The Ministry Of Truth

At the risk of sounding like Michael Winner, I went to dinner on Wednesday night with a number of American gentlemen.  They are all nice enough blokes with level enough heads and decent enough brains.  But the conversation was a bit distressing at times.

“What do you think of Palin?” one (an ex-pat marooned in Blighty for the time being) asked another (a Californian resident just visiting this planet).

“You remember David Lee Roth’s Hot For Teacher?  She’s got that kind of sexy teacher/librarian thing going on.  A real MILF.  She’s got a great rack.”

“But as a candidate [you think] she’s crap, right?”

“Oh, yeah.  But you can only vote McCain, right?  I mean, Obama…?!”

“Sure, sure, but you know – it’s a bit worrying: I mean, McCain could die at any minute…”

“True.  But she’s hot.  I’m for McCain.”

Inside, I wept for two and a half hours.

In her acceptance speech to the Republican Party convention, Governor Palin quoted a writer called Westbrook Pegler:

We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.

It seems Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not particularly impressed with the sexy librarian’s choice of reading matter.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

Still, cracking tits, eh?

In other news…

[Arrivederci Gordon] sought… to show that he was committed to reform of the City and tackling the financial crisis. Keen to re-establish his authority ahead of Labour’s annual conference, Brown said: “We are cleaning up the financial system where there have been problems and we are going to continue taking whatever action is necessary so we have a stable financial system.”

Forgive my naivety but how can the man who was, er, in charge of “the financial system” from May 1997 to June 2007 re-establish anything by admitting that “there have been problems” in that system, that it is not “stable” and that there is a need for it to be “cleaned up”?

Meanwhile…

If I place a bet with Ladbrokes and Ladbrokes refuses to pay out when I win, I cannot enforce that gaming contract because it is a long-established principle of English law that permitting the enforceability of gambling deals would be A Bad Thing – floodgates, public policy, that sort of thing.

However, if I decide to sell shares THAT I DON’T OWN to someone, in the hope that I’ll be able to buy them back later at a lower price (ie place a bet), I can earn gazillions in bonuses in the City if my luck holds.  This noble art is called short-selling and is what 21st Century GB plc is built upon.

So…

Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, said: “While we regard short-selling as a legitimate investment technique in normal market conditions, the current extreme circumstances have given rise to disorderly markets. As a result, we have taken this decisive action, after careful consideration, to protect the fundamental integrity and quality of markets.”

However…

[The] clampdown came as early signs suggested that fears that HBOS had been targeted in a frenzy of short selling earlier this week appeared to be misplaced.

We’re in safe hands.

OR

Doomed.  Doomed.  We’re all doomed.

You decide.

Ain’t Too Proud To Beg (The Temptations)
Ball Of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today) (The Temptations)
Beauty Is Only Skin Deep (The Temptations)
Car Wash (Rose Royce)
Cloud Nine (The Temptations)
He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’ (The Velvelettes)
I Can’t Get Next To You (The Temptations)
I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marvin Gaye/Gladys Knight)
Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) (The Temptations)
Love Don’t Live Here Anymore (Rose Royce)
Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone (The Temptations)
Psychedelic Shack (The Temptations)

That’s The Way Love Is (Marvin Gaye)
Too Busy Thinking About My Baby (Marvin Gaye)
War (Edwin Starr)

Norman Jesse Whitfield
composer and producer
12 May 1940–16 September 2008

Two things.

First, I’m getting an iPhone 3G.  And I’m not even paying for it!  Said thing of beauty is to be provided by my employers.  (Of course I’ll probably have to forfeit this year’s remaining annual leave entitlement, but…)

Second, The Moral Bankruptcy Of 21st Century English Football (Part Infinity + 1) and There Are Times It’s Embarrassing To Be A Lawyer (Part Infinity + 2), courtesy of The Guardian‘s George Monbiot.

In the past few days, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club has dropped its [libel] cases against some of its fans. I am now allowed to write about the worst example of legal bullying I have ever seen.

The club has had serious problems, on and off the pitch, and many of its fans use an internet forum – owlstalk.co.uk – to discuss them. They make the kind of comments you would expect to find on any talk board, and which would normally be forgotten within 15 minutes. Two and half years ago the club launched its first suit. Only now have the people who posted these comments emerged blinking from the labyrinthine nightmare of English law…

Sheffield Wednesday went to court to demand the names and email addresses of 14 people who had posted comments on owlstalk. Here are some of the comments over which the club complained. “What an embarrassing, pathetic, laughing stock of a football club we’ve become.” “Another day, another blunder. I doubt even Leeds were in such a mess this time last summer, and look what happened to them.” “I am waiting with bated breath to hear who the Chuckle Brothers have signed after their trip to watch players abroad. With the amount of money they have to spend and the wages they can offer the best we can hope for is that little known Transvestitavian International I Sukblodov, who last scored in a brothel.”

