Publish and be Damned

First of all, despite the fact that I am not a lawyer, I am a deeply cynical person and arguments such as this do not compel me in the slightest:

In light of these definitions individual bloggers are unlikely to be subject to the new proposed regulatory regime. So for example those individual blogs on WordPress or Blogger would remain unregulated and not subject to the adverse costs awards, or possibility of exemplary damages, that can result from not signing up as members of the proposed regulator. On the other hand websites such run by those such as the Huffington Post or Guido Fawkes could be.

Paul Staines’s ‘Guido Fawkes’ website for instance has a number of contributors, is run as a business and despite being off shore is targeted primarily at an audience in the United Kingdom.

If I enable Google Ads on my blog, I would fall under this regulator, because I've got a couple of guest posts on my blog.

The article goes on to say:

Whilst he is entitled to protest and refuse to join the regulator one has to ask, from a commercial perspective, why such a website would do so?

Well, up to a point, your honour. The events that led up to Leveson were NOT issues of regulation, they were quite clearly acts that were proscribed by law in which the media, police and the political establishment were complicit. The whole Hacked Off bollocks was not a failure in the existing media regulatory system, it was a failure of the criminal justice system to which the media were a party.

That is quite a different matter altogether and one that our glorious politico-legal Establishment has quietly glossed over with some fetching Farrow & Ball Red Herring emulsion.

The whole issue of media regulation (or not) should much more correctly be looking at the consumers of this tripe. The Sun, the Daily Star, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, etc. all feature swathes of salacious, scandalous gossip because that's what people want to read. If people didn't want to read this shit or see tits on Page 3, they shouldn't buy papers that provide that sort of thing.

The fact that this tripe gets bought and read so avidly is because there are cunts who want to read this sort of shit. It's a fucking lie to say that if papers didn't print it people would suddenly start reading Tolstoy, because there is a massive market for vacuous magazines filled to the brim with the banal details of Z-list-sleb lives.

You can regulate yourself to death and not fix the root cause of this shit.

And, of course, the slebs themselves are not at all blameless for this situation. It's insane for Hugh Grant to live the vacuous life of a sleb, trolling from movie star wife to movie star wife, enjoying all the glamour to then get the hump when the same media that fawned over him suddenly get the chance to report that he's been sucked off in a car by a prostitute.

The people who are actually the least to blame in this whole farrago of bullshit are probably the media, who are simply providing consumers with what they want.

The people who buy this shit and the slebs who whore themselves around for media attention both need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

The cunts.

Greenslade proudly defends the BBC

Greenslade fisks a Sunday Express article here.

Without the slightest hint of irony, the tale culminates with this paragraph:

The corporation takes the view that it cannot spend its time complaining about ridiculous tabloid stories. So the drip-drip-drip of anti-BBC articles are allowed to build up and fester among their licence payers.

And, of course, he's quite correct. The media in this country are fucking blatantly biased. The number of times I've read the final paragraph of a story in the Telegraph or whatever that outright contradicts everything that's been said in the rest of the article is what made me stop buying newspapers altogether. They ALL talk utter shite.

Of course, this is published in the Graun, which NEVER EVER publishes a steady drip-drip-drip of biased articles allowing righteous lefties to fester their righteous indignation. Oh, no.

The same Graun that wages a jihad on people who shift money offshore to avoid paying tax whilst itself being controlled by an offshore trust that, er, avoids tax.

No Roy, I can promise you that there is not the slightest whiff of sanctimonious hypocrisy in your tale of woe.

The difference between the BBC and the Sunday Express, Roy, is that I can choose not to buy the Sunday Express. If I own a TV, I have to pay for the BBC, whether I watch it or not.

In the meantime, do go see a doctor about that beam in your eye, yeah?

Striking off

"Dear fellow socialists, time has come for us to acknowledge that there is a group in society, who have an insidious and far-reaching power; a group who claims to seek truth and act in our best interests, yet has a much darker aim; a group that is completely unaccountable and even when caught acting in an improper manner will escape all but the most symbolic and trite of punishments.

