Claptrap

This alerted me to the downright silliness that is homeopathy. "Natural medicine" is where you go to a non-licensed pharmacy (of sorts) and pay stupid amounts of money for pills that are made from flour or fecal matter or leftovers. Bascially, there is no medical or scientific backing to any of the methods used; it encompasses a lot of stuff, including acupuncture. The lecturer in the video began explaining the science behind homoepathy with the words "Hey guys! You've heard of Einstein right? Steven Hawkings? Ever done any chemistry?". I was hoping she'd tell all the graduates to get out there and then, but this was simply her entry into trying to explain the wonderful, undisputable science behind homeopathy.

Only the problem here is that she clearly doesen't understand the basic laws of physics. "We don't know yet how to create energy" implying that, sometime in the near future, a Hadron Collider-esque machine will just start zapping pencils or teapots into existence from nothing. Then she goes on to, albeit through a winding route, say that the universe is massless. And her evidence behind this? "E=MC2". Now I understand that E=MC2 is the underlying formula that brings the whole Theory of Relativity together - but that doesen't mean you can just apply it to anything you want and say you're right. I couldn't rob a bank and then justify it in court by quoting Einstein, life doesen't work that way. And it's Steven Hawking, not Steven Hawkings. Flitting onto a very basic explanation of transforming energy (technically correct, though it's clear she has something against her neighbour's dog), she then tried to say that homeopathy was just transforming energy - this isn't an explanation - every chemical reaction involves transforming energy, and since most medications involve a chemical reaction or two, this doesen't give any scientific backing to homeopathy.

To be honest, she didn't look like a professor or expert on anything - more like a housewife who'd been convinced by a commercial on the Homewares Auction channel and was determined to tell all her gal pals about the wonders she was privy to. My suspicions were confirmed when she told the audience that we're all vibrating, using our ears, with either (and there was specific categorisation) plants, machines, objects or animals. The final nail in any lecturer's coffin is evidently, when they start playing Twenty Questions with the audience; god knows what she meant when she said "vibrating with machines". Obviously her husband's not up to much in the bedroom.

Our government today decided to try meddling in medicine by sacking its independant advisor on drugs - because he said that alcahol and tobacco were more harmful than cannabis. Obviously this flies in the face of the recent reclassification of marijuana from C to B. My personal view is that most things should be straight up legalised - it's my own decision if I want to swamp my veins with alcahol or nicotine, and I'm sure many people would be willing to risk schizophrenia for the occaisonal joint (I myself don't touch drugs - I don't like the idea of injecting or snorting or smoking things).

Besides the medical side of the argument, there is the very real threat that, with drugs comes crime. But if the said products were sold through accepted channels - Tescos or Sainsburys or Bargain Booze - then this would be nullified, no? It's a person's own fault if they overdose, ultimately (and there could quite easily be ways of limiting someone's consumption/purchasing power). Everything in life needs to be taken in moderation - too much of any substance can damage your health - whether it's weed, beer, caffiene, Sunny D, chocolate, bubblebath, carrots - everything!

***

Cheerleaders can't be real - nobody would do that for fun. Universities cannot seriously be impressed with that, and there isn't any monetary gain, surely? They look ridiculous, jumping up and down shouting the alphabet out to the crowd like a group of trainee preschool teachers. And who the hell invented pom-poms? Was that some sort of private joke that got taken too far? No. The simple answer is that they don't exist. Hollywood invented them sometime in the mid-eighties and has just spent a massive amount of money placing them in every teen movie ever, to give us this weird, farcical impression of highschool America. What other explanation could there be?

Bird? Plane? Nah it's just Sam.

I've been thinking about superpowers. To start, I want at least one. But which one? Let's begin with flight. Flight isn't that great a power really. Depending on how fast you can go, the effect really is cancelled out by cheap airlines like Ryanair. Why manually fly to Benidorm when you can sit back and let someone else do it for you? Besides, this ability would probably make you an enemy of the state - they have a habit of sending fighter jets after things they don't like. You flying through the sky is gonna get the attention of a government agency that "doesen't exist" And there is always the threat of accidentally being sucked into the turbine of a Boeing 747 and getting blended.

