Brookes on Corbyn & the Privy Council

Don't like to run cartoons back-to-back too much, and often ideologically disagree with The Times, but the choice of 'reading-material' sells me here on this genius from Brookes.

Morten Morland: State of the Union

Morten Morland on the Labour Leadership Election

Rowson & Adcock had great 'toons on Labour's leadership-election also, but...that Ed...  Still a couple I can't quite place.

Always...Priorities

Around the world, children are starving, children are dying of preventable diseases.  Children are being forced into child-labour, into slavery, even being forced to fight as soldiers.

Meanwhile, in the west, a certain toddler from an ever-so privileged family goes on an outing with his parents...and it's front-page fucking news (in mainstream publications no less).

Look at the little boy rolling down a hill.  Marvel in wonder as he kicks a ball !  See him running with his little toy-car in his chubby little fists...  But it's newsworthy, because one day, if our species hasn't completely destroyed itself before then, the adult this child may one day become could get to wear fancy-dress and pretend-rule over the people of a portion of a couple of small islands in the North Sea.

I will give the Telegraph & Times credit for one thing though: Not being the Daily Mail.  Because they apparently felt this particular combination to be appropriate:

There's a certain .gif out there on the 'ole Internetz that I could post here, that to put it mildly, starts with someone banging their head against a desk.  I'm going to refrain...this time.

History Repeating

Hmm, this from the Guardian piece on Thatcher's deal with Rupert Murdoch back in the eighties seems familiar.

Times Newspapers had long cherished their independence. In 1966, when the Times was in financial difficulty, the new owner who came to the rescue, Lord Roy Thomson of Fleet, promised to sustain it as an independent non-partisan newspaper – precisely how he had conducted the profitable Sunday Times. Murdoch was able to acquire both publications in 1981 only because he began making solemn pledges that he would maintain the tradition of independence. He broke every one of those promises in the first years.

Almost feels as if there were something in much more recent history along...oh, yeah...

Most readers just write a letter to the editor. Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to buy the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones. To do that, he must first win over the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for the last 92 years and has so far resisted all of his overtures, in part because of concerns about what he might do to the Journal.

He insists he will not meddle in the journalism or slash-and-burn the staff. "We're not coming in with a bunch of cost-cutters," he said, but added: "I'm not saying it's going to be a holiday camp for everybody."

Of course he wouldn't.  On the one hand, you've got his entire history, and his use of just about every property he ever owned for partisan political purposes, and then you've got the word of...Rupert Murdoch.

Now if only someone could encourage Rupert to put Fox News behind a paywall too...

That Ole' Grauniad

I get The Times. I get The Daily Telegraph. I get the Daily Mail. I pretty much ignore The Independent, and the like, if only because they bore me to tears. And then...there's always...The Guardian. That bastion of privileged left-leaning mostly upper middle-class liberal guilt. I read it, I've read it for years, and yet somehow I've never liked it it, never identified with it. And to this date, I'm not sure who reads it, or what their business-model is. If Murdoch hadn't put The Times behind a paywall, I'm not sure that I'd bother much with The Guardian at all. It's almost like they're constantly competing to shorten the distance between the right-wing portrayals thereof as trendy lefty politically-correct bullshit and reality. If there were a meaningful alternative in the slightly-left-of-centre UK media to the Grauniad crowd, I wouldn't waste another second on their site. Sadly...there ain't.  And thus I keep reading, and on some level supporting shit like this.

The evil evil licence-fee didn't pay for this crap, but something did.  And this kinda garbage won't occasion anywhere near the outrage that the average project of the (nominally-)public broadcaster would.  In what kinda fuckin' world do we live ?

Interesting Genetic Research and Utterly Inept Journalism

Saw various articles about the genetic study of Britons in the past two days, and while the data is interesting (clusters of very similar genetic profiles, Anglo-Saxon DNA dominant in England, hardly any Viking or Roman influence), noticed that almost every article managed to misrepresent the findings on at least one fundamental level.  Here's the Telegraph's headline:

Wow, that seems surprising, huh ?  Assuming, you don't take a literal reading of the headline, which would, in that case, seem to be utter obviously on-its-face horseshit.  So, okay...okay, not literally living in Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms, but...

Britons are still living in the same 'tribes' that they did in the 7th Century, Oxford University has found after an astonishing study into our genetic make-up.

Archaeologists and geneticists were amazed to find that genetically similar individuals inhabit the same areas they did following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, following the fall of the Roman Empire.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Okay, first sentence is still suggesting the same horseshit.  Latter sentences seem to clarify.  Especially as '600AD' plus '1415 years' would bring us exactly up to the present day.  Still, seems pretty shocking that populations in the United Kingdom in the Twenty-First Century would bear such a close resemblance to those of one and a half millennia earlier, given especially all the migrations of the past century.  One might expect for example that there would be a greater Jewish presence after the Holocaust, a greater percentage of Caribbean, African, and Middle-Eastern populations from the end of empire, a reflection of the Italian presence post-war in Scotland, and some reflection of the in-migration from the eras of the European Community and European Union.  So, what might explain this seeming discrepancy, huh ?

The ‘People of the British Isles’ study analysed the DNA of 2,039 people from rural areas of the UK, whose four grandparents were all born within 80km of each other.

Because a quarter of our genome comes from each of our grandparents, the researchers were effectively sampling DNA from these ancestors, allowing a snapshot of UK genetics in the late 19th Century before mass migration events caused by the industrial revolution.

They then analysed DNA differences at over 500,000 positions within the genome and plotted each person onto a map of the British Isles, using the centre point of their grandparents’ birth places, they were able to see how this distribution correlated with their genetic groupings.

Quoted from the same fucking article.  So the researchers analysed the DNA of a very selective population of white people in isolated rural populations for the explicit purpose of determining the genetic makeup not of modern-day Britain at all, but that of a century or more before now.

Here's the Guardian headline on the same story for comparison:

A little better...

Since that asshole Rupert Murdoch put his best publication (by far), The Times, behind a paywall, as with The Sun & The Wall Street Rag, I can't easily assess the content of their coverage of this very important subject.  But I can access the headline at least, and...

I just...WTF ?  Is that picture from the latest series of Game of Thrones, or...Oh, is it that shitty series by the so-called 'History' Channel ?  It's that, isn't it ?  This is the picture you chose...and the headline you chose...for covering serious scientific research.

I just give up.