. It’s a Festival of Ideas not a bloody dinner party. And in any case, it’s rude to invite someone and tell them they’re not wanted. Nah. He kiboshed the whole thing.
So Bannon wins. He might have been irrelevant, an opportunistic rabble-rousers, but now banned he becomes a man of substance. And he’s issued a statement: “The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation. In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.”
THE MEMO:
In 2016, Steve Bannon played a critical role in electing the current President of the United States. On Election Night I wrote a piece for our website that this event represented “a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Unfortunately, this was, if anything, an understatement of what was to come.
Today, The New Yorker announced that, as part of our annual Festival, I would conduct an interview with Bannon. The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him. Some members of the staff, too, reached out to say that they objected to the invitation, particularly the forum of the festival.
The effort to interview Bannon at length began many months ago. I originally reached out to him to do a lengthy interview with “The New Yorker Radio Hour.” He knew that our politics could not be more at odds — he reads The New Yorker — but he said he would do it when he had a chance. It was only later that the idea arose of doing that interview in front of an audience.
The main argument for not engaging someone like Bannon is that we are giving him a platform and that he will use it, unfiltered, to propel further the “ideas” of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism. But to interview Bannon is not to endorse him. By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity. Ahead of the mid-term elections and with 2020 in sight, we’d be taking the opportunity to question someone who helped assemble Trumpism. Early this year, Michael Lewis interviewed Bannon, who made it plain how he viewed his work in the campaign. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” Bannon said. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” To hear this was valuable, as it revealed something about the nature of the speaker and the campaign he helped to lead.
The point of an interview, a rigorous interview, particularly in a case like this, is to put pressure on the views of the person being questioned.
There’s no illusion here. It’s obvious that no matter how tough the questioning, Bannon is not going to burst into tears and change his view of the world. He believes he is right and that his ideological opponents are mere “snowflakes.” The question is whether an interview has value in terms of fact, argument, or even exposure, whether it has value to a reader or an audience. Which is why Dick Cavett, in his time, chose to interview Lester Maddox and George Wallace. Or it’s why Oriana Fallaci, in “Interview with History,” a series of question-and-answer meetings with Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini and others, contributed something to our understanding of those figures. Fallaci hardly changed the minds of her subjects, but she did add something to our understanding of who they were. This isn’t a First Amendment question; it’s a question of putting pressure on a set of arguments and prejudices that have influenced our politics and a President still in office.
Some on social media have said that there is no point in talking to Bannon because he is no longer in the White House. But Bannon has already exerted enormous impact on Trump; his rhetoric, ideas, and tactics are evident in much of what this President does and says and intends. We heard Bannon in the inaugural address, which announced this Presidency’s divisiveness, in the Muslim ban, and in Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville.What’s more, Bannon has not retired. His attempt to get Roy Moore elected in Alabama failed but he has gone on to help further the trend of illiberal, nationalist movements around the country and abroad.
There are many ways for a publication like ours to do its job: investigative reporting; pointed, well-argued opinion pieces; Profiles; reporting from all over the country and around the world; radio and video interviews; even live interviews. At the same time, many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum. It’s also true that we pay an honorarium, that we pay for travel and lodging. (Which does not happen, of course, when we interview someone for an article or for the radio.) I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns. I’ve thought this through and talked to colleagues — and I’ve re-considered. I’ve changed my mind. There is a better way to do this. Our writers have interviewed Steve Bannon for The New Yorker before, and if the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting as we first discussed, and not on stage.
— David Remnick
Bannon should write Remnick a thank you note for making him ‘great’ again.
