Labour women have 'helmet hair'

Sometimes you need a laugh: Daily Mail: Labour women have 'helmet hair' declares David Cameron's mother-in-law"

"David Cameron's mother-in-law would naturally be suspicious of New Labour. But it seems it is the haircuts, not the politics that bother Lady Astor most.

Samantha Cameron's mother said in an interview that female ministers in New Labour had 'helmety' haircuts, although she acknowledged that women in politics were under a lot of pressure.

Her comments seemed to refer to ministers like Harriet Harman, Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears and Yvette Cooper, who all have short-bobbed hairstlyes.

'I do think that working in the Commons must be very hard on women,' she said. 'You don't have hours to spend on your appearance, so I think it's unfair to focus on it – although the hairstyles could be a little less helmety.' "

Does anyone remember a few years back BBC News 24: every female correspondent/news anchor had a short pudding basin haircut, it got so conspicuous to the point of ridiculousness... It appeared to be some sort of symbol..

Simon Jenkins on Swine Flu

Simon Jenkins/Guardian: "We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.

Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration"

Guardian: Polls: Tories on course for landslide

I'm not going to talk about the Swine Fever thing right now, I see plenty of other sites are.

Some light, but interesting analysis from The Guardian on the political landscape. Surely The Guardian, just as Labour, will seek to motivate their constituency, but it's nonetheless interesting.

I haven't been studying political polls for some time, but the trend is clear overall as I understand it being reported and started to become all too obvious some time ago. It's just such a shame that, by and large, that old adage about the party in power loosing the election rather than the opposition winning seems to be what we are looking at.

However, I reckon we will be able to rely on the media and the Labour Party doing everything they can to evade why they lost the election; to put it down to a bunch of spurious political reasons, and 'lack of leadership' and so on, while the attempt to create a shocking police state of bobbling slaves, the legacy and endowment of Tony Blair and complicity of Gordon Brown and others of the Iraq War, amongst other horrendous crimes will never even come into it.

Guardian: "We've now had three polls, from two different polling organisations, since last week's budget, and they're all saying much the same thing, which suggests that they are worth taking seriously. The news is dire for Labour: on current form, the Tories are heading for a landslide.

For the record, here are the figures:

ComRes in the Independent (published today)

Conservatives: 45 (up five from ComRes last month)

Labour: 26 (down two)

Lib Dems: 17 (down one)

Conservative lead: 19 (up seven)

YouGov in the Sunday People (published on Sunday)

Conservatives: 45 (up four from YouGov in the Telegraph last month)

Labour: 27 (down four)

Lib Dems: 17 (no change)

Conservative lead: 18 (up eight)

YouGov in the Daily Telegraph (published on Saturday)

Conservatives: 45 (up four from YouGov in the Telegraph last month)

Labour: 27 (down four)

Lib Dems: 18 (up one)

Conservative lead: 18 (up eight)

I've fed the ComRes figures into two websites that provide election predictions on the basis of share of the vote numbers, Electoral Calculus and UK Polling Report. Electoral Calculus says the Tories would have a majority of 186. UK Polling Report, which uses a slightly different methodology, predicts a majority of 170. Either way, it's still pretty big"

Sex education for five-year-olds to be made compulsory in schools

Guardian: "The government has announced plans to make sex education compulsory for pupils aged five to 11, dividing faith groups and safer sex campaigners. Under the plans all secondary schools will have to teach teenagers about contraception, safer sex and relationships, but faith schools will also be free to preach against sex outside of marriage and condom"

Ok. Sorry for the latest lull. And I don't think we've gone mad here as one commenter asked. Very very very occasionally we may take a light diversion from some of the very serious, very ugly and nasty issues that nobody really wants to talk about.

And there's a book we are going to be talking about on here at some point, an extremely controversial book and it has a wealth of interesting other little pieces of information in it. And one of the things that caught my eye, and I wish I had made some better notes, was that there was some initiative rather similar to what the Labour government are trying to do here under the pre-Stalin Soviet Union as well.

I've just spent a while raking through pages and pages and unfortunately I just can't find the specific quote I'm looking for. There are some strong hints about this here though.

But the quote I was looking for was particularly chilling in what it said about children, and I'm just so annoyed I can't find it right now but will update the article if I find it.

Gordon Brown: 'crucible of terrorism'

Guardian: "Gordon Brown today signalled a shift in the UK strategy for Afghanistan, announcing that greater effort will be directed towards the border with Pakistan, which he described as "a crucible for terrorism" responsible for fostering up to three-quarters of terror threats faced by the UK.

Brown was speaking on his first visit to Afghanistan since announcing troop reinforcements for the country at the Nato summit at the end of March.

