The tiniest of victories...

I assume this will put the matter to bed, and come Euro 2012, there will be no talk of a ban on England shirts. I also assume there is a unicorn in my garden.

Know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society

Sky News website readers, your challenge is to grind an axe of your choosing on a story about real children suffering real abuse. Ready... GO!

I could never understand how parents could leave their little ones with a woman who looked like Vanessa George in the first place. I'm not a lover of lewd language and rarely use coarse phrases, but goodness me, she is one ugly cow isn`t she?

'Beethoven' gets the ball rolling. Bad news for ugly childminders, however good they are. Imagine parents turning up for their toddler's first day at nursery, taking one look at the staff and turning right back round again. 'Plod' agrees:

Its a wonder any child got through the door with an ugly woman like this.I thought Halloween was the other day.

Haha, an ugly child molester. A paedotroll. 'Akira Khan' won't let this happen again:

is it just me or when ever you see pictures of these sub sub sub sub sub humans, I can't help but think, does no one see it there in their eyes, I mean look at them!? absolute scum in-carnate, even the guy, how can these people walk about without others being suspicious? im sorry but I don't tend to know many ugly scum like this but if I was to come across one my instincts would be to think what the hell are they up to and maybe report them to the police regardless, I mean it's a win win situation, if they are not what I think they are at least they should be removed as to save the eyesight of law abiding citizens everywhere, what an ugly ugly troll of a living sack of meat. utter contempt for this phat thing

Turn you down, did she? But to some posters, this focus on Ms George's looks is puerile nonsense, distracting attention from the sins of the villains of the piece - THE VICTIMS' MOTHERS. 'Rothschilds Nemesis' explains:

What sort of world do we live in where mothers 'have' to go to work, and cannot/will not stay home and be a mother, keeping an eye on their children and taking responsibility for the human being that they brought into the world? If women took more pride in actually doing feminine things, as nature intended, then this problem would never exist in the first place.

Doing feminine things as nature intended? Your glasses are steaming up a bit there. The Gibbons Family know who to blame as well:

We should be discouraging parents from hiring others to bring up their children and stand against the propaganda printed in radical feminist magazines and still expoused by baby-boomer activists and their brainwashed children.

But it's sooooo tempting. The other day, I was in WHSmith and I caught sight of the cover of Radical Feminist Monthly and the cover line was 'LEAVE YOUR CHILDREN WITH A PAEDOTROLL, THEY'LL BE FINE'. But I managed to resist.

I'll let Bruce Coleman-Wood have the last, bewildering words. Watch out for the bit in the very first sentence where he accepts that the children of single parents are pretty well certain to get paedotrolled, and that we might as well save our efforts:

Why do ladies work when married (single mums & dads are not in this argument). One possible reason is that they work to better their families & of course there are many other reasons. however, if that is your only reason, consider this (& this is really controversial girls): The minute the market knows families have more cash to spend (e.g. housing & consumer markets), prices go up. so are you all working for nothing? Lets bring that debate into the 21st century. I include married dads whose wives have the capacity to earn more than they do.

That BLOODY market. My wife got a job, starting salary £14,000, goes to the shops - everything's more expensive than it was before! They must have seen her coming - I told her (& this is really controversial girls) not to tell the market she'd got a job.

In summary: I too long for the days when women knew their place and no child ever, ever got abused, because the only setting in which child abuse has ever happened is a day nursery for evil grasping career women. Run by a paedotroll.

A hundred trillion gazillion

Ian Duncan Smith says broken homes (whatever that might mean) cost the country (whatever that might mean) £100 billion. He said this to make a point about two-parent families and how important they are - and in modern politics, if you want to people to believe something matters, you have to put a price tag on it.

The price tag he chose, £100 billion, was apparently chosen pretty much at random, according to Edgar Gerrard Hughes at Full Fact. EGH tracks down IDS's stats to a report which, he notes, 'includes some projections that may overstate the total figure'. For example, it includes costs related to domestic violence and care for the elderly, which can hardly be blamed on falling marriage rates.

EGH adds:

Perhaps most contentiously, the authors consistently assume direct, one-way causal links between family breakdown and social problems. It is quite plausible that much of the causality could act in the opposite direction, or that various “third factors” - whether cultural, socio-economic or otherwise – account for the correlation.

