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The myth of middle England just exploded

Anyone who doubted that the myths of "Englishness" were anything more than a rhetorical device in the service of racism, greed, bigotry and exclusion will have been able to put their mind comprehensively to rest this weekend. I refer to the release of the Christian peace activist Norman Kember and his two Canadian colleagues, and the small demonstration in support of "freedom of speech" that took place yesterday in London.

The bitterness with which Telegraph readers - if they are a barometer of a certain strand of English opinion - greeted Kember's release was illuminating. Little sign here of the soi-disant characteristics of Britishness or Englishness that often get such people so dewy-eyed. No sense of tolerance, respect, humour, but instead the purest venom. Contempt for Kember's religious faith, scorn for his "selfishness" in "putting lives at risk", and the inevitable nonsense about how much "taxpayers' money" had been spent in rescuing the three. One could almost smell the real ale with which these people would be washing down their small-mindedness.

On, then, to the unhappy little gathering in Trafalgar Square. Notable for the excitement it had generated among the knuckle-dragging classes , what was interesting was the apparent engagement between the organiser, Peter Risdon, and Ismaeel Haneef of the Muslim Action Committee. The howls of protest at such dialogue from Risdon's racist congregation were as predictable, and revealing, as the minute turnout.

Greasy pole

Yesterday, I was a slimy mollusc, today merely a lowly insect. But I am now linked from the awesome, all-new Chicken Yoghurt!

Who's going to be in the remake of this?

We are all war criminals unless we stop this

From Chris Floyd. Read it and weep.

In vino veritas, again

The third anniversary of the US-led rape of Iraq has given renewed popularity to the sport of Hitchens-checking. For this we must thank not only the roly-poly entertainer himself, but also our friends at Hitchens Watch, who are daily uncovering vintage nuggets of his pure PNAC-inspired bollocks on Iraq which would be risibly ironic were the subject not such a hideous crime.

Inspired by HW, I have been pottering about during a sleepless night caused by a bad cold, and found this beauty from November 2002. As Tubby admits, "part of the charm of the regime-change argument ...is that it depends on premises and objectives that cannot, at least by the administration, be publicly avowed." Helpfully, Hitch puts his boozy candour at the disposal of those who might, in late '02, be guessing as to what those premises and objectives might be.

"Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway."

Oh OK. So, no need to invade then? All that stuff you've hawked round over the past three years about the "threat" posed by Saddam was either irrelevant or a lie. So why are all those people dying, Chris? Do tell.

"To suggest that these consequences—Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two—to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business. (I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.)"

Sorry Chris, not with you. You did mention the O-word, did I get that right? And you also reckon we can prevent Sunni-Shia rivalry, social chaos, etc.? And please - Chris - spare me the knee-jerk patronising reply in those cut-glass vowels of yours, would you? Be a love.

"Once this self-evident point has been appreciated it becomes a matter of making a virtue of necessity. If an intervention helps rescue Iraq from mere anarchy and revenge, some of the potential virtues are measurable in advance. The recuperation of the Iraqi oil industry represents the end of the Saudi monopoly, and we know that there are many Wolfowitzians who yearn for this but cannot prudently say so in public. The mullahs in Iran hate America more than they hate Saddam, while Iranian public opinion—notice how seldom "the Iranian street" is mentioned by peaceniks—takes a much more pro-American view. It's hard to picture the disappearance of the Saddam regime as anything but an encouragement to civil and democratic forces in Tehran, as well as in Bahrain, Qatar, and other gulf states that are experimenting with democracy and women's rights. Turkey will be wary about any increase in Kurdish autonomy (another good cause by the way), but even the Islamists in Turkey are determined to have a closer association with the European Union, and the EU has made it clear that Turkey's own Kurds must be granted more recognition before this can occur. One might hope that no American liberal would want to demand any less."

Well at least he was right about the oil.

The world's gone mad

Man walks into The Ivy and orders a shit sandwich.

What was that about freedom of speech?

So the famous "tolerance" on which Middle England prides itself has limits. Say what you like about muslims, foreigners, religion, but leave Winston Churchill alone. The statue of the wartime leader wearing a straitjacket, erected by a mental health charity to highlight the stigma surrounding depression, with which he suffered, has been quietly removed following a chorus of complaints from his family, the good people of Norwich and the Daily Express.

In stamping on the charity's freedom of expression, critics of the statue have performed a valuable service. Not only have they given the lie to all that "freedom of speech" bollocks trotted out by racists last month, they have also articulated perfectly the point the charity was trying to make in the first place. Namely that the stigma surrounding mental illness remains as strong in 2006 as ever. We now know that certain people regard a public reminder that a revered figure such as Churchill suffered with depression as an insult; would the outrage have been the same had the issue been cancer?

The President's been simian a little odd all week

Thanks to Andrew Bartlett for the latest evidence.

What IS the truth about the Monkey family?

From today's Daily Mail: "Their affliction is grotesque, disturbing, and like something out of a Victorian freak show. They crawl on hands and feet like animals, but with the swift agility of circus gymnasts. Their speech is a primitive babble...a Turkish scientist quoted by the programme goes so far as to claim that the family are some kind of genetic throwback, a "missing link" to our pre-human ancestors."

"Uner Tan, of Cukurova University Medical School, believes the family represent a case of what he calls "backwards evolution". He says the children's quadrupedal gait, primitive language and impaired hand skills are all throwbacks to our ape-like ancestors."

"Astonishingly, he declares: "This syndrome can be considered a live model for human evolution.""

I wish I was deaf

Then I wouldn't have to hear shit like this. I'm not sure what I hate most: her dull, lifeless, poor-man's-india.arie-lift music; the way this stuff gets marketed to death by a music industry that is terrified it won't exist in 10 years; or the 30-something cunts who buy it, think it's "soul" just because the middle-class, English Literature graduate's dad is black, and listen to it in their cosy flat with their partner, when they meet their cunty friends for Sunday brunch in All Bar One, and at the fucking gym. More cunts.

Oh, by the way, this is the motherfucking 200th post.

I hope Melanie Phillips gets cancer

Spot the difference...

Sugababes vs. Arctic Monkeys

I can't work out whether this is cool, or just knowingly funny.

Dig deep for the lecturers

As a humble academic, I face the unpalatable prospect of taking industrial action as part of a national pay dispute between the higher education teaching unions and our employers, beginning with a one-day strike on 7 March. As the professionals responsible for educating future generations of graduates and postgraduates, we are paid between £24,352 and £37,513; our pay rose, in real terms, by 6.6 per cent between 1994 and 2003, compared with the following real terms increases for comparable groups:

Public sector average: +12%

Personnel, training and industrial relations managers +23%

Managers/senior officials in government (HEO to senior principal/grade 6) +31%

ICT professionals +22%

Medical practitioners +27%

Secondary education teaching professionals +12%

Chartered and certified accountants +12%

[Source: New Earnings Survey (series)]

"The shortfall of teaching funding has badly hit the salaries of academic staff, which have shown practically no increase in real terms over two decades." Tony Blair, speaking to Universities UK, 14 January 2004.

Lecturer pay was cited by university vice-chancellors as one of the key reasons behind their support for top-up fees, and committed to allocate at least a third of the extra income to lecturers' salaries.

More info, and details of how you can support our claim for fair pay, here.

Folk heroes

It's hard not to root for the gang who stole £50 million this week. While there's the little matter of the depot manager and his family who were traumatised in the robbery, there is a general, quiet sense of the British almost hoping they get away with it. Arrests after our heroes, eager to start earning interest on the loot, walked into the local bank with a big bag marked SWAG, adhere strictly to the comic-book discourse of bungling crooks. The trauma of the manager, his wife and 8-year-old son, weighed against the lives devastated by the Enron thieves, puts the Kent job firmly in the category of "good luck to 'em".

Which raises the question of why we tend to brand certain figures as either heroes or, literally in this case, villains, with no attempt to shade in more detail in between. Consider too the way that our soldiers fighting in Iraq are similarly divvied up: heroes (usually when they're dead) or villains (despite the protestations of the Defence Secretary). When they're not earning posthumous medals, or beating the shit out of unarmed civilians, British soldiers in combat are, to all intents and purposes, invisible in the public sphere.

While the flag-in-the-front-yard jingoism of the US sits ill with us Brits, it is odd that - whatever one's views on the war - the young men and women who are shipped out to kill for oil remain faceless cyphers to us, rather than real people not much older than my own kids.

BBC panders to fashionable attitudes on race

As someone who works at a university, and has had to deal with complaints of racism against members of my department at a previous job, I was interested to hear a programme about diversity awareness courses when I was driving back from a walk with the dog today. Radio Four, just after The World This Weekend? Bound to be a thoughtful, illuminating examination of the subject. I rapidly discovered, on the contrary, that the programme was inspired by the sort of fashionable, racist political-correctness-gone-mad lies one would normally expect to see smeared across the pages of Her Majesty's Press.

The polemic's central theme was that such courses are divisive, and seems to suggest that the UK is about to see an increase of training along the lines of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes programme. Good - about time too. I know from personal experience how little sensible advice there is for managers trying to deal with racist incidents at work, while the sound of racist scumbags complaining, in their newspaper columns, pamphlets and blogs, about being "gagged" grows more deafening by the week.

The faithful don't deserve our hatred, just our pity

The world's most famous bloggeur, Fuckbuddy, recently spotted his dream headline. I have to admit, this looked like a dream headline of mine: Five crucifies Dominik Diamond. Turns out that ugly, beardy twat Dominik (eugh) Diamond ("best known to television viewers as a frequent pundit on Sky One showbusiness documentaries") likes nothing more than going to the Phillipines, not for this, but to join his fellow xtians in re-enacting the crucifixion of Jesus H Christ. What a cunt.

A great night for music

Who could have failed to cheer KT Tunstall to the echo last night as the feisty wee lassie from Bonnie Scotland walked away with the Brit Award for Best Woman? The Caledonian rock chick gave a mesmerising performance of some song or other, and her place in the pantheon of rock greats, alongside Lulu and her out of Texas, is surely guaranteed.

The call's coming from inside your knickers

Now I'm as likely to form an obsessive relationship with some mouthwatering ubervixen off the telly as the next bloke, but every so often someone comes along and raises the bar for the rest of us. Be afraid, Nina Hossein, be very afraid...

Britain's descent into madness

Smoking yesterday, glorifying terrorism today. Is there no part of the British way of life™ that Tony and the self-appointed Islington elite will leave untouched? While you still can, savour the images above, and gaze wistfully upon these.

I wish I was dead

More Californian lunacy spreads like bird flu: as smoking becomes an at-home or outdoor activity in England, I'm thinking of hastening the end of my sentence on this lump of rock by upping my habit to 200 a day.

Look into an airy ring and what does one find?

Well, scientists have been doing just that, and discovered what some of us suspected all along - that spacetime is not as foamy as we thought. You know the way that space is, like, totally composed of ever-changing arrangements of bubbles, called spacetime foam? Yes you do - the uncertainty principle blatantly allows virtual particles to spontaneously pop into and out of existence, remember?

Yeah, so anyway, these scientists have observed an airy ring around the quasar-like object PKS1413 + 135, and reckon that the ring limits the amount of light scattering that could be caused by spacetime foam. The quasar is 1.2 gigaparsecs – or about 4 billion light years – away from the Milky Way, allowing the physicists to accumulate the effects of the fluctuations over a distance, necessary for amplifying the tiny effects of the foam.

Y. Jack Ng, member of the team that observed the ring, was like, “The detection of spacetime foam will give us a glimpse of the ultimate structure of spacetime,” and all, “The observational results may also point physicists to the correct theory of quantum gravity.”

Mental!

Why Christopher Hitchens always was a cunt

Are you an erstwhile admirer who can't work out what happened to Hitch? Nothing happened, my friend. This guy's worked it out -

"The contradictions and tortured logic of his opinions only seem incoherent when viewed through the lens of political thought. Don't bother. The point is not to be right, or fair, or even consistent. It's all about branding: the book jacket poses surrounded by empty glasses and full ashtrays, the unruly look, the pugnacious attitude. It's about being different, unique, memorable - and "the blending of quite discrepant images." Pay attention, pundits manqué."

