And What Is Wrong With Being Different Anyway?

     I just read a really nice story, linked to on Twitter, about the Krankies. You remember the Krankies, they were always on telly when I was a kid, and when I found out that Jimmy Krankie was really a woman, not only that, but a midget who was married to the chap playing her dad, my brain fried a little bit. Young brains are really not meant to endure such lines of thought. And so they passed out of time and mind until I read this report in the Daily Record. Apparently, if you don't want to read it, they were avid swingers for many years during their panto and TV careers. At first this made my young self pop up, already weirded out by the aforementioned thing about him being married to the small woman who dressed as a schoolboy and pretended to be his son, and do a passing imitation of Munch's Scream face as it went into meltdown. 

    After recovering from this, I then read the article again, and it was actually a gentle article, it passed no judgement on their swinging lifestyle, it was just a very frank interview. Ian even admitted to punching Paul Daniels in the mouth once, for which he is now one of the few people in my hall of heroes. I was impressed that this story dripped into a smallish paper with a nice, laid back story about a one-time celebrity couple who engaged in a swinging lifestyle. If the Mail or Express or the Sun had broken the story, I can't imagine how terrible it would be, how very judgemental. How damaging. Let's face it, these papers do not typically shy away from taking the moral high ground against anybody. Look at the way the Sun cried and pointed the finger at the Guardian over the phone hacking story when it was revealed that there wasn't enough evidence to say that the NOTW journalists had actually deleted Milly Dowler's messages. They sulked and pouted and cried that it was unfair reporting, including demanding that Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, should have been sacked for the story. That the NOTW had actually hacked the phone of a missing schoolgirl was irrelevant, morally. They had been hard done to and they demanded some recompense. Anne Diamond said it best to these wailing fucking babies on Newsnight; "Now you know how it feels, that sense of moral outrage."

   I digress, as I often do when an opportunity presents itself to plant a boot in the guts of the vile gutter press. My point really is that it is nice that in 2011 Britain, a former celebrity couple feel OK to come forward and say "Yeah, we had a swinging lifestyle. We had sex with lots of other people, and look at us. We're still together after 42 years." That is a nice reflection on how cool Britain is gradually becoming. As religion slowly fades into the background and it's high-horse moralising and finger wagging becomes more and more irrelevant to most Brits, we feel more comfortable every decade with alternative lifestyles. Even Facebook has an option for 'open relationship'. Whilst it is still seen by many as a taboo subject, I think the younger generation are more and more at ease with homosexuality, bisexuality (although bi people weirdly come in for a lot of stick from some in the gay community, as though sexuality is some kind of bipolar thing rather than a continuum), transgenderism, and polyamory. They see their parents getting divorced (current studies show that between 50 and 33% of marriages end in divorce) and realise that monogamy doesn't always work. In fact, doesn't often work. If marriage breaks down almost half the time, then marriage isn't working no matter how much the Tories would like to shoehorn couples into it.

    I believe that sex outside a relationship, with the permission and trust of the other person, can serve several very useful functions. Firstly, as a pressure valve. If the sex in the main relationship is getting stale or simply not happening enough to suit a highly sexed person, then going out and finding it elsewhere lets them get their rocks off and takes the pressure off the partner with the lower sex drive. Secondly, it takes away that feeling of the grass being greener on the other side that so often entices people away from their partners - you get to go roll around in that grass, have a good play in it, then think, actually, the grass was fine where I was, but this was fun. You can play the field *and* still have someone to share a long-term genuine love with. Finally, if pressures build up in the main relationship, having other lovers to talk to and spend good times with can help put those pressures into perspective rather than the usual closed system of the married pressure cooker. If a couple can challenge their own jealousies enough to do it, then I'd say do it. Maybe marriages would last longer if more people were like the Krankies. And, as more of these young, accepting folk with all of these alternative lifestyles mature, we'll see if I'm right, and maybe, as this generation comes to the fore and the older, Mail-reading, Tory voting generation die off, society will become a bit more accepting, a bit more open-minded, and a bit more of a lovely place. And then the USA, which by then will be a massive church-driven theocracy with Tea Partiers at the helm, will nuke us for being a godless, liberal bunch of stinking communists on welfare.

