The Aged P

Polly Toynbee, UK Guardian columnist and champagne socialist (house in fashionable Clapham and villa in Tuscany) has been rightly described by Boris Johnson as the living embodiment of “all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess “ of the liberal left.

Smug, hypocritical and humourless she epitomises the arrogant self righteousness of the BBC/Guardianista cabal that spearheads the ruling cultural establishment – a self perpetuating elite whose dominance has only been threatened once, by the premiership of Margaret Thatcher.

Speaking today at the Edinburgh Book Festival she finally laid her cards on the table

left-wing people are more intelligent, and just generally better people

The joke is – she wasn’t joking. Read The Guardian, The New York Times, watch the BBC and US networks – it’s the built in assumption that threads through every narrative.

And most people on the right, after struggling against the inertia of the left wing cultural elite eventually advocate compromise. What they fail to grasp is that the Toynbees of the world can never be defeated by coup or blitzkrieg. It’s a war af attrition, best summed up by the Duke of Wellington fighting against Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo.

Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let’s see who will pound longest.

Bill Nighy, wooden, crinkled and oozing bus pass angst, meets up with earnest young woman (Rachel Weisz, born 1970!). Nighy, as per usual, autocues his lines in a monotone to nobody in particular, is hardly ever out of his overcoat and sacrifices his career and pension to flag up the evil Americans.

You’ve guessed it – “Page Eight” (BBC2 28/08/11) another glossy drama of beautiful people in NW1 (and weekend rural retreats) pumping out a subliminal version of the eternal and unchanging BBC philippic against capitalism, America (pre Obama, of course) and those vicious, conniving Je…whoops….Israelis.

Written by Richard Curtis David Hare, the storyline is as predictable as a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 boss hands Public School/Oxbridge educated MI5 agent (Nighy) a file fingering UK PM as the The Evil One Covering Up US Rendition. Said agent discovers his next door neighbour had a boy friend killed by Israeli soldiers while innocently protecting defenceless Hamas protestors. This has also been covered up by the same UK PM.

Usual ending of any Nighy drama….he forces UK PM to publish the truth about the evil Israelis in return for remaining schtum about rendition. Nighy then heads off into the sunset until the next BBC drama.

Production values – AAA+
Characterisation – pure unadulterated cardboard
Message – BBC Goebbels TV at its most blatant

Martin Kettle, an associate editor of The Guardian, is deeply saddened by the fact that in the UK we align politicians with car salesmen and estate agents as the least trustworthy of all professions.

He blames – the satirists.

Today’s satire is deeply cynical, depicting British politics as a nest of fools. It may make us laugh, but its impact is not funny

Moreover he fingers the two faces who, he claims, are most to blame for this sorry state of affairs, “Private Eye” editor and HIGNFY panelist Ian Hislop and political blogger Guido Fawkes.

Without them, no doubt, we would be seeing our politicians in a different light – even on a par with doctors who are perceived as the most trusted of professionals ,regarded as truthful and public spirited.

Yeah, right…..naturally Kettle, as a journalist, makes the assumption that Joe and Jane Public are too dim to draw conclusions from their own observation and experience so they must have someone else to tell them what to think.

What is truly fascinating, however, are the names he did not include – Mark Thomas, Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle et al. Hear these and any other TV or radio comedy with a political edge and you soon discover that to a man or woman they are left wing, pseudo marxist, rainbow and unicorn preachers of political correctness. They were weaned on Thatcher hatred and transferred their bile towards Blair because he recognised that Labour could only gain power by suppressing the student union leftism that drives their “comedy”. Luckily for them their views were and are shared by those in the upper reaches of BBC programming – hence the absence of any right wing comedy on mainstream TV/radio.

Hislop and Guido are great mockers of Cameron, Osborne and the Tories, just like Thomas and co. But – and here is the key to Guardianista Kettle’s discomfort – they also mercilessly lampoon the left wing media/political/cultural elite. What is more, they regularly shine a light onto the cant, hypocrisy and mendacity displayed by many editors and journalists in the smug, self satisfied world of the media……Martin Kettle’s world. For what he forgets to tell us is that our regard for journalists is as low as our view of politicians and estate agents….

