Olympics Schmolympics

By now most of you will probably be aware of the ghastly 2012 Olympics logo unveiled by Sebastian Coe this month. It really is awful. It vaguely resembles a shoddy graffiti tag--an already out of date concept which will only seem more irrelevant in 2012 made particularly annoying by its supporters insistence that it will appeal to the "youf". Yeah, "Seb", writing "London" with a lowercase "l" is really going to be enough to bridge the gaps between the aristocracy, sporting elite and sink estate hoods (which is what these people are invariably referring to when they talk about "young people", in the same way that when the BBC references "youths" it actually means "ethnic minority criminals aged somewhere between 9 and 30") .

The government and people in various committees whose jobs could be done without have of course leapt to the logo's defence, talking down to the majority (who hate it) and throwing out soundbites about it being a brand that will carry the nation into the future, it will send out a message to those irascible "young people" that hey, these are "Everyone's Games" and this isn't just about the sporting elite (it's the Olympics. Of course it is. That's the point), and the ever-nonsensical chatter about the need for a logo which is "relevant"--but it isn't really the blatant disregard for the will of the majority or the childish and "for the sake of it" break with decades (arguably centuries?) of tradition that has my back up in this instance, it's the waste. For you see, this logo cost four hundred thousand pounds. How? How did they manage to run up this price? It's just a picture. The colouring is simplistic. Any moron with a laptop and photoshop could have cooked it up after an absolute maximum of maybe a day, asking maybe ten other people what they thought of it before sending it in.

I'm struggling to bring this entry to a concise close, to be honest. What conclusion is there to draw from the fact that the government is ploughing four hundred grand into almost universally opposed drawings besides the stereotypical "the world has gone mad"?

Forcing a Smile

Teaching Lessons on How to be Happy

I honestly can't think of any particularly clever remarks to make here. I mean, what can you say? Hopefully the absurdity speaks for itself.

The Spoils of War

Some 140,000 ballot papers were spoiled in the hotly contested Scottish Parliamentary and local council elections on May 3rd. Frequently, the number of spoiled papers in a constituency exceeded the number of votes a candidate won the seat by. As much as 10% of the electorate were (after a fashion) disenfranchised, and the Scottish National Party won by a single seat.

I must admit: I couldn't care less about the majority of these people.

Now, fair enough. The electronic vote-counting system is no good. I think some people lost votes because the system couldn't understand some different forms of the numbers one, four and seven, and as ever the postal vote was a waste of everyone's time (why there has been no appreciable change in how these are dealt with after those Muslim councillors in England were voted in through the use of a little factory ran by the Asian community that processed dodgy postal votes is beyond me).

However, the overwhelming majority of spoiled votes were spoiled because people were stupid. Despite the attempts of the newspapers to make it look as though it was all very complicated and filling in two forms on the same day was a "recipe for disaster", I was there, and let me assure you, it was pretty damn simple.

First Form: Scottish Parliament

There are two little lists. In the first you are voting for your constituency MSP. Put a cross next to the name of the fellow you want. In the second your vote counts towards regional seats. Put a cross next to the name of the party you like best, or think deserves some representation.

Second Form: Your local council

There is a list of candidates. Write numbers next to their names in order of who you like best. If you only like two, you only have to put numbers next to two.

And this was all spelled out pretty clearly at the top of these forms. Voters weren't being asked to wrestle with quadratic equations. It took me somewhere in the region of ten seconds to fill out my votes--it was actually kind've dissapointing for me, as a first timer ("I'm paricipating in the democratic process! Woo!").

As callous as it may sound, my view is that if you managed to screw up your vote then you didn't deserve it, and are almost certainly clueless as to what your vote represented anyway.

And Now for Something Upflifting:

One can't help but wonder if poor old Gerhard would've been able to do this in Britain without being prosecuted for using "excessive force".

Another Stupid Idea

The charity Alcohol Concern (recommended by the BBC) wants to prosecute parents who let children under 15 have a drink in the house with a meal because they think it leads to binge drinking sprees. This is dumb for a couple of reasons:

1) Someone who is, say, 10-14 being allowed a glass of champagne or wine with Christmas dinner, on an older relative's birthday or at a wedding anniversary or something is a million miles away from letting a five-year-old knock back a six-pack of hooch. Alcohol Concern's proposed law would not discriminate between these scenarios.