Anorak
Posted: 4th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Bad news, pop fans. Lana Del Rey will not be headlining the Meteor Festival in Tel Aviv. She can’t make it because the venue, Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan, is in Israel and she been cowed by activists and censors working for the quintessentially white, middle-class Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Del Rey did say, “performing in Tel Aviv is not a political statement or a commitment to the politics there”, adding that “singing in California” does not equate to a support for the government there either. But according to the BDS lobby, Israel is a case apart from all other countries. Del Rey was free to play in Madrid, and thus support the government’s attacks on Catalan separatists. But Israel is out. Israelis – Arabs, Christians and Jews – are forbidden from hearing Del Rey sing live in a socialist idyll. She tweets:
“It’s important to me to perform in both Palestine and Israel and treat all my fans equally. Unfortunately it hasn’t been possible to line up both visits with such short notice and therefore I’m postponing my appearance at the Meteor Festival until a time when I can schedule visits for both my fans, as well as hopefully other countries in the region.”
As her managers looks at venues in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the totalitarian, racist hellhole that is Dubai (fly direct from Gatwick), we wonder about the lack of Western campaigns for equal rights in any of those countries. Don’t those Arabs trapped in fascist kingdoms deserve freedom and an alternative to absolute monarchism, misogyny, the persecution of homosexuals and marginalisation of ethnic minorities? Or do they target Israel because unlike lobbying to stop gays from being executed in Iran, demonising Israel might actually get results. Those uniquely barbaric Jews are more likely to listen.
Anorak
Posted: 3rd, September 2018 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
A new report shows that unisex changing rooms are dangerous. Or at least claims that they are. Which brings us to an important philosophical concept, Chesterton’s Fence. The point being that if we see something then, before we decide to sweep it away, we’ve got to work out why that thing as put there or done in the first place. Only once we’ve worked out that original motivation can we think on whether it is still needed or not:
Unisex changing rooms are more dangerous for women and girls than single-sex facilities, research by The Sunday Times shows. Almost 90% of reported sexual assaults, harassment and voyeurism in swimming pool and sports-centre changing rooms happen in unisex facilities, which make up less than half the total.
Gender-neutral changing is growing as councils seek to cut staff costs and cater to transgender people. But one MP said it risked becoming a “magnet” for sex offenders and increased the danger to women and girls.
GK Chesterton pointed out that if you’re out walking in the countryside an you see a fence, well, you might well think that it doesn’t need to be there, tear it down. This may or may not be an error. In order to work this out you’ve first got to consider why was it built in the first place? Only once you’ve done that can you then go on to think about whether that original reason still holds, still justifies it:
Just under 90 per cent of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment are about incidents in unisex facilities.
Hey, maybe we care more about being gender neutral than we do about complaints of sexual assaults. Thus that original reason for the segregation – it being a reasonable enough assumption that it’s going to be men preying upon women – no longer holds.
The point being that whether or not we have gender neutral or segregated bathrooms is a decision we can and should take. But we do need to understand why they were originally set up segregated. Only once we’ve one that can we decide as to whether that reason still holds. No, I dunno either but there’s near no one recommending unisex who seems to have considered the point at all.
Tim Worstall
Posted: 3rd, September 2018 | In: News | Comment
In the US they still kill prisoners by electrocution. The last use of the chair was on January 16, 2013, when Robert Gleason, Jr., picked the electric chair over death by lethal injection. In the UK, the death penalty is not an option. But the law can still fire a Taser that zaps your body with up to 50,000 volts of power. Senior police officers say there is “an increased risk of cardiac arrhythmia and barb penetration in children and thin adults”. Ooomph! The metal punctures the skin – like being shot, right? – and the electricity gives your heart a kicking.
But it’s completely harmless. Really. The City of London police tell us:
Amps can vary in size, to put this into context no more than 13 amps are needed to power a kettle. 32 amps are usually found running around a typical house. Two to three amps are enough to cause a person some harm. Taser runs on considerably less at 0.0021 amps
At the science museum they had a Van de Graaff generator which the public were invited to touch. The generator had in excess of 1 million volts going through it. When the glass ball was touched it caused the persons hair to stand on end. They were able to do this safely because there were no amps carried by the volts.