Thanks to the succulent Sonic (for Hitchens Watch is he) for serving up the link. Now I can just settle down and enjoy dismissing Hitch as a big fat cunt.

Scott Burgess, cunt

He calls his blog The Daily Ablution, suggesting that reading it results in some sort of cleansing or purification. Unfortunately, like washing with any kind of shit, DA has precisely the opposite effect. However that hasn't stopped Burgess from becoming a poster boy for racists since his part in the sacking of junior Guardian staffer Dilpazier Aslam last year, on account of Aslam's membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir(So much for "freedom of speech"). Burgess counts the usual suspects among his fans, thus ensuring his daily emissions reach a large readership. Which makes it all the more surprising that he hasn't been found out yet.

The Bag Lady of Fleet Street cites one of his latest cries for help as "magnificent", so let's take her at her word and give it a close reading.

The topic is the demolition of claims to membership of the muslim "mainstream community" by Faiz Siddiqui, convenor of the Muslim Action Committee, a barrister and principal of Hijaz College, an Islamic university in Warwickshire, during an interview on yesterday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

Burgess starts by claiming that Siddiqui presents himself "as the fabled "moderate Muslim"", before gleefully quoting Siddiqui dismissing the very notion nine years ago. Just two problems there, Scotty. First, "moderate muslim" was never uttered by Siddiqui in his interview. He was, in refusing to condone those who had called for beheading etc. at last week's protest, distancing mainstream muslim opinion from such "extreme views". In the 1997 interview, by contrast, he was responding to a question about western political interpretation of the recently-elected President Katemi, as a moderate - again, the interviewer's words, not Siddiqui's.

Two interviews, two entirely different subjects, a word introduced by Siddiqui on neither occasion. If this were an undergraduate essay, Burgess might already be looking at a fail, having used such sophistry to concoct the basis for his argument. At no point does Siddiqui make any claim to moderation, but merely refers to mainstream Islam and distances it from figures like Abu Hamza - exactly the sort of thing that the racists are always demanding. Siddiqui is, on the contrary, presented as a muslim activist in opposition to a Metropolitan Police superintendent, which makes Burgess' "exposé" distinctly, like, yawnsville. No matter, let's move on.

He then quotes Siddiqui - highly selectively - as describing the US as "the Pharoah of today" and the EU as a "devil". However the Pharoah reference follows on from his response to a question about Iran-US relations, which he described as "tension between truth and falsehood. For every Pharaoh there will be a Moses. And for the Pharaoh of today, which is the United States, there will have to be a Moses."

And the devil reference? "a better devil, because Europe has a culture, has a tradition and a history. Therefore, the American officials feel vulnerable and are frightened of any interaction between Iran and European Union.... I think Germany can be the best ally for Iran." Sounds like the devil you know, more a figure of speech, but either way, for an Islamic activist to describe the EU, in reference to Iranian foreign policy, is hardly the sort of swivel-eyed lunacy which Burgess is claiming.

Burgess then concludes by juxtaposing Siddiqui's approval of Ayatollah Khomeini with a particularly fire-and-brimstone quote from the old man himself. Again, doesn't really amount to much, since it's like putting Saint Tony next to a sermon from Ian Paisley.

Tampon Teabag informs me that they prefer not to nominate bloggers for their popular Cunt of the Month awards. Pity, as Burgess oozes cuntishness from every pore, and his lies are evidently getting halfway around the world before they're exposed.

Cartoon protests and freedom of speech

After much thought I've decided I'm definitely on the side of Itchy and Scratchy.

The other Man in Black

Walk the Line finally opened here in Airstrip One this weekend. Hugely enjoyable, smokin' music, great cars, a good night out. The headlines: Joaquin Phoenix just about retains the cred and cool he's built up in films like Gladiator, Buffalo Soldiers, Signs and The Village, although he does seem to need the loo rather urgently whenever he's performing onstage; Reese Witherspoon turns out, against all previous evidence, to be a good actress; the opening and closing scenes, of Johnny Cash's seminal 1968 performance at Folsom Prison, remind us that country, like all music, is best played LOUD. But the coolest character in the film is Luther Perkins, Cash's guitarist and friend, played almost silently by Dan John Miller. Miller fronts "twisted art-rock country" band Blanche and not only co-directed but played the priest in The White Stripes' Hotel Yorba video. In Line, Miller's character periodically steals the show, while his nerdy, white-bread demeanour is so authentic in the Folsom scenes it could almost be original footage.

The perfect Valentine's gift

Want to show your squeeze just how much you love her? Want a little gift that will get her in that special mood after dinner on the 14th? Then iTunes can help you out, with an album of wistful melodies by South Africa's very own Mister Romantic, Eugene Terreblanche. Never mind Italian or French; Die Tolbos reminds us that Afrikaans is the true language of lurve, in songs like Nie Om Digter Te Wees, Sandspruit Se Bloekoms and the boat-floating Hoe Ver Moot Ek Loop. All together now: AWB my baby, my one and only baby...

Mister Cancer™ will be representing himself

Long-time readers will recall that cars and cancer™ don't really go well together. Well the long arm of the Safety Camera Partnership has finally caught up with your correspondent, and tomorrow I have to go to the Magistrate's Court with my 12 points and one other offence to be taken into consideration in tow, where the outcome of my trial will almost certainly be a six-month ban. We'll bring you the verdict as it is announced, or a bit later depending whether I stop off to buy a new bike on the way home... UPDATE: Case adjourned till April.

David as Tony's cute baby brother

The yoghurt is particularly fine at the moment, and this inch-perfect characterisation of Thatcher's bastard offspring is sublime...

Cancer at the heart of our intellectual life

i hope you get cancer™ had its first academic paper published today. Woohoo!

Black Box Records Last 90 Minutes Of Hot-Air Balloon Crash

The Onion can still do it when they try...

Marsh gas

"A month ago, Jodie Marsh was just another Jordan wannabe. But her turn on Celebrity Big Brother proved there's far more to her than that."

What, like desperate insecurity? Self-delusion? Hypocrisy? In one of the laziest, most cynical pieces of "journalism" on the whole Celebrity Big Brother circus, Laura Barton tries desperately hard to present Marsh as some sort of post-feminist icon, as a victim of "the tabloids".

"Big Brother, Marsh says through drags on a cigarette, was full of "the most fake, hideous people I've ever met", and her crucial error, she thinks, was going on the show without a game plan. "I was like, do I need one? I just thought I'd be, 'Hello ... here I am!'" Arguably, it was Marsh's naivety that led to her downfall. Having initially charmed the nation through a fly-on-the-wall series, she saw no reason to change the formula, and the fact that nearly all the other celebrities on the show were also vying for public redemption - and might do their best to quash her - had not really occurred to her. "I'd got to the end of my tether with the negative press. There's only so much you can take of every single day hearing yourself being called a slag or a bitch or a slapper or ugly or thick or whatever it is they're calling me. You kind of get to a point where you just don't want it any more.""

Where to begin? "Fake, hideous people"? Er - pot and kettle? "She was, she says, just looking for a way to stop people calling her a slag in the street." Hmm, yes maybe putting yourself on your umpteenth reality TV show and talking all the time a) about yourself and b) about sex ain't the way to do it.

"Recently, Marsh became brunette again, after years of being blonde and blue-eyed. "For so long I hid behind the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Now I feel like I've done it, I've done what I set out to achieve, now I can just go back to being me.""

Achieve? Dying your hair counts as being you does it?

""I could've been a lawyer by now, I could've gone to uni. But I've taken the quickest and easiest route to making as much money as I can, and having as much fun as I can, and I don't regret that." She has, she points out, recently bought herself a splendid new home, she has worked in Australia and Cyprus and Barbados, she has made a lot of money and written a book. "You can't knock that.""

Fine. So shut the fuck up about it. She closes by digging up the standard bleat about women not being "allowed" to talk about sex, conveniently ignoring the point that it wasn't the subject of her conversation to which people objected, but the sheer, mind-numbing, deadly dull monotony of talking about nothing else - apart from when she laid into others. I'm no psychiatrist, but I've met people like Marsh, people who - no fault of their own, admittedly - try to hide their seething insecurity by going around looking like a dog's dinner, talking about themselves to the exclusion of everything else, and who have a heart like a fossilised rabbit turd. Hideous.

Where is "David Duff"?

The pyjamahadeen hold a tense vigil, anxiously awaiting word that one of their foremost brethren is safe and well. Around the world, lonely men in their underpants leave Pot Noodles untouched, clicking again and again on that link, refusing to believe the 404 that greets their tear-stained eyes. I am David Duff is offline. In a nicely postmodern turn of events, just as a "non-celebrity" is crowned Queen of Celebrity Big Brother, so a pastiche blog has become, in less than a month, entertaining, witty and valued where its original is obvious, boorish and samey. For anyone familar with both, the probable conclusion is that the anonymous imitator found the demands of creating his or her inch-perfect parody too time-consuming. A great shame, whatever the reason, and we still hold out of for the safe restoration of IADD to our screens....

7/7

Well raise my rent, sister! Those lovely Tampon Teabag people have tagged little old i hope you get cancer™ in a 7x7 kind of a way. It would be churlish not to accept, so... Seven things to do before I die

1. See my kids grow up happy
2. Live in New York City
3. Do a PhD
4. Get off the happy pills
5. Fall in love with the dark eyed, olive-skinned Ms Right
6. Earn money from writing
7. Put the rubbish out

Seven things I cannot do

1. Give a shit any more
2. Afford to buy shit I don't need
3. Stop smoking
4. Stop swearing
5. Tell jokes
6. Drive once they ban me next week for speeding
7. Understand why we put up with so much crap in Britain (e.g. our capital "city", the monarchy, permanent Thatcherite government, the Daily Mail)

Seven things that attract me to...

1. Big dark eyes
2. Glossy hair
3. Big dark everything else
4. Did I mention big dark eyes?
5. Big dark sense of humour
6. Smoking
7. Swearing

Seven things I say

1. If it's any consolation
2. It'll be our little secret
3. Fuckin
4. I think I'll be the judge of that, don't you?
5. And I suppose if they said jump off a cliff you'd do that too, would you?
6. Mocha no cream
7. What do you mean, pregnant?

Seven books that I love

1. PowerBook G4
2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
3. Molesworth
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four
5. Handbook of Public Relations by R L Heath
6. The Communist Manifesto
7. A Brief History of Time

Seven movies that I've loved

1. Fargo
2. Bad Day at Black Rock
3. Double Indemnity
4. High Fidelity
5. The War Room
6. Anchorman
7. Manhattan

Seven people to tag

1. Hutton
2. Hynes
3. Marcela
4. Deaths Goldfish
5. Snotty
6. The Preston Street Gang
7. Drano

But guys, this is my job!

Who'd'a thunk it? The nation's students (well, 648 of them) despise their lecturers, not least for their excrutiating ingratiating techniques. One said: "They pick up 'street' information from the media and decide they understand today's youth. It is pathetic to talk about these things to us in the hope of seeming knowledgeable and cool." Another said: "They try to be funny - I'm not at clown college." One particularly aggrieved student said: "In short, every aspect of their measly little lives irritates me." I know you are - but what am I?

ITV in paedo watersports horror

So there I was, discussing TV branding, scheduling and promotion with some of my students today, when I asked them to consider the merits of ITV's recent rebranding exercise. One bright young lady asked what the image above depicted. "Well," I replied, with increasing disbelief, "it seems to be an unidentified man throwing water over some children." The group went quiet, except for the odd titter. Some marketing type from Britain's worst TV channel said: "We aim to move perception of ITV from terrestrial broadcaster to content brand, making it fully fit for a multichannel, multi-platform world." Yeah. Anyway, Simon "Slappy" Shaps, the pint-sized director of television at BWTVC, had the gall to say the new look for ITV1 was designed to be "very warm and inviting, not scary". Well I'm afraid you're wrong, Napoleon. That sort of thing - to a parent, or any decent person - is indeed scary. Very scary. Must we pump this perverted filth into the living rooms of hard-working Britons?

