You know copyright law’s got out of hand when…

When it’s being used to attack an endangered species. Not a biological kind of species, because they usually have a queue of people trying to save them. This is a pub, and so the great and good are mostly absent with the exception of Stephen Fry.

Actor Stephen Fry, who’s in the cast of The Hobbit films, has accused their American copyright holder of bullying an English theme pub called The Hobbit.

Lawyers for California-based Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) have written to the landlady of the Southampton pub, demanding it changes its name and remove all references to author JRR Tolkien’s classic by the end of May or face legal action for copyright infringement.

[…]

Fry, who plays the Master of Laketown in The Hobbit being filmed in New Zealand, says he’s ashamed of being in the film business.

His tweet helped boost the cause of the Save the Hobbit, Southampton Facebook page, which quickly attracted more than 13,000 followers.

Honestly, @savethehobbit, sometimes I’m ashamed of the business I’m in. What pointless, self-defeating bullying. fry.am/yGQDeh

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) March 13, 2012

He’s a funny bloke, Stephen Fry. Not funny ha-ha, though he certainly can be, but funny in that I really don’t know what to think about the guy. I once called him names because he defended political expense fiddling, but I’ve also blogged at how ridiculous it was that he had to cancel travel plans to Japan because of what someone else on QI said about one of the few double A-bomb survivors. In this instance, though, it’s very easy: I think Fry is absolutely right and I’d be fucking ashamed as well. What else can you think when a company who did not create the original works but have simply bought the rights is setting lawyers on to a member of a dying trade who’s highly unlikely to be able to afford to defend herself.

SZC are doubtless looking forward to a nice cheque from the movie studio behind the upcoming film, and this isn’t exactly promoting ‘The Hobbit’ (am I allowed to say that?) as a good brand. It’s tempting to suggest boycotting the film just so SZC, who are making money from doing fuck all I can see apart from buying the rights years ago – they’re not even making the fucking movie, for Christ’s sake – get less. I won’t because this isn’t the studio’s fault, but seriously, fuck Hollywood, fuck copyright abuse and fuck the parasites who live of this kind of thing. If a #BoycottTheHobbitmovie hashtag starts appearing regularly on Twitter I reckon it’ll be SZC who deserve the credit for it.

Questions you’d wish you hadn’t asked

Listen for what one of the co-hosts of this talkback radio show asked a caller on the topic of four BASE jumpers who’d parachuted (without the building owners’ consent, of course) from a restaurant balcony near the top of Melbourne’s Rialto Tower, incidentally skipping out on the bill for four cocktails they’d ordered from the bar shortly before. It’s around the 28 seconds mark.

“Did they all make it to the ground?” I realise that the unspoken word there is “safely”, or at least I hope it is. The alternative is that talkback radio hosts might think that perhaps one or more of them ended up bobbing around, Arthur Dent style, several hundred feet above Collins Street. Since 3AW hosts had earlier asked a caller if it involved ropes and the SAS, and whether it happened often I suppose it’s a possibility that can’t absolutely be ruled out.

If it’s broke fix it with the thing that broke it*

Both my readers (hi Mum) will recall that since the UK election nearly two years ago I’ve often said that the Cobbleition government really doesn’t seem all that different from the Labour government that preceded it. I can’t be bothered to look back and see when it was that I began saying that it was like Labour had never lost the election but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t long. However, I can recall exactly when I said that the country may as well bring back Gordon Brown, which was late last November, my reasoning being that if all politicians who can attract enough votes to win power are hell bent on wrecking the place then real change can’t happen until things have got so bad that the people who voted for them can no longer ignore it, so you might as well have the worst of the bunch in charge so as to get the painful wrecking part of the process over and done with quickly. Not a new argument – Obonoxio the Clown was saying something similar even before the election, and I don’t think he was the only one. But what persuaded me that the current incarnation of the Tories, which at its best has only ever been a party that likes to boss people around about different things from those which Labour likes to boss people around, really are doing nothing more than prolonging the agony was Camermong’s announcement that he was going to fix the economy with the very thing that, in America, fucked the economy right in the eyes.

The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages.

Dave, Nick, say it ain’t so. Tell us that even you aren’t so monumentally stupid that you can’t see that it’s precisely this kind of policy – using taxpayers’ money to underwrite loans for overpriced housing to people who are at higher risk of being unable to repay them – that led with grim inevitability to the fucking subprime mortgage crisis in the fucking first place. And what did that lead to in its turn? Oh, yes, that’d be adding to an unsustainable bubble with a bonus prize of a banking crisis, wouldn’t it? And you two freak shows are now standing here telling us that you want to fucking do it all over again in the deluded belief it’ll get the economy moving. Folks, I think this year’s Jeff Buckley Award for being the Public Figure Most Hopelessly Out of Their Depth may end up being shared.

But no, they did mean it. And today it turns out to be even worse.

Up to 100,000 people will get Government support to buy homes worth up to £500,000 in a Coalition move to revive the middle-class dream of home ownership, ministers will announce.

I just want to draw attention to the maths here. £500,000 times a hundred thousand people is fifty fucking billion pounds. Fifty billion! Has the country that’s recently fallen behind Brazil in the ranking of world economies actually got fifty billion to spare? Without adding to the already mind-fuckingly huge debt that’ll need to be repaid by future taxpayers?

The guarantee will allow people buying new-build properties to borrow up to 95 per cent of the value of their new home.
Since the credit crisis that began in 2007, most people seeking to buy a newly-built property have been able to borrow no more than 80 per cent of the sale price.

Can someone explain to me why this is necessarily a bad thing? Surely if you’re borrowing less then your ability to repay is easier, giving you either a cushion or the option of early repayment or more disposable income. And if being able to borrow less means you can’t afford it at all, couldn’t that possible indicate that despite adjustments property in Britain is still too fucking pricey by far?

Some estimates suggest that the average deposit required for a mortgage is close to £38,000.

This is telling. When I bought my first house, which was back when the housing market was only silly and not outright batshit insane, I think the rule of thumb was being able to borrow triple your salary. The thing is that a little googling finds that the median UK salary is in the mid £20K area, meaning that a median salary earner needs either to scrimp and save or borrow about 50% of their salary just to get the fucking deposit together. Not the mortgage, the bloody deposit. Surely that screams ‘over priced housing’, and surely this move of Cameramong’s is only going to exacerbate it. I’m no economist but I seem to recall hearing that encouraging too much money to chase too few goods is inflationary.

Though of course it might not be in the longer term if it means loans being made to people who can’t afford to repay them.

… it could also raise fears that the State could end up guaranteeing more risky borrowers.

Quite. Because that’s exactly what happened in the US to spark the whole bloody GFC off in the first place. Put a big government made and taxpayer funded safety net under businesses and eventually some of them will forget to take as much care as they should, and so inevitably banks made bad lending decisions while feeling safe and secure in the knowledge that Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac would take care of things if they went tits up. Can someone tell me how what Cameramong and Cleggie are doing is fundamentally different?

Formally launching the mortgage guarantee today, the Prime Minister will today pledge that the NewBuy scheme will help repair a “broken” housing ladder.

“It’s no good hoping people will climb the property ladder if the bottom rung is missing. Affordable properties and available mortgages are vital,” he will say.

You’re not repairing it, you tool. You’re fucking extending it and weakening the remaining lower rungs still further. Oh, and that name? Sounds a little familiar. Not thinking of yourself as an English Roosevelt, are you? I ask only because among other things FDR’s New Deal created Fannie Mae. If you mention the hand of history I swear I’ll get on a plane, come over there, and twat you heavily about the head and neck with Tony Blair’s autobiography.

And your drones are just as moronic, by the way.

Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, said the guarantee scheme will help unlock a housing market where for many people, owning a home is “no longer a dream, but a distant fantasy.”

Turning it into a fucking nightmare should fix that.

“We want to help everyone achieve their aspirations, and feel the pride of home ownership. The NewBuy Guarantee will give thousands of prospective buyers the chance to buy a home with a fraction of the deposit normally required.”

Yeah, because you wouldn’t want to let a market of an overpriced good fall to a natural level. Oh, no. Far better to keep those prices unnaturally high by pulling magic money out of your arse with one hand while writing out “IOU – We’ll pay for everything no matter what it eventually costs. Love, the Taxpayers” with the other. Have none of these self described conservatives thought that maybe if they didn’t keep interfering with markets and pushing up prices as well as adding to the taxpayers’ bills then maybe those same taxpayers would have a better chance of being able to afford these things without help?