Secondly; invisiblity. Maybe cool at first, but overall this would be pants on its own. People can't see you - unless you're looking for a career as an international assassin or MI6 agent, this isn't going to be much help. It doesen't make it any easier to fight a big evil boss or rescue children from burning schools, and eventually you'll get really bored of people not offering you a seat on the bus.

Invulnerabilty? Captain Scarlet never got any of the girls. Infinite strength? The Hulk can't even stand in a queue without his testosterone levels propelling him to feats of incredulous vandalism. Shooting lasers from your eyes? Pretty darn useless if you're short-sighted. X-Ray vision? Sure to get you on the sex-offenders register.

So, discarding all the previous possibilities, I want teleportation to be my power. Being able to appear anywhere in the universe, instantly, would be brilliant. You'd be able to rob banks and then blame it on the bad guy without a moment's thought. Not like in Jumper, more like in that temporary car insurance advert - Hayden Christenssen is always bumping into things when he teleports; bookcases, pillars, bad guys. I want to be suave and collected, not frantic and sweaty. Besides, I bruise easily. Also, you could eat at swanky restaurants and leave without paying, or make a career in marathon-running. Stopping time would probably come second, but seeing as the whole travelling-at-the-speed-of-light thing negates the need to make more time for yourself, and I want to be omnipresent, not a Bernard's Watch copycat.

Scooby Doo & Sons, Ltd

I wonder who actually dreamt up the idea of a bookcase that revolves into a hidden room, and if anyone actually had one installed. I'm also wondering if I could get a quote for such an installation and from which builder?

Bias, huh? I think people need to learn one day that just because something/someone says something you don't like, doesen't mean they're biased. Or to accept that fundamentally, they are biased. You're biased, I'm biased - If we didn't have our own opinions we'd be horrid pale clones with albino eyes and enthusiastic work ethics. Bias doesen't have to be a bad thing, and it doesen't have to be hidden either. Bias is only a bad thing when the author decides to cloak the information that might endanger the credibility of their product; i.e. information that is impossible to be twisted or warped or that exposes the bias. Bias is a bad thing when it is passed off as truth. This blog is biased; the BNP are biased. Labour are biased and so is Colonel Dannat, the ex-Army head who recently joined the Conservatives. The Guardian is biased and the Telegraph is likewise polarised. It's human nature to think in terms of one's best interests; the BBC manages to stay biased because it draws a fine line between news and opinion, comedy and tragedy; the reason that the tabloids are so often maligned is that they too often blur this line and present someone's (intrinsically biased) opinion as the cold, hard, irrefutable truth.

It's an easy path to go down. "Man crashes car" is an easy example - a man has crashed a car. But once you pad out the story, add in a few quotes, you invite bias into the mix. Take a quote from the RAC, the council and say, his wife. The RAC, a commercial organisation can be taken for granted as biased towards their insurance policies and marketing efforts. The council, depending on their party affiliation, might comment on there not being a need to worry about the safety of roads, etc. His wife has concerns about the fact that her hubby has managed to wrap the Volvo around a tree. However, present the council quote as the primary source of information- then juxtapose it against the wife's opinion - and you can now headline the story "WIFE RECALLS CAR CRASH HORROR, COUNCIL DOESEN'T CARE" or something like that. I'm not great at headlines. But this is what papers do all the time. Just a few words either side of a quote can discredit it or give it supreme authority. Put that quote at the front end of an article and the entire story is then hijacked by the presence of that person's credibility.

I know that was an entirely simplified (and not brilliant) version of how you could skew an article to your own personal or editorial slant, but my conclusion is: don't trust the media - however much it reflects our society. Most of what is written in the papers is thoughroughly against the Code, anyway.

Question Time

So, in the aftermath of BBC One's Question Time last night, the BNP have announced that they had the biggest recruitment night in their history as 3000 new members signed up. Having watched the programme, I found it simply reinforced my view that Nick Griffin is a horrid, horrid man with repulsive views. But I can quite easily see how others could percieve otherwise; Question Time was quite clearly, geared towards giving him a kicking - rightly so - but it wasn't a fair match. Most of the questions were aimed towards exposing the BNP's racist core - rightly so - but they still ignored the "immigration question" that fuels the BNP's politics and is the downfall of every party manifesto in Britain. You either sound weak or you sound racist - not because there isn't a middle ground, and not because it's some PC-brigade conspiracy; there are no clear solutions.

