Triple whopper with lies

Today is the third anniversary of the 2010 General Election and, like any normal three-year-old, the present coalition government has learnt to walk, talk and destroy things.

Quite a lot can be achieved in three years. You could, if so inclined, complete a university degree course and saddle yourself with debt and no hope of gainful employment. You could, with tenacity and stamina, produce three children and therefore enjoy a life of luxury by scrounging state benefits. Given an advantageous launch window and a suitable propulsion unit, you could journey in a space craft to Jupiter. You could train to be a nurse and save people`s lives only to find that your hospital is closing because a lying minister unqualified in health has decided that you are “uncaring”. You could become a teacher and educate three cohorts in Key Stage One or Key Stage Two only to be described by a lying minister unqualified in education as a Marxist for wishing to nurture children with a balanced curriculum. You could develop a serious disability or terminal illness in order to adopt a lifestyle choice of state benefit dependency only to be told by a lying minister unqualified as a human being that you are a feckless, workshy scrounger and will receive no support during the time it takes you to die.

Opportunity knocks

Your votes count

Former senior advisor to Bill Clinton and former Chief of Staff in Obama`s White House, current Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel once let slip an insight into the mindset of politicians; bad news, it seems, is always good news.

With unusual candour, the Democrat spin doctor turned Chicago boss man confirmed the motivation of power when he said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that (is that) it`s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

The logical conclusion of this established Machiavellian approach is to maintain control by inventing a crisis when no crisis actually exists.

Never one to shy away from shifting responsibility and never one to miss an opportunity from some bogus tub-thumping, Thursday saw our action man Prime Minister aboard a submarine armed with nuclear weapons. Watching the carefully arranged news footage, an overwhelming instinct to scream; “for God`s sake don`t let him touch anything” was replaced by the chilling realisation that he has the launch codes anyway. Later, he told Scottish manufacturers of weapons we sell to tyrants to kill people that they would not have a job if they voted for independence. To seal the double whammy crisis manufacture, Cameron said:

“North Korea does now have missile technology that is able to reach, as they put it, the whole of the United States, so if they`re able to reach the whole of the US, they can reach Europe too. They can reach us too.”

The rather poor use of English in this statement, but more importantly the breathtaking ignorance of science and geography, suggests that Michael Gove might be correct after all in asserting that standards in education are falling.

But, Michael Gove has his own crisis to engineer

All fools` day

Homeless and hungry image via guardian.co.uk

A good prank is reliant upon there being people stupid enough to believe that spaghetti grows on trees. The basic premise of a successful April fool hoax is plausibility, however preposterous and the implied gullibility of the intended target.

Mercifully, our coalition government has done away with the tedious and not very funny tradition that every first day of April requires the reporting of the capture of the Loch Ness Monster, sightings of Elvis, alien abductions and π being rounded down to three as part of a European Union directive. We are far too sophisticated and intelligent to fall for that same old claptrap. Instead, most of the media including the BBC serve up a constant diet of amusing misinformation, mischievous propaganda and some rounded down porkie pies to keep us in stitches all year round. Pete Townshend was wrong when he claimed that we won`t get fooled again all those years ago. There are still enough credulous innocents out there that believe anything the coalition government says and, in the face of irrefutable proof, believe that spaghetti grows on trees.

Size matters

One of the more amusing habits of news media when trying to explain things is its curious use of comparable measurement. Size, it seems, is really difficult to describe and so tired journalists have invented a universal scale of contextualised bigness based on the London bus.

With the assumption that the audience has the attention span and the cognitive ability of a three month old chimp, very small things are smaller than a grain of sand and very big things are measured in multiples of the area of Wales or sometimes Belgium. In between these extremes are standard units for everything else ranging from a golf ball, a grapefruit, a football, a sofa, a family car (small, average or large), a London bus, a football pitch, an aircraft carrier and the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham. These descriptors can be multiplied but are not so effective when divided so other arbitrary factors need to be applied.

Thus, with the impending perigee of asteroid 2012DA14, the news media went a little bit potty and refused to believe scientists who had the proof that impact would not occur. On the BBC, one slightly hysterical hack asked a scientist how big the thing was. The astrophysicist estimated that it was probably about 150 metres across. The hack had done some homework and suggested that it was the size of an Olympic swimming pool. The boffin looked confused and reiterated that it was estimated at being about 150 metres across. In the week that dear old Reg Turnill died, BBC science reporting hit rock bottom when footage of the Russian event horizon meteor exploded all over the internet. “The sonic boom sounded like an explosion” bellowed one excited non-scientist who did not actually witness the event. “It looked like something from a disaster movie.” Mercifully, he did not revert to default media nomenclature by describing the object, estimated to be about 15 metres across, as being the size of a London bus or that its passage through the upper atmosphere had reduced it to the size of Eric Pickles nor that by the time it had impacted on a frozen lake in the Urals it was the size and shape of a baked potato.

Invisible men

Image via Walsall Council

You can`t beat a good ghost story. Months beyond Halloween, it is deliciously chilling to know that spectres still haunt the streets of Walsall that are beyond the imaginations of Sheridan Le Fanu or even Edgar Allan Poe. The terrifying ghouls are invisible Walsall snow spirits.

To everyone`s great surprise, snow fell in winter on a small island just off continental northern Europe. Oh the humanity as car drivers trembling with fear at the covering of white ectoplasm used first gear and a floored accelerator in the hope of escaping the horror by spinning their wheels to polish snow into ice. If the “right foot make car go” boneheads cannot master driving in snow, what hope for them next week when the pot holes of Hell have opened up again. It is likely that the boy and girl racers lacking in the competence to drive to the conditions are the ones complaining of an absence of rock salt treatment to the highways and byways. Others, however, report experiencing ghostly visitations from huge yellow monsters spewing out grit in some malevolent attempt to keep the roads open. We might never be able to explain the presence of the creatures of the night on “the other side”. Mwuhahahaha…

Okay, Walsall does not boast of the best track record for gritting when the snow descends and the ice forms but, the ghost busters claiming that the roads received no grit seem to be as knowledgeable of physics as they are adept at driving in the white stuff. It seems that the amiable snow rider Brownhills Bob pointed out on the dreadful Facebook that rock salt was not magic and would probably not slaughter household pets. The reason that I don`t “do” Facebook is because it is difficult enough to cope with idiots on Twitter and apparently Bob`s sensible comments were removed from idiotville Facebook because of complaints by some very stupid people. The truth is out there, but some folk still believe in ghosts.