the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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June 28, 2025

34:63 presents ‘David Attenborough’

Glastonbury is upon us again. And the use of the words ‘upon us again’ is deliberate. There is no escape from it. The media are obsessed with telling us how wonderful it is. As the  broadsheets (as were)  would have it, it has seemingly transformative powers, somehow  combining a near mystical experience with an empowering odyssey of self-enlightenment. The tabloids are less fawning, but no less obsessed. They judge that their readers have more sense than to fork out the £378 price of the ticket for what is essentially a 3 day camping holiday with no knowledge of who’ll be playing when they book or what’s going to happen, other than they’ll be constantly ripped off.  

Much better to watch it on the BBC. At least there’s a much better view, much better sound, a toilet mere feet away and a bedroom with a bed, cleanish sheets and a door. Nothing screams Glastonbury than trying to sleep often feet- but if, unlucky inches – away from strangers with only canvas between you. But the BBC has ruined Glastonbury and I’m not going to launch into some fatuous nonsense about how it was much better in my day. Because it wasn’t. I’ve only been three times. The last was in 2000 and only because Orbital and Pet Shop Boys were playing was it any good.

There are a few reasons why the BBC has ruined Glastonbury, and in so doing, helps if one better understand the increasingly losing battle to secure broadcasting rights the BBC fights. Additionally, I’m also be incredibly hypocritical, because despite the fact that I subscribe to Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney + and Netflix – whom I’ll collectively call ‘the streamers’ – that won’t stop me criticising them.

The main reason why the BBC has ruined Glastonbury is contained in the name of the BBC itself. It is a broadcaster. The giveaway is in the word ‘broadcaster’. It’s coverage of Glastonbury is heavily skewed in favour of musical acts who will either have name recognition and a back catalogue of hits, be the sort of radio friendly muzak that only a deaf person could like, or else be so worthily cutting edge that their next appearance on the BBC will be on ‘Later…with Jools Holland’. 

One could very easily spend the entire festival not visiting any of the main stages and be well satisfied with the wide variety entertainments on offer. Aside from the official stages providing a breathtaking amount of comedy, theatre and other performing arts, there’s also the impromptu acts, who just pitch up and do their thing, much like the wandering minstrels or troubadours of old. Some are simply drumming up an audience for a performance later on in the festival, some are less polished than others, and some are simply chancers and opportunists with hope and enthusiasm if not always talent.

But you’d get none of that from the BBC’s coverage. Which isn’t their entirely their fault, but well… sort of is.

Music acts, especially the better known ones, provide good television. They also offer a ready made narrative for the viewer encountering them for the first time. Whilst they might never have heard of this particular band before, the cheering crowd watching them clearly have, and besides, they’re on TV – or more likely iPlayer. So in most peoples minds, Glastonbury is a music festival. Sure, there’s other things happening, but off-screen. The BBC reinforces this impression because it needs to justify the cost of securing the rights to broadcast the more than 120 hours of TV and radio it’ll produce. There just aren’t the viewing figures in avant-garde mime, experimental theatre or penis puppeteers. 

Since 1997, the BBC has been Glastonbury’s official broadcaster and it’s easy to see why. Previously they’d gone with Channel Four and whilst there may have been some mutual ideation of being outsiders, Channel Four had neither the technical competence to manage such a complex outside broadcast, nor could they offer the hours needed. The BBC, by contrast first devoted BBC2 for the entire weekends evening saturation coverage, with additional bigger names on prime time BBC1. Things really moved on when BBC3 and 4 both joined the fray but Glastonbury exploded when the BBC launched iPlayer.

Before then, it was a niche thing, the sort of thing a wild cousin might do, to get all that youthful folly out of their system before they settled down like a grown-up. Now, thanks to the BBC’s relentless promotion of it across TV and radio, it has become a rite of passage for the sort of people who’d like to imagine that they once possessed youthful folly, despite them no longer being young or ever  having had much desire to folly. Over the years, and by a gradual process of inculcating it into the the mainstream of British life, the BBC has somehow managed to make Glastonbury into something both culturally irrelevant yet incredibly lucrative. 