So, with all these caveats, what figure do you think the report gave as the total cost of relationship breakdown? £37 billion. Thirty-seven. Not 100.

It's called anchoring, that - giving a falsely inflated  figure as a starting point will result in people's estimates of the 'true' figure being higher. So even people who think '£100 billion? Pah, it'll never be that much' will be affected subconsciously.

Surely, our magnificent press will rush to correct this 'mistake'?

Cue the Mail.

And the most recommended reader's comment reads:

so true...bring back the daddy from the shadows and into people's homes...a family with a man and a woman and a child is a family...The state cannot keep subsidising the single mom's(or feminists who believe that men are unnecessary) (Stewart, London)

Yeah, bring back the daddy. More of the top rated comments:

When LABOUR made it easy for young mothers to move out and get a place of their own, I realised back then that we as a nation would be facing these problems in years to come. But tony blair got his way and labour hailed it as a great thing. Perhaps thinking they would gather more votes by these dysfunctional familes. (Mutal Bilah, UK)

My God, you're right! If we make it more difficult for women to leave their husbands, domestic violence will fall for sure. And finally:

Of course the loony left have expended enormous effort in undermining the family unit because it is the basis of our society which they seek to destroy and then rebuild to their liking. (Ethel, London)

Of course.

So what have we learned today? That politicians will take unreliable figures and exaggerate them in order to promote their political agenda. That sections of the press will repeat this unquestioningly as fact. And that Daily Mail readers are a right bunch of bellends. Class dismissed.

Worst. Analogy. EVER.

Simon at Adventures In Nonsense has confused me. Like every opinionated SOB out there, I tend to expect certain things of people based on whether their opinions are similar to mine. Simon campaigns against pseudo-science and nonsense. His all-too-infrequent posts are filled with gems like this (in which he pesters Boots with email after email about how much non-water there is in their homeopathic remedies, if you can't be bothered clicking through). As Cheryl Cole might say, that means he's right up mah street.

And then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like this. It's not quite the stupidest thing on the internet, but it's the stupidest thing I've ever read from someone I usually agree with. Feel free to make up your own minds, but I think an argument so flawed, backed up with logic so twisted and morality so dubious deserves a step-by-step takedown.

After a brief preamble, he begins:

I’ve experienced employment law on both sides of the fence: as employer and as employee. And while I acknowledge that for some people these laws are a benefit, I personally see them as an attack on my freedom. In my experience, the situation seems far worse for the employee than it is for the employer.

This is a bold statement to make. Nothing wrong with bold statements. But really? Employment law as a whole makes things 'far worse' for the employee than for the employer?

So much so, that as an employee in 2000 I spent around £1200 with an accountant to help me waive my employment “rights”. Why, might you ask, would anyone actually pay money to waive their “rights”?

I might. I might also ask what an accountant can do about all these horrible, horrible rights you were lumbered with. Nice to know you can afford to splash out £1,200 on their services though.

I wanted to waive, amongst other rights:

• My “right” to 20 days paid leave (it’s 28 now).

• My “right” to sick pay, and protection of my job while I’m sick.

• My “right” to a long drawn out disciplinary procedure if my employer no longer wants to employ me.

• My “right” to paternity leave and pay.

So why did I want to waive these “rights”?

Ooh, it's getting interesting now. As an employee, he didn't want sick pay or paid holidays. Why indeed? I'm all ears, I bet this is going to be brilliant...

Let’s use an analogy: TV rentals.

Oh.

A TV rentals salesman is pitching to you. It’s the perfect TV and you love it. But there are some strange terms and conditions.

Here is where my heart began to sink.

Firstly, you don’t get your TV all year round. For 28 days, you can’t have it. You can rent another TV for that time, but you have to keep paying for the first one. 

TELEVISIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE.

Secondly, the TV may break. If it breaks, you get a slight discount on the rental price while it’s being repaired but you do need to keep paying for it. If the TV is broken for a long time, you are able to get out of the contract but only after a long drawn out process.

PEOPLE ARE NOT TELEVISIONS.

