The Week in News: A Brief Guide

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!!

The Telegraph: A Tale of Trolling

Katharine Birbalsingh is not a name many of you will be familiar with, but her blogs for the Daily Telegraph show a desire for infamy Peter Andre would blush at…

I confess, I only recently found out what, in internet terms, a “troll” is. I am not what you would call tech-savvy, but after I found this word in, of all places, an English language textbook the internet made a little more sense to me. It is surprising, however, to find a troll blogging for a broadsheet newspaper.

I am of course assuming Birbalsingh’s latest blog is an excellent piece of trolling. It is such an offensive piece of vile tripe that it even stands out in the Telegraph. According to Birbalsingh, who made her name as “the teacher who exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference last year” (their words and definitely not mine), Jens Breivik, the father of Anders Breivik who killed dozens of innocent Norwegians last week, “has a lot to answer for”. The tenuous crux of her blog is that, by insisting on a custody battle when Anders was one and subsequently losing access to his son, he caused Anders to go on to commit the atrocities we have all witnessed. Indeed she goes on, arguing that:

Of course, normally neglected children go on to have difficult adult relationships themselves and maybe they see a therapist. Sometimes they have trouble settling at school. Most do not go on killing sprees which result in 76 dead. Clearly, something else wasn’t quite right with Anders Breivik. But his father is deeply confused. “How could he just stand there and kill so many innocent people and just seem to think that what he did was OK?” Well maybe he didn’t have a father when he was growing up to teach him the difference between right and wrong. What I want to know is why his father isn’t feeling any sense of remorse for having failed his son.

Sorry, what?! Bringing up events Anders Breivik couldn’t possibly remember, the custody battle and then suggesting only fathers can teach children right from wrong is madness, and this woman is a teacher!! To tar all single-parent families with the “difficult adult relationships” is so Telegraph it’s painful, but this is beyond the pale.

You know what Katharine, I didn’t have a male role model and I have a very healthy relationship, in fact most of my friends from one-parent families do. My mother taught me right from wrong far more than anyone else, certainly my father. When you say “Clearly, something else wasn’t quite right with Anders Breivik” you’re competing for the understatement of the century. A man with clear mental illness, Breivik was not turned homicidal by his father’s absence, of which we know little.

What we do know is that Telegraph writers should look closer to home, indeed Breivik quoted extensively from at least four Telegraph articles about immigration. The abhorrent anti-immigrant-baiting articles and the far-right had far more of a spell for Breivik, but as I have said Breivik is insane and his true motives are a box we can put him in afterwards, they actually explain very little. His father’s remorse is for the innocent who were killed which is only right, not for his mass-murdering son.

Of course, like most modern online papers, the Telegraph has a comments list after the blog and it reveals the depth of feeling on this issue, most of it baffling, inaccurate bile, as shown by “thingsarebad”:

It would be more accurate to say that Breivik's mother has a lot to answer for since she's the one who denied his father access to him. Boys growing up in single mother homes are far more likely to get in trouble with the law and have other problems. Boys require a father figure growing up, and the anti-male laws in place that deny fathers access to their children while turning them into nothing more than wallets for mommy to spend on whatever she likes are the real culprit. I'd actually put more blame on women like Katharine Birbalsingh, feminists who hate men and boys so much they are happy to endorse laws that take away fathers from their kids. And then, no surprise, they go ahead and blame the men, when it was feminists anti-male laws that caused Breivik to grow up in a dysfunctional home in the first place. Thanks feminists, you really are amazing!

In fact it would be more accurate to say you have all lost your fucking minds!! The right-wing press perpetually stigmatises the children of one-parent families who have no choice in the matter. Birbalsingh does not hate men but she clearly knows very little about adults from one-parent families, in fact it appears she clearly thinks they are amoral lunatics, or are at least more likely to be. The assumption that children need two parents to succeed is flat out wrong, look who’s the most powerful man in the world (well at least for five more days), Barack Obama. Whilst two parents may be preferable this stigmatism really needs to stop and it certainly has no place in this debate.

