Showing posts with label U.K.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.K.. Show all posts

Saturday, April 12, 2014

%*(#!^& brilliant!


OK, this isn't safe for work. Or your little kids.

But come to think of it, neither is life.

Anyway, watch the brilliant video that came out of a social experiment by the British poverty charity, The Pilion Trust, to see whether people really do care about the poor. Turns out they do. Which sets the charity up to deliver the advertising kill shot.

Just watch.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Noise nazis mind the bollocks


The sun not only has set on the British Empire, but now it's set on what's left of British civilization as well.

Never mind the lads and ladettes, skirmishing with the bobbies in the street . . . or on the street, prostrate in their own vomit.

Never mind last year's mindless riots all across England.

Never mind Hackgate . . . or Rupertgate, if you will.

Never mind austerity, either.


AND NEVER MIND Sarah Ferguson, for God's sake. All that could happen anywhere, and probably will. Hell, even Fergie -- the British one -- is kinda like if Snooki and Britney had gone to finishing school.

No, you know a great nation is finished well and good when it pulls the plug on Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney. Together.

In concert.

For the first time ever.

Why? All because a bunch of Westminster Council noise nazis dared not to, in the name of history, turn back the hands of time in the face of a 10:30 p.m. Hyde Park "noise curfew." How twee . . . in a vaguely fascist kind of way.


When Britain's contributions to music begin to equal its achievements in dentistry, it's just time for 'em to hang it up and let the French run the joint. Again.

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Just the Libyans' way of saying 'Thanks!'


If you see a Libyan in one of your military cemeteries, and he's kicking over headstones and trying to fell a large cross with a sledgehammer, do not be alarmed.

He's just saying "thank you."

Unfortunately, irresponsible journalistic rabble-rousing could lead some among the British people to believe the worst as they assess certain cultural differences between the Western and Arab worlds, and thus be needlessly gobsmacked by online videos of freedom-loving Libyan rebels desecrating one of their World War II cemeteries in the north African sh*thole emerging democracy.

It would have been most helpful if Libyans had helped some of the more confused Brits bridge the cultural divide -- say by sending a nice exploding floral array to No. 10 Downing Street with a sentimental card attached.

Something like,
"We care enough to vandalize the infidels' very best."

THAT COULD HAVE
gone a long way toward ameliorating this kind of bad press in The Telegraph:
In the videos posted online, headstones marking the final resting place of the famous Desert Rats in the Benghazi War Cemetery were torn down and crucifixes attacked with hammers.

More than 1,000 soldiers from the 7th Armoured Division were buried there after serving in the battle for control of Libya and Egypt between 1941 and 1943.

The men in the footage, seen by the Mail on Sunday, are heard saying: "They are dogs, they are dogs."

Among the graves defiled by the extremists was the gravestone commemorating the Reverend Geoffrey Bond, who was the chaplain to the forces until his death in 1941 at the age of 30.

His nephew, David Bell, told the newspaper the cemetery attack was "greatly upsetting, a disaster."

Describing the reverend, he said: "I was only a baby when he died but my mother absolutely adored him.

"She spoke of his special aura, a way he had of making everyone feel better about themselves."

Others buried at the cemetery include Geoffrey Keyes, who was the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army when he was killed aged 24 during a raid on the suspected headquarters of Rommel.

Former diplomat Edward Chaplin, who heads the War Graves Commission, said: "Clearly it’s a terrible thing to have happened. It’s shocking that attacks of this nature should be carried out against a cemetery. We take very seriously the preservation of these memorials to those who have given their lives in wars."

Speaking on the Sky News Murnaghan programme, Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne said the Libyan government has been "extremely apologetic" about the desecration.

But he said the attacks were not aimed particularly at Britain or Christians, and did not represent a Libyan response to last year's military action when British aircraft took part in a campaign which toppled Colonel Gadaffi from his role as dictator in the North African country.
THANK THE Mythological Opiate of the Masses Formerly Known as "God" there is at least one evolved life form -- namely, Jeremy Browne -- in the British Isles. Perhaps he can persuade the average dolt (like newspaper writers who can't tell a cross from a crucifix) how absurd it is to think Muslim mobs whacking away at crosses and kicking over headstones in a British military graveyard might be casting the slightest aspersion on either Britannia or followers of Jesus Christ.