Cancer for the cure

I thought this was a joke. Evidently I was wrong.

First candidate for Cunt of the Year

What a cunt.

The Koran had it right

"He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh." In which case Arlington Hynes, Pete Burns and Gorgeous George can pack in the flying lessons now, for nearly making me shit my pants laughing in an otherwise hellish week.

If the Lib Dems are the new Tories...

...with all the drinkers and punters, and the Tories are New Labour, and Labour is the Thatcherite Tory party, then... ...how many people in the picture were wearing hats?

Why the US will attack Iran, sooner or later

"Our national security is linked in innumerable ways to accessible, secure, and preferably cheap energy." So says Lewis Lehrman, well-connected banker, long-standing business partner of President George W. Bush, former Iran-Contra collaborator with Oliver North, and member of the board of directors of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In his 2003 article for The Weekly Standard, Lehrman makes the strategic economic argument for US access to cheap, stable sources of energy. Primarily an attack on the "environmental left", Lehrman's piece also leaves no doubt as to the strategic importance the US currently attaches to energy. "The American people face fundamental choices about energy, on the supply side and the demand side," Lehrman declares, "which will decide the way they will live their daily lives for generations to come." He points to the link between the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s and the price of energy, and draws an immediate conclusion: "Cheap energy should once again be a key goal of economic policy." He also rejects out of hand the whole idea of sustainable development, arguing on the contrary that building - not just maintaining, but building - energy supply is a prerequisite for economic growth: "Growing the supply of energy slightly in excess of demand contributes to full employment policies...cheap and growing energy supplies are a crucial part of an effective policy of full employment at rising real wages." Not only does Lehrman dismiss the energy rhetoric of the Europeans as "national suicide", but he posits objective factors such as geography which make the US a special case when it comes to needing more energy than others. Just in case we weren't getting the point, Lehrman spells it out: "A policy of restoring greater energy independence and maintaining inexpensive energy is not only possible but necessary--if Americans truly desire increased national security, a vibrant basic materials industry, and rapid economic growth." Such a policy, he adds, would include "a concerted national trade and security policy to prevent monopolistic collusion by foreign energy producers, especially in crude oil--and thus to restore more U.S. energy independence. Since collusion is not tolerated in any domestic industry, why must we tolerate collusion abroad against a vital U.S. interest, especially by oil-producing countries whose political existence depends to a large extent on U.S. military power?" We may assume Lehrman's views, in an article carried on the PNAC website, from one of W's oldest allies and a former partner in his oil business, represent the thinking behind US policy. Given this, given what we know about the US adventure in Iraq, is it in any way conceivable that the United States will tolerate Iranian defiance indefinitely?

Margaret Thatcher on ice

Well, not quite, but the inevitable has happened and Mother of Blair is to be immortalised in a musical.

Words of the year

Those crazy kids at the American Dialect Society have been at it again, identifying those words and phrases which entered the lexicon in 2005. My personal favourites are:

Heck of a job: catch phrase coined by President Bush. Brown-out: the poor handling of an emergency. Muffin top: the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans. Patent troll: a person or business, especially a lawyer, who applies for or owns a patent with no intention of developing the product but with every intention of launching lawsuits against patent infringers. Jump the couch: to exhibit strange or frenetic behavior. Inspired by the couchbouncing antics of Tom Cruise on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in May. It derives from an earlier term, jump the shark, meaning to (irretrievably) diminish in quality; to outlast public interest or popular support. Metrospiritual: an unspecific, cosmopolitan, and expansive view of spirituality. Inspired by metrosexual.

The 2005 Word of the Year, inexplicably, is truthiness, the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true, while podcast was voted the most useful new word. Previous WotY winners are: 2004: Red/blue/purple states (my favourite is pajamahadeen, bloggers who challenge and factcheck traditional media) 2003: Metrosexual 2002: WMD 2001: 9/11 (my choice: impeachment nostalgia, longing for the superficial news of the Clinton era.) 2000: Chad 1999: Y2K 1998: e (as prefix) 1997: Millennium bug 1996: Mom (as in Soccer Mom) 1995: World Wide Web 1994: Cyber 1993: Information superhighway 1992: Not! 1991: Mother of all... 1990: Bushlips

The golden age of TV is right here, right now

Anyone who doubted that Big Brother represents the finest TV gold will have been silenced by the live task on last night's Celebrity Big Brother. The 10 Z-listers were ordered onto podia, where they had to place themselves in order of celebrity. Now, i hope you get cancer™ knows, from many long years working in this crazy business we call show, just how needy and insecure these types are. Talk about going for the jugular! Seeing them torn by the twin impulses to squirm in agony, or to rip each others' eyes out was just too delicious. But seeing "fake celeb" Chantelle Houghton kid her way into the bosom of her "real" celeb housemates, thus turning their own vanity on its head, was sublime. Haven't laughed so much in ages. Unmissable.

I've got ginger hair, admits Kennedy

Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, tonight publicly admitted what had become an open secret in the Westminster village: "I have a problem, and that problem is ginger hair." The 46-year old stunned Westminster in a bid to quell the growing tide of gossip about his personal life, and his political future. In an emotional statement before a hastily-assembled group of reporters, Kennedy further admitted he'd sought the answer in a bottle, before asking for professional help.

"I learned the hard way of the need to face up to this medical problem, one that is dealt with successfully by many others on a daily basis," he said. "I chose not to acknowledge it publicly before in this way because, if at all possible, I wanted to overcome it privately."

Ginger hair, though far less prevalent than in earlier times, still affects a substantial minority of Mr Kennedy's fellow Scots. As yet, however, there is no cure.

Immigration and the nanny state

Typical. Just when somebody takes a sensible approach to immigration, there's some jackbooted hippy ready to piss all over the idea.

Not the best start to the year

Man-flu. It hit yesterday, and I've been flat on my back with it ever since. Sleeping, sweating, aching, dizzy. Rubbish. Anyway I hope your new year is going better, and that 2006 brings you, you know, stuff.

Arise, Sir Cunt!

HE'S DONE IT!!!! The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has cruised to victory over his fellow nominees to be named i hope you get cancer™ Cunt of the Year 2005. Early voting saw David "From the Tap" Duff streak ahead, but Sir Ian never lost the commanding lead he built up over Duff, Scott Sala, Melanie Phillips and That Bloke From the Picture Loans Advert after the opening weekend of voting. Sir Ian, who presided over the killing of an innocent man, a cover-up and an aggressive spin campaign against the dead man's family and supporters, won with a massive 58 per cent of the vote. Sir Ian, you truly are Cunt of the Year, and we salute you.

Uzbek torture "routine" - Foreign Office

The latest Human Rights Annual Report, by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, catalogues widespread and systematic abuses of human rights by the Uzbeki government, and concludes that "torture and other forms of ill treatment are routine, particularly in the early stages of custody". Amid the diplomatic babble of condemning this and encouraging that, the report makes very clear the scale and nature of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, the failure of the regime to honour its international commitments, and the UK policy of "critical engagement." Chapter 7, dealing with human rights, international law and the "war against terror", sets out the UK's position (my italics):

We observe UK law in all our contacts with other states. There have been repeated allegations in the last year about the use by the UK of information from third countries that may have been obtained through torture. The Government has consistently made clear that it never uses torture to obtain information and would never instigate others to use torture. We condemn the use of torture unreservedly and are working hard to eradicate the practice worldwide. We accept, however, that when we receive intelligence from our partners we cannot always be sure of the circumstances under which that intelligence was gathered. The prime purpose for intelligence is to avert threats to British citizens’ lives. Where we receive reliable intelligence on such threats we would be irresponsible to reject it. We do not take intelligence at face value; our intelligence agencies evaluate the reliability of all information they receive. They consider, for instance, where the intelligence comes from; whether the source was in detention; and the source’s motivation and record.

So, on at least one of Craig Murray's fundamental points - the routine use of torture to obtain confessions - the FCO is in full agreement, and as Murray pointed out in his Radio 4 interview yesterday, the scale of the problem is such that information extracted from detainees is highly unlikely to have been gained without torture. And in the FCO's own words above, the Government condemns the use of torture except where it uses the confessions extracted by such acts. Classic Third Wayism, classic Blair: trying to have one's cake and eat it, trying to appear "critically engaged" (trans: say one thing, do the opposite).

BBC ignores torture memos, New York Times reports them

The compliant, post-Hutton BBC still appears to be ignoring Craig Murray's campaign to force the Government into the open about its complicity in torture. Fortunately, the New York Times is not so squeamish.

Her Majesty send a big shout out to Sir Tim Westwood

Or so I thought.