Crocodile tears, Mr Kettle, crocodile tears…..

Six weeks.

That’s the length of an election campaign here on the other side of the pond – and even that’s too long for some people.

Furthermore we do not have zillions of professional “consultants” and “strategists” pimping themselves for campaign employment. Because there are quite strict UK laws governing electoral expenditure almost all our campaigning is done by amateur volunteer activists often working out of their own homes (a bit like O4P, perhaps….)

So the reports coming to us out of Hot Air and other political media (“Perrypalooza”) fifteen months before the actual election give us the impression of a nation in a state of stretched out permanent political hyperventilation. Ed and Allahpundit, bless their little hearts, descend in a frenzy upon every opinion poll and analyse each cross tab with the zeal of an augur in Ancient Rome examining a bunch of chicken livers.

They then present the findings as if they are tablets of stone from Mount Sinai itself.

But a few days ago Pollinsider provided a refreshing dash of ice cold water to dissipate the heat generated by the Bachmann/Perry feeding frenzy and the speculation about Governor Palin.

Believe it or not, in their quests (or probable quest in Palin’s case) for the GOP nomination both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney are working under the same premise: No one is paying attention right now. Sure, some people are paying attention. But that “some” is probably you and me and maybe 5% of the rest of the voting population.

See his point? Only political junkies are paying attention at this moment in time. However much the media play it up (and after all they have columns and screens to fill) he hazards a guess that Ames/Iowa had very little impact on the consciousness of most Americans.

As Palin has said, most people are not interested in the primary process right now, most people are worried about their families, their jobs, their kids, and what to make for dinner tonight. She is right. Being the most politically interested of my family and friends, I nevertheless have many friends and family who fall into the 96% group. These are people who know and follow politics to a degree, but are not uber-involved in the process and what is going on.

The media especially gets all wound up over who is where and what he/she said. They are constantly searching for new angles….

All of these candidates announced at different times. All of them had a short time frame when they were the “it” candidate. The Media Flavor of the Month. Right now, Perry is the flavor of the month. Why? Because 96% of the population is not paying attention. Everything they know comes from passing, a brief blip on the tv or radio, or by word of mouth. And these are the people who are polled, and this is why the race changes so dramatically so often, with so many new and frequent “frontrunners” challenging Romney.

Read the rest here then just unclench those muscles and relax for a few moments. The circus is in town but it could be that most people are probably not paying too much attention.

Am I wrong or am I wrong?

BTW…maybe Sarah Palin has been reading these words from one of the greatest poems ever written

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting….

After all there might well be a definite need for adult supervision later……

Next time you hear someone bemoaning the youth of today tell them about Alex Honnold.

No rope, no harness – just free soloing the NW face of Half Dome in Yosemite.

It’s hard to know what to make of Alex’s astounding ascents. No words can describe the difficulty and dangerousness of these ascents. It’s simply pure brashness. Let’s face it–the kid has a lot of chutzpah. Climb high Alex, and be safe.

Amen to that….

That Robert Stacy McCain is a feisty young fellow and he lets us depraved and decadent Europeans have it with both barrels over sexualising young girls – and he has the pictures to ensure we know what he’s talking about.

With our vasectomies and birth control and taxpayer funded health services we are sooooooooo degenerate and Stacy never misses a chance to trawl through the UK tabloids to warn clean living Americans against the perils of the European primrose path to perdition.

After all you would never get this in America, or this…and no US retail outfit would do this.

And those Australians – they must be protesting against something seedy coming from Europe, not from Texas….

Meanwhile surely only European 14 yr old girls would ever be so blatant….

BTW JonBenét Ramsey would now be 21….

