This is my brief look at the week’s news and is a new feature… Enjoy!!
* An economic crisis the like of which the world has not seen for, oh, about three years was averted as the US made its hatred of its nine per cent unemployed and sick citizens official. The prospect of taxing those corporations and individuals who were in no way responsible for a global recession proved too much for the crazed loons on the right, led by the Tea Party and its Republican representatives.
Once again Democrats reacted with disbelief and mild fury but quickly caved in like an older brother who knows no-one’s getting ice cream if he doesn’t give in to his crazed, violent younger sibling. Indeed Democrat Emanuel Cleaver described the deal as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich" which the Republicans could celebrate.
Just like Clinton before him, Obama is having his hands effectively tied by America’s electoral system that gave him two years to fix eight years of Bush and then promptly rejected his party because a few radio hosts doubted the validity of his birth certificate. It has been a terrifying example of how the world, for now, is led by a minority of frightening eejits.
* In lighter news scientists discovered how the African crested rat uses toxic fur to kill and wound predators. Another poisonous rat who appeared in the news this week was Sunday Mail columnist Liz Jones whose article about the NHS was so hate-filled that even Mail readers were outraged, quickly closing the comments section on the website as Twitter went into meltdown.
If you missed this particular piece of drivel, the long and short of Jones’ complaint was that they would not see her that day as an unregistered patient to administer jabs she needed to report on the famine in Somalia.
The lack of self-awareness exhibited is staggering even by Jones’ ‘high’ standards and raises the fundamental question, why the fuck would any paper, even the Mail, send an egomaniac of such epic proportions to the site of one of the most harrowing famines in years?
As a riposte to Jones’ ‘article’ I called a private doctor’s surgery to enquire about having jabs to go to Somalia. Here is an abridged version of the conversation.
Me: Hi, I’d like to have some jabs so I can go to Somalia.
Receptionist: Okay, are you registered with us?
Me: No.
Receptionist: Okay, well you will need to be to have the jabs.
Me: Why? There are people starving in the world (looks to camera David Brent-style), which I hate.
Receptionist: I understand that but we will need your notes and you will need to make an initial payment to register.
Me: But I don’t have any money as I don’t get paid for my writing. Can’t you do it now, for free? I mean do you want the blood of dead African children on your hands, because that’s what will happen if I don’t get to go and write my insightful and sensitive piece.
Receptionist: Look sir, those are rules of the practice I’m afraid, can’t you use your own NHS doctor?
Me: Are you even listening to me? Didn’t your doctors sign a Hippocratic Oath? Do you want thousands of people to die? I don’t have children…
Receptionist: Sorry what? What’s that got to do with it?
Me: I don’t know, apparently it matters. Anyway FUCK YOU, YOU MURDERING JOBSWORTH. I CAN’T BELIEVE MY PERFECTLY UNREASONABLE REQUESTS AREN’T BEING MET. I’M MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL THOSE SICK PEOPLE WHO HAVE MADE APPOINTMENTS AND FOLLOWED THE RULES…
(Phone goes dead.)
So Liz, it’s not just NHS staff who are ‘jobsworths’…
* Speaking of the famine, it has received woefully little media coverage this week with the papers instead plumping for pieces about phone-hacking, a royal wedding, the US debt crisis and ,er, Paul Daniels - who was apparently left reeling by a pizza.
The Daily Organ and Independent have presented some excellent pieces in the last week that I highly recommend reading, but the general reticence to talk about the crisis in most of the mainstream press has left me uneasy in the extreme. Apparently if it’s not a whimsical distraction or a ‘domestic’ issue the papers really couldn’t give a fuck.
Perhaps News International should be forced to donate to DEC as much as they paid Glenn Mulcaire and give the same exposure to this story as they do to celebrity ‘news’ as some form of penance. Everyone’s a winner! Or perhaps just a little bit less grubby and stained.
* On a personal note my new deodorant resulted in a number of private investigators approaching me for ‘information’…
Thanks for reading, have a good week!!
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