And this kind of shit is why this blog is beginning to swing towards overt support of Labour. Not because I have any respect or faith for that party, and certainly not in the expectation that they’ll be a significant improvement on with the Cobbleition or either of the parties in it. In fact I expect Labour to be even worse and possibly to have the capability virtually to destroy Britain even more quickly than the other two. And I’m coming to believe that virtual destruction is not only inevitable but is necessary to wake up the majority of the 26,146,419 people who voted for the Big Three for no better reason than their family has always voted that way, or because they didn’t want the other lot to win, or because they’d vote for fortnight dead roadkill if someone dropped the right colour rosette on it. It’d be far better if they’d realise the damage they’re doing by prolonging the paradigm of incompetent and destructive politicians and just start voting for someone else (though I still have concerns about them UKIP is currently my least worst option, but Christ’s sakes, anyone but the Big Three really) but I’m afraid that the majority of those 26,146,419 will carry on as they have been doing until one day dawn breaks on a Britain that is completely bankrupt, probably in more than one sense.

Only then will those destructive political parties be destroyed themselves, or at least made electorally irrelevant, because all will finally be clear and in the wreckage there will be very very few who will ever forgive the Big Three. What will happen then is anyone’s guess, but I’d very much hope it’ll be the beginning of several generations with an inherent distrust of government and big stater solutions. I can’t help but feel that if destruction is indeed a necessary condition for recovery then why put it off by voting for someone marginally less catastrophically incompetent?

That said, if destruction can be avoided altogether it goes without saying that we should, so although I’m pessimistic I really hope an alternative presents itself. Besides, voting Labour would make me want to go home and wash for about a month.

* Title from The Daily Mash.

Okay, enough now

On Sunday I talked about offence seeking and mentioned that something I find particularly weird is this fashion of being offended on behalf of someone else, particularly when they’re not all that bothered themselves, the example being the fuss made over comments by a couple of daytime TV hosts about VC recipient and SAS member Ben Roberts-Smith when he clearly doesn’t think it worth getting worked up about himself. This happens a lot these days, and its zenith (or nadir, depending on your point of view) is generally found when some well intentioned right-on type, generally white, gets offended about something on behalf of a group who are not white and begins talking about patronising these people without noticing how patronising it is to act as if they can’t decide whether to be offended for themselves but need some PC obsessed wanker to do it for them.

However, there’s another depth it can sink to, and that’s when actual threats of violent retaliation are made, which is about where we are now with the level of frothing outrage over the remarks of those two TV airheads.

Two more companies have pulled their sponsorship from the morning television show The Circle as Channel 10 today condemned a number of “extreme comments” and threats on social media sites targeting co-host Yumi Stynes.

The latest company to cut ties with The Circle was Mirvac Hotels and Resorts, which posted on its Facebook page that it had cancelled all sponsorship due to the “abhorrent comments” made on the show last week about Australian war hero Ben Roberts-Smith.

[…]

Yoplait has also reportedly withdrawn its advertising within the morning television show. Yoplait has been contacted for comment.

It follows news yesterday that Swisse Vitamins, coffee chain Jamaica Blue and Big 4 Holiday Parks had cut their ties with The Circle after Stynes, along with and veteran journalist and guest co-host George Negus, mocked the Victoria Cross recipient.

Stynes has since become the target of an online hate campaign, including physical threats against her and her children, and racial vilification.

If companies want to ditch advertising during or sponsorship of the show then that’s up to them, and if people want to boycott the show or the products of companies who – how very dare they – don’t think such puerile comments are worth changing their advertising strategies over then likewise. But threatening someone over it? Threatening their children? Seriously? Why, what did her kids do?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

A tale of two, no, make that three Aussies

First, via an Ambushy Predatory tweet, the case of Geoff Stephens, a UK based Australian whose feelings were hurt by colleagues making Australian jokes, as I blogged in passing last year.

An Australian community warden called Geoff Stephens suing his council employer because people keep saying things like “G’day, sport” to him and making kangaroo jokes.

Look, folks, this must stop. It is wholly inappropriate to call Mr Stephens “sport”. The correct term is “yer big sooky la-la” and must be used from now on.

Well, it seems that Geoff – be careful not to call him Geoff-o or anything else that might sound a bit Australian in case the poor guy can’t take it – must have lost because he’s now in the news again. Yes (said with a sense of depressing inevitability), he’s taking his case to Europe.

An Australian community warden who claimed he was racially abused by colleagues who constantly greeted him with ‘G’day Sport’ is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Geoff Stephens, who has been in the UK for 27 years after coming over from Australia when he was 22 years old, claimed he suffered a barrage of abuse from co-workers for being Australian.

Anyone interested in how many times I’ve been called a pom? Anyone? No? Funny that, and maybe it’s because nobody, least of all me, thinks it’s that big a deal. With Western society having become so litigation prone I’d obviously be lying if I said it had never occurred to me to try to sue anyone over it, but I would be lying if I said it really bothered me and doubt I could do so with a straight face.

He claimed that the ‘racism’ and bullying’ he suffered at work ‘would eventually have killed him’ and that he constantly asked colleagues to stop making jokes about him being an Aussie.

Racism? Geoff, you idiot, Australian – except when referring to indigenous Australians – is no more a race than Islam is. I’d like to think that this is a subtle move to destroy the ability to play the race card by rendering it a bad joke with members of non-existent races making ludicrous claims about racism by people who look exactly like them, but sadly I suspect it’s just silliness.

He said that fellow wardens constantly greeted him with ‘G’day Sport’, ‘Is your girlfriend called Sheila?’ and made jokes about kangaroos and asked him to ‘Throw another shrimp on the barbie’.

Which is almost as lame as some of the attempts to mimic an English accent while I’m around. You know when David Cameron tried to do Julia Gillard?* Like that but even worse. My response has not been to run off crying for compo but to try to teach them how to do it properly using references to appropriate study material. This usually means films with Michael Caine in, and so if you happen to ever meet an Australian who, upon realising that you’re English, shouts “Dan’t throh those bladdy spears at me” you’ll know whose fault it is and how successful I haven’t been.

He said: ‘I’m totally disappointed with the tribunal outcome but am really hopeful about Europe.

‘The last few months have been a nightmare and my whole life has been turned upside down.

That’s because you’re from Austr… oh, forget it.

‘I have transcripts which prove they listened to my private conversations, including one with my doctor to see if I was telling the truth about my health.

‘I thought ‘Strewth’, and couldn’t believe it when I realised.

“Strewth”? Geoff, did you seriously just say that word? Come on, after spending more than half your life in Britain you must realise that that panders to every stereotype Brits hold about Australians. I think you should sue yourself for every penny you’ve got. I also think that you should, as they say here occasionally, harden the fuck up.

Something similar could be said about the unnamed police officer in this case from Plymouth (I think also via JuliaM).

A man abused a police officer from Australia saying: ‘We speak English in this country’.

Oh, that Wilde-ian West Country wit. The poor Aussie copper must have been mentally devastated, coming as he does from a country where everyone speaks, er, English as well.

Eoin McCarthy, for the Crown Prosecution Service, said police were called to a report of an incident in Wyndham Street East in Stonehouse.

He added officers questioned a group of men and wanted to search Morrison.

Mr McCarthy said: “The defendant was not particularly impressed by that, saying: ‘We speak English in this country’.

“The officer took offence in view of his nationality, which is Australian.”

The court heard Morrison continued to abuse the officer, despite being warned to stop.

Now it’s not said what the form of the continued abuse was and for all I know there was something arrestable at some stage (he ended up in court, after all), but it’s that penultimate line that got me. He took offence in view of his nationality. Aw, bless, although how this delicate soul was considered the right material for a job where being called a pig is an occupational hazard when he’s clearly so thin skinned that a pathetic gibe at his country of birth stung so much is quite beyond me. I’d have suggested a less confrontational line of work, such as a librarian. Yes, people could still take the piss but at least they’d have to do it in a whisper. On the other hand, if the officer wants to carry on with his chosen career I suggest he ponder the words of his fellow Aussie, Steve Hughes.

