Rowson on ISIS and...

...and I don't know where CiF is currently, but the more mystery the better figuring this shit out.  Love Rowson.

Steve Bell on Osborne's Defeat on Tax Credit Cuts

Way too early to count Gid. out, but great to see him taken down, if only temporarily.

Creative Placement

One of the reviewers didn't like the film so much as the brilliant design above might suggest...

Steve Bell's If on Harriet Harman's Voter Purge

Rowson's illustration for this column on the real extremists in British politics is also brilliant, as usual, but I just love Bell's PC Harman.

Steve Bell on Iain Duncan Smith & DWP Lies

Bell in fine form back in the Graun. taking on IDS.


Suppose I should include a link for some background: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/18/dwp-admits-making-up-positive-quotes-from-benefits-claimants-for-leaflet

George Monbiot on Corbyn and the Labour Leadership Race

Really liked especially this bit from George Monbiot in the Guardian, and intended posting it with the title 'QOTD'.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

But re-reading the piece again, there's too much that needs repeating.  So...

On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates. Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority. The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.

In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers – as the SNP did in Scotland – could smash the political concrete.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to Ukip at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are flocking back to him.

...

Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back Ukip supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout? What is attractive about a party prepared to abandon its core values for the prospect of electoral gain? What is inspiring about a party that grovels, offering itself as a political doormat for any powerful interest or passing fad to wipe its feet on?

In an openDemocracy article, Ian Sinclair compares Labour’s attempts to stop Corbyn with those by the Tories in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, seen by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her.

Across three decades New Labour strategists have overlooked a crucial reality: politicians reinforce the values they espouse. The harder you try to win by adopting your opponents’ values, the more you legitimise and promote them, making your task – and that of your successors – more difficult. Tony Blair won three elections, but in doing so he made future Labour victories less likely. By adopting conservative values, conservative framing and conservative language, he shifted the nation to the right, even when he pursued leftwing policies such as the minimum wage, tax credits and freedom of information. You can sustain policies without values for a while but then, like plants without soil, the movement wilts and dies.

...

Rebuilding a political movement means espousing what is desirable, then finding ways to make it feasible. The hopeless realists propose the opposite. They assemble a threadbare list of policies they consider feasible, then seek to persuade us that this package is desirable. If they retain core values, they’ve become so muddled by tacking and triangulation as to be almost indecipherable.

So great has the damage been to a party lost for 21 years in Blair’s Bermuda triangulation that it might take many years until it becomes electable again. That is a frightening prospect, but the longer Labour keeps repeating the same mistakes – reinforcing the values it should be contesting – the further to the right it will push the nation, and the more remote its chances of election will become. The task is to rebuild the party’s values, reclaim the democratic debate, pull the centre back towards the left and change – as Clement Attlee and Thatcher did in different ways – the soul of the nation.

Because Labour’s immediate prospects are so remote, regardless of who wins this contest, the successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again. Only one candidate proposes to do that.*

One might also note that by trying to take the more centre-right (at best) ground formerly held by the Tories, that Tony Blair helped force the 'Conservative' Party further to the right as well, such that, as has already happened with the Republican party in the US, it is become increasingly a radical party, an extremist entity.  In fact, I'd suggest that Tony Blair had almost as much to do with the Tories' disgusting transformation as Keith Joseph.  And that arseholes like Liz Kendall & her supporter David Miliband also deserve much of the blame in their complicity for what England has now become.

Was watching part of an LBC interview with Liz Kendall earlier, till I got to the point that I wanted to vomit.  She said something about not being able to bear seeing 'fifteen years in total of a Tory government.'  Strange.  If we're talking about right-wing rule generally**, and New Labour are arguably to the right of what the 'Conservatives' once represented even in my lifetime, then I'd say the number would be more like forty-six.***


* As a non-partisan, I find it interesting that Monbiot seems to be only talking about Labour regaining power in the context of an outright victory, rather than considering the possibilities of a broader progressive coalition, but then this is an article in the context of the party's leadership-election after all.

** And frankly, who gives a shit more about the names of the parties or their members than actual policy ?

*** ie May 1979 to May 2025

Does the Grauniad Only Exist to Piss Off Non-Wankers ?

