My Glorious Memories of Thatcher's Britain

On the eve of an election, when there is, for the first time in years, the very real possibility of waking up tomorrow to find a Conservative government in power, I find myself reflecting on my memories of being a teenager  and a young adult in Thatcher's Britain.

Ah, what a sad day it was when school milk was stopped when I was 6. It was a point of the day that we all looked forward to on our run-down council estate. Most parents there couldn't afford to give their kids a glass of proper pasteurised milk - most of them could only afford the longer life sterilised milk which, let's be honest, tasted like it was suckled from a robot's weak tit - so to have a small bottle of creamy milk was a real luxury for us primary kids. It was ended because Thatcher and the Conservatives didn't believe in spending government money on the public sector - things like schools, NHS hospitals, public transport - and so made massive cuts in those areas.

As a teenager, I saw the government closing down coal mines, shipyards, docks, and crippling other industries by not investing in them because, again, the Conservatives believe in letting businesses stand or fall on their own - government intervention bad, massive rising levels of unemployment good. I saw friends in jobs that paid £1.50 an hour when they left school, because with record unemployment of well over 3 million, and with the government making live unbearably hard for the long-term unemployed, people had to grasp at any job that came their way. I remember being outraged when the Poll Tax was pushed through and I learned just how much the wealthiest few were saving with the new tax, and how much more the poor (which was basically everybody I knew) were going to have to pay. We're talking about people working 40  and, in some cases, 60 hour weeks for £2 an hour, suddenly having to find extra money every month whilst people earning over £50,000 a year suddenly had even more pocket money to play with. Even when it was replaced by the Council Tax in 1993, the disparity was still obvious despite the vague attempt to make it look scaled.

I remember being appalled by the Falklands War, even though I was too young to understand it. As I grew older, the more I learned, the more I despised what happened. It was a war with no purpose other than to sell Thatcher to the country in order to win another election. The General Belgrano, sunk (on Thatcher's personal orders) as it was complying with warnings and was sailing outside the exclusion zone, went down with over 300 lives just to keep a flagging Prime Minister in power. As a teenager, this disgusted me and really showed me the kind of values that the Conservative party treasures; power, at any cost. At all costs.

Trying to find a job in epic, record unemployment was hard. It took me almost a year before I managed to get a 'zero hours' job at a department store over Xmas, and then lucked out and started working at a certain wargames shop on the princely sum of just over £3 an hour - how superior I felt to my friends who were only earning £2 and £2.50! Of course, the company I worked for could get away with all kinds of appalling exploitation because the Conservatives don't believe in regulating businesses in any way - whether with obstructive and irritating health and safety procedures, or with horrid things like a minimum wage, or limits on how many hours you could be forced to work. 

Since 1997, we've been given tax credits, minimum wages, schools and the NHS have been re-invested in and revitalised, waiting lists are down from almost 2 years (seriously, that's what it used to be like under the slash and burn Tories) to less than 2 months, we have the human rights bill, the EU working time directive, a corporate manslaughter law, Surestart, state funded nursery places for the under 5s, Child Trust Funds, council estates have been cleaned up and modernised with double glazing and, in many cases, central heating. Yes, we had an unforgivable war that nobody is forgetting anytime soon, especially the relatives and friends of the almost 1 million dead Iraqi civilians - but I don't see anybody saying "What about the Falklands?" when they say they want Labour out. Nobody seems to recall the government that started a war just to keep a politician in power. Memories are short, it seems, and the grass really is always greener on the other side to most people. 

All I can say is that if we wake up tomorrow with a Conservative government, you will all get to experience the horrors of it for yourselves. Forget everything you've gotten used to this last decade. Forget your comfy, tax-credit fuelled wages, and your right to expect rapid treatment on the NHS. Forget your clean, well-staffed schools. Forget council estates that don't actually resemble war-torn Bosnia. Forget being able to find work when you leave school. And forget being able to live on Jobseeker's Allowance. And I'll sit around and watch your miserable faces and every so often snipe bitterly "I fucking TOLD you so" at you.

Good luck.

Posh knickers and Misogyny

Latest in the seemingly endless barrel-scraping attacks that the right-wing press are throwing at Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats is this story (by the legendary Jan Moir) about the wives of the leaders. In it, she criticises Clegg's wife, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez (whom she annoyingly keeps referring to as 'Mrs Clegg' as though repeatedly saying "How dare she not take her husband's name!") for going shopping for underwear at Rigby and Peller, a rather expensive lingerie shop, claiming that perhaps the Cleggs are not as close to ordinary plebs like you and I as they pretend to be. 

The article gets my goat on several points. Let's dissect each of them. Firstly, Nick Clegg has never hidden his public school education, has never tried to go about identifying himself as being an ordinary bloke - that's just how he comes across, and that's because he's probably slightly less stage-managed and more genuine than David Cameron. His wife also works as a lawyer, and typically they don't get paid minimum wage - so when she buys clothes I'd personally be very fucking surprised if she bought her underwear at Primark. The socialist in me doesn't like to see people pissing money away on expensive food, or clothes, or cars, but I hate hypocrisy even more. The Daily Mail shouts "Look! See? They're posh and have nothing to do with the likes of YOU!" whilst at the same time trying to get us to vote for an Etonian and his shadow cabinet of Etonians, who arguably have even less to do with the likes of us, and are openly declaring their plans to cut inheritance tax for their closest chums.

Secondly, I take issue with the notion that Miriam is somehow doing something wrong by staying at work and not accompanying her husband on the campaign circuit like some appendage. It smacks feminism in the face squarely with it's patriarchal suggestion that a woman's place is BY HER HUSBAND'S SIDE no matter what, even if it means giving up her own very lucrative job to do so. Miriam has very wisely said "Screw that - that's your job, Nick, and this is mine" as any woman should be able to do without fear of mockery or ridicule.  This line of reasoning extends to a kind of slightly disapproving frown that she wields too much influence over her husband by 'encouraging' him to take a day off from his important campaigning to spend a day off with his children who have been stuck in Spain for the last week or so. I'm sorry, Jan, but 'encouraged'? You don't think that maybe, just maybe, Nick might have been missing his boys and might just have a) needed some time out, and b) wanted to see them again and spend some time with them? You think he needs to be 'encouraged' to do this? Do you even know any human beings, Jan? Or have you been too long enclosed in the misogynistic bubble of the Daily Mail, where men caring for their children is seen as weakness, and should be done by the little subservient women? Moir sums up this anti-feminist mindset when she says, "For don't you feel that the wives could do a little more to help their floundering husbands in this yo-yo election?" No, Jan. I don't. Because that's their job, not their wives'. I also don't approve of the way she tries to hilariously insinuate that Miriam's dominance over her husband extends to beating him up if he doesn't empty the dishwasher. Seriously, read the piece, it's in there, I kid you not.

Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, and still on a feminist rant, this appallingly facetious mentioning of Miriam as 'Mrs Clegg'. She has clearly decided not to take her husband's name, in a move I applaud wholeheartedly, and yet Moir uses it as a stick to hit her with. It's like she's being all sniffy and saying "Well, you might have chosen to try to be all feminist and clever, but I'm still going to call you Mrs Clegg, because you're a nuaghty little woman who should have done the right thing and being utterly subjugated by your husband. So there." 

Another corker from Moir, and another black mark against the Mail in what surely must be a record fortnight for black marks against them. 