I only wish he would have added, for diversity's sake, how idiotic it would be to infer that the population of a Muslim country might have some problem with Judaism just because this particular cultural expression also involved destroying headstones featuring the Star of David while repeating "They are dogs, they are dogs." Not to mention "kafir."

That truly would be unfortunate. If left unchecked, taxpayers in any number of NATO countries might get the wrong idea about the rightness of spending billions and billions of pounds, dollars and euros -- and endangering the lives of thousands of allied military personnel -- on helping Libyans build a bigger, smellier sh*thole modern liberal democracy in the Islamic world.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

So much for 'products of conception'


We have met the Antichrist, and he is us.

What else is there to say about this story in
The Telegraph, one of Britain's national dailies, reporting that a group of medical ethicists affiliated with Oxford advocates the killing of unwanted newborns, being that there's no difference between a newborn and a fetus. Their position was outlined in an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

I suppose pro-lifers should at least welcome the dropping of pretenses and the acknowledgment that, no, there is no biological difference between a newborn and a fetus in the womb. Nor is there any moral difference between the killing of one and the killing of the other.

And I suppose that we could, as well, appreciate the irony of one of the authors -- in the wake of the predictable death threats -- saying that "those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were 'fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.'"

Aye, there's the rub.

It really isn't ironic at all. The "fanatics" really might be "opposed to the very values of a liberal society" -- at least the one we presently have, which holds that one creates his own moral universe and, indeed, his own reality. In the Oxford death-dealers' reality, "babies are not 'actual persons' and do not have a 'moral right to life.'"


THIS IS the "liberal society" we all have been busy creating the past number of decades, one that perhaps may have been made inevitable by the dawning of the Enlightenment. I mean, by what objective standard was the Enlightenment enlightened? By what -- or whose -- authority do we proclaim such?

Exactly.

In liberal society, all that is required for the repellent to become the height of morality is us saying it is. Or at least enough people with enough authority (and enough guns) to make it so. And the first step is getting a serious journal to legitimize your crackpot theory that up is down, left is right, green is red, wrong is right, and right is wrong.

Or that "babies are not 'actual persons' and do not have a 'moral right to life.'" Enter the
Journal of Medical Ethics, and suddenly we don't need to pretend anymore that what's inside the womb is materially different somehow from that which pops out of it. Death to "the products of conception"!

Now we can get on to the real business of categorizing Lebensunwertes Leben.
The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.

“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

However, they did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.
PETER SINGER would be so proud.

So would Adolf Hitler.

One way or another, if civilization is to survive, our "liberal society" must be destroyed. I mean, given the most recent empirical data, you'd have to agree that it's been demonstrated to be nothing more than a "potential" society at best and therefore has no justifiable "right to life."

Pull the plug now. We must make room for something less crippled, less retarded and more robust. It's only logical.

Little pig, little pig, give us a quote


Bloody brilliant! And bloody well spot on in its portrayal of the present media landscape.

Friday, August 12, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: Cheerio, got a match?


I wanna be . . . anarchy.

Oh, wait, Anarchy, we got. Maybe I want to aim for something more original -- like putting out a kick-ass music program every week.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

And we call that little something 3 Chords & the Truth. It's a little bit punk; it's a little bit country. It's a lot rock 'n' roll, and it's the blues in the night.

Or jazz in the morning. Whatever.


THIS WEEK, we're all over the place, and we're topical, too. I'll bet you can guess.

Anyway, you're free not to like what we're doing on this Internet Age version of "Loose Radio" on 'shrooms -- if you're of a certain age and from Baton Rouge, La., you'll get that pop-culture reference -- and I guess you're also free not to give the best damned thing on the Internets a listen, either. But I just want to tell you that we at the Big Show are packin' bricks and petrol, and we know where you live.

Destroy!

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Make that right-o!

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

This . . . is London


Somewhere in hell, Adolf Hitler is kicking himself right now for wasting all that time and effort on the Blitz.

This works just about as well and proves to be much more demoralizing for the British public than Luftwaffe air raids.



FOLKS, THIS IS what it looks like when people have no morals, no taboos and no hope for the future. The Brits are no more or no less virtuous than we in the States, and now we're entering the Age of Austerity, too, with fewer jobs, fewer social services, less welfare, less hopefulness, more materialism and more nihilism.

Take a hard look. This is the next new thing, coming soon from Austerity Britain to Tea Party America.