Obviously over the last few days the great and the good at the BBC have become rather unsettled as control over the urban mob violence and looting narrative began slipping through their fingers.

Shocked by the tsunami of contempt that hit them when they tried to frame the discussion in terms of “protestors”, poverty and/or race the Beeboids and their allies in the left wing media/academic cultural elite have been desperately searching for a way of regaining control of the issue by shifting the parameters of the debate.

The initial attempt was laughably unsubtle. Making much of a bevy of leading police officers, spearheaded by ACPOs big cheese Sir Hugh Orde, the aim was to portray the Cameron government as being out of touch. “Leave it to the boys in blue” became the watchword.

Unfortunately the evidence of a lack of leadership and control from the higher echelons at the Met over the first 2/3 days of mob rule in parts of London was so overwhelming that the utterances of Orde and Co. had a very hollow ring.

But, as David Vance at Biased BBC noted yesterday, a new editorial line had been adopted by the BBC suits and programmed into the robotic Sarah Montague as she fed the appropriate cues to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, over sentences handed out to looters. Naturally he came back with the appropriate response – “a collective loss of proportion” This triggered Sarah’s circuitry and produced the key phrase we shall be hearing over and over again at this weekend’s North London dinner parties.

Moral panic.

It’s all out of proportion, you see. There’s no real threat but a lot of opportunists have jumped on this bandwagon to further their own political agenda.

Moral panics allegedly arise when an event is perceived as a threat to society and its values. Those who foment the panic are said to be motivated by a fear of losing control. They therefore attempt to channel potentially disruptive energy by portraying another person or group – “folk devils” – as more of a danger than they actually are. So the Sarah Montague/BBC line appears to be that Cameron is using the riots as an opportunity to demonise the disenfranchised and divert attention from his austerity drive and, strangely enough, that was the angle recently taken by The New York Times…..surprise, surprise….

Heavy stuff, indeed…

But wait a minute – “no real threat but a bandwagon to further an agenda”……”folk devils”…..that seems to ring a bell….

Rupert Murdoch, Anders Breivik, bankers, EDL, AGW deniers, Israelis – now there is a collection of folk devils for you, always presented as the symbols of dark forces ever ready to take us back to some Thatcherite nightmare away from sweetness and light.

Moral panics? At the BBC it’s what we do…..

The New York Times, the house journal of the Obama administration, has obviously been given the nod from the White House to convey an important message to UK Prime Minister David Cameron from the Presidential golf course.

You have got it so wrong on the causes of those riots.

Mr. Cameron…..has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subcultures.

That is so naive.

It’s about being POOR, man. The rioting and looting was a cry for help from the blackberries of the penniless, starving hordes of England’s shanty towns as well as a political protest against Cameron’s savage budget cuts.

What’s that? These are scheduled cuts for 2012-2015? Spending for 2011 is still much the same as previous years?

Irrelevant.

It’s the perception,stupid…..the masses trust only the BBC and the BBC has, since May 2010, been constantly warning them about THE CUTS.

That is why the “protesters” (as the BBC preferred to call them) needed all those flat screen TVs. They were to be used as COMMUNITY SCREENS so that the downtrodden could bypass government propaganda and hear the truth from the BBC.

Fortunately President Obama from his years of executive experience in Chicago can redirect Mr Cameron back onto the path of righteousness.

You don’t solve these problems with “draconian punishments” and “excessive sentences”

Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services……..What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting.

That is how it was done in Chicago by Obama – and it is now, presumably, one of the safest cities in the western world.

So there you have it, Mr Cameron. The NYT is telling you to spend more money and ignore the debt and those scaremongers at the credit rating agencies. I am sure they could put you in touch with the Chinese bankers who have been so helpful to President Obama.

On the other hand…..perhaps you could just tell the NYT to STFU……

In answer to the current phone hacking accusations swirling around CNN’s Piers Morgan (aka Piers Moron in the UK) the old smoothie adopts his standard posture of injured innocence.

