News Category
After Grenfell: John McDonnell suggests Camden Council is guilty of attempted murder?
John McDonnell says the Grenfell Tower disaster was “murder”. The shadow chancellor says the victims of the horror in west London were “murdered”. He says the dead were “murdered” as a “direct consequence of Tory attitudes to social housing”, cuts to fire brigade numbers and political decisions made over “decades”. As such the guilty should be charged with murder, no? And the likes of Camden Council leader Georgia Gould, where residents have been forcibly evacuated from tower blocks swaddled in flammable cladding similar to that used at Grenfell Tower, should be arrested for attempted murder, right?
Camden Council is run by Labour. The cladding on its estate in Swiss Cottage was installed in 2006, under Tony Blair’s Labour government. It’s good to see that McDonnell is not biased in his call for justice. In his judgement, Tory and Labour members are all guilty of murder. Lock ’em up. And the LibDems, too, after all they formed the coalition government. And let age be no barrier to justice. Go back over those decades when mass murder was fomenting in politicians’ warped hearts, and lock up anyone still alive. Strip honours from the dead.
McDonnell’s judgement that the dead were “murdered” is at least hasty. The deaths of 79 innocent people were not designed and arranged. Georgia Gould’s decision to evacuate the towers in her area was not because she experienced a change of heart about murdering scores of people. Thousands of people who advised and worked on cladding tower blocks with dangerous substances are not part of a huge conspiracy to murder. If they are, they are being remarkable silent.
McDonnell makes get play of speaking up for the victims. But we know how little politicians think of the great unwashed by their attitudes to Brexit. When the working classes and poor voted for change, they were called thick. David Lammy, who lost a friend in the Grenfell fire, wanted the Brexit vote undone by the politicians, you know, those people who knew best about social housing and used their nous to commit “murder” in a decades-long plot. “We can stop this madness’: London MP David Lammy calls on Commons to overrule Brexit vote and ‘end nightmare’,” ran the headline. As one writer notes: “Lammy has pushed himself to the forefront of politicising Grenfell. He wants to be a voice for the voiceless. We must be a society where ‘we care for the poorest and the vulnerable’, he says. This is the same David Lammy who following the first June disturbance, following Brexit, devoted himself to overthrowing the voice of the voiceless.”
Politics matters, but let’s not put too much faith in politicians.
Meanwhile, it turns out that every council block cladding checked since Grenfell has failed fire safety tests. So far 60 of 600 blocks have been tested. And what of the insulation behind the cladding? No news on that.
This is why we hate the word ‘moist’
Words I do like and words I don’t like are many. I like “twat”, “spoon”, “bingo”, “slash”, “bins” (when referring to spectacles) and “pastry”. I don’t like “schedule” when it’s pronounced with the hard Americanised ‘k’, “cockwomble” and “moist”. On the last prejudice I’m no alone. In 2012, The New Yorker asked readers to nominate a word to remove from the English language. ‘Moist’ was the clear winner. Not that any words should be censured, of course. Better we make up better ones and recognise the hatred and loading when saying things are ‘moist’. (This might explain the furore over Dapper Laughs, the British comedian who aimed to teach losers how to “moisturise” women – get ’em “proper moist”. Dapper wasn’t nuanced enough to be in on his own joke; his act was not based on self-deprecation. But the use of “moist” in any catchphrase gave him limited appeal and shelf-life. Generally, in my experience, men who use the word “moist” have something to hide and would make a decent case study for any budding psychotherapist.)
Also, our dislike of “moist” might be down to what the word does to our faces:
A separate possible explanation not tested in the current studies, but which the author acknowledges, is rooted in the facial feedback hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that facial movement can influence emotional experience. In other words, if facial muscles are forced to configure in ways that match particular emotional expressions, then that may be enough to actually elicit the experience of the emotion. On this explanation, saying the word “moist” might require the activation of facial muscles involved in the prototypical disgust expression, and therefore trigger the experience of the emotion. This could explain the visceral response of “yuck” people get when they think of the word. Separate research has identified the particular facial muscles involved in the experience and expression of disgust, but no research as of yet has tested whether the same muscles are required when saying “moist.”
There might be something worse than moist. Something could be ‘like, moist’. Or, perish the thought, “M.O.I.S.T”, the word spelled out to give it added repulsion.
Posted: 25th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
After Finsbury Park the police attack free speech
The tally of people arrested after a man drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque is two. Darren Osborne has been arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation and instigation of terrorism, attempted murder and murder. The second man is Richard Evans, aka the self-styled ‘Richard Gear Evans’, who when not making bad puns is allegedly posting vile messages on Facebook. Evans, reportedly the owner’s son of the hire firm whose vehicle was used in the attack, has been pinched for writing things.
“Glad I’m not running the van hire,” he allegedly wrote on Facebook. “The police wouldn’t like what my answer would be. It’s my dad’s company I don’t get involved it’s a shame they don’t hire out steam rollers or tanks could have done a tidy job then.”
Idiotic? Yes. Horrible? Yes. Illegal? Surely not. But it might well be because Evans has been arrested on suspicion of displaying threatening, abusive, insulting written material with intent that is likely to stir up racial hatred”. Did you read that and think: “I never thought about it before but now it makes perfect sense. Evans writes so persuasively and with such rare eloquence. I’m in. I’m going to hire a tank and murder innocent people. I think I’ll go and do it.”
The police think you might have read it and become radicalised. They’re not taking any chances.
Trouble is that the kind of person who doesn’t like Muslims will feel that their views have been martyred. They are unlikely to reconsider their monocular view when it’s outlawed. They will most likely feel repressed, right and aggrieved. Which makes us wonder what the point of nicking him is?
