Now that every brand is also a publisher, we can cock a glance at the twitter account of Nordstrom. Who they? Well, according to the company’s website, they are visionaries with “an incredible eye for what’s next in fashion”, possessed of a “passionate drive to exceed expectations”. They’ve been in business for around 100 years. And they’ve now confirmed that they did NOT “like” a tweet that said the “DS” in the computer game system “Nintendo DS” stood for “Dick Suck.”
“The DS in Nintendo DS stands for Dick Suck,” said Nick Wiger. “The idea was, playing it was as fun as gettin your dick sucked. 3DS, as fun as 3 dick sucks.”
That was followed by someone operating under the name ‘KatieMetzi’, who offered: “Um, this appeared in my feed because @Nordstrom liked it?”
“Sorry for the confusion, Katie,” Nordstrom fired back. “We can confirm we have not liked this tweet.”
The media has not led with salutes and tributes to Anna Campbell, a 26-year-old British woman killed in Syria. The British government has not made protestations to the Turkey regime for killing her. Campbell was a member of the YPJ, the all-female Kurdish military unit allied with the People’s Protection Units (YPG). She was killed on 15 March in Afrin, which has been under bombardment by Turkish forces. Turkey says the YPG is associated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey says the YPG are nothing but terrorists.
Anna Campbell
Anna Campbell was in Syria to help the Kurds build a nation and defeat Islamic State, the group that murdered 130 people in Paris, 86 people in Nice, 32 people in Brussels, 12 people in Berlin, 14 people in San Bernadino, 22 people in Manchester, 8 people in London Bridge, 5 people in Westminster and 16 people in Barcelona.
She died fighting the people who murdered so many. She died doing the West’s dirty work. But there’s no words of praise for Anna Campbell in the lead news bulletins on TV and radio.
Her father tells the BBC: “She wanted to create a better world and she would do everything in her power to do that. I told her of course that she was putting her life in danger, which she knew full well she was doing.”
Jose Mourinho says he wants to build a legacy at Manchester United. Nothing about his past suggests that he will. Mourinho leaves clubs spent and exhausted. He’s never lasted more than three years in one place.
One player tired of the tiresome manager is full-back Luke Shaw. Mourinho thought it right once again to criticise Shaw in public following United’s FA Cup win over Brighton on Saturday.
A fit Shaw was substituted at half-time. Mourinho says Shaw and fellow full-back Antonio Valencia failed to follow his tactical instructions. “I could have changed both of them at half-time.,” said Mourinho. “…I had to change one and I chose Luke because at least Antonio defensively was capable of good positioning. Luke, in the first half, every time they came in his corridor, the cross came in and a dangerous situation was coming. I was not happy with his performance.”
Reports suggest United players think Shaw is being “bullied” by his pouting manager. Mourinho says only Nemanja Matic and Romelu Lukaku – the goalscorers against Brighton – would escape his anger. The rest possessed “a lack of personality, lack of class and lack of desire”. When you get schooled in class by Mourinho, you give Dr Eva Carneiro the side eye and check your finger for bits of eyeball.
“I didn’t have many managers in my life but he is special because he wants to win always,” says Matic, in full teacher’s pet mode. “You can see when we lose a game he cannot accept that. Probably that’s why he won more than 20 trophies in his life. It is very difficult to work with him because he always wants more and more. Even if you win the league he wants to win again next season. He is like this and the players need to be ready for that. Because at this high level, at Manchester United and where I used to play Chelsea, the players need to be ready for that because the pressure is big. Everyone expects you to win every game. Obviously it is not possible, but supporters always expect. It doesn’t matter if you are tired or not, supporters want high quality football. It is normal.”
He had us up to ‘high quality’. Mourinho’s win at all costs approach is anathema to the so-called Manchester United way. At Chelsea and Inter Milan, success-starved clubs with no adherence to a style, Mourinho delivering silverware was the be all. Does grinding out a result work at United?
Alex Ferguson used to give under-performing players a blast of the ‘hairdryer’. But always in private. Mourinho makes it all about him. In reviewing Mourinho’s turgid 12-minute speech delivered after United’s defeat to Sevilla in the Champions League, Oliver Holt spoke for many:
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address lasted two minutes. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech lasted 17 minutes. John F Kennedy’s Inauguration Speech lasted 14 minutes. Winston Churchill’s ‘Fight on the Beaches’ speech lasted 34 minutes.
Acclaimed as football’s answer to all of them, Jose Mourinho’s self-serving, self-aggrandising, self-regarding, self-pitying, melodramatic, hard-luck claptrap that passed for his attempt at oratory on Friday afternoon lasted 12 minutes. His only theme was Jose Mourinho. He used his moment on the stage to deliver a homage to himself.
Ask not what Mourinho can do for Manchester United but what Manchester United can do for him. His was a dystopian vision of a great football club as a vehicle for a narcissist. His was a speech that denigrated United so that he could vindicate himself. Some managers subjugate themselves to their clubs. Mourinho asks that the club subjugates itself to him.
And to the live draw for the FA Cup semi-final. Lynsey Hipgrave is the designated BBC blonde sports presenter tasked with announcing the matches. The balls are pulled from U-bend beneath the FA Cup plug hole by Gianfranco Zola and Petr Cech.