US & UK support use of torture to gain "inadmissible" evidence

Go here, here, here for more on how our Government is lying to us about its complicity in unimaginable acts of brutality and murder. As is so often the case, Lenin's Tomb and Chicken Yoghurt offer exceptionally clear coverage and analysis, while Blairwatch has full background and mp3s of Blair lying and Straw lying. 5am update: This site is showing a running update of blogs which have published Ambassador Murray's documents. Here is a message of thanks from Craig Murray: "Can I pass on my thanks to everyone who is posting the documents and making them public. You are striking a real blow for humanity and against the appalling decline in our civil liberties and standards. We have also proved that, as long as we have good people out there, technology now makes it impossible for Western governments and political establishments to bury the truth, no matter how much they control the mainstream media." Those memos from Ambassador Murray in full: Letter #1 Confidential FM Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray) TO FCO, Cabinet Office, DFID, MODUK, OSCE Posts, Security Council Posts 16 September 02 SUBJECT: US/Uzbekistan: Promoting Terrorism SUMMARY US plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism. Support to Karimov regime a bankrupt and cynical policy. DETAIL The Economist of 7 September states: "Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism." The Economist also spoke of "the growing despotism of Mr Karimov" and judged that "the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record". I agree. Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism. Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim. Again we are back in the area of the US accepting sham reform [a reference to my previous telegram on the economy]. In August media censorship was abolished, and theoretically there are independent media outlets, but in practice there is absolutely no criticism of President Karimov or the central government in any Uzbek media. State Department call this self-censorship: I am not sure that is a fair way to describe an unwillingness to experience the brutal methods of the security services. Similarly, following US pressure when Karimov visited Washington, a human rights NGO has been permitted to register. This is an advance, but they have little impact given that no media are prepared to cover any of their activities or carry any of their statements. The final improvement State quote is that in one case of murder of a prisoner the police involved have been prosecuted. That is an improvement, but again related to the Karimov visit and does not appear to presage a general change of policy. On the latest cases of torture deaths the Uzbeks have given the OSCE an incredible explanation, given the nature of the injuries, that the victims died in a fight between prisoners. But allowing a single NGO, a token prosecution of police officers and a fake press freedom cannot possibly outweigh the huge scale of detentions, the torture and the secret executions. President Karimov has admitted to 100 executions a year but human rights groups believe there are more. Added to this, all opposition parties remain banned (the President got a 98% vote) and the Internet is strictly controlled. All Internet providers must go through a single government server and access is barred to many sites including all dissident and opposition sites and much international media (including, ironically, waronterrorism.com). This is in essence still a totalitarian state: there is far less freedom than still prevails, for example, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. A Movement for Democratic Change or any judicial independence would be impossible here. Karimov is a dictator who is committed to neither political nor economic reform. The purpose of his regime is not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls. As a senior Uzbek academic told me privately, there is more repression here now than in Brezhnev's time. The US are trying to prop up Karimov economically and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is underway. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion. This policy is doomed to failure. Karimov is driving this resource-rich country towards economic ruin like an Abacha. And the policy of increasing repression aimed indiscriminately at pious Muslims, combined with a deepening poverty, is the most certain way to ensure continuing support for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They have certainly been decimated and disorganised in Afghanistan, and Karimov's repression may keep the lid on for years - but pressure is building and could ultimately explode. I quite understand the interest of the US in strategic airbases and why they back Karimov, but I believe US policy is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism but in the medium term it will promote it, as the Economist points out. And it can never be right to lower our standards on human rights. There is a complex situation in Central Asia and it is wrong to look at it only through a prism picked up on September 12. Worst of all is what appears to be the philosophy underlying the current US view of Uzbekistan: that September 11 divided the World into two camps in the "War against Terrorism" and that Karimov is on "our" side. If Karimov is on "our" side, then this war cannot be simply between the forces of good and evil. It must be about more complex things, like securing the long-term US military presence in Uzbekistan. I silently wept at the 11 September commemoration here. The right words on New York have all been said. But last week was also another anniversary - the US-led overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. The subsequent dictatorship killed, dare I say it, rather more people than died on September 11. Should we not remember then also, and learn from that too? I fear that we are heading down the same path of US-sponsored dictatorship here. It is ironic that the beneficiary is perhaps the most unreformed of the World's old communist leaders. We need to think much more deeply about Central Asia. It is easy to place Uzbekistan in the "too difficult" tray and let the US run with it, but I think they are running in the wrong direction. We should tell them of the dangers we see. Our policy is theoretically one of engagement, but in practice this has not meant much. Engagement makes sense, but it must mean grappling with the problems, not mute collaboration. We need to start actively to state a distinctive position on democracy and human rights, and press for a realistic view to be taken in the IMF. We should continue to resist pressures to start a bilateral DFID programme, unless channelled non-governmentally, and not restore ECGD cover despite the constant lobbying. We should not invite Karimov to the UK. We should step up our public diplomacy effort, stressing democratic values, including more resources from the British Council. We should increase support to human rights activists, and strive for contact with non-official Islamic groups. Above all we need to care about the 22 million Uzbek people, suffering from poverty and lack of freedom. They are not just pawns in the new Great Game. MURRAY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Letter #2 Confidential Fm Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray) To FCO 18 March 2003 SUBJECT: US FOREIGN POLICY SUMMARY 1. As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focussed on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth. DETAIL 2. Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom. 3. Uzbekistan's geo-strategic position is crucial. It has half the population of the whole of Central Asia. It alone borders all the other states in a region which is important to future Western oil and gas supplies. It is the regional military power. That is why the US is here, and here to stay. Contractors at the US military bases are extending the design life of the buildings from ten to twenty five years. 4. Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid - more than US aid to all of West Africa - is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov's vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He - and they - are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West? 5. I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging). 6. From Tashkent it is difficult to agree that we and the US are activated by shared values. Here we have a brutal US sponsored dictatorship reminiscent of Central and South American policy under previous US Republican administrations. I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and "dismantling the apparatus of terror… removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms". Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes. 7. I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan. MURRAY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Transcript of facsimile sent 25 March 2003 from the Foreign Office] From: Michael Wood, Legal Advisor Date: 13 March 2003 CC: PS/PUS; Matthew Kidd, WLD Linda Duffield UZBEKISTAN: INTELLIGENCE POSSIBLY OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE 1. Your record of our meeting with HMA Tashkent recorded that Craig had said that his understanding was that it was also an offence under the UN Convention on Torture to receive or possess information under torture. I said that I did not believe that this was the case, but undertook to re-read the Convention. 2. I have done so. There is nothing in the Convention to this effect. The nearest thing is article 15 which provides: "Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made." 3. This does not create any offence. I would expect that under UK law any statement established to have been made as a result of torture would not be admissible as evidence. [signed] M C Wood Legal Adviser --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Letter #3 CONFIDENTIAL FM TASHKENT (Ambassador Craig Murray) TO IMMEDIATE FCO TELNO 63 OF 220939 JULY 04 INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE SUMMARY 1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror. 2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results. 3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state. DETAIL 4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice. 5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture. 6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood. 7. Sir Michael Jay's circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department. 8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened. 9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true - the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured. 10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact 11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention; "The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights." While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present question also. 12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." 13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform. 14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment. 15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services. 16. I have been considering Michael Wood's legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material. 17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael's views on this. 18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit. 19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale. MURRAY

Vote! Vote! Vote!

You have less than 24 hours to vote for your nominee in the first ever i hope you get cancer™ Cunt of the Year awards. At 6pm GMT tomorrow voting will close and Cunt of the Year will be decided. So whether you're backing current favourite Sir Ian Blair, Melanie Phillips, That Bloke Off The Picture Loans Advert, David Duff or Scott Sala, make your voice heard!!!

Lie, hate...

So let me get this right. One shameless self-publicist sucks off another so they can both go around saying "look at me! I'm, like, so against poverty!" Altogether now...

Seasonally self-indulgent post about music

i hope you get cancer™ momentarily departs from its lofty public service ideals to do what many other blogs get away with, to tell you what music it's currently listening to. In no particular order, current faves include: The Stooges - The Stooges (why did it take an old punk rocker like me until I was in my 40s to realise how fantastic The Stooges were?) Son House - John the Revelator Dennis Brown Presents Prince Jammy - UMOJA/20th Century Dubwise The League Unlimited Orchestra - Love & Dancing Luxuria Music and DIfm Modern Jazz, the best internet radio stations I've heard. We now return to our regular programming.

i hope you get cancer's review of 2005

On 30 December 2004, this blog took its first stumbling steps. What better time, therefore, to look back at 2005 through the eyes of some of Hell Is Other People/i hope you get cancer™'s leading writers. December, inevitably, was given over to mawkish reflections on the tsunami and on 2004 itself. Having ended 2004 resolving, mawkishly, to be less self-centred following the tsunami, 2005 started as it would continue, with a whiny bleat about my dead iPod. In February, I coined a new word, McAdemic, to describe those, like me, who toil at the coalface of Blair's vision for higher education. Of more significance was the opening of our Ghetto Names Collection point, an immediate hit with our US readers, who seem to Google little else. In March I was too busy to post, and April was little better. In May, I posted a little bit of reportage from my home town's Masturbation Mile and, talking of wankers, Melanie Phillips darkened our doors for the first time the following month. The London bombings on 7 July brought Phillips and her fellow bigots crawling out of the woodwork in droves, and it was your super soaraway Hell Is Other People that first pointed out that Melanie Phillips is a racist scumbag. Another future Cunt of the Year nominee made his HIOP debut the same month, using the London dead as masturbation fodder for their Londonistan racist fantasies. Having reported the Guardian's early revelation that the Metropolitan police admitted to his family that Jean Charles de Menezes had been neither wearing a "bulky jacket" nor jumped the barrier before they shot him dead, HIOP continued to decode the Met's aggressive crisis management during August. A third CoTY nominee was born. September saw HIOP get its collar felt by none other than the Pentagon, but the month belonged to our friends at Lenin's Tomb, for their exemplary reporting of Hurrican Katrina. The first HIOP podcast came out in October, followed by its debut on iTunes in November. As the year draws to a close, HIOP has a new title, and our handful of readers eagerly awaits next week's announcement of the i hope you get cancer™ Cunt of the Year. Will Sir Ian Blair romp home, or could one of his fellow four nominees shoot him in the back? You'll find out right here.

And if you don't believe me...

Christmas algebra

Here's a little holiday brain-teaser for you. One of 2005's more ridiculous showbiz liaisons was reportedly between redundant rock-widow Courtney Love and MOR TV comic Steve Coogan. It prompts one to wonder which other equivalent personalities might make a similarly odd couple. If Courtney Love is to Steve Coogan as X is to Y, what else could be X? And Y?

The semiology of decadence

Guy Debord called it the society of the spectacle. Jean Beaudrillard coined the notion of the simulacrum. Roland Barthes and other 20th century thinkers helped us make sense of a world of signs, of socially-constructed myths. You and I are living in it now, friend, and in this hall-of-mirrors world where we engage in a "reality" which has no referent, good to see that the ultimate symbol of decadence, our very own royal family, is as able to delude itself as easily as the rest of us. Charles is reported to be seriously considering calling himself King George VII, "to avoid unhappy associations with some of the bloodiest periods in the monarchy’s history." The Times goes on: "The name Charles is regarded as jinxed in some royal circles. Charles I was the only monarch to be executed. His beheading in 1649, after the English Civil War, brought about the short-lived republic under Oliver Cromwell. Charles II, the son of Charles I, returned to the throne at the Restoration in 1660, after spending 18 years in exile overseas, but was mocked as the Merry Monarch because he had a string of mistresses, including the orange-seller Nell Gwyn. There is sensitivity in royal circles about Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, who was known as Charles III by his supporters. Despite his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, he is still seen as a Scottish romantic figure." Talk about missing the point. Never mind the anti-democratic absurdity of an hereditary monarchy, the obscene waste of our money. Let's worry instead about whether we call it a shit or a turd. This is how seriously Charles takes the rest of us. Link: Republic - the Campaign for an Elected Head of State

i hope you get what you wished for this xmas...

Bingo.

The new title has brought the first cancer nazi out of the woodwork. Amanda's all, "i don't want to come across as "oohhh...pity me!" or anything like that--but please consider another name for your blog. i'm not offended easily, but this crosses the line..." And I'm like, actually "oohhh...pity me!" is precisely how she comes across. OK, her young husband's illness, like anyone's, is crap with a capital c, and i'm sure the blog is therapeutic, cathartic, or whatever - but shit happens, you know? Cancer killed my mum, but so what, if it hadn't been that it would have been something else. Like maybe Amanda's hubby should think about losing a bit of weight if he wants to see 30. And then - with truly breathtaking hypocrisy - the not-easily-offended one hijacks a Maya Angelou poem about fucking slavery in the name of her cancer-wank!

New name - same great flavor

Helllo me again. had a bit of a bad night last night as you'll have seen. Hence the new name for this blog - rather catchy, i'm sure you'll agree. In other news, have discovered the joys of winding up the world's worst bloggers*. *Note for the literal-minded: This is a rhetorical device. Everybody knows that this and this battle for the title of world's worst blog.

The world in mourning

MONDAY, 19 DECEMBER 2005, 14:54GMT - Hell Is Other People can remember exactly where it was when the news came through that the Mac version of the world's worst web browser is being discontinued. Outside having a mocha and a fag. Lucky I've been using Safari since 2003 then.

A breath of fresh air

Evidently Hutton's gone all gay because some of his posh friends have had a go at him about having a picture of Australia's foremost intellectual smeared all over his front page. So he moved it. Hell Is Other People will never surrender to such politically-correct censorship (insert previous copy on chattering classes, Tony's cronies, finger-wagging busybodies, Islington elite, Eurabia, etc.). So here's that picture in full:

Happy fucking holidays

Message to Hutton: our girl santas are better than yours. So there

Another soulmates gem

See if you can count the ways "hardcore feminist" "Zorny" is a cunt...

A fitting tribute

I see that dead pop singer John Lennon is to be immortalised as an action figure, which will apparently utter "authentic" phrases used by the chippy Scouser. Will these include "I've got off with a Jap"?

Vote for the Hell Is Other People Cunt of the Year

Who is your Cunt of the Year?
	Sir Ian Blair
	That bloke off the Picture Loans advert
	Melanie Phillips
	David Duff
	Scott Sala
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HIOP is proud to mark its imminent first anniversary with its inaugural Cunt of the Year award - and you can be part of it. CotY goes to the man or woman who, in the opinion of Hell Is Other People readers, has most offended them by their very existence. The recipient will be announced on New Year's Eve, once all the votes have been collated and the result verified by HIOP's independent team of psephologists. The nominees come from all areas of public life. Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, for example, is joined by that bloke off the Picture Loans advert ("Yes, we have got a mortgage"), bloggery's David Duff, racism's Melanie Phillips and idiocy's Scott Sala of Slant Point.

Really lame seasonal post

I see that the three wise men have been replaced by a single, neo-conservative, pathologically-lying, enemy of the people, PNAC-sponsored cunt.

