Dogwash

Commenter Joseph K writing at Harry's Place on Hate not Hope's newly released survey of identity politics and attitudes to immigration in the UK. Worth quoting in full, I think.

Six identity ‘tribes’ in modern British society. These are: Confident Multiculturalists (eight per cent of the population); Mainstream Liberals (16%); Identity Ambivalents (28%); Cultural Integrationists (24%); Latent Hostiles (10%); and Active Enmity (13%).

Let me translate:

Confident Multiculturalists (8% of the population):

That’s people who live in places that resemble the aptly named Whitehaven (pop circa 97% White English, 3% White “Other”). Think Billy Bragg of Burton Bradstock (minority population: one Asian car dealer) and you’ll recognise the type.

Mainstream Liberals (16%)

Those members of the moneyed metropolitan middle-class, whose wealth has given them the ability to live in urban enclaves surrounded by people like themselves, thus avoiding those parts of our cities that have been “culturally enriched” by mass immigration (But they’re not racist, oh no… they would live in such areas, but they only want the best for little Marcus and Sophie, who simply adore their wonderful [95% white middle-class intake] school.)

Cultural Integrationists (24%)

Saps who still hold out the belief that politicians are basically on their side, and therefore trust them to do what is best for the nation, rather than what is best for themselves. These are the people most likely to be fooled by bogus rhetoric about “clampdowns” and “putting the rights of British citizens first” and such nonsense. The kind of empty crap that Cameron promised in the last Election, that the Blair government used to spin out on a weekly basis, and which Brown tried, albeit more clumsily (natch). “British Jobs for British Workers” anybody?

Identity Ambivalents (28%)

People who have seen our politicians for the scheming, thieving, treacherous shitbags that they are, and have given up on politics altogether. People who might find an anti-political party, or a party that sets itself against the liberal orthodoxy slavishly followed by the three main parties, an attractive proposition. DANGEROUS PEOPLE therefore, who must be told how misguided they are, and made to feel bad about their beliefs, their feelings, and ultimately themselves.

Latent Hostiles (10%); and Active Enmity (13%).

Poor sods who lack the money to move to a nice white middle-class part of the city, and are stuck in neighbourhoods that have been “culturally enriched“, and economically impoverished, by the indifference of politicians committed to mass immigration policies (policies which have, of course, turned these areas into Labour strongholds). People who feel that they have no place in Britain, that they have been abandoned by [supposedly] their governments, and who will support parties like the BNP in the vain hope that they will make things better. Ordinary people most of them, the forgotten and despised of our nation. Thank God you’re not in their position.

Legislation is being promoted in the Netherlands to ban the slaughter of meat animals without pre-stunning. The various secondary sources in English on this tend to garble the story. The most coherent one I can find is at Halal Media, a Malaysia-based English-language site. Even that report refers to a non-existent Dutch political party, the PVD. I think we can safely assume that they mean the PvdD (Partij voor de Dieren = Animal[-rights] Party), who are promoting the bill with the support of Geert Wilders' PVV. Since between them these two groups command only one-sixth of the seats in the lower house, and with the entire weight of the Jewish and Muslim communities up in arms (including interference by the Knesset, FFS), it is hard to see this one getting too far.

But things are definitely moving.

I note in passing that the situation with regard to Amendment 205 to the forthcoming EU directive on food labelling remains at best confused. See the "update" to Peter Wedderburn's Telegraph blog of last December, here. Long grass manœuvre or good old EU muddle?

UK MSM acknowledgment of the evolving Camp of the Saints scenario remains remarkably muted. Russia Today (RT) is less reticent. It its report from Lampedusa, broadcast this morning, I found this image telling:


Looking forward to your new life in Europe, are we son? Where the streets are paved with gold. The Catch-22 is that if you and the rest of the Maghreb migrate to Europe, you will turn it into the Maghreb and you will be as poor as before. I am as unconvinced by your faux "patriotic" enthusiasm as I was by all those South Americans waving the Union Flag and mumbling an approximation to "God save the Queen" in Trafalgar Square two years ago.

Do us all a favour. When everybody has calmed down a bit and the next tranche of dictators has been installed in North Africa, just fuck off back and try and make it work.

Dyspeptic rant ends.



Update (10:35)

A Maghrebi "refugee" on Lampedusa, interviewed by RT (voiced-over translation):

"We are historically a free nation and we want freedom of Islam. We want to live as the Prophet told us in the Holy Books, to live in an Islamic state."