Thirdly, the contract lasts until the TV is 65 years old. If you think the TV is no longer up to the task and wish to change it – or you just no longer need it, you’ve got to follow a long drawn out process. You need to fully document this process in advance, and stick to it to the letter or the TV company may sue you. If the TV company no longer wishes to continue renting the TV, they can take it away easily.

PEOPLE AND TELEVISIONS ARE NOT THE SAME.

Fourthly, the TV company might need the TV back for a while to help make another TV. They can decide to do this at any time, but you need to keep renting the TV at full price for the first 6 weeks of this process, and then at a reduced price for up to a year. At a time decided by the TV company, they can bring the TV back and you need to put it back in your home and continue paying full price. You can rent another TV to cover this period, but of course it will be under the same contract terms.

STATEMENTS THAT APPLY TO RENTING A TELEVISION DO NOT NECESSARILY APPLY TO EMPLOYING A PERSON.

Now it should be fairly obvious that if you are trying to rent a TV under this contract, then you’re not going to get a great deal of money for it. This is a very silly way to rent TVs.

THIS ISN'T ABOUT TELEVISIONS, IT'S WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAT THAT: THESE ARE PEOPLE'S LIVES.

But, I hear you say. This isn’t about TVs, it’s way more important than that: these are people’s lives.

Phew. Glad you heard me say that.

And you’re right. My life is way more important than a TV and if I’m going to sell a significant portion of it, it is critical that I am able to negotiate the best possible terms.

Hang on a minute though, are you the owner of the TV or are you renting it? Or are you the TV? Leaving aside the awful, awful analogy, you started off by saying how things were 'far worse' for the employee as a result of these laws, then you spoke from the viewpoint of the employer for a while about how rubbish it would be if TVs had paternity leave, now you're back to bemoaning the lot of the poor employee.

You hit the nail on the head when you said people's lives are way more important than TV rentals. Then, sadly, you turned the hammer round, prised the nail out and poked yourself square in the eyeball with it. See, the problem is not simply that 'people are not TVs', the problem is also that EMPLOYING IS NOT RENTING. My boss doesn't own me for the 37.5 hours a week I spend working for him, just as you didn't own the people who worked for you when you were the boss. The power relationship in the workplace is a unique situation and no amount of twisting your clumsy analogy will make it fit.

I can save up for my holidays; I don’t need my employer to do this for me. I can put money aside for when I’m sick. I can imagine nothing more demoralising than turning up to work and demanding pay from someone who no longer wishes to employ me. I will only make the decision to have children if I can pay for them myself.

Ah, 'only have kids if you can pay for them yourself'. You're like an old friend, good to see you again. Where was it I saw you last? Oh yes, Jeremy Cunting Kyle, that's where. Maternity leave exists in order to give women two things: Time to recover from the physical and mental trauma of new motherhood; and the chance to spend a few precious months nurturing their young. It does NOT exist to 'pay for' the child. Paternity leave is a relatively modern invention which gives men time to support their partners just after they've given birth and to spend some time with their young. It does NOT exist to 'pay for' the child. Children are bloody expensive - they cost a lot more than a few weeks' paid leave.

And you'll 'put money aside' for when you're sick? Good luck with that. How much money? How sick are you planning on getting?

Waiving these “rights” gives me the negotiating power to demand more of what I do want. For me personally that means more holiday time, flexible hours, better pay, great people to work with and interesting & challenging work.

Well, bully for you. No, really, well done. You can obviously afford to play fast and loose with those rights. Sorry, "rights".

I’m not negotiating a simple contract to rent a TV; I’m selling a significant portion of my life.

No you're NOT. You have real ISSUES if you think your boss owns you. Never mind fighting to give up your rights as an employee - maybe try finding a job where you don't see yourself as being property of your employer.

When the government forces me to sell under these ludicrous terms that personally offer me little benefit, they’re not controlling and devaluing my TV.

Oh, back on TVs, are we? Not everything has to be like renting a TV, you know. Do you behave like this in everyday life? When you get on a bus, do you spend the whole journey complaining to the driver that you wouldn't rent a TV if it stopped every few minutes to let a few more people watch it, and you had to stop watching after a while because it was time to change the driv... I mean, cathode ray tube?