Finally, we have an example of an increasing trend that’s even more annoying than taking offence over trivialities – taking offence on behalf of a third party over trivialities that aren’t even aimed at you. In this instance the offended-on-behalf-of mob included half the media, and they really did make the whole thing look particularly ludicrous because far from being of a delicate flower like disposition the person at whom the comments were aimed is a serious contender for the title of Hardest Australian Alive, which he could put alongside his SAS beret, his Medal for Gallantry and his absolutely-shitting-you-not Victoria Cross.

Oh, and at more than six and a half feet tall he’s also fucking massive.

Harden the fu... oh, er, sorry mate, didn't mean you

This is Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, who was awarded the VC for an incident in Afghanistan in 2010 in which his patrol was under fire from three machine gunners. Cpl Roberts-Smith deliberately left cover, killing at point blank range an enemy grenadier who got in the way, in order to draw fire away from his team, and since his patrol commander’s grenade only took out one of the machine gunners he stopped screwing around and killed the remaining pair himself. He must be pretty damn quick on his feet too because those three machine guns that stopped firing at his patrol in order to concentrate their fire on him managed to miss despite him being, as I think I mentioned, fucking massive.

That or the bullets were frightened of getting hurt when they bounced off him.

What can anyone possibly say about a guy like Ben Roberts-Smith that he’d need protecting from? That maybe he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer or much good at sex, apparently.

The co-host of Channel Ten program The Circle has publicly apologised for making a sexist and disrespectful comment about Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, saying she had never met the Australian war hero and “felt sick” at the angry backlash she had received after branding him brainless.

Yumi Stynes admitted she did not know much about Corporal Roberts-Smith when she commented on a photograph of the shirtless war hero in a swimming pool yesterday, saying: “He’s going to dive down to the bottom of the pool to see if his brain is there.”

Stynes’s guest, co-host and veteran journalist George Negus had then quipped: “I’m sure he’s a really good guy, nothing about poor old Ben. But that sort of bloke, and what if they’re not up to it in the sack?”

Another host questioned whether Negus was suggesting “that he could be a dud root”, to laughter from the audience.

Yes, the mind does indeed boggle. Offensive? This kind of thing is so lame that if it had hooves someone would shoot it behind a tarpaulin. I could shrug that off and I’m not worthy of standing in temporarily for one of Ben Robert-Smith’s lower legs. Addressing such witless and puerile remarks to such a highly decorated soldier is certainly tasteless and may be embarrassing for the rest of us to have heard or read, but whether it’s offensive to Ben Roberts-Smith is solely for Ben Roberts-Smith to decide. Nonetheless…

The Circle’s Facebook page was flooded with angry comments, while a relative of another decorated war veteran contacted The Age to call for the Stynes and Negus to be sacked.

[…]

Opposition defence personnel spokesman Stuart Robert condemned the comments made by Negus and Stynes.

Nothing quite like the faux outrage of an opposition politician to make me take something less seriously.

“The irony is that the freedom of speech these journalists exercise is a freedom neither of them have fought for -but which both enjoy.”

Wrong, Stu. I’d argue that we don’t actually have freedom of speech when there are things that simply may not be said, but also that anyone may fight for freedom of speech just by saying anything that someone disapproves of and refusing to be kowtowed into retracting it. Not that I’m suggesting Yumi Stynes and George Negus were doing anything so noble rather than just talking the kind of schoolyard bollocks which both of them, and Negus especially, should have outgrown. Still, the content of their comments is not the point. The point is that the only person who can say whether Cpl Roberts-Smith is offended is Ben Roberts-Smith himself. And, perhaps not all that surprisingly for the Hardest Living Thing in Australia (Counting Some of the Crocs), he wasn’t really.

Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith has dismissed sexist and disrespectful comments aimed at him by the Channel Ten program The Circle as “surprising” but not malicious.

[…]

Both personally apologised to Corporal Roberts-Smith for their comments before appearing on The Project to explain their actions.

Stynes said that she was “humbled” and “sorry” for her comments.

“I did speak to the winner of the Victoria Cross on the phone and said to him ‘look, I’m really about this’ and he was like ‘I’ve got a pretty thick skin’ and he kind of went ‘you know this stuff happens, you say stuff, don’t sweat it, let’s move on.’

She added that it was “uncool to make fun of him” yet she was “relieved” to speak with Corporal Roberts-Smith.

[…]

Negus, who also spoke with the decorated soldier, added: “It was very difficult to get him to accept my apology because he didn’t sound as though he thought I needed to make one.”

Perhaps because for some people not even sticks and stones, or bullets and grenades for that matter, seem able to break their bones. Some words might be able to hurt them, but for damned sure words like ‘brainless’ and ‘dud root’ won’t be among them. Most people are made of strong enough stuff to deal with that, and those like Roberts-Smith are made of sterner stuff still.

So if you want to make some remark about mad hair, guy-liner and 80s Goth/New Wave music I’d go right ahead, because the chances are that nest to nothing you can say or do to the guy is going to be significant enough to warrant much of his attention.

* I mean her accent, you dirty minded sods.

Alternative medicine poll

The manipulation of an smh.com.au poll has again thrown the spotlight on online voting.

Late last month the Herald reported on a lobby group of more than 400 doctors, medical researchers and scientists – dubbed Friends of Science in Medicine – that is pressuring universities to close down alternative medicine degrees, arguing the practices have no scientific basis.

On February 4, several experts were interviewed for a new article on the topic and the story was accompanied by an online poll asking readers “Should universities teach alternative medicine?”

Voting progressed steadily at first but on Tuesday votes began skyrocketing from about 125,000 to more than 877,000 by the time voting closed on Thursday. The end result was 71 per cent “no”, 29 per cent “yes”.

The number of votes in the poll was about eight times more than the number of online readers of the story, a clear indicator that the poll had been gamed. Fairfax technical staff said the poll logs all but confirmed that the voting had been manipulated.

Nonsense. All that’s happened is that somebody diluted the ‘no’ vote to make it much, much stronger than it was to begin with. Carry on as you were.

PETA jump the shark

Except it must of course be a free range shark rather than that poor thing in the cage that the Fonz jumped over, or so I’d assume from this.

A JUDGE for the first time in US history has heard arguments in a case that could determine whether animals enjoy the same constitutional protection against slavery as human beings.

US District Judge Jeffrey Miller called the hearing in San Diego after Sea World asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that names five orcas as plaintiffs in the case.

Now I’m not a fan of orcas and dolphins in captivity and won’t pay a cent to go see them (and I have paid well to see them in the wild). If the orcas themselves had squeaked and clicked at a lawyer and sued Sea World I’d be barracking for them, but since the orcas are animals I just hope that people get over this kind of thing and Sea World gradually diminishes. They may be very bright animals but as with the iPad apps for cats thing the other day I think it’s anthropomorphising to go much further. Any being that’s clearly able to speak up for itself and complain that its rights are being infringed I’m on the side of, and ownership of such a being is slavery or something very much like it. But as far as I know the only such being is a human being, and even then not all of them qualify. Children need looking after while they are still children and while we don’t own our kids as such that can’t really be said to own themselves either.

Animals, even very bright ones, are a different story, but it’s a story that PETA seems not to have not heard.

“This case is on the next frontier of civil rights,” said PETA lawyer Jeffrey Kerr, representing the five orcas.

It’s on the next frontier of something, alright.

Sea World’s lawyer, Theodore Shaw, called the lawsuit a waste of the court’s time and resources. He said it defies common sense and goes against 125 years of case law applied to the American constitution’s 13th amendment, which prohibits slavery between humans.

As I’ve indicated, I’m not all that keen on supporting Sea World in keeping orcas but I think he may just have a bit of a point here. Look at what it says in the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

‘We the People’ not ‘We the People and Cetaceans’, and nor was anyone involved in drafting, signing and ratifying the Constitution a member of any species other than Homo sapiens. That’s not a one-off use: even before we get to the Bill of Rights ‘the People’ are mentioned again in Article 2 where it talks of membership of the House of Representatives, and even in California dolphins do not have the vote. In the Bill of Rights itself the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 10th Amendments all explicitly refer to people (in the first person in the case of the 5th), the 3rd doesn’t but must as well because it relates to land ownership, and it can be inferred in the remaining three amendments since they relate to judicial proceedings such as excessive bail, impartial juries and so on, and you wouldn’t expect anyone to put a dolphin on trial. Later Amendments, such as the 14th which refers to citizenship and the rights and liberties that come with it, again refer to people and there’s no mention in the two that extend suffrage beyond the 19th Century ‘white guys only’ model refer only to race and sex respectively. ‘Species’ doesn’t get a mention because – duh – animals physically can’t vote anyway, and in fact both speak only of citizens so we’re back to the 14th and people again. In fact it seems so blindingly obvious that ‘duh’ could almost be the whole argument if lawyers weren’t all prolix bastards that put me to shame.