His warning today mirrors the new strategy adopted by the US since Barack Obama became president. It places the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as central to the UK's future operations in the region. Brown is heading for Pakistan today where he will meet its president, Asif Ali Zardari.

Brown said: "There is a crucible of terrorism in the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our approach to those countries is different but must be complementary. Our strategy for dealing with this breeding ground of terrorism will mean more security on the streets of Britain."

Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009

This isn't what we usually talk about on here. But screw it. Let's talk about something fun for a change. Our friends at RickWrites have this posted, and amazingly I did see it at the weekend, and never normally watch these shows really, occasionally I catch a glimpse of them.

And occasionally, very occasionally television creates a great piece of television. It's very rare, and if anything, it's getting rarer. But occasionally it happens.

I guess I'm a little wary of this Simon Cowell guy and Ant and Dec etc, but there's nothing actually wrong with the format of the shows. But frankly this is a brilliant piece of television and a brilliant performance by this woman.

I don't know how 'constructed' her story and image has been for this show, and there must be some degree of management with this, some degree of presentation, and I would imagine she must have trained seriously at some point previously. But I guess it doesn't really matter.

The theme here is that we are disarmed because she looks kinda frumpy and middle aged, and 'isn't it quaint and quirky she's not yet married.' And I was just reading about this, apparently everyone from the Telegraph to ABC News talks about this in a tone as if it ought to be an 'issue'.

Well there's a reason the media don't like anything that's not part of their own putrid propaganda schema, and it's not because they think it's funny, it's because it's actually quite threatening to them.

This lady is an absolute sensation, with an astounding voice and delivery. Unfortunately every single YouTube version of this won't let you embed it presumably on the orders of Simon Cowell and his production company. So here's the link:

Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009

'Nazi guard' seized by US agents

BBC: "US immigration agents have detained an 89-year-old man at his Ohio home ahead of deportation to Germany to face trial for alleged Nazi war crimes.

John Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory to the deaths of some 29,000 people at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in World War II. His family claim that Mr Demjanjuk, who was carried out of his home in a wheelchair, is too ill to be deported.

Lawyers for Mr Demjanjuk have filed an appeal against the deportation order. Mr Demjanjuk denies the charges against him, claiming that he was captured by the Germans in his native Ukraine during the war and kept as a prisoner of war.

He arrived in the US in 1952 as a refugee, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the automobile industry. In 1988, Mr Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp.

Israel's highest court later overturned his sentence and freed him, after newly unearthed documents from the former Soviet Union indicated that "Ivan the Terrible" had probably been a different man.

Mr Demjanjuk returned to the US, but in 2002 had his US citizenship stripped because of his failure to disclose his work at Nazi camps when he first arrived as a refugee.

In 2005, a US immigration judge ruled that he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

Germany issued a warrant for his arrest last month, and his family have been fighting to prevent him from being deported ever since"

pssst pass it round... #amazonfail like...dude

Drum rolll.......

Do you remember 'WE ARE NOT AFRAID ?"

Shhh..listen. The latest hot citizen news is in: it's called...wait for it....

DAH DAH DAH!!!!......

AMAZONFAIL!

And it's all the buzz on uber-spakwad plebplob site Twitter apparently and a bunch of blogs.

And it's all do to with the heinous crime that Amazon had apparently temporarily delisted some gay and lesbian books from their searches or sale ranks. Apparently it was just a mistake anyway, but a look at the disproportionate furor it caused, or rather we are led to believe it caused shows that some people have got real problems with their political priorities, and without question that's being supported by the media.

Amazon are a huge business, and even it wasn't a mistake I kind of doubt they would have had any political reason reason behind this.

The Wall Street Journal's blog says:

"In the message, Amazon said it excludes “adult” material from searches and best-seller lists by not calculating their sales ranks. Mr. Probst (some blogger ? -j) wrote that the “adult” classification didn’t apply to several of the targeted books and that some adult-oriented books, including a hardcover edition of “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds,” continued to maintain their ranking. He also pointed to the blog of Craig Seymour, a writer who has noted his troubles with Amazon and sales rankings since February"

And of course the WSJ loves it, as do the media as a whole, because the whole gay issue has tremendous utility as a proxy issue, and has possibly become the de facto way of chipping away at the status quo by proxy.

Personally, and I don't mean to be rude, but I don't see some extension of the civil rights movement at all in any of this stuff.

I don't know about this blogger, and it's not all gays, but overall you do see a group of hysterical people trying to rationalise themselves predominantly, and completely the wrong way and getting certain quite important things wrong and alienating themselves even more in the process.

And we see this repeated mistake, this goof, that unfortunately some gay people do have about themselves, that's been encouraged by the media, and that the media propagate which is that: the gay lifestyle has a right to be seen as an equal partner to heterosexuality, and in pretty much any context.

