Giles Coren: just fuck off

Giles Coren – star of food history programme The Supersizers, posh food critic, winner of an award for writing the shittest sex scene of any novel in 2005, “Fuck the Poles” racist and general snobby bastard (see his twitter at any one given time for evidence) – has authored an article for the Daily Mail today. About the sexist comments made by Sky sports presenters Richard Keys and Andy Gray (and his caught-on-camera sexual harassment), two old misogynists unable to accept that women are real people with the ability to work competently, and their subsequent sacking/resignation. Coren starts from the ever-promising position of ‘I’m not sexist, but…’ and from there on blunders into a horrifying public display of loathing for women that would shock even Tommy Sheridan.

The article is actually so offensive it makes the rest of the Mail’s content look like it’s been written by the Teletubbies loved up out their bins on MDMA. I can practically see the eternally offensive Jan Moir, Bel Mooney and Richard Littlejohn hugging each other and intently discussing how they totally now really get why hate and fear is just a media ploy to keep us from joining together in happiness and song. Coren’s article is THAT bad. Yes, I know it’s in the Daily Mail, so I shouldn’t expect better. That doesn’t make it okay for something this sexist to be published, especially as Giles Coren often presents himself as some kind of average liberal middle class guy whose opinions educated people should listen to. It’s like he’s tried to pack every offensive trope out there into the one piece. How bad the article is really can’t be explained adequately second hand, so we’ll just have to show you exactly what he said. And demolish his pish line by line.

Read the rest of this entry »

Porter perfects his 'Mullaband' contemplative face for the future.

Mind when the media took it upon themselves to decide that Diana was “the people’s princess” even though she had just as little to do with us untitled scum as the rest of them? Well, Aaron Porter would do well to remember that just because the media treat you like you’re King of the Students doesn’t make it so.

NUS has been basically an irrelevance for many students for a long time now, with the closest a lot of us get to them being flashing an NUS extra card in a shop. Others (including me) attend institutions where the student population has repeatedly rejected having NUS organise on campus, because they’re basically useless to us and in some cases would actually be detrimental to student organisation, as well as food and drink prices in unions. Given that, perhaps it was inevitable that when a real crisis happened, the NUS would be no help at all.

In his tenure as NUS president, Porter has abandoned the idea of free education and proposed a graduate tax, attacked those who occupied Millbank as a “tiny minority” who apparently weren’t ‘real’ students (whatever that means), and then, in a desperate attempt to claw back some credibility and power after the movement ran away from him, was forced into a humiliating admission of “spineless dithering” on his part. I’d propose that that statement was the most truthful and relevant thing Porter’s said during this entire attack on students all across the UK, because the latest move from NUS has again been to push for lobbying of MPs, and to reject the UK wide demo on vote day in favour of their own candlelit vigil by the Thames. Oh, and we should all spend the day lobbying our MPs instead to tell them just how mistaken they are about fees increases.

There’s two problems here. First, the idea of lobbying, with specific reference to the NUS call to lobby Lib Dem MPs. The thing about this approach is that it largely depends on the belief that MPs simply haven’t thought through the consequences that fee rises and cuts will have for young people who’re seeking education. The idea of free education has been under attack for years, with further attacks on the idea that the arts are worth studying at all, and thinly disguised snobbery towards any institution that’s not an ’ancient’ university. These attacks don’t come out of politicians being misguided, it’s part of a concerted agenda to privatise education, delimit what is worthy of study (and what is worth studying is what’s immediately valuable to UK capitalism) and further turn educational institutions into cash machines that are basically closed to people without money, much like the US. This isn’t some mistake, it’s a mission. There might well be a significant number of MPs who will vote against this week’s bill, due to personal convictions or political expediency, but the amount of them who will truly believe that education should be free at the point of demand and genuinely accessible, and who wont buy into the limiting of what people can study, will unfortunately be much smaller.

So, given that it’s not just about one bill, and not just about some Lib Dem betrayal (many of us aren’t surprised at all, because a generally social democratic, pro capitalist party like them were always going to run into a bit of cognitive dissonance when they actually got power, and were never going to take long to drop the policies that appeal to young people and students) then it’s more than fair to say that lobbying MPs is not going to solve this. This is a long term fight to stop education cuts, and to preserve the rights of people who aren’t of the upper classes to get an education without jumping through scholarship hoops, so this repeated rejection of big demos and focus on lobbying days that NUS champion just isn’t going to cut it as a strategy.

Some people find it perplexing that an organisation called the National Union of Students can be so utterly out of tune with the way the wind’s blowing among the people they wish to represent. However, we need to take into account that an NUS position is a classic career move for those who want a job in politics, particularly people who are dying to become a Labour MP. Aaron Porter stood as an independent for the NUS presidency, but is in fact a Labour member. After talking to Porter on the Daily Politics Show, Andrew Neil probably got it dead on when he said “I think I was talking to a future MP there!”. If Porter wants a career as an MP, he’s going to have to play the game and avoid rattling any cages, and that basically rules out doing anything that will actually make any difference, or make people feel a sense of cohesion, power and optimism.