2) How on Earth are the police supposed to enforce this law? How are they going to know you let junior drink that can of shandy? Cameras in the dining room? No-one could be caught, investigations would be a waste of time and money.

"Binge drinking by children can have serious consequences for brain function, significantly raises the risk of alcohol dependency in later life and diminishes their life chances." - Srabani Sen, Alcohol Concern

No, really? Alcoholism damages your brain, people who drink heavily are more likely to become alcoholics, and being an alcoholic can mean you have fewer "life chances"? Wow. Im glad we've got these people to tell us these things and conduct important research with the money we donate to them. Maybe their next study tell us how shooting up can be hazardous to your health.

Besides, talking about how binge drinking by children is bad is not an argument for banning drinks for meals. In fact, it's logically fallacious.

Lunatic of the Month

Starring Kenneth Eng!

Yeah, no-one's particularly interested in why you call yourself God or the bearing cyborg dragons have on evolution, buddy.

As we say on the interwebs: "WTF?"

"You are worfless Arec Baldwin..."

Declining actor and liberal activist Alec Baldwin recently left a nasty little voice mail to his daughter "Ireland" concerning a missed phone call.

How charming. Charity begins in the (broken, in your case) home, Alec. What happened to all that "compassion" and "understanding"?

Your Old Pal the Double Standard

"If we look at Hounslow in London, it's a borough that is predominantly from a minority ethnic background. Now whilst my white colleagues are immensely qualified to do the job, I would put forward that Hounslow would be better served as a borough by a person from an Asian background, who has got culture in common with the local inhabitants, and perhaps speaks the same language." - Keith Jarrett, President of the National Black Police Association

Yeah, that sounds fantastic, Keith. Totally Balkanise the country by creating little ethnic minority city states with their own police forces, speaking the same languages (which, even though Hounslow etc. are in England, are presumably not English) and practicing the same religions. I'm sure the officers' first loyalty would remain with the Met. Clearly this is going to do a lot for the cause of ending segregation.

I imagine Mr. Jarret is also formulating proposals to ban black, Asian and other ethnic minority police officers from interfering in the affairs of the white man, of course. Can't have "coloureds" arresting white people with a different background and culture from theirs, after all--it just wouldn't be right, would it?

Control

The tragic slaughter at Virginia Tech University in America this month has prompted calls in Britain and the US (from the usual suspects) for a ban (or at least tighter controls) on firearms.

The UK is of course replete with condescending admonishments for America at this time, particularly galling on the BBC (who else?) website's online "Have Your Say" feature accompanying the story. There are a few comments which take a different tone, of course, but these are few and far between--the website "moderators" do their work well in ensuring that public opinion is portrayed exactly the way they would like it to be, and the only dissenting voices spell and articulate themselves poorly.

"The obvious comment is sadly true - that a country that refuses politically to accept gun control is bound to experience more of such awful and frightening events." - John Knowles, Norwich, United Kingdom

"I hope all those pro-gun Americans will acknowledge that not one of those poor people killed today were protected by their right to bear arms. Self-defence with guns is a myth perpetuated by the gun companies while they make a fortune selling mysery ["Mysery"? Come on, now. -Terranix]." - ChrisR, Reading

"This is why guns should be banned. Can't you see that America?" - Awibble, Hull

"How many more American children will have to pay with their lives to support the sacred cow of the NRA and its anachronistic adherence to the right to bear arms." - Kevin McAuliffe, Hertford

"How many more American families need to be left with just a photograph by their fireplace before the politicians will get started on serious gun-control legislation?" - Lee Sainty, Hull, UK

As always with the caste of quasi-intellectuals the messages are low in sympathy and high in moral superiority. The recent spate of shootings in Britain (where gun laws are truly draconian in their strictness) clearly illustrates that criminals and psychopaths are always going to find a way to get hold of guns (if they think murder is okay they aren't going to be too worried about carrying illegal weapons, are they?), but this seems to have gone over the heads of these individuals. The "tighter gun controls" they constantly prod America to adopt have in the UK seen crimes involving firearms (perpetrated mainly by members of ethnic minorities) increase literally a hundredfold since the beginning of the 20th century, when even children could lawfully own arnd carry guns. The use of handguns (specifically) in crime has risen by around 40% since they were made completely illegal following the Dunblane massacre, while sports like target shooting are almost extinct, the British olympic team actually having to go abroad to practice. I'm seeing to gains for considerable losses, there.