The case has echoes of the treatment dished out to Samina Malik, from Southall, west London. She was found guilty at the Old Bailey of owning terrorist manuals – or reading, as we like to call it (The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, Encyclopaedia Jihad, How To Win In Hand To Hand Combat, and How To Make Bombsand Sniper Manual) . She called herself the Lyrical Terrorist “because it sounded cool”. In her work The Living Martyrs she wrote: “Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine“. A second poem was called How to Behead. “It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It’s all about the flow of the wrist,” she rapped. For that Malik was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for 18 months. She appealed and won.
And it all leads to a key point about what it is to be human and be able to speak your mind, which vitally includes saying what you hate. Hate is active, angry and makes you do things. Most often it makes things better. If you hate Nazis, you fight them. If you hate the sound of nails down a blackboard, you invent projectors and marker pens. If you hate living in a poor country infested by corruption, you work hard to live in a better one and expose the rotten core.
Am I hateful for sticking up for hate? You hate that that I am, don’t you. You don’t? Oh, I see, you just want a quiet life of conformity and agreeing with whatever the latest law decrees. You don’t want to cause offence. Well, that’s fine so long as you never want to prove anything, challenge the status quo and win.
Richard Evans allegedly says hideous things. But what’s much worse that hate is to cut out tongues and let the nastiness fester unchallenged by reason.
All aboard the Betty Bus where boys are looking at a sad girl on her period
The Betty Bus aims at “encouraging open and honest conversations about periods with girls and boys aged 8-12”. What will the boys learn about periods? Well, here’s a picture of boys looking at a sad girl on her period. Pity her and her suffering.
And it’s got a slide.
The Betty Bus has a slide. Your period is an adventure playground. Which way to the (mood) swings? It is a slide, isn’t it – not an applicator?
Spotter: Joanna Williams
Posted: 23rd, June 2017 | In: News, Strange But True | Comment
Anthony Gormley should get over himself: Crosby beach statues are there to be enjoyed
Britain is replete of big ornaments, keepsakes and statues. Anthony Gormley made a few more and stuck his life-sized iron men statues into the sand at Crosby beach on Merseyside. Now someone’s gone and decorated them in bright bikinis and shirts with slogans like ‘This is Art’.
Gormley wants the paint removed. He says the painting is vandalism.
I’d argue that his statues modelled on Gormleys own body are worse. Who asked for them to be there? But since they are why not embellish them? And they look good, don’t they. The sinister grey lunks now carry a spot of seaside fun. It can’t be long before someone goes full gadabout Stag and Hen do and augments them with knobs and knockers. Ah, they have. The art world is nothing if not fast moving.
@ysgolbryncoch Crosby Beach “another place” Anthony Gormley. pic.twitter.com/SPYq6EQ4Ze
— Katy Parry (@EWANTHEBRAVE) April 22, 2017
#anthonygormley statues defaced – or bettered? pic.twitter.com/mhrJN6EQXW
— Kingmakershaker (@Kingmakershaker) June 22, 2017
I understand Gormley’s cheesed off that his work has been subverted. But what his public work means is not set in stone, whatever he initially intended. Is it really art now it’s been updated? Dunno. What does it matter to you if it is or isn’t? Maybe better next time to make it very big or stick the statues on plinths, thereby reminding the great unwashed to look up at art and see it as something better than you. Of course, if the officials do remove the paint the statues become memorials to crowd control and conformity, which would be very fitting for our age.
Posted: 23rd, June 2017 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
After Grenfell: 600 deathtraps, party political boomerangs and another lousy inquiry
News is that Grenfell Tower was not the only building swaddled in flammable cladding. The Sun leads with “600 Fire Traps”. It sees “thousands of families living in fear” that what happened in North Kensington could happen to their home. Eleven building in eight local authorities have been tested by the Government so far, including those, says the paper, in the London borough of Camden, which just happens to be a council under Labour control. So much for the narrative about only people in jeans, double-vent jackets and brogues placing the poor in danger. The Sun is happy to point out when a horror comes along and upsets all the pieces on the board, playing party politics with the dead is a campaigning boomerang.
Theresa May does not murder children. Jeremy Corbyn does not value life more or less than other party leaders. Using the dead for a political campaign is sick. I’m sure among the enlightened and knowing screaming about justice for Grenfell and Tory child killers it’s a monumental order of self-restraint not to revisit Guy Fawkes’ old plot.
On page 5, the Sun tells us of the 4,800 residents in five Camden council tower blocks who can’t sleep for fear of a blaze. The “killer cladding” was installed by Rydon, the same company that worked on Grenfell Tower.
Over in the Mirror, the front-page news is also of thousands more people “living in deathtraps”. We hear from Labour’s Harriet Harman, who calls the news “chilling”. It too mentions Camden Council, and looks at the Rivers Apartments in Tottenham, London, where the building is wrapped in the same “lethal material” as Grenfell. In Camden, the council has ordered the cladding on the Chalcots Estate to be stripped immediately. The paper does not mention that Camden Council is under Labour control. It does, however, remind readers that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is under Tory control, and that its hapless leader has resigned.
In the Express, Grenfell and cladding becomes something to do with illegal immigration. Ross Clark agrees that any illegal immigrants who survived Grenfell Tower should not be prosecuted but his bleeding heart swiftly dries like camel spit. No-one wants to be an illegal immigrant, dead or both. But he tells us that illegal immigration is a health and safety issue because lots of them live in sub-let council flats. Presumably, the way around this is to flush them out with random spot-cheques and drills. All for their own good, of course. The Grenfell Towers disaster, he notes, “might not have been caused by overcrowding” – no might about it, Ross, it wasn’t – “but unless we investigate properly the living conditions there, then sooner or later we are going to have similar tragedies caused by having people crammed into unsuitable housing.”
