The Bleeding Heart Show

FAO Press TV

Dear Press TV,

Either develop some semblance of morality & integrity or just shut the fuck up.

Kisses,

The Bleeding Heart Show

Nothing tastes as good as stupid feels

When you compare this:

You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you can’t remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips from fingernails forced in haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to dissolve with a battery-acid mixture of caffeine and pills. They do not wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting with muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. They may or may not be awakened in the night by their own inexplicable sobs.

– ‘Wasted‘ by Marya Hornbacher

with this:

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”

– Kate Moss

You realise that there’s a very good reason why Kate Moss doesn’t give many interviews.

The Sun does cyber-stalking

So how was your day?

It’s a question which must get asked millions of times a day. All over the country, people return home after a hard day’s work and report to friends, housemates or partners about how it all went.

Some surgeons may celebrate a successful operation; some police officers may toast the closing of a case; some bartenders may have enjoyed an evening’s banter with their regular punters.

However, if you’re John Coles, Ace Reporter for The Sun, your response to that question goes a little something like this:

“Oh, my day was GREAT! I went on Facebook and stalked a 24 year old that nobody’s ever heard of. THEN, out of revenge for his Dad’s ‘zany’ statements about drugs, I publicly humilated him in a national newspaper!”

Yes, the minds of tabloid journalists operate a little differently to the rest of us.

So how did Coles’ intrepid cyber bullying increase his readers’ understanding of the world? Well, we’ve discovered that Steve Nutt either smokes weed or roll-ups (or maybe even both!); we’ve found out that he sometimes makes risque & inappropriate jokes to friends; we’ve learned that he has a sister who once drank booze at 16, and a brother who was once NAKED! In Sweden!

So basically, what we can deduce from all of this is that Professor Nutt has raised what appears to be a completely ordinary, unremarkable family, who just happen to have had the misfortune of being related to a scientist The Sun didn’t like.

Not that you’d get that understanding from the ‘article’, of course, because Coles tries his level best to portray Steve Nutt as a potentially disturbed, spliff-smoking terrorist sympathiser, and his siblings as raging, out-of-control hedonists who like alcohol and.. erm.. Scandinavia.

Let’s just set aside the observation that ethics at this newspaper seem to have been completely abandoned, and instead just take a moment to sigh at how poisonous the issue of drugs has become. Not only can a well-credentialled scientist get the sack for trying to explain that science, but his family can be harassed and humiliated for no other reason than politically-motivated revenge.

I really wish Murdoch would hurry up with his plan to charge people for reading his papers; the day when I don’t have access to this vindictive garbage can’t come soon enough.

Shorter Pilger: Obama won the Nobel because he’s black

I think Jay-Z said it best when he sighed:

“Every step you take they remind you you’re ghetto”

Y’know, after he’d offended a whole bunch of people by dismissing Barack Obama as a ‘glossy Uncle Tom’, I had hoped that John Pilger would’ve buried his race card deep in the ground. Alas, the old fool just can’t help himself, as whenever the President enjoys some measure of success, Pilger feels a duty to remind us all what his skin colour is:

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills.

With apparently no self-awareness, Pilger then goes on to mock the ‘Call of Obama’, which is “not unlike a dog whistle” to attract “the besotted and boneheaded”. Oh, there’s certainly a dog whistle here, but it’s not being blown by the President. No, it’s a whistle which is more often blown by the birthers, troofers, tea-baggers, hacks and half-wits who lay waste to our political discourse. It’s depressing, if unsurprising, to see Pilger join their number.

Of course I could wax lyrical about the man’s early journalistic exploits; his brave, penetrative, excoriatingly human portrayals of war and injustice. But the reason I won’t do that is because he seems bent on wrecking his own legacy. In the past year, Pilger has transformed into the Melanie Phillips of the left: overwrought, resentful, misanthropic, inaccurate, conspiratorial and, ultimately, totally irrelevant.

Deep thought

It’s a little troubling to discover that the people we elect to decide on matters of war & peace can lack the most basic comprehension skills.

‘Chav fighting’

You couldn’t make it up:

It’s not entirely clear from the ‘literature’ or accompanying video (which trades on a mixture of violent revenge fantasies and ‘chicks dig violence’ machismo) which of the martial arts you’ll be taught in order to survive a ‘chav attack’. Kung fu? Taekwondo? Or is jujitsu better for repelling a chav’s savagery? Who knows, maybe the traditional forms of self-defence aren’t sufficient to deal with the chav’s menace & guile, forcing the civic-minded folks at Gymbox to invent a type of self-defence which is more suited to 21st century street fighting. The possibilities are endless; lessons could include: “How To Drop A Chav Without Dropping Your Kebab”, “Didn’t Pull Tonight? Then Shove A Hoodie On Your Way Home”, or “The Ultimate In Male Bonding: Form a Chav-Banging Gang!”

Or maybe it’s just a last resort for sad little men who don’t have the friends to field a 5-a-side football team to try to raise their sagging self-esteem through fantasies about beating up teenagers. Y’know, like real men do.

Well, each to their own, I guess.

God of love, God of fire

Not content with allowing the destruction of the Twin Towers or sending waters surging through New Orleans, it seems the planet’s number one terrorist is at it again:

The Catch the Fire Ministries has tried to blame the bushfires disaster on laws decriminalising abortion in Victoria.