So, a British Olympian tweeted his disappointment in the new kit for the Brits...

Well this isn't right... Where's the Union Jack!?!? @BritAthletics (this is the kit for worlds) pic.twitter.com/RAVoi6yRex

— Greg Rutherford (@GregJRutherford) August 13, 2015

I was inclined to agree with him, especially given the inclination of the government to shit over both the flag and other traditional designs in recent years.  And given the recent (although increasingly due to DC & Co., sadly seemingly temporary) vote on Scottish independence, why not celebrate the flag ?  But no biggie, really.

So, how does the Graun. respond to this shit ?  Why by having some asshole shit all over not just 'Team GB's kit, but the Union Flag itself...of course...As one does.

The trouble with the United Kingdom’s flag, when you come to think about it, is that it is really quite ugly. I have every sympathy for the designers who removed it from the British athletics team’s vests for the imminent World Athletics Championships in Beijing. Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford has complained that “it isn’t a British kit any more” because it hasn’t got the union flag, but the decision makes sense aesthetically. The new vest is an elegant flowing dance of red, white and blue – the flag’s colours, remember – and has Great Britain written on it in big letters. It just doesn’t have that jagged, explosive, aggressive flag.

So, your problem with the Union Flag is an aesthetic one, right ?

I don’t mean the union flag is aggressive because it embodies an imperial arrogance or a coercive union that keeps Scotland in its place. No, it just looks as if it does.

Nothing to do with divisive politics then...Go on, do say...

Look at it, if you can bear to. With its cluttered burst of both right-angled and diagonal radiating lines, the British flag is heavy and overbearing, forceful and strident. On a battlefield it would make sense. Sure, this virulent standard served to rally regiments at the Battle of Waterloo. But today? At sporting events? It looks crap. Instead of suggesting unity, its sharp-angled divisions imply fragmentation. In fact, the relentless dynamism of its design evokes the shock and shatter of a cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Who wants a dynamic flag, with any sense of urgency or purpose, huh ?  And those 'sharp-angled divisions' sure as hell put me in mind of a 'cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar'...wait, you meant that as a...bad thing...right ?  So, anyway, go on with your aesthetic critique...

This was fine when Britain ruled the waves but its military hysteria makes no sense nowadays. To see how visually repellent* the union flag really is you just have to contrast it with a truly great national flag, that of the United States. The American flag is beautiful, as the artist Jasper Johns saw very clearly when he made one out of collage and waxy paint. The stars and bars** are soothing and reassuring to look at. Those layers of repeated lines have a quality of minimalist art, although they date from long before such art was invented. Perhaps America’s flag has had a hidden influence on all its art movements, not only on Johns. The bars hang there in harmony and peace, and the stars float majestically in their blue ether.

You.Have.Got.To.Be.Shitting.ME.!!!  The American flag, scraped hastily together out of scraps of its own forebear ?  That stripey-assed Waldo-esque remnant of centuries past ?  I'll acknowledge that there are in fact worse flags...by far...but, as a symbol of the supposed leader of the free world, the US flag is a joke.  I could take your argument seriously if you acknowledged just about any other iconic flag but that one...

...The same goes for the French tricolour, another of the world’s most attractive flags. Its simple rectangles of colour are bold but beautiful. No wonder it has been imitated by so many other nations in varying colours.

Erm, yes.  Yes, indeed.

You don’t see many other countries imitating the British flag.

Wha...wha...what ?  Never mind how many flags explicitly incorporate the Union Flag directly, such as a certain US state, or are otherwise symbolically based upon elements of the Union Flag, such as the flag of the United States itself, or use similar motifs such as Jamaica.  Just WTF are you talking about ?

The flags of the United States and France are the results of 18th-century revolutions that gave their creators a sense of starting afresh. No ghosts of the past or compromised histories influenced the design of these revolutionary standards. On the contrary, they needed to be totally new, to symbolise new constitutions, new beginnings. 

Bull-fucking-shit !

...Perhaps Rutherford’s objection to the British flag’s disappearance from the national British athletics team’s kit reflects an anxiety about insidious anti-union propaganda, as if in the age of SNP triumph it is becoming politically incorrect to sport unifying British symbols too proudly. But I would argue it the other way around. Perhaps the union flag itself is a psychological boost to nationalists who want to break up Britain. Its sheer pompous ugliness unconsciously damages the image of the union.