As the Express looks to rehousing the poor and displaced in better accommodation – i.e. a prison before deportation – the Mail sees the “GREAT EVACUATION”, saying that thousands of tenants in the 600 infected towers may have to move out.
Of course, the exact cause of the inferno that destroyed Grenfell Tower on 14 June remains to be discovered. But, yes, you’d want to move out if you lived in a tower block with questionable safety standards.
So they move out into temporary accommodation, the contractors move in, the council wonks say “lessons have been learned” and thank sheer luck that Grenfell never happened on their patch – and then what?
Right now the feeling is not that we need more legislation, but that building companies and clockwork councils need to better observe rules already in place. They should employ more common sense and gut-feeling in jobs that have been reduced to box-ticking. A disaster on this scale could have been prevented had people in power listened to the warnings. The cladding changed the building. But who was looking into how cladding affected fire risk and fire control? Nothing exits in isolation. In focusing on the cladding, the councils are not considering the bigger picture: who oversees the whole thing not just the micro-management? Who wasn’t listening to Grenfell Tower’s residents when they campaigned long and hard for their Tenant Management Organisation to address their concerns? Instinct and local knowledge were ignored. Removing faddish and dangerous cladding won’t alter that.
And then there’s the ubiquitous inquiry. Over the need for quick action and addressing the concerns of people who live in their flats and know them best, politicians franchise action to a body not accountable to the public. And nothing changes.
Posted: 23rd, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
The Tories are rubbish but poll says we don’t want a Labour government
Not much demand to overthrow the Government is there, according to this poll in the Times.
A Tory Party bereft of ideas with an illiberal ‘dead woman walking’ as a leader and yet Labour remains unattractive and less trusted on the biggest challenge. Corbyn’s hollowed-out Labour might be ready to form a government, as he keeps telling us they are, but we don’t want them to.
Glastonbury, however, does. And he’s very much at home in that hard-bordered, middle-class police state.
Posted: 23rd, June 2017 | In: Broadsheets, News, Politicians | Comment
Jeremy Corbyn finds his natural home in Glastonbury’s police state
Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury is perfect. Corbyn will preach about the rich who aren’t able to tell you the cost of a pint of milk (cow’s not almond) while addressing the middle-aged and middle-classes who can afford the better drugs and cosier tents, who can take a few days off work to spend £238 to stand in their Jerusalem and even more on bottled water, sparkling wine, a cutting of AK47 and sanitary wipes.
Corbyn is among his people at Glastonbury, the big BBC-endorsed party of organised rebellion and spiritual bollocks headlined by Ed Sheeran – the ultimate box-ticking performer Simon Cowell would decant into his cloning machine.
As the middle-classes realise they’re paying a fortune to watch Newsnight Live! whilst striving to make little suburban front gardens in the mud, the rest of us can laugh our heads off enjoying the televised rain-soaked hell of all those poor sods at Glasto, knowing that the campers are staring into bucketfuls of projectile rectal pebble-dashing wondering if spending the price of a Tuscan holiday and a good plumber pretending to be homeless and incontinent was worth it.
Go Jezza! Yay! You really are at home in your curtained-off, self-governing, hard-border mini-state patrolled by millions of police – a city-dweller’s vision of the countryside that runs on Boden, bankers and bands they play on Radio 2.
Posted: 22nd, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
DAY OF RAGE: tabloid facts and figures from the Grenfell Tower march
How many people attended the “DAY OF RAGE” March? Was it a success? What did they protestors achieve? The tabloids review the action.
Daily Mirror: “Rage against the Maychine” – “400 people passed Downing Street shouting ‘Theresa May – murderer'”. The protest is front-page news. The protestors are seen behind a banner demanding: “We Need Justice for Grenfell Tower.”
The Mirror finds one person who survived the disaster at Grenfell Tower who supports the march. She wasn’t on it, however. It makes no mention of survivors who did not agree with the march. Says survivor Anita Mohamed, 46: “I blame the council and the Government. More than 100 people could be dead because of their policies.”
Daily Star: “DAY OF RAGE MARCH FURY.” The paper says protestors “clashed with police”. The Mirror made no mention of any aggro. The march “erupted in violence”. There were “several arrests”. How many were on the march to topple the Government? “Around 250,” says the paper.
The Sun: “TOO HOT TO TROT.” The march to “bring down the Government” “fizzled out”. In all “around 400 turned out to march 5 miles from Shepherd’s Bush to Westminster”. How many people were nicked? “There were two arrests.” We don’t hear from any Grenfell Tower survivors who support the march. We do hear from aid worker Zeyad Cred, 29, who says: “The community are still trying to recover – the last thing we need is a day of rage.”
On Page 10, the Sun calls the marchers “the furious few”. It was a day out for “freshly-minted Socialist Worker propaganda”.
On Page 13, Rod Liddle tells readers the march was organised by “another tiny left-wing organisation, the Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary”. They are “nasty, self-righteous, thick-as-mince Trots and snowflakes”. He says the people who suffered and the charities helping the Grenfell survivors “did not approve” the march. Their “misery has been hijacked by Left-wing nutters” – it was “egged-on by by the Labour Party”, specifically Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. When McDonell doesn’t get his way “he can always be found standing in a street surrounded by furious anti-Semitic Muslim protestors, radical lesbians… bedwetting students and professional agitators”.