Britain is an island. It's got a sea around it, and not too far away, there's all of Western Europe. Therefore anyone with a boat, kayak or pedalo can gain access to our nation; the only way of keeping all the immigrants out is to build a giant concrete wall around the entire country. So you either try and espouse tighter border checks; harsher criteria for asylum - which inevitably hurts innocent refugees, or you decide that you're going to deport anyone who isn't white.

I also think that the problem of immigration has been vastly misrepresented by the media as a whole; irresponsible scare stories about migrant baby-booms or complete lies about immigrants going to the top of the housing lists just exasperbate the fear. In fact, recent statistics show the annual migration to Britain overall has dropped; the recent study claiming that the population will rise to 70 million by 2029 shouldn't be that much of a shock - it's roughly 65m now. 5m over twenty years isn't a terrfiying rise, considering the advances that have - and will continue to happen, making our lives longer - and of course, remembering that white people have children too.

Griffin was deliberately ambushed on Question Time. However; his opponents were not political heavyweights. At times they dissolved into bickering amongst themselves and Baroness Warsi came across as as much as a homophobe than Little Hitler himself. A better politician could have fought back - and would have fought back. Griffin to an extent, played up to the victim status. The BBC were ultimately right to allow him on air; he has been elected, and has a right to express his views, however odious. It is not in the Director General's authority to deny him that. Some have called for the BNP to be banned from media exposure like Sinn Fein in the 80's - the difference then was that Sinn Fein were trying to pull a Guy Fawkes. Even so, freedom of speech does not guarantee a place on Question Time just because you want it. I'm sure the Greens or UKIP, or any of the independant MEP/MP's would have jumped at the chance to lay into Nick.

The BNP won't probably be featured on the programme for years to come; in the long-run, it will have dealt them a heavy blow. And to claims that the audience was overtly hostile; the whole point in the QT audience is that it represents a cross-section of society; and the society of the host city. The majority of British people do not support the BNP, in fact it is only a very small minority that do; proportionally they won't ever get the same level of support as the Conservatives so they can't exactly complain. London has more ethnic minorities than anywhere else because it's our capital. But it wasn't just Muslim or Black people twisting the knife; white people hate him too. Griffin would probably put that down to a liberal elitist conspiracy - quite clearly there is no such thing (liberalism is fundamentally the opposite of an elite; he attempts to demonise the left because the majority of the country is Right. "Intelligensia", really? Being intelligent is not a crime).

Overall, the programme exposed the BNP, and Griffin as idiotic, conspiracy theorist jackasses who don't believe in the Holocaust and use playground politics - "My dad went to war and yours didn't" - as solutions. Their leader is nothing less than a scheming, vicious, malignant boil on the face of British politics and the worst kind of elitist politician (the guy went to Cambridge so he is hardly "one of us"); quotes in the show exposed his intention to hide the fascist heart of his party with a patriotic facade. It is not racist to be nationalistic, but the thought processes that lead one to the conclusion that one person who belongs to one nation is better than a person who belongs to a different nation is a very dangerous path indeed.

Cod and Chips, Please

Autumn here in Cheshire is beautiful. The leaves rain from the trees like a golden, dizzying, decaying blizzard of reds, greens and bronzes; the horse chestnuts fill up the gutters and the sky is a cold, steely cerulean blue. It's got that wonderful balance of warmth and brisk chill that I love. It's by far the best season - until the rainclouds roll in. Since winters in England are generally fairly dry, rain is not actually that common a sight; but the gloomy combination of dark skies and lower temperatures means it feels like the world is just one continuous weather front. If I had my way then it would constantly be September 29th. However, if I had my way, the world would be a lot different.

Only about 15% of my brain is sensible. Thankfully it's that 15% that I use to cook, take exams, cross roads, join Greenpeace and drive cars with; the other 85% though, is a different story. The first segment tells me that climate change is akin to apocalyptic catastrophe, that until electoral reform is brought in universal suffrage will be defanged, that child labour standards in the third world are appalling, that the Daily Mail et al are a mockery to the freedom of speech, and that the BNP are a disgusting, putrid, vile stain on British democracy. I could go on. However, the majority of my mind tells me otherwise. Knowing the aforementioned facts, it tends to warp their significance slightly, in a savagely cynical yet undeniably amusing way. I mean, oil. We should probably start to cycle everywhere, plant a tree everyday and stop importing our apples from New Zealand or the Arctic or wherever they come from. However, I happen to like oil.