Ultimately, it is terrible articles like Birbalsingh’s in the mainstream press that cause hate, not the actions of a single father attempting to see his son grow up. Anders Breivik is a depraved lunatic pure and simple; to band him in with every other neglected child is breathtakingly stupid and shows an ignorance that is unforgivable but disturbingly symptomatic of much of today’s press.

The Sun: It gets more sickening by the day...

The Sun newspaper’s headline today highlights just what a cancerous organisation we are examining, Brown’s not wrong The Sun is.

Today News International begins its offensive defence with the headline “Brown Wrong” and a sneering defence of the 2006 revelations about Gordon Brown’s son, claiming that Brown has got this all wrong and that Rebekah Brooks et al obtained this specific information legitimately. Disregarding the other allegations against News International they reckon we’re all being too mean about Brooks, The Times and their right to freedom of speech.

You would have thought this organisation and its newspapers would have shown more humility, given the stories that have come out in the last week. One allegedly false allegation does not warrant this response, the basic question with this story does not concern where the information came from but that they printed this story at all, particularly with the Browns’ plea for the paper not to do so. It was an inhuman action by a morally bankrupt corporation representing the interests of a shell of a man. In short it was one of the worst things you could do to a family, to a four-month old boy who had wronged anyone and did not deserve this exposure. It was not, however, the worst. For this, see the Dowler case…

This is the last desperate stand of a cancerous organisation against a deeply unpopular man. A man whose unpopularity was created by the consistent lies and mistruths reported by a media conglomerate with a personal vendetta against an elected, career civil servant. A decent man with the integrity and decency that no one from News International has shown over the last twenty years and certainly not in the last two weeks.

News International’s actions today have underlined the cancerous, sick, distorted nature of this crumbling empire and I am left with nothing to say but “Show some fucking humility and respect and take one on the chin, Lord knows your victims have earned that you twisted scum. It is not the source but the nature of the story that is so disgusting, arrogant and harrowing…”

Chilling, Disgusting, Murdoch...

The latest revelations show a breath taking, chilling arrogance on the part of the Murdoch empire and the British media in general, as a society we can no longer allow this to continue.

There is a difference between press freedom and media ethics. There is also a difference between the public interest and what News International prints on a daily basis. Whatever you think of Gordon Brown, and I appreciate he is not a liked man, the revelations about his children’s health have no place in newspapers. A democracy does not mean privacy no longer applies. In fact it means the opposite. That’s why we have a secret ballot; it’s why we have privacy laws, the Data Protection Act et al.

A free press is a cornerstone of a safe and free democracy but with the advent of the Murdoch era and the pornographer Richard Desmond’s acquisition of the Express group came the erosion of journalistic practices and their intent. Sensationalisation and muck became the focus and the public became engrossed in a series of repugnant exclusives, sorry EXCLUSIVES, that hid behind the pretension of freedom. The papers courted the worst of human nature and News International and McMullan’s defence that people still bought their papers just further exposes their contempt for the law and the majority of the public who find these rags reprehensible. People voted for Mussolini, Hitler, Bush, and it didn’t make it right. The perverse interest in the private lives of others has become accepted because of papers like this, and it shouldn’t be. Particularly when children who are unable to defend themselves are involved, what does this say about British society? Certainly nothing good.

Indeed democracy is fundamentally damaged and undermined by the fear of politicians who are only one step away from having their private lives thrown across the tabloids. The Data Protection Act states that only “relevant information” can be held about an individual; new press regulations should state the same thing. Fraser Brown’s cystic fibrosis has nothing to do with Gordon Brown’s competency; it has nothing to do with my impression of him as a man, a leader, a father. In short, we do not need to know, it is a private, family matter that he is free to conceal or reveal, to deal with privately as a family.