Murdoch Shapes The Election Even More

Last night's election debate was lots of fun, Cameron and Brown clearly both learned a lot of tricks from Nick Clegg. Watching it, and keeping one eye on the Channel 4 poll tracker, was also very informative and backed up what I was thinking; namely that Clegg was having his star moments, but Brown was definitely controlling the debate far more powerfully; he was making the points that the other two were having to answer, and rarely vice versa. Cameron meanwhile was again very light on actual details of policies - when pressed by Nick Clegg to give a figure for the Tory's proposed cap on immigration, he consistently avoided answering - but big on rhetoric, and the whole 'vote for change'. Cameron appears to be trying to win an election on shallow soundbites, and people just aren't convinced. The Channel 4 poll ended with Clegg hovering at about 50%, Brown on around 30% and Cameron languishing at the bottom with only 17%. 

But then Sky's polls came up, and Sky News started telling everyone that Cameron had won the debate. The polls were somehow showing Cameron in the lead. What the fuck? Were they even watching the same debate I was watching? Because I'm pretty sure that Cameron had his arse handed to him on a plate for most of the time, only having a real moment when he stopped Brown in his tracks over the leaflets (although the Tories accusing any other party of using appalling scaremongering made my hypocrisy meter explode). Other than that, Cameron floundered, failed to answer questions until, getting visibly annoyed and trapped by Brown's insistence that he tell people what he was planning to do with free eye tests and prescriptions for the elderly, he snapped and made up on the spot that they were going to keep them. Nobody watching that could possibly see anything other than a desperate ad lib on Cameron's part. How then were the polls so different?

Well, to be fair the Yougov polls are often referred to by Private Eye as the Anyresultyouwantguv polls, and if they were paid for by Murdoch because, y'know, Sky being his channel and all...

Let's also cover the facts of the production of Sky's coverage; Nick Clegg, noted last week for his down the lens eye contact, was consistently denied as much camera time for his eye contact as David Cameron, I noticed. Cam was allowed moment after moment to stare pleadingly down the lens, whilst Clegg was viewed from the sides, from the back, and occasionally from the front, when he was directing his attention elsewhere. The questions were also selected by Sky News, so you have to ask whether any questions got filtered out that might have made Cam look even worse than he did. The pundits afterwards seemed hell-bent on painting Cameron as the king of the debate, which made me think that either they have no idea how people actually win a debate, or they are deliberately fabricating it in order to make the sluggish minds of the majority of viewers question what they had just witnessed. Lets face it, the press do tend to view themselves as the gatekeepers of information, and this election is starting to highlight just how seriously they take that role. From the Sky News bods frothing about Cameron's 'victory' after a dismal performance, to the Daily Mail's apoplectic attacks on Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, to James Murdoch and Rebecca Wade storming the Independant's offices because the naughty Indie dared suggest that Murdoch was trying to influence the vote with his mighty army of right-wing media outlets, we've seen the press' masters role in events highlighted dramatically, possibly more dramatically than ever before. People need to know this. People need to see what goes on here. They need to be made aware that they are being played for fools by the likes of Murdoch and Dacre. The Mail's vitriolic attack on Clegg alienated some of its readers, showing that you can, indeed, go too far.

The big question is, though, will this fake reality that is being projected by Murdoch et al affect voters? Will people do as they are being told and go back to voting Tory again in the haze of media bullshit? Or are enough people seeing the vague shapes of the manipulators moving behind that haze, and not liking it? We'll see in a fortnight, I guess.

When Did 'Liberal' Become a Dirty Word?

Am I missing something? At some point in this life of 36 years did I somehow manage to miss the moment that believing in equality among people who are biologically identical save for the colour of their skin, their sex organs and their sexual preferences became somehow evil in comparison to the mindless bigotry that the right (sometimes brazenly) espouses? What happened? At what point did 'liberal' become a dirty word? 

In the US, the so-called Tea Party held their first big conference in the US, and it seems like this damage to the perfectly good idea of being liberal was done across the pond first by the increasingly histrionic paranoid racist right-wing fucknuts who don't believe the Republicans go far enough. Among the wonders bounded around by these scary people (who each paid over $500 a ticket, to keep a certain class of people out, let's not forget) during this conference were truly terrifying; apparently Obama only won the election because the US no longer has a civics literacy test - a test that was deemed illegal in 1965 because in the Southern States blacks were not allowed to attend the same schools as good ole white children, and then had to pass a literacy test in order to be able to vote, thus disallowing them the ability to vote. In other words, because they allow blacks to vote, we now have Obama. Doesn't matter that Obama's support came from most of the US on the grounds of policy and from a hell of a lot of white people, to this bunch of foaming racists it's all just a part of an evil liberal conspiracy to destroy the purity of the United States ("if 30% of the population were Hispanic, we wouldn't be America any more"). 

Another corking soundbite from the convention was this; "the Blues beat the Reds and they came back Green...(environmentalism is) the greatest threat to America now and in the future". Right. So people not wanting to toast the planet and destroy the ecology that allows us to survive here is somehow just communism under another guise? Do these people ever listen to the words that spit forth from their snarling mouths? Even the most basic logic and facts would overcome that argument. Oh but wait. Here comes a prick at the convention wearing a t-shirt that says "Annoy a liberal - use facts and logic" - these cunts wouldn't know what facts and logic where if they broke into their house with the words "Facts" and "Logic" painted on their bodies in luminous paint and proceeded to alternately punch the aforementioned cunt, repeating the words "Facts" and "Logic" with each blow. Facts, logic and the Far Right are not easy bedfellows. Most of the people I know who are left or liberal or both have reached their positions from a combination of respect for the actual facts and the understanding of logic. I'd love to see one of these teabaggers try to use 'Facts and logic' to defend their brainless brand of racism against the usual array of weaponry (ie, facts and logic) that the average liberal can bring to bear.

It's scary to watch Fox News clips with people like the bizarre madman Glenn Beck and the shouty, bag-faced cuntiferousness that is Bill O'Reilly, and these loud-mouthed retards have a mainstream media platform from which to denounce the evils of liberalism, pausing only long enough for the cameraman to wipe the flecks of spittle from the camera lens. I am convinced that Glenn Beck in particular spends most of his life in a special rubber-walled room, heavily sedated until he is due to go on air, at which point the production team pump him up with a cocktail of amphetamines and crack to the point where his already considerable schizo paranoia achieves a kind of paranoid singularity which then begins to suck in the rest of what is left of his mind, leaving nothing but a faintly glowing event horizon of screams, wuffles and crying about how much he loves his country. The fact that this concentrated beam of fact-free insanity is directed into millions of US homes every week is just frightening and not a little sick. How is it that in the 21st century such fabricated, jingoistic bullshit is actually lapped up by people? Is it because of a lack of good political education? I think everyone should have to study sociology before they leave school - the Far Right loves the ignorance of the masses, because it is a void into which they can ejaculate their propoganda, distortions and prejudices.

It makes me angry that 'liberal' is used as an insult. The very definition of the word from the Free Dictionary is as follows;

a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

c. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.

Only in the insanity of the Far Right does this word become an insult.

Climate Change Deniers are the New Creationists

So some scientists got into trouble for trying to delete emails in order to prevent deniers access to personal emails that might or might not have had anything to do with their climate change reserach. Their explanation was that they receive ridiculous numbers of requests under the Freedom of Information act from deniers using it as a tool to a) hold up their work while they have to deal with the request and b) use their complete lack of scientific knowledge to punch holes in perfectly acceptable research.

