This latter comment touches on a very serious concern that crosses most cultural boundaries but which is particularly horrifically embedded in the Muslim cultural approach to women. The Burka, the Islamic states that whip women for showing an ankle, the many countries where, out of “cultural respect”, western women have to cover their heads and limbs no matter what the temperature, the whole notion of women having to be modest that is most definitely in the Qu’ran…
All these things speak of a culture where it runs deep and is even often expressed,
that men cannot control their sexual urges.

It is significant that the less advanced the culture the more dominant this view seems to be, and the more deeply embedded in rules and customs are the restrictions on women’s rights. There is always a religious drapery placed around it and this is wrong. Although no Imam or priest wishes to state openly that they too suffer from these uncontrollable violent lusts, these same priests do however preach about the “sin” of masturbation. The best viewing on this is supplied by Sam Harris – objective morality this realisation actively requires us to change this reality…

It’s time to confess,
I am a wanker.
I’ve been a wanker since I was about 11 years old – and what’s more Portnoy’s complaint was not a complaint as far as I, nor any other boys at my school were concerned. We talked about it openly, exchanged soft porn and books, did it not very secretly, and we knew, yes flat out knew, that it was an entirely harmless activity that did one thing very well…
It meant we wouldn’t get embarrassed about having a stiffy on the bus or playing field, nor damp then crispy sheets on our beds.
This was a co-educational, part boarding, part day, school with a fairly enlightened approach to social life and very high academic standards. I imagine that half of those wankers are now running major government departments or businesses that straddle the globe. I imagine that all of them have a fairly healthy modern western approach to the equal status of women and are better balanced sexually than the typical Public School types who like the rubber and humiliation of Ms Whiplash.

Even those wankers however, are probably not as dangerous and downright dumb as to believe that a woman appearing to show some leg means that their libido is suddenly a legitimately uncontrollable force. That privilege belongs to the people who were told never to masturbate, were told that it was a sin and that women must be guarded and their temptress ways locked away from sight.
So the solution to a huge number of the world’s problems is clearly that we need all these men to be taught to masturbate from an early age… WE NEED MORE WANKING. Boys should be told that this will relieve them of the physical urges and enable them to be decent sociable human beings who can relate well to women as equals. (who should also be taught to wank, but for other reasons)

Having said that however, I will gladly admit to just seeing this Fashionista in the G2 newspaper today, and agreeing with my wife that he looks a complete tosser. There are wankers who interpret the word to mean someone who masturbates due to inadequacy in ability to find a sexual partner, and this is just wrong, masturbation continues throughout the lives of every sane man (and most women) before during and after a happy sexual relationship. I am sure that Marc Jacobs and his partner are sexually very active, never rape women or “pass them around for sex” (what a disgusting phrase), and I am happy for them in their freedom to be gay lovers adored by a section of the public who see Emperor’s new clothes as wonderful…
but he dresses like a complete tosser.

The first trick I spotted, and became annoyed about a long while back, was to do with how the typical politicians have been taught to speak to the public… from US presidents to UK political tricksters.
How many times have you heard Obama say, “Make no mistake…”? or Tony Blair say, “Look.. what’s important is…” or “Let’s be perfectly clear”?
The variant that Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg have chosen to over-feature is the rephrased and self answered tangential question…
so when an interviewer pointedly asks about the worst impacts of their latest policy change, for example: bringing in extra charges for student loans, they say, “Do I want to see universities thriving in this country?… yes I do, Am I determined to avoid an extra burden on tax payers?… yes I am”.

The interviewers try, day upon day, month on month, decade on decade, to squeeze a direct answer to their hypocrite-trapping questions from the politicians, and in turn, these elected people try and rephrase the questions back to suit what they want the public to perceive they have done.

I have some sympathy with the politicians…
and not so much with the latest generation of personality journalists. Why should Nick Robinson get to dig at a weak spot in what might be only a partially flawed policy (they nearly all are) and then afterwards get to comment without challenge on prime time news “Live” from Westminster about what is really going on?

Every one of these journalists has biases and beliefs that are as easily challenged as those of the elected politicians, but only their media bosses voted for them, not the public.