That’s the problem. The BBC, in seeking to widen the festivals appeal into the mainstream and having devoted its numerous ‘platforms’ to promote it, is now facing a problem of its own making. Basically, it has been too successful at it, and the BBC knew, or should’ve known, that this was a very likely possibility. Because it’s happened to them before. A few times, and always with sport.

Remember when snooker was a proper old mans game? When, as the saying had it, ‘proficiency at snooker was the  sign of a misspent youth’? Something vaguely disreputable, not seedy as such but nonetheless rooted in most peoples minds as determinedly working class, and not just that, but northern working class. Played in dimly lit rooms, the air thick with cigarette smoke and tables full of empty pint glasses? Of course you don’t. Now it is a thing, a very popular thing. But not in 1969 it wasn’t. But BBC2 had just started televising things in colour and its then controller, David Attenborough – yes that one! – had the idea that the televising snooker would be a great showcase for the new technology. 

Thus “Pot Black’ was born. It was a hit and ran until 1986 and was so popular it turned a minority pastime into national obsession, snooker players like Steve Davis and Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins into celebrities, such that the BBC broadcast World Championship Final between them in 1983 on prime-time Saturday night, uninterrupted until it ended at just after 1am. Used as we are now to television never ending, in 1983 it had never happened. Live sports overran, but never until !am. I know, as me, my brother and my Dad watched the drama. And it was. Tense, gripping and mesmerising. Millions of others thought so to. So did the people running World Snooker. They were able to sell the rights to broadcast snooker to the highest bidder, and because ITV wanted the audience, the price skyrocketed.

Same thing thing with Wimbledon. Previously only interesting primarily because it took place when football wasn’t happening and consequently there was no other sport, it has now become a thing. Its only still on the BBC because certain sporting events are legally mandated to be free to air for at least 95% of the UK population. Same with football, the World Cup and the F.A. Cup Final. But not the Premier League or any Champions League matches. Premier League broadcast rights were snapped up by Sky in a five year deal worth £6.7 billion. The rights to broadcast Champions League matches live are divided up by TNT and Amazon Prime. The BBC makes do with highlights.

Rugby League, Golf, Athletics that are not the Olympics, Formula One, Motorcycling, have all followed the same inevitable trajectory. Once simply niche fillers as part of BBC1’s excellent’Grandstand’, but over time popularised by constant, repeated exposure, once the audience had been hooked, an audience moreover that was willing to pay to watch it, then those governing bodies showed all the loyalty of a prostitute, and like a prostitute, took the money.

It’s foolish then to imagine that there’ll be any difference when the broadcasting rights to Glastonbury come up for renewal. The BBC will be priced out, a victim of its own success yet again. A shame, not because I’d miss Glastonbury on the BBC, but because it is yet another reminder that the BBC has finite resources, and as such is unable to compete on the world stage. Soon, not even the Pyramid Stage.

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June 23, 2025

33:64 presents “Kemi Badenoch.”

We are indeed living in strange times. Times made all the stranger by things happening, that up until quite recently would’ve seemed by turns ridiculous, outlandish or farcical, but now seem to be another indicator of just how strange the strangeness is. And nothing seems to perfectly encapsulate the strangeness of these times more than the demonstrations against the bombing of Iran that took place in London last weekend.

Had one no knowledge of the well documented brutality of the Iranian regime, one might be forgiven that rather than being an unspeakably strict theocratic regime, it was a much maligned innocent in world affairs, one that had been unfairly cast as a villain by others in their pursuit of some unfathomably evil plan.

One might also be forgiven for thinking that because of the presence of women in the photographs that accompanied these demonstrations, that Iran was an implacable defender of female rights, and that these women doing nothing more than showing solidarity with their Iranian sisters. 

Seeing such photographs and having read accounts of these demonstrations online, as so much news is accessed nowadays, one might also imagine that Iran was a bastion of press freedom, where internet access is as ubiquitous as it is unfettered.