So, we get useless shite like a candelit vigil, an idea which has unfortunately spread to some individual student representative councils, for example Glasgow uni’s. Candelit vigils are usually held to mourn something that’s already happened, or something happening that is outside of our power to change because we are removed from it. That is not the case here, and apart from anything else, asking people to stand quietly and hold a fuckin candle while this vote happens is a great way to demotivate everyone. I wont be trekking to Edinburgh to melt a bit of wax, and I doubt the NUS demo will pull many folk away from Parliament Square either, no matter how many pleas they put out.

Porter is guilty of a massive dereliction of duty as a student representative, and I’ve outlined why. He has no interest in following the wishes of most students across the UK, because it doesn’t fit his political and personal interests. The campaign against cuts and fees has officially run away from NUS, and they’ve nobody to blame but themselves. Students of all stripes, and future students too, don’t want a king, they want a voice, and unfortunately from Porter’s point of view, they’ve found it themselves.

Notorious New Labour Knobhead Phil Woolas is facing explusion from Parliament after a court ruled today that he’d broken electoral law during his successful re-election campaign in May. This is after he lied throughout his election material, which falsely claimed that his rival Lib Dem candidate was being “wooed” by Islamist extremists.

Indeed, it didn’t stop there: Woolas decided to centre his whole campaign around the “tough” line he’d taken as immigration minister from 2008-2010. He managed to weave a whole fantasy around this: that “militant Muslims” were waging a war against him in alliance with a local Lib Dem candidate and his party’s crazy plans to circumvent local planning rules to build Mosques in every street, and give an amnesty to “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants”. The special election court’s ruling today means that Woolas will be barred from parliament for three years, and a by-election will now be held in his seat.

Woolas claims to have come into politics as an anti-racist campaigner – he joined the Labour Party in college and ran a “campaign against Paki-bashing”. He was elected in 1997, in one of the most ethnically diverse seats in the country, Oldham East. Phil said in 2008: “It’s had a race riot, it’s had a huge BNP presence and it’s a marginal seat. It’s a complete crucible. But we’ve never had a BNP councillor – I hope I’ve had something to do with that by getting in and getting dirty.”

It’s now fairly evident what Woolas meant by “getting in and getting dirty”.  He didn’t mean confronting the BNP’s ideas, politically and in the streets. He didn’t mean proving the BNP’s politics to be based on lies and hysteria, division and hate. No, it’s now clear that he meant taking the votes of the BNP by seizing the ground of the BNP. And not by talking about real issues that the far-right do occasionally bring up, but by pandering to their obsession with “Islamic extremism”, immigration, and asylum seekers. The Labour Party were so impressed that, after years of scapegoating Muslim women and refugees, he was given the role of Immigration Minister in 2008. He proceeded with glee in his new role of kicking out desperate asylum seekers, attacking charities that offer vital help to them and appeasing the right wing press with his tough talk on “immigration caps” and jobs for the “indigenous population”.

Phil Woolas is a racist fuck, no mistaking that. He made a calculated decision that whipping up racial tension in his area – which as he helpfully reminds us, suffered serious race riots less than a decade ago –  would be a sure-fire vote winner. Much of the commentary surrounding Woolas’ outrageous election material has stated that his leaflets read more like something the BNP or UKIP would produce than a supposed social-democratic party. But Woolas didn’t face victimisation or even official condemnation in his party – in fact his outright Islamophobia was applauded, with “lefty saviour” Ed Miliband appointing him as a shadow Home Office minister, responsible for immigration, in his new opposition cabinet!

They weren’t the leaflets of the BNP or UKIP, they were just the leaflets of a Labour Party beset by racist, anti-immigrant populism. All Woolas did was take twelve years of racist Labour policies to their logical conclusion andstuck it on a leaflet. What he said wasn’t much worse than what the wider party was proclaiming during the election – and then when Labour lost, the leadership became stuck on blaming the fact that their discourse on the issue hadn’t been right-wing enough, that they’d “failed to connect”. With the exception of Diane Abbott (who finished last with 7% of the vote), every candidate in the recent Labour leadership election was united in holding this view. Andy Burnham said of immigration, in a comment surely worthy of the BNP: ”People aren’t racist, but they say it has increased tension, stopped them getting access to housing and lowered their wages”. Go figure.

Burnham is lying – the Labour Party are convinced that most working class people are racist. No one would dispute that racism is a large problem in our society – but the way to get around this is to challenge and confront racist ideas wherever they come from, not pander to it through racist immigration laws and anti-terror legislation that serves little purpose beyond being a useful tool to harass Muslims.

Phil Woolas may have gone through a technicality of electoral law , but the ideas he represents are still every bit ingrained within the Labour Party.