This one's getting a bit of an airing:

Los islamistas de Lérida no quieren perros en el autobús

Given that this blog is called Dogwash, I guess I ought to help it along. Lérida is a city in Catalonia. Here's a translation (of sorts) of the article:

Lérida Islamists do not want dogs on the bus

They take the view that the Lérida City Council should regulate the presence of dogs on the street and in certain municipal facilities "in order not to offend Muslims."

Islamic associations have called on the Lérida City Council to enact local legislation to prohibit the presence of dogs both on city buses and in some areas frequented mostly by Muslims, as the animals are considered "unclean" under Islam.

They go even further and consider the presence among them of "unclean animals" to violate their religious freedom and the right of Muslims to live according to the tenets of the Qur'an.

These people are going to have to be stamped on. Hard.



I occasionally get traffic from people who are actually expecting to read a blog about washing dogs. Fine animals they are, who I am sure benefit from and appear to enjoy the occasional bath, but canine ablutions are not discussed here. Check out the strapline of the blog, above, and the link to Eric Raymond's "Jargon File" site. "Dogwash" is an archaic and probably whimsical piece of computing slang.

Helpful hint: Do not attempt to bathe cats. They are likely to take a very dim view.

Muslim student unhappy after police check at airport

Nicely posed photograph. Very Topshop or modern-day Marks & Spencer. I found myself waiting for the animation to start properly. Perhaps Twiggy and a corps of tastefully attired dancers, followed by some text along the lines of "The best dressed Islamists get their suicide belts at Your M&S".

Anyway, enough of that. It's the last two paragraphs which catch the eye.

A Heathrow Police spokesman said: “If he feels uncomfortable with the way he was treated he should contact Heathrow Police and we would be happy to go through our policies with him.

“What happened to him sounds like day-to-day policing at Heathrow and other major airports. We are all bound by the same laws and police are mindful of terrorist threats in the current age.”

Not a lot of appeasement there, is there?



Pedant's corner: Note the absence of a closing quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph (ie after '... go through our policies with him.') It's nice to see a local paper getting something right for once. Bonus point to the South Wales Echo, whatever their politics.

Barring a successful appeal, Wikileaks head geezer Julian Assange will be deported to Sweden to face charges (or is it still just an investigation?) of rape and sexual assault. An odd business, whether or not you agree with the received view that Mr Assange is an arrogant, sanctimonious weirdo who does more harm than good. Particularly odd is the nature of the alleged offences. If I understand correctly, he is charged with not telling the woman whom he was shagging, entirely consensually and seemingly at her enthusiastic insistence, that he was also shagging, or might possibly shag in the near future, some other woman. If that amounts to rape then I have to count myself as being at one with Mr Hislop's infamous banana.

Methinks Julian is being fitted up.

Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, tanning shop operator and head man of the English Defence League, has for some time had his bank account frozen, or more precisely throttled, while the authorities investigate accusations of "money laundering". The authorities seem in no great hurry to complete these investigations, leaving our man in difficult financial straits and unable to run his business effectively.

Methinks Tommy is being fitted up.

Well, methinks those things, but maybe both of these gents are banged to rights; I have no inside track on either matter. Let's move on to the case of Richard Price.

Here it gets a wee bit tendentious. Mr Price (no I'd never heard of him either) was apparently a senior figure in the EDL. Then the Times published a piece about him having to sign on the sex offenders' register. The article is behind Rupert's paywall, but such niceties are of no consequence to the Left, so here is a full copy of the article at an Indymedia site. The antifascists have, to put it in the vernacular, been creaming themselves over this one.

Tommy Robinson initially supported Mr Price against the allegations and put out a statement via a number of EDL-related sites defending him . This statement was then quietly withdrawn and removed from all sites. A period of silence followed. I understand Mr Price has since severed his connections with the EDL by mutual agreement.

The antifascists, of course, interpret this as an admission of guilt and are cock-a-hoop. I make no interpretation either way. Certainly Mr Price's reputation was damaged to the extent that his former position became untenable. Beyond that I don't know. Not that it matters, the damage has been done, the mission has been accomplished. Who cares about the truth?