It seems completely obvious that the problem here was not a lack of firearms prohibition but the mentally unstable South Korean expatriate who pulled the triggers on those pistols. Virginia Tech University did, in fact, implement rules forbidding the lawful carry of firearms on campus a very short while before this killing spree, and the result was that students and staff alike were totally defenceless in the face of this murderer. Back in February, Sulejman Talović, a Muslim refugee, also had a crack at going on a shooting spree in Trolley Square Shopping Mall, which was also a "Gun-free Zone", in Utah, but found it brought to a sudden end by a shopper with a concealed carry permit who had chosen to ignore the rules in much the same way the would-be mass murderer had. Legally held guns (Cho's guns lacked serial numbers and thus were never legal anyway) belonging to responsible citizens with a vested interest in protecting themselves, their property and their families frequently foil crimes in America, hard though this might seem to many Brits, who have surrendered the right to even carry pepper spray for their own protection, forced to instead to rely on a police "service" who cannot even be relied on to pursue bicycle thieves for fear of being sued if they fall off and hurt themselves.

Finally, I would like to raise the spectre of Switzerland--gun ownership there is almost compulsory. There's an assault rifle in almost every home. There were very few restrictions on gun carry until the EU managed to twist its arm a few years ago (to what purpose is anyone's guess). Incredibly low levels of crime. Far lower than here in the UK. Far higher sense of personal responsibility and pride in one's nation, though.

How do you reconcile that with your "a country that refuses politically to accept gun control is bound to experience more of such awful and frightening events" dribble, Mr. Knowles? As ever, perhaps the "liberal" agenda is not gun control at all, but just control.

UK Scores Low in UN "Report Card"

The UN has released a report that claims that British children are the unhappiest in Europe. In my experience you can learn a lot about an “official report” simply by asking who commissioned it, who supports it and what do they expect to get out of it?

The UN is a non-democratic transnational organisation that constantly seeks to increase its power over independent, national democracies. Having no real army the UN cannot score military victories over its rivals an so instead looks to secure moral ones. The commissioning of a report on child welfare by the UN implies that the UN is concerned about child welfare. Is it just a coincidence that their report indicates a lack of concern for the welfare of children on the part of the UN’s two most powerful rivals: Britain and the US?

Jonathan Bradshaw, one of the report's authors, put Britain's poor ratings down to long-term under-investment in children and a "dog-eat-dog" society.

In a society which is very unequal, with high levels of poverty, it leads on to what children think about themselves and their lives. That's really what's at the heart of this."

In fact, British society is no more unequal in terms of distribution of wealth than it has been in preceding decades. The real difference is that wealth and consumption have become the sole criteria upon which an individual’s value is based--being honest, kind and industrious now confers less social status that sporting the right designer label. This is the result of a convergence of liberal attacks on parental authority and an excesses of consumer capitalism, not inequality of wealth.

Colette Marshall, UK director of charity Save the Children, said the report was a "shameful" indictment of Britain. "Despite the UK's wealth, we are failing to give children the best possible start in life," she said in a statement, "drastic action", including an injection of 4.5 billion pounds, would be needed to combat the crisis. In other words Colette Marshall is calling for £4.5 billion for the inauguration of a vast and profitable job creation scheme for people like.....Colette Marshall!

If the government really want to make children happier they should stop persecuting parents for disciplining their children, reintroduce proper discipline in schools and tax designer labels beyond the means of the underclass. The execution of a few thousand habitual child abusers wouldn't go amiss either.

Jade Goody, Celebrity Big Brother & "Racism"

What a ridiculous pantomime. Now, I haven't really followed any Big Brother since I moved out of my parents' house (because it's garbage and I don't put it on the TV) until very recently so the first I heard of this was on the front page of a newspaper. Someone had called a Bollywood actress a "Paki" and, as you would expect when the big top collapses at the circus, there was chaos.