Oil is great! Without oil we wouldn't have any lights on, or be able to fly airplanes, and James Bond would have a really hard job blowing up Blofeldt's base with a single, well placed shot. It has so many uses, we'd be stuck without it - we went to war for it, for heaven's sake. And as a nation, we have a history of invading places for things we need; Clive of India subjugated an entire subcontinent just for tea. Oil deserves more respect than you ungrateful sods attach to it. You want to just leave it there?! It's expensive stuff! You wouldn't just leave your television in the middle of the Iraqi desert, would you?

I think, that there's no point in going cold turkey when (metaphorically speaking) there's lots of freshly slaughtered birds waiting to be eaten hot. What's the point? The Earth has already (probably) gone over the tipping-point with regards to the C02 balance in the atmosphere; the fact that our climate will begin to morph over the next century is now, almost certainly, unstoppable. And even if that watershed moment has not yet been reached, the United States and China and Russia and France and all those rednecks in Texas won't ever reach a meaningful agreement. We all love cars, holidays, carrots, bananas, cheap toys and tanks too much to give them up. So I propose we hold a massive party in the middle of say, Macclesfield Forest. Not just any party in a forest; an oil-party. Giant 40ft speakers will be powered by incredibly inefficiant oil-generators, the fireworks will have petroleum instead of gunpowder inside, diesel will run black in the rivers and giant faucets and taps will pour kerosene down the hill so that we can make a massive oily rainbow. Everyone coming must be made to leave all their incandescant lightbulbs on and their televisions running all week.

It'll be brilliant. And when the dawn breaks, we'll have no oil left. At a point in the midst of our bleary-eyed, petroleum-induced hangover, we'll realise it's all gone. No nitrogen oxide to make our eyes sting and our lungs hurt when exhaust fumes are spewed from an articulated lorry, no fish getting poisoned because some tosser was playing with petrol too close to the garden pond. No more boy-racers getting minced in their hatchbacks trying to emulate Vin Diesel and no more supertankers nicked by Somalian upstarts who reckon they're Blackbeard the Pirate. Sure, the climate might get fucked; who wants mediocre weather anyway? I'm all for a hurricane season in Blackpool if it means we get a nice summer once in a while. And once the oil is burnt up, we can start rebuilding civilisation with with windmills and solar panels and hydroelectrics and tidal power, and in general make a nice little utopia for ourselves.

*Having just watched End of the Line, I was shocked to learn that by 2048 - when I'll be 56 - there will be no fish left. None. We will have eaten them all. So gobble all the sushi you can while there's still time!

It's Only A Model

Right, I got pointed to a silly video the other day from the EDL (that's the English Defence League/moron patrol) and one of the sentences in there, if you bother watching it, says something about a "shadowy cabal". I think they were referring to cabinet government. The whole point is that it's small and confidential. Y'know , so Guy Fawkes inpersinators don't know where our nukes are and stuff like that.

The whole gist of the video is that King Arthur has been reincarnated... as Prince William. Yes, the guy who arrives at stag dos in helicopters, is going to reunite the Knights of the Round Table and lead the descendants of Camelot to freedom (oh and by the way, King Arthur and his mates are thought, if they were at all real, to be Welsh. So you anglo-saxon hooligans are getting left behind). If you don't like the government that got voted in, don't have a hissy fit and start a revolution about it. That's the sort of reaction Alan Hansen gives when United beat Liverpool 4-0. These chaps have got their wires crossed; firstly they accuse every Muslim in Britain (note the medieval spelling "Moslem"; this is 2009, not 1095) of attempting to usurp the "indigeneous inhabitants" and then calling for a Royalist-led rebellion against the elected officials of the lands. And then they posted the devious plot on YouTube. Really subtle.

Rebellion

One of the headlines on the Guardian's website today was "Royal Mail hires 30,000 workers to crush strike". Now I'm really on Peter "Beyond Anger" Mandelson on this one. Not getting mail is kind of annoying, and the fact that the RM is trying to make our mail harder, better, faster, stronger is not annoying. Ergo, the workers striking in a luddite show of defiance really grates with me. If I were the employer in this scenario, I too would not be able to help myself from wanting to crush the insolent proles with an army of mercanary landsknecht posties.