I'm more interested in the scenario described in Tommy's statement and its wider implications. Tommy should be aware that if you publish to the web and then have second thoughts, you have to move pretty damned sharpish to retract it before it gets replicated. In this case the spiderbots of Google beat Tommy to it and I have the cached copy of the article from English Defence League Extra.

As the matter now seems to be done and dusted, I'm sure it will do no harm if I quote a couple of relevant paragraphs:

When his house was raided the police took a number of items from his house, including his mobile phone and his computer, which he had recently bought second hand. After investigating his computer further, West Midlands Police informed Mr Price that they had found 5 photographs of children on the computer. Although they would not show him, he was informed that photographs are put into a scale of 1 to 5 - where 1 being photographs of children in a swimming pool and 5 being indecent photographs. All 5 of the photos that where found where scale 1 images. Mr Price has no idea what these photos are and how they where on his computer.

The police however informed him that if he pleaded guilty to possessing them he would be put on the sex offenders register and no more would be mentioned and nothing would be made public and all would be finished with. If, however, he pleaded not guilty there would be a public trial and he would be miss-represented by the UK media as being a paedophile. After legal advice Mr Price felt he had no choice in the matter and since the photos where not of a paedophilic nature chose the option of pleading guilty, something that any man in his position would be forced into doing.

I'm not particularly interested here in whether Mr Price is innocent or not. He may well be as guilty as sin. I am interested in the immense scope that agents of the state, in this case the police and the CPS, have for quietly fitting up or intimidating political opponents.

The police refer to 5 images at scale 1. Five images is a remarkably small number. From all the reports I've seen, your average dodgy porn obsessive has thousands upon thousands of images. Compulsive acquisition seems to be part of the buzz. Well, OK, perhaps they were specimen images to form the basis of a charge, with the rest to be "taken into consideration". Or perhaps not.

The images were at level 1. The classification of child pornography used in the UK criminal justice system is a subset of the international psychatric COPINE scale. Level 1 on the SAP scale essentially refers to "provocatively posed" images not necessarily involving nudity and definitely not involving sexual activity. This seems to be open to very broad interpretation. (Incidentally, the Heresiarch has an interesting post in this area which you might like to take a look at.)

So what constitutes a naughty level 1 image. Well I don't know either, which again is rather part of the point. Here is an image. An entirely legal image of an adult woman. At considerable risk to my personal street cred, I have watched and recorded on your behalf part of Lorraine Kelly's breakfast TV show, and in particular Mark Heyes' high-street fashion segment. I don't think you can get more anodyne than that. Most assuredly I would have no qualms about letting my servants watch it.


Sasha (for it is she) is posing for us on the catwalk. I'm not up to speed with catwalk jargon, so I will call this pose the sinuous half teapot. Well, I'm not going to do a detailed analysis in case we all get overexcited and have to go and lie down for a while, but I think we can take it as read that this would be generally viewed as a mildly, almost formally, "sexy" or if you like "coquettish" pose.

Now suppose that the image on your hard disk is not of the lovely Sasha, but of your friend's or neighbour's 14-year-old daughter. You have been taking pictures at a social gathering: a barbecue, a church fete, a birthday party, whatever. Among them several pictures of the children. Why would a 14-year-old adopt such a pose, you ask. Because she's a 14-year-old in her best party dress playing at being a grown-up. Showing off. That make sense? Would you consider there to be anything remotely untoward about it? I wouldn't.

Now I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that if they had a mind to, the police could at least make a prima facie assertion that such a picture could be potentially classified as erotic posing at level 1 on the SAP scale. Even in isolation.

Loads and loads of weasel words there, but weasel words are all you need.

Of course the CPS would throw it out. Or would they? Of course a jury wouldn't convict. (Or would they? I'm not even sure of that anymore.) The point is that context is everything in this sort of case. Coquettish photo of a younger Sasha in among a set of consistent "family gathering" photos. No problem. Folder upon folder filled entirely with cheeky pictures of the younger Sasha and her mates. Hmm, maybe keep an eye on this one. Making the final decision on context is the jury's job. By which stage it's already effectively in the public domain.

But let's go back to Mr Price. Mr Price is, shall we say, a nasty rough sort with a bit of form for being nasty and rough. He moves among a demographic which is not at all known for its tolerance of nonces, suspected or confirmed.