"I'm looking at you funny cos I am a bit funny"

Nadine Dorries is the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire. She’s a corrupt liar. She’s one of the greatest threats to reproductive rights in the UK through her attempts to get parliament to reduce the term limit for abortion. And she also exploits the very real problem of stalking and abuse to try and avoid criticism – in fact she doesn’t like people looking into her activities as an elected representative one little bit.

Nadine has been in the news this week because of a public spat with blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. He and some others have been working to document the frequent lies she tells and her flagrant corruption. She has responded by accusing him of being a stalker, but also by admitting that what she writes on her own blog is “70% fiction.”

Nadine was criticised in a Commons report last week for using her blog to try and make it look as if she was living primarily in her constituency, and lying to her constituents about how much time she was spending locally. She had been under investigation for her expenses claims, because she was claiming for her home in Bedfordshire as a second home, meaning she got about £24 grand from the public purse for it. But she was cleared of wrongdoing because although she wasn’t staying mainly in London, she also wasn’t staying in Bedfordshire – she actually lives in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire!

Defending her lies on her blog about where she was at any particular time, she said:

“My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”

She has previously attacked the media for “bullying” MPs over the expenses scandal (God forbid that journalists would look into how they’re spending our money!), famously saying on her blog that MPs were all checking up on each other because “everyone was fearing a suicide” (a post she later deleted when she realised how bad it made her look.) She again developed this theme to account for her blog lying:

“In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.”

Reassure them by lying?

She also went on to claim that she had been lying about her whereabouts to conceal them from the aforementioned blogging “stalker” Tim Ireland. However, the lies on her blog date back to before Ireland had even taken any interest her, and yet again she is trying to make herself look like a victim when she has been uncovered doing wrong, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention.

The story of how she came to be targeting Ireland is a complicated one, that he explains in full on his blog. However, it dates back to some investigative journalism he did that exposed some of the extremely dodgy activities of a group of Tory MPs and their associates. In January last year, he uncovered that a man called Glen Jenvey, a professional associate of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer (who btw is chair of the Commons sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism), was going round the internet pretending to be an Islamic extremist. His aim was to create tabloid headlines and whip up anti-Muslim racism, based on lies.

When Ireland exposed this, he made himself a target for the Tory lie machine, who got hold of his (ex-directory) home address and started publishing it around the internet claiming he was a convicted paedophile and in league with Islamic terrorists. They handed this information to people who they thought were hostile, including members of the BNP. When Ireland began contacting Tory MPs to demand this stopped, they began the story that he was an “electronic stalker” who was bombarding them with emails and phone calls. This is a real misrepresentation of what happened, and I know if I was in his shoes I would be going considerably more ape shit than he appears to have done. From this however emerged the allegation that he was stalking a number of MPs, including Nadine Dorries.

One of the main people responsible for the attacks, a man called Charlie Flowers, said he was acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries. When this was brought to her attention, she claimed she had taken action (another lie) and then claimed she had reported Ireland to the police for stalking.

Ireland has responded to the allegation by asking for any evidence of the abusive emails she claims he sent, or even any evidence she has spoken to the police, as he has had no contact from them. She can’t even produce a crime number for her supposed report because it’s bollocks. Since then the cabal of Tory liars of which she has part have also initiated false allegations against Ireland’s children that they were guilty of criminal damage.

When a constituent tried to challenge Nadine on her smearing of Tim Ireland, she went on to launch a venomous attack against her as well. The woman in question blogs and tweets as Humphrey Cushion, and also has arthritis meaning she has had to give up her job as a carer temporarily while she waits for a foot operation. She does not qualify for benefits for disability, however, Dorries and chums decided to go all out describing her as a “benefits cheat”.

“Do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it’s someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP . . .

Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is . . . then don’t expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get off your Twitter and get a job.”

The hand of hope - on Snopes and everything

All this bizarre behaviour shouldn’t surprise us given some of Nadine’s wackier political outbursts. She’s most well known for her attempts to lower the abortion term limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, based on totally made up science and yet more lies. In the last parliament she put a private member’s bill up, which was defeated. In the debate she lied that polls show that 75% of women back her position (the real figure is 15% and only when it’s fed to them as an option.)

She also repeated the ‘hand of hope’ hoax. This is a photo that was taken during surgery on a fetus that it was claimed showed it reaching out to hold the surgeon’s finger, proof, claim anti-abortionists, that fetuses are fully formed little people and killing them is murder. Except it’s bollocks, the surgeon says what happened is he accidentally pulled the hand out of the womb, after which he tucked it back in. It’s an anti-abortion urban legend – it’s on Snopes and everything. (She does back up her scientific credentials however by being one of the MPs that backs homeopathic hospitals becoming part of the NHS.)

She also campaigned against what she claimed was an attempt by unions to “ban high heels at work.” The origin of the story was that the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists had submitted a motion to the Trades Union Congress asking employers (many of whom force women to wear high heels as part of a dress code) to consider the serious ill health wearing them all day can cause to the feet, legs and back. No call to ban, but that didn’t stop Nadine from smearing this perfectly sensible appeal as political correctness gone mad.