To say nothing of the fact that these demonstrations, whilst heavily policed, were nonetheless allowed to take place and as such were part of the same freedoms as enjoyed by the citizens of Tehran.

The reason why you’d never think any of these things is possibly because you’d been aware of Irans previous abominations long before last weekend. The numerous reports on its human rights violations. It’s medieval treatment of women. It’s censorship of the internet. And that would mean that you didn’t rely on social media for your news and most importantly, weren’t infected by the current plague for interpreting every act through an incredibly subjective and highly reductive prism of anti-Israelism.

So whilst Iran may be bad, the US is far worse, there aren’t words sufficiently descriptive enough to describe just how bad Israel is. Despite Israel being the only country in that part of the world where most Britons – especially women and gays – would choose to live, it has attained a place in some peoples minds as the embodiment of evil. Which is utterly insane, factually unsustainable and morally repugnant.

Kemi Badenoch found herself engulfed in a media brouhaha a while ago after she made the claim that not all cultures were equal. Quite why is a mystery.  It is undeniable fact. Life in Britain is better than life in Iran and only a fuckwit would suggest otherwise. But to users of the same reductive prism that absolves Iran for any complicity in the situation it now finds itself in and who happily march in support of it, it also allows them to denounce Britain as somehow being a jackboot away from being fascist.

There are protests to be had, causes deserving of media attention, injustices to be highlighted, action to be demanded. Iran however, isn’t one of them and for proof of that, I’d suggest that those protesting support for Iran in London, try protesting support for Britain on the streets of Tehran and see where that gets them.

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June 8, 2025

34:63 presents “Greta Thunberg.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is, of course, the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The most audaciously successful example of this is Greta Thunberg’s ‘school strike’, which somehow transformed her bunking off into some sort of noble act of protest. Quite why no-one called ‘bullshit’ on her little stunt, I can’t explain, but fair play to her, by her constantly banging on about how something has been exacerbated by political inertia, and that because of that, the action needed to combat it is as drastic as it is urgent, she has managed to get away with it.

Because if I’d have tried to get justify me bunking off school as something other than a test of how far I could push my luck with my parents, I’d have gotten more than a stern talking to. If I’d then constantly been on at them to change their lifestyles, to the extent that my mother had to give up on her career as an international opera singer because I’d been incessantly haranguing her about her flying to concerts, I doubt if I’d be eventually invited to address the United Nations or nominated three times for the Nobel peace prize, 

But because of the world we now live, one that places a disturbingly worrying amount of importance on positive media coverage, her bunking off has been rewarded with her being lauded as a something about that something. And because of this, she is given platforms upon which to berate pretty much everyone for not doing what she wants. And in an almost masochistic way, one that seems to have the bizarrely religious need for flagellation to it, the more she lambasts people, the more they seem to want it, She’s like a virtue signalling dominatrix.

And no virtue is more worthy to be signalled these days than support for the Palestinian people. Despite their plight being having as many complicated causes as the something she gained ‘celebrity for, that is the only similarity. Yes, people are starving, but so too are people in Yemen and the Sudan caught up in the middle of civil wars fought between disparate factions as only civil wars can be, but then again, their humanitarian crisis’ don’t lend themselves the kind of performative display of virtue that is so beloved by the media. She is on a boat, sailing towards Gaza, in an attempt to bring food and medical supplies to the people of Gaza, as I write this. She is also live-streaming the whole thing. Of course she is. After all, what’s the point of virtue signalling something, if no-one knows that your virtue signalling something?

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May 23, 2025

34:63 presents “Mr. Kobayashi.”

All of the chatter last week about the assisted dying bill was concerned with MP’s voting for an amendment to give health workers an ‘opt out’, and a slew of measures that had been added ostensibly as ‘safeguarding’ vulnerable persons, to protect them from coercion. 

Because of this, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was a fine example of MP’s putting ‘country before party’ and voting on principle, that the grubby business of party politics had been temporarily suspended in pursuit of some notion of a  higher moral obligation. 

You’d be wrong though.  