Come to think of it, I think I was on the next table to you in a Beefeater this one time - I heard someone complaining to the waitress that you wouldn't rent a TV if it was covered in gravy.

They’re controlling and devaluing my life. Controlling another person’s life when they are causing no harm is immoral. Controlling another person’s life in a way that significantly devalues it is exceptionally immoral. This is the morality of employment law.

Which sixth form debating society drop-out are you plagiarising this shit from?

Simon, if you want to believe you live in a world where mental illness and cancer and break-ups and car crashes and recessions and unwanted pregnancy don't happen, join the fucking club. And if you want to chance your arm and sell your rights down the river, knock yourself out. You've got what you wanted anyway, thanks to your accountant and your £1,200. But please don't demand that the rest of us join you in your great big gamble. Some of us happen to think we've got too much to lose.

What babies think

The Express has finally lost the plot. Its idiotic CRUSADE FOR CHANGE campaign to stop the clocks going back has been well covered by Atomic Spin and Tabloid Watch, doubtless among others, but I wanted to focus on one particular aspect of the coverage - namely, the brazen misuse of mathematics.

"29 MILLION SUPPORT" screams the headline. What a lot of people. This Crusade certainly has captured the  public's eye - a number of people many, many times higher than the Daily Express readership supports it. But of course, that's not actually the true number of people who responded positively to the poll. No, what they've done is take the 'yes' percentage - 58% - and multiply it by 50,000,000 - roughly the population of England.

Why England? Well, the Scottish Express isn't so enamoured with the campaign. And Welsh people don't count. Regardless of this, is it reasonable to assume that support for the Crusade really runs at 29 million people?

No, of course not. Here's a few reasons why:

• The article itself admits that 58% of respondents said the government should 'look at the system', which falls some way short of the unequivocal support hinted at in the headline.
• The survey was of Daily Express readers. In general, if the Daily Express runs a poll asking readers 'would you like a large man to stamp on your testicles until you vomit?' then the 'yes' vote would be in the upper 80s at least, provided it was linked in with an article headlined NOW SPONGING EU MIGRANT BRIGADE SAY NO TO BRITISH BOLLOCK STAMPING. In context, a meagre 58% is something of a snub.
• You simply cannot extrapolate a poll about political opinions to the whole population like that. Look at that picture, for example. What do you see? That's right - babies. Babies don't care about politics. They don't care about immigration, the NHS or the deficit. Things might affect them, but they don't care about the issues as long as the milk keeps flowing. They certainly don't care about the clocks going back. (Well, the one on the left might, because he lives in Scotland, but he doesn't count.) And yet the Express included them in its data, because they multiplied 58% by the WHOLE population of England, not just the non-baby population*. The fallacy involved here becomes more obvious when the next Express poll comes back with a 97% 'yes' result - such a figure would account for everyone in England over the age of nine.

I simply do not buy the idea that this mathematical incompetence was an honest mistake. When they get a 90%+ poll result, they don't multiply that by 50 million because the answer would look ridiculous. Just because the 29 million figure isn't actually impossible, doesn't mean that the methods used to obtain it weren't a complete crock of shit.

Add this to the usual cherry-picking of data, bold assertions and the odd truly mystifying claim (including that 'a third of us will oversleep' when the clocks go back - think about it), this whole campaign is a masterclass in pointless newspaper rubbish.

* 2009 figures here. If you're anything like me, that's you done for the day.

What most sensible people do

Ah, bobbing for apples. Nothing says 'by gum, it's Hallowe'en' more than sticking your head in a bucket of water and trying to grab an apple with your teeth. As the Mail puts it:

Most sensible people consider it a jolly Halloween tradition that poses a danger no graver than getting a squirt of water up your nose.

See how the tone of the 'news' article is set by the intro - if you disagree with the Mail, you disagree with sensible, jolly, traditional folk.
And now - boo, hiss - enter the baddy in the second paragraph:

But now apple bobbing has fallen foul of the health and safety police – with participants advised to wear goggles, remove stalks and use bottled water.

Playing the villain is opthalmologist Parwez Hossain. Pfft. Opthalmologists, eh? What do they know about eye injuries?