The Pentecostal church’s leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah, claimed he had a dream about raging fires on October 21 last year and that he woke with “a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

[…]

He quoted a headline describing the fires as “The Darkest hour for Victoria”. “A few months ago the news media should have reported `the darkest hour for the unborn’, but unfortunately the `Decriminalisation of Abortion bill’ went through parliament and was passed, thus making many people call Victoria `the baby killing state of Australia,’ ” Mr Nalliah said.

Pastor Nalliah said there may be criticism. But he said he did not send out his media statement thoughtlessly. “We spend two days working on it.”

He had previously said drought and the world financial crisis could be partly blamed on human sin.

There’s much I don’t understand about these lunatics, but foremost is this: assuming that what the Pastor says is true, why would anyone in their right mind want to worship such a vindictive God? You’d have to have serious self-confidence issues to pray to someone who’d endorse such suffering.

Coal is the new Christmas

I wish I could say this was some kind of joke, but alas, it seems the ‘clean coal’ industry really is this desperate…

Treehugger has even more, if you can stand it.

Rewards for lies

I’m sure it’s a secret only shared among members of the gilded media elite, but I would love for someone to explain why the BBC is so infatuated with Kelvin MacKenzie.

For a start, they’d do well to remember that he was editor of a newspaper for which Beeb-hating is its raison d’etre; you’d surely think the instinct of self-preservation would dissuade them from giving a mic to a guy who hates their very existence.

But this isn’t really about that; the BBC is free to fawn over anti-license fee acolytes if it so chooses, I just wish their airtime was after the watershed. And on a channel nobody watches. Nor is this even about the spite his newspaper spat in the faces of working people during the 1980’s – if the corporation excluded people on that basis, they’d have to impose a media blackout on half the Conservative Party.

No, this is really about The Lie. The Lie to end all lies. A Lie of such magnitude that it makes ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, ‘the sword of truth‘ and ‘I’d like to report a missing child‘ seem like minor fibs. A Lie he authored, defended and still defends to this day, and which continues to haunt and hurt its victims. You know The Lie I’m talking about, right?

In almost any other walk of life (aside from professional politics, of course) making such a disgraceful error, and then standing by that error over a decade later, would make you persona non grata in your own profession. If you were a doctor, you’d be struck off. If you were a builder, you’d struggle to find work. But if you’re a mendacious media rent-a-mouth, the market will embrace you with open arms.

And so on the BBC’s Breakfast news, MacKenzie was brought on to advocate for James Purnell’s welfare reforms. Quite what qualifies him as an expert on welfare provision – or an expert on anything other than the art of tabloid slime – is beyond me, but there he was, on that plush, license fee funded sofa, explaining that (I’m paraphrasing here) poor people can go fcuk themselves. It was like a ghostly, ghastly echo from the eighties.

And he’ll be back in few weeks time, no doubt, armed with tabloid-pleasing quotes and hackneyed ‘analysis’, and the BBC will once again ignore the hurt his appearances continues to cause to The Lie’s victims, simply because he makes good TV. And we wonder why everyone wants a career in the media.

Update: Sorry for betraying my usual temperate self, but some people just incite enraged ranting.

Shorter Al-Qaida: “Now we know how John McCain felt”

Following this little belch of bigotry and the condemnations which followed, Al-Qaida supporters respond by… attacking pro-Obama bias in the media:

Global reactions to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s controversial condemnation of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama as a “House Slave” (or, alternatively, “House Negro”) have begun to pour in — including via the top jihad web forums used by Al-Qaida to disseminate its propaganda. Though hardcore Al-Qaida supporters have predictably dismissed any criticism of Dr. al-Zawahiri and are fiercely backing his choice of words, there is a rather ironic (if not entirely unfamiliar) twist to this issue. After observing international press reporting on the incident, these same supporters are now bitterly attacking the media for its “unfair” pro-Obama bias and for deliberately “confusing” the meaning of al-Zawahiri’s message.

Yeah, that line of attack didn’t work too well for John McCain either.

Memo to terrorists: Don’t ever mock the Obamessiah. You have no idea of the kind of adulation you’re up against…

Swinging London

I suppose you should call this a work in regress. Back in 2003, the execrable, homophobic loon Bounty Killer weaseled out of some UK concerts after Peter Tatchell & OutRage! called for him to be arrested for inciting violence against gay people.

Five years later, the Metropolitan Police have decided that Mr Killer ain’t all that bad, and providing he doesn’t perform songs where he says things like ‘burn the queer’ (it’ll be a very short set, I guess), then they’re okay with him spreading what I’m sure is his primary message of peace, love & understanding.

Both Tatchell & Brett are completely correct to point out that if a musician tried to enter Britain with a songbook of ballads about white supremacy, he or she would struggle to find a visa, let alone a venue.

Maybe the soft, passive, ‘well, the last time he played a concert no gays were killed’ way of dealing with things has its merits, and if anyone has a clue what they are, I’d be happy to be enlightened. But I don’t see how we’re going to succeed in erasing homophobia when the police’s actions seem to imply that it’s less of a social evil than racism.

You talk way too much

I think Mark Twain said it best:

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Someone should really tell that to Hazel Blears…