"I therefore propose that politicians be licensed and placed on a register, and if struck off from this register, they will not be allowed to politic at the rest of us ever again."

-- Ivan Lewis, not at all an authoritarian fuckwit, not at all speaking out of his fucking arse later today.

Hari kiri

I am absolutely amazed that despite being rumbled for plagiarism, Johann Hari has been able to keep his job at the Independent. I can only assume he has very special photos of Simon Kelner.

But it will, almost inevitably, be a Pyrrhic victory for the fat poof. The media has its dander up, and stories have been dripping out and will continue to do so. The worst to date is how Hari has evidently used sock puppets to attack his critics, particularly one called David Rose.

I struggle to see how the Independent can retain Hari after this, but as the Telegraph blogger Nero points out, it gets even worse. Imagine the Independent retaining an actual racist as one of its leading columnists!

Still, it's good that journalists can hold their heads high, secure in the knowledge that their professional standards and credibility are so much better than bloggers.

The cunts.

In which Steve Richards shows what a fucking idiot he is all over again

I've noticed quite often that lefties can be quite astute at describing concisely, what things actually are like. But when it comes to identifying the root cause and especially when it comes to fixing it, they get it completely fucking wrong. So it is with Steve "Dick" Richards in the Indy today:

Power in Britain is distributed widely and erratically. Yet on the whole we report and scrutinise decisions, events and public personalities on the assumption that most power is concentrated in the hands of politicians in general and ministers in particular. Around the clock, politicians are held to account, even though most of them wield virtually no power at all. If anything happens anywhere, the instinct of the media and the gladiatorial parliamentary culture is to hold the Government to account almost alone. Weak-kneed elected politicians feel compelled to respond.

And thank fuck for that, even if the mendacious bastards just lie through their teeth all the time.

This form of robust accountability is largely healthy. To reverse the proposition and argue that elected figures should not be held to account would be deranged. But the consequence of an excessive focus on mainly insecure, scared politicians has led to a distorting lack of accountability in relation to non-elected institutions that wield power with anonymous, and often unjustified, self-confidence. Few voters had heard of the senior bankers who were leading them to the edge of the precipice until it was almost too late. And yet the likes of Sir Fred Goodwin, who steered Royal Bank of Scotland towards catastrophe, had far more power than most elected ministers who were regularly attacked on the front pages and summoned to explain their timid, powerless behaviour at 8.10 am on the Today programme.

It is healthy. And Richards skirts around the very edge of the real problem here. But being a lefty, he can't face the truth of the matter, because it would totally uproot his weltsanschauung.

Similarly, only now is more intense scrutiny being applied to the activities of the Metropolitan Police and the quality of some of its senior staff. The accountability of the police is highly sensitive and complex, but some senior figures in the Metropolitan Police have sheltered under convoluted lines of scrutiny. Both the Mayor of London and the Home Office have theoretical powers, while police retain operational independence. In fairness, the head of the Metropolitan Police is a public figure and extensively scrutinised, but it was alarming to watch the Home Affairs Committee interview a former assistant commissioner, Andy Hayman, and a current holder of that rank, John Yates. How did such cocky mediocrities rise to senior posts, ones that gave them responsibilities for handling the threat of terrorism? No elected minister would get so far up the Cabinet in the way that unimpressive duo rose up the hierarchy of the police. The media and parliamentary scrutiny would have exposed their different flaws long ago. Yates wields more power than most ministers, and Hayman used to.

So close. So very close. Will he grasp the nettle? Of course not!

Some media organisations, but most specifically Rupert Murdoch's, have become the most extreme example of this trend towards unaccountable power. Murdoch rarely gives interviews.

Disaster neatly averted. Attention diverted to the bogeyman du jour.