Good-oh. Unless you die shortly after being Tasered, as some people have done. Police have fired on patients in mental health hospitals. And now to the latest news. Yesterday, police Tasered a 17-year-old in Coventry. He went into cardiac arrest.
West Midlands Police tells everyone:
“A 17-year-old was Tasered in an effort to detain him, but immediately required CPR as he went into cardiac arrest.”
They saved his life!
The boy and three other youths were detained on suspicion of violent disorder and assaulting a police officer. You might wonder which party was the more violent?
Anorak
Posted: 2nd, September 2018 | In: News | Comment
Right now hundreds of skeletal and grey-skinned models are ordering double celery in the hope of getting work. Cosmopolitan magazine has featured a big girl on its cover and the dye is cast. Not only do bigger-boned models fill more of the page, thus negating the need for copy and ads for weight loss, liposuction and cosmetic surgery but the also make the magazine relevant in its ‘Celebration of Diversity and Difference’. This means anyone can be a model because everyone is beautiful. And with bigger pool to pick from , modelling rates are bound to plummet. Whereas ‘super model’ Linda Evangelista reportedly said “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” in the 1980s, today’s tall and skinny bird will be there for 10,000 lira (Turkish) and sleep standing up.
Tess socks it to the ‘haters’
And so the debate: will Tess Holliday, the Cosmo cover model, prove that we – given that so many of us are fat as the nation reels from an obesity crisis (see all press) – prefer to buy magazines that reflect us as we truly are: fat? Or are mags just a trite form of escapism in which we fetishise other people as celebs and learn how to look like them, dress like them and smell like them?
Cosmopolitan Super Diets & Exercise Guide Spring/Summer 1980 cover with Kathy Davis
The encouraging news is that if you’re big you’re more likely to sweat than someone who’s thin, thus making it easier for perfumiers to fill vials with the celebrities’ essence from their scraped sheets and underwear. Look out for a whole range of Tess Halliday scents with names like ‘Difference’, ‘Diversity’ and in a bid to reclaim the word from the haters, ‘Obese’.
In the meanwhile, we can fret about how many children – won’t somebody think of the the children – will be inspired to pile on the pounds by Cosmo mag’s brave stance – the answer being none. Oh, and the rest of you can pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine for free in your – get this – gut-busting gym.
NOTE: Cosmo’s editor in chief is Michele Promaulayko, who got the job “having spent eight years as executive editor prior to her blockbuster run at Women’s Health“. On Women’s Health you can read lots and lots and lots about how to get slim and stay slim.
DON’T BE FAT!
Cosmo – putting the fat in ‘fatuous’.
Anorak
Posted: 2nd, September 2018 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News | Comment
Kuwait’s Ministry of Commerce has closed a fishmongers that was sticking googly eyes on fish to make them appear fresher than they were.
Kuwait has issues with fish. I July this year, the Kuwait Times reported on fishmongers selling fish with nails into increase their weight and price. women complained of crunchy fish, the seller was convicted of fraud.
More facts should we get them. (How we hope the story of the googly fish is true.)
Spotter:@eldahshan
Anorak
Posted: 1st, September 2018 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
The Guardian’s headline is suggestive: “Antisemitism row ‘risks chances of Labour government’.” Jew hatred only increases doubt that the electorate will vote Labour and so get Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10. How fair we are, eh. Racism should obliterate the combatant’s chances of winning the popular vote.
Bookmaker William Hill is offering odds of 4-1 on Corbyn becoming Prime Minister after Theresa May. Given that the respective leaders of one of the Conservatives or Labour are shoo-ins for the top job, 4-1 is remarkably generous – all the more so when you realise you can get 5-1 on Boris Johnson, current leader of his TV’s remote control and little else (even his shorts seem to be working independently).
The other things that stands out is that seven Tories are seen as having a better chance of replacing Theresa May in Number 10 than the towering figure who can replace Corbyn: Keir Starmer.
