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.

The Terrible, Joyless Life Of Women

The internet is brilliant. Whereas once I used to have to reserve my anger at idiots by looking at the tabloid front pages in newsagents and sneering at the pathetic drivel they try to pass off as 'news', or reading it over the shoulder of the bloke in front on the bus and wishing the bastard would turn the page to the next story so that I wasn't being stared at by some plastic Page 3 model's nipples (the model of course looking startled, as though she wasn't expecting the photographer to come round to her house while she was tottering about on her 6 inch heels and wearing only the bottom half of a kinky nurse's outfit), these days I can have the very worst shit that the tabloids pump out fed directly to me thanks to such brilliant places as Twitter and Reddit. Yes, within minutes of the bowel movements of the tabloids being curled, steaming, into the toilet bowl of their website, people are tweeting them to the world. Jan Moir's vile homophobic rant about Stephen Gateley and the subsequent answer that dug her even further into the hole; Rod Liddle's accidental exposure of his inner racist (not that it's that hard to spot generally, mind) - and these are just the high profile ones. Today brought me one that will no doubt get much less interest, but which to me, as someone who respects individuality and women's rights to equality, demands an answer.

 Liz Jones posted an article on the Daily Mail's  website today - in the Femail supplement, of course - that is clearly inspired by the current news about the wife of the Northern Ireland First Minister, Iris Robinson, and her much-publicised romp with a 19 year old boy. I don't feel too sorry for Iris, to be fair, because she also spouts homophobic rhetoric too, so I shrug as she gets pelted with shit from the media and wish someone would just point out to her that this is exactly what she dishes out when she spits venom at gays. However, Liz gets carried away with her discussion of toyboys and takes us on a dark trip into her own frustrated, joyless, dysfunctional sexuality - and then assumes that all women work this way. Let's take a peek into the mindset of this woman.

"But while we all know that men are driven by sexual desire, there is a consensus, and I’m not being anti-feminist when I say this, merely realistic, that women care a lot less about sex and validation via the bedroom." 

I suspect that isn't actually the case, but do continue.

"In her new film, It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep – who at 60 looks fabulous – plays a character who is positively whorish." 
 
Whorish? Did she just say that in 2010? That a woman in a film portrays a character who is sexual and enjoys it, but she's been described as whorish? What decade is this again? Did we suddenly fall down a time hole and end up in the 1950's? I thought the only people who used words like that nowadays were fundamentalist southern baptist types in the US, who also fall to the floor 'speaking in tongues' and frothing at the mouth when they are not staring beatifically at their bibles and listening to voices. But to hear it coming from a modern journo - not only that, but a female modern journo is just gobsmacking. And yet this still pales before the sweeping generalisation that comes next.

"But to be honest I don’t think the majority of women, once they are past the teenage crush period, even think about sex that much.

They put up with it, with the repetitiveness, the ridiculousness, the inconvenience and the inevitable disappointment, because it gets them to where they want to be: married, with children and someone to help shoulder the bills and dig the garden"

Ok Liz, let's backtrack a bit here. So you have issues with sex. You find it repetitive and ridiculous, inconvenient and disappointing. Stick to what you know. But to then take that personal experience and tar all women across the board with that dreadful picture? That's just a slur against your own gender, and you should write another article apologising to the women of Britain for effectively describing them all as withered, dried up sticks who 'put up with' sex and really just want someone to give them children and help them with the fucking gardening. I can see thousands of women gnashing their teeth in anger and disbelief at this article; in trying to speak for everyone in this way she's ended up like someone at a party who's just said, in a loud clear voice, "Well of course, we've ALL wanted to taste someone else's shit at some point in our life, haven't we?" and then wondered why everyone is moving away from her quickly and giving her looks of disgust. I know there are women who do see sex the way she sees it - however (and this is the weird bit - unlike Liz, I'm neither a woman nor a seasoned journo) I also understand that there are many, many other women who do enjoy sex, and for its' own sake too, and many more who fall in the middle. Because, guess what. Humans are all different. Just because I personally get quite excited by ginger haired women doesn't mean that I suddenly believe that all men everywhere only fancy ginger haired women. Jones seems to miss that very fundamental part of writing for people, and assumes that her deficiencies in this area are general female traits.