Daily Express: “Militant mob clashes with police outside Downing Street.”
There were “fewer than 500” on the march. The march continued “despite the pleas of victims’ families who said their grief was being hijacked”. One volunteer helping the Grenfell survivors tell the paper: “It’s politicising the anger. Now is not the time… They are running around saying how can we get Jeremy Corbyn in.”
Daily Mail: “‘THIS is class war!’ yelled a thug at an old boy in a blazer.”
“Hey! Hey! Theresa May! How many kids did you kill today?” ask the “few hundred” fair-minded marchers. One woman carries a poster of Jeremy Corbyn with the word “Hope” over his face. We learn that the march did include “some who had been personally affected by the fire”. One woman whose young son had lost a friend in the blaze in marching. We see a few banners. “WHY DO TRAGEDYS [sic] always happen UNDER TORIES?” asks one, the holder seemingly oblivious to goings on in Iraq and Libya.
Such are the facts.
After Grenfell Tower: let’s envy the ‘victims’ in their luxury flats
After Grenfell Tower, news that displaced residents will be rehoused in “Posh New £5m Flats” (Star) at a new-build complex called Kensington Row located around a mile and a half from the disaster. The development has 68 flats, where the three-bed and four-bed flats are worth “around £5m” each. These bigger flats, says the paper, are where “a majority of the survivors” will live.
Over in the Express there’s news that only “some of the victims” will be rehoused in the new flats. I’d say none of the victims will be. They’re dead – at least 79 of them. It’s the survivors who are being rehoused because their last home was a toxic time-bomb.
The flats, secured by the City of London Corporation, are worth even more in the Express. Now homes on the plot are worth up to £8.5m. Residents have access to a “gym, swimming pool, spa, private cinema and 24-hour concierge”. Are we supposed to envy them, or just marvel at the insane London property market which keeps so many people off the property ladder?
The Mail says those survivors are living the dream
And then we learn that the City of London Corp paid around £10m (source: The Sun) for the 68 flats. That’s not £5m each is it – even if Diane Abbott is doing the maths. The majority of survivors are not living in £5m flats. It’s just under £150,000 for each, on average. Yes, I know that’s not the asking price, but the base price. The developers have “sold the properties at cost price”. But it proves that the flats’ monetary value is affected by many forces, not least of all guesswork and the legal requirement that all new complexes contain an element of low-cost housing. The government defines affordable housing as “social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing provided to specified eligible households whose needs are not met by the market”.
The need for a decent roof over your head is not a luxury or an investor’s punt. It’s a basic human requirement.
Oddly, the Mirror makes no mention of the new flats until Page 5. Buried in the 14h paragraph of a story on how Grenfell Tower became enveloped in a “deadly cyanide cloud”, we learn that “some Grenfell residents” will be rehoused “in a £10m deal”.
The Mail leaves it to pages 20 and 21 to focus on the flats. Now the flats are in “£2bn blocks” and worth up to £13m. The flats are “the stuff of dreams”. Well, the privately owned ones next door the council flats on the same £2bn development are. The council homes will have a lower spec.
The rehoused Grenfeell Tower survivors will, the paper observes, “live near multi-millionaires”. Not everyone’s a multi-millionaire in London – yet. There are people in the city who live in social housing and do menial and blue collar jobs. Who knew?
Posted: 22nd, June 2017 | In: Money, News, Tabloids, The Consumer | Comment
Someone stole the amputated toe from the Sourtoe cocktail
Amateur drinkers drink cocktails. They’re the Happy Hour dross fuel, the drinks the witless and bovine sup at moments of enforced joviality and acute self doubt. At Dawson City’s Downtown Hotel, Yukon, Canada, the cocktail of choice is Sourtoe Cocktail Club. It might well be the perfect anti-cocktail cocktail, a lampooning of the usual pretentious swill . The Sourtoe cocktail is 1 oz of whisky, mostly a decent bourbon, with a severed toe.
You don’t drink the toe – it’s not pureed. You just chin the proper booze and let the toe touch your lips. It’s the literal kicker to the hard liquor slap.
And now it’s gone. Not swallowed. Stolen. Someone has stolen the toe.
“We are furious,” says Terry Lee, the hotel’s Toe Captain. “Toes are very hard to come by.” No, they’re not. You just need to look in the right places. The inside of rugby boots, graves and building sites have plenty. The original Sourtoe toe was found in a jar.
CBCNews has more:
The hotel says the suspect is from Quebec and had earlier boasted about wanting to steal the toe. Lee says the man reportedly coaxed the bartender to serve him the drink after the nightly 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. “Toe Time.”
“One of the new staff served it to him to be nice. And this is how he pays her back. What a low life.”
If you can’t trust a toe sniffer, who can you trust? But, then again, all cocktail drinkers lack spirit in the hard drinkers’ race to the bottom.
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Strange But True | Comment
2 minutes of Hew Edwards not reading the BBC News is compelling TV
BBC 10 o’clock News anchor Hew Edwards sits in silence. A technical glitch meant viewers saw Edwards sitting alone and in silence as the cameras rolled on last night’s live news feed. News continues inexorably. Even if there’s no news, there must be rolling news. If Prince William flying a helicopter can be news or Cheryl Cole getting a tattoo, why not Edwards sat at a desk?
The video of Edwards looking at his table top, contemplating the meaning of EastEnders, if taking two bottles into the shower is right and proper, and if the next BBC makeover show should feature amateurs auditioning as news readers, is compelling. We want to know what happens next.