This latter point I can all too easily understand. People like to assume that science is always based on hard numbers that don't need altering, and then claim that science is a fraud when the raw data doesn't seem (to their simple eyes) to stack up. One of the things the deniers are complaining about is about how some researchers removed Japanese weather stations over 300m from their research progressively, leaving the (colder) 300m plus ones in place of older measurements, but ground level ones from later measurements, thus fiddling the figures. Welcome to science, where you have to try to control for variables that  are fundamentally uncontrollable, ie the fact that Japan didn't have many ground level weather stations in those days - almost all of them were over 300m. In order to keep the record, you then have to calculate a formula that works out from the 300m + figure what the ground level figure might have been, and then use that figure in your data when you start the analysis - not the original, colder figure.  More accurate later data can be drawn unaltered from the ground level stations, and so the data from the 300m+ weather stations can be safely ignored - it's not needed anymore. 

Another argument trotted out by deniers is the fact that 75% of weather stations used for Californian figures are on the beach. Apparently this is based on the 'common-knowledge' assumption that it is always warmest at the beach because people go there to lay out in the sun in their swimsuits. As usual, a few seconds on Google provides the casual researcher (ie me) to find that there is a simple and non-cheaty reason why they used weather stations near the coast for this sample. California has a very variable temperature difference between highs and lows the further you get away from the coast due to the way that the air flows are blocked by the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sheer difference in elevation of different parts of the state once you get a few miles inland. The coast is the only place to get consistent and reliable results if you want a genuine average temperature result from California. If the scientists had wanted to cheat, they could have just taken daytime readings from the inland desert weather stations; they didn't, they just tried to get a realistic reading of California's average temperatures without having to do endless work controlling for the hot and cold spikes from the inland stations. They did this by taking readings from the cooler coastal areas.

What scientists and those who at least have a vague knowledge of statistical analysis and science understand, most people don't. This isn't saying that most people are stupid, far from it - the majority of people usually trust science. You don't see many people wondering if their TV set is going to work or not, or whether the Moon is suddenly going to get all uppity and decide to fall on us. Deniers, however, wield a special branch of ignorance. Not only do they not understand science, but they actively have an agenda to fight it.

Nick Davies, in his excellent book 'Flat Earth News' (which I advise everybody to read), covers a lot of very interesting ground about the climate change lobbying - not only the deniers, but also the truth mangling that goes on by groups like Greenpeace which then adds fuel to the deniers' fires when discovered. In the US, fake grass-roots organisations were set up by oil companies (Davies refers to these fake groups as Astroturf groups) in order to provide a platform for issuing climate change denial press releases to the wire news services. These press releases (which are usually either bullshit pseudo-science, manipulations of the truth or just lies) are then picked up by the press, who, being overworked and understaffed, don't fact-check the piece and just publish it as is, sometimes with little more than a bit of rewording to make it appear as though they had written the story themselves. One key feature about astroturf groups is that they appear from nowhere, issue press releases and encourage people to lobby their politicians on the issue, but they don't seem to need any funding, nor do they seem to be looking for new members. There are good examples of exposed astroturf groups here and here. The latter example unmasks how the tobacco industry in the US used astroturfing to try to deny the damage that was being done to smokers' health, to downplay medical evidence, or even discredit scientists or their research. And the motivations for the oil and coal industries today are exactly the same; profit. If global warming were accepted by the politicians, then energy producers (the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters) would have to adhere to strict legislation to reduce their CO2 emissions, and this would cost them a lot of money. They would have to make huge modifications to all of their processes, from mining through to the actual energy production. Naturally, being fat greedy cunts, they don't like to part with any money whatsoever, and the lives of the rest of the world in 100 years time don't matter to businessmen who only care about themselves right now. So they try to find ways of weaselling out of it, and the best tactic is to fight the evidence, and attack the climate change science publicly. 

The biggest problem science has in this battle is that it is not used to this battlefield. Scientists like to think that arguments can be won by the best theories and the best fit with the evidence. In an ideal world, this would be the case, but they underestimate the power of public relations, which the big energy industries are all too comfortable with. A press release here, a 'leaked document' from a company paid scientist there, and suddenly the papers are all over the story, because any conflict like this is news. As mentioned earlier, journalists don't have the time to fact check what they print, and so these stories are published and the ordinary person thinks that scientists are all liars and that climate change isn't happening at all. Scientists simply can't hack this form of disinformation warfare, they lack the temperament and the experience (not to mention being unable to fund their own astroturf groups). Remember the much-touted list years ago of '400 scientists against climate change' that Senator James Inhofe shouted loudly about? Turns out that 'scientist' is a fairly loose term, and a large number of the 'scientists' on the list were actually economists, with a smattering of theoretical physicists, inventors and a tiny representation of actual geologists, at least one of whom (Agnes Genevey) has had their anti-climate change work viciously torn apart by scientific peers. And the petition by the a crackpot anti-socialist organisation that claimed 32,000 signatures of scientists? The petition was on the internet to sign - I'm not too sure about whether Perry Mason, Michael J Fox and Ginger Spice are particularly respected for their contributions to climate science. Let's face it, anybody can sign an internet petition and claim to be a top climatologist - a fact that, I suspect, was not lost on the people who set up the petition, but they were hoping that fact would get lost in the media. And it did. The list of 32,000 scientists made it into the news without question, and only when groups of scientists and environmental bloggers got hold of the list did these flaws start to come out.

What is starting to happen here is almost exactly like Creationism. Science is not about public relations, or about forcing research down a certain line; facts are facts, and when enough scientists check these facts and perform their own studies, there is either a consensus, or there is a need to create a new theory to fit the facts. At the moment, there is most definitely a scientific consensus that a) global warming is happening, and that b) it is being driven by our emissions of greenhouse gases. Data for research is manipulated, but not in the way the deniers claim - it gets manipulated in order to make it more realistic and to control for variables outside scientists' ability to control, for example the data from Japanese weather stations, or the data collected from the Californian coast. The deniers point and shout loudly at what they see as flaws, but which are not flaws to anyone who understands statistics or science; the trouble is that all of this bogus astroturfing and blind news reporting of these atstroturf groups press releases then begets a bunch of moron-level devotees who then swamp the 'have your say' columns of the newspaper websites with their eye-swivelling, name-calling rants, people who use terms like the 'loony left', who find it amusing to refer to 'Idiot Nick-Nucks Can't Do A Sum McBroon', and who love to close their self-congratulatory posts with mindless phrases like 'Sauce for the goose' as though they have clearly blown apart all of the oppositions arguments with their fetid pile of uninformed twaddle. Phrases like that are more like the smile on the face of a child showing off his latest shit. These fucktards are the same people who have the same reaction to immigration, or to suggestions that equality legislation is sound and valid (a transparent window into their mindset comes from a post about 'Harriet Harperson' on the Express' comments section where the poster suggests that 'there is an empty kitchen sink out there it's time she filled the vacancy' - so, not totally misogynistic at all, then). In short, these are exactly the same sort of people who prop up the idiocy of Creationism.

Creationism has been an evolution denier since day one, and it frankly astounds me that over 150 years since the Origin of Species, these ignorant fucktards are still given a platform from which to attack a perfectly valid science which has a veraitable mountain of evidence, both fossil and genetic, to support it's claims; indeed, evolution is one of the few scientific theories that has been pretty much universally accepted across the disciplines that it crosses over. They've had 150 years to accumulate this impressive store of illuminating evidence, and still the Creationists stand there with their hands on their hips and a snarky smile on their lips declaring that 'if evolution happened, surely there would be some evidence for it?' The trouble with climate change is that if people don't believe in evolution, it isn't going to mean a global catastrophe (unless you count the sudden sharp drop in IQs worldwide as a catastrophe) - climate change deniers are playing a dangerous game with everyone's lives and the lives of everyone's grandchildren, and one that has far more serious implications for our planet than a bunch of cretinous brainwashed religious nuts who refuse to open their eyes.

Have I Missed The Point About Inquiries?