In a brilliant moment on a recent Newsnight Steve Coogan called former News of the World editor and all round sickening, inhuman apologist Paul McMullan a “muckraker”. Yet such a term fails to do justice to this behaviour. The original muckrakers were American journalists unveiling the terrible conditions of the tenements of the large American cities. Journalists such as Stephen Crane whose bleak, naturalist novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets reveals the true purpose of journalistic endeavour, to protect citizens and give a voice to those without power. What you read in the tabloids is nothing but perverse entertainment and hand-washing. A group of criminals cannot be the moral arbiters this country, or any country, needs or wants.

The truth is the revelations about Brown reveal a chilling and disgusting arrogance on the part of the Murdochs, Brooks and News International. Brown was elected by his peers to lead this country. Love him or loathe him, a certain level of respect for Brown or any other Prime Minister is due. There has never been any suggestion Brown was involved in corruption or wrongdoing of any kind, he was hounded for the political gain of a man who was never elected, essentially for profit. Medical records are not obtained legitimately, that’s a simple fact. To attack the Prime Minister in such a way shows a contempt for the electorate, the public and an arrogance that is inexcusable.

As for celebrities, McMullan claims that by parading themselves on a red carpet and by earning large amounts of cash they are fair game. Well that’s disgusting. For the most part celebrities attempt to entertain people, not hand over their lives to reckless and abhorrent journalists and paps. It will be swept under the carpet by the increasingly disgusting things we have read over recent weeks, but the fact remains, everything we have read is criminal. Everyone is entitled to a level of privacy the current tycoons in charge of our media arrogantly dissuade. Of course the facts concerning Milly Dowler, the families of 7/7 victims and dead soldiers are the most shocking and disgraceful but do not let us lose sight of the fact that titillating gossip is symptomatic of the disgusting abuses committed by News International. The whole system can no longer be trusted with self-regulation as it shouldn’t have been from the beginning but there’ll be more on that later in the week…

The Sun: An open letter

Below is a copy of a letter I sent to the Sun newspaper today in response to the Guardian's revelations regarding the interception of Milly Dowler's voicemails, I am currently working on a longer response as the phone-hacking allegations have infuriated me from day one but the latest news is so revolting I have not been able to formulate a coherent blog yet! I suggest writing your own angry letter or simply using mine (remember to change the name!) and please send all reactions to talkback@the-sun.co.uk This is a crucial moment in the history of the media in Britain and I suggest we all react with appropriate ire!

"Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing regarding the details that have emerged in recent days relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s voicemail and the conduct of your employee Glenn Mulcaire.

Obviously I do not read your newspapers as I have an IQ over 4 and can understand more than four thousand words, however I acknowledge that a large number of people or ‘idiots’ do read the utter tripe you publish on a daily basis. Instead of pointing fingers and using the old defence that everyone was doing it, for which you have produced zero evidence, you may wish to at least appear to be humbled by your company’s actions and unilaterally concede and confirm your wrongdoings instead of “welcoming” inquiries. Perhaps a small sign of remorse rather than a bleeding heart memo from someone (Rebekah Brooks) who was either involved or at least criminally negligent may offer some contrition. I have never been an editor of a national newspaper but I would assume payments of tens of thousands of pounds would have to be signed for by some top-level employees and a basic level of questioning about how your reporters were gaining such personal information.

I also notice that the News of the World’s disgusting actions are sixth on your list of headlines today, behind such newsworthy items as Cheryl Cole’s ultimatums for Ashley Cole, what basis or sources you’ve used for this ‘story’ I dread to think, and long-range pictures of Arsene Wenger on a family holiday. Ground-breaking reporting! In fact the most believable story I found was about a Mexican UFO.

Perhaps also you can now offer a t-shirt on your site as well, something along the lines of “I’m a private investigator for News International and I got this t-shirt by pissing on the families of murder victims…” Perhaps this will more accurately reflect the level of contempt you have for good media practices and the privacy of individuals.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Mistry"

Britain's not broken it just needs switching off and on again...