And given the doom and gloom in the news of late, no news might be the luckiest thing we’ve experienced for some time. More no news, BBC, we need a break.
Huw Edwards accidental two minutes of silence at the start of BBC News At Ten is weirdly compelling. Quality TV. pic.twitter.com/USyKM53HkO
— b3ta (@b3ta) June 20, 2017
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: News, TV & Radio | Comment
Barbie’s Ken’s got a manbun and cornrows
Keeping in step with the times, Mattel has unleashed a new range of Fashionistas Barbie and Ken dolls. This 40-strong platoon of dollies come in a range of shapes to reflect modern humanity’s obsession with individuality. You can buy a “slim” Ken, a “broad” Ken or an “original Ken” – “for the ultimate storytelling experience.” You can create whole worlds of narration as Ken bulks up on protein shakes and ‘roids, slims down with tape worms and stays just the way he is.
The gang also comes in 11 skintones and 28 hairstyles. Bu the picks has to be Ken’s Manbun.
Ken might not be able to talk, but he sure can issue a loud cry for help.
And look of the Cultural Approbation Ken, who sports cornrows.
Spotter: The WOW Report
Posted: 21st, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, The Consumer | Comment
Peak Clickbait: Arsenal player transfers to Arsenal
Have we reached peak clickbait in the Daily Telegraph? In “Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to leave Arsenal? Seven destinations and seven replacements”, the paper of record ticks all the boxes in how to create clicks from nothing.
Having asked the question to which you’d once-upon-a-time have expected a national newspaper with experts to answer – and the answer is always ‘No’ to any question posed in a headline – the paper then sets about making a Transfer Balls list.
The Tele argues that Oxlade-Chamberlain could leave Arsenal for – deep breath – Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, West Ham, Everton, Manchester United and…Arsenal! Can you leave and remain at the same club?
As the paper mangles the English language, it also lists 7 players who could replace the underwhelming Ox. One of them is Kylian Mbappe, a striker, which Oxlade-Chamberlain most certainly isn’t.
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Arsenal, Back pages, Broadsheets, News, Sports | Comment
Otto Warmbier and me: The Huffington Post’s disgusting attack on North Korea torture victim
Not long after Otto Warmbier was arrested in North Korea, the Huffington Post produced a hatchet job on the man. Entitled “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal”, writer La Sha laid into Warmbier, using his suffering to nourish her status as the real victim.
Warmbier was a 21-year-old University of Virginia student on a visit to North Korea with China-based travel company Young Pioneer Tours when he was arrested on January 2nd 2016. The North Koreans claim the “student entered the country under the guise of a tourist and plotted to destroy North Korean unity with the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation”.
The dastardly US plot involved Warmbier allegedly attempting to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel the tour group was staying at. For this Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years hard labour at a March court hearing. Warmbier had already been shown “confessing” to “committing a crime” and begging the Korean people and government for forgiveness.
According to the North Koreans, Otto Warmbier “fell into a coma” that same month. The North Koreans never mentioned his stricken state. On June 13 2017 a comatose Otto was flown back to the US. On June 19, 2017, Otto Warmbier died. His family has released a statement:
“Unfortunately, the awful, torturous treatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.
Although we would never hear his voice again, within a day the countenance of his face changed – he was at peace. He was home and we could sense that.”
The Times says “the brain damage he suffered was more consistent with the effects of respiratory arrest, which can be caused by physical trauma, suffocation or the misuse of drugs.” Sources suggest he lost a significant amount of brain tissue. Horrific stuff, then.
But to the Huffington Post’s writer, Otto Warmbier’s horrific ordeal is something to be celebrated. On March 23, 2016, the Post stuck the knife in. La Sha tells us:
…my reaction to [a] young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.”
La Sha is shocked by a man’s curiosity to see North Korea. Dennis Rodman (not white) has visited the place. Shocked? She continues:
That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country.
The “reckless gall” of being a tourist whilst white. Salon thought as much, telling its readers: “This might be America’s biggest idiot frat boy – meet the UVA student who thought he could pull a prank in North Korea.” He had it coming. Lark about, get tortured and killed. They’d pick out bits of brain through his nose if they could find it. Ha-ha. What a dick.
La Sha is not alone in her nastiness.
She then slips into full on English student mode, using the kind of convoluted language kids employ when they want to look smart:
Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege.
It’s not been working that well of late, then. Barack Obama is away, so too is Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Kim Kardashian, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Alice Walton and more and more women and non-white male faces who have made a decent fist of making it in the USA. The list of white males who didn’t rise to the top is long. But who cares for those millions of losers who frittered away all that privilege in The Rust Belt and elsewhere in America’s hinterlands? Maybe there’s a wrinkle in the Matrix?
And on and on she goes:
The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.
Let’s interject, break up this hideous hatchet job. We can share another aspect of Otto Warmbier’s life:
In a tearful statement made before his trial, Warmbier tells a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang he tried to take the banner as a trophy for the mother of a friend who said she wanted to put it up in her church.
He says he was offered a used car worth $10,000 if he could get a banner and was also told that if he was detained and didn’t return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.
Warmbier said he accepted the offer because his family was “suffering from very severe financial difficulties.”
Check your privilege, whitey.
But the Huffington Post’s writer isn’t listening. She’s making it all about race. It’s very nasty:
Yeah, I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege.
She then likens Otto Warmbier – a young man who allegedly tried to nick a sign for larks – to mass murderers who gun down innocent people in a church and run amuck at a fast food restaurant. You see, Otto’s skin colour makes him a suspect:
When you can watch a white man who entered a theatre and killed a dozen people come out unscathed, you start to believe you’re invincible. When you see a white man taken to Burger King in a bulletproof vest after he killed nine people in a church, you learn that the world will always protect you.