When we look at the imagery of the politicians in the press we get selected lowlights with emotional impact built in. The digital media enable us to reshape our impressions and, via memes, such as the politician corn dog eater (left), and via a combination of these half-truths and lesser truths, we can create a subtly absorbed image of our politicians as either bumbling buffoons or hypocritical spawn of the devil.

If you wanted to change the world via democracy, which post would you be prepared to stand for?
…and what would you make of personality journalists who make their careers shine by shaping your worst mistakes to amuse the lowest common denominator?
I am not advocating that we suddenly start trusting our politicians in some 1930s style, very British, deferential manner. I am suggesting that we take more responsibility for our own political views and stances, developing an equally sceptical approach to the media as to the politicians they are determined to portray…

As a suggestion, try listening to radio 4′s “The week in Westminster” and on TV, watching the select committees at work. This is the way to see politicians and journalists in what may be their most human, and humane, form… this is a vastly different mood from the Radio 4 Today and News at Ten approaches.

(Well, one of the things he does)
I asked him why he did this thing that amazes curious passers-by and he explained that part of it was guilt expunging for the many years of discarding cigarette butts. The maths at the end of the video shows why we should perhaps get our act together here…mining/quarrying alumina is not cheap, and doing it in landfill sites not entirely practical…

what do you think?
#RecyclingDoctor

Most recently the Government has countered with pointing out that people can still give as much as they like to any charity they like, they just won’t get the tax relief after the total reaches £50,000 or a quarter of their income, whichever is the higher.

Still no one seems to explain how tax relief works in this instance.
It does not mean that each fat cat gets some ‘optional relief’ from Ms Whiplash for free, every time they push £100k into Eton’s registered charity coffers*
(*Oh yes, Eton, like nearly all private schools is a registered charity, and oh yes, Ms Whiplash knows this)
It means that those who pay tax on incomes that are well over quadruple the national average do not get to choose to force the taxpayers (themselves and the rest of us) to contribute from our net tax pot contributions to the charities of their personal choice.
i.e. When a fat cat donates £100k to Eton for them to develop swimming facilities, the tax office will not now add 50% of that amount on top.

The taxpaying rich of course see this as being “their money” that the tax man has unjustly taken from them, and that the system as it stood rightly makes the tax man give it back to the charity that they have chosen.

Is this making sense?
So, given the nature of these very rich men and the charities they tend to sponsor, I am with the government in not allowing these excessive donations to have this degree of tax relief – but I am also in favour of encouraging proper charitable funding to the charities that are in need of such income in order to survive, which some of them may now have difficulty with, following withdrawal of direct (tax based) grants from government. What to do?
The answer…
Allow certain charities to appeal to a government committee for exceptional tax relief on large donations from philanthropists. These charities would not include the private schools of Britain, they would not include any offshore charities whose beneficiaries have the same surname as the massive fat cat donor, nor would they be Donkeys for the Blind in the Orkneys. They would include the public-facing major arts and Health & Wellbeing charities that the government has reduced direct funding toward over the past 20 years.
Plug the loophole, help the best charities.
I thank you.

My own experience suggests a majority of the population are racist to one degree or another. It therefore seems logical to assume that a police force that largely has to deal with an us & them mentality as part of every day working life, will be likely to have a slightly larger proportion of racists, and overt racists at that, than the general population.
There have been hints reported in the same mainstream media that the Police have felt, for a long time that the MacPherson report over-stated the case and unfairly accused the force of being institutionally racist. This is a dangerous indicator of the maintenance of the delusional thinking that allowed that racism to become institutionalised in the first place.

The latest tape recordings of officers arresting a black man, being physically violent and verbally abusive with repetitive racist attacks, is being treated as if it was possibly a one-off, that these individual officers are the sole exception to an otherwise squeaky clean force. This is such obvious, naive whitewash thinking, that I have to call: BULLSHIT.
Any black male in South London, between the ages of 18 and 26 will, I say will have witnessed police being racist or had racist behaviour directed at themselves.