“With all due respect, the court does not have the authority to even consider this question,” Mr Shaw said, adding later: “Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the ‘We the people’ … when the constitution was adopted.”

Quite, and probably as close as a lawyer can come to ‘Well, duh’.

The judge raised doubts a court could allow animals to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit, and questioned how far the implications of a favourable ruling could reach, pointing out the military’s use of dolphins and scientists’ experiments on whales in the wild.

Sounds like he’s trying to find a more official legalese version of ‘duh’ as well. Incidentally, I wouldn’t shed a tear if the military stopped using dolphins but I’d rather it was because of human ingenuity producing something that does the job better or, at a push, statute law forbidding it.

Mr Kerr acknowledged PETA faces an uphill battle but said he felt positive after Monday’s hearing.

“This is an historic day,” Mr Kerr said.

“For the first time in our nation’s history, a federal court heard arguments as to whether living, breathing, feeling beings have rights and can be enslaved simply because they happen to not have been born human. By any definition these orcas have been enslaved here.”

Big deal. You can go to court and argue that Elvis came from the stars and therefore his will was invalid and Gracelands should become public property, but that doesn’t mean you’re not talking bollocks. Bottom line, the Constitution is a document for and about human beings. Call that speciesist if you want, but that’s how it’s got to be unless you want to extend human rights and citizenship to non-humans, which might raise further problems for some of Sea World’s orcas.

Click for linky

A SeaWorld killer whale has snatched a trainer from a poolside platform, thrashing the woman about underwater in its jaws and killing her in front of a horrified audience.

It is the third time the animal, named Tilikum, has been involved in a human death.

[…]

A marine conservationist at the American Museum of Natural History believes the whale’s actions at SeaWorld were intentional.

Extending human rights to animals, even bright ones, cuts both ways. Humans have responsibilities as well as rights, top of which is the responsibility to other humans. Many of us fail to respect that and there are legal sanctions for those who do so. In much of the US, including in Florida where the Sea World trainer was killed, those sanctions include the death penalty. But of course nobody would consider an animal that’s killed a human is a murderer because they’re not human. Well, apart from PETA who seem to think you don’t have to be born human to have a human’s legal status.

I wouldn’t ascribe malice to it myself, but that’s not the point. If it was a human doing it there would be an investigation and, if appropriate, charges. If the orcas are to be treated as if they are humans then that must mean treating them exactly as if they’re human, in all respects.

And what else might this mean? Sea World could then be sued, probably into bankruptcy, for many years back pay for the orcas, who’d doubtless have another self appointed PETA lawyer insisting that they be recognised as employees in the entertainment industry. Which achieves what? The orcas physically can't open bank accounts so it'd need to be a cash lump sum, and the taxman will complain that it's wet when he comes to get his share. And because the pools are half full of banknotes Sea World, assuming it's still there, will get sued again for poor living conditions and again when one of the orcas dies from some $100 bills getting lodged in its blowhole. All because of a bone headed insistence of treating animals not simply with respect, but as actual people.

And why would it stop there? Other dolphin species are just as bright if not more so, which means they'd have to be treated the same way. And then there are dogs, some breeds of which can be pretty bright and are used as working dogs on farms and in police departments and so on – hey, you with the guide dog, you slaver bastard! It probably means every dog in the US that's been taught to fetch, and I'm sure PETA are fine with that too because they're on record as being opposed to domesticated animals including pets and livestock.* Bee keepers are fucked.

This opens a massive can of worms – except it mustn't because the worms have rights – as it has the potential to be extended to every other living thing. To me that should include fungi, soil microbes and plants, especially those that are grown with the express purpose of being cut down and exploited as a food source. Which is something I doubt all the vegans and veggies at PETA have considered or would agree with, but hey, exploitation is what it is and all life is related. If a dog is a rat is a pig is a boy then surely it's also a wheat plant and a tasty mushroom and a vegetarian sausage and case of strep throat – and how many microbes did you massacre in the shower this morning just so you could smell nicer, you genocidal bastard? All life consumes and exploits other life, PETA, and vegetarians are no exception even if they do self righteously refuse to eat anything even vaguely cute and start pouring piss about keeping animals being slavery.

That's taking PETA's arguments to extremes but ad absurdum or not I think it’s a fair point. This is about where you draw the line, and while most people are happy to draw it around our own species PETA want to draw it around the whole animal kingdom. The interesting thing is that I cannot believe they expect to succeed. I cannot believe that they expect to reach a point where having a few beehives is seen as being as bad as having fellow humans in chains working fields, and I doubt they really expect to persuade a federal court that the document which is the United States’ highest law and refers explicitly to people also includes a large species of dolphin whose last ancestor shared with us would have died many millions of years ago and wouldn’t have faintly resembled either of us.

In fact I suspect PETA expect to lose but hope to drum up a lot of publicity in the process, which is inevitable when you’re in a court arguing that a twelve tonne sea mammal that can rip a shark’s face right off is the same as you and I. Not worthy of respect or kindness, but the same. They’re going to lose but they’re going to gain PR out of it.

Hang on. Doesn’t that mean PETA are exploiting these beautiful creatures too? You utter bastards, PETA.

* They also advocate vegan diets for domestic cats despite all cat species being obligate carnivores. Their reasoning? Cats eat some plant matter. Hey, fuckwits, just because cats eat some plant matter does not mean they don’t need any meat.

Fantastic news – booze and fags are as harmless as sugar

Click for linky

I know this isn’t new news as it, or something very much like it, was doing the rounds on the anti-nannying blogs not so very long ago, and I’m certainly not the only one to have deliberately misinterpreted the headline. But what else can you do in the face of such relentless nannying but carry on taking the piss out of them?

Sugar is so harmful that it should be controlled in the same way as tobacco and alcohol, according to a team of leading public health experts.

Three US scientists from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) maintain sugar is more than just “empty calories” that makes people fat.

They argue that high calorie, sweetened food is indirectly responsible for 35 million annual deaths worldwide due to lifestyle-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Professors Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis call for restrictions and controls on sugar that mirror those on tobacco and alcohol.

You know, I thought they might.

The health hazards were similar to the effects of drinking too much alcohol — which was, in any event, manufactured from the distillation of sugar.

Yep, add two sugars to my coffee and I’m absofuckingloutely anyone’s, the cheapest of cheap dates. No, I know that’s not what you mean but seriously, you lot can’t possibly be sitting there with a straight face and telling us that the effects are similar and then bringing up the completely irrelevant point that sugar is used to produce alcohol. Come on, that’s like saying that beer is bad and wheat, which makes beer, also makes Weet-Bix. True, but bugger all to do with anything.

The main culprit is said to be fructose, a sugar molecule that is commonly added to processed food in sweetening agents such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). There is increasing evidence that excess fructose has harmful effects on the body.

And you know where else you find fructose?

Click for linky

Also lots of berries, if I recall. It’s tempting at this point to change the post title to ‘Your five a day is going to kill you’ except I used that last November over at the Orphanage. How about ‘An apple a day keeps the mortician employed’ instead? Or would it be a different kind of fructose that’s bad for you because it knows it’s in nasty processed food instead of something nice and natural, like an unwashed apple with bird shit on or some nice broc-E. coli florets.