Guardian Soulmates: cunt-magnet

Long-time readers will know of the comic potential of online dating. What may be less familiar is the unique disgust I reserve for the kind of "people" who infest Guardian Soulmates, and HIOP may from time to time bring you gems from that particular pucket of cold sick. Like "moneypenni" (above), who is a stereotype made flesh. From the hideous, punless username, and the fat, smug face onward, this failed abortion ticks all the boxes that have me reaching for my AK47 as I leave home of a morning:

• Lives in a soi-disant trendy part of London? Check.
• Expresses a fancy that she represents the love-child of three equally stomach-churning "personalities" (Nigella, Lara Croft and Mark Thomas, since you ask)? Check.
• Travel nazi ("where are you going next")? Check.
• Uses the word "feisty" without irony or apology? Check.

Click the link if you're still managing to keep down your lunch.

More chips news as it happens

Yes, but as they used to ask in the old ad, What have McCain done to them?

Now I know why it's called happy slapping

Because it makes me happy to know that self-deluding, fucked up, needy, talentless overpaid cunts like Myleene Klass are not beyond the wrath, or the chips, of the great unwashed. Bitch then has the nerve to use a bag of chips on the head to PR her involvement in some bollocks anti-bullying campaign.

Don't say this blog doesn't do what it says on the tin

Just look at these cunts. Or this one. WTF?

I'm not dead, just an academic

Duffman has expressed fears that I might have died, hence another prolonged absence from your screen. Sadly not, merely the cacophonous conclusion (ooooooooo!*) to another term. And moving house. Twice in a month. Once into temporary accommodation, with no phone, no internet, no mobile signal. And then into HIOP's luxurious bachelor pad, whence I now correspond. While I was in my hide-out, I note that Britain's Worst Political Party has elected another new leader, a man nearly as posh and out of touch as Tony Blagh. Whose wife comes from Scunthorpe. Can I be the last to say: "He took the cunt out of Scunthorpe"? *This will only mean anything to viewers of long-running TV show The Good Old Days.

Can you help settle an argument?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Sarah Miles is primarily known for one thing, and one thing only. Please help HIOP to test this thesis by voting in our free poll:

For what is Sarah Miles best known?

Drinking her own pissAnything else

Free polls from Pollhost.com

Less like Tony Blair, only more so

For those of you unable, or unwilling, to keep up with the wit, wisdom and just plain common sense of Decent Dave Cameron, the first potential Tory leader to have been raised by a single mum on a Glasgow sink estate, may I direct you here and here. Baudrillard would have a field day: if Blair was Mrs Thatcher dressed in social democratic clothing, what does that make "Begbie" Cameron?

Are we sleepwalking to disaster?

I want to kill myself.

David Blunkett: cunt

Thanks to the eminently suckoffable people at Blood and Treasure, this little nugget from our thankfully ex-Pensions Secretary, blind-as-a-bat, fingers-in-the-till, careerist, opportunist enemy of the people David Blunkett. Softening up BBC radio listeners to draconian cuts in Incapacity Benefit last month, Ol' No Eyes lied: "If people... re-associate with the world of work, suddenly they come alive again. That will overcome depression and stress a lot more than people sitting at home watching daytime television." (Well at least some of us can watch television.) Showing the sensitivity towards mental health for which the Myopic One is rightly, and completely, unknown, he went on to describe the current system as "crackers". Try telling that to those, like me, who were "let go" from their job and forced onto benefits precisely because of their depression, and who have since been unable to find work at anything like their old salary. Blunkett, may your dog get run over, your bastard children get leukemia and you die a slow, painful death. Cancer of your priapic cock should do nicely.

Dick keeps spurting

Even as (or rather, precisely because) the IPCC inquiry into the de Menezes murder nears its conclusion, "Metropolitan police sources" can't stop spinning. This time with the preposterous claim that Gold Commander at the time of the killing, Cressida Dick, "never gave" the codeword signalling that her officers should go ahead and shoot dead the innocent, prone, unarmed Brazilian.

Golf club racist woos "skiffle generation"

Smarmy, racist Tory cunt David Davis today made a shameless attempt to pretend the Cuntservative party is for normal people by making the rhetorical equivalent of wearing a baseball cap.

What's the collective noun for this lot?

The happy band whose evening out led to that domestic.

Wadegate and that ad in full

So the media marriage made in heaven has hit a rough patch. Interesting that domestic violence, against which Rebekah Wade's Sun has been 'campaigning', can in this instance be dismissed by La Wade as 'a silly row which got out of hand'. Would such an explanation be accepted, and the whole farce be such a source of amusement if Ross Kemp had been the aggressor? Meanwhile, here is 'Fruit'n'Fibre' Kemp in that legendary ad from 1990. Powered by Castpost

Hell Is Other Podcasts now on iTunes

Just go here. It's what iTunes was made for...

Thought for the day

I wouldn't sit there mate...

Have you hugged your child today?

Didn't these people notice her bed hadn't been slept in?

Beat the NHS death squads

During my increasingly seldom moments of lucidity, I can just about make out adverts on TV. I've lately been shouting at the telescreen every time never-was 'funnygirl' Josie Lawrence comes on bleating about her health insurance premia. "YOU DON'T FUCKING NEED HEALTH INSURANCE YOU DOZY BITCH!" I breathe, before the meds kick in. Now I'm not so sure. It seems the NHS is out to kill us one way or the other. How much they want to off you depends who you believe, either only a little - or you're as good as dead already.

See how shit life is - in color!

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	4
Mind:	4.8
Body:	4.3
Spirit:	4
Friends/Family:	4.1
Love:	0
Finance:	2.8
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

The first sign of cancer: verbal diarrhoea

Have you noticed how some people with cancer - especially those with ready access to their own newspaper column - can't fucking shut up about it? It was all the rage a few years ago, with Nigella Lawson's now-forgotten husband John Diamond and his chronicle of looming death. Moving, inspiring, and handy for La Lawson's cv of course, since she was able to use hubby's still-warm corpse as a stepping-stone to TV fame and a decent interval before shacking up with Tory-promoting billionnaire cunt Chuck Saatchi in 2002. Although Diamond wasn't the first - I think some Observer hackette beat him to that dubious honour some time in the 1990s. But since then the floodgates have opened, and still they keep on coming. Just google the terms cancer+journey and see what you get. My advice to anyone with the big C, thinking of using it to shift papers? SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT. (Or start a blog)

By special request

When cult directors have a "mainstream" hit

Many British cinemagoers will have seen, or be planning to see, Broken Flowers, the new film directed by Jim Jarmusch starring Bill Murray, which opened in the UK this weekend. I was among that number, having popped out on Friday night with my daughters to see it. Having been a devoted fan ever since his first feature, Stranger Than Paradise, in 1984 (above), I came away on Friday relieved and satisfied. Relieved that Jarmusch hasn't done a Tim Burton. Burton left behind much of what made his films unique when he made 2001's Planet of the Apes, and his subsequent films have seemed pretty thin by comparison to earlier tours de force like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow. No, Flowers retains all the Jarmusch touches: the slow-burning, absurd humour; the scenes that last just a few seconds longer than you expect before they fade to black; the less-is-more dialogue; and the killer soundtrack. Like I say, a relief. What is interesting is the extent to which Broken Flowers translates as a more "mainstream" film. The narrative is more clearly signposted than usual; there are few if any overtly "cool" signifiers (no cool characters, no monochrome) other than the aforementioned soundtrack. Yet if some reader reviews are any guide, the film's remaining idiosyncrasies may still be too much for some audiences unfamiliar with the Jarmusch grammar. Which is a shame, but better that than the alternative.

Without you I'm nothing: part deux

I nearly forgot the goddess who brightens up my breakfast viewing, while the rest of you losers are watching GMTV. I refer to the edible Monita Rajpal of CNN International. Tune in: the photo doesn't do her justice.

Without you I'm nothing

I've always held firm to the principle that for a balanced life, a man needs a fevered sexual obsession with someone he's absolutely no chance of forming a relationship with - and ideally never going to meet. Like women in adverts on TV. Last summer it was the mouthwatering girl on the swing in the Wanadoo ad. Pretty floral dress set off by fuck-me leather boots. Olive skin. Full, pouting lips. Brown eyes like saucers, framed by tumbling dark brown curls. Oh sorry, I was miles away. Anyway she's old news. Now I'm devoting every waking hour to the French girl in the new Renault Clio ad. Pouty. Parisian. Cocquettish. Unavailable. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm....

A match made in heaven

It had to happen, and now it has. Hell Is Other Podcasts brings you a memento of a unique musical event to add to your collection. Those pikeys from the Ocean Finance ads live on stage, in full effect with top DJs, at London's Ministry of Sound.

Rock'n'roll. Phew!

I have just returned from the best concert I have ever seen. Crap town - Portsmouth - on a Monday night in October. No matter. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club played over 90 minutes of amazing music, super loud and crystal clear, with all the black clothes and cool that fans expected. Having always 'dug' them for their reworking of the Jesus and Mary Chain schtick, I was still working on fully acquiring the taste for BRMC's new, rootsier, sound, but tonight did it. Quality. Will The White Stripes match them in three weeks?

Hell Is Other Podcasts

Thanks to the frankly rubbish people at Podomatic, HIOP can now bring you the magic of its first podcast. We all remember the man from the Personal Injury Helpline, half Fred Elliott, half retired CID officer. Well now our boffins have set his sonorous tones to music. Hit the link and download. Like the man says, if you don't make the call you'll never know.

Jamie Foxx deserves an Oscar (TM)

I've just woken up after seeing Jamie Foxx' mesmerising performance as r'n'b legend Craig Charles in the new movie about his life, and I can't recommend it strongly enough. If there's any justice, Foxx - previously best known for his roles opposite Dirk Bogarde in The Servant, and (cast against type) as the posh gay bloke in Sexy Beast - will walk away with the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. It's uncanny - it could be the musical superstar-turned-Coronation Street cabbie himself. Bravo, Jamie! Bravo!

Ghetto names are back

Hell Is Other People has developed a wide and loyal US readership since we started our Ghetto Names Collection Point back in February. Nearly 200 names were sent in, some beautiful, some inventive, some comical and most with 'crazy' spelling. Sadly the recent move to Haloscan comments sent these contributions drifting off in hyperspace. But now they're back, just in time for all those babies expected in time for the holidays. Enjoy!

Anybody ring?

Ah, the start of a new academic year! Mists, mellow fruitfulness, fresh, eager young minds. I become Miss Jean Brodie, coaching my gels (and 90 per cent of them are gels) as they blossom into the bloated PR fatcats of tomorrow. Hence no bloggery for the past few weeks. That, and the fact that my iBook was a little under the weather and had to go away for a few days. It has returned, however dear reader, as good as new, so I thought I'd give you a nocturnal emission. Obviously the big news of the past few weeks has been the release of a new Bon Jovi record. Shockingly, it's the same record they always release, just with a different title. Originally called Living (Livin'?) On A Prayer back in 1980-whenever, it was released in 1999 as It's My Life, and has now resurfaced as Have A Nice Day. Perhaps Hungfunny can podcast a "mashup", as I believe they are called, of all three... In other news, Harry Hutton calls me a cunt. It's good to be back...

It ain't half crap, mum

As you know, I'm a pretty easy-going sort. A people person. Live and let live, all that. But even I have my limits. There is one thing that just makes me want to grab an AK-47 and go into a busy street and spray death, come back and murder my kids before turning the gun on myself™. I write, of course, of the TV ad for Uncle Ben's Tikka Masala Sauce. The one where the all-white, Xtra-CheZy, TV family start doing a Bollywood as their favourite plastic curry-substitute gunk is served. I mean, What The Fuck? Sorry, are we living in 1973 or something?

I have found the cure for our economic ills

Never mind a flat tax - abolish the lower tax band altogether and introduce a new supertax rate of 90% for our useless fucking so-called national football team.And all their useless, obscenely overpaid, lazy mates in the hideous cancer of the premier league. Anyone else we should bleed dry?