So, let's talk briefly about senior figures in private companies being held to account. In essence, that is what shareholders do. Sometimes it's difficult depending on the structure of the shares and who holds the shares, but in general, any company with a public shareholding is compelled by law to allow shareholders with even a single share to propose motions and argue against actions taken by the company, to vote against the appointment or reappointment of directors, etc. In general, if the company is making money, shareholders will be happy. But there will always be people with particular bees in their bonnets and companies are legally obliged to hear them out, no matter how blatantly vexatious they may be. I own some shares and every year when the AGM comes along, I get to vote, democratically, on things that shareholders and directors propose. I always take this seriously and I always vote, because it's my money that's at stake.

People being interviewed by the press is a load of bollocks for accountability. The only reason an exec would ever voluntarily agree to an interview is the chance to raise his profile and that of the company he works for. It's true that occasionally some senior exec will be shredded by the press, but it's usually a sacrificial goat situation, not that the company is being held to account as such.

Murdoch doesn't do interviews because he doesn't fucking need to. He owns newspapers, he doesn't need to raise the media profile of his company and he's rich enough not to need to raise his own profile. So let's just park the stupid idea that the press (or anyone else) needs to, or even can, hold executives to account.

The real issue that Richards skirts around here is the real unelected, unaccountable power in the country. He touches on it with the police, but inevitably he pokes at a couple of people, rather than the systemic failure.

It's true that the police wield lots of direct, unaccountable power. Don't ever piss a cop off, because they can make your life a fucking misery without you ever being able to prove it or stop it.

But the real problem, the thing that Richards cannot face or admit to is that the entire civil service is stuffed with faceless, unaccountable people who have power at various levels and degrees.

Stalin was partly right when he said that it doesn't matter who can vote, power rests with those who count the votes. But in Britain's completely fucked political system, the power does not rest with the elected policy makers or even the vote counters, but rather with those who get to implement (or not) those policies.

Ministers propose legislation at the broad brush level. The nuts and bolts of implementation can align with the intent of a policy or completely undermine it. The people who decide how and when a policy get implemented are completely unaccountable, completely hidden from scrutiny.

Another fine example of how unaccountable people in state employ are can be found in the latest issue of Private Eye (issue 1292), where the saintly NHS is exposed in how it hides avoidable deaths and punishes those who try to expose its failings.

It is true that journalists do terrible things in pursuit of stories. But it's equally true that they do these things in response to a demand from the general public, who are desperate to read disgusting tittle-tattle. So I do not really subscribe to the current froth of high-minded criticism of journalists. They wouldn't do those things if they didn't sell papers as a result of them. And crucially, newspapers do not fuck up thousands of lives every year or kill 25,000 people a year needlessly.

Belatedly, a strange sort of enforced accountability is taking place as parliament reasserts its right to stand up to non-elected institutions that function in the dark. Some commentators suggest that this is a sinister development, possibly leading to excessive political interference. Such fears are unfounded. How can it be sinister when those we elect challenge lawbreaking by a non-elected organisation?

Two words: parliamentary expenses. What do you say now, Steve? Or do you think the MP's got an unfairly rough ride there?

We need to know a lot more about the activities of bankers*, powerful business leaders, senior civil servants, police and, of course, what is happening behind the closed doors of media empires. This is a story about who runs Britain, and as light is shone we discover horrors. The light must not fade again.

All our public institutions deserve much tougher scrutiny than they get and at all levels, not just the police or "senior civil servants". And I wonder if the "media empires" will include the saintly Independent.

But of course, this will all blow over, much as the expenses scandal did. We can always count on occasional tweets and press releases from MP's moaning about IPSA to reassure us that they are learning their lessons and that they're never going to do this kind of thing again. Until the next time.

(And if you're that fucked off about what News of the Screws did, why are you railing at them for supplying something that millions of people paid to read week in and week out? Why aren't you attacking the people that wanted those dire little titbits?)

*Banker bashing. Yawn.

Thoughts on hacking Milly Dowler's phone

Predictably, the Twitter has exploded. Left, right and centre are apoplectic with rage. Calls for Rebekah Brooks's head, Andy Coulson's head, Rupert Murdoch's head, Jeremy Hunt's head and the death of the monarchy have all crossed my timeline.

And The News of the Screws was bang out of line. Whoever was in charge at the time (I really don't give a flying fuck who it was) should grow a set and take responsibility.