The numbers in the hat are – and if anyone knows the method behind the numbering, do tell:
1 – Tottenham
2 – Manchester United
3 – Chelsea
4 – Southampton
They come out in order: 2, 1, 3, 4.
It’s Manchester United v Tottenham. It’s Chelsea v Southampton. Or as Hipgrave puts it: it’s Spurs v Southampton. It’s Man United v Chelsea.
It’s a fix! @lynseyhipgrave1 reads out Spurs vs Southampton and Chelsea vs Man Utd as FA Cup semis. Balls were oddly numbered, not alphabetical. This goes right to the top! #facupdrawpic.twitter.com/j7jP6zBGmF
‘The dive gets a big fat 0. Nothing can excuse it, embarrassing,” wrote the Daily Mirror’s John Cross in his awarding of player scores at the end of Arsenal’s Europa League victory over AC Milan. The Sun gave Welbeck 9/10, not mentioning what Cross called Welbeck’s “blatant dive to win a penalty”. Italy’s Corriere della Sera delivered its match verdict: “Affondati da un tuffo” (“Sunk by a dive”).
Welbeck will discover tomorrow whether he will face any retrospective action for that alleged dive. Uefa hold an option to act if the match referee or delegate raise concerns. But there is no word that anyone has done. The Football Association has the power to review the cheating and ban divers for two games. More power to the FA. But they matter not in this instance.
It’s all rather dispiriting. England players diving is all the rage. Gareth Southgate’s latest England squad features the following forwards: persistant diver Dele Alli, Raheem Sterling (“We know that Raheem Sterling dives well, he does that very well” – Arsene Wenger), Danny Welbeck, slippery-booted Jamie Vardy and Marcus Rashford.
As Daniel Taylor notes: “Raheem Sterling and Jamie Vardy have made an art form of initiating contact with the defender and then going down in the penalty area. Marcus Rashford’s dive to win a penalty against Swansea last season was one of the reasons why the FA beefed up its rules.”
Here’s Welbeck playing for Manchester United against Wigan in 2012:
Diving is a horror. But not enough is being done to end it. The players don’t care. The media admires it – Corriere dello Sport actually made Welbeck man of the match. And the clubs just see it as a marketing opportunity:
📊 Lots of protestations from the @acmilan players when we were given our spot-kick…
Three pupils at Greenbrier Public School in Arkansas who partook of national school walkout day on March 14, 2018 – part of a protest against gun violence after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered – were reprimanded in the old fashioned way: two swipes of a paddle across the buttocks.
A mother of of the of the spanked students did as she must and took to twitter. @JerusalemGreer tweeted:
My kid and two other students walked out of their rural, very conservative, public school for 17 minutes today. They were given two punishment options. They chose corporal punishment. This generation is not playing around. #walkout
This generation got off lightly. Two spanks is not six of the best. When British children walked out of school in 1972, Prime Minister Edward Heath mobilised MI5 and Special Branch to monitor the schoolchildren revolutionaries. Mr Heath asked Margaret Thatcher, then the Education Secretary, to compile a report which warned: “Some boys and girls are already beginning to develop political attitudes in an immature way…”
The tweeting mother’s son, Wylie Greer told all to the Daily Beast:
Walking out of class at ten on Monday morning was not an easy thing. Many students were vocally insulting and degrading to the idea of the walk-out and anyone who would participate. At 10:00, I walked out of my classroom to a few gaped mouths and more than a few scowls. I exited the building, sat on the bench, and was alone for a few seconds. I was more than a little concerned that I would be the only one to walk out. I was joined by two others eventually, two of the smartest students at the school. We sat outside the front of the building and were approached first by the principal, who asked us “if he could help us” and “if we understood that there would be consequences.” After we answered affirmatively, he went back inside. A few minutes passed and the dean-of-students approached us. He asked “what we were doing,” we told him that we were protesting gun violence. He told us to go inside. We refused.
After the 17 minutes had passed, we re-entered the building and went to our classes. Over the next two hours, all three of us were called individually to talk with the dean-of-students. He offered us two choices of punishment, both of which had to be approved by our parents. We would either suffer two ‘swats’ from a paddle or two days of in-school suspension. All three of us chose the paddling, with the support of our parents.
I received my punishment during 6th period. The dean-of-students carried it out while the assistant principal witnessed. The punishment was not dealt with malice or cruelty, in fact, I have the utmost respect for all the adults involved. They were merely doing their job as the school board and school policy dictated. The ‘swats’ were not painful or injuring. It was nothing more than a temporary sting on my thighs. The dean-of-students did stress however that not all punishments like this ended this way.
I believe that corporal punishment has no place in schools, even if it wasn’t painful to me. The idea that violence should be used against someone who was protesting violence as a means to discipline them is appalling. I hope that this is changed, in Greenbrier, and across the country.
Wylie A. Greer
Class of 2018
Greenbrier High School, Arkansas
The Daily Beast says it tried to speak with Greenbrier Public School, but the assistant principal hung up on them.
Image: 17th May 1972: School children holding a demonstration in Hyde Park against caning in schools.
YouTubers Monalisa Perez and her lover Pedro Ruiz III had a plan for fame and fortune. Perez would fire a bullet at Ruiz, who would cheat death by holding a hardcover book (an encyclopaedia) across his chest. They found the weapon: a .50 caliber, semi-automatic Desert Eagle, a powerful handgun. It features the largest legal caliber allowed for a handgun in the U.S. Would the book stop a bullet that could piece armour?