To understand why, first of all you need to question who exactly it is those MP’s were so keen to safeguard and then to ask yourself who are the vulnerable people at risk from coercion? It is never fully explained what safeguarding is, or what a vulnerable person is, is it? Not really. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘vulnerable people’ have, in regard to having any meaning within the whole assisted dying debate are as meaningful as calling a trans-woman a woman.

Where is any there notion of safeguarding the public purse in all this, of putting economic probity first, of safeguarding all the other public services that would face ever more drastic cuts to help pay for an increasingly ageing population? According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. It gets worse because whilst 26% of people will be over 65, an additional 15% of them will be under 16. Thats nearly half of all the UK’s population not paying tax, but still expecting the state to provide for them. Granted, eventually the young might become taxpayers, but by then quite a lot of them them will be working in the kind of low-wage job that requires government bailouts – working tax credits, housing benefit and the like – to avoid even more government help.

It’s all a vicious circle, and part of the blame lies with the NHS. Yes the NHS, so beloved by, well everyone, being as it is an institution that occupies such a unique place in our collective psyche that a segment extolling it was included in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Because all of its various health initiatives – to help people to stop smoking, improved detection leading to better survival rates for heart disease, cancers and other previously life ending conditions for example – have been too successful. 

So successful in fact, that of the 26% of the population that will be aged over 65 by 2065, the that the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population will be older than 85. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

To misquote Mr Kobayashi in ‘The Usual Suspects’, the fact that they were unaware that they were committing fraud is no excuse.  When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions, that when they were of working age, the they tax paid then paid for pensioners pensions then?

The pension bill is only going to increase, whilst at the same time the umber of people paying that bill is decreasing. It is a state of affairs that is as unaffordable as it is unconscionable. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – more than we spend on defence, transport and education combined. And those numbers are only going to get bigger.

Thats why the Assisted Dying Bill is hopefully a much needed first step towards state sponsored euthanasia. And just because people find something distasteful to even to contemplate, doesn’t make any the less urgent. If anything, the fact that people do find the subject of euthanasia, or assisted dying a topic they’d much rather avoid altogether is precisely the reason why it has become so urgent.

The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them. 

And of course the financial benefits to society would be worth it. In addition to the savings garnered from a reduced welfare budget, the savings to the NHS, and local authorities, if people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. There’d also be a societal benefit. In the housing sector, as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities

We urgently need our politicians to do the leading part of leadership, as opposed to them being constantly fixated on what the media or the public think and constantly aware of their ow career. Of course MP’s have a idea of themselves as being all kinds of wonderful to everyone – after all being an MP means they have to take part in a popularity contest every five years – but unfortunately for them, economic reality makes their ideals unaffordable. Its those ideals that are actually coercing millions into hardship, creating the vulnerable they seem so concerned with protecting and plunging the country state ever closer to civil unrest. Generational inequality is not something that can be ignored for much longer.

Tough choices should mean exactly that, because otherwise they’ll only get tougher.

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May 21, 2025

34:63 presents “The principal principle.”

The best kind of virtue signalling is of course the kind that has minimal adverse consequences for you, but a multitude of positive ones. The announcement of more sanctions against Israel, is but one example of this.

According to a report in ‘The Independent’ “Britain has issued fresh sanctions against Israel over its “morally unjustifiable” escalation of violence in Gaza, and demanded an end to its “cruel and indefensible” 11-week block on humanitarian aid.”

And what, exactly, do these sanctions consist of? Suspending trade talks with Israel, basically. Which of course leads one to ask exactly how much trade Britain does with Israel and then, how does this compare with other countries?

According to the governments own figures, ‘Total trade in goods and services (exports plus imports) between the UK and Israel was £5.8 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2024.’ This made Israel our 44th largest trading partner. The 1st was of course the US, with a total value of over £314 billion.