Mr Hossain said three people were admitted to the hospital with apple bobbing injuries last year. He added: ‘Casualty staff have seen children and adults turning up on Halloween with scratches on the cornea and eye injuries from impacts caused by apple bobbing.'

 Oh, OK, he knows a fair bit. But don't listen to him, kids, he's the health and safety police. Like the police, only without any authority, and speaking in a purely advisory capacity, partly because we asked him to. Listen instead to 'Hallowe'en enthusiast' Ben Richards:

‘I’ve done apple bobbing for years and never had any problems’

 Ben has clearly got his wires crossed, and thinks that Mr Hossain (boo, hiss) was saying that absolutely everyone who bobs for apples will be injured.
Less enthusiastic about Hallowe'en, but probably more so about apples, is Adrian Barlow, chief executive of English Apples and Pears, who said:

'I have never heard of anybody suffering an injury as a result of apple bobbing.'

Speak to Mr Hossain, he saw three last year.
The punchline of the article is a crescendo of further Hallowe'en health and safety 'horrors', culminating in:

[The hospital trust] advised care when using glow sticks because the contents can cause irritation if splashed in the eye.

Yeah, you know what? I think I'll probably actually take that one seriously.

And it's two for the price of one. Accompanying this article is a short piece about champion swimmer Alex Crossland-Robins, 10, who has been 'banned from wearing goggles in the pool under health and safety rules'.
Turns out it's policy to let children get used to the feel of water in their eyes - so they are less likely to panic if they find themselves in deep water without goggles, presumably. Oh, and it only applies in Alex's school swimming lessons - he can wear goggles whenever he likes on his own time.
He's pictured with about a dozen medals and trophies and is obviously dead good at swimming and that. I doubt he won those competitions in school time, so it's completely incongruous to link his 'champion' status with his school's rules about goggles.

Never mind though, the die has been cast and the narrative established. By next week, Littlejohn will be riffing on apple bobbing being banned by Muslim lesbian PC do-gooders - and the facts will be nothing but a distant memory.

Name shame

The Office of National Statistics has released its annual list of the most popular baby names. And the big news is that, after 14 years at the top, Jack is no longer the most common boy's name! Isn't it?

No, it's not. The big news is that Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys ahead of Jack and Harry. Kind of, if you combine all the different spellings of Mohammed but fail to combine all the different spellings of, say, Oliver. This bullshit comes back every year. The Daily Mail (among others) wants to tell the story of SCARY MUSLIMS COMING OVER HERE TAKING OUR JOBS AND OUR WOMEN AND NOW THEY'RE NAMING OUR BABIES TOO!!!!!!!!


It's beautifully summarised by Jonathan at No Sleep 'Til Brooklands here... no, hang on a minute, here. The Mail, Express and Telegraph are cherry-picking their data and twisting it to fit their narrative. We're all used to that.


But the BBC... surely you can rely on good old Auntie. Far from the liberal-biased monster some would have you believe, the Beeb is the closest thing we have to a neutral media organisation. And how has the Beeb reported the baby names report? With a flashy graph and the headline Oliver and Olivia top names' list. Not sure about that apostrophe (actually, I am sure - it shouldn't be there) but at least it sticks to the facts.


But what's this... after mentioning the clean sweep for olive-based names, and Jack's slide to second spot, and the lack of new entries in the top 10, the story reads:

Mohammed was at number 16 nationally...

What sort of chart rundown is that? 1, 2, 16. No wonder Top Of The Pops got axed. At least the BBC didn't mash the figures to make it number one... but in a way, that makes it even odder that they've mentioned it at all. Without wishing to sound crude, it doesn't mention where Hardeep charted, or Stavros or Sergio or Vladimir, or any other foreign names for no reason other than that they're... you know... foreign.

What's happened is that the Mail et al have won. Their narrative - invading armies of super-virile Muslims colonising our white and pleasant land - has poisoned even the most innocuous of stories. So much so that even the BBC, which doesn't even attempt to gerrymander the results so Mohammed is top, feels it has to mention it. Simply because, if it didn't, it would be accused of being part of the conspiracy.