Perez and Ruiz thought so. Stood just a foot apart. Two cameras rolled. Around 30 people, including the couple’s 3-year-old daughter looked on. Perez fired once. The book failed. Ruiz was shot dead. Ruiz called 911 and told the operator what had happened. Last December, Perez admitted second-degree manslaughter. The Star Tribune surveys her punishment:
Monalisa Perez’s punishment, as outlined in an agreement to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter, is a 180-day jail term, and lifetime bans on possessing a firearm or receiving payment for telling the story of the June shooting of 22-year-old Pedro Ruiz III outside their home in the northwestern Minnesota town of Halstad.
The sentence falls below state sentencing guidelines that would have sent her to prison. Norman County Attorney James Brue said that was proper under the circumstances for the 20-year-old mother of two.
She keeps custody of her two children – and can serve the sentence in 10-day slices.
Is that a tough punishment? Hasn’t she suffered enough?
Isn’t technology great? For 30 years, rapist Eric McKenna was at liberty. The 59-year-old had never been arrested for two rapes in England. In 1983 he raped a woman as she walked home alone Gateshead. And in 1988, he raped another woman also walking alone Newcastle. Both times he was armed with a knife.
But then he made an error: in 2016 he took a wee in a neighbour’s plant pot as part of a sustained campaign of harassment.
The neighbour called the police. They swabbed McKenna, of Clarewood Court, Newcastle. The DNA left at the crimes scenes all those years ago matched McKenna’s.
At Newcastle Crown Court, McKenna was handed a 23 year sentence.
Det Con Mick Wilson, of Northumbria Police, tells us: “In the 1980s we did not have the same forensic techniques available that we do now and we have secured a conviction thanks to those developments. McKenna thought he had got away with his crimes, but a neighbourly dispute and a moment of stupidity has landed him in prison for 23 years.”
Isn’t technology great. The police that failed to link two similar rapes, less so…
Snapchat wants to know if its users would prefer to “Slap Rihanna” or “Punch Chris Brown”. There’s no option ‘c’, but if there were it would most likely be: do we know which marketing boffin thought it wise to turn criminal assault into larks? You’ll no doubt recall that in 2009 Chris Brown used his fists to put his then lover Rihanna in hospital. Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault.
Nine years laster, and domestic abuse is rebranded as a leisure activity.
Snap, the company that operates Snapchat, tells the BBCthat the poll was published “in error”.
“The advert was reviewed and approved in error, as it violates our advertising guidelines,” says Snap. “We immediately removed the ad last weekend, once we became aware.”
Is it just me, or is this ad that popped up on my Snapchat extremely tone deaf? Like what were they thinking with this? pic.twitter.com/7kP9RHcgNG
Now SNAPCHAT I know you already know you ain’t my fav app out there! But I’m just trying to figure out what the point was with this mess! I’d love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain’t that dumb! You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to DV [Domestic Violence] victims and made a joke of it!!!! This isn’t about my personal feelings, cause I don’t have much of them…but all the women, children, and men that have been victims of DV in the past and especially the ones who haven’t made it out yet….you let us down! Shame on you. Throw the whole app-oligy away.
The maker of Marmite, Unilever, has announced that it is to give up its UK headquarters and move to Holland. This doesn’t matter a damn. No, really, it’s a triviality of no import at all. It’s also nothing to do with Brexit, They even say this themselves:
Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch group, said on Thursday that Brexit played no part in its decision to choose Rotterdam over London for its single legal base.
It’s always useful to take peoples’ word for such things.
Asylum seekers and economic migrants swear by it
Unilever has always been a slightly odd company anyway. It’s long been near half Dutch anyway. And it reports its results, does its internal accounting, in euros as well, something a bit odd for a UK company. But then no large multinational is really from or in any one country anyway. There’s some slight importance, mainly due to where the senior execs get to live, to where head office is. Other than that it doesn’t really make any difference.
The factories are going to remain where the factories are. That doesn’t change when HQ moves. The company will still have its shares listed in London. Because you don’t have to be a UK company to do that. In fact, there are FTSE100 members who don’t do any business at all in the UK, they just use the stock market as the place they’re listed and that’s it.
The change won’t even make any difference to taxes collected. Now, as it wasn’t in the past, we don’t tax foreign profits made by companies with an HQ in the UK. We tax only on the profits they make from business in the UK. And we tax companies without a UK HQ on exactly the same basis. Foreign profits aren’t taxed by us, profits made in the UK are.
Unilever moving HQ to Rotterdam makes very little difference therefore. Sure, a few wine bars will miss the spending of the top execs but other than that, pretty much nothing. No factories will move, tax collected won’t change, it’s all a bit of nothing in proper economic terms.
Shrug, have fun over there folks is the correct response.
So it’s farewell to Jim Bowen, my Bullseye Tumblr muse. He was the engine of that show, propping up hours of awkward banter with shy contestants like Colin the carpet tufter from Dridlington (my favourite ever contestant name town and occupation combo) shuffling in their seats, eyes down. They had only come to win a dinner service, maybe a luggage set, they didn’t want all this razzle dazzle. He chatted to them about their home town, their family, their job, and would valiantly press on whenever the banter couldn’t overcome the nerves and didn’t land, as it once didn’t with a shopkeeper from Diss who took umbrage at Jim saying he had DISS-satisfied customers. The man disagreed (DISSagreed!) Jim explained what he meant. “I know what you meant,” he muttered irritably; right, on with the show!