Some of it may just be people who mean well, but frankly, at some point, someone has to say something as well. Sure the odd article in the Daily Mail has come close to this at times, but I don't think seriously it can or should be seen as an equal partner per se and I think trying to do that is a distortion and error for a whole bunch of reasons, and in that sense Amazon are indeed under no obligation to present any books in principle, which is what these campaigners are worried about.

Note I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be published or burnt, what I'm saying is that how others treat them is an entirely different matter. It's not an issue of equality, as the WSJ suggest:

"Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says in a statement: “GLAAD has reached out to Amazon.com and they indicate this was an error, so we expect to start seeing evidence of its correction immediately, and any loss of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon … When people learn about the lives of gay and transgender people and the common ground we share, the culture changes and advances. It is so important that stories about the lives of our community are available, and that companies like Amazon promote these titles in an equal fashion”

Why ? I'm sure most people aren't that interested in them, and the idea that some gay romances excluded on Amazon represent some 'important' cultural fabric in general that people are 'missing out' on because they are gay is, just probably delusion if that's what's being suggested. And unfortunately we have seen several examples how the organised gay lobby globally is not a rational lobby, but an hysterical and even psychotic one, that's very much a complete renunciation of the most basic 'common ground'.

It's not just enough to blame the wider society for those problems.

If anything its real utility is as a proxy for other issues of 'diversity' and for the media to chip away at essentially Western, conservative, basically normative society.

I don't believe the gay lobby has a whole lot of power on its own or is that significant on its own. Most of that power comes from what the media grants it, and where it's supportive it is so for other reasons.

On the other hand I don't believe all gay people subscribe to the worst aspects of their own frankly dreadful representation and image.

We are probably going to talk about this more at some point, and it's something one always does with a bit of a heavy heart, as it's a topic no one really wants to talk about.

Labour and Alastair Campbell: legacy & lies

BBC:" David Cameron is demanding a personal apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown over e-mails sent by an adviser discussing smearing the Tories. The Tory leader is "absolutely furious" and is calling on Mr Brown to give a guarantee that such messages will not be sent again, a spokeswoman said.

Damian McBride quit after his unfounded claims about Mr Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne became known. Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne says Mr Brown knew nothing of the e-mails. But Labour backbencher John McDonnell has called for an inquiry to find out who was involved. "

If you read this sorry story, it's just sickeningly ironic the way that former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell thinks the whole thing is somehow 'beneath' the standard of spin mechanics or indeed behaviour that Labour should be seen to uphold.

"Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, wrote in his blog that he had been struck not just by the "unpleasantness" of the emails, but also by their "incompetence". "McBride will be thinking that was his big mistake - writing it all down. His really big mistake was thinking it might be effective," Mr Campbell added"

I really makes you wonder what he's thinking. What did Alastair Campbell then think about the great dossier, the 45 minutes and so on, and does he seriously think that compares favourably to now ?

I can't pretend I'm an expert of every single mechanic of the Blair government. I'm not. I don't know every little thing Alastair Campbell did or said, but I strongly think we know more than enough. And to summarise Alastair Campbell's role, I agree with Michael Howard in a Newsnight interview from a while back that Alastair Campbell was one of the main factors responsible for taking politics exactly into the loathsome gutter it is today. Howard reflects:

"I think that's the man who's responsible for what's changed [pointing at Campbell -j]. The way in which Alastair has conducted his operations, he was in Downing Street when he bullied and lied his way across our political life...consistently did more to lower the tone of our political life, our public life than anything else. And that was all of course done with Tony Blair's connivance and authority"

And I've never seen Michael Howard look as sincere and serious about anything actually.

It's the height irony, it's an insult to injury, for a lying murderous charlatan like Alastair Campbell to be slitheringly admonishing about a culture he was heavily involved in creating and normalizing, much to the delight of the Labor plebs.

Which bit doesn't he like, the fact that it may not be 'effective?' or their 'incompetence' ?, or just the fact this guy got found out ? Well I guess Campbell would know.

I just see this as just another sinister little drip drip way of trying to normalize, trying to exonerate Blair, Campbell and others for the catastrophe of the Iraq War and the monstrous pile of shocking lies they thought absolutely nothing of concocting and presenting to sell it.

It's as if to say that was normal, but this is abnormal. And that Alastair Campbell is still doing this years latter, tacitly supported by the BBC in this case, I find extraordinary.

And credit were it is due to Labour's John McDonnell for taking a stand on this topic which as he rightly says only reflects on Labour not anyone else:

"They drag the Labour Party into the gutter. They just add further to the undermining of the belief that Labour Party supporters have placed in our party"

Happy Easter!

A very Happy Easter to everyone!

And sorry for the latest lapse.

J