On a par with this towering piece of craptitude is her statement about why a woman gets herself a toyboy;

"A woman embarks on a relationship with someone much younger than her because she believes she can manipulate him, boss him, steal his sperm and then nurture him as she would a child or a pet" 

Wow, this is a cold woman. I mean properly, heart made out of cold dark matter that interacts with nothing. Absolute zero is the coldest temperature in the universe, where everything stops completely, but her soul makes 0 degree Kelvin seem like a warm summer day by comparison. So not only does she find sex tedious, but she seduced a younger man (whom she later married) in order to basically stick a joypad socket in his head and control him a la Halo, though involving less shooting and more shopping. Incredible. And to nurture him as you would a pet? Christ, what did she do, have the poor cunt lay across her lap while she tickled his tummy and fed him chocolate drops if he'd been a good boy? Take him for walks with a special collar on and let him sniff her crotch from time to time? Oh no, she'd have hated that latter, it would be too much like sex.

And the scariest part of all? I already mentioned it. This piece of anti-feministic dogshit is published in the Femail, the Mail supplement aimed squarely at women. This is the image they want to pass on to the people of the country. Feel good about sex? Now feel guilty about it because Liz Jones tells you that it's dysfunctional to feel so horny you want to fuck  someone just for the sake of it. Thought relationships might be about love? Nope, sorry to shatter your illusions girly, they're about manipulation and cold-hearted control. What the hell are the Daily Mail trying to do, breed a generation of frustrated, bitter, asexual Margaret Thatcher clones? 

Oh. Oh. Right. Sorry. Don't know what came over me there...

Celebrity Big Brother Retard Speaks Out On Evolution

I'm not going to watch Celebrity Big Brother, I refuse to watch it on the principle that I don't want to become one of the hordes of people talking about the mundane goings on and who-shagged-who on the damned thing - frankly, I don't want to know, and find BB pretty tedious despite the initial interest factor of torturing the minds of minor celebrities and idiots. It wanes fast for me. 

However.

Last night Stephen Baldwin, a man who has the closest approximation of a Lego wig for hair that I have ever seen on a human, spent apparently 45 minutes reading from the Bible to everyone. Tellingly, they cut to this scene from one of Vinnie Jones laid on his bed asleep, and Heidi Fleiss walked off claiming that it was putting her to sleep. He seemed initially reluctant to say that he was a creationist until Stephanie Beacham pushed him on the subject, when he admitted to not believing in evolution. He leapt from one inane and meaningless statement ("I believe in the word 'faith'" - yeah, so does everyone, dumbo, it's in the fucking dictionary, doesn't take much believing in - I believe in the word 'idiot' too, also the words 'dumb' and 'cunt') to a statement of towering stupidity, which is what prompted this blog and, yes, to actually seek out and watch the section in question. He said "Evolution means that something becomes something from something else, correct? So my question is - if we're from apes, why are the apes still here?"

Where do you start? 

Firstly, chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor going back about 6 million years ago - this ape was neither human or chimpanzee, it was something different that is no longer found presumably because changing conditions forced it to evolve into what we now know as chimps and human bengs, presumably due to the survival pressures of the different wings of the species going to live in different environments - it's safe to say that chimps stayed in a forest and evolved improvements to their ability to climb trees, whilst our ancestors, for whatever reason (living in a swamp, living on plains) evolved to walk upright and evolved new and interesting ways to use their freed front hands (although both humans and chimps can masturbate, so presumably this wasn't the big motivator that produced an entire species of wankers like humanity). This is basic stuff, Baldwin, really basic stuff that my 10 year old daughter understands. If she can understand it, I'm sure a 43 year old can. But wait! He's a born again Christian, a type of religious fundamentalist who simply goes mad for whatever reason and refuses to ever listen to sanity or reason again. Apparently he says that after 9/11 he had 'experiences that go beyond most people's wildest dreams' (Oh yeah? Like what? Someone slip you an acid tab when you weren't looking then left you in a room full of mirrors with a red lava lamp and a perpetually looping video of Keyboard Cat for six hours?) and now, apparently, he 'can honestly look you in the eye and say the experience I am now having with Jesus Christ blows away everything I did before.' Given that you've not done any acting since 1988, (and that was in a 'cult' film that nobody has ever heard of)  and in the meantime have only ever appeared on a string of degradingly stupid reality celeb shows such as 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here", "Celebrity Apprentice" and "Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge" (I kid you not, this is true) that doesn't surprise me. Sitting alone in a bare room and giggling every time you shat yourself would blow away anything you did before.