Jim really came into his own during the quiz portion of the show, routinely asking anyone who responded to a question with a self doubting tone “are you asking me or telling me?” They would confirm that they were indeed telling him and he was duly appeased. Except for one time, when a woman threw him by saying “I’m asking you”. He paused and in a low sombre voice said “I’d prefer it if you’d tell me”.
He wasn’t very consistent bless him, oscillating between violently and unnecessarily shushing the always silent audience whilst the contestants considered their answer and then occasionally jabbering all over their thinking time. My favourite such occasion was when he asked a woman about a cathedral that had burned down “…which cathedral was it?…it was a cathedral…but…but it’s got another name for a cathedral” MOOOOOOOO. Thanks for that Jim.
Another classic was when he spent a man’s thinking time telling him he looked like Rumpole of the Bailey. The man looked annoyed at this comparison and then came Bully’s roar which annoyed him further. Afterwards Jim apologised to the glowering contestant for offending him but maintained that he did look like him.
That man should count himself lucky that at least he didn’t get the “I’m surprised you didn’t know that” treatment on a question about STDs.
The quiz section led to everyone’s favourite part of the night; the famed prize board. Where Jim would get to announce such bizarre prize hauls as “pound puppies and fine wines” (GAMBLE!) and physically drag people to what they had won and also to what they hadn’t won. Like when he pushed two unhappy contestants up onto a beach set and made them sit unhappily in cane chairs so they could watch footage of a holiday they had failed to obtain, having lost all of their other prizes in the process. But they had a good day and that is all that matters. Plus you got a tankard win or lose.
I will leave you with a clip of Jim being serenaded by some very 1980s men for far too long. His face in the middle is wonderful.
Thank you Mr Bowen for all of the awkward moments, the great chat, the deliberately bad jokes, and for a show that I always find gives me the biggest of hugs whenever I watch it.
James Bowen (born Peter Williams; 20 August 1937 – 14 March 2018).
From Rochdale and Rotherham and Oxford, we’re now reading grim news of horrendous sexual abuse in Telford, Shropshire. The Mirror reports on the claims that over 1,000 girls, some as young as 11, were raped – three were murdered – by gangs of predominately Muslim, Asian-heritage men over four decades. Huge news, then. Or not.
Sunday Mirror – Telford
One day on from the story only the Daily Mail led with it. No other paper thought it worth a front page, including the Guardian, which champions the #MeToo movement, and The Times, which went big with the story of how Damien Green MP allegedly touched Tory activist Kate Maltby’s knee and attempted to seduce her. Why is that the suffering of 1,000 beaten and raped young women and girls from an unfashionable part of the world is ignored but so much space is afforded to better off, better educated and better looking victims?
The world knows what actress Rose McGowan says she experienced at the hands of movie mogul and “monster” Harvey Weinstein, but we don’t know what happened to Charlene Downes, the poor, white girl who vanished in Blackpool, Lancashire. Maybe if she’d been seen in the company of a famous face, we would have?
The lack of comment on the Telford abuse scandal exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the #MeToo movement. High-profile campaigners announce time and again that they are not driven by self-interest, but from a desire to help women less fortunate than themselves. Jane Merrick told all because, ‘I knew that by failing to act I was letting down not only my 29-year-old self, but also any other women who may have been subjected to the same behaviour since. More importantly, I would be failing to protect other women in future.’ Kate Maltby made a similar declaration: ‘It is true that I have many privileges that other women do not. That is why I owed it to others to come forward. When we see white, financially secure women saying #MeToo, we should ask: where are the voices that we are not hearing?’ Yet Merrick and Maltby, for all their self-sacrifice and sisterly compassion, have so far had nothing to say about the rape of teenage girls in Telford.
Time’s Up, the celebrity #MeToo spin-off, launched a fundraiser to pay legal fees for victims of sexual harassment and assault seeking justice. The aim, it said, was to ‘lift up the voices, power and strength of women working in low-wage industries where the lack of financial stability makes them vulnerable to high rates of gender-based violence and exploitation’. More than $16.7million was raised in less than a month. The British actress Emma Watson, one of the most generous and high-profile donors, posted on social media: ‘The clock’s been ticking on the abuse of power. I stand in solidarity with women across every industry to say #TIMESUP on abuse, harassment, and assault. #TIMESUP on oppression and marginalisation.’ Only, it seems, some women are more deserving of solidarity than others; some women’s voices are more worthy of being lifted up.
Too true. The story has yet to catch. The Sun cover it lightly on page 27; and the Express on page 11. The Mail uses the horror to give the BBC a kick, citing MPS “from across the political divide” who accused the BBC of “failing to cover the Telford scandal adequately”. What is adequate for what one victim calls a “whirlwind of rape” meted out to her between the age of 14 and 18? The Mail has the story on page 22, after first covering news of a new Harry and Meghan TV movie and Ken Small’s painting, which looks a lot like a Canaletto, but isn’t. Even the Mirror has it on page 5.