It's a well known fact for anyone who's ever worked with a computer that, a) the computer will fire warning messages at you quicker and with more regularity than Katie Price hurls "exclusives" at the lip-licking tabloids and, b) that it will do so only at the most inconvenient and crucial moments leaving you berating everything from your job to Bill Gates to the woman who sits opposite you chewing obnoxiously and recanting the details of her bizarre and ugly sex life with all the volume control of Brian Blessed. And when said CPU meltdown occurs you can also guarantee the lifeless IT helpline worker will offer only one solution, the dreaded "Off 'n' on" solution or 'ONO' as it used to be called in my office. As in 'ONO if that didn't work I'm really fucked.' But the most disheartening thing is that it really works, it's as if the machines need a rest or they're just laughing at the futility of mankind and our belief that "progress" means there are people who earn in excess of £15,000 to simply reboot machines all day. Okay so I may be underestimating the work of our friends in IT and I daresay we all have a few given the proliferation of computer-based services in this crazy world. However, whatever the truth one thing remains a constant nine times out of ten, things aren't really broken they just need a brief break; the 'ONO' solution really works.

I think we've now got to a stage where if Britain was a computer it'd be showing a granite box to our neighbours with the fury-inducing message, "An error has occurred and Britain needs to shut. Do you want to send an error report?" And maybe for once we should send a report, a detailed memo to the world on how not to develop and behave. After that we should shut Britain down for, say, six months and wait to start again fresh, having used our break to chill the fuck out and see where we've been going wrong for so long. We should ban all media outlets except the BBC website and insist even that only prints boring, factual news pieces. Any job title with more than three words should be rebranded to say simply what it is or better still disbanded. No more 'Head sales representative for marketing' thank you very much, that ship has sailed and been sunk.

The media would halt; the same papers that peddle the notion of broken families and communities that then gleefully print blow-by-blow accounts of divorces whether it's the Price and Katona break-ups in the red-tops or the oil magnates and people no one has ever heard of in the Mail and the Express. If we want people to be reasoned and civil during a divorce especially involving children, and we really should, we should ban the likes of Trisha and the Jeremy Kyle Show and send them to a distant island with their inbred guests to scream and shout and behave how they wish. Let's not put a microscope on the negative all the time, let's be genuinely thankful that this isn't Rwanda circa 1994 or Vietnam circa 1969 or even London in 1941. Life isn't really that bad for us, yes there are problems but most of them are simply impotent, wearied attitudes. As for removing pointless job titles that’s just for my personal fun, plus I just want to be told what someone does in an inane conversation, I don’t want follow-up questions just because some twat got a thesaurus for Christmas and feels compelled to call his poor minions by an absurd selection of meaningless words placed together with all the care and attention and organisation put into Leslie Ash’s face.

I know this all sounds a little communist and dictatorial but if people want change they have to do something about it. Forget Obama's "Change we can believe in" and let's look at Ukraine where people have genuinely moved for change in the last decade. Countries like Ukraine don't peer listlessly and bitterly at tabloids bemoaning the little things or the big things, they do something about it. Maybe I'm idealising a country I know little about but the reality is Britain isn't bad, we're the problem. We need to come to some key realisations, principally we're not the biggest or best country on earth and shit does, indeed, happen and when it does you have to deal with it sensibly and with action rather than fingers pointed in blame at everyone but ourselves. Take the recent attacks by two young brothers in Sheffield, a tragedy no doubt but it's naive to suppose that this is a) a one-off, and b) not part of wider a social problem which we should try to resolve as a collective rather than tut and moan about parental decay and social services in this country.

Life isn't easy and being part of a balanced, cohesive society's even harder but it's possible. Shit will always happen, unfortunately there will always be unpleasantness, it's hard to accept but inevitable that humans will always commit unfathomable acts against each other, Ross Kemp will always find work in TV and people will still buy James Morrison albums. But it's the reaction that really shows humanity and society's mettle, it's the ability to exist with a degree of happiness and success. Britain's not broken it just needs a bit of reflection, a bit of perspective. It just needs switching off and on again.