What really gets me is the lack of sensible reaction this got ; Sisqo, a real-life brain donor who didn't realise you were supposed to be dead before spooning out your grey matter  and giving it to medical science in a wet envelope, staggering around and going 'Durrrr', and whose only mental power left is to sing like a fucktard every so often, piped up with "Yeah, I would think the same thing" - presumably if you had anything left to think with, I'm guessing? The man is so unfeasibly dense that he just copies the thought processes of those around him - formulating an opinion of your own is just such hard work, after all. Place him in a university with some boffins and he would become a normal person. Place him in a Big Brother house, however, and watch him devolve to a state where he's shitting into his own cupped hand and daubing his name on the mirrors whilst grinning toothlessly within three weeks. Mark my words. Three weeks. Then one of the female housemates (I couldn't tell which one) chimed in with the hopelessly mindless comment, "Well what about spirits and spirit powers and the evolution of spirits and, you know, energy and fields and that?" What? I mean, really, what the fuck? So instead of someone saying, "Stephen, you're wrong, you're a creatin and THIS IS WHY" (cue lengthy, Dawkinsesque lecture on evolution) we get some dippy New Age shitwit who probably has crystals at home to help her piss glow orange and consults a Tarot reader every week banging on about the evolution of spirit powers! Unbelievable! In this day and age where our knowledge of evolution's processes and the evidence for them are so staggeringly overwhelming that you really would have to be a retard or insane to look at even a fraction of it and still say "Buh, no, I don't believe it", that's the only challenge to his idiocy?

But thankfully it gets better. 

Alex Reid and Jonas showed some pluck by challenging Baldwin's preachings, and his counter argument was one of the most confusing and pointless pieces of religious pseudo -reason it has ever been my misfortune to witness, and reaffirmed my view that to be a born again Christian, you have to be completely insane and have no handle on rational thought whatsoever. OK, stay with me, because this gets weird and dumb in equal measures. Right. "What is the thing you need the most right now? The thing that, if I took it away, you would die? That's right, oxygen." Right Stephen, we need oxygen, that's right. With you so far, "Why is it called oxygen?" At this point Jonas earns a bonus point for coming back with "Because we named it that" which renders Baldwin's follow up completely nonsensical - "Ah! Ah! So someone told you that it was called oxygen and you believed them, but someone just told you that the words in this book are true and you said you don't believe them! You believe in oxygen." Alex's comeback to this is rather priceless in its simplicity, and the confusion as to where Baldwin is going with this reasoning is evident on his face - it's as though he's trying to explain it to a child - "But I'm living proof that oxygen exists." Exactly. The basis for science - we say oxygen exists because scientists did experiments to find out what the air was made of, what properties each of the gases had (oxygen, for instance, catalyses reactions and bonds with other things easily whereas nitrogen isn't so reactive) and built up a body of empirical evidence that anyone, even Baldwin, can go out and test for themselves. Mm. Not quite the same for God, though, is it? But according to him, it's only when you let go of all need for proof (ie rationality) that the spirit of god comes to you and gives you proof (ie insanity). Apparently this is an oxymoron. In reality, an oxymoron is a combination of words that seem to mutually contradict one another, ie military intelligence, or clever Stephen Baldwin; although in this context it would also be a good way to describe Baldwin himself, for example: Oxymoron - person who believes that proving that oxygen exists will somehow make people think that God does too.



General consensus among the housemates seems to be that the Bible readings are not a good thing. Here's hoping they go all Lord of the Flies on us and by Day 20 they'll have built a giant wicker man in the garden out of used toilet roll tubes and be getting ready to burn the black hole of supercompressed stupidity that is Stephen Baldwin to a) see if God protects him and b) prove that oxygen exists. I for one would welcome this and would actually tune in to watch. Especially if Sisqo is still daubing his shit on the walls.

On Optimism

Generally speaking I am not a neurotic person. I'm reasonably stable, but I do have my moments. I have a tendency to obsess about the worst that can happen in any given situation to the point that I end up not doing anything on the basis that the real world outside is too starkly terrifying to contemplate interacting with at all. I daren't even look at my bank statements half the time - some weird part of my brain assumes that if I never actually observe my bank balance, it will remain fine. It's like quantum theory applied to banking. My account contains Schrodinger's Money. How much easier would life be if you could just switch off the 'worry centre' of the brain?