It's political incorrectness (lying) gone MAAAD!

And then there’s Channel 4 documentary, Tower Block of Commons, in which MPs were invited to live for a couple of days with people on welfare. Nadine took part, and managed to alienate the women she was staying with so much they set up a Twitter page called ‘I hate MPs’. They claim that she’d hidden 50 quid in her bra to avoid the reality of living on their income, and that she offered them temazepam!

“South Acton hates Nadine ­Dorries. Get her off the estate . . . Nadine Dorries is a lying two-faced bitch. I know first-hand,” they wrote.

All in all, Nadine is a bit of a train wreck of an MP, and if she was under proper media scrutiny rather than individuals on the internet being left to expose her she would have been forced to resign. Apart from being comedic in how much she lies, it’s good to read up on her as a cautionary tale as what we are up against in the Tories. And when it comes to the investigation that sparked all the trouble for Tim Ireland, it’s yet another warning that if we want to counter the politics of the SDL/EDL and the BNP, we should understand that the lies they tell about Islam and Muslims don’t just originate with them, but as much with members of UKIP, Labour and the Tories as well. In this case, there was in fact direct collusion with the BNP to promote a shared agenda.

Bonus: Check out the dedicated blog, The Nadine Dorries project.

Christine O’Donnell is the Republican candidate for the US Senate in a special election to be held in Delaware in November. She defeated the Republican insider candidate, a guy who’s been in Congress for ages and used to be the state’s governor, with the support of the mass movement for paranoia and fantasy known as the Tea Party.

The Tea Party are a radical right wing alliance of nutters that have been taking over the Republican party, and their success in putting O’Donnell in the candidacy is a sign of their strength. Their movement is opposed to the government spending money on the economy or healthcare, as well as black people in positions of power, as can be seen from the number of birthers among them. Their racism even extends to recently holding a rally in Arizona IN FAVOUR of their new apartheid laws against people of Latin American descent. They’ve provided a rallying cry and natural home for a lot of Americans who are seriously confused about reality. These same nutters have looked for wacky people like them to represent them in office.

Christine O’Donnell is just such a mentalist. In uni she converted from Catholicism to become an Evengelical Christian, and takes the Bible super seriously. The way she sees it, it’s not just a holy book but also a biology textbook, after she claimed there was “just as much, if not more evidence” supporting creationism over evolution, science and dinosaur bones that are way, way old.

But perhaps her most well known pro-Bible belter is her stance on masturbation. She made herself famous as a vocal opponent of taking matters into your own hands. Check the video below of her denouncing wanking on MTV in 1996:

In the video, she famously says “If he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture,” which seems to imply that she hasn’t heard that WOMEN CAN MASTURBATE TOO. This fits pretty well with her view of women and what they should be -- dutiful Stepford wives living meek and quiet lives and never expressing any thoughts or desires of their own, sexual or otherwise. Men, on the other hand, are raging buckets of hormones just driven to satisfy urges they can’t control, as seen from her comments that nude sunbathing would make it “very hard [sic] for their boyfriend not to want to take it further”, and her call to ban freak dancing because it was responsible for an “epidemic of date rape” (personally I thought rapists were responsible for rape, but there you go.)

Quite why she’s decided to take up such a lost cause as trying to persuade people that masturbation is bad is beyond most sane observers, especially considering the Bible never mentions it. Her anti-wank crusade has been cobbled together on the basis of interpreting other bits of the Bible and what they have to say about “lust”.

O’Donnell calls herself a feminist, but a bit like her twisted understanding of what goes on in our pants, she doesn’t seem to be very clear on what that means:

“I consider myself an authentic feminist. Not as defined by the modern movement. And, let me clarify that a little bit more. I was an English major, so break it down: -ist means one who celebrates. As a feminist, I celebrate my femininity.”

Aha, I see what you did there! Except feminism categorically isn’t about reinforcing a traditional, patriarchal view of women as being essentially “feminine” (submissive, chaste, wearing petticoats, chained to the kitchen sink etc.) Feminism is for everybody because it wants to free us all from the tyranny of men and women having to be defined by false ideas of femininity and masculinity. For Christine O’Donnell though it’s about biblical literalism and keeping your hands out of your pants.

For a picture of what she wants women to be like, we have to go to an unusual place for the debating of gender roles: Middle

This is what a feminist looks like, apparently

Earth! Seemingly the fantasies of her political views reflect a real love of fantasy literature, after she described the Tea Party as being like Aslan (“not a tame lion”), and tried to prove J.R.R. Tolkien was a feminist.

Even the most hardened fan of Lord of the Rings would have to admit that Tolkien didn’t really write in many female characters. And almost all of them are pretty, stupid and not much given to swordplay, orc fighting or anything that the books are actually about. Tolkien was an old fashioned old guy who spent most of his time making up tales with other old fashioned old guys, and exciting as they may be they’re hardly progressive on the issue of women. Their role is to be the beautiful eye candy cooking up banquets for when the heroes get home. Sounds great, reckons Christine.