Not stopping there, she attacks his parents.
And while I don’t blame his parents for pressuring the State Department to negotiate his release, I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK.
Dunno. Is it relevant?
What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.
A “bummer” to see your son ripped away from you and vanished. Biased, bigoted and wholly objective, the article is the antithesis of good journalism. Pause from casting aspersions over all whites and the dead man’s grieving parents to wonder how this bilge passed before the editor’s eyes and wasn’t spiked.
She continues:
As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws.
No. Visiting North Korea is not unimaginable. It’s something you can do legally with a ticket. And if you find it so hard to imagine the hell of enslavement in a work camp, I can commend If This is A Man by Primo Levy and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Reading when you’re a writer can be useful. Also manual labour – yeah, who does that for 15 years? That question to coal miners and anyone else employed in one of those “unimaginable” blue collar industries that keep the lights on and writers in laptops.
She concludes:
I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.
No. You don’t. Because in the race to the bottom that is competitive victimhood, your moral compasses has gone haywire. Otto Warmbier appears to have been tortured to death. His trial and treatment should earn our utmost sympathy. To use his plight as a means to showcase you’re own victimhood and self-aggrandisement, to stand on his grave and shout ‘But what about me?’ is anti-human, needy and ultimately self-defeating.
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News | Comments (3)
A movement towards free abortions on the NHS for Northern Irish women
Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP Scottish government will look at providing free abortions for Northern Ireland women on the NHS. Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, is reported in the Belfast Telegraph as having discussed the plan with the country’s Chief Medical Officer, Catherine Calderwood.
Abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland under the terms of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. A woman is a criminal for having an abortion unless the State decides her physical or mental health is at serious risk. Anyone carrying out an abortion in Northern Ireland faces being jailed for life.
Who owns your body? The Northern Irish government exerts more control over women’s reproductive organs than women themselves do. And it’s the same in the Irish republic.
The choice for women seeking an abortion in Ireland is stark: an illegal abortion and prison – and if something goes wrong with the abortion, where do you turn for help if those pills you bought online turn out to be dangerous?; or a flight to Great Britain and lies.
Here’s one example of how woman suffer. In 2016, a Belfast woman was given a suspended one-year sentence for a self-induced abortion. She told her housemates that she tried to travel to England for an abortion but could not afford it. So she bought some pills over the web to induce a miscarriage. Her housemates were “taken back by the seemingly blase attitude” and called the police. Police raided her home and discovered a male foetus inside a black bag in a household bin. They arrested the woman. She was 19.
Figures from the Department of Health in England revealed last week that 724 women from Northern Ireland made the journey to England or Wales for abortions…
The Sunday Times reported yesterday that some Northern Ireland women were already gaining free abortions in Scotland by naming the address of a Scottish friend as their home.
Medics are alleged to turn a blind eye to the fact the women are not living in Scotland.
It’s awful. Abortion should be removed from the criminal law. The State has no business ruling over what a woman can do with her womb.
Brian Cant explains whatever happened to Brian Cant
Brian Cant has died. The face and voice of children’s TV in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was from an era when men on pre-school telly looked like your dad. An actor by trade, Cant was working on programmes for schools when he got wind of Play School, a BBC show for toddlers. He became the show”s lynchpin, first appearing in May 1964 and staying at ‘School’ until March 1988.
His voice gave life to characters on the brilliant Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley (1969). That was Cant doing the roll call: Pugh, Pugh, Barney, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.
Brian Cant (12 July 1933 – 19 June 2017).
Posted: 19th, June 2017 | In: Celebrities, News, TV & Radio | Comment
After Finsbury Park: hate crime hunts and usual suspects
The righteous are taking sides, using the ‘facts’ to mutate the Finsbury Park murder to fit a cause. On twitter there is mention of anything and everything.
At London’s Al Quds march one know who understands things better than any of you told the masses that Jews were to blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Find your prejudice and look for someone to affirm it.
What is clear is that we are not united.
If we cannot speak our minds publicly for fear of being branded a bigot a racist or occupying ‘the wrong side of history’- shut down by the knowing and shut out of decent society by illiberal liberals – society splinters into groups and shibboleths of the ‘loving right’ and ‘disintegrating wrong’.
Officials strive to keep certain topics out of reach because they are scared of public opinion. What is ‘hate crime’ but a means by which to control speech and thought? We are left in a state of intellectual cowardice in which views fester and mutate into something nasty.
Oregon offer citizens a choice of three genders
From next month Oregon drivers can select any one of three genders for their licenses and state IDs. You can opt for M, F, or X.
The first recipient of the new rule will be Portlander Jamie Shupe, a US Army veteran, who became the first non-binary person in the United States to be officially recognized.
“Imagine I had a white mother and a black father,” Shupe explains. “I would be a mixed-race child. Well, take the word ‘race’ out of there and replace it with ‘sex.’ I feel like nature just popped me out as this mixtures of sexes.”
For ages women were defined as being the opposite of men. How would we define men and women now? Is gender fluid? Is gender constructed by society? If gender is no longer fixed is public affirmation of self all important?
Oregon has moved on. But it’s got some way to go to match the virtual world – Facebook offers over 50 gender options for people to choose from.
Spotter: The Oregonaian
Schools use loaned laptops to spy on students
Rhode Island schools operating ‘1-1’ programs are spying on students. Under the terms of the program adopted by 22 of the state’s 33 school districts, students each get a laptop supplied by a third party. The issue is that everything students do on those laptops gets seen by the State.