So suspending trade talks, not the trade itself mind, might sound as if Britain plc is taking a stand, but it is nothing more than essentially an empty gesture. It might appear that Britain is taking a principled stance, because that is precisely what it is meant to do, to give the appearance of principle being enforced. Although if that principle boils down to nothing more minimising the threat of yet more candidates winning largely Muslim populated constituencies by standing on a pro-Gaza platform, appeasing disgruntled Labour MP’s, Owen Jones and assorted keyboard warriors and garnering positive media coverage into the bargain, then that principle isn’t that all that principled, is it?

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May 20, 2025

34:63 presents “Judas Iscariot.”

Much as it pains me to write this, I suspect that Farrago might be only honest politician in Britain. This bold assertion comes with add a few important caveats. The foremost one of these is that the usual standard of honesty as most people understand it, does’t seem to apply to to the world of politics. Boris’s Johnson’s entire political career bears this out. As his former Home Secretary Amber Rudd once put it “Boris well he’s the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.”

But at least Boris tried to implement the will of the British people  after they voted for Brexit. This was despite the entire cultural and media elite being fervently opposed any expression of democracy that didn’t advance their interests, the judicial and parliamentary attempts to thwart it, and the relentless besmirching of those who’d dared to do make the elites nightmare a reality. The deal he got wasn’t perhaps the best deal he could’ve got, but it wasn’t as if the EU were minded to offer him one. They wanted to signal to other EU member states – the ones who had a high degree of Euro-scepticism among their electorate and were closely looking at how Britain fared – France, Italy  Austria, and The Netherlands – exactly how steep the price for leaving would be.

Fast forward two elections and five PM’s to yesterday and Plonkers so called ‘reset’ deal  with the EU. I’m not going to discuss it in any great detail and not just because I’m holiday as I write this, looking out at the sea and luxuriating in the good weather, but more importantly because it was’t a surprise, him never exactly being a massive supporter of Brexit.

After all, he campaigned for a second referendum, happy to ignore the democratic wishes of the majority of UK citizens when it suited him and his increasingly metropolitan outlook. By that I mean an outlook that wasn’t predicated upon prioritising the needs of the many, but instead the minority of people unhappy about the whole Brexit enterprise, people who thought of themselves as Europeans and not British.The ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ bit of the deal amply demonstrates this.

Ostensibly a scheme to allow UK youth to work and study in Europe, in reality it serves as an encapsulation of his betrayal  of Brexit. Firstly, it is because only those children that have not just the necessary skills and qualifications needed to make that even a possibility, but also parents rich enough to make that possibility a reality. Parents who not only have encouraged their children learn a European language, but have inculcated in them a sense that this is but the restoration of an entitlement. So not the kind of parents who work in care homes, as mechanics or teaching assistants. 

Secondly, we have a population of around 60 millions, as compared to Europes total of nearer 450 millions. Can anyone see the problem here? In Britain we have a welfare system, one that’s struggling cope as it is, without even more demands placed upon it from EU citizens with a legal rights to it.

All this at a time when net migration is at historic highs, when the public is palpably crying out for control, when Reform UK gave Plonker fair warning as to the levels of discontent brewing in the country at the recent mayoral and council elections and he responded by seeming to take heed of their concerns, when in reality all he has done is make it worse. 

Thats why, much as I am am loathe to, I think that Farrago might be the most honest politician in Britain today. Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. But if you were to ask any British voter at anytime within the last 15 years or so what two things sprang to mind when they thought of him, those two things would be the EU and immigration (although to be fair, that’s because they were the only things he ever seemed to talk about.) So he hasn’t shifted so much as the electorate have moved closer to him, in part because the other political parties have have moved further away from them. 

So with that in mind, I’m going to rename Plonker ‘Stymied’ because that’s what he’s done to Brexit and as always, when I write about Brexit, I feel the need that to point out that I voted to remain

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May 18, 2025

34:63 presents “Yuval Raphael.”

If there’s one act that perfectly encapsulates the moral obscenity of the pro-palestinian ideology, then yesterdays attempt by two protesters to storm the stage during Israels performance in the Eurovision Song Contest is going to take some beating.