In her essay, ‘The Women of Middle Earth,’ O’Donnell describes characters like Belladonna Baggins (mother of Bilbo), who, by her own admission is in the book for “about four lines”, as “content, even utterly satisfied, in the role of a wife and mother.”

“To me, Belladonna is the unseen grandmother whose prayers guide and protect her family as they go on to accomplish great tasks. She is the picture of a woman who has led a full life. The few lines written about her tell us that Belladonna did not have many adventures after she married, for her husband provided a great home for her. Belladonna’s independence in her earlier adventurous life before marriage provides a catalyst for Bilbo, her male heir . . .

. . .Some critics claim that Tolkien’s serene version of femininity is offensive to the modern female viewer. As a modern female viewer, I find the assumption itself offensive . . . Everything about Tolkien’s Arwen is tranquil, serene, calming. These qualities are part of the charm of the womanhood she expresses. There are many types of women in the world. Arwen represents one of them. She represents a pillar of calm that is a source of strength for her man. Her great contribution to the war is the strength she provides to the future King.”

Women: Know Your Place (in The Shire).

O'Donnell's natural supporters may be alienated by the latest revelations

This week it came out that she’d done her own small bit to make the world a bit more like the one inhabited by elves and wizards, when she revealed that when she was younger she “dabbled in witchcraft”!

“I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven … I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there and stuff like that … We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

This came to light after footage of her on a talk show back in the 90s was released by it’s host, Bill Maher. The best part is he says he has loads more embarassing material of her which he will keep releasing until she comes on his show, (“It’s like a hostage crisis: every week you don’t show up, I throw another body out”), so the laughs at the expense of the politically crazy look set to keep on coming.

Bonus: Just so you don’t think this was a lone episode of the Tea Party selecting a total mad bastard as a candidate, check out Tim D’Annunzio, a guy they tried to make a Congressional candidate in North Carolina, who believes the US government is the antichrist, believed he was the messiah, that God was going to drop a 1000 mile high pyramid in Greenland and that he’d found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.

Michael O’Leary is the head of Ryanair, one of the richest men in Ireland, and loves nothing more than seeing his own name in the papers. The main job he does for his company is making ridiculous public statements about what cheapskates Ryanair are, like that they might start charging you to use the toilet in flight, or that they’ll have a “fat tax” for larger passengers.

The reason he does this is to make everyone who reads his wacky ideas think “Fucking hell, Ryanair are cheapskate bastards.” Although maybe this will mean you hate him and his company, you will associate it in your mind with cheapness, and check their site first when you’re going away. His whole public persona is built around basically saying to people “I am a total dick, and YOU FUCKING LOVE IT.” He calls it his “dog and pony show.”

It isn’t just an act though. He actually is a knobhead. Although he likes to paint himself as some kind of champion of the common man, but he attended Clongowes public school, described as “the Eton of Ireland.” He’s tried to completely ban trade unions from representing Ryanair staff -- the Irish union Impact say they have 270 outstanding cases of victimising and bullying. Staff have to pay for their own uniforms, training and meals, and office staff have to supply their own pens and are banned from charging their phones at work. He wants total deregulation of the airline industry, meaning your safety at 40,000 feet is in the hands of total free market gangsters -- he described the British Airports Authority as “overcharging rapists.”

It’s not just staff he bullies as well -- in 2002 a woman who won free flights for life as Ryanair’s millionth customer was awarded €67,500 damages after a judge found she’d been abused and bullied when she tried to complain that she’d started being charged again.

On top of all this he’s also a climate change denier, a position that makes quite a lot of sense for the head of a rapidly expanding airline. “Do I believe there is global warming? No, I believe it’s all a load of bullshit,” he said. Scientists argue there is global warming because they wouldn’t get half of the funding they get now if it turns out to be completely bogus. It’s horsehit.” Yes Michael, it makes total sense for scientists to make up something that runs counter to the interests of almost everyone with money, and who would have a vested interest in influencing research. Scientists give factual scientific opinions, not ones tailored to suit an agenda like you do.

In 2004 he bought a taxi license for his private Mercedes so he could drive it through Dublin bus lanes. As he put it to one interviewer: “I don’t give a shite if nobody likes me.”

His latest brainwave really takes the biscuit though. Last week he went on record saying Ryanair might get rid of co-pilots. Instead he said, if anything happens to the pilot a member of cabin crew can take over because “computers do most of the flying now.”

This may be a step too far for Ryanair passengers. The idea of sitting in a giant metal box a couple of miles in a sky that’s being controlled someone who’s training mainly covers flogging smokeless cigarettes and scratch cards. But Michael tried to re-assure us with the claim “”In 25 years with over about 10m flights, we’ve had one pilot who suffered a heart attack in flight and he landed the plane.”