“Not me, guv – must be that other bloke”

Moron hopes that his cheeky chappy routine will once again provide the appropriate coating of Teflon to deflect all accusations so that any future employer will willingly decorate his court jester’s hat with even more golden bells.

And he might well be right for Piers sees himself as another Bill Clinton – someone who still walks high with the Cultural Elite despite seducing a young White House intern and ejaculating over her dress. He realises that the liberal/left media will give a pass to one of their own but cry havoc and release the dogs of war if any UK Tory or US Republican even thinks of placing his hand where it shouldn’t be.

Piers, you see, is a champagne Socialist, former editor of the left wing UK Tabloid (and circulation dropping) Daily Mirror – and ‘twas he who wrote that headline about Americans after W won his second term in 2004

How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?

The trouble is, however, that the BBC/Guardian/NYT left wing media nexus has made such a big thing of the Murdoch hacking story that they forgot it was part and parcel of UK press practice for years alongside blagging into someone’s personal details via identity fraud and paying off sundry police officers and public officials for information.

It’s also the third dark cloud to be swirling around our hero since the turn of the century.

The ramped shares.

The faked photo of British soldiers abusing Iraqis

Both times PM has slipped Houdini like from the black hole that often sucks in those who sail too close to the wind. But this is Morgan’s third little “difficulty”.

As Goldfinger famously observed to James bond
“Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence. The third time it’s Enemy action”.

There are other pressures as well – to be beaten by Rachel Maddow must be particularly humiliating…

Has Piers been finally hit below the waterline?

Just a few days ago in the Pakistan city of Lahore Muhammad Riaz was feeling very depressed. A very friendly and concerned stranger asked him why he was so unhappy. Mr Riaz told him that with no regular income he was desperate for money.

Don’t worry, the man said, I can fix you up with 110,000 Rupees (about £800) by this evening – and all you have to do is sell one of your kidneys to a wealthy Arab. He is ill, but your kidney will save him, you will still have your other kidney plus about four times what you could earn in a year by doing various odd jobs.

To Mr Riaz that was an almost unimaginable sum of money so he followed the man to a house in Street No 6 Block-A of Al-Faisal Town where he was told to lie down on a stretcher while a doctor made preparations for the transplant operation.

But Mr Riaz began to have second thoughts and, just as the doctor was about to inject him he broke free, ran out of the house and sought assistance from passers –by.

Such were the details presented by police to a magistrate who decided there was a case to answer and remanded two doctors and five other men in custody for further investigation. One of the doctors, however, was not very happy. He said the house was not used for organ transplants but merely as a free clinic for poor people. Moreover he claimed that he was beaten up by one of the police officers and told that if he passed over R700,000 the case would be “forgotten”

Who was telling the truth? Police in Pakistan, like police in many other countries, are not averse to a bit of intimidation and bribery. But Lahore has become a major organ bazaar as thousands of poverty stricken locals are driven to sell bits of their bodies to keep the rest of themselves alive – and there is no shortage of customers for these body parts from wealthy families in every continent. Waiting for a legal above board donation can be frustrating and in countries like China, Egypt and Pakistan there is a ready made medical mafia willing and eager to trouser big bucks for no questions asked medical procedures.

Charging the patient £20,000 and paying the “donor” £800 certainly equals a juicy profit margin though part of that might have to be passed to corrupt police officers – the traffic was recently made illegal after a public hue and cry. However passing a law in Pakistan does not guarantee enforcement in what many believe to be a failing state.

The donors are, like Mr Riaz, from the poorest levels of society – usually Punjabi bonded labourers faced with a lifetime of debt. Just as with the drugs cartels in Mexico whenever there is a demand there will always be supply.

And of course there is always a more chilling dimension to the supply side. A donor can survive with only one kidney but there is also a demand for transplanting other organs – and a child with no family could offer a rich harvest for ruthless and greedy criminals with no soul…..

H/T to Pakistan press: Dawn, Express Tribune, Daily Times