The hard working Daily Mail Reporter was helping readers sat in their Comfi-Gowns and support stockings identify the “Worst dressed women” at the Oscars.
Eyes are drawn to Salma Hayek, who came as a “Shiny disaster”. Her “dress was baffling to behold… serving as more of an eye sore than a style statement”. What a horror show.
And you too can get the look because just one line down, the same readers are told: “Shimmer in sequins like Salma wearing a Gucci gown… Whoever said sequins can’t be worn all over on a maxi gown must’ve not seen how good Salma Hayek rocked this one at the 2018 Oscars.”
You know how it goes: you shag the billionaire and take his hush money. Then the billionaire becomes president of the US of And you realise you undervalued your services. And so it is that adult film star Stormy Daniels says she not longer wants the $130,000 she claims Donald Trump paid her to remain tight lipped about their affair. She thinks it best that she return the cash and place her story on the public record.
Hush ‘n’ tell
Daniels, nee Stephanie Clifford, has laid out her plan in a letter to Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. She has set a deadline of Friday for the return of the cash. She will then be at liberty to “speak openly and freely about her prior relationship with the president and the attempts to silence her and use and publish and text messages, photos and videos relating to the president that she may have in her possession, all without fear of retribution or legal liability.”
“This has never been about the money,” Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told NBC New. It’s the principle, right? “It has always been about Ms. Clifford being allowed to tell the truth. The American people should be permitted to judge for themselves who is shooting straight with them and who is misleading them. Our offer seeks to allow this to happen.”
Generous it is, indeed. And should Trump fall into a a trap marked ‘TRAP’ with huge arrow pointing at it, we can all marvel at how a man who outlined his mating ritual as “Grab her by the pussy” really treats women he fancies.
A new report out insisting that 25% of the Welsh are living in poverty. Our conclusion might therefore be that we’d not like to have Labour running the UK as they have been Wales these past few decades. But that would be partial, extreme and unfair. The truth being that we’re measuring what poverty is wrongly:
Growing numbers of Welsh families are at risk of being trapped in poverty, a major report warns today.
Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows Wales has a higher rate of poverty than England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
What poverty is depends upon how we measure poverty. For the world as a whole we use the World Bank’s measure, $1.90 a day. There is no one at all in the UK living at this standard, not one single person.
Within the UK we use something called “relative” poverty. This is less than 60% of median household income. If you live in a household which gets less than 60% of £25,000 or so a year then you’re in poverty. Sure, it’s not great riches but it sure ain’t the same as that global poverty. Also, note that this is after benefits, this is total income, not just that from work. But note one more thing – that’s the national median income.
And incomes vary over the country. More than that, the cost of living varies over the country. It’s not just housing either – a pint’s cheaper outside London, outside the SE, than it is within either of them. But we don’t account for that at all. And as anyone who has ever tried it knows, trying to live in London on £25,000 a year is very different from trying to live on that in Abergavenny is.
The reality is that many of those described as “poor” in Wales actually have a higher standard of living – well, except for being in Wales – than many of those in London on nominally higher incomes. Britain does have regional variations in wages but it also has large regional variations in costs. Once we account for those differences, both of those sets of differences, much of reported poverty simply disappears.
The biggest problem we’ve got with poverty in the UK is that we just don’t measure it the right way.
Referee Dean Hulme asked former Arsenal player Sanchez Watt for his name. Watt, playing for Hemel Hempstead Town in a National League South game against East Thurrock United was going into the ref’s book.
“Watt,” said the 27-year-old. Hulme believed he was saying “what?” and sent him off for dissent. The card was soon rescinded.
“It was a human error,” Hemel Hempstead chairman Dave Boggins told BBC Sport. “The referee was man enough to rectify it. I think everybody found it amusing afterwards – including the referee. He came into the boardroom after the game and explained how he had made the mistake. He was very apologetic and saw the funny side of it. He was a good ref on the night to be fair to him.”
Don’t open those eyes yet, Arsenal fans: Arsene Wenger is still there. But the Arsenal Supporters Trust (AST) has done its bit to defenestrate the manager and prick a supine, greedy board and absentee owner into action. AST members voted overwhelmingly against the Frenchman remaining as manager beyond the end of this season.
A whopping 88% of fans responded to an AST survey saying that they do not support Wenger continuing in charge for another season – last year it was 78%, and Arsenal still gave him a new two-year deal.
As Arsenal FC go full ostrich, we can marvel that 12% of Gooners want Wenger to stay. The same 12% also consider that dream of being tied naked to Nelson’s Column and forced to watch Gary Linker discuss Spurs matches to be the best they’ve ever had. Masochists, eh, they’ve never suffered enough.
Meanwhile, the Times says Wenger spent the hours after Arsenal’s defeat to the mighty Brighton telling his coaching staff that he is “the best man to take Arsenal forward”. He will not break his contract. So Arsenal will have to sack him.
Over to the hapless Ivan Gazidis, then, the Arsenal chief executive. The AST will hand him the results of its survey at a fans’ forum ahead of the match against Watford on Sunday. The meeting promises to be more interesting than the match.