After a long Absence, I find Chaos

Goodness, it's been almost 2 years since I last blogged. Why? because I got a job. You'd think that the kind of job that could cause me to be so tired that I stopped blogging about politics, the nefariousness of the papers and the terrifying craptitude of the voting public would be some kind of megajob, where I get to jet around the country for squillions of quids. I wish. Instead, it was a minimum wage shop job that saw me out at work for 9 hours every day and utterly fucked at the end of them (and not in the good way). Now I've been made redundant - a sign of the times - I seem to have more time to read the news and get angry about what I see in it.


The strike seems to be the big thing that is looming up, #N30 on Twitter, the biggest strike since the seventies. If you don't already know, the government decided at some point to fuck over public sector workers' pensions, including messing around with money many had already paid into the system, so that they would now have to work longer, pay more, and get less at the end of it. That's basically it in a nutshell. 


Suddenly, phrases like 'gold-plated public sector pensions' start getting bandied about in the press, a phrase that gains momentum alongside fatuous comments about how private sectpr pensions are shit, so why should public sector workers, who are PAID BY THE TAXPAYER, get a better deal? This last is usually bellowed by some Mail reader with foam-flecked lips and swivelling eyes showing far too much white in the comments section of their favourite bullshit paper. Leaving aside the fact that private sector pensions are shit partly because of wealthy people stealing from them for years and undermining them to the point of uselessness, and partly because the private sector thinks it is clever to fuck over their workers completely and, after working them to death, doesn't believe they deserve the dignity of a pension, leaving all of that aside for now, figures emerged this week that show that the average civil servant on middle management wages (about £35k) will finish on a pension worth just £8k. An MP, who earns not even twice that salary ends with a pension of over £21k. Simple question that even the most rabid and fundementally stupid Express or Mail shouter can answer - which of those pension deals is the gold-plated one?  Are MPs taking a hit on their pensions? Are they fuck.


Equally hilarious (if it wasn't for the horrific consequences of dripfeeding bullshit to a willingly ignorant mass of readers) is the accusation that UNION BARONS FORCING STRIKE TO GO AHEAD, and NOTHING CAN STOP STRIKE NOW, all of this attributed to Brendan Barber, whose actual quote was, when asked if there was any chance that the strike would be averted, "Well, I think at this stage it's probably unlikely". So in that sentence we have "I think", "probably" and "unlikely", three words not often associated with the kind of decisive domineering that the media are trying to lay at the doors of FAT CAT UNION BARONS WITH GOLD-PLATED PENSIONS FALLING OUT OF THEIR ARSES. (The irony of Paul Dacre's Mail calling a £140k a year union boss a fat cat when Dacre banks over £2 million a year, and fuckwitted racist idiot Richard Littlejohn bags £750k for writing a couple of fetid, ill-informed rants a week does not escape me). In other words, this is the media blatantly lying in order to make Joe Public hate unions and hate strike action and hate public sector workers whose lives are so much better than theirs. 


The message the papers try to push is, basically, hate the person with the slightly better deal than you, don't dare to ask why you can't have a slightly better deal instead. No, drag everyone down to the lowest level so all workers are treated like shit, just like in the private sector. Add into this the way that the government is now in consultation about how best to strip workers of even more rights, including the right not to get sacked just because your employer doesn't like you, and the lot of the worker is about to get even worse.


 I say we get the private sector properly unionised, galvanise the low-paid, overworked workers. Strikes are pretty effective when done by public sector staff, but the effect of a strike in the private sector would be nothing short of apocalyptic - the economy would stand still if shops or banks closed for a day with only minimal staffing keeping them going. It would have the added bonus of hurting the real fat cats, the bloated company directors with seven figure salaries, where it hurts - in the profits. If you are a low paid private sector worker, go out now and join your union. Do it. Let's stop trying to drag down the public sector into the shit, let's try to rise up out of the shit and start forcing employers and the government to treat us with some fucking dignity. Don't accept the bollocks that the media try to feed you, read the facts, not the opinions.

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.