Yuval Raphael survived the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas gunmen at the Nova music festival. She hid under a pile of dead bodies for eight hours until she was rescued. But apparently her trauma wasn’t sufficiently traumatic. So despite having survived one act of unimaginable horror by having to commit another, her ordeal continues.

The two protesters will ever know how that day changed her life, and how much bravery it takes for a Jew to stand on a stage outside of Israel and represent Israel. Because they don’t care, their warped ideology doesn’t allow for there being any Jewish victims. In their world, the only victims are the Palestinian ones and the only ‘genocide’ being committed is the one by Israel. The fact that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly and repeatedly calls for the killing of all Jews, with the ultimate aim being the eradification of Israel itself, is something else.

What that something else is, however, doesn’t much matter really. When one’s world-view is shaped by social media posts, reinforced by their friends groupthink and bolstered by dubious ‘facts’ and biased ‘news’, when the concept of ‘my truth’ becomes a thing, it does so at the expense of objective truth.

Of course, this means that the Chinese State Circus can perform around the world with impunity, despite widespread evidence of human rights abuses by the Chinese government and allegations of a genocide of the Uyghur population. Perish the thought that because Beijing has takes a hard line with protesters – even outside China – that this informs peoples thinking.

And as a result of which, we get two protesters thinking their deranged understanding of things trumps Yuval Raphael’s lived reality. Because of course, when it comes to Israel, it is only a Palestinians lived reality that has any value.

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May 16, 2025

34:63 presents “Count Arthur Strong.”

Why do some people imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of? 

Gary Crisp, who looks uncannily like Count Arthur Strong without his hat, is a serial offender who it comes to this kind of thing and like Strong, he is a someone who thinks he’s more intelligent than he is and thus fits himself in hot water as a result. Unlike Strong however, this was all done for laughs and unlike Strong, he wasn’t cancelled by the BBC years ago. Resulting in a interview in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which he gave his opinions on two of the most divisive issues of the day, Gaza and trans.

Quite why anyone care’s what he thinks about anything other than football, I’m not really too sure. It’d be like asking Orson Welles how to bake a cake. But we live in an age where people do and where ‘celebrities’ own ego and sense of self-importance convinces them that they do. We also live in an age in which the media love to give an opportunity for someone like Crisp to say something controversial, because that will ultimately generate more revenue for them. It’s such a mutually beneficial arrangement that its essentially a digital ‘reach around’ 

So Crisp can say, safe in the knowledge that he’s saying the right thing – right in the sense that it won’t harm his career – “I think if you’re silent on these issues, you’re almost complicit.” The problem for him though, is that by not staying silent on these issues he is complicit in revealing himself to be a mental pigmy.

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through, unimaginable. I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters. I don’t know how the world thinks this is OK.” Does he not understand what happens in a war? Does  Does he not understand that Israel is surrounded by countries who wish it never existed, or that the founding charter of Hamas espouses jihad – holy war – until Israel is no more. 

“Obviously October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened prior to this, many of them against the Palestinian people.” There it is, the but. The ‘but’ that somehow transforms anti-Semitism into a bastardized moral equivalence. Is Crisp an authority in Middle Eastern history or is he just a student at the University of Twitter?

The attack by Hamas wasn’t just ‘awful.  Being stuck in a traffic jam is awful. An undercooked meal is awful. Biting into a chocolate only to discover its coffee flavoured that’s awful.  To suggest that the massacre of 1,141 people, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was ‘awful’ belies the sheer scale of its barbarity and his stupidity.

He is lives in a country where his stupidity has no cost, where his luxury beliefs are protected by democratic freedoms that the people of Gaza can only dream of. One where having different views won’t make you fearful of a knock on the door at dead of night, one where being gay isn’t seen as a crime, and in a time where one can earn an obscene amount of money by talking  about an irrelevance to adults with who have yet to fully grow up.

He is a highly distilled iteration of the same combination of presumed moral authority, self-importance and entitlement that saw a a load of people most people had never heard of write a letter to The Guardian last week expressing something with some others.

Crisp also has deep feelings for these others. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?”