But I do wonder about the rage. Milly Dowler clearly doesn't give a fuck. And really, I don't think the largely left-wing clitterati aren't normally unduly vexed about the government doing things like this, or about the papers doing this sort of thing to other people.

Nobody's complaining about the Police being implicated in helping and / or covering up journalists doing this.

And I'm amused to see that other papers are generally not being too savage in their reporting of this, I can only assume they don't want to crow too loud lest it wake skeletons in their own closets.

I also don't recall this fulminating lefty hatred for Murdoch when he was in Tony Blair's camp.

Let's face it, this was disgusting and shameful. But I bet it's no more disgusting or shameful than stuff all the papers get up to every single day. They're all at it. The government keeps equally invasive tabs on us. The police do it to suspected criminals and if those suspects are exonerated, fuck all gets said about that.

And the idea that Rupert Murdoch personally knew about it and approved it is laughable.

Nah, fuck it. This is just a convenient excuse for some moral outrage, the lefties are using it as a hook to beat up a media mogul because he's not on their side any more.

Everyone else who is outraged seems to think it was because a dead girl it's somehow worse than hacking a live sleb or listening in to John Prescott's pie orders.

It's a load of shit. It doesn't matter any more or any less than any of the other hacking or any of the other manufactured bullshit of manufactured personalities devoured avidly by vacuous tits who can't think beyond the latest issue of Heat magazine.

All of the people frothing at the mouth are exactly the same low-life twats who are so obsessed with Peter Andre and Katie Price and Ryan Gigg's sex lives that they drive this kind of demand for salacious titbits.

We get the government we deserve. We also get the media we deserve.

Mea culpa! #OBL

Hands up, I got my facts wrong.

I read this, which looks pretty conclusive and posted it all over twitter. But apparently, this is an old Photoshopped image which has been doing the rounds for years, so it's just the US media using an image without verification, rather than proof that Osama is not actually dead.

So I guess we're going to have to wait for the official Photoshop, I mean, er, photograph.

Coulson vs Campbell

It's funny reading Big Bad Al Campbell giving it large about Coulson. Especially when Thatcherite Marxist and lifetime Labour voter Dave Spart weighs in:

And say what you like about Coulson, but at least he has never sexed up a dossier on Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destructive in order to lead Britain into an illegal war. Nor has he leaked the name of a vulnerable man who later committed suicide, simply so that he could ‘fuck’ a BBC staffer, to use his own infelicitous turn of phrase.

Sorry, but compared to Alistair Campbell, Andy Coulson is a saint.

(Do go and read the whole article. Dave is a journo, and makes several very good points.)

Like Dave, I hardly condone newspaper editors for doing this kind of thing (or turning a blind eye to it) but even the saintly Guardian's sister paper, the Observer, has been caught doing it. The whole thing is a contrived scandal by people with huge vested interest.

Uncritical reporting

It's when I read things like this, that I really wonder how far the dumbing down of Britain (and, probably, the world) has gone.

We are so dependent on the media to give us the facts and they don't bother to check them. Hell, I'm no better, just look at how easily I was gulled, ungulled and re-gulled about the "Ground Zero mosque".

In an age of spin, deceit by omission, context and outright lies, how the fuck do we know when we're being told the truth? And where can we actually go for fact-checked, reliable reporting*?

*Don't tell me "blogs", because I'm a blogger and I lack the talent and ability to check my own facts -- I don't believe that the vast majority of bloggers are any better.

Intriguing

Watch the video:

Mob (a near-future science fiction story) by Tom Scott from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

Now read the breathless, wanky Grauniad commentary. "Without bubbling into a fit of hysterical technophobia," my arse.

Cognitive Dissonance ...

The "Rapper" edition:

Best known for provocative songs such as 1992's Cop Killer, Ice-T now plays an NYPD detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Ahahahahahaha!!!

Ground Control to Major Tom

Ladies, this is a not a good look. The enormous collar makes it look like your head is floating in a soup tureen. This is not a style that BBC newsreaders should be copying.