This is not to say that a majority of policemen should be sacked for being racist, but that those who should be, for putting such thoughts into overt racist action, do not spring from within an otherwise anti-racist culture. The Daily Mail has put its populist, if akin to a reformed slave owner, mentality to the fore in condemning these (2) policemen and, in the past, publicly going after the racist attackers of Stephen Lawrence, one of the few initiatives in its past they can be rightly proud about. But in faking pictures of black refugees trying to board Eurostar trains beneath a banner headline on the need to keep immigrants out, it betrays its own racist heart. (White skinned immigrants never seem to feature in this calculated opprobrium) and I have yet to see the Mail acknowledge in any way that it supported Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War 2, this support being based on its cultural identity with the superiority of the white European class structure.

We all have varying degrees of racist attitudes embedded somewhere within us – it comes with the territory of growing up in a culture like the UK, even if since 1969. It has been said in the USA that there was a certain class of young male who grew up to be either a cop or a crook, or often both. The nature of being in a uniform that separates you from the crowd seems bound to encourage that “us & them” mentality in which racist thinking thrives and grows.
In a police station I was waiting in back in 1990 I clearly remember the casual and accepted racist talk that accompanied the chats behind the door about the black bastards that they had nicked the night before… the only difference from 1970 was that, now, they only spoke like this when they thought no one was within earshot.

Change is happening, but it is happening much more slowly than the wishful thinkers currently dominant in the media pretend. The shooting of Mark Duggan and the police approach to young black men and gangs in London give the lie to the idea that Macpherson said anything beyond the simple truth. It is still probably a majority of police who express racist ideas from time to time, the best we can hope for is to moderate the behaviour so well as to make it never emerge into violent or verbal abuse as was caught on tape in this latest case. If we can recruit enough black men to the police so that no force unit has less than two black officers within its ranks, we have a chance.

there is only one...species

It was the worst of scenes, it was the best of scenes

Muamba’s name was chanted around the stadium, a choir of 35,000 using every breath to try and inspire a revival for a player who they feared may have just taken his last. It was emotional, it was uplifting, it was heartening.

– The Sun.

I found myself welling up as I watched the crowd, players and officials at the Bolton game yesterday, they were cheering as one, applauding as one, embracing as one. The warmth among the management and back room staff of opposing teams was unprecedented.
The “as one” thing is what moves me, and I suspect others.

Like many other non Bolton fans I had no idea who Fabrice Muamba was until St Patrick’s day, I had no emotional investment in that individual whatsoever. In this there is something similar to, yet different between, the sentiment that echoed around the stadiums of Tottenham and Bolton one week apart, and the sentimentality that went into the Princess Diana death mass experience.
Notwithstanding the feelings of those who actually knew Muamba, the dropping “dead” of that, as good as unknown, football player had a cutting effect. It cut like a knife through the rival tribe mentality; the, “What’s important is…” Politician’s weasel lines; the Bill Shankly joke about football being more important than life and death…
and it showed us a way in which we actually are, “all in this together”, (shame on Osborne-the-smug for daring to use that phrase in his fiscal butchery context). I can see and agree with Marina Hyde that Football need not congratulate itself on the reaction, but the reaction is not primarily about that pride, it is much more about pride in being human. Football is just a front end badge for those who don’t see what is really going on here.

It is only on extraordinary occasions that this effect actually does cut away our superficial differences, and the hushed crowd watching medics pump the blood around a dead circulatory system to save a fit young player’s life, turned out to be one of these. I have seen it a few times before:- in cases of individual acts of “bravery” where a total stranger has, for example, jumped into a flooding river to try and save a life.
What this represents to me, is how some people are open to this sudden realisation, that we are, actually, one. As an individual, the death of any other that I can prevent, is a partial death of ‘me’.
My previous post on New York post 9/11, I believe, touches on some of the longer term effects like this when the nature of a disaster is particularly hard cutting.

We are not in the realm of bravery here, nor in some sentimental projection of love for a particular individual. What Muamba represents is a part of ourselves, not because we are involved in football, far from it, because we are all one human species, and deep down inside, we know it.

adjusted for decorum and sanity not Santorum and Hannity

But in New York, there is largely incredulity at the lengths to which the GOP media folk will go to prove their own stupidity. They are much more interested in getting on with life in a manner that is so very different from when I was last there in the 80s.
A lot of credit has been given to Mayors Giuliani & Bloomberg, in tidying up the streets, reducing crime, and more, but the mood of the people is something else.
I saw it manifested in approaches to police and firefighters in the media back in the immediate aftermath of the Towers disaster, but now it has mutated into something far more general and far more optimistic.

