the brilliantly leaping gazelle

As things change, so they remain the same and so just as Galileo was found guilty of heresy in 16th Century Italy, so too has the BBC’s Justin Webb been found guilty of expressing the modern equivalent of a heretical belief in 21st Century Britain.

Galileo’s accusers were the Roman Catholic Church and his his supposed heresy, expressed in his book ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World System’ was his belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice-versa,. This view was gaining some traction in 16th Century Europe, and because of that the Catholic Church in the form of the Inquisition sought to punish him. He was found guilty of heresy, forced to renounce the truth, sentenced to life imprisonment – commuted to house arrest until his death – and the publication of any of his books, including any future works, was banned.

Who accused Justin Webb isn’t know but his heresy was that, whilst co-presenting BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he uttered the phrase “trans women – that is males’ last year when discussing new International Chess Federation guidelines regarding whether being biologically male can give players an advantage in the game.

Leaving aside the question of exactly how biological males competing in a women’s category are somehow conferred an advantage when playing chess – chess – isn’t clear. Proper sport – the kind that causes you to sweat and muscles to ache if you do too much – I understand the advantage. Any male who has gone through puberty has all manner of biological advantages because of it and no amount of ideologically driven scientific gerrymandering will alter that fact.

But nonetheless, someone complained that the comment amounted to Webb giving his personal view on a controversial matter in breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality, and the the BBC’s editorial complaints unit agreed, saying it “gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial areaHow exactly is this ‘a highly controversial issue’? It isn’t. Far from it, as polls have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of Britons hold same the view, namely that trans-women are in fact men. When they properly understand what is meant by a trans-woman, that is.

To me, this is just another baleful, yet increasingly modern example of a ‘sport’ or organisation wishing to jump aboard the trans bandwagon and in the interests promoting this and championing that, essentially negating the rights of biological women. And of an organisation that has abandoned all moral authority in trying to placate the digital mob.

The frightening thing is that Galileo had to wait a couple of centuries to be proved right.

We already know Justin Webb is right.

Anyone with even the merest pretence of being a supporter of democracy must be glad that George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election. Not because he’s an especially nice politician, but because of the fact that it demonstrates the robust health of our electoral system.

There are many things I find highly disagreeable about George Galloway and his campaign, but the fact is that enough of the voters in Rochdale didn’t and no matter how calculated one considers his campaign to have been, it was undeniably effective. Making it clear that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale that made up 30% of its population and shifting the focus away from local or even national issues, but instead onto Israel/Gaza was many things, but one of them was being from the same election strategy handbook every other political party ever has used.

Only a credulous fool would deny the obviousness of that statement. It used to be a truism of politics that if you threatened benefits that targeted the elderly, you’d pay the price at the ballot box because the elderly were more likely than any other age-group to vote. Famously, Teresa Mayn’t forgot that piece of election orthodoxy and in the midst of campaign published proposals for social care that were quickly dubbed ‘the dementia tax’ and were even quicker abandoned.

Compo Clegg pledged not to increase student tuition fee’s before the 2010 election to get the student vote? Remember how that turned out!

How prior to the 1997 election Labour made it clear that they weren’t going to reverse any of the Conservatives spending cuts? That was a reassuring promise to wavering Conservative voters that everything would stay exactly as it was for them and that other people would continue to bear the brunt of those cuts. These are the three examples that spring immediately to mind, but there are countless more, perhaps not not so blatant as Galloways, but in a weird way that makes them even worse. But for me the undisputed master of this in the modern era was Margret Thatcher. From letting people buy their own houses and then turning them into shareholders of utilities the public had previously owned, her entire premiership was just one long bribe.

And that even now, as we’re told that Galloways election victory was a triumph of kind of divisive politics, one that categorises the electorate into nothing more than set of issues to be pandered to, the Chancer is planning a budget which promises tax cuts, benefit cuts but better public services! Labour are no better, finalising an election manifesto which will be full of warm words and assurances to do all manner of things for all manner of people, but will reluctantly conclude, upon election, that the reality of government doesn’t enable them to do it.