P.S.: I agree with the British public. Mark Stone has two of them.

Sunday, August 07, 2011

The next big thing

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


When I was young, the wave of the future rolled in from the east across the North Atlantic.

The British Invasion, it was called. First, the Beatles . . . then everybody and everything. That's where we got "mod." That's where we got New Wave, too.

Now, from
NBC News' World Blog is a foreshadowing from Austerity Britain about what may well be coming to Austerity America.

Again.
As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

The truth is that discontent has been simmering among Britain's urban poor for years, and few have paid attention. Social activists say one out of two children in Tottenham live in poverty. It's one of the poorest areas of Britain. Britain's worst riots in decades took place here in 1985. A policeman was hacked to death. After these riots, the same young man pointed out, "They built us a swimming pool."

Police and local leaders in Tottenham made real progress in improving community relations in the intervening years and that's true about all of Britain. The best way to prevent crime, the theory goes, is to improve the lot of the people, then they won't need to commit crimes. But caught in a poverty and joblessness cycle, young people in many British urban areas have little hope of a better life.

So when a local 29-year-old father, described by police as a gangster, was shot dead by an officer, the response came quickly.
AS AN ANCIENT GREEK philosopher once wrote, "When the people lose hope, the fit hits the shan . . . but good."

Sadly, causing the people to lose hope is something American government and society have learned to do very, very well.

Friday, April 01, 2011

In case of morons, call Charlie Brooker


NOTE: Contains one F-bomb. But it's in reference to how big

an idiot 50-Cent is, so it's probably wholly appropriate.



I think this about covers it, don't you?

Charlie Brooker explains disaster coverage for the British television audience a couple of weeks ago.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Simply '70s: Punk in England in '76


From 1976, London Weekend Television takes a look at the British punk scene, in which we see the Sex Pistols before Sid Vicious, Clash before the "The" and Siouxsie before the Banshees.

We also see Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Topper Headon making some sense about why there had to be punk at that moment in musical history. And we see a calculatingly bored Johnny Rotten unable to grasp the contradictions of condemning bands like the Rolling Stones as "a business" while immersed in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle -- the real one, not the mockumentary -- up to one's spiky hairdo.

The mod, hip, now and happenin' --
or should that be "mawd, 'ip, now 'n' 'appenin' "? -- Janet Street-Porter presided over all of this, despite being nearly 40 at the time and well-ensconced in the establishment the punks so loathed.

Well, at least Rotten didn't spit on her.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Top Smear


There is a good reason the entire world hated the British Empire before it hated the American one.

This is it.

Obviously, wot we have here is a typical case of unfortunate British dentistry. It has led to a nasty oral infection, which has gone straight to the collective brain of not only the cast and crew of Top Gear, but also the entire British Broadcasting Corporation.


AND NOW it'll have to come out. The procedure is known by the coalition government as "austerity measures."

Before going under the mallet, however, producers of
Top Gear issued the following non-apology apology to the Mexican government, which had condemned the program as "xenophobic":
We are sorry if we have offended some people, but jokes centred on national stereotyping are a part of Top Gear’s humour, and indeed a robust part of our national humour. Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic; the French being arrogant and the Germans being over organised. When we do it, we are being rude, yes, and mischievous, but there is no vindictiveness behind the comments.

“This stereotyping humour is in itself a factor in the tolerance which the ambassador states is so prevalent in Britain.

“In line with that tradition, stereotype based comedy is allowed within BBC guidelines in programmes where the audience has clear expectations of that being the case, as indeed it is with Top Gear. Whilst it may appear offensive to those who have not watched the programme or who are unfamiliar with its humour, the Executive Producer has made it clear to the Ambassador that that was absolutely not the show’s intention.”
IN OTHER WORDS, "We British are a bunch of pricks. Do you have a problem with that? Now you may resume your siesta."

Next on
BBC 1, Gordon Ramsay tells Dago jokes whilst beating his kitchen help to death with a frozen haggis.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Simply '70s: Who the hell knew?


As God is my witness, I'd never heard of the '70s British group Omaha Sheriff.

Apparently, I'm not alone -- Omaha Sheriff's first album in 1977, "Come Hell Or Waters High," made it up to No. 175 on the Billboard album chart but couldn't get arrested on the retail front.