People seem to me to want to be friendly to others in a manner that reflects a realisation concerning the important things in life. Sure there were still a few of those famous telephone rows held on a cell phone in the busy street, but overall there was this steady undercurrent of “Thank you, You’re welcome”, on a level that way exceeded my expectations. Hell, even Chon, the passport inspection guy who was the first American we spoke to when we arrived, – he saw we were the last in line and gave us his copy of the New York city guide with free vouchers and some good solid advice, engaged in a chatty conversation about the Asian community in New York, and took his gloves off and shook hands happily when I offered mine as a thank you.

This sort of greeting is very different from the aggression and hostility when I first landed there in 1975 and was detained for an hour due to not having sufficient funds for the length of my stay…
Right now I would say New York would be the one city in the world that I could actually live in. The people are friendly in the way I like, extrovert, chatty and helpful, all in a nice proportion as they get on doing their famous work ethic thing.

They have their expected selection of characters – especially visible at the Sunday Flea market

Mr Wong Chi Mir Awe

The outdoor market was equally bizarre

All in all I have to report on an excellent and very enjoyable week in the big apple, and whilst definitely expensive, so lacking in its former sense of a threat barely concealed, that even I could happily live there. And I never thought I would be able to say that.

I’ve enjoyed watching the Leveson inquiry slowly and methodically reveal ever more of the gross moral turpitude of a large number,(not a minority) of Tabloid hacks. And the “culture” (like bacteria), of corruption and disgrace, which was known about, nay positively encouraged, by Andy Coulson and Rebekkah Brooks/Wade.
I now want to see these hacks volunteer to go into Homs and recover the body of a journalist. This journalist was not a hack. This journalist was an honorable human being, someone who covered the news of murders and massacres, who wrote about power and politics in the harsh real world.
And in the future whenever someone starts to scream about the essential freedom of the fourth estate, press being such a power for good – let them differentiate between Tabloid hacks and journalists. If any of the slithering Tabloid worms that have paraded in front of the inquiry want to call themselves journalists, then let them take the place of those brave volunteer activists, risking their lives to get their wounded colleagues out of that besieged place. But you have to aspire to being a journalist to use that word “colleague”.
Otherwise – accept that you are a sad hack, and shut, your, mouth, forever, about claiming journalist’s freedom.

If we lose the Sun, the People, the Star, Mail and Express, would we really be losing the best checks on our own government?
Wasn’t it the Telegraph that exposed the MPs expenses scandal while the others were concentrating on Katie Price’s under-arm sweat patches?
Wasn’t it The Guardian that pushed the truth about corrupt police and tabloid editors and hacks while all tabloids mocked, all the time knowing how their colleagues hacked phones and bribed police officers for stories as a matter of habit?

The pieces written by Jack Kavanagh and other Tabloid pretenders to the title of journalist have been shown them to be less fit to belong to that rank of freedom preservers than many of the bloggers that they despise. They frequently attack bloggers – and yes there are all sorts, but quality is not the issue here… they despise the blogosphere for getting away with saying things that they feel they cannot.
But they are not using their time on the great scoops that they pretend they are so good at, are they? – no blogger is destroying the print media by making comments on a politician or a TV celebrity… this “battle” isn’t the real competition the Hacks are fighting. Hacks are much more annoyed at bloggers for doing their jobs, just as well as they have been doing, without an expense account.

So bring on the harshest Leveson result possible – a system of enforcement that effectively enables the broadsheet press journalists to keep their freedom, and prevents the Tabloids from publishing their unadulterated (as in not written or read by true adults) shit. I couldn’t be happier to see those people and their products collectively disposed of as a waste of oxygen.

As a worker within the health & Social Care system I have some views on the NHS bill that I won’t go into – but as a contributor to the money that funds the NHS and an occasional user of its services, I am appalled at the way the drinking public ignore the issue of how their irresponsible behaviour is, costing us all money that could “save the NHS”, and my NHS colleagues benevolence-fatigue and genuine physical harm.