So all in all I’m not as disheartened by Galloways win as I otherwise might’ve been. His win is a perverse win for democracy, because the if other parties had got their acts together, this probably wouldn’t have happened. He only got just over 12,000 votes and I don’t know how large the electorate was, but only 39.7% of them bothered to vote, compared with 60.1% at the 2019 general election. Granted, a low turnout but the by-election wasn’t held at a moments notice, there was loads of publicity about it and still people couldn’t be bothered to vote! And with rumours of a general election in 100 or so days anyway, his victory will be short lived.

Not as short lived as Liz Trossack’s premiership but another future pub quiz question nonetheless.

Yesterday there was this headline in The Guardian;‘ GB News has paid more than £660,000 to Tory MPs since its launch’ And just to make absolutely sure that the virtue signallers who read it could choke on their homemade muesli, it was billed as an exclusive and given lead story status.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog in relation to Guardian ‘exclusives’, it is technically an exclusive only in the narrowest of meaning of the word insofar as no other paper considers it to be news. But’s that me just nit-picking.

What really waxed my woody about this particular trivia was that it attempted to make a story out of its readers contempt for GB News. A contempt for which the Guardian, along with some of rest of the media, have only been too happy to create, inflame and generally present GB News as some sort Fox News copycat. If one believed all the negative press that continually engulfs it, one might think that GB News was some kind of emerging powerhouse elbowing its way onto the British media landscape, its audience and influence growing with every passing week.

Except it isn’t. Far from it. For the purposes of this post I tried to find reliable audience figures for GB News – which is harder than one might think – and could find none. Well apart from this one – which is an apology from BARB apologising for woefully inflated viewing figures for New Years Eve – which doesn’t really count. It is however online that GB News comes into its own. Perversely the very media outrage with which the supposedly serious papers treat it, the multiple OfCom complaints made against it, the more people subscribe to its YouTube channel. People are watching GB News, not just in a way , that can be measured using traditional – i.e. outdated – methods

But however many – or indeed few – viewers watch GB News, indeed regardless if one agree’s with it’s avowedly right-wing stance, no matter your disdain for politicians who espouse a particular kind of populism which can become worrying insular, the kind that provokes knee jerk reactions, distrust and suspicion and which may be anathema to you, despite all of this – in fact because of this – if you believe in free speech, then you have to allow it. Free speech isn’t for people you agree with, it only has any meaning at all, if you defend it in support of people you disagree with. It isn’t easy but that’s the point.

But back to the Guardian article and the £660, 000 paid to Tory MPs by GB News since its launch, in June 2021. Just to put that in some kind of context, in that same period, Kath Viner, the editor of the Guardian, trousered nearly £1.5million. She got a £150,000 pay rise in 2022. or 42%. . This is from the same newspaper which see’s no contradiction whatsoever between that and frequently criticising excessive executive pay.

If Guardian readers should be angry about anything, they should be angry about that.

I must confess to not having the firmest of grasps regarding the events that caused such consternation in Parliament the other day, but what I do know is that it concerned the ongoing situation in Gaza. Apparently, a vote calling for something was so badly handled that the whole thing quickly descend into chaos. Lots of senior politicians then did what they do best,. Namely, blaming each other for it, calling on someone to resign and generally convincing themselves that the majority of the population felt so strongly about this as they did, so that they craved an endless diet of media analysis to tell them not only was it important, but why it was important

At no point in all of this, did any politicians stop to ask themselves that if, in the real world, the one outside the Westminster bubble, far removed from TV studios and headline writers, political pundits and wannabee has-beens does any of this actually matter? Will it have any effect whatsoever upon the issue upon which they were so preoccupied? Had the vote gone ahead, and if a motion calling for a ceasefire have passed, would have given rise to some sober reflection on the part of Netanyahu? Or would he would’ve thought, ‘The news that some people of no consequence have said something of no consequence, and have called for something that has no consequence, has no consequence for me.’

It is a seems to be a peculiarly British political class delusion, that no matter how much we are reminded that Britain no longer has an Empire, no matter how guilty modern Britain constantly finds itself to be over endless real and imagined wrongs committed by it, the antecedents of the class that oversaw it still feel emboldened enough to lecture other countries as to how to conduct themselves. And are possessed of a blinkered perception of their own self-importance to think it matters, one that they’d be first in the queue to condemn others for. They live in a fantasy world created in a belief of their own self-importance, a belief that when Britain speaks, the world listens, a belief that world whilst the world has changed, it essentially remains the same. A kind of Schrödinger’s politics.

