I received the following email yesterday from [email protected]

russian email? But i’ll write to u in English..

Not only you are an ugly looking man,but you are born dickhead.heard your satanic speech against Israel and how you hate it.U deserve death.ASAP

I replied as follows

As I presume you feel the poor children of Gaza also deserve death, I am in good company.

If you want to try to kill me, I live at 31 Sinclair Gardens, West Kensington, London W14 0AU.

Nearest tube is Shepherds Bush. I do hope that is helpful.

Sometimes statistics really do tell the truth. Thanks to Gerard Mulholland:

From NBC’s Mark Murray

With President Bush set to leave the White House less than two weeks from now, here’s a “Then and Now” to show what the United States looked like when Bush was entering office and what it looks like now as he’s leaving. The “Then” is the best-available figure as Bush was taking office in 2001. The “Now” is the most recent figure.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

Then: 4.2% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2001)

Now: 6.7% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2008)

DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE

Then: 10,587 (close of Friday, Jan. 19, 2001)

Now: 9,015 (close of Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009)

BUSH FAVORABILITY RATING

Then: 50% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)

Now: 31% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CHENEY FAVORABILITY RATING

Then: 49% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)

Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONGRESS APPROVAL RATING

Then: 48% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)

Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

SATISFIED WITH THE NATION’S DIRECTION

Then: 45% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)

Now: 26% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE (1985=100)

Then: 115.7 (Conference Board, January 2001)

Now: 38.0, which is an all-time low (Conference Board, December 2008)

FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY

Then: 6.4 million (Census numbers for 2000)

Now: 7.6 million (Census numbers for 2007 — most recent numbers available)

AMERICANS WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE

Then: 39.8 million (Census numbers for 2000)

Now: 45.7 million (Census numbers for 2007 — most recent available)

U.S. BUDGET

Then: +236.2 billion (2000, Congressional Budget Office)

Now: -$1.2 trillion (projected figure for 2009, Congressional Budget Office)

In a world where individual freedoms are held light, this blog values freedom of speech higher than is currently fashionable. I do not believe that freedom should apply only to views I agree with.

The Israeli attack on Gaza is unconscionable. It is wildly disproportionate and plainly the attacks on schools yesterday were only the most blatant examples of Israel’s continual breaches of the laws of warfare – war crimes. But it is only an episode in the terrible ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Palestinian people by the Israelis who have stolen their land.

Let me say it loud and clear. I do not believe in Israel’s right to exist. It is a militarised, evil entity founded on a racist premise and a lot of religious hokum. It shuld be replaced by a single, secular state in which the Palestinians are free to live, and in which they receive either their stolen lands or genuine equivalent financial compensation, in either case plus damages.

I shall be attending Saturday’s demonstration from Hyde Park. I needed some new shoes anyway.

I have not deleted a single pro-Israeli comment from discussion on these pages, though I disagree profoundly with many. I have deleted three anti-Jewish comments. I should make it plain that I am in profound disagreement with those commenters who conflate Israel with Jews in general. We have had commenters excusing anti-Jewish comments on the grounds Jews are not a race, and positing claims of a world conspiracy of Jews and freemasons. I have only deleted three of these, because in general I believe the suppression of any opinion to be an evil which requires major justification. I find it hard to define the exact line which leads to deletion.

The great John Stuart Mill said it was legitimate to express the opinion that all corn merchants are thieves of the people’s bread; but it was not legitimate to shout the same thing to a howling mob at night carrying torches outside a corn merchant’s house. He was, as ever, right.

So almost any opinion can be expressed here. But I would be grateful if those people who have a serious grudge against Jews in general, would go and express their views on their own websites.

UPDATE

Michael has overstepped the mark by a posting about “Jews with their Satanic Smirks” (long overdue yellow card) and then introducing the Protocols of Zion (automatic red card offence). All of his 31 comments have therefore been deleted.

Between 2am last night and this morning, all the comments ever made on this site seem to have disappeared. I can’t find them inside the site anywhere.

Breathtaking lies from the White House press spokesman:

“Israel is only doing what is necessary to prevent terrorism. Nobody supports violence.”

The horrific thing is, some people do actually believe this ludicrous propaganda. But on the subject of supporting violence, I had a momentary emotion today of which I feel deeply ashamed. The BBC reported an Israeli civilian killed by a Palestinian rocket, and my involuntary reaction was:

“Good – they got one back. 340 Palestinian dead, but at least they got one of the bastards”.