Fuck you !

So here is an idea to save the United Kingdom as a political, emotional and cultural entity. Let’s invent a new flag. Let’s visually forget the history of internal compromise and external violence this flag so unattractively embodies. A new flag for a new Britain might help us love our – whole – nation again.

Like you give a flying fucking shit about the union...I just shat all over the evil emperialist entity that is the English, and would much rather see the damn thing dissolved, but yeah, let's fantasise about a new 'Union Flag' that we could all celebrate after we finally killed the beast...  Not that we need bother given said arsehole's fondness for the flag of the United States of America:

US Flag with 51st star for additional state, such as Puerto Rico

One single solitary identical star added for each soulless entity added.  That's it.  That's your glorious national identity right there.  Inspirational, isn't it, that slight adjustment in the field of stars ?...

Far far more inspirational than a simple symbol of the union of three*** nations thus:

I've said it before...I'll say it again... I hate the fuckin' Guardian.


* He actually said this; If he said this in, and regarding the country whose flag he apparently worships, he would likely be shot dead on the spot.

** You really do not want to use that phrase regarding American flags.

*** The Welsh were fucked with the flag, I will admit that much.  And the flag would be much cooler with a dragon.  No...Doubt.

Ben Jennings on the Continuing Dismemberment* of Greece

* Would rape be too harsh a word ?

The Moscow Guardian ?

Damn, now I'm wondering if I inadvertently stepped through some time/space-portal into an alternate timeline.

How the hell did that happen ?*


* Figured it out eventually, but still funny.

Brian Adcock on Osborne's RBS Giveaway

Got to put the taxpayers' money back into the hands of (bailed out) private banks and billionaires, where it rightfully belongs after all.  Meanwhile, about that allowance of yours...

Guardian: Can we reverse the ageing process by putting young blood into older people?

A series of experiments has produced incredible results by giving young blood to old mice. Now the findings are being tested on humans. Ian Sample meets the scientists whose research could transform our lives

On an August morning in 2008, Tony Wyss-Coray sat in a conference room at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, California, waiting for his lab’s weekly meeting to begin. Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, was leading a young group of researchers who studied ageing and neurodegeneration. As a rule, the gatherings were forgettable affairs – the incremental nature of scientific progress does not lend itself to big surprises. But a lab member scheduled to speak that day had taken on a radical project, and he had new results to share.

Saul Villeda, an ebullient PhD student with slick black hair and a goatee, had spent the past year engrossed in research that called to mind the speculative medical science of the middle ages. He was investigating whether the old and frail could be rejuvenated by infusions of blood from the young. The hypothesis was not as absurd as it might sound.

Villeda had conducted pilot studies with pairs of surgically conjoined mice that shared a blood supply for several weeks. Young mice received blood from older mice, and old mice received blood from younger ones. Villeda wanted to see the effect on their brains. Neurons in ageing brains lose their connections and start to die off; ultimately, the brain shrinks and becomes less effective. A region called the hippocampus, crucial for memory and learning, is one of the first to deteriorate with age, causing people’s memories and thought processes to falter.

...

Villeda got three hours’ sleep that night. The next morning, he stood up at the lab meeting and revealed to his colleagues what young blood did to the ageing brain. “There was a palpable electricity in the room,” Wyss-Coray recalled. “I remember seeing the images for the first time and saying, ‘Wow.’” Old mice that received young blood experienced a burst of brain cell growth in the hippocampus. They had three to four times as many newborn neurons as their counterparts. But that was not all: old blood had the opposite effect on the brains of young mice, stalling the birth of new neurons and leaving them looking old before their time.

The other scientists in the room were stunned. Some were sceptical. Could it be real? “This could be big,” said Wyss-Coray. “If an old mouse starts to make more neurons when you give it young blood? That is amazing.”

Since that meeting seven years ago, research on this topic has moved on dramatically. It has led some to speculate that in young blood might lie an antidote to the ravages of old age. But the apparent rejuvenating properties of young blood must be treated with healthy scepticism. The hopes they raise rest solely on mouse studies. No beneficial effects have ever been proven in humans. Then again, no one has ever looked.