The rich aren't rich enough

Those cunts at the Adam Smith Institute think that rich people need more money. Not just any old money. More money from people who have less than them. They've just published some bollocks in support of flat tax. Flat tax, for the uninitiated, is a system where everyone pays tax at the same rate, regardless of income. You don't need Hell Is Other People to tell you why they think it's a good idea: flat tax is about to become part of popular political conversation in Britain. But be very clear: it is a way for higher-rate tax payers to have a massive pay cut - from 40 per cent down to anything as far as 15 per cent. The likelihood is that people will argue for somewhere a bit less than the current standard rate of 25 per cent. So most people would get a cut of, say, 2 per cent, while higher-rate payers would see theirs cut by nearly half! So the standard-rate tax payer suddenly lives in a country where the better-off suddenly have a lot more money, while funding for education, health, and other public services is slashed. This idea is being pushed, and pushed HARD. By them. And him. They and their friends in the corporate media will tell you how simple it is. How much better off "most" people will be. They and their rich friends will threaten to leave the country if "something isn't done" about the tax system. They are, as always, lying pieces of shit. They just want to keep more of their money. And they'd like the rest of us to clear up after their endless binge. If some of the super-rich want to leave the country, good riddance. We should not be held to ransom by a handful of greedy cocksuckers who contribute far less to the Exchequer than they'd have you believe. It's a con-trick. Don't fall for it.

If you want to know what's really happening in New Orleans...

...become a Tomb Reader. Yet again our friends at Lenin's Tomb go beyond mere commentary to provide some excellent investigative journalism, this time on the people responsible for and benefitting from the hell of New Orleans. Go here, here, here, here, and here, then bookmark'em. 5 September Update Lenny has now helpfully collected all their posts on Katrina here, in chronological order, where they will be regularly updated. Point your newsreader at it...

LiveJournal & Blogger: flying the flag for free speech?

Now more than ever™, freedom of speech is a right that, where it exists, should surely be guarded jealously. But it seems that blogs may become an uneven battleground, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, where different commercial interests apply different standards. Blogger recently appended its toolbar with a little flag which it invites users to hit if they want to report "objectionable content". The idea is that individual users express their opinion of blogs and, if a large number of flags is raised about a particular blog, then Blogger may warn users about its content and de-list it from its promotional tags. So far, so what? you might ask. Except that there is no accountability involved in Blogger's apparently light-touch innovation; the company cites a book by New Yorker journalist James Surowiecki entitled The Wisdom of Crowds, as representing its rationale. Crowds are anything but wise, if you ask me. Over at LiveJournal, things are a little more transparent in process, if ineffective in outcome. A couple of weeks ago, my newsreader picked up on a little gem from AmericanJihad, one of several outlets for the wit and wisdom of one George M Weinert V. Although Gorgeous George clearly has plenty of issues he'd do better to explore with his therapist than with blog readers, his output would appear to represent the kind of hate speech up with which Blogger and, so they claim, LiveJournal, will not put. The first clause of LJ's Terms of Service section on Member Conduct states: "You agree to NOT use the Service to: Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in LiveJournal.com's opinion to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information with out the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;" (my emphasis added) Here are AJ entries which, as far as I can see, demonstrate and promote hatred on grounds of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or sometimes all three: Black Muslims - The Enemy Within Confronting the Global Jihad Mulsim Queers in Palestine Muslims are DUMB DUMB DUMB!! Angels in the Muslim Queer'ran AIDS Comes to the Arabs - Praise God! CAIR = Public Enemy Number One Muslims - The Party - Commies Live in Islam Black Muslim Pigs Muslims are Criminals Muslims Speading Disease Worldwide Queer Muslim Society Dumb Black Muslims Ask for Death Yet when I drew this to the attention of LJ, the "Abuse Team" rapidly came back with the following reply: Dear LiveJournal user, While that (sic) the content in question may be disturbing and in poor taste, it does not constitute a violation of the LiveJournal Terms of Service. The content posted is simply an opinion, and we allow the expression of a wide range of opinions on LiveJournal, as long as no explicit threats of physical harm are made against any particular racial, ethnic, or social minority. As such, we will be unable to assist you. Regards, LiveJournal Abuse Team I can see LJ's point, yet while one person's hate speech might be the next person's free speech, George's posts would seem to constitute a breach of its terms. The reason this is important is that freedom of speech and related issues seem to be assuming greater importance on blogs, and current anti-terror legislation promises to add greater urgency to such questions. Transparency, accountability, consistency will therefore be essential if judgements as to free speech are to be fair and credible. Thoughts welcome.

Now I know how Jack Bauer feels

PLING: PLING! PLING: PLING! At 2.04pm yesterday afternoon, Hell Is Other People felt Donald Rumsfeld's icy breath down its neck as your favourite blog became, momentarily, the front line in TWAT (The War Against Terror). At that moment, using the most advanced technology known to humankind*, an agent of The Great Satan perused The Pink'Un from deep inside the Pentagon. Using Uncle Sam's top secret "search engine" weaponry, the goon had tapped in the search terms "police+statements+from+people" and, bizarrely, HIOP's latest disclosures on the de Menezes killing had come up as the second hit on MSN Search. I'm not sure what's more worrying: the possibility that the entire editorial staff here at HIOP might be Gitmo-bound, or the thought that the military of the world's remaining superpower has got nothing better to do when it gets into the office (it was 9.04am in Virginia) than fiddle around on the internet looking at my little rants about Sir Ian Blair. Unless of course...? *Er, Windows XP.

There's a gag in here somewhere...

Among the thousands of tragic tales coming out of New Orleans this week, I couldn't help smiling at the no less sad news that blues legend Fats Domino is among those missing. For a man whose signature tune is something about a hill, Domino doesn't seem to have grasped the whole hurricanes-flooding thing, and told his agent, Al Embry, that he would be staying at his home in a low-lying district of NO with his wife. "We haven't got anybody that knows where he's at," said Embry.

Parental Advisory

Since I had Haloscan put in at the weekend, all previous comments seem to have vanished. I couldn't care less, except that my Ghetto Names Collection Point, from back in February, has been generating a steady stream of traffic, and I had a couple of hundred hilarious/picturesque names in my collection that are now drifting in hyperspace. If anyone knows how to retrieve the Lost Comments, I'll happily award them an Honorary Degree. Meanwhile, the following is a naked attempt to replace the lost traffic. Or an attack of Tourette's. Or the next offering from those magnetic poetry people. Cunt fuck pussy cum covered slut wank tits fanny porn xxx rock hard cocks lesbian girl on girl harry's place gays rimming deep throat bondage golden showers wank fisting videos donald rumsfeld vagina whore pumping bisexual femdom oral muff shaved hairy penis dildo jihad. We now return to our scheduled programming.

The allotment of the 21st century

Like many people, I couldn't see what all the fuss over podcasts was about. That was, until Hungbunny told me how to subscribe to his cool music casts, and thereby others linked from his site. Until then (ie. about half an hour ago) the most interesting thing I'd found was BBC Radio Four In Our Time. Now we know that bloggery is a low-cost way for sad, lonely men like me to potter about and fill their empty, friendless lives. In that way the blog is the allotment of the 21st century. But what, then, is the podcast? The racing pigeon of the new millennium? Your thoughts welcome.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Where's that manly monochrome look gone?

You might have noticed a slight change in the appearance of HIOP. One or two people had remarked on the difficulty they had reading the old WOB typography, and given the way this blog is going, and the higher traffic it's getting these days, we've binned it and gone for tampon-box pink instead. I know it's not particularly classy, but until I can get a mate with HTML skills to sort me out it will have to do. So stop moaning.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up? A: A victim of terrorism

Now I know how M*l*nie P**ll*ps feels. In that sort of, "It's not me, it's everyone else who's mad" kind of way. Proof, as if proof were needed, that the world has gone as mad as an actress comes in today's Sunday Telegraph report of a sad, Walter Mitty character who apparently killed herself after her bogus medical credentials were exposed in her native New Zealand. On 7 July, Richmal Oates-Whitehead had been hailed as a hero for tending to blast victims outside the offices of the British Medical Association, where she worked. Whether or not she had done so much as offer a sticking plaster is unclear, but evidently she had created an entire fantasy existence for the benefit of friends and family down under. Some of those same friends and family are now mourning her as "effectively the 53rd victim of 7/7". That's right. A women suffering mental illness kills herself and thereby joins that exclusive club, the dead of 7/7, thereby revealing just how chic that epitaph has now become. Once it was a train driver, or a nurse. Now people are apparently queueing up to have their names added to memorials in London, Madrid, New York... After a week in which bereaved relatives of the bomb victims have been wheeled out in the Met's PR battle with the de Menezes family, this represents a further sick, cheap exploitation of death. How long before some kid falling off their bike is anointed with the 7/7 badge of honour? As the Eye has it, pass the sickbag, Alice. CORRECTION: We misread the original Telegraph article (Thanks Bat020). It appears that Ms Oates-Whitehead died of a blood clot possibly induced by stress, and not suicide as originally feared. Sincere apologies to anyone who knew the deceased.

EXCLUSIVE: Has Met spin breached police media policy?

Press misinformation "potential misconduct" - Met PR chief Hell Is Other People has discovered that off-the-record briefings, and other statements made by Metropolitan Police officers on their killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, may breach the police's own policies on dealing with the press. According to written evidence submitted by the Met's own PR chief, officers making such statements will have needed top-level authorisation - or face misconduct charges. Since the killing on 22 July, the Met has pursued a vigorous news management strategy and made a number of significant public claims about the circumstances of the shooting, which have been subsequently contradicted by police evidence submitted to the IPCC investigation of the killing. In the hours and days immediately following the killing, Commissioner Sir Ian Blair claimed that de Menezes had been targeted in connection with the Met's investigation into the failed bomb attacks in London on 21 July. Last weekend the Sunday Telegraph reported that Met officers had fed false information about de Menezes' clothing and conduct to the press, which had resulted in widespread media coverage supporting the police's decision to kill the unarmed man. Two weeks ago, police told The Observer that CCTV cameras at the scene were not working, yet this claim was also subsequently contradicted. Last Monday, the police issued a statement, based on a mistaken timeline, which appeared to contradict remarks made by members of the de Menezes family. The statements come amid an aggressive Met PR strategy following the killing, in which Sir Ian has provided a series of high-profile press statements and interviews. Dick Fedorcio, Director of Public Affairs at the Metropolitan Police Service, presented written evidence to the Morris Inquiry into professional standards at the Met last year. He told the Inquiry that "each high profile internal investigation or resulting court case has a bespoke media strategy." "In many high profile cases an ACPO officer will chair a 'Gold Group' which will oversee the media strategy and authorise any media releases or responses," he added. In the absence of such a group, the Director or Deputy Director of Professional Standards (DPS) would approve such statements. Unauthorised contact with the media could not be ruled out, but on this Fedorcio was clear: "Such matters are treated as potential misconduct and are investigated by officers from the DPS...The sanction if such cases are proven is a matter for either police misconduct boards or the police staff equivalent...If I had reason to believe that any member of DPA (Directorate of Public Affairs) staff was involved in the unauthorised disclosure of information to the media the DPS would be asked to investigate it as a potential misconduct matter." Fedorcio's submissions to Morris also included ACPO and Metropolitan Police Service policy on dealing with the media. The Met's Media Relations Policy, which Fedorcio introduced in 2000, makes it clear that off-the-record briefings should only take place under strict approval from the appropriate level: "Officers must stick to the facts of the case and not speculate or let their own personal views or prejudices influence the discussions...It will be for the OCU commanders and heads of branches to decide at what levels...such discretion may be exercised. If there is any doubt about speaking off the record, advice must be sought from the DPA or enquiries referred direct to them." Finally, the ACPO Media Advisory Group has issued extensive notes for the guidance of officers nationally on dealing with the media. Section 6 includes explicit guidance on media relations in cases of "deaths arising from a siege or firearms operation." At a time when police unions have demanded a Home Office probe into leaks from the IPCC, the documents raise serious questions, not about the killing itself, but about the conduct of Sir Ian Blair and other officers since 22 July:

• Who is in charge of the media relations strategy for the de Menezes case? Is it Fedorcio? Has a Gold Group been assigned? Is the DPS involved?
• Were all statements to the press, including the off the record briefings revealed by the Sunday Telegraph, authorised?
• If any unauthorised comment was made, will the officers or staff involved face misconduct charges?

Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

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Firearms police make official complaint against IPCC

After a week of revelations, spin by Sir Ian Blair and the Met, smears against the de Menezes family and supporters, tonight Sky News is reporting that the body representing firearms police has lodged an official complaint againt the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). The complaint "accuses the IPCC and John Wadham, the commission's deputy chairman, of prejudicing its own ongoing investigation", says Sky News.

Menezes exclusive: Police issue false statement against the de Menezes family

Police bid to "take sting" out of cover-up allegations is based on false timeline This is a weird one. BBC Newsnight tonight reported* a statement from the Metropolitan Police - you know, the ones who don't do spin - saying that they had briefed members of the family of Jean Charles de Menezes on Sunday 24 July. In the briefing, the Met claim they made it clear that the details of his pursuit and killing by officers that had been reported - bulky jacket, failed to stop when challenged, vaulted the ticket barrier etc - were false. The implication, according to reporter Michael Crick, seemed to be that the statement "took the sting" out of allegations of a cover up, and raised the question of why the family hadn't made this public themselves since the alleged briefing. Except that the family DID make such a briefing public. It's just the Met's timeline is wrong. As HIOP reported via The Guardian, Jean Charles' cousin, Vivien Figueiredo relayed the revelations immediately following a briefing with her legal representatives and the Met. Except the briefing took place, not on Sunday 24 July but on Wednesday 27 July. The Met made no statement itself at the time, and perhaps as a result noone but The Guardian reported the details. Meanwhile, on Monday 25 July, the inquest into De Menezes' killing had taken place and the 'bulky jacket' version of events was presented by the Met to the coroner and duly reported the next day. Either the Met DID brief the family on the Sunday - but then why were they still lying about the 'bulky jacket' story to the inquest on Monday? Or the Met - the police force responsible for preventing more bombings in London - has got its facts wrong, and the briefing actually took place on the Wednesday. It also begs further questions. Why did the Met release this statement, and to whom? It's not on their website. Is it designed to embarrass the de Menezes family? Is it deliberately timed to spike tonight's demonstration? Why did the Met get the timeline wrong? Why is the Met so addicted to spin? Meanwhile, nearly a week after ITV News broke the story, the papers have woken up to the fact that the Met's "no CCTV" claim is - guess what? - lies. *Link now fixed, BBC account now on website Technorati tags: jean charles de menezes sir ian blair

Menezes: Blair still spinning to save his job

Home Secretary, GLA Deputy smear dead man's campaign Met officers placed 'bulky jacket' story in the press Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair is continuing an aggressive PR campaign in the face of his growing isolation and calls for his resignation over his officers' killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Interviews with Sir Ian appeared yesterday on BBC radio, and today in the News of the World, while Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, and the Deputy Leader of the Greater London Assembly publicly smeared the campaign by the dead man's family and supporters. Blair took the opportunity of his media blitz to deny it was any such thing. "The one thing the Metropolitan Police Service does not do is spin," he told the BBC during his exclusive interview, scheduled immediately following the damaging revelations earlier in the week by ITV News. However the Sunday Telegraph gives a detailed account of the explicit media briefings given by the Met once de Menezes' innocence had been established:

"At first the police were convinced that they had "shot one of the [July 21] terrorists". Within hours, they realised that they had not. The claim was changed: Mr Menezes was not, in fact, one of the four would-be bombers who had tried to blow up three trains and a bus on July 21. But he was "a player helping the 21/7 gang".

"A day later, the police realised that they had wrongly targeted and killed an innocent man: it was then that journalists say they started to receive calls from officers at the Met "spinning us lines which would distract attention from the fact that the cops had shot an innocent man"."

The Telegraph piece also makes it clear that Blair faces opposition within the Met and from political figures in the Conservative party who regard him as too close to the Government.

Meanwhile police sources have told the Observer that the surveillance team monitoring the block of flats where de Menezes lived, knew that he did not pose a threat, but they were overruled by the armed officers who later killed him.

Technorati tags: Sir Ian Blair jean charles de menezes

MENEZES: Police chief delayed independent investigation

The BBC has disclosed that Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, wrote to the Home Office on the morning his officers shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes. As a result of his correspondence, the Independent Police Complaints Commission's investigation into the killing of the innocent Brazilian was delayed for six days. Gareth Pierce, lawyer for the de Menezes family, told the BBC that this contravened the IPCC's statutory responsibility to begin its probe within 24 hours, and has led calls for Sir Ian's resignation. Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

Reasons why Sir Ian Blair must resign

On 24 July, two days after the Menezes killing, HIOP pondered the future of Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair. Three weeks later, the evidence that he is not fit to run a bath, let alone the Met, is piling up. Take your pick from the following unhappy events over which Sir Ian has presided since 22 July:

1. Publicly leaping to a version of events surrounding the de Menezes killing that has now been proved false;
2. Aggressive news management of an incident that remains the subject of an independent enquiry and a DPP investigation;
3. Briefing against a dead, innocent man - before his funeral;
4. False claims about de Menezes' conduct;
5. False claims about police conduct;
6. Incompetence among surveillance teams in the immediate aftermath of an attempted terrorist attack;
7. Evidence that police officers overpowered and killed de Menezes when he posed no threat - and if he had, the police action could have resulted in an explosion;
8. False claims about CCTV cameras at the scene;
9. Repeated leaks prejudicial to the investigations.

Sir Ian's departure will be resisted at the highest level of course. That does not mean he should stay.

The Mongolian menace haunting London

Lenin's Tomb reports one of the police officers involved in the de Menezes killing as saying he aroused suspicion partly because he had "Mongolian eyes". This is a troubling new development. How many rogue Mongolians are there in London? Should they be made to wear national costume? Are the suicide-bombing Mongolians representative of the wider Mongolian community, or "horde"?

MENEZES: Police lied about CCTV

Thanks to Lenin's Tomb: ITN has obtained police documents describing CCTV footage of the pursuit and killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station last month - two days after they denied that any CCTV cameras were working there that day. The documents also say that police did not challenge or chase de Menezes, but only identified themselves once on the train, when they beckoned him towards them. When he did, Lenin quotes a police intelligence officer as saying: "He stood, and walked towards me." Lenin reports: "He [the intelligence officer] grabbed Menezes, pulled his arms behind his back and pushed him back into the seat. "I heard a shot in my left ear". The intelligence officer said he was pushed to the floor at that point. A number of officers shot him in the head, seven times. Three bullets missed. One went into his shoulder." Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

Walken to the White House

Technorati is alive right now with the so-ridiculous-it-might-just-be-true news that supercool actor Christopher Walken might be running for President in 2008. Too early to work out what his politics are, though early indications suggest a soft-right, studiedly non-partisan conservatism. Too bad. Anyone who saw him in his cruelly-overlooked scene-stealing role as Frank Abagnale Snr in Catch Me If You Can would have to admit Walken would make a pretty cool alternative to the chimp. But it does make you wonder who else might look the part as well as Walken. Samuel L Jackson? Sigourney Weaver?

Enemies of the people: comedians' special

Now more than ever™, it is essential we are clear about whose side we are on. And, as I sit here putting off my overdue paper, this much I know. There can be no crime more evil, more unforgiveable, than a comedian not being funny. With one exception, that is: comedians who stop being funny. I reserve a particular, visceral blind hatred for those cocksuckers who pollute my living-room, who think they are funny, who might once have been amusing, but who now have all the rib-tickling capacity of cancer of the face. And so Hell Is Other People proudly invites your further nominations for the following rogues' gallery of the laughter-murderers:

1. Steve Martin Once the funniest person on earth. WTF?
2. Robin Williams As a comedian, he makes a great character actor. No really!
3. Sanjeev Bhaskar I'm torn between the Scylla of killing myself and the Charybdis of punching him in his smug face every time I see him.
4. Mark Thomas Po-faced, quite good agitprop masquerading as stand-up comedy. Give up the day job. Please.
5. Lenny Henry What makes him, or anyone, think he's remotely comical? And anyone so intimately involved with the laughter-free zone of Comic Relief deserves to be put on compulsory hunger strike.
6. Ben Elton Unfunny, mockney, millionnaire, gave life to that Queen musical. Where's my gun?
7. Eddie Murphy "Oo look at me! In another hilarious fish-out-of-water situation!" Get over it.
8. Lee Evans The poor man's Norman Wisdom. Stomach-churning.
9. Ellen DeGeneres I'm a funnier lesbian than her.

If I am an apologist for terror, you are a McCarthyite

It's taken me a month to understand my core objection to the "argument" that, if you stick up for Muslims, you are an appeaser of, or apologist for terror. Quite apart from the not-so-implicit racism of that position, I do not accept the analogy that is often drawn with appeasement of Nazi Germany, by those who put defenders of Muslims in the same camp, as it were, with the Mitfords and Mosleys. A more apposite analogy would be the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1950s, which indiscriminately demonised anyone who was perceived to stand in the path of Senator Joe. Those who use their weblogs, newspaper columns, TV and radio airtime to denounce Islam, Muslims and pretty much anyone who expresses concern about human rights, democratic freedom, racism, Islamophobia or shoot-to-kill, are conducting a witch-hunt and will be shown by history to be modern-day McCarthyites. As such, I am happy, indeed proud, to be so denounced. Bring it on.

A car for less than a round of drinks

Regular readers will know that Hell Is Other People's car recently exploded. This is just the latest in a catalogue of misfortunes that are being detailed over at our sister blog The Laughing Academy, and so needn't detain us here. But I took delivery of my new motor this week, and I'm ready to spew the thoughts provoked by the transaction. I've always loved cars, ever since I was tiny. So with the advancing years, and material success, I was able to indulge my twisted desires to some extent. From the 10 year-old Ford Escort that I shared with a mate back in 1981, through a Beetle convertible in my mid-20s, various Golfs, estate cars etc., in recent years I enjoyed a Chrysler Voyager, an Audi A6 and a BMW 530d. When things started going tits up a few years ago the Beemer went, and was replaced by a lesser beast, an Alfa Romeo 156. Thought One: Alfa Romeo is in inverse relation to Skoda. That is to say, Skoda is overcoming a lousy image with some decent cars, while Alfa Romeo is pissing a way a precious image with shitty cars. Item: my Alfa had 42,000 miles on the clock, looked lovely, tan leather, blah blah. The tiptronic gearbox didn't work, the climate control AND the ventilation stopped working ABOVE a certain temperature, a minor shunt to the rear disabled the central llocking, it stalled in traffic, changed gear when it felt like it, and the engine blew up. Thought Two: If driving a car is like making love to a beautiful woman, then I have just left Claudia Cardinale (top) for Helga, my elderly German cleaning lady (bottom). On Tuesday, having been forced to sell the Alfa for scrap, I bought my new car. A 1990 VW Passat estate. For £360. And you know what? I love it. It goes (which the Alfa didn't). It changes gear when I want. It doesn't stall in traffic. The brakes don't squeak. The doors lock. The ventilation works. And I don't end every journey tense and fearful of the next failure. What's not to like? And, it costs peanuts to insure. As someone who has been painfully weaned off new, expensive cars that smell of leather seats, this is a revelation, a liberating experience. And if I get a year's motoring out of the VW, if it then deies, I just get another banger!