An excellent article in spiked highlighted the grotesque disconnect between the concerns of the public and the concerns of politicians. It seems to me that our politicians are not so much interested concerns rooted in the everyday concerns of their constituents – the ones who put them on the soapbox in the first place and to whom they claim it is an honour to serve – as they are about being seen to doing anything that’ll garner approving tweets and which will enhance their chances of re-election.

Because to me that’s all it is, a fear of the digital mob turning on them and at the same time, a desire to say or tweet something that the digital mob can either turn into a viral entity or better yet, actual news. Being seen by some to say or do the right thing isn’t the same as actually doing or saying the right thing. Over Israel/Gaza, some of our politicians have failed to grasp that blindingly obvious truism.

I saw this headline on the BBC website yesterday and my mind went into overdrive, because the headline was so utterly bereft of any critical rigour as to be meaningless. It made on question the editorial standards that allowed such a headline to be even written. And here it is:

‘One million have undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in England’

Exactly how can one put a figure on something if that something hasn’t even been quantified? Well the BBC got around this by providing a link to some research by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which apparently proves this fantastical claim. I haven’t read the whole thing – because in all probability the ONS will, knowing my luck, publish research that proves that the more statical research one reads, the more one increases their likelihood of dying early – but have just skimmed the main points and it is by turn both unintentionally hilarious and alarmingly contradictory

‘An estimated 7% of adults in England showed evidence of type 2 diabetes, and 3 in 10 (30%) of those were undiagnosed; this equates to approximately 1 million adults with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.’

Ah good, our old friend ‘estimated’ making a not unexpected appearance in a piece of statistical scaremongering. One wonders if his trusty companions ‘projection’, ‘possibility’, and ‘eventually’ are lurking deep in the research paper? And then, just to ratchet up the fear still further, it added

Those with type 2 diabetes were also more likely to be undiagnosed if they were in better general health, and women were more likely to be undiagnosed if they had a lower body mass index (BMI), lower waist circumference, or were not prescribed antidepressants.

So hang on! I thought having better general health was a good thing? Also, isn’t women having a lower BMI an equally desirable thing? Or am I wrong? But there was no time to dwell on this, because;

‘Pre-diabetes affected around 1 in 9 adults in England (12%), which equates to approximately 5.1 million adults.’

What’s this now? ‘Pre-diabetes’? When did we start living in the world of ‘Minority Report‘? It follows that if there is a thing, then there has to be a time when that thing didn’t exist. If we accept that pre-diabetes is a thing, then aren’t 100% of people pre-death?

‘Groups most at risk of having pre-diabetes were those with known risk factors for type 2 diabetes, such as older age or being in the BMI categories “overweight” or “obese”; however, there was also considerable prevalence in groups typically considered “low risk”, for example, 4% of those aged 16 to 44 years and 8% of those who were not overweight or obese had pre-diabetes.’

So just to recap then. There are two things – undiagnosed and pre-diabetes – that can’t be proven, but are nonetheless presented as fact. The healthier one is the greater the risk of it being undiagnosed and even if you’re younger and slimmer, you’re still in the woods for the pre- version.

A few seconds before I posted this, I re-read the BBC article for any hint of healthy scepticism on the part of the reporter who posted this. They would’ve had access to the same, hopefully much more, information than I had, but there was not even a scintilla of doubt. It was presented as fact, whereas to me it reads like a last piece of ‘churnalism – a press release basically presented as news.

No wonder Dr. Andrew Wakefield got such an easy ride!

One of the things that neatly exemplifies just how ‘celebrity’ obsessed our culture has become, is not just the award ceremonies themselves, but the fawning sycophancy by a media that has suspended all objectivity for access to ‘talent’ It’s like a dog eating its own vomit, the seriousness with which they treat the basically trivial and woe betide anyone who punctures their ever so carefully inflated balloon of pomposity, as Ricky Gervais did to such great effect when he used to host the Golden Globes. Anyone would think he’d done something that mattered in the real world.

Tonight it’ll be Baftas, where the British film industry will delude itself once again that it’s nothing more than a tax break with a shared language and technical expertise. Once again the award winners will make teary speeches about how great this was, how lovely it was to work with that, but that actually the other was a story that needed to be told. And they’ll bang on about how brave this was, how selfless that was, and how humbling the other was, whilst being applauded enthusiastically by the losers who look overjoyed to have lost.