I live in constant amazement at my girlfriend's ability to stay calm in situations that would have me gnawing my own fingers off in sheer, desperate panic. I had previously thought that optimism was the reserve of the hopelessly naive until I met her; now I wish I could learn at her feet. She is so optimistic that I wonder sometimes if her body naturally produces its own Valium. It's wonderful to behold, but also utterly baffling to me, what with me being a hybrid of Mr Grumpy and Mr Worry. If I walk down roads I start to get convinced that I will be killed from behind by a person who has just gone insane and mounted the kerb in the world's quietest car at 70 miles an hour; when I go to the shops I get paranoid that my identity has been stolen and that the police will be waiting at the shop when I use my card to ask me some questions about weapons-grade plutonium purchased on the Russian black market with it. And flying? Don't even go there. I will never, ever get on a plane. Never. Statistically speaking it's often touted as the safest way to travel. But if your aeroplane breaks down at 10,000 feet, the only option is to tuck your head between your knees and wait to die along with several dozen other people who will all insist on screaming and turning your last moments into an annoying and undignified clone of any Hollywod disaster movie ever made. If your car breaks down you just pull over and swear at it a lot before ringing the RAC. And boats? Nope, boats sink. They do, or they catch fire and fall over. And that might not happen a lot, but you can bet that it will happen when I decide to go aboard to try to conquer my fear. My whole life is a classic case of Sod's Law.

When I started writing this, I was preparing for a drive back home from our New Year's Eve holiday in the Peak District. Normally not a harrowing prospect, but then it snowed the previous night and I couldn't even get the car out of the farm without doing hilarious comedy spins on the slight slope up to the small country road - I shudder to even think about trying to get up the bigger hill a few yards further on. And the night I was writing this, the temperature was set to hit -4, freezing all of that packed snow and semi-melted slush into a black ice nightmare. I was terrified that, as the farmer towed us up the hill in his tractor, that the tractor would somehow lose its grip and plummet back down the hill into us, crushing us at the bottom; or that once on the main road, we would effortlessly slide off a curve and into a yawning chasm; or we'd be hit by a jacknifing lorry; hell, I was even worried that a Wampa would rip us apart as we tried to get into the car. And that was just the worry about the trip. I was also worried that my house might have burned down, or that a family of rabbits had moved in, or that I hadn't emptied my bin thus leaving the flat stinking of rotten bacon. Had the building itself been removed from time and space and was only accessible if I used my front door key in any other similar lock around the globe? My girlfriends' response - don't worry. It'll be fine.

And do you know what? She was fucking right. The trip home was tense, but manageable, the flat was still there and smelled fine, and it turns out that Wampas only exist in the Star Wars universe. If she could capture that optimism in a capsule she'd make millions. Millions.

File Sharing Bollocks

I see that perpetually media-hungry smug prick Bono has waded in to the argument over file-sharing, more or less suggesting that we become a totalitarian state where all online activity is monitored so that people don't download entire seasons of, say, '24' (the argument he uses) or download U2 albums so he doesn't get anything from those downloads and has to spend slightly less on his clothes than he did last year (the subtext). He claims that "A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators...the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business." To my eyes, all this proves is that he is an even bigger cock than I thought, although my favourite bit of his piece was when he described how the technology does exist to monitor everyone's web activity, after all, look at China...Yes Bono, you've actually just suggested that we take the lead of one of the most oppressive and least humanitarian nations in the world in monitoring our citizens every web activity. Well done, Bonehead. Any intelligent person would have read back what they'd written and thought, "Fuck, I can't say that. Jesus. It's only a short jump from there to suggest that we open Soviet-style Gulags for filesharing dissenters. I'll scrap that." But not Boner. No, he stridently calls for the government to declare the internet version of martial law because he thinks that some people might be stealing some of his money.

Let's just take a look at some of the actual statistics compiled by the music industry in Sweden (one of the countries with a traditionally more 'relaxed' view on filesharing) for a second, Bono, if you'll permit me. The figures seem to show...why, they seem to show that musicians' take-home pay is just getting bigger and bigger over the last few years. Let me explain this, Bono, as you don't seem to be able to grasp this concept. Most musicians earn considerably more from live gigs than they do from sales of albums. Income from album sales is actually up - to the music industry - and yet the artists are seeing less of that money than they were four years ago. However they were never earning that much from album sales in the first place (say a figure of about 5% of the album's value) so compared to the mountain of cash they earn from playing, say, stadiums (like U2, Bono, you know when you play stadiums and everyone there has paid  £30 for their seat and you get about 50% of that sum), album sales only represent a small part of most artists' revenue. The figures show that the music industry's income from sales of albums is steadily rising, yet the amount they give to artists is shrinking. Who do you want to blame again for the loss of money you get from album sales? 