Such comments were deemed by Sheffield Wednesday’s lawyers to be “false and seriously defamatory messages” which had caused grievous injury to the delicate flowers who ran the club. (They should try posting an article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.) The lawyers threatened “proceedings to include claims for injunctions, damages, interest and legal costs (which could be substantial)”. The judge threw most of the application out, but instructed the forum’s host to reveal the email addresses of four of the posters, whose remarks seem to me to be almost as trivial as those he dismissed. This took place a year ago, and the long shadow of the law hung over the posters until the club’s lawyers dropped the case last week.

Another case dates back to February 2006, when the club sent a warning letter to a fan called Nigel Short. When he received the letter he offered to apologise and to change his comments, but the club rejected this. He was able to fight it only because he found a lawyer – Mark Lewis of George Davies Solicitors in Manchester – who was incensed by this case and was prepared to represent him. “I’ve had two and a half years of worrying I was going to lose my house,” Short tells me. “It’s been hell. If Mark hadn’t done this no win, no fee, I would have been bankrupt by now.”

In November 2007, Short was diagnosed with throat cancer. The case continued. But on Wednesday September 3 he announced that his treatment had been successful. On Friday September 5, the club dropped the case and agreed to pay his costs. It issued a press release which suggested it had done so because of “Mr Short’s medical condition”. I asked the club whether it had abandoned the case because it knew that Short would now live to fight the action. It has refused to answer my questions.

Full case report of the fiasco here.

I dare say if I thought about it long and hard enough I could come up with some pithy pun or other on which to end this post – given my origins it would probably centre around an (entirely justifiable) insult towards natives of South Yorkshire.

As it is, I’ll suffice myself to say that the firm of solicitors instructed by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, its directors and shareholders in the above matter was Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis, known colloquially as K&L Gates.

Decide for yourself whether you would ever entertain the notion of instructing such a firm.  The Minister will be taking his (admittedly limited) purchasing power elsewhere.

The Manchester Guardian newspaper was founded (in Manchester) in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor.

The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that

it will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty… it will warmly advocate the cause of Reform; it will endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy; and to support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures.

guardian.co.uk is a news website run by what is now the Guardian Media Group.

It is, essentially, the online version of that once-proud newspaper with some added extras.

It is – to all intents and purposes – the current day incarnation of The Manchester Guardian.

Yesterday, on its front page, that website ran an advertisement for an article.

The article was about butter.

Not about butter mountains, or butter shortages, or the health benefits or disadvantages of butter.

Just butter.

How it doesn’t spread well from the fridge.

And how it goes off if you leave it out of the fridge.

Read those last three lines again.

Then go here if you don’t believe me.

Don’t get me wrong – I like butter.  (To paraphrase Bill Hicks: if you leave this blog tonight thinking, ‘The Minister doesn’t like butter,’ you’d be wrong.)

I’m just not sure it’s something that should feature on the front page of a serious newspaper website on the day when the global economy was on the brink of meltdown and Arrivederci Gordon rang Pickfords to book the removal van.

Thankfully, I know I’m not alone.

Amidst the dross of comments beneath the “article”, sat a splendid comment:

uncleleo
Sep 16 08, 2:10pm
This article – I can’t believe its not better.

Thank you, uncleleo.

Harry Potter is a cunt.

Yesterday in Eastbourne the (at least notionally) sole mainstream political party vaguely committed to social democracy – the Liberal Democrats, for those who may have forgotten they existed – turned bright blue, deciding that the best platform on which to fight the next election is “£20 billion of spending cuts and a couple of pence off income tax”.

This is on top of the party’s existing plan to cut £20 billion from public expenditure and take four pence off the basic rate of income tax.

So that’s £40 billion in spending cuts.  Can you imagine the reaction if the Tories threatened that?  (Actually, what am I talking about?  If the Tories threatened that, there would be complete apathy in the streets. Fuck me.)

Of course, nobody’s quite sure how any this is going to be funded, given that the party two years ago ditched its commitment to introduce a 50p tax rate for those earning £100,000 or more annually.

Vince Cable keeps going on about closing “immoral tax loopholes”, but it must be nice to be able to spout bollocks knowing you’ll never have to account for it.  (Which is why I’m a bit surprised Arrivederci Gordon isn’t making the most of his final days in office by announcing some initiatives based on the rejected drafts of David Sutch’s speeches from the Seventies.)