The fact that it's the Royal Mail accentuates the idea that the elite is massing its forces to smash the revolution; the Imperial Guard will begin delivering your milk next week. Now obviously I don't believe that Postman Pat and his chums are raising arms in a neo-Leninist plot to take over; after all the loyal postman is hardly the stereotypical repressed man. And it is a futile coup, since now the Queen has ordered her 30,000 stormtroopers into the sorting depos and post offices around the realm. The serfs have squandered their emancipation. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a mail-bag stamping on a human face - forever."

Harry Potter and the Night of Zombie Lesbian Soccer Highlights 2009 Flaming Sword X

I was watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before and it occurred to me; the whole "franchise" has turned into the cinematic equivalent of a parish production of Bugsy Malone. Indeed, the feeling that JK Rowling's books have been transformed from masterpieces into the All Saints' Amateur Thespian Society's next sell-out performance is accentuated by the ownership that the mainstream media now claims over it; its not a film anymore, it's a British film. That means we should all support it because it is produced by Pinewood studios or stars Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, and therefore has the moral high ground. Child actors, cheesy morals and a man with a beard who dies at the end (yeah, I'm comparing Dumbledore to Jesus, essentially making Jesus gay. You got a problem with that, Jan Moir?), it's got all the ingredients of a second-rate period drama. The sort of thing that gets shown on ITV4 on Boxing Day. Thing is, as a child I read and cherished the original books; I've still got the whole set on my bookcase, next to the Artemis Fowl trilogy and the first six Alex Rider books. But since most books that get turned into films end up losing all trace of the charm and wonder they once held (the exception being Lord of the Rings and Children of Men), I was always doomed to hate Daniel Radcliffe with a biblical vengeance. And when I say biblical, I mean I want an angelic horde to charge from the sky and deliver righteous, Old Testament-style justice on that pathetic excuse for an actor.

****

Supermarkets, eh? As much as I feel loyal to Tesco, it really is man-hell. I was there to help mum with the shopping on Friday and I basically saw first-hand the three castes in supermarket society.

Firstly, the mothers. They know where everything is, even when all the aisles just got rearranged; it's a female sixth sense - know how The Stig always faces magnetic north? Well women always face towards the checkout tills. I think they must have some batlike sonar system implanted from conception in their brains so that they can navigate in a shop. Of course, once they're outside they are useless. My mum couldn't find the car in the carpark (it was 100 metres away from the exit - straight forward!), but this is also backed up by the fact that they can't read maps whatsoever.

Then there's the grandmas. Often accompanied by their married-away daughters, they lurch around the aisles, face thrust forward to increase vision, repeating past conversations and forgetting to switch their hearing-aids on. They lick their teeth and ponder for hours at the rotissery counter, deciding precisely which slice of crumbed Wiltshire ham is the best and cheapest. Tesco ain't Liddl so you see a better class of nana there, but it's all the same. "78p for a loaf of bread? You young 'uns don't know anything today! My mother taught me to hunt, kill and tin my dinner - nowadays you can't buy anything that isn't frozen!!! Back in my day you had to dance for your food!" et cetera et cetera.

Finally, the men. A mixture of husbands and bachelors, they invariably walk around in a bewildered state of shock. I saw one poor soul standing dazed and confused in the frozen meat section with just a bottle of Abbot's Ale and a lipstick. The little tyke didn't even have a trolley - he didn't stand a chance. These unloved blokes are usually victims of neglect; their hearltess wives give them a list and a postcode for the Satnav and push them on their way, without a word of warning or a care in the world. What you ladies don't understand is that the multitude of foods, of packaging, of instructions - it's all foreign to a male mind, which is kept stimulated usually on a diet of beer, Dave and football punditry. But here, in the vast wasteland of Tesco, the brutal reality of Asda, or the unforgiving wilderness of Sainsbury's, we are lost. Cut off from the Matix and sent out alone into a world of buy-one-get-one-free deals and clubcard points, we can't survive for long. We haven't been taught the ancient art of packing bags so that the vegetables and the raw meat don't collide, or that bread should always go on top so that it remains unsquashed.