Not Hogwarts, but Clongowes, the incredibly posh public school where O'Leary went

Which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be TOTAL BOLLOCKS. In a response letter to the Financial Times, Capt. Evan Cullen, President of the Irish Airline Pilot’s Association, spoke up on behalf of the pilot in question’s family, who were quite upset by O’Leary’s claims. The reason they were upset is because the guy in question did actually die. He didn’t get proper help from the cabin crew quickly enough because Ryanair hadn’t trained them in what to do if the pilot was incapacitated (I bet they’ll train them to LAND A PLANE th0ugh.) When doctors finally made it to the cockpit they declared the pilot clinically dead. They managed to revive him after “strenuous effort” but he later died. It may shock you to learn this guy did not land the plane, on account of being dead.

More importantly, what the incident in question does illustrate is the absolute necessity of co-pilots. Although the pilot was clinically dead, the plane landed safely because it had a co-pilot who was able to take over. There is a reason that when you go up in the sky you have a back-up in case anything goes wrong with the main person keeping you all from crashing into the ground.

As Capt. Cullen put it, in dead pan style, “That he [O'Leary] is prepared to make such statements while, apparently, not being fully briefed on these important safety matters is entirely consistent with Ryanair’s ‘innovative’ approach to staff relations, safety, pilot fatigue and related matters.”

But in an even better response, a senior Ryanair pilot came up with another suggestion to help the company save money. Capt. Morgan Fischer, who’s head of pilot training for the company, wrote:

“I would propose that Ryanair replace the chief executive with a probationary cabin crew member currently earning about €13,200 (£11,000) net a year. Ryanair would benefit by saving millions of euros in salary, benefits and stock options. Further, there will be no need to petition either Boeing or governmental aviation regulators for approval to replace the CEO with a cabin crew member; as such approval would not be required.”

We think this is a great idea, although we think that even then cabin crew/CEOs could be perhaps at least be paid a living wage. We’d much rather they were doing his job, which essentially involves being an arse in public on a regular basis, than flying planes. Straight off the bat this would save €241,000 in his salary, not to mention all the other money he rakes in from the company. It’s reckoned that he’s worth about €300 million, but nobody is sure. As he put it himself: “Money used to be my motivation. You always want to make the first million. Then you get to £10m and you think about £100m. But somewhere in the middle -- do not ask me where -- you stop worrying about money.” What a knob.

We doubt his cabin crew, existing on about £11,000 a year, have stopped worrying about money. Although we’ve been slagging the idea of cabin crew being made into pilots, that doesn’t mean we should disrespect the vital job they do, protecting people’s safety and making sure everything is ok in the body of the plane. The fact that on a Ryanair flight the main thing they have to do is sell stuff to you is an indictment of the company, not them, and they deserve Michael O’Leary’s millions much more than he ever will.

The Others are shocked by the consequences of Michael O’Leary’s penny pinching.

In love with himself: Bjorn Lomborg looks like he used to be in a boy band but then got too old

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and political scientist at the Copenhagen Business School who shot to international prominence a couple of years ago with his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’

In it he basically argued that taking action to tackle climate change would be too expensive and a waste of money. He tried to show that the risks associated with ecological destruction had been overstated; despite having no particular expertise in climate science he thought he knew better than pretty much all the other scientists in the world. As a result he has faced a lot of complaints about the serious scientific flaws in his work, from bodies like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientific American magazine (don’t worry, the right wing Economist mag rushed to his defence!)

Basically his argument is that tackling climate change doesn’t amount to value for money, and if governments around the world are going to spend big cash on a major problem they’d be better placed getting to grips with poverty or AIDS (of course ignoring the fact that poverty, climate change and the spread of preventable diseases are all consequences of capitalism). This has rightly led to him being ridiculed for underplaying one of the greatest threats to ever face civilisation. But last week, The Guardian and other papers were delighted to report that he’d changed his mind and has declared that actually spending £100 billion a year on climate change would be good value for money. Thanks for that Bjorn, not like you’ve been wasting our time up until now!

Although he was never an out and out climate change denier, and accepted its reality, Lomborg became a poster boy for the far right effort to deny scientific reality, that at its root is motivated by people who want to defend capitalism in general, and the energy corporations in particular. So the fact that he’s changed his stance is on one level kind of good news. That is, until you look into what he actually proposes doing.

How Lomborg would like to see us spend a good chunk of this money is the exceedingly mental idea of geoengineering. This means gigantic mega-projects by which humans would attempt to take control of the global climate and control the weather, in order to try and counteract global warming. Projects like sending thousands of ships into the Pacific to spray saltwater mist into the air and make clouds more reflective to deflect heat back into space (one that Lomborg seems particularly keen on), or filling the sea with iron filings to encourage the growth of massive algal blooms that would then lock up carbon in themselves.

One of the ships Bjorn would like to see pumping mist into the clouds. The reason it looks like cheap sci fi concept art is no one has been crazy enough to do it yet

What’s wrong with this? Lomborg puts it quite well himself when he says that geoengineering “could lead to really bad stuff.” Basically, the global climate is an incredibly complex system, with huge numbers of different factors affecting it. Already we’re seeing the unexpected impact of our actions through anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) global warming. There’s absolutely no way to predict what unforseen consequences would result from mega-projects like these. It’s a bit like pulling a thread from a big complex tapestry, and then trying to repair it by pulling out other threads and tying them together to replace them – you’re almost certain to do more damage that you can’t predict.