That is about to change. In October 2014, Wyss-Coray launched the first human trial of young blood. At Stanford School of Medicine, infusions of blood plasma from young people are being given to older people with Alzheimer’s disease. The results are expected at the end of the year. It is the greatest test yet for the medical potential of young blood.

...

Scientists may never halt the process entirely: ageing is an opaque and complex mingle of molecular pathways. But they might learn how to stop changes that underpin the worst chronic diseases. They want to extend healthspan, not lifespan.

...

The study was published in Nature Medicine in 2014. Immediately, emails flooded in to Wyss-Coray’s inbox. Alzheimer’s patients wanted infusions of young blood. So did numerous aged billionaires. One, who flies around in a jet with his name emblazoned on the side, invited Wyss-Coray to an Oscars after-party this year. (He didn’t go.) Another correspondent wrote with a more disturbing offer: he said he could provide blood from children of whatever age the scientists required. Wyss-Coray was appalled. “That was creepy,” he said.

...

As a business proposition, the transfusion of young blood raises all kinds of fears. It raises the spectre of a macabre black market, where teenagers bleed for the highest bidder, and young children go missing from the streets. Then there is the danger of unscrupulous dealers selling fake plasma, or plasma unsafe for human infusion. The fears are not unfounded: health has become one of the most lucrative sectors for criminals and con artists.

Havocscope, an online database, tracks the latest prices of all manner of black market goods and services. For $600 you can buy an AK-47 in Europe. A rhino-horn dagger will cost you $14,000. The services of a group of former military snipers? That will be $800,000. The list includes human organs too, mostly lungs, kidneys and livers. Today, a healthy seller can expect about $5,000 for their kidney. The organ broker who handles the deal can make a hefty profit, selling it on for $150,000 to a wealthy patient who needs a transplant.

In some countries, there is already a legal market for blood plasma. In the wake of the BSE crisis of the 1990s, plasma donations are not used in the UK. But in the US, donors can make $200 a month (plus loyalty points) from plasma donations. The fresh plasma is separated from the blood, and the red blood cells returned to the bloodstream, in a sitting that lasts 90 minutes. The plasma is used in medical procedures, to treat coagulation disorders and immune deficiencies. The business is completely legitimate, but if young plasma is proved to have anti-ageing effects, the risk of backstreet operators setting up will soar. When I asked Wyss-Coray if the prospect worried him, he looked serious. “Absolutely,” he said. “There are always going to be nutcases.”

Now, if only, for the sake of the ageing billionaires of the world, we had a large and ever-growing population of poor people desperate to make money any way they could.  Including younger generations growing up knowing that they will never achieve the same level of (relative) prosperity as their parents.  Oh, right.

Fun fun times ahead.

I Hate the Guardian

It’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton is no luddite. But the 2016 US presidential hopeful acknowledged this week that new technology is transforming the world of work and warned that we need to wake up to the consequences. She was right to do so.

In a major speech on the economy, Clinton talked about the threat to middle-class jobs posed by the so-called “gig economy”. The internet has enabled millions of people to make money by renting out a room or using their own cars to become part-time minicab drivers. That, said Hillary, is “creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation but it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future”.

 The digital and technological revolution that created companies like Amazon and Facebook is making life easier, more entertaining and cheaper for many of us. But it also places secure jobs at risk and threatens to lay entire industries to waste. A Labour party whose founding mission was to make sure work pays needs to find its own answers to some of the hard questions Clinton identified.

Ask any taxi driver, self-employed accountant or small hotelier and they will tell you the disruptive force of new technology is turning their world upside down. The arrival of Uber in the UK has reduced the cost of taxi fares for consumers, for example. But cabbies who are more heavily regulated in our cities see their incomes plummet as a result.

Tourists and travellers pay less for accommodation by using websites like Airbnb; but hotels suffer – along with their employees – because they have to pay business taxes that Airbnb is exempt from. New accountancy software makes it easier for people to do their own finances (and enriches its inventors) but threatens the employment prospects of accountants – a white-collar profession traditionally regarded as one of the most secure.