Even if you use the machine at home, the State is watching you.
If you can afford your own laptop, no problem. What you do at school can be monitored but at home you have a right to privacy. But if you’re poorer, a child in a family that can’t afford laptops, you are watched day and night.
Something that was intended to open up young minds and increase freedom and free thought is being used to control and limit. The people behind these schemes have a pretty low opinion of the students they teach, treating them as suspects.
How that webcam, kiddo?
The ACLU adds:
It also discovered that a majority of those districts allow school officials or administrators to remotely access the device — while a student is at home, without their knowledge, and without any suspicion of misconduct. We know from an outrageous Pennsylvania case, in which school administrators were found to have activated webcams to spy on students in their homes.
Blake Robbins: a screenshot of the sleeping student taken by the school district
CBS reported on that appalling abuse of trust in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District. The school had captured over 50,000 screenshots o! students using their computers:
Holly Robbins, Blake’s mother, told CBS News, “I don’t feel this school has the right to put cameras inside the kids’ home, inside their bedrooms and spy on them.”
The Robbins family claims they learned of the breach after the assistant principal showed Blake pictures of himself and confronted him for engaging in “improper behavior in his home.”
Blake said, “She thought I was selling drugs, which is completely false.”
That’s when Holly and her husband, Michael Robbins, filed a federal lawsuit against the Lower Merion School District, claiming officials had “spied” on their son.
School officials admitted they’d captured thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots from student laptops in a misguided effort to locate missing computers.
The school district agreed a $610,000 settlement. Blake received $175,000 in a trust and $25,000 up front. The lawyers got a huge slice of it, naturally.
Spotter: RicCentral,High School Non-Confidential: How School-Loaned Computers May Be Peering Into Your Home.
Posted: 19th, June 2017 | In: News, Technology | Comment
Phoenicopterus Rex: a giant pink flamingo looms over Black Rock City
The fetish for big man-made things is one of our pet loves. A trip round Australia in the 1990s introduced me to The Big… Ant, Apple, Avocado, Banana, Chook and lots, lots more big plastic landmarks. Artist Josh Zubkoff had added a Big Flamingo to the platoon of big objects. His 40-ft Phoenicopterus Rex will loom over Black Rock City.
Phoenicopterus allows flamingo enthusiasts to climb a ladder and look around inside. Naturally, the pink flamingo will be perched on a bright green lawn of fake grass and surrounded by the white picket fence.
Phoenicopterus Rex- prawn-eye view
The original pink flamingo lawn ornament was created by artist Donald Featherstone. His creation came to epitomise American suburban kitsch, an attempt at beautification in mass-produced, bright pink plastic.
The ornament’s ubiquity and inoffensiveness inspired John Waters’ to name his breakthrough film Pink Flamingos. Waters told Smithsonian:
“The only people who had them had them for real, without irony. My movie wrecked that.”
Spotter: Josh Zubkoff
Posted: 19th, June 2017 | In: News, The Consumer | Comment
Biased BBC identifies three Palestinian murderers as victims of Israeli violence
When Israeli police officer Hadas Malka, 23, was stabbed to death, the BBC headlined the story: “Three Palestinians killed after deadly stabbing in Jerusalem.” Let’s put some other recent news event through the BBC’s news shredder.
Briton killed after deadly stabbing on Westminster Bridge – BBC
The story: British-born Khalid Masood murdered three people on Westminster Bride. He injured 50 more. He fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer.
British man killed in Manchester bomb – BBC
The story: Twenty-two people were murdered and 116 injured in a suicide bombing at Manchester Arena. The dead British man is identified as Manchester-born Salman Abedi, 22. He detonated a home-made bomb as families were leaving a concert by US singer Ariana Grande.
British, Moroccan and Italian among killed after deadly stabbing in London – BBC
The story: Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba screamed “This is for Allah” as they murdered eight people and injured 48 others in an attack at London Bridge.
Others noticed the BBC’s twisting of facts to paint the killers as victims.
Here’s Hadas Malka, the woman the BBC is at pains to paint as anything but the victim.
The BBC changed the headline. It now reads: “Israeli policewoman stabbed to death in Jerusalem.”
But the story is still easy on the murderers. It begins:
Israeli police have shot dead three Palestinians after a deadly knife attack outside the Old City of Jerusalem, in which a policewoman died.
The policeman “died”. She was not murdered or “killed” in a what the BBC might call a ‘deadly stabbing’. She just “died”. But the killers were” shot dead” by “Israeli police”. The killers were armed with guns and knives.
Such are the facts.
Extremists’ demands for collective guilt unite Grenfell, Manchester and London
Grenfell Tower: Get angry, stay angry. Overthrow the Government. ‘Blood, blood, blood on your hands.’
Manchester and London: Don’t get angry. Let’s love one another.
Horrific events have claimed many lives in London and Manchester. But the message being delivered to the masses is different. After the horror of fire at Grenfell Tower, the message is, as one Labour MP demands, to “get angry, stay angry”. “Burn neoliberalism, not people,” says another Labour MP. Others on the Left want to marshall the dead to overthrow the Government. “Blood, blood, blood on your hands,” comes the chant. “May must go.” There will be a march on Number 10, the protesters demanding change and promoting the narrative that only a socialist government prevents such horrors; that only the Left does compassion.
As one commentator puts it: “The protesters outside No10 seem to be using the template of the Mark Duggan affair, which preceded the 2011 London riots: ‘no justice, no peace.'”