Nothing sums up the shallowness more, the utter fatuousness of these awards, than this The nominees are aware that a camera is right there in their face, to get their reaction when the result is announced so if they win, they need to act almost mortified but if they lose, act bizarrely delighted to have lost. It’s only a matter of time until there’s an award for Best Loser Reaction Shot. One for the showreel…

You don’t get this nonsense in any other field of human endeavour. You don’t get builders fondly reminiscing about a wall they’d put up years ago, how the mortar was so great. Neither do you get surgeons waxing lyrical about the thread they use to sew up patients after open heart surgery or waiting staff at a Harvester banging on tearfully about how the chef goes to great lengths to ensure that there’s always a vegan option on the menu. Because there are no awards for any of them, there not considered sexy enough to warrant that kind of attention, that’s not prime-time BBC1 enough, but what we do get is endless red carpet photos of actors wearing dresses designed feed the media cycle. Are they too this, or not enough that, or are they referencing the other?

David Tennant is hosting this year. Perhaps he might take us all on one last trip on the TARDIS to a time in human history that wasn’t so obsessed by self-important non-entities. Oops. silly me.There wasn’t. There never will be. Its the human conditioned to be conditioned.

The news that Wayne has got cancer saddens me.

Not for him, but because questions that should be rightly asked about health inequalities, especially those surrounding early cancer diagnosis, access to effective treatment and ongoing post survival rehabilitation have been largely ignored by the media. A glorious exception to this obsequious forelock tugging is an excellent piece in spiked by Joanna Williams. Much easier to focus on his two sons, Not Yet Wayne and On The Wane, whose every action is minutely dissected and discussed so as to help deflect attention from where it should be.

You know, instead of detailing the plight of some of the other 1000 people who were diagnosed with cancer on the same day he was. Those who by accident of birth will not get the same medical care he will. ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ As true today as it always has been.

It also saddens me that Waynes long standing devotion to homeopathy seems to have deserted him, and that this too hasn’t been remarked upon in the media saddens me. What better way to highlight its efficacy, to use his celebrity status to advance a cause he notionally passionately believes in and prove that homeopathy isn’t a load of old bollocks. But instead of staunchly sticking to his voguish affectations he, like countless others before him, jettison’s them when confronted with a potentially fatal condition and instead puts his trust in proper science, not pseudo-scince and expensive quackery. You know, the kind of science that actually works.

I always thought he was a hypocrite, its just nice to have it confirmed.

But what fills me with the most amount of joy about all of this – and yes, I find joy in this, I’m not going to do a Tony Blair after Thatcher died – has to be the awkward silences and unspoken recriminations and pent up rage directed at Ash by Wayne. He knew he was in love with her when he got married, continued his relationship with Ash and since the divorce from his wife and her subsequent death, has been tireless to rehabilitate the publics opinion of her. Again, it saddens me that the media haven’t drawn attention to the fact that whilst he isn’t a smoker, she is, and that his casual interpretation of his marriage vows are now coming back to haunt him.

Good.

It also saddens me that no-one has made the blindingly obvious observation – blindingly obvious to me anyway – that as the monarchy itself is a cancer on our society, that the cancer now has cancer.

The media coverage following the death of Terry Venables makes me think of Noam Chomsky.

Clearly the death of Mr Venables must be a cause of pain and loss to those who knew him, and as writing as one who recently was recently bereaved, I can understand their loss. But the acres acres of newsprint devoted to him, the elevation of the mundane to something approaching quasi-sainthood, is as both irrelevant as it is instructive. The ink that was spilled was by those regurgitating second-hand memories, banal platitudes and anecdotes disguised as ephemera whose only objective was a word count. His entire life was devoted to kicking a ball about, first by himself and then telling others how to do it and he was only ever reasonably good at that. He wasn’t excellent. He was a journeyman at best.

But not according to the outpouring of wholly fatuous guff that his death engendered.

Hers where Chomsky comes in. In my my mid-twenties I read a lot his books and his observations about sports, most specifically the function it provides our society, seem to have been starkly illustrated by recent events. Simply put, he posits that sports acts as a diversion, drawing the populaces mental energies and attention way from anything that might be be more worthy of effort. It’s hard at first, but then it gets easier and after a while you end up with what all political elites fear, namely a well informed electorate.