I always got the impression that an inquiry was like a miniature, but less strong, courtroom, where people have to face some damned tough questions about their part in controversial events. Take the big one in the media at the moment, the Chilcot inquiry over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, for instance. I welcomed it, thinking that the smug bastards who set the whole thing in motion and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in order to, basically, steal oil and sell rebuilding contracts to their own people, would have to face a hard line in inquisition for their actions. I for one was looking forward to seeing Tony Blair actually shit himself on live television from the fear of knowing just how indefensible his own position really was.

It looked like I might be in luck when he arrived; the Guardian describes him as looking quite terrified; pale and shaking visibly as he poured himself a glass of water. And so he should, because he knows that there are questions he could face that would strip his story to the bone and reveal it for the tissue of lies and misdirections that it is - and despite his training as a barrister, a good attack would leave him writhing like an upturned tortoise, with nowhere to go.

How fortunate for him that the panel of questioners seemed almost sympathetic to his plight, and appeared to be trying really hard to make him feel at ease; firstly by feeding him huge, vague and safe questions that allowed him to obfuscate to the point of insanity (even I wasn't sure which question he was answering half the time because a) the questions were so long-winded and unfollowable that they stuck in your mind like, oh, what's the name of that fellow on TV whose name you can never remember? and b) Blair turned every answer into a miniature lecture on 'doing the right thing' and 'feeling beyond any doubt' that he was 'doing the right thing'). He visibly relaxed when he realised that this was a panel he could dominate with ease. The questioners might as well have just said to him "Well, you feel that you've done the right thing, obviously, and you certainly think that Iraq is better off now than it was in 2002, is that correct?" To which he could then have just answered "Yes" and we'd know just about as much as we do today, after 6 hours of hearing the smug prick drone on with endless misdirections and cheap get-outs (it's so easy to shirk responsibility for over half a million deaths by saying that you were absolutely convinced that you were doing the right thing over and over again). Only Lord Lawrence Freedman seemed to make him squirm when he told the ex Prime Minister the death tolls for just the months of January in Iraq in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and yet instead of turning this into a fierce attack on whether or not Blair still felt that the Iraqi people were better off by comparing how many of his own countryfolk Saddam killed in the previous twenty years with the total death toll caused by the US and UK invasion and the subsequent occupation, he instead let Blair, once more, dominate the floor by leading them somewhere else.

I personally would have loved to ask him some questions. For instance, I would have suggested that, on the basis of intelligence alone, there is a country in the world with a high number of known Al Qaeda operatives within its borders; a large number of sympathetic Muslim extremists; an active and well-known nuclear weapons program; and, compared to the Western nations, a fairly lax security setup around that nuclear program. Yet it doesn't seem that at any point anybody considered invading Pakistan and demanding that they get rid of their weapons of mass destruction. But then Pakistan doesn't have much in the way of lucrative oil reserves, does it? 

So despite the very real threat of Al Qaeda managing to steal a nuclear weapon from Pakistan with the intent of using it in a terror attack, Blair and Bush instead chose to invade a country who have never particularly shown any great belligerence to anyone outside of their immediate vicinity (they warred with Iran, and invaded Kuwait, but I don't ever remember hearing about Saddam wanting to attack the US or UK or any other non-local country) and who didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction anyway. Iraq, did, however, have a huge number of oil fields, and even in the early weeks of the war, I recall seeing a press conference at which one of the US generals declared that "controlling the oil wells is our number one priority" which I recall made me bitterly laugh out loud at the brutal honesty of it. The politicians can wriggle and slime all they want, but even the grunts on the ground there knew what their real priorities were. Regime change? Meh. The US in particular has a great track record for regime change, but it's usually been in toppling democratically elected but slightly socialist governments to replace them with oppressive and brutal regimes that they can then make deals with more effectively. Weapons of mass destruction? Meh. Pakistan has them, India have them, Israel has them, and I don't see anyone calling for them to disarm, despite the way that Israel likes to throw it's US purchased military might at Palestinian civilians in their endless tit-for-tat battles. 

I would have attacked his assertion that Iraq now is better off than it was under Saddam Hussein by throwing the figure of people killed by Saddam himself in Iraq. Many figures are bandied about, some claim that 800,000 people died under Saddam's reign, but that actually breaks down to about 500,000 killed in the war against Iran, 100,000 killed by us in the first Gulf War, and possibly up to 200,000 in Iraq's gulags. So technically, Saddam can only really be held to be responsible for about 200,000 of those deaths, because the US funded his war against Iran, and we massacred 100,000 ourselves the first time round. Yet since 2003, the deaths from violence are estimated to be as high as 600,000, in a peer-reviewed Lancet study. Official Iraqi (and therefore heavily tainted by the presence of their occupiers - sorry, their best friends, the UK and US forces - suggest lower figures of just over 100,000. No surprise there. Even if the Lancet, who are not usually known for making things up out of thin air, are exaggerating, I'd take the figure as a midway point and say actual casualties are more like 400,000, that's still a shitload more than Saddam himself killed. Twice as many, in fact. Three times as many, if you believe the Lancet's figure. So 200,000 died as a direct result of Saddam's general cunty-dictatorness, which is never good, but at least 400,000 died as a result of our invasion. Hm. Difficult to say there whether the people are better off than they were. I mean, obviously the dead ones are not better off, and the living ones who have lost children or parents or siblings, they're not better off either and are probably already signed up to some insurgency group in order to avenge the wrongs done to them. And the living ones who didn't lose anybody, but now have to face an Iraq dominated by religious fundamentalists shooting at each other and at them, I'm not too sure they're better off either. But at least they don't have to worry about ending up in one of Saddam's gulags anymore. They just have to worry about being killed by US or UK troops or insurgents. Brilliant. Welcome to our Vietnam, folk.

Nobody questioned Blair either about the unfeasibly complicated and dense arrangements he has built around his finances. He has created, apparently, an impenetrable web of off-the-shelf companies and special companies, formed partnerships with himself at various points, and left it so mangled that nobody seems to be able to track where money is coming from and where it goes to. How convenient. If he had nothing to hide, why go to such incredible lengths to hide his income? Because it might show large payments from the sale of stolen oil, perhaps? Backhand payments through Bush's similarly convoluted arrangements for his part in the war? Or is it just to sidestep tax and hand over millions to his children? Whatever the arrangements, not many ex PMs, even hard-nosed capitalist Thatcher, managed to blag over £14 million in the short time after leaving office. Where is it all coming from? And where is it all being funnelled to?

There were no hard questions about the legality of the war, despite the testimony of senior legal experts earlier in the week suggesting that it was made quite clear that the war would be illegal without a second UN resolution - again, the panel allowed Blair to wax eloquent on the topic, subverting their questions and again performing sleight of hand misdirections.

You have to ask why. Why did they go so easy on Blair? Why were the questions of even the usually more effective members of the panel so wishy-washy and easy to hijack? Why did they let him hijack the questions? The general consensus in the press backs up what I thought as I watched the performance yesterday; Blair was deliberately given an easy ride. I want to know why.