If only Labour would elect as leader a pudgy-faced, pasty posh boy who used to wank over posters of That Bloody Woman (is Mr. Tony still available…?) then I could conscionably stay at home at the next election, secure in the knowledge that my vote really won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

I know I recycle this riff more regularly than anything similar achieved to date by Noel Gallagher, but I’m really not sure English football can sink any lower.

And my anger at the moment is as much towards the fans as towards the self-serving cunts that now seem to own all of the country’s clubs.

If there is hope, it has been alleged, it lies in the proles.

So what did the proles of Newcastle do to demonstrate their anger at, er, their club owner running their club on financially prudent lines?  Did they rise up in solidarity and boycott the club’s next home game, as they said they would?  Did they bollocks.  Over 50,000 spunked £30+ each to watch the visit of Hull City – 3,000 MORE than at their previous home game while the Sainted King Kev was still in charge…

The vast majority of Manchester City’s fans, meanwhile, were all too willing to jump aboard Thaksin Shinawatra’s gravy train 14 months ago despite the man’s reprehensible political record.  Having waved that nasty little man off, with a couple of hundred million quid of beautifully laundered money in his pockets, what did they do?  They donned Arab dress to welcome another billionaire owner who knows nothing about football (you wait 127 years for a billionaire and then two come along at once…) with a questionable record on human rights and had some “comedy” £500 billion notes printed up to wave at Roman Abramovich.

Having just seen the name of the club they profess to love sullied by its association with a morally bankrupt man on the verge of a conviction for tax evasion and corruption, they’ve not only got into bed with another apple pie regime but they’ve lubed themselves up, too.

For the uninitiated, and according to Amnesty International:

The United Arab Emirates retains the death penalty…

In December 2007, the United Arab Emirates abstained in the vote in the General Assembly on resolution 62/149 calling for a moratorium on executions and, on 2 February 2008, it was one of the 58 states that signed a statement of disassociation with the resolution, placing on record their “persistent objection to any attempt to impose a moratorium on the use of the death penalty or its abolition in contravention to existing stipulations under international law”.

In all of the Emirates, except Dubai, flogging sentences are imposed on those caught having “illicit sex”…

Amnesty International has regularly raised with the authorities reports of persons – both Emirati and foreign – arbitrarily arrested and held incommunicado for prolonged periods of time, commonly in undisclosed locations where they may face torture and other ill treatment. Those responsible are usually said to be members of Amn al-Dawla (State Security)…

Other forms torture and other ill treatment documented by Amnesty International have included sleep deprivation, suspension by the wrists or ankles, severe beatings to the soles of the feet, the use of electric shocks to various parts of the body, and threats of sexual violence…

Women in the United Arab Emirates continue to suffer the impact of discriminatory laws and practices which affect most aspects of their life, including marriage and the choice of marriage partner, dissolution of marriage and child custody, and inheritance…

In the course of 2007, the government failed to respond to UN human rights bodies in respect to requests for access and on individual cases raised in 2006…

There are also reports of restrictions on the right to freedom of expression…

Political parties do not exist in the United Arab Emirates; political dissent is not tolerated and those targeted for arrest include Islamists or those critical of the human rights situation in the country.

All but a few of those fans so vocally initially opposed to the Glazers’ takeover of Manchester United seem to have come to terms with their new owners now that another Premier League title and European Cup are in the Old Trafford trophy room.

Liverpool Football Club is being turned into a laughing stock, their new owners having reneged on their pre-purchase pledge not to load the debt financing for the deal onto the club itself and proving themselves incapable (or, more accurately, personally unwilling) to finance the oft-promised new stadium.  A full 1,000 Liverpool fans summoned up the energy to protest at the weekend – after all, the club’s joint top of the table…

Suddenly, Deadly Doug Ellis is beginning to resemble Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi.

So fuck it: I’m out. Mr. Scudamore, Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Abramovich:

I’m not scared:
I’m outta here.

Hahaha!

There IS a God.

So, to recap.

The Vice Presidential candidate said that it was time for “no more ‘politics as usual’ and somebody’s big, fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment” without realising that she was describing the Republican nominee for the Presidency.

She had never left the North American continent until last year.

She has never met a foreign head of state.

She initially said the war in the Middle East was “a task that is from God”, tried to claim she didn’t say it, and then conceded “I don’t know if the task is from God.”

And these are just the initially-released highlights.

I didn’t think the world could fall into more dangerous hands than John McCain’s, but……

THIS is brilliant.  (Click the link, then “Watch the Video”.)

The Minister is not on commission: he just thinks Dropbox is mighty fine.