"Come on Pricey. We've got the CPS on board. They don't like you EDL types very much. What do you say? You sign up for the register, nice and quiet like, and we'll say no more. Just between us. Just so we know who's boss. Just so we've got a bit of a handle on you, eh? Or of course you can go to court and get your name in the papers. Even the thickest jury will throw it out, but the mud'll stick, eh? No smoke without fire, eh? I'm sure your mates will be very understanding."

Once the reputational genie is out of the bottle, no amount of official apologies is going to push him back in.

A far-fetched scenario? Not far enough fetched for my liking.

Afua in the Graun: Beyoncé should know better than to adopt blackface

Yaz in the Mail: Why I believe Beyonce is betraying all black and Asian women

*popcorn*

I'm sorry, till the day I die I will continue to hear

Play that funky music right boy

as

Play that fuckng music, white boy

despite the inherent unlikeliness of that interpretation; the mondegreen is too deeply etched into the furrows of may ageing brain.

So it goes.

The country's most remarkable newspaper has a piece

Nursing dream fades for Filipinos as UK jobs dry up

about the impact of NHS staff cuts on the prospects for trainee nurses in the Philippines who hope to come to work in the UK.

Forgive me, but am I to understand that we, the Brits, are being set up to accept responsibility — morally and financially — for this unfortunate shift in market conditions?

So let me see if I've got this right. When my job is shipped out to Bangalore, heh man, that's just globalization, but when third-worlders lose out when the market shifts, then that's imperialism, innit?

The article also points to a certain amount of jiggery pokery and misleading behaviour by Philippines-based agencies. Isn't that up to the Manila authorities to sort out? After all, they were happy enough when the remittances were rolling in. Managing their end of the downturn is part of the package, guys.

Just sod off.

As I write, I am listening to a programme on the steam wireless about the The Stanford marshmallow experiment, in which small children are tested on their ability to forgo instant gratification in exchange for later profit. The tests are interesting because of the extent to which the results correlate in follow-up longitudinal studies with the subsequent success of the child as an adolescent and adult.

Googling 'marshmallow', I found what is clearly the adult equivalent, at least for us male heterosexual subjects. Presenting the marshmallow bra:

It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine what the delayed reward should be.

Answers on a picture postcard please...

Asked to resolve a dispute about a fine (well fine-ish) point of English grammar, the French barman commented (I paraphrase from memory), "There's no point asking me, I'm a foreigner. This is London, There are no English people in London."

Oh how we laughed. Actually a thoroughly nice chap but, as they say, out of the mouths of babes and French bar staff...


And for your bonus item, here is a special announcement.

The next time I am asked to interpret between a customer from Norn Iron (or Glasgae for that matter) and a Polish barmaid — sorry, bar associate — I shall be charging a fee.

From the Indy article which I wrote about earlier describing the hoo-ha over Thilo Sarrazin's trip to London to speak at the LSE:

A German banker who has said "all Jews share a certain gene" and described Muslims as "dunces" will speak tonight at the London School of Economics amid a row over free speech.

Anti-facist campaigners vowed to demonstrate outside the LSE during Thilo Sarrazin's appearance in a debate on multiculturalism. The former executive member of the Bundesbank caused outrage in Germany last year with his comments, in which he also attacked Basques. He was removed from the country's central bank and raked down by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who called him "stupid".

(My emphasis)

So what is this implicitly shameful "attack" on the Basques?

Here is a report from the Tagesschau website, which is as good a source as any,

Bundesbankvorstand Thilo Sarrazin hat erneut für Empörung gesorgt. "Alle Juden teilen ein bestimmtes Gen, Basken haben bestimmte Gene, die sie von anderen unterscheiden", sagte Sarrazin der "Welt am Sonntag" und "Berliner Morgenpost".

Sarrazins Zitat war gefallen, nachdem er im Gespräch mit den Zeitungen gefragt wurde, ob es eine genetische Identität gibt. Zuvor hatte der ehemalige Berliner Finanzsenator gesagt, die kulturelle Eigenart der Völker sei keine Legende, sondern bestimme die Wirklichkeit Europas.

Translation:

Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin has caused outrage again. "All Jews share a particular gene; Basques have certain genes that distinguish them from others, " Sarrazin told the Welt am Sonntag and Berliner Morgenpost.

Sarrazin's comment came after he was asked, in an interview with the newspapers, whether there is a genetic identity. Earlier, the former Berlin Senator for Finance had said that the cultural identity of peoples was not a legend, but underpins the reality of Europe.