Right Wing Idiot Fails To See Irony In Own Rant

I love right wing commenters on newspaper sites. They never seem to fail to amuse me with their eye-swivelling, raging invective against anybody they see as being 'not right'. This time, however, it's the entire country that is the target for their impotent rage. In a comment following on from this piece in the Telegraph came this rant about Labour's Britain:

"A mental picture of Labour’s achievements since 1997

* UK bound illegal immigrants massing in Sangatte

* Fat, career benefit claimants sat in front of the TV

* Drunken girls fighting outside a pub at 1:30 am

* Reams of costly regulations sitting on my desk

* The sun reflecting off of a speed camera on the A3

* The sneaky paedophiles hiding around every corner

* The big yellow signs that say…. £1.16 per litre

* The tax bill I paid this morning

* Dole scrounging aliens calling UK soldiers murderers

* A shop full to the brim with Chinese imports

* The empty space where once stood a beat policeman

* The car tax disc costing more than some cars

* Very young girls pushing prams

* 3rd world countries humiliating UK armed forces

* Britain as the world’s laughing stock

* Brown & Blair stepping off their chartered BA 777

* Pay nothing for 1st year, then 5 years interest free

* Hayes – Middlesex, or Karachi?

* The end of saved-for luxury items – a ‘must have’?

* A knife glistening as it catches the sun’s light

* India’s space missions – Britain’s baby bonds

* Fat people waddling down the road like pregnant ducks

* Can’t read, can’t talk, can’t write – ready for work

* The have-a-go hero sentenced to 5 years in prison

* The teenage girl ignoring me as I hold the door open

* CCTV & bolted gates on schools & nurseries

* Talent: – Elton, Bowie, Floyd? – No, Leona & Cheryl

* All foreign English football clubs – Uhh?

* The death of Great Britain"


Anton Vowl was right on his blog to call this a mental picture indeed. Trouble is, it's so easy to co-opt any or all of those statements into a blast against the state of Britain after years of successive Tory governments. Here's my attempt:

• UK bound foreign finance organisations coming to pick the bones off our declining industrial base
• Fat, career benefits claimants sitting in front of a TV - unemployment reached a record high of over 3 million in the mid-eighties that has never been beaten - though the Tories came close again in the early 1990's.
  
• Drunken men fighting outside pubs at 1:30am
• Lack of important regulations protecting workers from overwork, low pay, poor conditions, workplace bullying, and poor safety standards resulting in our workforce being one of the lowest paid and overworked in Europe
• The sun reflecting off the sinking hull of the General Belgrano after being sunk on Thatcher's orders despite it being outside the exclusion zone and heading away from the exclusion zone
• The sneaky paedophiles lurking around every corner - we just hear about them more now since the media decided that paedophilia was an epidemic
• The big signs across the gates of mines, docks and steelworks saying 'CLOSED'
• The council tax bills we all have to pay every month
• Soldiers being sent to die and kill to essentially keep a Prime Minister in power
• Shops full to the brim with imports from Taiwan and China
• The empty space where once stood a beat policeman before the Tories decided to pull police off the streets and make them fill out forms instead
• Car tax has always cost more than some cars
• Very young girls pushing prams - Britain had the fourth highest teenage pregnancy rate in the Western world in 1996. Under a Tory government.
• 3rd world countries humiliating British armed forces - we didn't actually win the Falklands, Argentina still lays claim to them to this day...
• Britain as the world's laughing stock - how those Europeans laughed at our low wages, dying industry, culture of overwork, and lack of protection for the most vulnerable in our society
• Thatcher stepping out of her private RAF helicopter
• The start of the culture of irresponsible lending to try and escape the black hole of the recession that, ultimately, led to another recession.
• Canary Wharf - London or New York?
• The end for saved-up-for luxury items thanks to record unemployment and a massive recession
• A knife glistening as it catches the sunlight - knife crime is not a new thing. Ask Peter Sutcliffe.
• Europe's space missions - Britain taking children's school milk off them to reduce education spending
• Fat bankers waddling into chauffeur driven Daimlers
• Record levels of illiteracy due to slashing on education spending that resulted in fewer teachers, larger class sizes and employing cheaper non-qualified non-teaching assistants to help instead of qualified teachers
• Have a go heroes have always ended up coming off worse if they happen to survive - it's the British law (that the Tories didn't try to get changed either when they had the chance) that lands such people in prison.
• Teenage girls ignoring people when you hold the door open for them. Because they're fucking teenagers.
• Lack of adequate security in schools and a consistent refusal to acknowledge the potential dangers of not spending money to help schools increase their security by successive Tory governments that eventually let a man walk into a primary school in Dunblane and shoot a classroom full of five year olds.
• Talent - Elton? Bowie? Floyd? No. Bros and Wham!
• All foreign-owned British industry - huh?
• The death of Great Britain, and its replacement with Thatcher's hateful, rich-coddling, poor-denigrating abysmal shithole of a country, obssessed with wealth but denying it to millions 

It's so easy to just reel off a list of things that are bad about the state of a nation - but in my case I also made at least a vague attempt to tie in why these things were bad as a result of Tory policies down the years, whereas Mr Dimwit commentator seems to think that somehow Labour should be going round schools talent scouting future David Bowies or Elton Johns, whilst simultaneously he also ignores all of the excellent musical talent this country has produced in the last thirteen years (I also did this in my list simply to show how stupid a statement it is - the eighties - like the last thirteen years - produced some excellent music). What always galls me about such frothing right wing attacks is the lack of thought and research that goes into their emotive rants. When I get cross about something, I rant about it, but I also check my facts to make sure that, whilst ranting, I don't end up looking like a total tit. It makes sense. Most conservatives don't seem to understand the simple idea of checking your facts - this goes all the way up to their biggest newspapers, too, sadly, where fact takes second place to making things up or misrepresenting the truth in order to push a right wing agenda (or, in the case of certain popular newspapers, a right-wing, racist and homophobic agenda).

I can't help but wonder if conservatives fall into two categories; the very, very stupid and easily led, who agree with what they are told as long as it makes them good and angry (immigrants stealing our jobs and shouting abuse at our troops? THE BASTARDS! String 'em up!) and don't really think about checking the facts of what they're told; they are gullible, overly trusting of 'official sources' and not given to critical thinking. The other type are very, very clever and know  perfectly well that they are peddling bullshit to the other type, and they manipulate them cynically in order to sell newspapers or gain political power. No wonder the Tories are attacking 'soft subjects' at colleges and schools, and specifically mention Media Studies - a subject that often contains modules encouraging students to view what the news and newspapers tell us in a far more cynical and critical light. If everybody gradually learned that the newspapers are full of PR, manipulation and lies, conservative politics would be buggered.

Money Is Shit

I hate money. Money is the root of all evil. Well, that and the X Factor. But money is the the rancid, sloppy dog diarrhoea that you slip on when you're not looking that makes you stink like an ill hound's arse for the rest of the day; it's the big fat knife wedged in the side of your head that you keep catching when you turn round and flicking pieces of your own brain out through your eye sockets; money is the patch of black ice on the corner of a road that just doesn't seem that icy, just before a bend that will lead you flying through the air on a mountain pass for several seconds before smashing you and your car into an unrecognisable metallic splat in a ravine, possibly killing a baby deer in the process. I don't like money.

To be specific, I don't like the power it gives people who know how to make more. I'm not talking about shopkeepers who are often as fucked as the rest of us, financially; I'm talking about the big financiers, the bankers who balls up the economy, have to be bailed out with taxpayers' money, and only a year later have the sheer bald-faced cuntiferousness to actually award themselves the same obscene bonuses that they have been awarding themselves for decades. A million here, £750k there, a few hundred thousand here, there and everywhere. Current estimates put the overall bankers bonus figure this year in London at around a billion pounds. That's about enough to buy Doncaster. Or a three bedroomed house in Kensington. Even ditzy old Boris Johnson, who seems to me to be generally a bit like a political Father Dougal MacGuire wandering around going "Ted, Ted, I'm confused. What's going on?", has gone from defending the bankers against calls to hit their bonuses with a supertax to suddenly realising how much they're paying themselves, then remembered with a shake of his mussed up hair that we're still kind of in a recession, and has now started denouncing the greedy swines. His original argument was that up to 9000 bankers would leave the City if the supertax was levied. Fuck 'em. Let them go. Because the one big obstacle to controlling the (largely US owned) banks and their executive excesses, is about to disappear.