As someone who loves new technical innovation – whether it’s a new game, a new phone or new music service – I think we should do more to celebrate technical innovation in Britain. But we also need to ensure the wealth created by the digital revolution doesn’t produce a “winner takes all” economy in which a tiny number of dotcom billionaires displace millions of workers in formerly secure jobs. We need to protect the interests of professionals and blue-collar workers even as we seek to reap the rewards generated by the new digital economy.

It is a difficult balance to strike. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that technology will become as potent a force as globalisation in the coming decades. In fact, most economists already agree that it is technological change, rather than globalisation, that does most to explain wage stagnation and rising inequality in advanced democracies.

It took Labour too long to acknowledge that many voters felt immigration, one of the defining features of globalisation, was the most important issue facing the country. It would be wrong to make the same mistake twice by underestimating the impact the digital revolution will have on wages and jobs.

I am a huge enthusiast for new technology. I served as the country’s first digital minister under Gordon Brown. I even review video games for the New Statesman. Over time, technology could mean we all spend less on everything from the weekly shop to cars, clothing end energy. It will give millions of people the chance to do more creative and fulfilling work.

BULLSHIT !!!

But the effect the digital revolution could have on middle-class jobs could be as dramatic as that experienced by the working classes in the industrial age, as machines began to take on the jobs they’d done for centuries.

Could be ?  Could Have ?  What fucking reality are you living in Mister Watson ?  Try the fucking reality in which those jobs have already been decimated in the name of right-wing economic extremism.

Reforming socialists have always believed change can be harnessed so that it produces better outcomes for everyone. So it is absolutely crucial that we continue to close the digital divide, so that all our workforce has the skills and training it needs so to claim a share of the enormous wealth the digital age is creating. It is too easy to pretend everyone has superfast broadband or a laptop. They don’t. We need to ensure everyone benefits – whether they’re from a country estate, or a council estate.

Umm, the middle-class jobs are already being destroyed, in case you weren't paying attention, and, even were the renumeration for working for Uber as a neo-feudal serf anything remotely resembling that necessary to live a bare-minimum civilised life in the West (hint: it isn't), the company and its competitors are all putting every asset they have into automating the lower classes out of employment altogether.  And there is no class of employment, outside of the board that it is, that isn't up for or eligible for replacement, by robots or computational algorithms.

This is a fundamental existential conversation that we should have started four decades ago.  Instead of which, after decades of delay and derailment by Randian fantasists and out-and-out greedheads, we find ourselves here at the point of no return for the human species with no Plan B.

Martin Rowson: Homes of the Future!!

Ostensible context here.*  But a great opportunity for dystopian brilliance from Rowson regardless.


* Actually, I'm not sure Osborne's entirely wrong on that issue.

Guardian: In more innocent days, you could write about cocks and not be misunderstood

The brave and resourceful small girl in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons, is called Titty. But not, we learn, in the new film version being made by the BBC. There she will be renamed Tatty, to avoid “too many sniggers”.

It’s not the first time this indignity has befallen Titty, who was named after the traditional English fairytale, Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, in a more innocent age. (According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word “tits” only started being associated with breasts in about 1928.) She was rechristened Kitty when the story was televised by the BBC in 1963, though she re-emerged with her original name in the 1974 film adaptation, and in a later radio broadcast in 2012.

Names have long been a hazard in children’s literature. ...

“Ejaculate”, another potentially troublesome word, was at one time popular with authors as an alternative to “exclaimed”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – not quite a children’s author but always loved by young readers – used it 23 times in his Sherlock Holmes stories, most arrestingly in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), when Watson, after dozing off in the great detective’s study, reports that “a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up”.

As a doctor, Doyle would have known the term in its sexual context, but at a time when open discussion of such matters was reserved for medical textbooks, could have thought that its use in another sense was perfectly justified. More probably, he simply missed the double meaning altogether. This was also true years later of the young Dr Seuss, whose first publications in the 1930s, Boners, More Boners, Still More Boners and The Pocketbook of Boners are now collectors’ items.