Capice?

Sniped!

I see Wesley Snipes has committed the only crime that a movie star can commit and get really nailed for: tax evasion.

But prosecutors, in their sentencing recommendation, said the jurors' decision "has been portrayed in the mainstream media as a 'victory' for Snipes. The troubling implication of such coverage for the millions of average citizens who are aware of this case is that the rich and famous Wesley Snipes has 'gotten away with it.' In the end the criminal conduct of Snipes must not be seen in such a light."

I thought he only committed a misdemeanor? When was the last time you saw someone get sent down for three years for first-time misdemeanor charges?

Some might ask if it's because he iz blak, I say it's because the state takes care of its own.

Fucking cunts.

The Wisdom of Celebrities

I was leafing through a pile of old magazines at the doctor the other day when I saw some deathless prose by Bob Geldof proclaiming Obama as "America's first Rock 'n' Roll President".

Leaving aside the issue of whether a has-been old muso (who last had something interesting in the shops when I was still a child) is actually a celebrity, as opposed to a relentless self-promoting twat, I was struck by the clarity of his assessment, especially since it was assessed at the time of The One's coronation. Later revelations have shown him to be a serial incompetent, dogged by controversy over his typical "Chicago machine" politics.

So, given that Bob's assessment was not exactly as accurate as Paul the Octopus, I did wonder why it is that media whores and people who a talent for being able to sing a pop song have such highly venerated opinions?

Do people really think to themselves, "Those lasses from Girls Aloud can really carry a tune, I'll let them influence my political reasoning?" And, as far as I can see, they actually do. Newspapers and magazines carry this endless vacuous drivel precisely because they know that people actually do buy it.

But lately, I'm beginning to wonder if even the cloth-brained fucknuts of the mentally defective class aren't beginning to question this endless parade of mindless stupidity. Surely someone must be beginning to notice that these twats are either completely wrong or just surfing a wave of media interest in something, so they have to articulate an opinion on it.

The fact that their opinions are mindless and illogical, shines through like lighting on a black night.

Surely, people must be starting to see through this shit?

Hm.

They're not, are they?

As seen on the Raccoon

Fuck the fucking BBC, again!

Via the ever-readable Iain Martin, this fucking jewel:

ITV is said to be about to pay Christine Bleakley more than £3 million over several years to present various television shows, while the BBC is proudly letting it be known that it wouldn’t be bargained up by Ms. Bleakley and her agent. She wouldn’t get a penny more than £450,000 a year they said. And then when she couldn’t make her mind up after a week or so they withdrew her offer with a flourish.

It is more evidence of how weird life is in Britain at the moment that the corporation’s bosses think that this episode is proof they are watching the pennies. That they only went to almost half a million pounds is supposed to show they have learned the lessons from the Ross affair. Look, they brief, we grasp that as the state broadcaster (funded by a compulsory levy) we must tighten our belt… by offering Ms. Bleakley £450,000.

Now look:



I certainly would, especially after a beer or two. But it's really not fucking all that. And she's clearly not a fucking rocket scientist or she wouldn't have sat down next to that fuckpiece twatmong Chiles.

And for £450,000 a year, I'd be expecting arse to mouth, three-ways and a tongue-bath for my cock, on demand. What the cunting fuck is the BBC smoking that they think £450,000 a year is worth it for a medium-grade sofa decoration?

Fucking twats, they really don't fucking get it, do they?

Will this last as long as the coalition government?

I doubt it.

Beware the claws of the Raccoon!

Anna Raccoon is going for another scalp!

WTF?

What?

And that ladies and gentlement is part of the reason why many people - me among them - want nothing more to do with national elected politics.

Nothing to do with the fact that you've whored yourself around a dozen constituencies who all told you to fuck off, then? Jesus, talk about being up yourself...

Quote of the picosecond

There are actors such as Michael Caine who occasionally do the most frightful crap, but are charming enough to be funny about it. "I have never seen it," explained Sir Michael of his outing in Jaws IV: the Revenge. "However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

Ha!