This hardly constitutes an attack on Basques — or Jews for that matter — does it? Sarrazin is simply stating that ethnic groups vary genetically and gives Jews and Basques as examples. In itself a truism, I would have thought.

I was initially tempted to attribute the Indy reporter's phrasing to simple laziness, a combination of a cavalier attitude to fact-checking reinforced by a revulsion towards the subject. But on re-reading the carefully chosen quote

A German banker who has said "all Jews share a certain gene"...

I am more inclined to suspect deliberate political malice with the intended subtext

Zis man is a Choo-hating Nazi who vonts to rebuild ze gas chambers

in an article which looks increasingly like the work of a sixth-form work experience monkey.



Incidentally, you may recall that Saag Bhaji, joint secretary of the UAF, was reported in the same piece as making the remarkable assertion that

"There is grotesque double standards in the implementation of bans on people entering Britain. There is no doubt that a known Muslim spouting similar views would be denied entry," she said.

This post at Anorak deals with Sabby-ji's arrant nonsense quite effectively, so I shall say no more.

In this piece at Kent Online, in which a juvenile act of casual soft graffiti is hyped up into an insinuation against the EDL, we read

Slogans including “kill Muslims” “keep Britain British” and “EDL” - the acronym for anti Islamist group the English Defence League - have been scratched into the moss on Jade’s Crossing in Detling.

By soft graffiti I mean that the "damage" was as casual, impermanent and almost as easily removed as someone tracing "I'm dirty, wash me!" in the coating of grime on the side of an unwashed white van. As non-stories go, this is almost on a par with the famous if possibly apocryphal local newspaper report of a house being broken into and a packet of 20 cigarettes stolen, or the shocker about the elderly lady who slipped while getting off a bus but was unhurt.

Some passing toerag who has heard of the EDL scrawls something gratuitously offensive in the gunk which has accumulated on the metalwork of a seemingly rather neglected footbridge. Said toerag may or may not be a member of or understand the aims of the EDL. If the story carries any weight at all it is in that it reflects the growing undercurrent of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment among the lower orders.

The number of reader comments below the line (60 as of this writing) is also noteworthy in this respect. I shouldn't bother wading through them if you don't have as much time on your hands as I do; they're the usual mix of shouty polarized viewpoints fairly evenly split between pro and anti, including at least one Godwin.

(Note to Godwinists: our grandparents' (in my case parents') generation did not embark upon the Second War in order to combat Nazism and Fascism. They did so — well, apart from the fact that they were told to do so and had little practical choice in the matter — they fought as part of an ongoing geopolitical struggle between the various tribes of Europe to settle unfinished business left over from the First War and the Great Depression.)

But enow, let's get our pedantry fix.

“EDL” - the acronym for anti Islamist group the English Defence League

OK, I'm being a wee bit pernickety here. As the relevant Wikipedia article points out, there is a certain amount of accepted looseness in the terminology, but in my book "EDL" is not an acronym, it is an initialism. An acronym is an abbreviation which is conventionally pronounced as if it were a word in its own right, thus SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) which is pronounced "scoober" rather than "S-C-U-B-A". If EDL were generally pronounced "eedle" or "eddle" it would at least arguably be an acronym. But it's pronounced "E-D-L" so it's an initialism.

A minor point to be sure, but one expects professional writers, even the monkeys working for the Kent Messenger group, to at least attempt to meet standards of precision. If you're uncomfortable with "initialism", chaps and chapettes, use the more general term "abbreviation" instead.

Mind you, I'm one of those infuriating bastards who pronounces "SQL" as "sequel", rather than using the officially sanctioned "S-Q-L". I think I'm right, 'cos the original IBM project was called SEQUEL, an acronym for Structured English Query Language. So there.

The Indy reporting on Thilo Sarrazin's visit to London (via),


"Anti-facist campaigners", eh? Now there was me thinking such people were just figments of the tortured imaginations of orthographically challenged "rascists". But there it is in black and white with the august imprimatur of the Indescribablyboring itself.

Further down, that well known side order and antifacist Sabby Dhalu is reported as commenting

"There is no doubt that a known Muslim spouting similar views would be denied entry."

I rather doubt that, love. But your choice of language is interesting. A "known Muslim" has a deliciously surreptitious sound to it: "I have reason to believe you are a Muslim, Sir. I'm afraid I am not able to land you in the UK." I don't think that's what Sabby meant to convey. And "spout". What is it with this word? Those with whom we agree "express" views. Our political opponents "spout" them. Or indeed "spout venom" or "spout bile". All very childish.