“Cock” as slang for the male member has been current since 1610. Yet in the chapter headed Aunt Jane’s Treat in Richmal Crompton’s 1924 novel, William the Fourth, one of William’s respectable maiden aunts accompanies him to a fair, where she rides on a merry-go-round, mounting – as the author puts it – “a giant cock” … “It seemed to give her a joy that all her blameless life had so far failed to produce,” it says.

Something similar, again involving a cockerell-shaped fairground attraction, takes place in Angela Thirkell’s 1939 novel The Brandons. This example of light fiction was aimed not at children but at a largely female, middle-class audience whose ultra-respectability amounted to another form of assumed literary innocence.

...

Today, double entendres are the regular stuff of comedy, even when writing for children. When AA Milne referred to Pooh “poohing in the sun” in a poem in The House at Pooh Corner, he unleashed decades of quiet merriment among parents and grandparents aware of how the meaning had changed since they were six. But perhaps the most devoted Milne fans reading to children now would draw the line at two American spin-offs, both picture books: Marlene Brown’s Cooking with Pooh (1995) and Isabel Gaines’s Pooh Gets Stuck (1998). Those earlier, unconscious verbal slips were so much funnier.

Ugh...

And from the earlier, related story:

This is not the first time the character’s name has been modified to avoid smirks: in a 1963 film adaptation, she became Kitty. And book publishers have made similar adjustments to children’s books in recent years: Fanny in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree is now Frannie, and cousin Dick is now cousin Rick, while Nobby in Five Go Off in a Caravan is now Ned.

Maybe, just maybe, authors wrote in the past using perfectly normal English words and perfectly normal names, and readers read their works without breaking out into fits of giggles every five seconds because...they weren't sex-obsessed potty-brained idiots.

Personally I'm against censorship of any kind of past works, without the author's own explicit permission, which if they're dead, they obviously can't now give, but some reasons make more sense than others.

Image: http://tygertale.com/2014/02/11/the-black-dossier-return-of-the-golliwogg/

The removal of the golliwogs from Blyton for example, is understandable insofar as they were based upon traditional racist stereotypes.  The offence there makes sense.  But Dick ?  Dick is only offensive if we choose to make it offensive.  And just what are we telling children by stripping this perfectly innocent language from their literature ?  And most of these usages historically were innocent, whatever the Guardian's writer may want to infer.

Just grow the fuck up people, and stop destroying our language.

What Was That I Said About British Cartoonists...

...Just a couple days ago ?

Well, how was I to know Steve Bell had this turd up his sleeve ?...

Speaking of...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH !

Compare and Contrast

The thing I love about cartoons like this in the British press, is the incredible detail involved -- a whole story contained in a single image.  That, and the relative absence of labels. 

Half the fun's just trying to figure who's who and what's what -- As with the purple speedo there on Farage; well I think it's Farage -- The commentators online seem to think it's Putin for some reason.

Editorial cartoons in other countries aren't like this.  For an example, I sought out cagle.com, always a source of some of the worst cartooning in America.  And on the third page, I found a perfect example of what I was looking for:

Not to pick on this guy, and he can draw when he wants to, judging by the other work on his site, but this just says everything about the state of editorial-cartoons in America: Everything has to be labelled, can't say anything controversial, when in doubt, go for the cliches.

Something bad happened in South Carolina.  Hate struck the treestate like an act of G-d.  Yeah, that, or a racist nut-job white guy went out and intentionally shot up a historically black church, killing a bunch of innocent black people who were there to worship:

But we don't want to be talking about race, just as we don't want to talk about the proliferation of guns in America.  Too controversial !  At best, maybe we could mention mental illness.  But easier still to just take a readily identifiable symbol for a state (and the state is the real victim of course, huh Nikki Haley ?), put a label on it anyway, then draw a lightning-bolt labelled 'hate'.

Speaking of that symbol, I think there may be something missing...

Oh yeah !  Huh, wonder why he left out the crescent-moon ?  Can't be that there wasn't room.  Can't be too difficult to draw.  Nah, it's just a mystery.

Now I know the media-markets are different, I know the Guardian doesn't make a profit, and I know what a shitty time it is for cartoonists in general these days.  But, even when the cash was flowing more freely, even when the print-media was still flourishing, shit like this proliferated.