Of course he thinks that. Once again, at no point in his life will he ever be be confronted with the reality of his luxury beliefs. No man will. No man will ever find women demanding access to mens toilets, no man will themselves losing against mediocre women in sporting competitions just as no man will ever see their identity turned into little more than performative wish fulfilment by deluded women.

Its precisely because he’s so removed from the consequences of his luxury beliefs that he can afford to hold them.   

What a Count.

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May 13, 2025

34:63 presents “Harold Macmillan.”

The news that was reported recently that president Donald Tangoed has ordered the US authorities to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco Bay that has been closed for more than 60 years is inspired.

Firstly, if it is all part of his wider strategy of ‘flooding the zone’ – a strategy that involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion – its working. The media in America are now totally unsure of what news coming out of the White House is fake, true, or worse fake that becomes true because the media endlessly bang on about it and thus it gains popular support.

It’s like when I was younger and I was caught shoplifting. Nothing serious. But my parents went mad. So I flooded the zone, except back then it wasn’t a political strategy with stupid name, it was swerve after swerve. I grassed up my brother for smoking – he was then twelve – then accused my parents of both being hypocrites because they smoked and for good measure also grassed him up for helping himself from the drinks cabinet. I really hit the jackpot when I complained that as I didn’t get any pocket money, it was really their fault.

They were so angry at this, that the shoplifting was forgotten and the discussion became instead on how lucky I was compared to their own experience of childhood in rural Ireland. All walking to school barefoot, working on the farm, yada-yada. In much the way, Tangoed has done the same, albeit on a far grander scale, so his critics constantly find themselves in a state of utter confusion and exhaustion. 

From his issuing of an unusually high number of executive orders – including basing transgender girls compete in female only sports at in schools to pardoning the rioters who stormed the Capitol building – as well as him making a number of controversial statements – taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”, the media perpetually confused. 

So maybe it is part of that strategy, to get the media all worked up about Alcatraz. But then again, maybe it isn’t, and if it isn’t, I think it’s a great idea. Why prisons are built in or near to populated areas has always baffled me, especially the high security ones, the ones that house the really mad or bad prisoners. That’s a crime in waiting, putting them near the law abiding public. No, its my belief that if certain individuals have committed a crime that so heinous that it breaks the social contract that exists between citizens and the state, then the state no longer has any obligation toward them. Some murderer’s, serial rapists, terrorists and paedophiles fall into that category.

The French had the right idea with Devils Island, an essentially uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where hardened criminals were shipped off to. It was less three meals a day than a endless quest for survival.    We have our own Devils Island. Well nearly. Gruinard Island is a small, oval-shaped island just off the coast in North West Scotland. In 1942, because it was uninhabited, it was used by the military to experiment with anthrax. Theoretically decontaminated in 1990, it is remains uninhabited. 

Why not just put the worst in society there? With no prospect of leaving. Food drops once a month – basic rations -, minimal accommodation and let them make the best of it.  Boats patrolling the waters around the island, 24hrs a day, armed guards with orders to shoot to wound anyone attempting to escape. Yes, without proper medical treatment they’d die, but proper medical treatment is to be found in hospitals, and hospitals are part of the society whose norms of behaviour they flouted. 

As a deterrent it’d be remarkably effective. 

Anyway, Tangoed controls the narrative, in a way that our glorious leader can only dream about. Plonker seems to be perpetually in fire-fighting mode, responding to things, rather than making those things happen. Already the news cycle – theirs and ours -has been forced to move on, covering the more serious business of dealing with the trade deals with Britain and Saudi, proposals to drastically cut the price of prescription drugs alongside the piffle surrounding Air Farce One. There’s also the ongoing brouhaha’s surrounding tariffs, dealing with Russia in his ongoing struggle to affect peace in Ukraine. 

By tomorrow though, or certainly by next week, there’ll be more things for the media to fret about, because that’s what they do. It isn’t so much ‘flooding the zone’, as creating the borders that allow there to be such a zone in the first place.

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May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?  

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’. 

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate.  Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?    

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority. 

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples. 

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others  who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that. 

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

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