His other solutions are generally along the lines of finding techno-fixes that will allow us to keep up capitalist society pretty much as it is, but maybe with some greener technology. This is where we get to the rub of why people like Bjorn Lomborg will be unable to prevent climate catastrophe. Fundamentally, what his work does is apply capitalist economics to the global climate and ecosphere, something that capitalism fundamentally can’t understand.

There are some simple facts about life on Earth. All species evolve in ecosystems that support them, and if they exhaust the capacity of that ecosystem to support them then they’re in trouble; if a predator eats all the prey to extinction, then pretty soon it’s extinct as well. Humans have done very well at using technology to offset our need for the natural environment to support us, but ultimately we are just another species, and need to recognise that we now need to choose between the short term survival of our ever expending, ever impoverishing socio-economic system, and long term survival. Lomborg’s line up until now has been to choose disaster in the long run, because it would be a waste of money to prevent it now. Now he’s changed his tune, but he’s still only a capitalist economist, trying to find ways to make our survival as part of the global ecosystem economically viable.

Even if we pretend for a minute that getting technology to fix everything for us would work, instead of just causing more problems, where does it end? Some scientists have tried to calculate the economic worth of all the tasks that the natural world performs for free that allows human civilisation to carry on as it does – purifying water and air, regulating climate, keeping the soil fertile etc. They found it ran to trillions of dollars every day. The more we damage these natural processes, and the more we rely on ourselves and our machines to do the job, the more we will start to take these costs on to ourselves, instead of just trying to live as a part of natural systems, not as a replacement for them.

The survival of civilisation isn’t economically viable under capitalism. It is completely possible for the human race to choose to live better, more equally and in a way that is sustainable over the long term. But to do that we need to get rid of capitalism. The future has a name, and it’s ecosocialism.

Glenn Beck is someone we’ve written about here before. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to check him out on youtube, he is one of the most prominent figures of the American right media, with 3 hours of radio and 1 hour of telly EVERY DAY to push his extreme agenda on to the public in the US. Some of his views make the Daily Mail look like a left wing propaganda sheet.

He’s also a relentlessly self promoting narcissist, who has raked in millions of dollars from his shows and books. He frequently fakes crying on air to try and give some fake sincerity to his constant verbal diarrhea of incoherent threats and garbage. He’s a convert to Mormonism (dum dum dum dum dum), mainly, by his own admission, so he could have sex with the woman who is now his wife (who btw he constantly insults, mocks and belittles in his show.)

Beck’s latest money making scheme is another book, ‘The Plan’, which apparently will detail his “100 year plan to restore our great country,” along with the upcoming paperback edition of his previous hit ‘Arguing with Idiots’ (takes one to know one.)

To promote these books, he’d planned a massive launch in Washington DC. That was, until he came up with an even better idea -- get a charity to pay for it so it doesn’t cost him anything! Although the event this weekend was originally billed straight up as what it was, a book launch designed to generate more cash for the Beck empire, it’s now being described as the “Restoring Honour” rally. Quite what the message of this event will be is pretty hard to work out, apart from a vague focus on the American military being great.

The event is supposed to be raising money for the charity Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This group provides counselling and support to the families of those killed on US military Special Ops missions around the world, including college education scholarships for their children. Let’s leave aside for a minute that a lot of these dead soldiers weren’t “heroes” but in fact scumbags sent to other people’s countries to kill, kidnap and terrorise in the name of American imperialism; that’s not the fault of their families and so some support for them is probably OK.

But all the money raised for the charity will first have to go for paying for the rally, featuring keynote speakers Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. So, these two self-promoting far right lunatics are getting a gigantic national platform provided to them FOR FREE. The estimated $1 million cost of organising the event will be met entirely by SOWF, allowing Beck to get in all the news and sell a whole lot more books.

Because it’s organised by a charity, the event can’t be “political” according to tax rules. But what that specifically means is that the speakers can’t endorse a particular political party or candidate; apart from that, they can rant away about their far out views as much as they like. The fact that the rally is also being sponsored by groups like the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, a right wing organisation behind many of the Tea Party protests, shows how much of a joke the idea of the rally as “non political” is.

However, the promotional stuff that Beck has put out for the event is a bit toned down, which in fact makes it even harder to watch. At least when this guy is ranting like a crazy person he can be entertaining to watch, like a car crash. But I challenge you to watch either of these two ads and not feel your last meal start inexorably rising towards your mouth.

“You see, I learned something today.”

But it gets worse! It turns out the date that Beck has picked for a gigantic celebration of himself is in fact the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr Martin Luther King Jnr made his ‘I have a dream’ speech.