Is William Hill alone? Let’s see what Paddy Power is offering:
Granted the question is skewed towards who will replace May. The odds on her being toppled from within are 1-3 (Corbyn is at 2-1). So you’d expect more Tories to stand a better chance than anyone from Labour becoming the next PM. However, May hasn’t gone. There is no leadership challenge. And the odds on Corbyn becoming the next PM are 6-1. One year ago Corbyn was favourite to become the next Prime Minister. He’s drifted.
Back in the Guardian, the aforesaid headline is rooted in the opinion of a former Labour MP. Look out for Ivor Caplin being trashed on twitter by Corbyn fans in 3…2…
Caplin, a former defence minister under Tony Blair who chairs the Jewish Labour Movement, tells the paper:
“It’s been depressing for members of the Jewish community, but not just for us, for members of the public as well, because they want to see the Labour party as an effective opposition to this shambolic Tory government, and particularly on Brexit, the NHS, schools.. I think that, for Labour, it is a very dangerous position to be in. It will affect any chance of a Labour government…
“I went to a CLP [constituency Labour party meeting] in deepest east Sussex the other week. A lot of them were very concerned about how we had got into this position. They weren’t saying it was smears. And a majority for them had voted for Jeremy to be leader.”
Interesting. Move away from the nastiness and toxicity on social media and you see people seeking not the weakest point in an opponent’s argument but the strongest. These people want to understand the other side’s argument before engaging with it. This is out of kilter with the mood around Corbyn, in which his monocular supporters cast any opponent as either mentally negligible or malicious. Caplin adds:
“In some constituencies, the constant aggressive nature of some people is wearing on activists and that is not right. One of the founding traditions of the Labour party is we are able to have different views but walk out and go for a drink afterwards, because that is what Labour is about. It is not about aggressive, nasty behaviour.”
If the bigots win the day, then Labour is spent. If you can’t engage with an opponent without branding them too old, too thick, too Jewish, too immoral, too racist (if they express concern over immigration) and discount them as a fascist for voicing any opinion not aligned to your own, you’re not ready for the big debates. You’re not fit to govern.
Anorak
Posted: 1st, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Is Jeremy Corbyn a racist? He is if he you look at what else he said at a London conference convened by the Palestinian Return Centre in London in 2013. The conference was marketed by the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military arm – they’re the group that want all Jews dead and who Corbyn has called his “friends”. Ok, ok, move on ,already. We know all about the mural, the iffy mates, Press TV and the report whitewashed and wrapped in ermine. Borrrr-ing! On this occasion Corbyn was irked by comments directed towards the Palestinian ambassador in response to a speech he’d made. Corbyn responded by saying Jews, sorry, Zionists heckling the ambassador suffered from two problems: “One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either. I think they need two lessons, which we can help them with.”
Did he man Zionists or did he mans Jews? Do you smell something nasty or not? Nothing of it, said Labour, holding its nose. Corbyn was using the word Zionist in a political way. It was a word employed in “the accurate political sense and not as a euphemism for Jewish people”. Phew! He’s not othering British Jews. Corbyn was not billing Jews as the enemy within, a people loyal only to Israel, a country he sees as the epitome of all Western ills and the ultimate enemy. Jews are not, in terms employed by the Left to demonise Israel and make the Jews not worthy of the Holocaust (but maybe deserving of another one; those uniquely barbaric sods never learn), Nazism’s fifth column.
And then he said this:
“[In the early 20th century], the progressive leadership in London of the trade unions and the Labour Party… was actually Jewish trade unionists and Jewish people in the East End of London. It was Zionism that rose up and drove them into the sort of ludicrous positions they have at the present time.”
That sounds a lot like anti-Semitism. British Jews used to be good. All of them. Now British Jews are bad. All of them. He didn’t mean Zionist in any political sense at all; he meant Jews.