I then froze in horror at my own thought, and said a quiet apology to the soul of the poor man killed, and to his family and friends.

I am happy to say my initial emotion still seems to me repulsive and aberrant, and if I think back on it I do not recapture any of that feeling. But if the Israeli offensive can make someone as dedicated to peace, and far removed from the conflict, as I feel that kind of instinct, even if momentarily, how truly counter-productive it must be. How much hatred and antagonism has been stirred among those related to the four young sisters killed in their bed, to give only one example? We are seeing not just the death of hundreds now, but the instigation of yet additional violence for decades to come.

Of course, some people will make money and/or gain political power and influence out of that. “Nobody supports violence” is bollocks. Some people profit very nicely from it, in a variety of ways.

As a seasonal thought, and a reminder that the Christian religion can be a force for good despite its abuse by Bush, Palin and their ilk, I wanted to share with you my favourite carol.

It came upon the midnight clear,

Which now the angels sing.

It was a poem before it was a carol, and it is worth savouring it as a poem. It is actually American – and interestingly in the US nowadays the great third stanza, which to me sums up the best ideals of the religion in which I was raised, is often omitted.

A week ago the Archbishop of Canterbury also reminded me that there can be much good in his tradition, with his strong comments on the economic crisis. His analogy of an addict returning to his drug, for the proposed government programmes for recovery, was extremely apt in so many ways.

Not the least worrying is the emphasis on reducing interest rates, and in the case of the UK government positively compelling banks in which they have a majority stake to start lending again. As a solution to a problem so evidently caused in large part by a colossal credit bubble, that is crazy. In particular, the desire to prop up the UK housing market is completely misplaced. My cramped, rented flat in Shepherds Bush is “worth” £350,000. There are over a thousand such flats just in Sinclair Road and Sinclair Gardens, and just in my own little corner of Shepherds Bush there are at least ten thousand of them. To buy a £350,000 house, even if you have £100,000 cash for a deposit, you should in rational lending be earning £75,000 a year. But the majority of households in this area have well less than half that income.

Your house is worth half what you thought it was last year. Live with it. Attempts to put patches on a bubble are stupid.

We all get from time to time those emails purporting to be from people who have stolen loads of money and wish to launder it, if we only hand over our bank account details. Until today, my favourite was last year when I received one claiming to be from the widow of Sam Jonah, ex-chairman of Anglo-Ashanti Gold. That amused me because Sam is a good friend of mine and I had just spent the early evening drinking with him!

But I just received possibly the most hopeless effort yet, claiming to be from…David Trimble! Can anyone beat that?

Peter Mandelson as Trade Secretary oversaw the “light touch” policy of regulation which has just nearly bankrupted us. His is now coming back to essentially the same job, and I just listened in disbelief as a reporter from BBC News just told us, after a lobby briefing, that Mandelson was going to help tackle the financial crisis by “Pushing forward on Brown’s deregulation agenda”.

Words fail me.

I must be going to wake up soon.

My Fellow Americans,

It grieves me to see the livelihood of decent ordinary Americans, folk who pay off their mortgages and file their tax returns every April 15, threatened by the behaviour of irresponsible people in the financial sector. That is why I am planning to take the money away from ordinary Americans and give it to those irresponsible people. Because capitalism and democracy is the best system of government in the world, and you can’t have capitalism without irresponsible people in the financial sector.

In normal circumstances I believe that companies which are managed badly should be allowed to go bust. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not working, as people have lost confidence in the system. That is why, so that ordinary decent people will still be able to get credit to buy homes and pay their children through college, I must take all their money and give it to these very well paid people who mismanaged their companies. Because these are not ordinary people in normal circumstances who use monkey wrenches and stuff and can be allowed to lose their jobs as firms go bust. These are rich folk like me. Society needs rich folk, so unless you give away all your money to these very rich people now, you will end up poor and without a pension and you will die alone and miserable.

This is not like taking money for medical insurance or welfare. I can assure you none of this money will be wasted on poor people, and hardly any of it on black people. So unless we build a bipartisan consensus and you give all your money to me to redistribute to the extremely rich, the plain truth is you will end up poor.

Thank you.

George W Bush

I may be just one man and his battered keyboard, but something I have brought to light about Buckingham, Spicer, Usmanov or some other creep has evidently struck home because the Sunday Times has run a character assassination piece on me yet again!