It don't get any better, do it?

I had not realized until it was mentioned very much in passing on the wireless this morning. Today is the 40th anniversary of the introduction of decimal currency in the UK. Which I guess is appropriate as my main memory of "D-Day", Monday 15 February 1971, was how smoothly everything went. No collapse of commerce, no rioting mobs in the streets. Just a modicum of traditional British grumbling while everybody just got on with it.

I have just received the latest issue of a periodical I subscribe to. Like many periodicals, particularly those dispatched through the post, it is stuffed with a selection of third-party leaflets. Inserted into the current issue are eight assorted brochures, of which four are targeted explicitly at the elderly. Well, more precisely at the elderly and infirm.

Why this emphasis? Well it happens that, for perfectly justifiable reasons, the publisher knows my age. For the last nearly three years, since I turned sixty, most communications from organizations which for one reason or another happen to know my date of birth have included "magazine stuffers" or "bill stuffers" for stairlifts, step-in bathtubs, hearing-aids, burial plans and insurance offers illustrated with photographs of that smiling, fit, pullover-clad grey-haired middle-class couple sitting in their charming, expensively-furnished, oversized living room contemplating the difficult decision of whether to set off on a round-the-world cruise or just pop down the golf course for the afternoon.

I suppose I ought to be mildly grateful that my new copy of Cod Batterer's Quarterly was for once mercifully free of a Stannah Stairlift advert telling me just how much fun my cat will have riding up and downstairs on the contraption, available under the company's exclusive "Buy now, die later" finance facilities.

Sod this. I'm off out and find some teenager to give a bloody good kicking to.

From everybody's favorite paper:

The Church of England has told its schools to ensure they are serving non-halal food after concerns that a number are only providing meat slaughtered according to Islamic law.

The official guidance was issued after Church members complained that the use of halal meat was effectively ‘spreading sharia law’ across Britain.

The Church’s financial arm has also come under pressure to withdraw its investments – worth millions of pounds – in supermarkets that do not clearly label halal food.

Update

Had I seen this EDL message board thread earlier I would have half-inched its subtitle:

Pigs fly — CofE speaks out

Well, gratuitous juvenile joke in fact, but there you go.


The new policy of putting a range of herbivorous species into a shared enclosure at the zoo was running into teething problems. The keeper of tortoises approached the keeper of elephants.

— Your elephants are fucking my tortoises. It's got to stop.
— Fucking your tortoises? Impossible. Behaviourally unthinkable. And in any case a total anatomical impossibility. I don't believe you.
— OK, come and have a look.

As the pair entered the herbivores' enclosure, one of the elephants strolled nonchalantly across to where a tortoise was nibbling peacefully at some lettuce, raised his foot and stamped down hard, crushing the unfortunate reptile into the ground.

"See? Told you!", said the keeper of tortoises, "There's another one fucked".


Oh, alright, suit yourselves.

In the Mail we read of another opportunistic serial offendee of the week and the terrible saga of JungleDrumgate. To be honest this is all pretty business-as-usual (apart of course from the point of view of the actual victim of this time- and money-frittering brouhaha, the public-spirited and by all accounts thoroughly decent Anna Farquhar).

But this example of the tyranny of tribal sensitivity is, as I say, run-of-the-mill stuff. What catches my eye is this fine example of the sub-editor's art:

This offence was introduced under laws to deal with the Far Right marching through areas like Southall in Manchester or Islamic fanatics descending on military funeral processions in Wootton Bassett. Not squabbles in the council chamber.

(My emphasis)

Now, when I was a kid I used to think that the Falkland Islands were somewhere off the north of Scotland and that Arkansas and Arkansaw were two distinct states of the Union. But then I wasn't an adult reporter or sub-editor on a national newspaper who apparently believes that Southall is in Manchester. Confused by fond memories of culinary adventures down the Wilmslow Road were we, Sunshine?


Warning! Gratuitous joke follows:

Q. Why is it usual to address Turks as effendi?
A. Because they're always taking effence at something or other.

From the Manchester Evening News, supposedly some kind of newspaper,

"You tell me you came here for a better life for you, your mother and your six children. You yourself in the two years you have been in this country have only worked for two months so you have money coming in from somewhere but I am not told where.