I think I'm in love

Not for nothing is the internet more often referred to, in Al Gore's memorable phrase, as the masturbation superhighway. Time zones and geography have no meaning on the pornopike, and today's generation can have little understanding of how their predecessors were restricted to mail order, or the nearest mucky bookshop, when meeting their bishop-bashing requirements. The net really has revolutionised the life of one-handed readers the world over. But bloggism is opening a whole new "killer app" for the web, and perhaps the time will come when people associate the internet with a broader range of material than When Harry Ate Sally 4. So, dear reader, I am delighted - for those of you who have yet to make its acquaintance - to introduce you to a thing of rare beauty, a blog which seems to come from another world. I refer to the strange, wonderful Bogol. At first sight, Arlington Hynes' creation might seem ludicrously simple. What's so clever about misspelling everything?, some might ask. Ordinarily, I would do the same. I've always been something of a spelling Nazi, and my current job, educating the nation's youth, has made me more Draconian in that regard. But Bogol takes bad spelling on to a different plane altogether. At Hynes' hand, spelling becomes at once both irrelevant and a crucial weapon in his armoury. "Beauty" is the word which comes to mind whenever I try to express the nature of his genius. His words possess a paradoxical synthesis of the fragile, like spring flowers, and an aggressive, Maoist disregard for the rules of English. Reading his posts one gets an idea of what Year Zero will be like. But it's not merely form, obviously. Bogol, like many blogs, deals with the banalities of life: things that piss Hynes off, from an amazon.com PR stunt involving Moby to a job ad, explaining that "you will be responsible to designing...etc". "'rasponsable to'?! wtf?! whats with tehse peopal who cant get perpasitions right?" spits Hynes. How right he is, and how much more vital his posts are for having slipped the surly bonds of orthography, and punched the face of God. Some of Bogol is so tenuously tethered to the English language as to be completely incomprehensible. Take the online poll (top right). That's beyond spelling. And voting in a poll that could be in ancient Greek for all the sense it makes, surely puts it on the level of art. Bless you, Hynes, and long may the world's best website thrive.

This man is an apologist for terror

Egyptian-born mastermind Ayman al-Zawahri has blamed Tony Blair's foreign policy decisions for the London bombings, and warned that London can expect more attacks. "Blair has brought you destruction to the heart of London, and he will bring more destruction, God willing," he said. According to the BBC, al-Zawahri wore a white tunic with black turban and posed next to a rifle during his outburst. It is precisely these sort of weasel words and moral equivalence that play into the hands of the bombers. Does al-Zawahri not realise the effect his comments have? Now more than ever, there can be no middle ground, no appeasement. By his ill-judged remarks, al-Zawahri has allowed himself to be viewed as an apologist for terror. Disgraceful.

Stevie Wonder helped target Brazilian

"Special" forces unit includes fortune-tellers, performing seals Whitehall sources have confirmed that a new army unit helped identify and track Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in the fatal minutes leading to his shooting at Stockwell tube station on 22 July. Giving new meaning to the term "special forces", the army squad is believed to include the blind recording legend Stevie Wonder, a fortune teller, a comedy hypnotist as well as a number of performing seals and a 25 year old man with severe learning difficulties. When asked if there was anything specific about de Menezes that marked him out as a suicide bomber, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: "Is it something I can use in the home?" Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

The man who wrote the script for Jihad vs GWOT

So-called 'clash of civilisations' is a self-fulfilling prophecy The way the apocalypse fetishists of the right tell it, you'd think all this clash of civilisations stuff had been written in the stars. Or at least it was an external phenomenon to which "we", in "the west", must simply respond. Yet (and apologies to those of you who know where this is going) like any exercise in doublethink, they know, even if they don't want you to, that it is in fact a construction devised by one of the backroom boys of the New World Order - just like the Jihad's predecessor in the Permanent Enemy hotseat, the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. The pointyhead in question is one Samuel P Huntington (left), who sketched out the script for the GWOT in an innocent-sounding essay entitled The Clash of Civilizations? in the academic journal Foreign Affairs - back in 1993. Subtitled The next pattern of conflict, just so we wouldn't be in any doubt as to its intent, Sam's little kite-flying exercise was designed as a strategic rebuttal of all the touchy-feely, flowers down rifle barrels peace dividend ideas of academics like Francis Fukuyama, who famously declared The End of History following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Hellfire, we can't be having any of that BS, you could hear Dr Strangelove squeal, and so Huntington duly obliged. "The fundamental source of conflict in this new world," Huntington corrects, "will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic....the dominating source of conflict will be cultural...The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future." He then goes through an eccentric reading of global geopolitical history since the 18th century and a token analysis of the "seven or eight" major civilisations expected to join this conflict before succumbing to the inevitable. Cutting to the chase, the guts of Sam's "thesis" deals with, you guessed it, conflict between the "West" and Islam. "Islam has bloody borders," he concludes, having spent several pages outlining reasons for conflict between these two ideologies. A key section highlights the strategic importance of WMD, and the potential risks to US (not "Western" - US) interests posed by the potential of China to become a supplier of such weapons to Islamic states. His conclusion, Implications for the West, is chilling: "It is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilisation...to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West...to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities...to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states...to support in other civilisations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests...to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values..." Clash was subsequently turned into a best-selling book, which naturally has found a wider and eager readership since 9/11. Incidentally, for those unfamiliar with Huntington, he was succinctly described thus by one of m'learned friends at the glorious Lenin's Tomb: "I think one can oppose Huntington's theses by dismissing it. This is a guy who wrote a book justifying dictatorships in third world countries when that was US policy ("Problems of Order in Developing societies") embraced democratic governance as a slogan following the trilateral commission ("the third wave of democracy") and then at the end of the Cold War argued that we had to beware of Islam and Confucianism (read Oil and the main strategic rival of the US in East Asia)." "His rationale was the contention that we no longer have anything to fight about but values and therefore needed to reject conventional geostrategic thinking is directly countered by the strategic rationale underlying his thinking. He then went on to write a book about the threat to the integrity of the United States presented by the undermining of white anglo-saxon Protestantism by Mexican migration." "He simply plays either to the State or to the right wing gallery. I do not think he has 'influenced' neo-cons, simply provided them with quotable quotes to back up pre-existing prejudices. In terms of 'influences' Leo Strauss is more interesting. His central theses was that the masses need to be kept ignorent and fed pap whilst elites did the thinking. Which raises the interesting question of whether these guys really do believe the crap they talk." Be that as it may, you may find it interesting to note how frequently elements of Huntington's worldview crop up among the emissions of the right, all the more so since most of them are too thick to know their provenance.

Religious extremism must be fought, er, sometimes

Ever tune out when some clown puts on the same old record about Islam? Well drink this in, friend. Never forget the kingmaking position now occupied in the United States by fundamentalist Xtians.

Hey you. Fuck off. Go on, fuck off!

I've decided that most of you don't deserve me. When I came out of the psychiatric hospital three years ago, I overcame my former addiction to news and current affairs. Perhaps it returned with my recovery, which accounts for HIOP. Either way, the experience of the past three weeks has been enormously dispiriting. It's bad enough that I have to teach groups of generally moronic students all year to earn a crust. It's bad enough that cunts like this and this infest our public prints with their brainless twitterings, contributing nothing to the greater good or enlightenment of humanity in the process. But I have been lately reminded that well brought-up, Pinot Grigio-drinking, buy-to-let offal like this represents what many on the so-called left regard as the pinnacle of achievement in bloggism, and that the world is cancerous with smug, comatose windowlickers whose idea of an original political thought comes free in the Daily Mail with a free classic comedy DVD. The world really is going to hell in a handcart, and I am now content to sit back and watch it slide. My misplaced efforts to engage in informed debate on burning issues of the day therefore cease here, and I shall henceforth play on the same level as the rest, mostly confining my emissions to urgent matters such as masturbation, Big Brother and America's Next Top Model. Concentration camps or Sharia law? Who cares. Surprise me.

Police highlight crucial role of the public in catching bombers

I was on my way to a party last night when the engine of my car blew on the motorway, and caught fire. A short while later I found myself sitting in the back of a police car talking to a couple of traffic cops while we waited for the tow truck. Inevitably it wasn't long before the conversation turned to the London bombings. Evidently proud of the speed with which the July 21 suspects had been caught, the police were also emphatic that the crucial link, in terms of intelligence, was with the public, and particularly the public in the areas where suspects live. Without that, they said, they would not be able to do their job, and wouldn't have been able to catch these suspects so quickly. So those racist scumbags who are trying to use the bombings to smear Islam and Muslims in general should instead be grateful to British Muslims for their role in apprehending the suspected bombers. This is further evidence, if it were needed, that those arguing for a more US-style approach, involving racial profiling, and dismissing calls for unity and against division as "apologising for terror" are talking complete nonsense. Worse, they are more interested in promoting their racist, apocalyptic agenda than the safety of the British people. Technorati tag: London Bombings

SHOCK NEWS: Mark Steyn makes sensible point

Like any normal person, I find the scribblings of Canada's leading pundit Mark Steyn extremely nauseating. Pompous, smug, patronising, ill-informed, grandstanding, bigoted shite. Yet in the same week that some people detected signs of lucidity in something Melanie Phillips wrote about (yawn) Israel, so our chubby bumfluffed friend seems to have - for once - got the right end of the stick. He set out a cogent, rational argument against those who have been happy to demonise Jean Charles de Menezes after his death at the hands of the Metropolitan police, and before his body has been laid to rest. Steyn has done so, moreover, where it might actually do some good. In the Daily Telegraph. Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

British death squads name their targets

As Carry On Suicide Bombing continues through its fourth week, British racism pops up in grimly laughable fashion. Thanks to Guido Fawkes for this gem: photo shows official advice to passengers at Notting Hill Gate tube on Tuesday morning - better be ready to duck if you "look a bit foreign"...

London shooting: official story crumbles

No jacket, no jump, admit police The Metropolitan police have admitted to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician they shot eight times last Friday, that two key elements of their version of how he became a target are in fact false. It had been claimed that he was wearing a bulky, padded jacket which aroused suspicion in the hot July weather, as it might have concealed explosives. Police now admit he was wearing a jeans jacket - a common sight in summer, and useless for concealing anything bulky worn underneath. Police had also persistently maintained that de Menezes had jumped over the ticket barrier while being chased by armed officers. Now it seems that he possessed, and used, a ticket to gain entry to the station. It is less than a week since the killing, and yet the police's version of events changes daily, raising more questions each time. Meanwhile the officer at the centre of the inquiry has been sent on an expenses-paid holiday with his family by the Met. Technorati tag: jean charles de menezes

Britain is at war with itself

Terror will force UK to grow up According to a Guardian/ICM poll, up to two-thirds of British Muslims have considered emigrating since the London bombings. When I see newspaper front pages like this, I feel the same way. I anticipate that the bombings will have the effect of unleashing the covert racism that continues to infect this country like a cancer - of which this Express front page is merely a taste. Irrespective of continued terror attacks, this country will - at last - be forced to decide which Britain it is. The old, racist, ignorant, deluded, monarchical Britain? Or a genuinely multicultural, modern democracy. Apologies to our friends at Daily Mail Watch for nicking their picture. No way I was going to pay for a rag like that, OBV. Technorati tag: London Bombings

Carry on suicide bombing

7/7 is to 9/11 as Michelle McManus is to Fantasia Barrino The media has rammed all this Blitz spirit bollocks down our throats for three weeks and it's good to see that it is now being exposed for the myth it always was. But what struck me on 8 July, and increasingly so since, is the other ways in which these events, and responses to them, are essentially British. When America sneezes, Britain gets an itchy nose. Anything the Yanks can do, we'll do worse. Media presentation of the London bombings and their impact follows the time-honoured template of pale British mimickry of the US example. So they had Elvis, we had Tommy Steele. They had the Chevrolet Impala, we had the Vauxhall Victor. They had Los Angeles (the prototype suburb) we had Welwyn Garden City. They had Clinton, we had Blair. They had 9/11, national trauma, photos of the missing, candlelit vigils. We had 7 July - oops "7/7" - national trauma, photos of the missing, candlelit vigils. Learned behaviour. Now we have the grim farce of last week. Bungling bombers who couldn't blow up a paper bag. Cops who put eight bullets into an electrician on his way to fix a burglar alarm. The Britain where nothing works, where the trains don't work, is where - surprise surprise - urban terror becomes as much Carry On as Fahrenheit 9/11. Technorati tag: London Bombings