This time I merit a page and a bit in one of their pullouts, and a big picture from which they have very kindly airbrushed the wrinkles, presumably to make me more plausible as the dangerous Lothario they are portraying. To be attacked for antiquated attitudes to women by Murdoch, with his page 3 girls and Jordan/Katie Price industry, is vaguely amusing.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4794188.ece

Ms Bowditch, the journalist, was quite pleasant, but kept asking me questions about my love life. For her to write that sex is never far from my mind is a bit rich. Actually it is quite often far from my mind, but not when people ask me repeated questions about it. It is difficult for anything to be far from your mind in those circumstances.

Ms Bowditch came determined to quiz me on and write about my love life. It is ludicrous hypocrisy to do that and then shed crocodile tears that my love life detracts from more important issues in Uzbekistan. I think that there is a simple test of how genuine the Sunday Times is on this:

Question: How many times this century has the Sunday Times sent a correspondent to Uzbekistan?

Answer: Nil

Question: How many serious articles has the Sunday Times written on Uzbekistan other than attacks on me?

Answer: Nil

The hatred of large sections of the British media for Nick Faldo is a puzzle. Faldo has an awkward manner, is uneasy with the press, and has always been inclined to be a bit…well, naff. His attempts to explain off the photo of his pairings as a sandwich list this week was emblematic of his lack of easy grace.

But for a substantial period Faldo was the best golfer in the world. To be the very best in a sport that has two hundred million players is tremendous. Yet compare Faldo’s treatment with that of Steve Redgrave, who was the best in a sport with approximately 200 million less players, or Johnny Wilkinson whose sport has approximately 199.5 million less players. Andy Murray will equal Faldo in stature when he has won six Grand Slam titles, compared to his current total of, umm, nil. All the signs are that Murray has less natural grace than Faldo. Yet in Murray the press portray it is a tigerish will to win.

A narrow loss to the United States in the Ryder Cup is no disgrace, The rubbish performance of seasoned pros like Garcia, Harrington, Jimenez, Westwood and Casey cannot be blamed on Faldo. Golf writers almost unanimously hailed one of the captain’s picks, Casey, as good and condemned the other, Poulter. Yet Casey was rubbish in the match. His decison to take a driver off the tee when Hunter Mahan was in the woods was for me the moment that lost the Ryder Cup. Poulter turned out to be the best player on either side in the entire match. Yet those same golf writers who got that completely wrong are now laying into Faldo big time.

Faldo is a sporting hero. There is not a golf writer in the country who deserves to shine his shoes.

This blog has moved into sport and films because, having seen David Milliband’s speech on TV, the very thought of politics makes me feel sick. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

I seldom venture into film criticism, but I suspect that like many men I was persuaded by my partner to go and see The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley. Looking at Keira Knightley is always a pleasure, but what a terrible script!

The credits list three screenwriters and an original book author, so you would think they might between them have got some of the period detail right. Unfortunately, in a genre of costume true story which has little but historical accuracy to justify making it at all, the entire film was an exercise in solecism.

Most fundamentally, it viewed Regency Britian through a prism of Victorian sensibility. The living arrangements of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were no more than very mildly scandalous by the standards of the time. In fact the Duke of Devonshire in question was pretty restrained in his sex life by late 18th century aristocratic standards. Nor was the menage a trois uncommon – this one was contemporary with that of Nelson and the Hamiltons. The attempt to project a modern sensibility onto a very different era was part of an attempt to draw a publicity parallel with the situation of a later Spencer female, Lady Diana Spencer. That commercial potential seems indeed the only possible motivation for the film.

The other fundamental flaw was the attempt to present the Duchess’ lover, Charles Grey, as a man of the people. He was played with a slight Estuary accent and there were several references to his lowly social stature and lack of funds; indeed his alleged dependency on the Duke of Devonshire for cash was brought into the plot at one stage.

What complete piffle. Grey was a senior member of the great Grey family of Northumberland and Yorkshire who people the Shakespeare history plays. He was born in their majestic seat of Fallodon and at about the time of the action of the film moved into his own superb mansion of Howick Hall. Almost all aristocratic families at this time led lifestyles that brought them into substantial short term debt despite their vast incomes, but the Devonshires were more renowned for this than the Greys. If Grey did have an accent (which he probably did – regional accents were more pronounced in aristocratic circles then) it was Northern, not London.