“Your circumstances did not put you in any financial straights driving you to commit these offences. Your sole motive in this offence was to get £2,500 and you plainly didn't care that you were abusing the laws.["]

(My emphasis)

It looks like the sub-editors and/or proofreaders at the MEN, assuming they still employ any, are getting their money for nothing. Whether they are also getting their chicks for free is another matter.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this. Read the whole thing and marvel. (More here and here.)

At the second (Oldham Chronicle) link, I read

Just hours after the shooting, armed police with riot shields swooped on flats in Drury Lane, Chadderton. The murder weapon, a mac-10 submachine pistol, was later found under a car in Hinton Street, Primrose Bank, by a dog walker.

"Drury Lane, Chadderton" sounded familiar. So I looked it up on Streetmap. In the early 1960s, my family moved from Moston to the slightly more upmarket New Moston. Drury Lane is less than a mile away from where I lived in my mid-teens. Then a nondescript corner of decent working-class England, now the haunt of Paki mobsters and their almost comically inept gun-toting Black footsoldiers.

What the Fuck have they done to my country?


One small benefit, I suppose. With luck, back in Pakistan (Mirpur?) the relatives of accidental but probably not particularly innocent victim Nasar Hussain will now be advising their neighbours that they would be a lot safer remaining in Pakistan than seeking to make their fortunes in the UK, where the streets are paved not with gold but with spent cartridges.

Fuck the lot of them.

Fresh into my inbox, notification of the latest article at on-line mag Linux Magazine, entitled

Short Stroking Hard Disks for Performance

And there's a YouTube video too!

Phew! I've come over all unnecessary. I think I'm going to need a little lie-down.

Amazing what you come across through the mysterious workings of serendipity. Having checked my email, and having just watched a TV advert which offers to print off and post a customized Valentine's card to your inamorata (or inamorato as it might be) while attempting to obscure the outrageous price behind the fact that "delivery is absolutely free", I decided to look up "Mail" on Wikipedia, where I came upon this photograph:


In the seemingly innocent backwoods of Dorset, a conspiracy of aliens disguised as pillar boxes was spotted. In the image below, an indoor rally of the mysterious creatures is sighted

at a seemingly Government-linked facility.

Something is going on. I think we should be told. Where is Doctor Who and his Totty-in-Waiting when you need them?

I was listening to one of those "meet the author" gigs on the wireless in the wee small hours. In this instance the affable PJ O'Rourke was interviewed about his book Eat The Rich.

He recounted his experience of visiting Albania during his research for the book. PJ was interested to understand how the Albanians, who are not entirely stupid, had fallen more or less en masse for Ponzi schemes. Simples, replied his Elbonian informants. We knew they were unsustainable, but we assumed they were properly run criminal scams and that we were on the inside.

When a CiF article by that well-known moderate™ Muslim academic Tariq Modood was posted yesterday evening, it ended with the unusual sentence

Comments on this article will be turned on at 9am.

Sure enough, comments were enabled a little after 09:00 today.

As "Yuthugai" puts it in a comment which at the time of writing remains in place.

Yuthugai
8 February 2011 10:44AM

Frankly an article where "comment is free" which openly states that it will only allow comment after such a time when they can round up enough moderators to purge dissenting opinion speaks volumes.

Interesting that the Guardian feels unable to allow free speech on certain subjects isn't it.

Well, here's a small sample of the comments which have thus far incurred the moderators' wrath...






I'll leave you to make your own minds up.

From today's CiF shouting match about CallMeDave's anti-multiculti speech:

Davgrin
6 February 2011 3:00AM

andrewwiseman

6 February 2011 2:53AM

Davgrin

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/07/05/1678954.htm

I in 10 muslims supported the 7/7 killings of innocent britons by muslim fanatics, uk muslims are the enemy within

I'm sorry, I've followed your link and I don't see what you apparently see. The fact that one in ten Muslims see the 7/7 bombers as martyrs doesn't necessarily impute any agreement with the bombers' actions. The Muslims are just stating that the bombers died carrying out a religious act, not that they agree with that act.

Yes, er, right.

"When I said that the plaintiff might meet with an accident, Your Honour, I was of course speaking in the abstract. I was merely stating the unarguable fact that there is necessarily a non-zero probability that the plaintiff might suffer an accident at some stage in the future. It is outrageous to infer that a threat was intended. Innit?"