Newspaper-editors and readers alike see editorial cartoons as disposable, because, by and large, they are.  And yet as demonstrated by the likes of Martin Rowson, they don't have to be.  They can be works of bloody art.

Bah, What do Economists Know Anyway ?

And no, I'm certainly not one.

George Osborne’s plan to enshrine permanent budget surpluses in law is a political gimmick that ignores “basic economics”, a group of academic economists has warned.

Responding to the chancellor’s Mansion House speech earlier this week, they said a law forcing the government to cut spending or raise taxes every year to generate a budget surplus, characterised as Micawber economics, would suck the economy dry and within a few years could trigger another credit crunch.

 In a letter to the Guardian, coordinated by the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, 77 of the best-known academic economists, including French economist Thomas Piketty and Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang, said the chancellor was turning a blind eye to the complexities of a 21st-century economy that demanded governments remain flexible and responsive to changing global events.

... 

And George Osborne's background is what exactly I wonder ?  <Checks, ineveitably, Wikipedia>  Okay, nothing wrong with a degree in Modern History is there ?  And tried his hand at 'journalism' for...The Telegraph...okay.  What's that about a flat tax ?  When was that ?   When he was back at public school perhaps ?...

2005.  Oh G-d...



* BTW, Grauniad, who the hell chooses the pictures for your articles ?  Why would you choose that crop other than to fill the damn space with text ?  And what is the choice of picture meant to convey ?  That Osborne is a privileged Toff ?  Or that he's James Bond ?...

An Odd Sentence

From 'The Guardian view on Turkey':

Turkey is a crucial country. In spite of its recent drift toward authoritarianism, in spite of the increasing intemperance of its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and in spite of the loss of the sure touch in foreign policy its government once possessed, it is still a rock amid the sea of troubles that is the Middle East today. Although growth is slowing and unemployment and inflation rising, Turkey is still among the world’s stronger economies, and aspires to join the top 10 within the next decade. And, while there must be serious concern about the government’s rough treatment of the media, its bullying of lawyers, and its general readiness to bend rules for political advantage, it is still a relatively free and democratic polity, one of only a handful such in the Muslim world.

So it is hard for outsiders to know what to wish for in the Turkish general election next Sunday.

Uh, no.  No, it really isn't.  And nothing in the remainder of your piece suggests any doubt, so why say that ?  (Concerns about NATO ?)  Not that the West has any say here, but, if it did, the choice of further autocracy and further Islamisation of what was once a staunchly secular state under Erdoğan would be the choice of a lunatic, certainly if we were still seriously considering membership for Turkey in the EU.  And are we ?

Will we still be if Erdoğan continues to take the country in its current direction ?  Can we make a rational case for Erdoğan's Turkey in the European club ?  Or will we at some point admit the EU to be/have become an economic playground for our elites with little basis in shared values, other than those of the worst form of vulture-capitalism ?  Cheap resources, cheaper labour, open markets, and do with the local populations as you will.

Maybe at some point we could even resurrect the dream of Russia joining.  But, that being, not as once we might have not altogether unreasonably have hoped via a newly democratised and liberal Russia rising to the standards of Western Europe as was, but rather via a Europe whose standards had eventually fallen to meet those of Russia under Putin.

Wish I'd Said That...

Hmm, why does this sound so familiar to me ?...

SNP will form the real opposition to the Tories, says Angus Robertson

The SNP will be the “real and effective” opposition to the Conservatives, the party’s Westminster leader has said.

With Labour searching for a new leader since Ed Miliband’s resignation, Angus Robertson said the SNP would be a strong voice for people in Scotland and across the UK.

The SNP are now the third-biggest party in the House of Commons with 56 MPs taking their seats when parliament resumes this week.

Robertson said: “For the sake of people in Scotland and across the UK, it is vital that there is a strong and effective opposition to the Tory government at Westminster – and that is a responsibility the SNP are ready and willing to discharge.

“We will work in partnership with the Scottish government and members of the Scottish parliament, and are prepared to reach out across party lines at Westminster.

“Indeed, I believe that the SNP will form the real opposition to the Tories. Labour are leaderless at Westminster and mired in a leadership crisis in Scotland, but the issue is deeper than that.”

It's a mystery.