But whereas in the 20th Century we had Goebells and ‘The Big Lie’, now we have what is laughing called ‘social’ media – which is anything but – which helps spawn the hate marches that have befouled our capital over recent weekends. Because they offer people a ready made explanation of who is suffering and who is causing the suffering, because it easily be expressed in a chant or placard and because alignment with those views doesn’t require much in the way of critical analysis, has therefore become the perfect embodiment of way this can work to the detriment of society.

Since the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Olympics and the subsequent hunting down and killing of those gunmen by Israel, no-one can have been in any doubt that the killing by terrorists of any Israeli citizen is considered by Israel to be an attack upon Israel itself and therefore treated as such. And Hamas can’t have been unaware of this. As this report from the BBC – under 3 minutes long and using Hamas’s own drone footage – points out, the attacks by Hamas on the 7th October were well coordinated, using as they did land, sea and air and as such required months, if not years of planning.

After all, people who can operate motorised hang-gliders need some training. A decoy missile attack of 2,000 missiles requires 2,000 missiles. Drones that flew over the Israeli border and then shot up their surveillance towers needed people to fly them…

The sheer scale of the logistics is simply staggering, dwarfed only the factthat at no stage when all of this planning was going on did no-one say ‘But hold on, do we really think there’ll be no response from Israel from this. That they won’t see this as act of such barbarity that can only be met with overwhelming military action. Oh, we know this ahead of time and are going to do it anyway? That we value Palestinian lives almost as less as we value Jewish lives.? Forgive me, I didn’t know that. Okay then, carry on.’

That’s why I thought of Terry Venables and Noam Chomsky, easy soundbites and lazy thinking, echo chamber politics and moral hypocrisy.

I’ve written about the problems caused by others peoples noise on my sleep before now and even though I know its a first world problem, a first world problem is still a problem nonetheless and one that seems all the more problematic because there’s nothing I can do about it.

In my old house, the noise came from planes flying in the morning. Really early in the morning. The first one would be at four am, the second at five am and then every ninety seconds or so. With my insomnia, this was far from ideal, meaning that if I wasn’t fast asleep by the time that the planes started, I had no chance of sleep. Additionally, because there was no other noise so early in the morning, I could hear the planes long before they were overhead. And that in itself bothered me, the fact that the flightpath had been lowered, so the noise was even noisier.

Then nearly three years ago the landlords of my old house decided they wanted to take back possession of it, with predictable consequences for me. Fortunately, my good friend Nosferatu lives in a house with enough space to allow her to invite me to share with her.

Fandabbidosy.

The only downside to this offer was that she lives in a row of terraced houses in a part of North London, where it seems everyone either wants a loft conversion or an extension. And when they’re finished, immediately to sell it only for the new buyers to gut the entire property and start again. It’s like an endless game of whac a mole. A loft conversion is started and within a couple of weeks of it being finished an extension will be started at someone else’s house and when that’s finished, another couple of weeks will pass before work starts repairing someone’s roof and well, you get the idea.

The building work would start bang on 8am – the time that council legislation allows building work to start. Putting scaffolding up, knocking walls down, getting skips delivered, drilling, etc, etc. It was like being trapped in the film ‘Live. Die. Repeat.‘ as directed by Nick Knowles. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

I was wrong.

It can always get worse.

Because at least the building work I’d hitherto had been incredibly annoying had at least been done by professionals, ones who knew what they were doing. By contrast, the neighbours opposite my bedroom window have thought to themselves ‘Hang on, didn’t that bloke build his own house with only YouTube tutorials as his guide. I assembled some IKEA furniture once so how difficult can it be to build an extension?’ With the zeal that only an enthusiastic amateur can have, they began in earnest only for that enthusiasm to wilt under the hot sun. In a way that a only a combination of blind optimism, a deluded estimation of one’s abilities and a misguided sense of the pollyanna’s can my make my life, never mind theirs, a bedevilment of of noise, they listlessly carry on. The dawning realisation finally sinking in, namely that professionals are called that for a reason, and that sometimes it’s better to throw money at a problem rather than creating loads of them. One hopes that they don’t accidentally electrocute themselves, or fall victim to some other DIY related fatality.

Although writing that, I’m aware that if no fatalities occur, that a trend might start, with the neighbours all attempting to out DIY each other with ever more elaborate structures. Then they can all proudly show off their magnificent erections.