Yes folks, no longer will bankers be able to hide behind the threat of pulling up shop and going back to the US where they can give themselves whatever bonuses they like, because now Barak Obama has decided that something needs to be done to cap their avarice. And if the US is serious about doing something on this score, then the greedy bankers are, frankly, buggered. Once the US starts the ball rolling, other countries (the UK included) will follow suit. We'll start to see tax haven after tax haven getting rolled up, and finally the bankers will have to start doing a dishonest day's work for a still ridiculous sum, though not quite as obscenely ridiculous as it was before.

I personally have my doubts that it will happen. Not because of Obama - I like Obama, he has good ideas - but because of the fact that he will have to get this through the Senate, past a fair number of greedy Democrats and a whining truckful of unfeasibly wealthy Republicans, many of whom have their hands dirty in the finance world. It's a noble plan, but I doubt whether it will get off the ground. However, the mere threat of it is absolutely putting the shits up the bankers, and that gets my vote every single time.

Here's my idea. Abolish money. That's right, get rid of the shitty, life-wrecking stuff. Let's get everyone to work, but we don't earn anything; we just get to live in our homes, have our stuff, everything is free and we all provide our labour for the sakes of keeping the whole thing still running. Work for a year, then take a year off - get to do something you enjoy for a year, write a book, do some dangerous extreme sports like base jumping or laughing at policemen. Seriously, it'd be great. Ahh, but what of those terrible, human, competitive urges, I hear you ask? Simple. In the centre of each town is a stocks, and in those stocks are chained some of the greedy shitbag bankers who fucked over our economy for the sake of lining their own pockets, and every day you can kick them as hard as you like in the balls. Whoever gets to make them scream the loudest gets an ice cream. And this happens every day. People will queue for miles. I would. And as soon as I'd had a go, I'd go straight to the back of the queue again for another. Smug, arrogant, greedy bastards.

When is a Joke Not a Joke? When it's a Threat To Commit a Terrorist Act, Apparently.

I woke up this morning cheered by the sunshine; after the recent sunlight drought we've been having these last few weeks, it was refreshing to see crisp, golden light slanting between my curtains and decorating the walls with a cheery glow. Then I went online after breakfast and the taking of the children to school and read a news article in the Independant that just had to be a joke. Surely not. Really? Here goes; a chap called Paul Chambers was getting mightily pissed at the snow constantly messing with flights over the Xmas period, as were a great many people. However, what marks Paul out as a terrorist (compared to all of the other people who just vented their frustrations to other folk around them) was that he dared post his ire on Twitter; the tweet in question said, "Robin Hood airport is closed.You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" Clearly to you and me this was a man being pissed off and expressing it in humorous form to the world at large. Some humourless cunt however saw this and actually thought it merited wasting the police's time with, and reported it. The police, being naturally on the bleeding edge of the information age and tech-crime, leapt into action and arrested Mr Chambers under the Terrorism Act. For posting a humorous message. On Twitter. The most public of all social networking sites. Yes, officers, because THAT'S clearly where Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are most likely to announce their plans for their next 9/11, after all. Where better than where millions of other Tweeters can read it? Graham Linehan, co-writer of Father Ted and Black Books, tweeted "I don't care if the joke was unwise. If the police are looking for terrorists on Twitter, they need to go to 'modern life' school for a bit."

The ultimate responsibility for this farce comes from a government vastly overreacting to the perceived terrorist threat and drafting a law that allows civil liberties to be curtailed in the interests of national security, but the police need to take some of the blame here; firstly, Mr Chambers actually had to explain to the police questioning him what Twitter was. Do the police not know how to use Google? Are they really that tech-savvy that the biggest social networking craze of the last year has passed them by without even one tiny bit of information lodging in their consciousnesses? Secondly, the police ultimately are the arbiters of what constitutes a crime and what does not; a simple application of common sense here would have told them that addressing this as a threat to national security would be a bit stupid, and would then by association make them look a bit stupid - which it did - and what should have happened was to send an officer to pop round and see Mr Chambers, let him know that someone had complained about his tweet, and find out why he had posted it - no pressure, something that could be done round at his house over a cup of tea as the policeman realised that this was a normal guy living in a normal house living a normal life, and not some yodelling fundamentalist suicide bomber or skinheaded, swastika-loving home bombmaker.

Now Paul Chambers' life has been turned upside down; he has been bailed until February - until then he doesn't know if they will be charging him with 'conspiring to make a bomb hoax'; he has had his PC, laptop and iPhone confiscated; he has been suspended from work pending an internal investigation; and Doncaster Airport have banned him for life.

According to Mr Chambers, the police interviewing him told him repeatedly during his questioning that "It is the world we live in" as some kind of mantra as to why they were doing this. Well, guess what? It isn't the world we live in. It's the world that's been puilled over everybody's eyes to allow governments to steal a little bit more of your civil liberties, to erode a bit more of your personal freedoms away. Freedom of speech? As long as you don't say anything that could be vaguely construed as a terrorist threat, that is. 

In 1984 Orwell predicted a dystopian society where 'Big Brother' watched everyone 'for their own safety' - cameras were installed in every home to record and monitor what everyone was talking about, and anyone who uttered dissension was arrested for thoughtcrime - not an actual crime, but the mere suggestion that the idea of one had passed through someone's head. Most of the people taken thus were taken away and either never seen again, or returned brainwashed and chastened. The government justified this level of oppression by being constantly involved in a (manufactured and fake) never-ending war, and where national security was paramount, and thus all citizens had to be stalwart and firmly behind their Bloc. Any dissension was dangerous and had to be stamped out in order to keep the Bloc strong.

In 2010, we have a dystopian society where there are cameras on every street corner, where people like the aforementioned humourless prick sit on the internet and report vague jokes to the police and where people get arrested for the mere suggestion that the idea of a crime might have passed through their heads. Most people taken this way have their possessions confiscated without explanation, their lives ruined, and could face prison simply for having committed a thoughtcrime. After all, we are involved in a never ending (and some might say, largely manufactured and certainly wildly exaggerated) war on terror, where the enemy is within us, and so they are eroding our liberties in order to better protect us. But we need to be strong, we can't dissent from this by cracking jokes about terrorism.

Over the top comparison? I think not. Let's talk statistics, which I know are more boring than having to stare at a blank wall for three years, but bear with me, I'll try hard to keep it short and interesting. In the ten years from 2000 to 2010, there have been 56 deaths from terrorist attacks in the UK, all of which happened during the dreadful 7th July London bombings in 2005. This was a terrible attack, and nobody is saying that it wasn't, or trying to belittle it. However. In the UK, on average, 79 children are murdered every single year, and a fair number of them have been placed on the Social Services' 'at-risk' register - and yet nothing was done, and children, arguably the most innocent and helpless victims of violent crime, have died. Where are the huge inquiries into Social Services misconduct and incompetence? In ten years, 790 children have been murdered in this country, over ten times the number of people who have died from terrorist attacks in the same country in the same period, but where the children get a vague mention in 'tightening up' Social Services procedures, the terrorist threat catalysed a movement that all too quickly skullfucked us out of some of our fundamental rights as free human beings. 