Anyway, it’s by the by because this equivalence to tobacco and alcohol is just ridiculous whether you say sugar’s just as bad or that booze and ciggies are no worse. One thing I will give the anti-fags and anti-booze brigade is this: when they say that the body has no need for alcohol or tobacco they do have a point. I no longer consume either and I haven’t starved to death, so from a strictly nutritional point of view smoking and drinking must have no value. Needless to say I don’t follow their example and ignore all the non-nutritional value smokers and drinkers get, which is basically that they just enjoy it – something these joyless arseholes who want it all banned, or at least under their control, may be incapable of understanding – but I’m not going to suggest that the human body needs five to ten smokes and a couple of beers a day or it’ll stop working.*

The same can’t be said of sugar which is actually quite important,  something the article doesn’t really get round to. I remember being taught at school about a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, about half a pound of which sloshes around inside each of us. Having only half a pound makes it sound like something relatively unimportant but here’s the thing: it’s what gives energy to all your muscles including, I believe, your heart and the diaphragm muscles that work your lungs. And half a pound of ATP will only run your body for about ten minutes or so. Fortunately we’re producing ATP more or less constantly as well as using it up all the time, so that we actually go through about our body weight of ATP over the course of a day. If you already know that mitochondria living in your cells are responsible for making all that ATP you may now make a Star Wars prequel joke about it. You’ll also know what the mitochondria make it out of: sugar.

Okay, I know that’s simplifying things, but it boils down to needing the mitochondria to make ATP for you as your fuel tank for it is a bit on the small side, and for them to do that they need you to put food containing sugars into your head hole regularly. Can you put too much sugar in? Yeah, sure, of course, nobody’s saying otherwise. Does it make you fatter if you do? Again, yes, because the body can turn fat into sugars for the mitochondria when needed, meaning that while the ATP fuel tank is stupidly small you can have a fat fuel tank almost as large as you want. Some might call this intelligent design but if my car only held a pint of petrol and came with a small refinery in the boot and capacity for several barrels of Brent crude I’d have bought a different one. However, while we can reject a car our bodies we’re stuck with, which means a certain amount of sugar intake isn’t an option but a necessity.

And because some of us (ahem, including me, but if you’d tasted Mrs Exile’s baking you’d understand) do indeed take in more than we need these nannying killjoys want to regulate this necessity. For everybody.

Speaking about the comment article, Professor Lustig, from the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, said: “As long as the public thinks that sugar is just ’empty calories’, we have no chance in solving this.”

Great, so they won’t try then? Yeah, some hope.

“There are good calories and bad calories…

Ohhh-kay, I was geared up to pay attention to you, Rob, but I’m going to have to stop you there because that’s the worst kind of unscientific arse gravy. Did you give the press conference in the middle of a kindergarten or something? A calorie isn’t good or bad, it’s just a unit of energy. If you apply some energy  to 1 gram of water so that you raise its temperature by 1˚C you’ve used one calorie. Saying there are good calories and bad calories is as ridiculous as saying there are good BTUs and bad BTUs, good joules and bad joules, good millimetres and bad millimetres. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete bollocks. Shall we just take all the hectoring as read and cut to the chase – what exactly is it you want?

In their commentary, the experts propose adding taxes to processed foods that contain any form of added sugar.

These would include carbonated drinks, other sugar-sweetened beverages such as juice and chocolate milk, and sugared cereals.

Other strategies included controlling access with measures such as age limits for the purchase of sugary drinks, and tightening controls on vending machines and snack bars in schools and workplaces.

Thought so. Fuck off.

Professor Schmidt [said]: “We’re not talking prohibition.”

Oh, that’s big of you, Laura. But really you are talking prohibition or something close because you’re telling us that it’s as bad as alcohol and tobacco, one of which has been prohibited once in the past and both of which, we’re often told by your fellow travellers, are unsafe in any quantity.

“We’re not advocating a major imposition of the Government into people’s lives.”

What? Yes you are. Taxation and age limits and controls on vending machines? Were you asleep for that bit?

“We’re talking about gentle ways to make sugar consumption slightly less convenient, thereby moving people away from the concentrated dose.”

Oh, that creepy nudge technique again. Too bad, we know what that looks like. I’d say try again, but really, don’t.

The experts concluded in their article: “Regulating sugar will not be easy — particularly in the ’emerging markets’ of developing countries where soft drinks are often cheaper than potable water or milk.

“We recognise that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby, and will require active engagement from all stakeholders.”

Oh dear me, this is cookie cutter nannying (sugar free dough, natch). You could almost change all references to sugar to read alcohol or tobacco and it would… in fact, screw it. Let’s try:

“Regulating alcohol will not be easy — particularly in the ’emerging markets’ of developing countries where alcopops are often cheaper than potable water or milk.
“We recognise that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for alcohol faces an uphill political battle against a powerful drinks lobby, and will require active engagement from all stakeholders.”

So that’s three ‘sugars’ and one ‘soft drinks’ replaced by two ‘alcohols’, one ‘drinks’ and an ‘alcopops’, and doesn’t it come out sounding familiar? Granted, harder to do with tobacco when it’s had the ragged arse taxed out of it to the extent that I doubt it’s cheaper than water in many places, but then it’s not true of alcohol either and it still gets repeated. Also we all know that people who’ll claim that tobacco needs to be more expensive are ten a penny, except that’s not quite right either. They’re really nothing like as cheap as a penny and it’s more like pay for one rent seeker and get another nine at the same rate.

All of which goes to reinforce what many of us, smokers and non-smokers and drinkers and teetotallers alike, who’ve been banging on about increasing nannyism have been saying for quite a while now: Niemöller has never been more right. They came for the smokers but they were never going to be satisfied with just controlling them. They came next for the drinker and won’t be satisfied with adding control of them either. And now it’s the salad dodgers and people who eat too much sweet stuff, including fruit and berries (fructose, remember). They will, in fact, never be satisfied until they control everyone, because there will always be someone somewhere who overdoes things. Give it long enough and I wouldn’t be shocked to see oxygen cropping up because of what it does to iron, the same stuff that’s in the blood of the nation’s children. All those kids with rusting veins, it’s a national disgrace and we must take the lead in yadda yadda yadda, won’t someone think of the chiiiiiiildren.

They simply will never, ever stop because, paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, tyranny exercised for the good of its victims is the worst of all tyrannies – cruelty and greed take the occasional nap but those who torment us for our own good do it with the approval of their consciences. They’re not all evil, but for all our sakes they must be resisted just as if they were.

* The owners of some of those human bodies might stop working, but that’s not quite the same thing.

Image of Jesus seen in picture of Jesus

Well, it’s about the last place the faithful no, gullible and/or desperate for their 15 minutes have actually looked for an image of their lord and saviour, various of them having claimed to have seen him in clouds, random bits of wood, chocolate bars and even ruined cookware.*

Toby Elles, 22, made the discovery after burning the food when he fell asleep while cooking.
After lifting off the scorched bacon Mr Elles, from Salford, Lancs, could not believe his eyes when the Christlike image stared back at him.
The face is complete with eyes, nose, a beard and is framed by long flowing hair.

Well, let’s have a look then.

Okay, I’ll grant you that it looks kind of like a bearded man, but does that mean it’s Jesus and not some randomised scraps of carbonised bacon fat? Not only does it seem unlikely that Jesus, who was Jewish if I recall, would choose to re-appear in bacon fat [and personally] I think it looks like John Lennon without his glasses.

However, let’s for a moment assume that this is a benchmark for what the Son of Man looks like, and of course ignore the fact that what Yeshua of Nazareth actually looked like probably wasn’t the medieval bearded guy from church windows or the BeeGee lookalike from more contemporary Christian art but a regular 1st century Palestinian male. So, if that’s an image of Jesus who’s this guy in the sock?

Sarah Crane, 38, said she was stunned when she saw a bearded man staring back at her from the laundry line.
Her boyfriend agreed the crumpled grey “holy sock” bore an uncanny likeness to the traditional image of Christ, and the couple took photographs to show their friends.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m going to regret this, but let’s have a look anyway.

Really? Look, firstly that doesn’t even look like a bearded man. I can see a face-like pattern, though that’s perfectly natural and happens to people all the time, but to begin with I thought it look more like a robot than a human face before finally deciding that actually it reminded me a bit of Eddie from Iron Maiden album cover art.

Of course we’re talking about the classic 1980s Eddie

And secondly, even if it did look like a bearded man it doesn’t look like the bearded man in the frying pan who, it’s suggested, is not John Lennon but our Redeemer, though unfortunately neither of them look a lot like I’d expect an ancient Palestinian to look and nor do they look like Jesus of Marmite Jar or Jesus of Cheap Interior Door.** And of course there’s a reason for that: not everyone with a bloody beard is Jesus. I mean look up there at Eddie… see it? Beard. And Eddie the Head isn’t even slightly saintly, much less Christ like. I shouldn’t need to spell this out but beard ≠ Jesus.