“Blood on their hands.” Posters at the #GrenfellTowerprotest pic.twitter.com/qp9ec8acJz
— Damien Gayle (@damiengayle) June 16, 2017
Justice delayed is justice denied. We want to know what happened whilst the matter is high on the news cycle and all parties involved are compos mentis. After Hillsborough, we fear that the long march towards justice will be a limp towards no-one being to blame. The dreaded “lessons must be learnt” must not be the end game. That must not happen.
But this protest and demand for justice is being shaped by party politics. The horror at Grenfell Tower is rooted in so much bad planning, greed and neglect perpetuated by successive Governments for decades. If you blame the Tories, then surely you must blame Labour, too, and the coalition which oversaw social housing.
As the far Left clambers over the ruins and co-opts the dead into campaigning for a Labour win at the next General Election, we should recall how different things were after Islamists attacked London and Manchester. Then it was all about love. Only the Far Right were using the dead to promote their own monocular agenda and bigotry, demanding collective blame for all Muslims. Love not anger was the watchword. “Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate,” ran the mantra delivered by media and politicians. There was no circumspection and sensible, rational debate about an ideology that kills children at a pop concert. No-one sane wants to be branded a racist or Islamophobe. But to talk openly about such things is to foment civil unrest and unleash the impressionable masses – those race-rioters-in-waiting. Better to hold up the light on your mobile phone and sway in unity.
In Manchester, officialdom and the media’s fear of public opinion drowned out a quest for the truth, the central responsibility of journalism. After Grenfell, public opinion is sacrosanct. Both responses are founded on the same matters: fear of the masses and a profound lack of leadership, “somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” Corbyn is slippery and nuanced. May is stark and spent. Where’s the leadership?
The Truth.
I don’t agree with politicising the Grenfell Tower horror. Politics matters, but to divide the response along party lines limits us. The horror was eminently preventable. Political policies is at least partly to blame. But to make it all about the Tories is wrong, just as it is wrong to blame the actions of deranged mass murderers on to much freedom of speech, radicalising preachers, religion or a response to our behaviour.
Narrowing the debate applies blinkers to any inquiry and stymies a clear quest for truth. That’s not to invalidate the activism and the anger. We feel the passion, the sense of outage and hurt. Not just hashtags and candle-lit vigils for Grenfell. Fury. Protest. Noise. The people will be heard. Good.
But it wasn’t so after Manchester and the attack on Borough Market and London Bridge. When children and families were murdered at a pop concert, we were told to behave, to embrace one another and to remain passive. As another voice notes: “If the massacre of children and their parents on a fun night out doesn’t make you feel rage, nothing will. The terrorist has defeated you. You are dead already.”
We need openness to discern right from wrong. We need gritty, unflinching commitment to say what we believe in, not to have our views dampened by official decree. Making a statement is not a simple state of being. We work hard at what we want in a disciplined way. We crave integrity. But without clarity, and objectivity, our demands are shrill, bigoted and shallow.
Posted: 18th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News, Reviews | Comment
After Grenfell: the revolting clamour for Theresa May’s tears and Corbyn’s embrace
“This is what leadership looks like,” says one tweeter by a photo of Jeremy Corbyn hugging a woman after the Grenfell Tower horror. It looks like compassion. It looks like sympathy. But we’re being told that leadership looks like emoting in public. Leadership does not, say the tweeters, look like Theresa May. She doesn’t do public emoting. She does old-school stuff upper lip. Her problem is that even the royals don’t do that anymore. If there’s one thing Her Majesty learned from the Dianification of British society, it is that you must seen to be upset in public.
Theresa May on Newsnight
So what has Theresa May been doing when she’s not declining the demand to sob on the telly, to wallow in an X Factor moment, when the camera draws close on the rheumy eyes, the crowd look sympathetic and we’re all manipulated by the visual grammar into voting with our hearts for not the most talented but the most needy, and in these therapeutic times thus the most deserving? Well, she visited the survivors in hospital, talked with the emergency services, met charity workers in St Clement’s Church, talked with Grenfell residents in Downing Street and organised an inquiry.
What does leadership look like, then? David Foster Wallace has an idea:
…a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
I don’t think May is a great leader. She fails to inspire. But she works and gets on with things. Jeremy Corbyn encourages laziness. He does not foster autonomy but strives for reliance and dependence.
Elie Wiesel has more:
…a true leader cannot function without those whom he or she leads. By the same token, the leader cannot work or live in their midst as one of them. Hence the ambivalence of his or her position. There must be some distance between the leader and those being led; otherwise the leader will be neither respected nor obeyed. A certain mystique must surround the leader, isolating him or her from those whose servant he or she is called upon to be or has been elected to be. Is there a leader, here or anywhere, who does not find time to complain about the terrible solitude at moments of decision?
May or Corbyn to lead? In time of crisis, who would you trust?
This is the letter:
Posted: 17th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Theresa May waits for the nation say story to her
Theresa May is reeling. This is not the time for her to be confronted by people by Grenfell Tower. Mrs May is in a weakened position and has housing and employment concerns to focus on, namely her central London council house at Number 10 Downing Street and the caretaker’s job that goes with it.
Fundamentally, she feels let down, disappointed and betrayed by the British electorate that refused to do as it was told and vote for her. Is it so very hard to say sorry?
May tells the BBC’s Dead Ringer:
Helmut Kohl is away:
They don't make politicians like Helmut Kohl anymore: pic.twitter.com/y5cJf5o4cI
— Björn Stritzel (@bjoernstritzel) June 16, 2017
Posted: 17th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