The sad thing is that "Davgrin" is almost certainly being entirely serious.

In a listener survey for the the Today programme, strangely unbroadcast, listeners voted for Neil Nunes as the most irritating voice on radio (Telegraph). Well, quelle surprise!

The BBC's gradual relaxation over the past 50 years or so of its strict requirements for plum-in-the-mouth, poker-up-the-arse RP accents from its news and continuity announcers is generally welcome. Who would wish to be deprived of the soothing soupçon-of-Ulster tones of la Clugston, for example?

But whatever Neil's other doubtless sterling qualities, his employment as a continuity announcer on Radio 4 and the World Service is a step too far. His vowels are eccentric and unpredictable and his prosody, both in terms of intonation and stress, is all over the shop. Listening to Neil is like straining to understand one of those foreign interviewees who insist on speaking very hesitant English over a dismal telephone line. Which is tolerable in such a case but not for a professional continuity announcer. It really does put you off the following programme.

An honourable mention should also go to Sue Montgomery. Radio 4 listeners may be unfamiliar with Sue, as she works exclusively (as far as I am aware) on the World Service. Sue has a fairly RP accent with one spectacularly irritating feature. She routinely drops the pitch of her voice sharply at the end of each declarative sentence, producing a sort of sultry effect which I can best describe as a sort of poor woman's Fenella Fielding impersonation. It's excruciating, and generally has the same effect on me as the sig tune of The Archers, namely an unwontedly athletic dive for the off switch.

Right then. I'm off to practice my best ee-bah-goom 'ell-as-like accent on any unsuspecting foreigners I can find up in that there London. I find the most effective weapon is a combination of a Deep Hill-Lancashire accent with a vocabulary liberally sprinkled with Cockney Rhyming Slang. Oh, and when giving directions and information to particularly bumptious American tourists, always insist on using metric measures.

— "The way to Oxford? Yes, you can catch a train from Paddington Station."
— "Pardon me?"
— "Oh, you mean Oxford Street? Yes, it's about a kilometre in that direction."

Outwood Grange Academy pupil Qaasim Hussain was left sick and distraught after he took a mouthful of a sausage roll, thinking it was a cheese and onion pasty.

I have to say he doesn't look all that distraught to me, but there you go.

Some time ago, responding to increasingly insistent pangs of esurience, I ventured into the chippy in beautiful downtown Greenwich, where I purchased a Jamaica patty to go with my chips. After microwaving, the factory-made patty was dropped, still in its cellophane wrapper, into the bag of chips. On a whim, I kept and later read the wrapper, including the very small print, which advised me that the meat (minced beef in this case) was halal.

I wasn't best pleased. I prefer to avoid halal for various reasons. Not just because of the widely cited animal welfare issues. But also for the cultural and economic/political reasons referred to here. In particular because, as a kaffir, I do not wish to subsidize Muslim dietary requirements by unwittingly contributing to economies of scale in that contentious market segment.

But I didn't run back to the shop to complain. Nor did I contact the local paper. Nor rope in my local MP,

Mr Hussain has contacted city MP Mary Creagh, who has confirmed she is looking into the issue.

(What, incidentally, is Mr Hussain expecting the MP to do about it?)

No, I simply no longer patronize the chippy in question.

Anyway, isn't there a certain amount of, shall we say, doctrinal "flexibility" going on here? You bought food from a section of the supermarket which sold unprepackaged fresh snacks, including haraam items based on pork. Probably prepared in a single factory environment, perhaps reheated in the same microwave oven on site, certainly handled with the same tongs*. Which makes anything bought from that facility haraam by contamination, as I, worthless kaffir that I am, understand it.

Opportunistic pick-and-mix Islam, eh, Khizer my old China? Pints of halal Foster's all round. Oh, and a family-sized bag of free-range kosher pork scratchings.

___
* I initially typed "tongues" here. Let's not even think about that.

Top Gear sparks Mexico complaints

Reviewing the Mastretta [some kind of pretentious Wetback horseless carriage, apparently; either that or a kind of Italian sausage] on Sunday's show, Hammond said: "Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat."

The presenters, known for their edgy jibes, then described Mexican food as "refried sick"

What would we do without this trio to inject a little sanity into our oh-so-careful equality-crazed risk-free po-faced little world?

Good on 'em. Made Oi Larf, anyway. But then I'm beyond redemption, innit?