Even at this point I regarded the whole thing as overblown. Front page news? While this has been the top story on the news an Asian gang attacked a 15-year-old white boy and battered him in the head with a hammer (I can't remember if they actually killed him or not--which just goes to show how little reported the assault/murder has been), that struck me as a little more newsworthy than people bitching at each other on Big Brother (the kind of petty carping which has gone on in every "reality" show since the time of the Jesus, I think). When it became apparent that the Indian actress (Shilpa Shetty) hadn't been called a Paki--she'd actually been called a cunt and Channel 4 had bleeped it (as you do) and this had lead to a bunch of media retards simply assuming the bleeped word was "Paki" (a ridiculous leap in logic given that Shetty is Indian, not Pakistani) and running with the idea--I caught that first familiar whiff of bull feces.

It turns out that the "racism" which has led to something like 50,000 complaints and at least one cretin filing a complaint with the police amounts to little more than your standard playground bickering, which we've seen on every Big Brother. Certainly Jodi Marsh, Jade herself the first time she was on the programme and a few others have got it a lot tighter in the past than Shetty has, often not just in the house but from the same newspapers who are now screeching their horror at what Jade etc. have said as if they'd set a box of kittens on fire.

There were actually only two incidents to go on which the media have been able to spin into "racism": firstly, one of the housemates mimicked Shetty (who by all accounts is a bit of a snotty cow, even if she has been picked on unfairly) in an Indian accent (Shetty had taken the Mickey out of the way one of the other housemates spoke herself before). They weren't insulting the accent, they were just doing an insulting impersonation of her--and since she has an Indian accent (on account of being Indian and all) it shouldn't come as a surprise that an impersonation of her should include one. Secondly (and this was the biggie): Jade--who couldn't remember Shetty's surname while complaining about her to someone--referred to her as "Shilpa Whatever. Shilpa...Poppadom."

...

Are you kidding me? That's what earned front page in the newspapers and top story on the news channels? Surnaming someone "Poppadom"? What do poppadoms have to do with racism? Last I checked, your nation's preferred foodstuffs are not racial characteristics. Local cuisine has nothing to do with your biology.

And they're talking about this in parliament--parliament! Doesn't the government have more important things to discuss, what with MRSA in the hospitals, rising instances of gun crime, the European constitution flopping, those illegal immigrant criminals the Home Office lost upon their release when they should have been deported, climate change, the two wars this country is currently tied up in? The same government that calls people "hysterical" when they call for the death penalty when it comes out that yet another paedophile released early from prison or on parole has abducted an infant is in talks with the Indian foreign ministry because some Z-lister on Big Brother said someone's surname was Poppadom?

It's pretty tricky for a white European or white American (or whatever) to be racist to an Indian in the first place, it should be noted, given that "whites" and Indians are actually of the same race. They're both Caucasian--heck, before saying "Caucasian" became fashionable the correct term was actually Indo-European--so that's at least one torpedo in the argument that Jade was being maliciously racist right there. A second torpedo hit home when I was made aware of the fact that Jade's late father was himself a white/black half-caste (we're allowed to say that again, right? I've had trouble keeping up with the latest in pointless censorship since they changed "blackboard" to "chalkboard") making her of mixed race herself.

Surnaming someone "Poppadom" should by no means be enough to cause this kind of uproar--they're actually burning Channel 4 executives in effigy in India like it's the 5th of November in scenes reminiscent of the Islamic world spitting the dummy when the Danes drew some doodles of their prophet. The crowds which normally gather outside the Big Brother house during evictions were also banned when Jade's time came because she's had death threats and Channel 4 was worried she'd be attacked.

Of course there has been some overt and indefensible racism (and classism) on Celebrity Big Brother this year, but not directed at Shilpa Shetty. No, it came from Jermaine Jackson when he referred to Jackie Goody as "poor white trash". He also told Shetty he was pleased to see another "person of colour" in the house. What would the reaction have been had the Goodys told Danielle Lloyd and that S Club girl that they were glad to see a a few more white faces in the house? We can but wonder.

I don't see anyone pulling up that whinging nobody in the diary room or crucifying him in the media. As a white person I find it offensive he's trying to suggest poverty and "trashy"behaviour are somehow due to a person's white heritage in some cases--had I the temerity to call Jackson a nigger on TV when I was upset with him then you can bet your glass eye I'd have ended up in court for it.

The usual double standard is filmly entrenched here, of course. It's hear no evil, see no evil--unless the evil has a pale face.

Quote of the Month

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience" - C. S. Lewis