ONE OF the band's founders, Bob Noble, however, did come to play in the band of Judie Tzuke -- someone I had heard of . . . and purchased her album "Sportscar" -- later in the '70s. He also did an album and a couple of tours with Dexy's Midnight Runners.

Go figure.

In the early 1990s, Noble moved his family to the States -- first Seattle and now Lake Worth, Fla., where he writes music, produces, arranges . . . and plays in an Irish band? (Isn't a Brit playing in an Irish band grounds for resumption of the Troubles or something?)

Anyway, it seems to me the least the man could have done was settle in Omaha.


Take afternoon strolls across "The Bob."

Maybe run for sheriff.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Sic semper (Argentine) tyrannis


The spring of 1982: Britannia rules the waves . . . and, once more, the Falkland Islands.


In Argentina, things weren't going so well. Thus always to tyrants, Gen. Galtieri.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Good eggs on breakfast TV


When Australian funny lady (and psychologist) Pamela Stephenson went on Britain's TV-am in December 1986, no one knew eggs-actly what the hell she was doing.

But at least weather presenter Wincey Willis was an egg-cellent ducker.



THAT YEAR, the independent-TV morning show crew got off easy.

On
BBC 1, there were firearms. Enough said.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Monday, November 08, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Wanna go to London


Skinny ties are back in, I hear.

Good. I have some.

That's reason enough, on this edition of
Your Daily '80s, to revisit local music in 1982. That local music would be the U.S. Times, a New Wave band that was in the forefront of hip in Baton Rouge, by God, Louisiana.

Well, at least as far as we LSU students were concerned at the time.

But if you want to know the truth, I think the Times -- as the band was known before it adopted the "U.S." as part of its name -- remains pretty hip today, even though now they're just a footnote in the history of a middling town's "college bands."


THE TITLE TRACK from the band's "Wanna Go to London" album pretty much sums up a time and a place . . . and the music we loved. We just as soon would have loaded up a trunk and flown to London town -- skinny ties, rock 'n' roll stars.

Heck, in 1982, I actually sent my resumé and clips to an English newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the economy was crappy all over, and the editor politely informed me he didn't have jobs for British reporters, much less ones from --
What was the name of that place in the colonies again?

STILL, dreaming was as cheap as air-mail postage.

I wan, I wan, I wan, I wanna go to London,

Go to London, England. . . .


(NOTE: Contains a single F-bomb, not overly noticeable.)

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Your Daily '80s: (Radio) Anarchy in the U.K.


Bloody hell!

Pirate radio in the U.K.! Didn't the blokes in the Home Office take care of that in the late 1960s?

After all, it's 1982 now.



WELL, according to this documentary on Channel 4, I reckon not. I guess rock 'n' roll -- and pirate jocks -- are here to stay.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Shakin' over Shirley


Welcome back to 1982.

In May of this year, Shakin' Stevens took this little ditty, "Shirley," to No. 6 on the British charts.

But for me, the original of "Shirley" hits a little closer to home.



WELCOME to 1959 -- two years before I arrived on the scene -- in my hometown, Baton Rouge, La. Then, "Shirley" was a little somethin' put to hot wax by John Fred and the Playboys.


ABOUT NINE YEARS later, John Fred and His Playboy Band had a No. 1 hit with another little something you might remember.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Goodbye to 405


When Great Britain introduced the world's first public television service in 1936, its "high definition" broadcasts were all-electronic at an amazing 405 lines of definition.

By the 1960s, though, a newer 625-line color system began to supplant the original British scheme of transmitting TV programs, and 405's days were numbered. Above, we see the end of 405-line transmissions as viewed on a 1938 receiver dusted off by the BBC for the occasion.

It's Jan. 3, 1985.


AND HERE, we see how it looked to folks with "newfangled" 625-line color sets.

Below, meantime, we see a news story on the oldest working TV set in Britain -- a 1936 model.



YOU THINK your brand-new high-def widescreen set will be "kickin' it old school" in 2083?

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Your Daily '80s: The year that was almost our last

Somewhere near Moscow.
Sept. 26, 1983.

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.


It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.

Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.

He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.

This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch - hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.

It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?

The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go 'hot', seconds could make the difference between life and death.

Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.

Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background - 'LAUNCH. LAUNCH'. Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.

The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no tell-tale flash of an missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?

Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.

The warning light flashed again - a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: 'Missile attack imminent!'

But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.

Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.