The film rightly connects Grey with progressive politics of the time, but errs ludicrously in trying to make him a working class hero. He was to go on to become the Prime Minister who forced through the Great Reform Act, the first and most crucial step towards British democracy, and the abolition of the slave trade. The tea is named after him. The family were always connected with the progressive side in politics. A Grey was the only member of the House of Lords to sign Charles I’s death warrant. Stephen Grey, the best exposer of extraordinary rendition and author of Ghost Plane, is a member of the family.

Back to the film. Among the scores of the easily avoidable mistakes, the use of titles was wrong more often than not. Grey tells a grieving Duchess: “I am engaged to Lady Ponsonby”. That would come as a hell of a shock to Lord Ponsonby. He meant he was engaged to one of Lady Ponsonby’s daughters, and would in fact have said “I am engaged to Lady Mary Ponsonby”, or much more likely between these two, just “I am engaged to Mary Ponsonby”.

Anyway, “The Duchess” is a lot of unhistorical bollocks written by the terminally ill-educated. It would have been much more enjoyable just to watch Keira Knightley sitting quietly for ninety minutes.

To state the obvious, the problem with the US government’s bailout of the US financial system is that the US government doesn’t have $700 billion. It doesn’t in fact have any money at all, being substantially in debt. The idea that this creation of yet more funny money in some way heals the system is patently absurd. It merely postpones, very temporarily, some impoverishment and ensures the pain will be borne for a generation or three.

The profligate use of taxpayers’ indebtedness throughout the last year, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been astounding, whether from the hundreds of billions “pumped into the money markets” by central banks, or all those successive rescue packages for individual institutions.

The signals sent to the market are extraordinarily contrary. Executives of failed institutions, whose policies were the direct cause of failure and who awarded themselves billions in bonuses for pursuing those policies, now have their jobs protected after they failed so badly. Irresponsibility and massive greed pays. Neither in the US nor the UK will the government again be able to tell public servants that they get lower pay because they take less risk than the private sector. And we now have institutions which are in effect now public sector, but where individual public servants – for that is what they now are – are receiving pay in the millions.

Furthermore, the investors – who if the market works should, indeed must lose their funds if the institution goes bust, just as they can make great gains if it booms – are not going to lose their money. At least with Northern Rock the British government got that bit right.

What we have instead is perhaps the single most regressive movement of funds in history, with taxes going to protect investments. Yes, I know many ordinary people benefit a bit from investments through pension funds etc, but the wealthy undoubtedly have many more investments on average than the poor, while many of the very poor have no interest in investments but still pay tax.

This is a huge bailout of the wealthy on the backs of the poor. That is why Bush is acting with such alacrity. Those commentators claiming Bush is taking leftward action iwith a “New Deal” philosophy could not be more wrong.

Stop giggling there! Schadenfreude is not nice (or easy to spell). There are those who may find it funny to see vastly overpaid merchant bankers scurrying out of Lehman Bros with their executive toys and diaries jumbled up into old photocopier paper boxes. But think of the knock-on effects in the economy.

Several cocaine dealers are out of business already. The man at the Evening Standard who writes the stories about the groups who order £20,000 worth of wine at dinner is wondering how he will feed his children. Not to mention the poor estate agents.

Stop laughing you unfeeling bastards!

Richard Wilson, author of Titanic Express and a member of the team that maintained this site in its early days, has now got his own blog. Richard Wilson’s blog is a sceptics guide that seems to target anything from obscure place names on maps, through exposure of Britain’s complicity in torture, on to behavioural psychology.

In this piece he profiles Craig and talks about his decision to include him in his forthcoming book, ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’.

I have never pretended to political correctness, so I can happily abhor the sanctimonious politically correct bullshit that made the British contribution to the Olympic closing ceremony so appalling. The most dull dancing imaginable, completely unsuited in scale to the ceremony, and mismatching the Royal Ballet with (wait for it) a South London Hip-Hop ensemble and a dance group featuring able and disabled dancers. The quality produced was risible – it would not have graced a county fair, let alone the Olympics.

The PR bullshit said we were “honouring diversity”. No, we were honouring mediocrity, and then apparently honouring Hello magazine by introducing Leona Lewis and David Beckham. I think I should run in the 100 metres in 2012, thus honouring diversity by vastly increasing our representation of overweight and unhealthy middle-aged men.

Some weeks late, just picked up on this incredible story. It is indeed from 2008, though that is hard to believe.