Twice I have had the misfortune to have to attend A&E units on a Saturday night, and witnessed first hand what is almost a repeat of that town’s nightclub queues but in a post war state of a mixture of blooded unconsciousness and occasional violent aggression.
I sat and listened to nurse after nurse asking semi-comatose young people,
“Hello… Hello?.. Francis… have you taken anything else besides the alcohol..?”

On one occasion the jam up in A&E meant my hemorrhaging nose had to carry on bleeding unattended for 4 hours (since I was capable of holding a bowl and tissues whilst staying upright in a wheelchair) while they attended to these largely self inflicted injuries.
There are no easy solutions to this problem. Members of parliament drink, the vast majority of people enjoy a drink, we have no collective desire to become Islamic over this issue. (Muslims though, must take an awful lot of encouragement for their extreme views on the subject when they witness this weekly ritual of waste, violence and abuse).

I have a solution.
Yes, unlike many other folk sitting on their hands and moaning, I have a workable (if complex to implement) answer to this problem.

The government propose to make alcohol more expensive to purchase, as is planned for Scotland. This has some merit based on research that shows that drinking levels increase with the affordability of alcohol.
The NHS reform bill proposes to introduce competition in a manner that has people very upset that we will attempt to save money by introducing privatised health services through the back door. I agree this is a bad idea.

My proposal will undoubtedly not please those who think no one should ever pay money for NHS services – without realising that this is exactly what we already do – through our taxes, but not only through out taxes, through our motor insurance policies.
Road Traffic Accidents can lead to ambulance trips and the negligent party has to pay

What I am seeking is a way to increase the costs to negligent drinkers (who clearly have money to burn) and at the same time prevent and repay costs to the NHS accident and emergency services.

The nature of repeated drunkenness means that people take for granted that the NHS will pick up the pieces and, mostly, the worst this leads to (apart from the regular deaths) is a lot of “joking” at work the next week, “Man! he was so out of it!, covered in puke and blood, hahahahaaa”.

Of course you can be in A&E at blood alcohol levels double those allowed for driving and it not be your fault at all you fell/ got in a fight/ got hit by a car jaywalking. This is why my proposal for the “negligent party pays” includes a 3 strikes element.

There will be issues, including those who are broke and alcoholic – sorry to be ruthless but that might mean community service for non payment of fine.
The way this is designed to work includes, as its dominant purpose, to become a severe deterrent to “being drunk and abusing doctors and nurses” being an habitual fun occupation.
I commend this proposal to parliamentary committee…

“Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found.
Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma.
Such drugs now cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.”

Whatever Whitney died of she had no chance of being seen as an innocent victim of an accidental disease.
At the time of writing no one actually knows what caused her death at age 48, but the jokes are already flying because her previous years of cocaine addiction seem to point automatically to problems associated with that as most likely cause.
What is it that seems to make jokes more acceptable about star deaths if they have been drug abusers?

I pulled up short when Amy Winehouse died as most were immediately assuming the same old cause. Mariella Frostrup declaring immediately that “Drugs never looked less glamorous” …a host of celebrities on twitter and other sites hastily paid similar backhanded tributes.
It’s not as if drug deaths were a celebrity issue – we choose not to look at the many tens of thousands whose deaths from one form of drug abuse or another cause personal and economic mayhem in our lives and wider society.

The fact that it turned out to be alcohol, everyone’s (including Mariella) drug of choice, tended to be ignored when it came to making grand statements about the nature of society. The fact that alcohol can kill you other than by driving drunk is not generally felt as a conscious fear among the British public. Even more significantly we look to prescribed drugs, over here almost as much as America these days, seeking alleviation of pain. without ever clocking the sheer weight of numbers of those who find death is the price of such pursuit.

But everyone loves a star – and just as we use drugs, we want to use them for their own purposes.
No matter how close to home that star’s faults may be for the person attaching their own meaning. Perhaps its the closeness of the dead person’s failings to their own that prompts this type of reaction as a defense mechanism, to make sure we do not all look more studiously at death and what it means to us.
I remember when River Phoenix died, I was incredulous that he was a drug user – I had just assumed him to be a clean living actor, and with Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson I was equally shocked, drugs being by prescription makes no difference to dying.

Let’s see if Whitney’s cause of death turns out to be drug abuse – and how different the reactions will be if it turns out to be prescribed drugs or illegal ones… or something else altogether.