Jews and the Left were once of a single mind and purpose. They joined forces at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to fight fascists in London’s East End. That was then. Now Labour has nothing in common with Jews, who do not hold English values. Born and bred British Jews are foreign and hold only the possibility of civilised humanity. This was Corbyn the tribalist, middle-class Jew hater of a type we know too well, who sees “large fat foreign” Jews, as the author Graham Greene did, a writer who opined for The Spectator in 1939: “How the financial crisis has improved English films! They have lost their tasteless Semitic opulence and are becoming – English.”
Are you still uncertain as to whether or not Corbyn is a racist? One Guardian writer said Corbyn’s words were “unquestionably anti-Semitic”; another said they were “anti-Semitic and unacceptable”. Both are right. That Corbyn is still in with a chance of being Prime Minister is depressing: how can a bigot lead the country? The conclusion must be that for too many people anti-Semitism is no big deal. It’s only the Jews, a Biblical people remarkable for having survived persistent persecution. This leaves Jews to form their own conclusion: grandma was right. The oldest story is back. Keep a bag packed under the bed and rely on nobody else to fight your battles. They always come for us.
Anorak
Posted: 31st, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
We still don’t know what happened to Kyron Horman, the 7-year-old boy who vanished on June 4 2010. We’ve covered the story in depth – the hapless police to the fore. This month the missing child was remembered at Kyron’s Car Show held at the Golden Valley Brewery in Beaverton. The theme was child safety. But we don’t know if Kyron was unsafe. His last confirmed sighting as at his school in Portland as he posed with his science project. That a safe space, right?
Since then: nothing. No sightings. No arrests. No new facts.
The press and police monstered Kyron’s step-mother, Terri Horman. Known as Terri Lynn Moulton since her divorce from Kyron’s father, she just remarried in Nevada. KGW says Terri married Jose De Jesus Vazquez Martinez on March 17 in Clark County, Nevada. She’s now Terri Vazquez. Oregon Live reports: “Authorities have said she was the last person to see then-7-year-old Kyron before he went missing from his school in Northwest Portland in June 2010.” Not exactly. She was last person we know to have seen him.
Such is the level of reporting on a case where the police kept a closed mind.
But something is coming. Kyron Horman’s mother says “something big is coming”. Desiree Young, for it is she, “has long stated her belief that the boy’s former stepmother, Terri Horman, was responsible for his disappearance”. Belief? What of the facts?
There is a $50,000 reward offered for information. Someone knows. Someone always knows.
Anorak
Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: News | Comment
Labour MP Frank Field says Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is “a force for anti-Semitism in British politics”. Since the BNP and NF disintegrated, Labour is pretty much the leading force in democratic Jew hatred. You hoover up votes where you can. Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, says Corbyn’s Labour possesses a “culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation” in local parties. So Frank Field has resigned the Labour whip. Corbyn loves using the whip to get his MPs to side with him – which is odd given that he voted against his own party more times than former Tory PM David Cameron. According to a Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown, those rebellions shows Jeremy Corbyn’s “strength of character”.
So Jez will be full of admiration in Field’s actions, a kindred spirit. As ever, of course, the glorious leader says nothing. But a Labour Party spokesman tells us: “Jeremy Corbyn thanks Frank Field for his service to the Labour Party.” Thank you, your Highness.
The bitterness in that snooty message is laced is rooted in Field’s move to vote with the government against an amendment that would have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. Momentum leader Laura Parker said Field must go. There was “no room” in Corbyn’s politburo for such disloyalty to the party (if not the Brexit referendum and the 17.4 millions of us who voted to leave). Sure Corbyn is a Eurosceptic who voted to leave the EEC at the 1975 referendum. Sure he voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU. Granted Corbyn voted against the Lisbon Treaty and EU’s constitution. But Corbyn is leader and it’s his way or else. What his way is, well, answers on a a propagandistic casus belli. pinned to the wall at your local synagogue.
Field resigned in a letter to the aforesaid Brown. “Britain fought the Second World War to banish these views from our politics, but that superhuman effort and success is now under huge and sustained internal attack,” he writes. “The leadership is doing nothing substantive to address this erosion of our core values. It saddens me that we are increasingly seen as a racist party.”
Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson said Field’s departure was a “serious loss to the party… It is a major wake up call. We cannot afford to lose people of such weight and stature.”
The question is this: why is he the only one to go? For a party that makes such a song and dance about identity and being anti-racist, there is little by way of actual anti-racism.
Anorak
Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: News | Comment
Did you see the Nazis massed in Gloucester? There was Herr Flick and the rest of the Herrenvolk who used to star in he BBC’s fly on the wall documentary Allo ‘Allo!. These recreational Nazis were at the Gloucester Goes Retro festival.
Columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown spotted them. She noted: “Too busy accusing Labour of anti-Semitism to heed the real scary threat posed posed by the hard right.” Yeah, all four of the Far Right enthusiasts surrounded by media – which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to reporting on Nazis, a minority focus group with huge reach. There the “real” threat – unlike the Jew hatred that’s rife in the Labour Party, which is presumably fakery made up by a team of scriptwriters.
As they used to say on the TV show, she’s the one with the ‘big boobies’.
Anorak
Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, TV & Radio | Comment
Minted tax-exile Bono, aka Paul Hewson, aka the stately Mr G21, has not been wasting his bath time. He’s thought up a new way to irritate everyone: the U2 singer will wave the EU flag on stage when the band begin their European tour in Berlin. It’s “provocative”, says Bono in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
“I’m told a rock band is at its best when it’s a little transgressive: when it pushes the bounds of so-called good taste, when it shocks, when it surprises,” he writes. “Well, U2 is kicking off its tour in Berlin this week, and we’ve just had one of our more provocative ideas: during the show we’re going to wave a big, bright, blue EU flag.
With a rebel yell, Bono will wave the EU flag that pokes a finger in the eye of those elitist, conformist swine in Catalonia, Greece and Portugal. Waving the flag of those lands’, let’s call them the oppressors is, says Bono, a “radical act”, something akin to buttering your bread only on one side and taking one bottle into the shower.
Stop Press: In other news, the EU plans to keep the same flag after Brexit, with the UK’s star being adopted by planet Bono.
Anorak
Posted: 30th, August 2018 | In: Celebrities, News, Politicians | Comment
She was only “copping a feel” puns the Sun in its take on Inspector Owen Pyle, 28, who arrested a woman at the Notting Hill Carnival for “patting” him on the bum. Yeah, this is story about a man called Pyle’s arse. Oh, nominative determinism.
Having nicked the “boozy reveller”, Pyle did as all police must and took to twitter. “I didn’t come to work to be sexually assaulted while doing my job,” he tweeted. That kind of behaviour is unacceptable.” To say nothing of it being illegal, which his tweet didn’t. The paper says the Met Police have not said if the woman “faces action”.
But over in the Mail, Pyle is repotted as having said the women was arrested for being drunk and disorderly – which is not the same as being arrested for “patting”. She was issued with a dispersal order banning her from the carnival.
Scotland Yard has issued a statement:
“At 21:45hrs on Monday, 27 August a 26-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly in Westbourne Park Road, W2.
“She was taken to a central London police station, where she was issued a dispersal order requiring her to leave the Carnival footprint.”
The Carnival what?
Anorak
Posted: 29th, August 2018 | In: News, Tabloids | Comment
To Newcastle Crown Court, where vicar Peter McConnell is accused of groping a fellow traveller aboard a flight from the US to London. Innocence is assumed, of course. Mr McConnell denies any wrongdoing. The trial continues. This is not about Mr McDonnell, rather reporting on the matter. Might it call be a case of mistaken identity?
The Daily Mail identifies Mr McConnell thus:
The Mail
But the Sun spots a different man apparently of the same name:
The Sun
A look at the Newcastle Chronicle reveals that the Sun’s photo is the correct one.
Anorak
Posted: 29th, August 2018 | In: News, Tabloids | Comment