Here's an even scarier statistic. In the year 2007-2008, almost a million violent attacks in the UK  were deemed to have been committed under the influence of alcohol. A million. Rest your mind a bit, because frankly a million is a bloody big number. As you can imagine, a fair number of those involved murders. And that's just one year. If that was an average, then there have been around ten million violent attacks in this country in the last decade all of which were fuelled by booze. Do we see a national crackdown on alcohol drinking? Nope, this last decade has in fact seen ithe introduction of 24 hour opening times for pubs, one of the wonderful side effects of which is the sight of people throwing up at half past three in the afternoon on Bank Holidays outside your local Sainsbury's before threatening to kick you in and then falling over into their own waste when you're out with your kids for a nice afternoon walk. Lovely. But no, despite this being a genuine menace to our society, the best the government can do is to make the police stop a few more drivers to randomly breathalise, and send out the riot vans if a fight breaks out. No preventative measures to stop violence before it starts there at all. Not one. All they've done is make it even easier to get pissed up any time of the day.

But you joke about blowing up an airport and they'll arrest you, screw up your life, and keep on telling you that "It's not my fault guv, this is just the world we live in today."

What other prices have we paid for our 'protection' from these dubious terrorist threats? Well, Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian plumber, was shot in the head seven times for daring to run for a tube train because he was late; a few days later a man was arrested for wearing a jacket that was deemed 'too warm for the season' and carrying a backpack - it took the police over a month to drop the terrorist charges; despite this being the only reason they had arrested him in the first place; a chap called Abu Bakr Mansha was accused of plotting to murder a British soldier and was sentenced to 6 years for possessing a document that was "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"; the raid and non-fatal shooting of a man in Forest Gate on suspicion of preparing a chemical weapon - they found absolutely no evidence whatsoever to substantiate this (after pulling his home apart) and dropped all charges; in 2008 a student and friend who were writing a PhD on counterterrorism were arrested for being in possession of an Al Qaeda training document - it turned out later to have been downloaded from the US Department of Justice website for research purposes for the PhD, but the police, not wanting to be let down yet again by yet another bumbling cock-up (and after all the effort they allegedly put into psychologically tormenting the young men, according to the student in question, Rizwaan Sabir), let them off the hook for the terrorist charges, but then rearrested the friend on immigration grounds because they found an irregularity with his work visa...; the same year (2008) an Oxford graduate was arrested after someone claimed they saw him taking photographs of a sealed manhole cover near a library - he was detained for 36 hours whilst his home and computer were ransacked by the police - no photos of manhole covers were found and, for fuck's sake, even if they were, SO FUCKING WHAT? What the screaming fuck is wrong with a society when a guy can't take a photo of a bloody fucking manhole cover without having his life turned upside down by the Thought Police?

So, for the sake of 56 people who died one year, the entire country now has to watch what it says, what it downloads, what it might accidentally get emailed by someone, because otherwise they might get you, lock you up and rub their shitty, unwashed arses all over your innocent life. Who gives a flying fuck about doing something to stop child murders and drunken thugs when you can arrest people who make jokes about blowing up airports and shoot people in the head for running for a train? Not our politicians or police forces, that's for sure.

Should Murderers Be Allowed To Try To Convince A Jury That Their Insanity Justifies Their Murder? Err.....NO.

The US appears to be sliding further and further into the realms of religious insanity; not only have we gotten to the stage where a third of Virginian voters genuinely believe that Obama is the antichrist, but now a judge has permitted 51 year old Scott Roeder, who shot an abortion doctor in the head last May, to plead to a jury that he believed that he was justified in his actions and should only be convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. 

Let's just clarify this for you, because we need to be clear on this issue. The judge is allowing him to try explain that this was not a cold-blooded killing on the basis that an unprovable religion with an unprovable god and a core text that even Catholic scholars admit is piecemeal says that abortion is a sin. Now, I'm no expert, but isn't that like letting Jeffrey Dahmer appeal that he was really just a cannibal and a necrophiliac, so it was excusable to want to kill people as his  personal beliefs justified it? Yes, he was insane, but so is anyone who believes in things that aren't real. Sorry, religious folk, but just because millions of other idiots believe in your fantasy bullshit doesn't mean that it's true; it just shows how many ignorant, uneducated and gullible people there are out there.

Insanity should never be allowed to influence a court verdict; the laws are written, they are carved in stone. Even in their own Bible, Christians, no matter how fundamentalist, are commanded not to kill (although, in typically religious fashion, the priority of this is shunted way down below "Don't worship any other gods but me", "Don't take my name in vain" and "Always honour the Sabbath", so it's no wonder they don't see murder as being quite that important). If they break the law and shoot anyone in the head because of something they think their imaginary friend said, they should never be allowed to try and use this psychosis as an excuse. I hark back to the blog I wrote the other day about Ireland introducing a blasphemy law and repeat what I said there; namely, if people want to have their religion taken seriously and to allow courts to take it into account, they must present the case for the validity of it in a court of law; they must provide evidence for the existence of their god, and prove beyond a doubt that they are, in fact right, calling deities as witnesses and subjecting their claims to historical and scientific scrutiny. Then, and ONLY then, should courts allow them to use religious reasoning to justify their crimes. 

The implications of this are worrying; the US is already becoming seen as a nation in which fundamentalist Christians are gaining more and more influence over the media, local government, and even one of the main political parties, the Republicans. An increasing number of stories are published where atheist kids are victimised for not saying prayers at school despite there being a very well-defined part of the constitution that says that the state and the church should remain seperate; where abortion doctors and nurses live in fear of their lives in some areas from Christian violence (and in the above case, sadly, their fears are well justified - poor George Tiller had previously been shot in each arm in 1993 by some other religious cunt, and his clinic was bombed a few years earlier); and where the braindead lunacy that is creationism is actually being taken seriously by teaching staff and politicians. What this judge is doing by allowing Roeder to testify is giving his insane religious views validity in a legal arena, and that really is a slippery slope. It opens the doors for all kinds of savagery that can be explained away and justified in religious terms; killed a gay in a hate crime? No problem, 5 years for manslaughter instead of life for murder because you did it in a justifiable religious rage. Killed a shop worker who was working on a sunday? No worries, it's in the Bible so you can justify it.

The awful thing is that the US knows it has a problem. Frank Shaeffer, one of the prime movers in the Christian Right in the early '80's, was interviewed last year in the wake of the mindless mudslinging of the Republicans claiming that Obama wasn't even an American, and had some very interesting things to say on the subject. Read the interview, as it shows an interesting point of view from someone who was at one point enmeshed in that environment. Tellingly, he feels that the Republicans need to stop pandering to fundamentalist Christians (who he collectively refers to as America's village idiot) and ignore them, stop giving them validity and influence in the political sphere. His views tally with those of many democrats and, I suspect, not a few Republicans too. However, whereas Democrats are more likely to be seen trying to break free of these ideaologies, Republicans do have a distinct tendency, like most right wing parties, to play on any sentiments that they think will bring on more power. As Schaeffer wisely says, "the evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States...It's fed red meat by buffoons like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and other people who are just not terribly bright themselves and they are talking to even stupider people."

So, stop this insane, murderous little prick from trying to be able to excuse himself from murder by trying to convince everyone that his shared psychosis says it's OK; slam the cunt in chains and throw him in a shitty penitentiary for life for murder, which is what he did according to the law of the USA. We live in the 21st century, and it's about time civilised countries stopped listening to medieval cretins who still think the Earth is only 6000 years old despite all the evidence to the contrary out of a sense of not wanting to offend them. Fuck them. If they don't want to be offended, they can choose to stop believing in fairy stories and start learning about reality. Face facts - if these fuckwits were left in charge, we'd still be in caves and making a fire would be a sin punishable by stoning.