This week... Chris would like to send a massive shout out to our only follower, hope you're better soon mate. Chris also sat at home and read a not very good book by Carol Joyce Oates.

Brown's government is walking haphazardly across the road as we speak...

First, a disclaimer: This blog was first written several months ago for a national student newspaper that decided not to use my piece so it may seem less error-strewn (it's been edited) and the events of Prof. Nutt's sacking were not known at the time. Some say I'm psychic, a visionary, a prophet; all I know is that this mess has been coming for a long time now.

Imagine a sad scenario. You’re a young person who has just been blinded; following the accident you’ve won compensation with which you decide to train a guide dog. But not just any guide dog. This guide dog has to have experience, to have been trained by the best in the business and be able to show a level of ability that goes beyond any normal guide dog. So you hire the best people and your dream guide dog becomes a reality but there’s a problem. You. You don’t want to be pulled around by this dog, you think you know better than the dog and so you start pulling the dog around, ignoring its advice. You’ve lived in this world longer and you know what you want. You’re not going to be bullied by a dog, no matter how smart it is. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the world of Gordon Brown’s Labour government.

I have voted Labour in every election since I was 18 and that’s more elections than I care to admit. But I, like seemingly everyone else, am finally losing patience. Since 1997 Labour has been putting in place quangos, policy boards, tsars and whoever else to give expert advice in all manner of fields such as drugs policy, education and enterprise (arise Surallun). A much maligned but potentially brilliant idea, its basis is to allow experts to have a direct input on important policy decisions. But that’s only if the government decides to take any of the advice on board. In the last two years any proposal that the government does not like has been tossed haphazardly into Number 10’s big “No” bin. Why? Because they don’t seem to fit with what the government thinks the electorate wants to hear. Take the political minefield of drugs. Just the mention of the word has politicians and their spin doctors breaking into a cold nervous sweat. Their ties suddenly feeling tight, they shift awkwardly about and dodge the question quicker than Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn in that movie about balls and all the while this country’s drug laws sit in a crumpled, rotting mess in the corner becoming outdated, lost and confused. Take the recent re-reclassification of cannabis back to a class B drug; a decision the government’s own advisory board specifically objected to. It’s like having that guide dog and crossing a road aimlessly yourself.

Drugs policy has always been a squeamish, tense issue not least in middle England where the moronic majority seem to think all drug users look weird and smell funny like the people stalking town high streets at night asking for change. The reality of drug use is unbelievably complex. Drug users veer from the rich and powerful (Barack Obama - cocaine and pot; Bill Clinton – who probably did inhale; Boris Johnson – cocaine and pot again) down to students via pretty much every profession. I spoke to a police officer recently who said any school or large company that claimed it didn’t have a problem with drug use was either lying, deluded or in deep, deep denial. Drugs are a fact of life; as students we will all at least know someone who uses drugs, whether it’s a bit of pot or pills or cocaine, and we can probably get hold of drugs if we so desire. The government’s insistence on pursuing and punishing cannabis users is nothing short of senseless. But don’t take my word for that, ask the government’s own advisory board, the WHO or the UN. They all accept the policing of the drug trade at the moment is not working and a new approach is urgently needed. Why chase users of the softest, least volatile drugs like ecstasy and cannabis when people’s lives are being ruined by heroin and crack cocaine and two of the most toxic substances, alcohol and tobacco, are freely available?

Clearly something needs to budge, but as for ultimate solutions I’m afraid I can’t provide those, I’m not an expert. That’s allegedly why the government has an advisory panel, and it’s probably time it stopped dancing preciously around the subject with their remaining eye on the polls and actually listened to the advice. After all it can’t get any worse for Brown, can it?

This week Chris... listened to The Invisble's self-titled debut album and agreed with it's sentiments. Also, Chris and Ed went clubbing in Derby and got so drunk a series of unflattering photos have now appeared on facespace from the dark, lurking blanks of that night. All good!