The music industry is like a bloated parasite that has grown enormous by latching its many vampiric tentacles into the talented for decades and bleeding them dry to fuel its coke habits, big cars (I'm reminded of an anecdote of a time when a certain well-known boy band, who were signed to Simon Cowell's label, were living on, effectively, less than minimum wage, relying on food parcels from their parents despite having had chart topping hits and a hit album, and one day, when they were on their way out of the label's office, Cowell drove past in a new Aston Martin, wound down the window, patted the side of the car and told them with a grin, "See this? This is the last single, boys!" before driving off like the epic cunt that he is), sex parties etc etc, and now that the ordinary person has at their disposal a means of bypassing them to get directly at the music, and through that, give the band more money by going to see them live once they've discovered them, it is the music industry itself that is whining and bleating about the imminent death of the music industry, and trying to wrap it up as a sob story about how artists are struggling now as a result of YOUR THEFT of their music. The figures don't support this, however, and the only artists who actually believe this are the cretins who either a) believe what their label tells them as they deliberately trim more money for themselves from the rising album sales and give the artists' less then lie about it being down to filesharing, or b) earn ridiculous amounts from their album sales, but nowhere near as ridiculous as the amount that the labels earn from them, ie Metallica, U2, etc. Sorry, music industry, I can't feel sorry for your corporate rape of music finally being stung after all these long years of you buttfucking artists to fund your lifestyles and billowing incomes. Time to pay the piper, you ignorant selection of overfed cocks. 

Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor was so disgusted by this aspect of the music industry that, when he released Year Zero and fulfilled his contractual obligations, he didn't bother signing to a label again and now sells his music directly from his website - which means his subsequent albums are a lot cheaper (he was always very outspoken about how expensive the labels made his albums, 'penalising the fans for being fans' as he saw it) and he actually gets a realistic cut of the money, as should have always been the case anyway.

The real impact of filesharing on musicians seems to be that more people are going to live gigs than before, thus placing more money in the pockets of the bands themselves. It's easy to assume that because people can check out the music of more new bands for free, they then like some of them so much that they buy a ticket to see them live. That's my line on this; go see bands live and put food in their mouths. Or buy albums and singles and put another Aston Martin in Simon 'Epic Cunt' Cowell's garage.

The One Where Ireland Becomes Europe's Village Idiot

Do you know what the worst thing is about having studied psychology? It's when you tell someone about it and they recoil in mock horror from you and look all nervous and giggle about how they bet you know exactly what they are thinking, don't you? I want so badly just to say "Yes, but that's not because I studied psychology, it's because you're a fuckwit." I hate this pathetically mindless belief that, somehow, having studied psychology gives you the power to turn someone's skull into glass and lets you read what they are thinking about on the little mindscreens inside. The world is full of these stupid, stereotyped reactions. If you tell someone that one of your hobbies is playing computer games, you are treated like a moron or a child; tell a group of lads that you don't support any teams because you hate football, and you'll have your sexuality questioned; tell someone that you do roleplaying games and you are instantly a geek, despite the fact that the person who has said this to you can tell you the lineup of Manchester United in 1995 and exactly how many goals they scored in each game they played that year without even a pause. The reason for this proliferation of automated programs is simple; most people are thick. 

You heard me. They're thick. They can't handle having to actually think about anything beyond drinking a can of Special Brew, staring slack-jawed at a bunch of howling baboons on the telly voting for X Factor, and farting, so people acquire a set of standardised, second-hand responses to things - social programs, if you will. They're like a viral set of memes, passed on from idiot to idiot. Most of them are passing on opinions or statements, ad verbatim, that they then recite ad nauseum like some sort of reality-defying mantra when their single thought is challenged. How many more 'salt of the earth' cunts must I hear bang on about how the BNP is 'only representing the voters, mate, that's democracy'? 