The Week In Supernatural Nazis : Wolfenstein Review (PC)

I never played the original Wolfenstein. I played Doom, and Doom 2, and Quake, and Quake 2 etc, but somehow missed the very first Nazi blaster, the one that kickstarted the whole PC first-person shooter ball rolling, the ball that Doom popularised and became synonymous with. Still, I don't mind. I did once install it and was so put off by the piss-poor graphics and limited movement available (like the original Doom, no jumping, no ladders, no looking up or down, etc) that I ran about a bit, got shot and uninstalled it again. I didn't play it for the same reason I wouldn't go back and play through Doom again; namely, FPS gameplay developed a whole set of golden standards a few years later (the excellent Quake series, for example) that were then used as the template from then on in, along with all of their new gameplay innovations - Wolfenstein is like getting into a Ford Model T after you've been blazing around in a Lamborghini Murcielago for months. Novelty value carries it for a few minutes, and then you get pissed off and want to be able to bunny hop and rocket jump and so forth.

Skip forward a few years and the awesome (yes, even nowadays, still awesome) Quake III had just come along and redefined the standards for the genre; slick graphics, unbelievably frantic gameplay, superb atmosphere and, above all, gameplay that was so well balanced, so sleek, so effortless that it sucked you in and chewed your skull like a Rottweiler until you became one with its electronic wizardry and had to be physically removed from the monitor and mouse in order to even eat or shit. Along come Raven Software and the revamp of the Wolfenstein name with Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW). It used the Quake III engine, so looked superb; it featured lots of Nazis experimenting with the supernatural and high tech weaponry (that you could obviously steal and use), and payed homage to classic war films like Where Eagles Dare with its' whole German castle theme. It was brilliant, and the Enemy Territory multiplayer game based on it was good enough to keep you hooked after you'd finished the single player campaign.

Skip along again, past Doom 3 and Quake 4, past Quakewars, past Far Cry and Bioshock and other genre-redefining games, and Raven again feel that we are ready to enter the world of Agent BJ Blaskowicz (no, I don't know why they named him BJ either; maybe it was an in-joke that was amusing to the programmers themselves for about ten minutes - "Oooh look, he keeps asking for a BJ! Titter!" - but it's just weird now) with the 2009 game entitled, simply, Wolfenstein. I was expecting a lot from this, because RTCW was a brilliant game that really hit the spot for the time; I was looking forward to a really good post-Bioshock adventure FPS - the stuff I had read about being able to buy upgrades for your weapons at your own rate and to customise your character's supernatural Veil powers had me quite excited, and the idea that you could choose the missions you wanted and essentially play in a big sandbox German town, taking missions from various different factions appealed enormously. Add in that the first impressions are that where RTCW was paying homage to Where Eagles Dare, this one is definitely channeling Raiders of the Lost Ark in places, and I was practically salivating as I installed it.

First impressions were good; the graphics were certainly detailed, and movable objects clattered about demonstrating physics when you bumped into them or blew them up, the sounds were atmospheric. The voice acting seemed a bit strained, however; it was like they'd just dragged people off the street and given them a script and told to 'sound German' in some cases. A bit uninspiring after the brilliant voice acting on many games these days. The controls also seemed to slip up a little. I'm used to running by holding down the 'run' key - in Wolfenstein you tap it, and then you are running. Unless you stop, in which case you revert to walking when you start moving again. And you revert to walking if you hit an obstacle (of which there are many). If that wasn't frustrating enough, when you are running the screen sways alarmingly from side to side as though Blaskowicz is shambling along in some kind of drunken stagger. I used to laugh and point at friends who tried to play FPS games and complained of motion sickness, to someone who practically lived inside the 3D environment of Battlefield 2, wandering around the landscape seemed quite natural to me. This swaying, lurching movement, however, never failed to make me feel as though I was about to chuck my guts. Consequently I spent most of the rest of the game walking everywhere, or using the Veil to speed myself up (a very cavalier way to squander one's supernatural resources, I know, but meh, whatcha gonna do?)

The open-ended game I had been looking forward to didn't really exist, I soon realised. You can indeed upgrade your weapons as you see fit - but certain upgrades are only available after you have completed certain missions, and many of those missions you have to do in a certain, fairly linear order, which precludes the idea of a sandbox FPS. You have a tiny amount of flexibility in how you want the game to play out, but it's not what I was expecting, and there are nothing like the game-changing consequences of your actions or the order you play the missions in that made Bioshock so spectacularly gripping. They might as well have just remade RTCW and painted on prettier graphics, that's how linear the storyline is as it unfolds. 

The AI in the Nazis and their attendant monsters is fairly poor. Compared to other games such as the FEAR series, where the AI soldiers actually try to outflank you or hide, the Nazis don't really seem to have any brain cells beyond self-preservation. They make a token gesture to vaguely step behind cover most of the time, but never employ anything more sophisticated than that. The weapons you get to shoot them with are, however, quite wonderful.

You start out with the old faithful of WW2 games, the MP40 submachine gun; good in close quarters, not so hot over distances; the K98 bolt action rifle that can be equipped with a sniper scope, improved rifling and a silencer to make it the ideal sniper rifle (also, for bonus gore, upgrade it with large bore too, and blow Nazis arms and legs off with it - if you're into that sort of thing. And I am. So there.); and the MP43 assault rifle which is much better over distances than its smaller counterpart. These guns are conventional, but still very effective. As you will happen upon common Nazi soldiers a lot in the game, the MP40 remains just as effective at ventilating them as itwas at the start of the game, which is a very good bit of game balancing - too many games feature starter weapons that you never ever use when you get further into the game as they are worse than useless against the endlessly scaling monsters you have to face. Wolfenstein however chooses to make the weapons all sensible, and all useable no matter where in the game you find yourself.

The more exotic weapons are a Tesla Gun which can electrocute multiple adversaries at close range; a powerful particle cannon; a panzerschreck (missile launcher); a flamethrower, and a powerful Veil-driven cannon that blows it's targets into dust. However the most interesting addition is the Thule Amulet. This artefact can be powered up with different crystals and allows you to activate special powers during gameplay that slow down time, giving you access to bullet time, throw up an impenetrable shield around yourself, or empower your weapons to shoot through shields and, with upgrades, through cover and walls. It works superficially like the Plasmid system in Bioshock, except that the Veil powers are more add-ons to your conventional weapons than offensive weapons in their own right. The graphical efect of entering the Veil powers is downright awesome, made of awesome, in fact. The world itself rolls back to reveal a garish otherland where streetlights seem to be emitting boiling luminous smoke, and people glow, and where curious creatures bob along inoffensively, looking for all the world like giant fleas. Very impressive.

So the gameplay is linear and dated, the controls are a little flawed and the run option is useless unless you have no stomach at all. But despite that it manages to be a huge amount of fun. It somehow defeats the drag factor of the negative aspects of it and sticks to what it knows best; gameplay. It's slick and easy to pick up, the weapons are superbly scaled and a joy to use, even a fairly good player will be challenged by the toughest difficulty mode, and you keep wanting to have another crack at it. I managed to finish it in a week, but where other gamers will wander round marvelling at the scenery and graphics, I tend to go into adrenaline panic mode and run (or walk briskly in the case of Wolfenstein) around, madly shooting any  bad guys who pop up and making for the exit as fast as is humanly possible because I might get blown up if I stand still for too long...

In summary, a jolly good blaster, don't expect too much flexibility out of it but it's a good romp. Don't think of it as a District 9 of a game; it's more of an Alien Resurrection, somewhat formulaic, but inexplicably good fun despite that. If you enjoy FPS, and don't mind the lack of sophistication of Bioshock, then Wolfenstein will go down well, I think.