Some stores we can cope with - Blockbuster or BNQ, for example. But that's because those are man-friendly environments, nature-reserves to ease us into the terrifying reality of exchanging money in return for goods and/or services. They have entire sections devoted to paint, or screwdrivers - and aisles of films with names like "The Night of Zombie Lesbian Soccer Highlights 2009 Flaming Sword X" (I tried to sum up the gist of every man-orientated film ever. In this one, Silvester Stallone stars as an ex-marine dropped into Iraq, armed with only a rolled-up copy of The Sun, to rescue a beautiful Eastern European singer from dastardly Argentinian Neo-Nazicommunist guerillas who happen to be brilliant footballers). There are a few men - proper city-slickers who look great in suits - foodies - but they already know to go to Waitrose, where everything is simple, organic and expensive. There, you don't have to think about finding a bargain because there simply aren't any.

This lack of supermarket-awareness is what makes men flawed. If we had a head for multitasking, then the world would probably be perfect. Probably.

I feel weirdly loyal to certain brands. Tesco, Twinings, Orange, the BBC and Trident, as well as Masterfoods (the company that produces Milky Way, Mars, Galaxy, and Magic Stars) I won't betray. This has and will continue to lead me down the crazy-paved garden path to financial ruin but for some deep psychological reason locked in the core of my mind, they taste better. I think it's linked to that effect you get when you pay more for a fancy meal. It just tastes better. Your pounds are working to make your tastebuds feel upmarket, and they're doing a good job. So I will continue to munch on Penguins instead of Tesco Chocolate Sandwich biscuits, and carry on smothering Philadaelphia Spread on my sandwiches instead of using the own-brand Soft Cheese Spread. And why? Because I'm cool.

Engine Stall

Some people are effortlessly insufferable on television. That can be said for Jeremy Clarkson. I happen to quite like his articles in the newspapers because they bring a degree of humour and sophistication to what is basically saying "this car goes faster than that one but I like that one anyway because it's red and it has a Ferrari sign on the front". He's got an excellent flair for satire and biting humour, his vocabulary is inexhaustive and ultimately, he makes boring machines fun.

He is also part of the media - which has been campaiging steadfastedly ever since Henry T. Ford sold his first automobile - to make cars sexy. Let's face it; an engine is not cool. It's a complicated piece of machinery and understanding it, however a commendable achievement, is not going to get you laid. However, after a century of oil, deadly crashes and advertising, we now think - all of us - that driving a car over the allowed speed limit and therefore endangering children, senior citizens - everyone - is awesome. That's why Top Gear continues to linger on with its staple diet of drag races, recycled Stig-similes and short films consisting of Richard Hammond shouting exaggerations about a car that goes faster than last week's car.

The reason Clarkson is annoying on Top Gear is because he drops the clever jokes and the genuine expertise he demonstrates in his articles. He's a proper journalist and bantering with James Blunt about his ten Land Rovers should be beneath him. It is obnoxiously self-centered ("Let's discuss how many cars we have") and the oafs in the audience clearly worship him with the same kind of unswerving devotion that spurred the Church on to burn witches in the Middle Ages. And what's seriously foul-smelling is the impotent political rants he has. The odd joke in the Telegraph doesen't matter because the Telegraph is already on a right-wing slant and is steadily wading into Daily Mail territory. But the snide comments he makes while driving are just stupid and immature; yelling "HAHA I'm over thirty in a residential area" when the production team have obviously closed the road off. I bet Gordon was shaking his fists at that, you modern-day Robin Hood!

And when he blew up that speed camera in that advert of his - what a crusader against 'elf-n-safety he is! Exploding deactivated government property on a private racetrack! Rage Against The Machine eat your heart out, because with political firebrands like Jeremy, it's a mystery where all this apathy comes from.

Anyway, to conclude, I hope he goes for a country drive with Cameron in the back seat and crashes and dies and gets set on fire. And I hope David survives and sparks a speed camera-campaign in the Express and "Middle England" wherever the hell that may be (I assume it's some landlocked Saxon paradise where "indiginous" inhabitants can drink tea and scones and crush the proletariat with rolled-up copies of the BNP constitution) suffers a horrible famine.