The real danger, however, comes from religion. Religion thrives on creating and passing on whole meme sets to allow the common person to cope with most situations - need to deal with homosexuality? Here you go. Someone is an atheist? Here's a bunch of statements we think are clever and that should befuddle them, yet leave you writhing like an insect on a pin when they come back with deeper questions. Religion goes deeper though. It passes on a whole second hand morality and saves you the effort of having to think your way through any morally grey situation you might come up against in your life. The side effect of this is that most of them don't fully understand these morals, which is probably why they keep fucking them up (Dubya not quite understanding the idea of loving thy neighbour, and the whole 'thou shalt not kill' thing - hint: it applies even if you don't actually do the killing with your own hands, Bush - for example). Religions pass on these ideals, these beliefs, and make imbecilic recommendations like the Catholics telling Africans that contraception is a BAD THING despite the rife AIDS epidemic there. It's based on fairy stories from the arse end of time that have somehow achieved massive validity simply because enough people around the world repeat it in the face of all of the evidence to the contrary (which is pretty much all of the evidence that's available, incidentally). And what's more, the Republic of Ireland has just passed a law that makes it a crime to say all of this, because it's blasphemous.

Let's just look at that last bit again in case your mind refused to accept it the first time.

In the year 2010, when we should all be driving flying cars, when science has unravelled the human genome, worked out what happened mere seconds after the Big Bang, made enormous discoveries about the origins of life and the processes of evolution and can send a probe out to the cold, distant worlds of our solar system to parachute through an alien atmosphere, where homosexuality is becoming more and more accepted, where rationality and logic and evidence and information are deemed the ultimate tools in the quest for knowledge, the Republic of Ireland has made it illegal to write anything that might offend a religious person, on pain of a fine of up to £20,000. I mean, have you seen how easy it is to offend deeply religious people? Just saying that you know someone who's gay and they're quite nice actually on your Facebook page is enough to send some religious idiots foaming at the mouth and chewing on furniture. Writing "There is no god and those who think otherwise are morons" on your blog will trigger a frenzied horde of offended Catholics that will burst through your door and drag you screaming to the courtroom, there to get a criminal record and a ridiculously over the top fine.

How far will it go, this law? Let's say you live in Dublin, and you're engaged in conversation on an internet forum or newsgroup, and you say to a persistent fundamentalist mentalist that they need to go and look at the evidence for evolution because their literal bible interpretation is not backed by any evidence whatsoever, and all of the evidence supports evolution. You get caught because the guy you're talking to is also Irish and he rings the police. You've blasphemed, mate. Down to the courtroom. Ker-ching! Twenty grand, please, do not pass go. What else? Will you be fined for owning a copy of The God Delusion by well-known idiot-basher Richard Dawkins on the grounds that your religious neighbour once came round for coffee and was offended when she saw it on your bookshelf as the title is blasphemous? Ker-ching! Another twenty grand, just for having a book!

I think that it is a fundamental part of freedom of speech that we are allowed to criticise everything; government, law, the media, religion, everything that tries to hold a position of power over us should be held up to the same scrutiny by the people and be prepared to stand or fall on its own merits. I'd personally go one further and say that before any religion gets to be taken seriously by anyone, they should have to actually present the case for the existence and factual basis of their religion in a court of law and have it proven beyond doubt that their religion is completely factual and is in no way based on half truths, myths or outright lies - and they're facing Dawkins on the other side of the argument. Otherwise it's bullshit and they should shut the fuck up crying to the state when people call them on it. The Irish government is basically legitimising religion's brand of mindless thought control by silencing dissent in a not dissimilar way to how Stalin silenced political dissent in Soviet Russia. When you make opposition illegal, you're on a very, very slippery slope indeed. It's quite funny to watch religious folk flap about with their fingers in their ears shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! NYAH NYAH!" when faced with evidence, that proves them wrong, it is chilling in the extreme to see the atheist strapped to a chair with tape over his mouth whilst the religious stand around in front of them spewing their braindead bile about how atheism is the work of the devil, and aren't atheists all evil people, and atheism is the rot at the heart of our society - because let's be brutally frank here, atheism isn't protected by this new law. Oh no. If some pious cunt says to you that you're an evil monster who isn't fit to walk this earth because you're a vile, queer-loving atheist, you can't take them to court for offending your 'beliefs'.

Basically, the Republic of Ireland, by creating this anachronistic law, has just cemented itself  in the position as Europe's Village Idiot, complete with a stupid straw hat and dogshit smeared around the mouth. It doesn't take a psychologist to work that out, either, Ireland, so stop pulling that face and telling me that you bet I know what you're thinking. Fucking dunce.