Does a teacher have the right to a life outside school? A Florida middle school teacher has been suspended from class for working nights as a white nationalist podcast host. The Huffington Post claims Dayanna Volitich, who teaches – get this – social studies at Crystal River Middle School, was also ‘Tiana Dalichov’, host of far-Right podcast show Unapologetic. The HuffPost alleges Volitich “suggests Muslims be eradicated from the earth and believes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”. Part of the show reportedly features the following exchange on far-Right educators getting into schools:
GUEST: “They don’t have to be vocal about their views, but get in there! Be more covert and just start taking over those places.”
VOLITICH: “Right. I’m absolutely one of them.”
Its reminiscent of the Trojan Horse story in Britain. In 2014 Birmingham City Council was investigating a number of schools in the city after “receiving a copy of an anonymous letter referring to Operation Trojan Horse – a plot by some Muslim groups to install governors at schools. It claims responsibility for ousting four head teachers.”
Volitich’s school has issued a statement on Facebook:
On Friday, March 2, 2018 the Citrus County School District was made aware of a concerning podcast by a Huffington Post reporter. The reporter indicated they believed one of the persons participating in the podcast was a teacher at Crystal River Middle School. The Human Resources department was notified and an investigation was initiated immediately. The teacher has been removed from the classroom and the investigation is ongoing. Pursuant to Florida Statute an open investigation and materials related to it are exempt from public record and cannot be discussed until the investigation is complete.
If true, perhaps an anti-intellectualist like Volitich could find work as a home schooler?
David Allen Turpin and Louise Turpin home schooled their 13 children. Mr Turpin was registered in the state of California as the headmaster of Sandcastle Day School. In the school’s final year of business, the Turpins’ six school-age children were the only enrolled pupils. The Turpins are accused of abusing their children. Rachel Coleman, of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, tells the Los Angeles Times: “Current law provides nothing to stop families like the Turpins from using home schooling to isolate and imprison their children.”
Why bother to get your weird, bigoted and agenda-driven views into an existing school when you can just set up your own?
You might ask what is the purpose of school? Is it to indoctrinate children with a monocular curriculum or to educate them through access to knowledge of the world and the dead?
In the UK, over 350 unregistered schools serving more than 33,000 children operate, according to Ofsted, the education regulator. “I have huge concerns about unregistered schools and the lack of regulation and inspection,” Robert Halfon, head of the Commons education committee, told The Times. “Any school of any kind shouldn’t be unregistered. There shouldn’t be room for grey areas. Even if they have less than five pupils and are open less than 18 hours they should be inspected and registered.”
The Times obtained five extremist books relating to Islam, including Dos and Do Nots of Islam and The Islam Way of Life. One was by Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born extremist Muslim preacher who has been banned from Britain. Concerns have also been raised about illegal Christian and Jewish schools.
The Times then lists “Lessons for children”, but is unclear about the source of what follows. Another article in the paper says “Take home schooling out of the shadows”. So much for the thousands of parents who surely teach home-schooled children to be curious, doubtful, challenged and well-rounded – around 1.8millions children in the US are home-schooled. We don’t see many examples of the good. But we do see the alleged “lessons”, which are not exactly enlightened and progressive:
“It is lawful to give slight punishment to the wife for her adverse behaviour but it is not permissible to beat her black and blue.”
“If a sweet thing is left uncovered, swarms of dirty creatures are liable to prey upon it and corrupt it. Similar is the case of a woman. The current wave of rape incidents in regions where public exposure of women prevails, strengthens this argument beyond doubt.”
“Celibacy is an unlawful criminal indulgence in sinful violations involving sex. Socially it is a disruptive and destructive act amounting to disobedience to Allah.”
“Homosexuality is not only an abomination but also unbecoming to human dignity.”
Neil Basu, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has gone on the record, claiming “segregated, isolated communities, unregulated education and home schooling are a breeding ground for extremists and future terrorists”. Time to make the British method more appealing then – less arbitrary in its authoritarianism that erodes freedoms hard won in the name of fighting the War on Terror and keeping us all ‘safe’.
Of course, if you’re rich, things can be different:
Emma Thompson and her husband, Greg Wise… withdrew Gaia, their 16-year-old daughter, from her private school in north London in the run-up to her GCSEs. “She loves learning and she’s terribly focused and hard-working,” Wise has explained, “but she didn’t like the sausage factory of formal education. I’ve no argument with that.” She is now taught by top tutors in a shed in their garden.
There’s more than one way to teach children. And if school is to be valuable and valued, we should be asking why adults can’t do more in the service of educating children, who should be equipped with the tools to judge a lesson or an opinion for themselves.
We’ve another of those claims about sex trafficking which is simply complete nonsense. For, to any level of statistical accuracy, there is no sex trafficking in the UK. But people seem happy enough to accuse Google and Facebook of facilitating what doesn’t happen. The correct response to which is to tell these people to go boil their heads of course:
Internet giants were accused of profiting from sex trafficking in Britain last night as security chiefs warned of a new wave of “pop-up brothels” sweeping the country.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) last night accused firms such as Google and Facebook of “making profits” from the trafficking of vulnerable women, many of whom end up in temporary sex clubs and massage parlours that have sprung up around the country.
The agency’s “modern slavery tsar” said web companies have become the “key enabler for the sexual exploitation of trafficked victims in the UK” and demanded action.
This all boils down to that most unfashionable of things, the definition of words.