Plus, and I realise this is obvious to both my readers, these things are not Jesus but are the leftovers of a couple of ruined slices of cured pig meat, a cheap sock, a few cents of plastic with some random blobs of yeast extract, and a fucking door. In fact the only three things that links these and any other example of the Jesus-appears-in-random-everyday-object phenomenon is their different looking Jesuses, their essential non-Jesusness that follows from the inability to agree on what Jesus looked like, and their being obsessed over by nutters. And by nutters I don’t mean religious believers, though no doubt some are, but dedicated non thinkers who’d rather believe that they’ve been blessed by an entity whose existence is unproved, and if you ask me pretty doubtful, than that human beings are so naturally predisposed to recognising patterns that they see them in things that are random and patternless.

I mean, what’s the alternative? Yes, the bloke who burned his bacon might like to think how miraculous it was he didn’t die in the fire, but other people do die in fires all the time. Are we to believe that the Good Lord saves those who nod off while making bacon sarnies but not from dodgy wiring that they don’t even know about? And the others, what do we make of those? Are B group vitamins particularly holy? Blessed are the squeaky doors, for they shall inherit the earth? Is the Bible wrong and Jesus actually say unto Peter “You are my sock, and on this sock I shall build my church” or does he just want to cure corns and verrucas?

Not if the experience of the sock Jesus woman is any indication.

They even talked about creating a shrine to the sock but then the face was lost when they moved it.

I was half expecting the Ascension to be mentioned at this point but fortunately for both my head and my desk it never came up. Instead, and almost as laughable, this:

“We think it’s a bit of a sign – but for what we don’t know.”

Well, I can think of a couple of things that it could be a sign of. One is that you might just be a fucking idiot, and the other is that with electronic media making the space for online news practically infinite every day is a sufficiently slow news day for this stuff to be included, even if it’s so ridiculous and embarrassing that nobody wants to put their byline on it.

I hope that 2012 will be the year this guff goes out of fashion in the MSM, but I’m not holding my breath. In fact I’m afraid that if that happens at all it’ll only be because the 2012 Mayan apocalypse non-prediction and associated cockwaftery will be taking centre stage instead.

And there’s no point saying “God help us” because if he’s there at all he’s probably too busy laughing.

* For those with the patience of Job or who find the whole thing funny (the only way I cope with this kind of lunacy) The Tele has a whole gallery of this stuff.
** Linking that really went against the grain.

Final countdown

I meant to mention this the other day but what with Christmassy stuff going on it slipped my mind. It’s only 363 days until the world doesn’t end. Yes, it’s also only about half an hour until the world doesn’t end as well, but Mexico isn’t expecting millions of visitors to arrive any second so as to be closer to the ruins built by the people who are believed to have predicted the end of the world but in fact didn’t predict any such thing at all.

”The world will not end, stressed Yeanet Zaldo, a spokeswoman for the Cancun area. ”It is an era.”

Quite. In the same way that when the modern calendar runs out this New Year’s Eve the world won’t end either. It’s just that 2012 will start.

Not that that’s stopping some famous(ish) names – George Lucas, Ashton Kutcher and Lil Wayne among them, as I blogged a while back – from seeking New Age wisdom in someone else’s ancient history and getting it arse about face. Them and quite a few million other people.

That said, she’s helping the area and a few others close by gear up for what is promising to be the region’s biggest tourist season ever.

More than 52 million people are expected to visit the Quintana Roo (where Cancun is), Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche regions. In an average year the whole of Mexico only gets 22 million tourists.

And I don’t blame them for wanting to cash in on this wave of the cashed up and credulous – I sure as hell would. Look, by all means go visit Mexico if you want to, but if you think the world’s going to end it doesn’t seem to matter much where you are so you might as well be somewhere that’s important to you. If you think it’s going to end and you’re going to leave home and the people you care about to go get killed in Mexico then I suggest you try some of their excellent drugs while you’re there, because if you don’t make any sense normally then you might was well try being off your tits on something instead. But I suspect the reality is that almost everyone who goes to Mexico next December will have booked a return flight.

I do hope so because they won’t want to miss the real end of the world as (completely not) predicted over 30,000 years ago by the aborigines of south east Australia, which is due to begin at around four in the afternoon on Friday October 25th, 2013, on Wurundjeri Way just west of Melbourne’s central business district. Or it might just be the queue for the freeway at the Montague Street junction, who knows? It’s probably best to come and see for yourself when the time comes, but bring money. Bring lots of money.

Free gifts – the next thing to be on the restricted activities list?

Some things don’t mix well, we all know that. Street luging on public roads is one, and we saw yesterday how that makes it a restricted activity you need to get permission for. Another is alcohol and, well, if you took the opinion of every nanny and wowser out there alcohol and practically anything, including life and happiness, don’t mix. Certainly at least one will tell you that alcohol and promotions by way of free gifts don’t because not everyone is as bright as him, and a handful of people do very stupid things when drunk. So obviously a branding iron that’s given away with bottles of Jack Daniels is a bad idea because a tiny number of complete idiots will use them to brand each other.

Yes, this is going to be just like the two guys taking it in turns to shoot each other in the arse with an air rifle to see what it’s like, but with extra nannying.

And straight away I feel the need to point out that the men didn’t actually suffer burns in the promotion, as the very first line of the article makes clear.

THREE WA men suffered horrific burns after branding themselves with novelty branding irons given away as part of a Jack Daniel’s promotion.

See? Saying they suffered burns in the promotion makes it sound like that was either a risk or even the idea of the promotion, or at the least something went horribly wrong. Nope, nothing like that at all. It’s just that if you make enough novelty branding irons eventually one will end up in the hands of an idiot.

Cue the wowsers.

Health advocates are now demanding legislation that stops “reckless” alcohol marketing.

Reckless? Seriously? The brand was intended for steaks, as hinted at by the fact it was part of a barbecue set Jack Daniel’s were including with a bottle, and what’s reckless about branding a chunk of long dead cow? Naff, maybe, but reckless? Hardly, since they must have turned out thousands and thousands of these things, all but three of which have not been involved in any incidents as far as anyone knows.

The men, aged in their 20s and 30s including one who branded his backside…

Pffffft!

… were admitted to Royal Perth Hospital for surgery and emergency skin grafts. The last one was operated on earlier this month.
The others chose to plunge the hot metal rod with the words “Old No.7 Brand”, in reference to the Tennessee bourbon, on the back of a hand and a leg.

Okay, sounds like serious injuries, but let’s remember that this is part of a barbecue set, and unless you’ve invited Jeffrey Dahmer nobody, drunk or sober, is going to think it’s supposed to be used on living people. But even so, just in case (or more likely as required by some nannying law) Jack Daniel’s provided a label on the branding iron in order to state the completely bloody obvious.

… Jack Daniel’s brand owner Brown-Forman Australia says it has done nothing wrong because the product comes with a warning [which reads:]

• This branding iron can cause serious skin burns.
• Do not touch metal parts with fingers, skin or any flammable material.
• Branding iron will remain hot long after being heated. Remove this label before first use.

Surely that’s enough to keep the nannies happy? Nah, ‘course not. Because the nannies want everyone to be treated the same as the daftest person in the country.

[Royal Perth hospital] head of plastic surgery and burns surgeon Mark Duncan-Smith branded the gimmick “an irresponsible cocktail for disaster”.

Disaster? What, like the Japanese tsunami or the Christchurch earthquake? Well, it’s a stretch but I could accept it as disastrous if hospitals all over the country were getting flooded with victims of these would-be killer barbie brands and the ambulances and burns units were starting to crack under the pressure, but the reality is there’ve been one self inflicted burned hand, one self inflicted burned arm and one self inflicted burned arse. Disaster? Seriously? In fact even these three victims of their own machismo/masochism aren’t complaining, presumably because being daft enough to stick pieces of hot metal on themselves on purpose doesn’t mean they’re too daft to realise it was their own fault. If so then this, in my opinion, makes them brighter than the one solitary person who did complain.