An Italian court has ordered the government to pay 100,000 euros (£79,919) to a man who had to retake his driving test because he was gay.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7503861.stm

Berlusconi land is a rather worrying place. Attacks on Roma are now very severe and frequent, with signs of official collusion, while recent distressing photos on the net (which I won’t post) showed the bodies of two young drowned immigrants lying for hours on a beach while people just continued to sunbathe and party around them. I am 25% Italian myself, but deeply puzzled.

Thought inspired from here.

http://einekleinenichtmusik.blogspot.com/

I didn’t make a fuss when this blog steamed past its millionth visitor mark, and we are now around the 1.3 million visitors since a new statcounter was put on some 30 months ago. That is visits, not pageloads, but does include returning visitors (I think).

Rather peculiarly, in the last 24 hours the biggest source of visitors has been the BNP website. I presume they are saying something nasty about me, but don’t recommend you to look to check. On the other hand, after my Quixotic stand against Jack Straw in Blackburn at the last general election, I had to speak at the count immediately after the BNP candidate. The hordes of New Labour supporters in the count listened to the BNP candidate in comparative quiet, but erupted into roaring jeers to try to drown out my brief speech. A plastic beer glass was thrown at me. The BNP candidate turned to me in astonishment:

“My God”, he said, “They hate you more than me”.

It was true. That simple fact tells more truth about New Labour than I could do in long essays.

If it wasn’t for the border crossings, an eight hour drive from the Eastern border of Uzbekistan would take you into China. There you would be among the Uighurs, a people culturally and linguistically extremely close to the Uzbeks. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs are culturally, religiously and ethnically oppressed by the highly racist Chnese state. But the Uighurs are Muslims and they do not get the press coverage of the Tibetans, even though their oppression has been still more systematic and brutal. Over a million Uighurs have been displaced by the Chinese state in the last three years alone. Thousands are murdered – either executed or disappeared – every year.

The Uighurs are one of a swathe of Muslim peoples across Central Asia, who fell into the thrall of foreign Empires between the middles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are at least eighteen of these identifiable and mostly Turkic ethnicities, running from the Chechens in the West to the Uighurs in the East. About half the groups who fell under Russian, then Soviet, rule are now in “independent” republics named after Turkic ethnicities. But their political, cultural and religous freedom is still generally repressed as a consequence of continued domination by Soviet apparatchik elites who cling to power through ruthlessness. Meanwhile both Russia and China keep down the Turkic ethnicities within their borders through fierce and relentless brutality.

The War on Terror has enabled Russia, China, Karimov and other Central Asian leaders to characterise any manifestation of a desire for freedom in the region as Islamic terrorism and extremism. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, combining China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan*, is a dictators’ club. Despite having several theoretical fields of activity, the main practical focus is entirely on security and, in the words of their declaration, combating “terrorism, separatism and extremism”. That is code for repressing any moves to freedom in Central Asia. Co-operation extends to false flag operations and fake intelligence. The Uzbek government response to the Andijan massacre was an example of this, with the Russian government providing “Evidence” to back the Uzbek government’s story that the massacred demonstrators were terrorists organised by Chechens and funded by the USA (sic).

One good thing about the Olympics going to Beijing is that the western media has run a few articles on the plight of the Uighurs, of whose existence I suspect few western reporters knew a couple of weeks ago. It is entirely predictable that the Chinese governemmt is responding by organising “terrorist incidents” to try to blacken the Uighurs as part of Al Qaida. Do not be taken in by this rubbish.

*The Tajiks are not Turkic but Persian

With great reluctance, I took some Sturgeron anti-vomiting tablets and turned to David Miliband’s much-vaunted article.

I really am stunned. If this is the best hope for New Labour, they have lost all touch with reality. Nobody will recognise the parliamentary answer style list of the government’s great achievements as having any relationship to actual life, on the day that British Gas announced a 35% price rise. The careful soundbites bear no relationship to the way normal people talk about anything. The general vacuity and failure to outline a single policy proposal make Barack Obama look like a man obsessed with practical detail. The continuing failure to admit the Iraq War was wrong (Miliband only parrots the New Labour mantra that we should have prepared better for the results) is an abomination of shiftiness.

I wonder what Keir Hardie would make of this brash, empty, embodiment of undeserving ambition? I wonder if Miliband has ever spoken to a working man other than to give him curt instructions on installing the Aga? If anyone thinks this empty vessel will save New Labour from the worst political defeat for a century, I am chuckling to see them try.