Given that the event is inextricably linked with the racist Tea Party movement, dedicated to a far right politics of attacking the working class and motivated by a hatred of the first black president, understandably the surviving members of the 60s civil rights movement are a bit pissed off about this. Glenn Beck’s reaction? To claim that he and his supporters are “the inheritors of the civil rights movement”!! You couldn’t make this shit up. Check out what he says in the clips below on the subject, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a close collaborator of King’s in the civil rights movement, slamming comeback.

Beck’s insulting claim to have any right to the legacy of the civil rights movement is based on pissing on the legacy of what he actually stood for. Beck claims that the left has lied about what King. He tries to claim that King was in fact an individualist or even a conservative. In hijacking the memory of the 1963 march on Washington he wants us to forget it was actually called the March for Jobs and Freedom, and was organised by Socialist and trade unionist A Phillip Randolph to demand federal investment in new jobs.

Martin Luther King might not have gone as far left in his politics as we in SSY do, but at root he was a left wing figure. Around him in the civil rights movement were a host of socialists and communists who saw the fight for racial equality and desegregation as inextricably linked from the fight against capitalism. King himself recognised that the battle against racism was in fact a battle against the socio-economic foundations of American society, saying:

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

As the 60s went on, King became more and more radicalised by events. Whereas before he had seen the way forward as appealing to the Democratic Party and the “moral conscience” of white liberals, after riots in Watts and seeing the horrors of the war in Vietnam, he increasingly saw the importance of appealing to the working class. In the last weeks before he was assassinated, he was in Memphis showing solidarity with striking black bin workers, some of the lowest paid in the US.

He also developed an uncompromising opposition to the war in Vietnam and US imperialism, denouncing the war as clearly linked with poverty and oppression at home. This drew the condemnation of many of his former liberal supporters, who found that messing with US geopolitical interests was a step too far.

Dr Martin Luther King wasn’t a full on socialist as we would understand it, but he was a social democrat who wanted to see an end to racism and imperialism, massive redistribution of wealth and huge government investment programme to provide decent, well paid jobs for the poor. He’d recognised the need to organise outside of the two-party system, and was preparing for the possibility of an independent run for President on a ticket of Peace and Justice.

For Glenn Beck to try and deny the legacy of King’s left wing ideas, and to claim that his racist mob of pro-capitalist crazies has any continuity with the civil rights movement would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting. His far right movement wants to undo everything achieved for the oppressed in the US during the revolutionary moment of the 60s, and he must be fought every step of the way.

“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Martin Luther King.

It's a damned impertenince that you unwashed socialist chaps should put a fellow of my standing on your website!

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a man who talks like he’s a character in Jeeves and Wooster stories, has stood down as leader of UKIP. The main reason he’s given for doing this is his own raging poshboy incompetence.

The aristocratic Pearson, a would-be even-more-crap Oswald Mosley, took over from fellow toff Nigel Farrage last year. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a blundering idiot who makes a fool of himself on telly and doesn’t even know what’s in his own manifesto. His performances displayed all the arrogance of a traditional British aristocrat furious at being challenged by upstart journalists of no good breeding stock.

The video below has been doing the rounds today after his announcement, in which his performance was dubbed “the worst campaign interview ever” by his natural friends in the right wing press, who were forced to admit one of their own was a bit of an embarrassment.

To be fair to the old fool, he fully acknowledges that he’s a throwback to an era where the ruling class stayed in power in Britain by birth alone, and didn’t have to try and make themselves look good on telly. His resignation statement makes clear that he knows he’s “not much good at party politics.”

He says he’s going to concentrate on his other interests. Predictably enough for someone as upper class as he is, one of the main ones is slaughtering animals for his own pleasure, as he’s the chair of the deerstalking committee of the Countryside Alliance.

Although we're glad to see him go, Pearson's resignation may turn out to be bad news for Muslims and deer

He’s also going to be able to devote more time to his racism, a great hobby of his. As UKIP leader, Pearson famously invited rightwing anti Muslim racist politician Geert Wilders to the UK, which may turn out to have been one of the early stages of the growing alliance between the (largely working class) street thugs of the EDL and their aristocratic would-be leadership among the racist toffs of UKIP.

But now he’s resigned he can focus on “the [non existent fantasy] threat from Islamism.” Apparently one of his interests includes “the relationship between good and evil,” so we can probably expect him to be seen leading the crusade to save Britain from an imaginary threat over the coming years.

Although it’s always good to see the post-fascists of UKIP in trouble, we shouldn’t get too excited about today’s announcement. As UKIP themselves are quick to point out, the last election did see them increase their vote, and although they remain a fringe party staffed by lunatics (hi Kris!), their potential as the seedbed of a growing extreme right mainstream movement in the UK is worrying. The continued antics of UKIP just point to the need for anti-fascists and anti-racists to widen their understanding of the threat we face from the far right, to include post-fascists and official racists, both in UKIP and the mainstream parties of government.

Pearson: resigning to spend more time fighting fantasy evil that doesn't really exist