Sex trafficking does have a useful meaning. It’s lying, cheating, using force, to move women – it is usually women talked about because of the obvious realities of the sex trade – across borders and then force them into prostitution. This is of course appalling, it’s a continued series of rapes and anyone doing it should be severely punished.
We do indeed have laws against it and people looking for it to stop it too.
We’ve also the meaning which is being used here. There are, must as it will surprise some maiden aunts, those who are, given their other opportunities, quite happy to rent out their bodies for the sexual jollification of others. Some goodly number of these people live in poor countries and would much rather be in a rich one, getting much higher payments for their services and generally living a better life. There are even those who would not prostitute at home but would abroad – the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker explained this rather well in fact.
It’s even true that some of these foreigners come here to screw on fake papers, are smuggled in, lie about visas and so on. But this is very different from that first case.
It’s the difference between those illegally in prostitution, as in being forced into it, and those legally prostituting themselves but illegally in the country. Do remember that prostitution itself is legal in Britain.
Google and Facebook are being accused of facilitating people illegally here doing something legal, offering sex for money. Yet the language being used implies they’re aiding and abetting something very different, the repeated rape of sex slaves. These are not the same thing and we shouldn’t be calling them by the same name.
Which is exactly why the modern slavery tsar is using these same terms. Because we don’t actually have that proper form of sex slavery:
The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Everyone, including all the police forces in the country, went looking for sex trafficking for six months. And found absolutely no one who could be jugged for doing it. That’s about as good proof as we’re going to get that, to any reasonable statistical level, it doesn’t exist. But of course that answer doesn’t provide a budget for the modern slavery tsar which is why they use the different language.
How sad are you around women? If you aspire to James Bond levels of sadness – all that precise drinks ordering, flash cars and innuendo – then Super Seducer is the game for you.
With Super Seducer, gamers “learn state-of-the-art seduction secrets from the master himself, Richard La Ruina, in this incredibly valuable live action seduction simulator.”
La Ruina is the kind of character you first wonder if someone made up and second why anyone would bother. With his tutelage you can say such things as, “If you’re not good at cooking you better be real good at sucking dick then” and “‘I like big boobs,’ and try and touch her boobs.”
A shadow of the one salient point La Ruina makes is in his line: “In the game that’s cool, in real life it’s totally illegal.” Quite. Fantasy is not reality. In our pornified world, it might well be the motto.
One of the more difficult things to get people to do is make them understand the implications of their prejudices. One such is that all those Wonga-like companies offering high APR loans must be overcharging. APRs of 50%, 500%, 5,000 %, these must just be capitalist greed ripping off the poor, right?
The granddaddy of these firms probably being Provident Financial, starting out as a door to door operation well over a century ago rather than some internet upstart. But the logic and economics work the same way:
Provident Financial’s shareholders are hoping for better days ahead after the troubled doorstep lender unveiled a £331m cash call aimed at reviving the business after a torrid year.
But if the plutocrats are successfully ripping off the working man then why do they need to put more money in?
The update came alongside Provident’s much-anticipated annual results, which revealed a pre-tax profit drop of 67.3pc to £109.1m during a year that was the toughest in its 140-year history.
Well, yes, that’s a decent enough profit there. But on the capital that they’re employing it’s actually lower as a percentage than the average across British companies. They’re making less profit than normal industry, despite those sky high interest rates. Which does rather mean that those interest rates aren’t too high, doesn’t it?
The truth being that lending small amounts of money for short periods of time is a very expensive thing to do. Firstly, say you’re going to lend £100 to someone. Or £1,000? The decision making process will probably cost you about the same. So also the basic nuts and bolts of taking the application, sending the money out, setting up the repayment plan and so on. There are simply costs to doing this. Whatever, call this £10. Now note, that’s 1% of the larger sum, 10% of the smaller.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that not everyone repays all of their loan in full. whatever interest is charged has to cover that fact too. Finally, the way APR is calculated means that the arrangement fee, that £10, is counted as a fee that repeats and repeats through the year. If the loan is for a week then the APR calculation counts that fee 52 times to get to the annual rate.
A much simpler and more accurate method of working out whether these charges to borrow are too high is to look at the profits being made by those doing the lending. If those aren’t high – and that Provident Financial shareholders have to put more capital in shows they ain’t – then the lending rates aren’t too high either.
It just costs a lot to lend small amounts for short periods of time. Shrug.
This little statistics rather surprised me. I should have known it but didn’t:
The average house price has soared by 7,578 per cent, from £2,100 in 1952 to £161,937 in 2012, according to Halifax. But in the 1950s, prices were much lower relative to earnings — around 3.5 times the average salary compared with 4.8 times over the past decade, so it was more affordable to get on to the property ladder.
OK, well I did know that. Houses have got more expensive relative to wages. It’s one of the ways in which you can say that we’ve not actually got richer over the generations: sure, wages have risen, but we’ve got to spend it all on a house.
It would have cost around £160 a year over a 20-year mortgage term to buy a typical home in 1952, but at that time around two thirds of properties had no hot water.
And that’s the important point. Sure, houses have got more expensive: they’re also less shit than they are. Central heating didn’t become even a luxury until the 1950s either, widespread adoption only coming in the 1960s. Which brings us to another complaint. We’re often told that a generation back one income could feed and house and raise an entire family. Now it takes two: so we’re no better off at all.