[Brown-Forman managing director Marshall Farrer] said the only injury complaints he had received nationally were from Dr Duncan-Smith in WA.

I wonder, would this possibly be Dr Mark Duncan-Smith of the Royal Perth Hospital plastic surgery and burns department? I don’t think we need to ask.

“You can’t stop everyone from doing something silly, but when you are actually providing a method for people to injure themselves, even though it is still their responsibility, it is providing fuel in one hand and a lighter in the other,” [Dr Duncan-Smith] said.

No, they get the fuel and the lighter from Bunnings, or the supermarket or the local petrol station or any of dozens of places, and they can do plenty of damage just with those and without a novelty branding iron. But, as with the branding iron itself, almost nobody does. And it’s not providing a method for people to injure themselves any more than selling barbecues is providing a method for people to cook each other.

“It is a devastating mix. The combination of alcohol and a branding iron is just crazy. It is a cocktail of diminished capacity and a mechanism to inflict serious damage. I personally think this is madness.”

Interesting. I wonder if the doc would say it’s more mad or less mad than taking a sample of three idiots – and a self selecting sample at that – and taking that to mean the whole country is just as dopey with a few glasses of JD inside them? Leaving aside the obvious point of Dr Duncan-Smith’s hideously paternalistic view of his fellow man this argument makes as much sense as estimating that there are 615 billion cats in Australia based on the sample in this room. It’s nonsense, and it’s infuriating that Perth Now seem unable to call him on it.

Nor is Dr Duncan-Smith the only one whining, even if he is the only one who actually complained to the company itself.*

McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth director Mike Daube said there was a “glaring gap in curbs on alcohol promotion”.
“These are entirely predictable outcomes from an outrageously irresponsible promotion,” Prof Daube said.

Oh, really, Prof? Entirely predictable, are they? Well, I’m going to call that claim weapons grade bullshit, though I’d be delighted to eat my words and apologise if you can show us exactly where you predicted it. Because I’ve done a web search for your name in connection with Jack Daniel’s, which I’d have thought would be sufficiently broad to pick any such prediction up if it made it into press or even if you’d put it on the MCAAY (pronounced “Mmkay?” in a South Parkian Mr Garrison voice, I guess) site, and would you like to guess what I found between the beginning of the promotion and the news of these three self inflicted burns cases from West Oz? Go on, have a guess.

Oh, alright, I’ll tell you: not a fucking thing.

Entirely predictable, Prof Daube? My unburnt, non-supperating, pristine and entirely healthy arse.

“There are no controls whatever none on alcohol promotions of this kind.” He said he would write to the federal and state governments calling for measures to halt irresponsible alcohol promotions.

Look, the range of humanity from stupid to sensible is going to be such a wide bell curve that simply whispering that alcohol exists is probably irresponsible for someone at one extreme end, but you’d have to go to insane lengths to come up with something that’s irresponsible even for everyone in the middle, much less the Spock-like people at the far end. A free pallet of booze for anyone who drives themselves to the bottle shop having snorted more coke than Tony Montana might qualify, but some piece of tat for branding your steaks certainly doesn’t.

And so we turn, but only because we’re forced, to the politicians. You just know it’s not going to turn out well, don’t you?

State Mental Health Minister Helen Morton, who is also responsible for drug and alcohol issues, supported regulation changes on alcohol promotions, but said it was a federal matter.

Well, of course she does. She’s a politician seeing an excuse to get a bit of media, possibly encouraged by some of the people in her ministry who’ve just seen a half-arsed justification for extending the remit of their department or by people who just want to extend the role of the state in our lives in general. It’s as Reagan once said, the instinct of governments is that if it moves they should tax it, if it keeps moving they should regulate it and if it stops moving they should subsidise it – they never look and think that maybe they should just leave it the hell alone. And I don’t take any comfort from a state politician bouncing it up to the federal government because the federal government is likely to take one look and either tax it, regulate it or subsidise it, possible even all three at the same time, regardless of whether it moves or not.

But what I really find bizarre is that the WA Health Minister understands something about people and governments and legislation. Something most people understand, even the ones sticking branding irons in the barbecue for a bit before trying to make their own gluteus the property of an American drinks company.

“However, at the end of the day, how can we legislate against that level of stupidity,” she said.

You can’t, Helen. It’s an exercise in futility, and that being so what the hell’s the point of regulation changes on alcohol promotions? Accept that a tiny number of people will do something daft with practically anything we can imagine, and that an even smaller number of people will remove themselves from the gene pool in the process.

But never forget that the vast majority of people won’t.

* I wonder if he writes to car manufacturers every time he has to hide the scars on someone who was injured because they or someone else was screwing around while driving? Or is it just alcohol that lights up his brain’s complaint node?

Too bad

Click for linky

Cynthia Crawford, who worked as Lady Thatcher’s personal assistant from 1978, said the Hollywood biopic was likely to upset her friends and family.
She said the opening scenes of The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, were likely to be particularly distressing as they show her suffering from dementia.

I have exactly the same thing to say to offence seeking right wingers as to their offence seeking left-wing oppos. There is no right to not be offended and there never can be such a right because I for one would find the imposition of it extremely offensive (and no, I’m not saying that to be bloody difficult but because I’m a fucking adult my skin’s thick enough that I don’t need some paternalist twats wringing their hands on my behalf). If someone says something you don’t like, don’t listen. If they say something you think is wrong then debate it. If they make a film that you think is unfavourable to someone you admire in that it portrays them with dementia, even though they really do have dementia in real life, then just don’t go and watch it. And so on.

This is not rocket science. Grow up and get over yourselves.

Hell hath no fury like a public sector union ridiculed

Oooh, Jezza, you are in trouble now. It was one thing having a pop at the Prime Mentalist of Britain and his eyesight, though I felt the term ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’ just served to identify exactly which of the 600 or so idiots was being talked about in case anyone didn’t catch the name, but how very dare you use a typically hyperbolic expression that only a attention seeking moron with a Pavlovian response to take offence to almost anything would take literally when talking about the heroic public sector workers.

Heroic workers

Within hours, public servants had bombarded the BBC with more than 4,700 complaints, but Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, took matters further. He said Clarkson’s “revolting” comments were “totally outrageous, and they cannot be tolerated”.

Okay, more than 4,700 complaints from the two million or so that Dave Prentis claims were striking. I make that less than a quarter of one per cent who got sufficiently bent out of shape about it to complain. Or who knows, perhaps a quarter of one per cent is about the number who complained when they were told to by Dave Prentis? Or any combination of the two.

Or is it 4,700 out of the six million or so people in Britain who are either in the public sector or who depend on it for a living, making it well below a tenth of one per cent? Or should we go the whole way and just say that it’s 4,700 out of the 50 million or so adults in the UK, making it less than one per cent of one per cent. I suppose given the minority rule model of democracy practised in the UK and favoured by left and right alike, but I feel especially the left, acting on the wounded feelings of one person in every ten thousand seems almost reasonable.

Clarkson should be sacked by the BBC, he said, adding that the union was “seeking urgent legal advice about what further action we can take against him and the BBC, and whether or not his comments should be referred to the police”.

Britain having long since given up any pretence of free speech. Look, Dave, this is a phrase that’s been used by people in the same exaggerated style for decades. as pointed out in The Tele by James Delingpole.

… he was employing it as a figure of speech. I know this won’t mean much to half the morons who complained to the BBC yesterday, but the English language is an extraordinarily rich and nuanced thing. Sometimes, when the speaker says that someone should be shot, he really does mean it: if, say, it’s an officer giving orders to a firing squad about to shoot a deserter or a looter in 1915. More often, though, he doesn’t. For at least the last fifty years “they should be taken out and shot,” has been a socially acceptable, perfectly unexceptionable way of expressing colourfully and vehemently one’s distaste towards a particular category of unpleasantness, be it striking Unison workers, revolting students, poorly performing members of your football team or the Lib Dem members of Cameron’s cabinet. Context is all.

And that’s easily confirmed by googling variants of the phrase and setting filters to exclude all the stuff from the past couple of days. In a couple of minutes I’d found people who’d said that health nuts should all be shot, jobless hippies should all be shot, fairweather motorbikers should all be shot, people who like Elvis Presley should all be shot, and somewhat ironically, someone who’d said journalists should all be shot. Jeremy Clarkson, having certainly started out as a journalist and I expect technically still being one, would Dave Prentis and the 4,700 complainers be leaping to his defence in the belief that he’s about to be killed?

And calling in the police? For heaven’s sake, Dave, do you have any idea how ridiculous that looks to people in the real world? If Clarkson had control over people who both had the means to take strikers out and shoot them and were willing to do it then maybe, just maybe, it might have been incitement. But Clarkson doesn’t control the judicial system, police and military, does he? He doesn’t even control what he describes as the pokey little motoring programme of which he’s a third of the presenters, much less its entire fan base – very few of whom in the UK would possess guns and even fewer of whom would think his comments were anything more than his usual over the top style.

It’s not a crime, Dave – no, not yet even in non-free speech Britain – if no rational person would take it seriously, and on that point what does it say about you and the 4,700 complainers that you do seem to take it seriously? I mean, if they really think a right wing bigmouth like Clarkson would mean it when he says he’d have people shot and could follow up on it would they themselves be dragging people into the street if Ed Milivanilliband had said it?

And now before I go any further, a mandatory blog warning in the spirit of regulations that don’t yet exist but might one day. Readers with recent surgical stitches may be advised to look away now.

In a rant worthy of Clarkson himself, Mr Prentis suggested children watching the programme “could have been scared and upset by his aggressive statements”.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahahahaha. Ahahah. Hoohoohoohoo. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahaha.

Dave, are you that desperate to score a point or are you actually clinically delusional? Look, this is how the BBC describe The One Show: “Magazine show with topical reports, features and interviews from around the UK.”Do you really think any child of the narrow age group that is old enough to understand what was said but too young to recognise it as nothing more than exaggeration for cheap laugh (which of course was the reaction it got in the studio, and is probably the kind of thing that helps children learn what not to take literally) would be watching? I don’t mean in the room at the same time it was on, I mean looking and listening and paying attention to the content. I’d suggest the number to be hovering right around zero with even less remembering it by the next morning, though I’ll concede that there might be a few whose heads were turned to the TV by loving but very PC and extremely fucked up parents who whispered, “That nasty man on telly says he wants to take mummy and daddy away from you forever.” They might still be upset because some tool of a union boss keeps bloody going on about.

Seriously, Dave, this is almost the right-on version of Godwin’s Law. “Won’t someone think of the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren” is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and when someone resorts to it it’s a good sign that their argument holds less weight than a paper bag that’s been left in a puddle of piss for a month and won’t smell much better. For that reason alone I think Dave Prentis loses any credibility and forfeits the argument.

We could call it Lovejoy’s Law.

Midair shock death-risk sex horror Qantas outrage

Although I’ve not mentioned it for some time both my regular readers (hi Mum) will probably be aware that I think the Australian press have a bit of a thing for slating Qantas and that they do sometimes over egg that particular pudding. And here’s another prime example of a classic media beat up involving Qantas, all from the online pages of the Murdoch owned papers, and all with near carbon copies of the same article.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot’s amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

EXCLUSIVE: A Qantas pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot’s amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger on a flight to Sydney.
First class passengers on QF32 from London to Sydney were stunned at the pilot’s antics with a woman in seat 2A. He was seen sitting on the woman’s lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the A380 jet before things became more heated.

Shock! Outrage! Disgust! How dare this individual leave the controls of the aircraft for a bit of a sweaty fumble. Not only is it a disgraceful dereliction of duty but also an issue of demarcation – everyone knows that with Qantas it’s the stewardesses responsibility to have sex with the passengers.* Not an unreasonable reaction to those headlines, but on further reading it turns out that nothing like that actually happened.

The pilot was off-duty and not in uniform at the time of the incident.

So what’s the big deal and why the lurid headlines? Basically what we have here is a pair of passengers, one of whom happens to be an employee of the airline and whose job is to fly planes, got frisky in First Class and had to be told to pack it in a few times before the cabin crew ended up separating them. Probably happens all the time, and the only thing that makes this any different from any other incident where a couple of passengers have to have the mid air equivalent of a bucket of cold water thrown over them is that the guy’s a pilot for the same airline and should reasonably be expected to know that that behaviour isn’t tolerated on their planes. As a result of that he’s under investigation, but it sounds more like an internal Qantas investigation than anything official – The Telegraph headline may say ‘court hears’ but neither their article nor either of the others mention any court at all, just what sounds like a Qantas in-house disciplinary. And of course if the guy hadn’t worked for Qantas there wouldn’t even be that. Hell, if he’d been ground crew he’d have had the same investigation but the papers wouldn’t have bothered to report it because there’s no much value in headlines like this:

Qantas check in guy gets steamy midair

Qantas baggage handler’s wild blue wander as court hears of mile-high scandal

If you’ll pardon the pun, they don’t exactly fly, do they? But because it’s a pilot we can go crazy with the headlines and make it look like it was one of the blokes flying the plane who decided to leave the flight deck and try entering the cockpit instead, at least until people get down to paragraph four when it’s finally mentioned that the guy wasn’t actually working at the time and had no more to do with flying the plane than the fat guy trying to sleep back in 56G or the bawling child kicking the back of his seat. It seems it’s not always about what’s newsworthy but about making something newsworthy out of something irrelevant, especially when it comes to the Aussie media and their national carrier. Just you wait and see how they’ll cover a real emergency, like one of the toilets running out of soft paper and having to use that horrible cheap shiny stuff instead.

* Kidding, of course. It’s been a while since I last flew but when I’ve used Qantas I’ve found the cabin crew to be polite, helpful, professional and incidentally pretty easy on the eye, but none of them have ever offered me sex instead of tea or coffee. Maybe you just have to be Lord Voldemort. This is in contrast to the booking departments of several airlines which have certainly fucked me in various ways, generally involving the words ‘extra charge’.

Oranges are not the only fruit death kill weapons

I know people on supermarket checkouts haven’t been hired to think, just to swipe barcodes over lasers for hours at a time, and I do realise that must be pretty mind numbing but surely something’s badly wrong when staff lack the initiative to question anything the till tells them. F’instance:

A chef was stunned to find she was almost banned from buying two limes from a supermarket – because they could be classed as a weapon.

Can I just repeat that the woman is a chef. Have you seen the knife collection the average chef has?

They keep the bloody sharp too, and since they’re for professional use I’d bet they can carry them around without getting arrested so much.

Marisa Zoccolan, 31, popped into the new Asda supermarket close to her home in Wallsend, North Tyneside, to pick up some groceries, including the citrus fruits.
But when she tried to pay for them at the self-service checkout, the message ‘amount exceeded, authorisation required’ flashed up.
An assistant then came over and told her that more than one lime was deemed a weapon – because the citric acid could be squirted in someone’s eye.

Would that be the same stuff Asda sell in convenient quarter litre bottles for less than 50p?

Marisa, a self-employed caterer said: ‘I thought they were taking the pip, but the assistant told me the same applied to lemons.”

Nope, I think you’ll find that lemons are a special case, and Asda sells the ammo for those too.

Or is it just plastic ones with ‘Jif’ written down the side?

Thankfully for Ms Zoccalan, who lives with partner Jacqui Nicholson, 37, and dog Doobie, the assistant allowed Marisa to eventually buy both of the fruits.
‘Yes, they vetted me and let me buy them.”

Oh, God. Not “They thought about it for about half a second and realised that since the whole bloody thing was patently ridiculous the best thing to do was apologise and get a supervisor to come and override the till.” No, they fucking vetted her. What this involves we’re not told, but I’m guessing Marisa Zoccolan told them she was a chef and that limes were not weapons but ingredients – it not being all that hard to find recipes that include the instruction “take the juice of two limes” – and they then asked her for something that showed she was indeed qualified to handle such lethal objects and safely make interesting desserts out of them. If it was anything even vaguely like that then that’s barely any better than refusing point blank to let her buy the limes and sticking with the retarded belief that a small green citrus was significantly more dangerous than a zillion other things kicking around the average home or office.

And in a way it’s a shame they’re not really a practical weapon because I know the perfect place to become the world’s first citrus supervillain. I’d have got away with it if it hadn’t been for those Asda kids.

The Big Orange in Berri, SA. Photo by Bilby.

Tip of the Akubra to Nanny Knows Best.