To which I would say bollocks. You can live a 1950s lifestyle on one income in the UK no problems. A house with maybe an inside lav, more likely than not no hot water, almost certainly no actual bath in a bathroom. And certainly no central heating: mebbe a coal fire in one or two rooms. Shitty food, no foreign holidays at all (this is still the era of a week’s camping at Scunthorpe). No meals out of course: it’s not just that no one could afford them, restaurants, other than those in expensive hotels, just didn’t exist (seriously, the expansion of Berni Inns in the 50s and 60s was the first experience of restaurants for many).
You can very easily live a 50s lifestyle on one single earner these days. The problem is that we all like being a great deal richer than that.
There are times when it appears that the transatlantic cousins are more than a little odd. Their preoccupation with guns puzzles many this side of the Pond for example, their continuing love affair with executions meets with the approval of the vox populi over here if not with those who rule us. But seriously, who tries to execute a terminal cancer patient?
An execution in the US was aborted last week after the inmate was left with 10 puncture wounds when medical personnel were unable to find a vein after two and a half hours of trying. The failed attempts left behind a bloodied death chamber, the inmate’s lawyer said.
No, that’s getting it right. The purpose of the death penalty is to put the Fear of God into those who might commit a serious crime. A blood spattered execution chamber aids in doing that so why not? In fact, there’s a good argument that if a death penalty we’re going to have then the more public and gory it is the better. Why go with private and peaceful like a lethal injection in a prison when we could have breaking on the wheel in the public square? Evisceration perhaps? Either would be more of a deterrent.
But then there’s the part that they got wrong:
In court filings in the days before the planned execution, Hamm’s lawyers said he had terminal cancer and a history of intravenous drug use that had severely compromised his veins.
Yes the drug use will have made the injection more difficult. But the terminal cancer would make it unnecessary as well. In fact, why bother with the rigmarole at all?
It’s fairly well known that a death from cancer isn’t a pretty nor enjoyable one. That’s why those who die that way tend to go out on a cloud of morphine – these days perhaps the much stronger fentanyl. A prisoner whose veins can’t be found isn’t going to be getting useful amounts of either of those drugs now, is he? So, why bother with the execution?
Why not just with hold treatment for the cancer, including pain relief, and allow nature to get on with the rest of it? Possibly film it as an example to others?
For if we’re going to have death as a disincentive to crime then let’s make those deaths as awful as possible so as to increase the disincentive, the precautionary effect. And if we’re not doing it so as to dissuade people, as gorily as possible, then why in hell are we doing it in the first place?
Ever since Maradonna attributed his cheating to God, sceptics and religionists have been debating the divine one’s role in the beautiful game. Is Deli Alli lysing down a lot because he’s a modern day Lazarus, rather than a persistent cheat? Are the Red Devils scared of crosses? And here’s Alan Pardew reacting to West Brom’s team-building jaunt to Barcelona last week, which featured four senior players going on the lash, nicking a taxi in the early hours of the morning and joy-riding to McDonald’s before dumping it outside their team hotel.
Gareth Barry (36), Jonny Evans (30), Boaz Myhill (35) and Jake Livermore (28) were each fined two weeks’ wages for breaking the midnight curfew. Such is the tough line at West Brom that Barry and Evans were picked to play in the next match. Pardew explained all:
“He (Evans) has paid a heavy price for [his conduct]. Trust me. It’s like all things in life, if you make a mistake does that mean you are going to have to pay for it for the rest of your life? I don’t think so. I think God teaches us to forgive. On this occasion I wouldn’t say he’s been forgiven. But he’s paid a price and he’s still paying a price with you guys [the media], so he’ll learn that that was an event he deeply regrets as he lives on.
West Bromwich Albion are bottom of the Premier League, five points behind their closest rival. You’d think that arrogant players larking about, boozing and eating junk food less than ideal. But with the Rev. Pardew at the helm, the lads have a prayer.
All power, then, to Kylie Jenner, 20, half-sister to Kim Kardashian, who has issued the first billion dollar tweet: “Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?”
Her message was liked more than 250,000 times. Around the same time, shares in Snap, which operates the social media app., dropped 6 per cent ($1.3bn).
Such is Jenner’s power that a role as share tipster must beckon. Kylie tips a few companies for greatness and – waboom!- their short-term share price rises sharply. You can debate why anyone would follow the advice of a woman who called her first child Stormi Webster later. But they do. So there.
Of course, there’s more to it that just Jenner’s tweet. Citigroup analyst Mark May has seen a “significant jump” in negative reviews of the app’s redesign. Over one million names appeared on an online petition asking Snap to keep the old look. Maybelline New York asked its followers if it should bother staying on the Snapchat platform.
But the story is out there – “Kylie Jenner’s pop at Snapchat wipes $1bn off value” (Times); “Reality TV star Kylie Jenner wiped $1.3bn off Snap’s stock market value after tweeting that she no longer used its Snapchat messaging app” (BBC); and “SNAPCRASH -Kylie Jenner wipes £1BILLION off value of Snapchat just by saying she doesn’t use the app any more” (Sun).
When later on Jenner tweeted “Still love you tho snap”. The stock did not rally. Last night shares in Snap closed down $1.13 at $17.51.
Still, it’s good marketing for Jenner and Snapchat, which now appears to be relevant. It’s almost as if – as if! – it was all a spot of PR…
