sweets for my sweet, twit for my twitter

Just to point out that I've got a Twitter account, @MerrickBadger.

It has notifications on the increasingly rare occasions when I publish a blog post, plus some personal life idle thoughts, and mostly (so far) it's been political stuff on current events.

There's a wee grey button in the sidebar if you want to follow me.

andrew marr doth protest too much

The BBC's venerable Andrew Marr has seriously laid into blogging. In a speech at Cheltenham Literature Festival he said

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

This is someone in a glass house firing numerous stones of various sizes in all directions.

Firstly, and most obviously, attacking people for their appearance is cheap and low, and that goes doubly for elements of appearance that are not of their choosing. It's a cornerstone of why we oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, disability discrimination and so on.

Within that, however, consider the fact that Marr himself is not what many of us would think of as a looker. I'm willing to bet he was that mercilessly abused jug-eared lad at school that everyone called FA Cup.



He is perhaps outstripped in these stakes by the phenomenally ugly John Sergeant. Yet this has nothing to do with the quality of their reporting, even though they're on telly. With bloggers, they don't show you what they look like so it makes no odds whatsoever.

And because we don't see bloggers, we get to the serious point about Marr's charges. He doesn't actually know this stuff. He's just listing a variety of things we say about people we don't like, without any evidence. So much for his implied moral high ground of authoritative opinion.

It's notable that these accusations of warped male friendless nerdiness are exactly the same things that were said ten years ago about anyone who used the internet. They were ways for the people who saw the rise of online communication as alien and threatening to pretend they were above it.

By the same token, the mainstream media is feeling the ground shift under its feet, hence these outbursts from Marr and colleagues. Their old certainties, their aloof position, their power to publish where the only available space for retort was a Letters page controlled by the same publisher, it's all been swept away.

Which brings us to another problem with what he says. Yes, there is a lot of ill-informed, vile, misanthropic, intrusive stuff on blogs. Of that material, much of it is intentionally written that way. In this respect, it is no different to the tabloid press.

For Marr to talk as if reporters only write things that are considered, beneficial and true is to pretend that the best selling newspapers in this country have never existed. Such vitriolic, speculative, seedy tittle-tattle is the public's preferred flavour of reporting.

But to look at The Sun and use its standards as grounds to attack the likes of Charles Moore and Nick Cohen is ludicrous. So it is that our repulsion at the putrefying mass of tabloid-equivalent blogging is no basis for attacking the medium as a whole, let alone making Marr's snidey snipes. The lack of real facts in his criticism only underlines that point.

The stuff I love in blogging is the way that, every day, there are news stories dismembered. The bloggers walk you through their reasoning and cite sources that are credible. It's like a forensic version of The Day Today, teaching you to use your critical faculties with news media, keeping your bullshit detector at full power.

All those stories about how 'they're trying to ban Christmas' and making people call it Winterval in case it offends muslims? Not one of them is true. Likewise lots of the stories about immigration. But you wouldn't know that if you only read the papers and watched TV. It's when bloggers look into it that we get the truth.

There are large elements of crossover, because responsible reporting is essentially the same endeavour whether it's bloggers or professionals. Channel 4 News' Fact Check blog does a superb job of correcting what we're told, and conversely news broadcasters pick up rumours from blogs and turn them into stories. Last year there was something going round about Gordon Brown being on certain pills. It didn't appear to have any real foundation, but that didn't stop it being inappropriately being included in an interview by one Andrew Marr.

It appears that, fingers burnt, he's blaming bloggers for telling him to put his hand in the fire.

bnp tolerance

The comments sections of news sites seemed such a bright idea at first. Democratising journalism and creating a new system allowing debate, challenge and correction to be on the same page as the article. This would surely lead journalists to draft their pieces more carefully, and to a better understanding and level of engagement for all.

It rapidly became clear that nothing like that would happen. Out there on the comments pages it's survival of the shoutiest, with access favouring those who've got the internet in front of them all day and nothing interesting to do. Shielded by anonymity, the need for civility and accuracy wither to nought.

Last year I pondered why news sites get this crap much more than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's a reference tool, the Guardian is a news site. If you manage to skew the first wave of comments on a news article, you've effectively neutered the ability to debate. Who goes back to a four month old news article to start a discussion?

Most posts on this blog only get a couple of comments, if any. I've deleted very few, just the ones that were solely comprised of insults. I've let ones from climate deniers, Simple Minds fans, BNP supporters and people even further right stay up.

In May I did a post about BNP leaflets and the party's climate denial. Within 12 hours it had about 30 comments. About two-thirds were from BNP supporters, all bar one were anonymous, and none of them about the content of the post (that the source the BNP cited to prove there's no climate change actually shows the opposite).

It was during the period of the European elections when the BNP had clearly got their flunkies to trawl the internet and bombard the comments sections of anything that mentioned the party. The effect is rather like having them run into a meeting with airhorns. Nobody can be heard over the din, and by the time they leave everyone sensible's left the room. I've got another post about the BNP coming soon, and I'm half expecting the same flood of comments, so I thought I'd set out the rules in advance.

Free speech is one of those issues where I strongly agree with opposed sides. I think people have a right to be protected from hate speech, and it is blindingly obvious that extreme actions have their roots in seemingly innocuous incitement activities. We should not allow the fascists credibility and let them march the streets, creating an atmosphere of intimidation, normalising aggressive racism and bigotry. I applaud those who use force to confront and fight fascists.

Conversely, something in that feels a bit paternalistic, like we're saying we don't trust the public to be as smart as us in seeing through facist lies. If we don't trust the mass of people to discount stupid opinions then there is little point in any political activism as a decent future is impossible.

On a more philosophical level, where does the no-platform policy end? I agree with George Orwell when he said

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

We can't have this apply to our controversial views but not those of others simply because we disagree with them. Or to put it another way, as Noam Chomsky said,

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.

However, Orwell qualified his point with stuff that makes obvious sense

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

So which ones are activities that deserve to be stymied because they 'harm the community'? Fascist attacks on ethnic minorities? Advocating the deportation of our neighbours? Making stupid comments online that inhibit proper discussion?

Here on this blog, I don't have to find definite answers. It's not a freedom of speech issue. If I were the BBC then I would have a duty to be impartial, but really, this place is no more powerful or laudable than a blog anyone could set up in seconds. So if I delete comments it is not shutting down anyone's freedom of speech.

It's my blog, and if I deem comments to be discouraging to the kind of debate and atmosphere I want to see here, stuff full of insults and not even on topic, then I'm free to delete them. And if you don't like that you BNP scumfucks then go cry to your mums.

on this deity (slight return)

Dorian Cope has relaunched her On This Deity site! I say now what I said when she did the beta version:

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut observed a truth there that all of us who write recognise.

Dorian Cope, however, is one of those people who can do it without so much of the revision and editing, she can just lay it out off the top of her head. Look what happens when she's interrupted on her way somewhere by a randomer who asks her about the MC5.



Dorian is the wife of the indefatigable Julian Cope. As he releases an album more than once a year and has written a swathe of effervescent groundbreaking scholarly books on history and music, it must take a mighty intellect and a bold character to keep up with him at close quarters, let alone to encourage, inspire and criticise as he creates. Dorian does all that and more, so it's long past time that she started publishing stuff herself.

Her On This Deity site marks anniversaries of events in history. And not the history of kings and presidents but the other history, the history of dissent and rebellion. It's got the classic Cope mix of vision, fresh interpretation and an understanding of music as central cultural force and key part of radical history.

Each post is an illuminating piece, but there's a powerful composite message too. As we see that these events have gone on - every day, all around the world, year in year out for centuries - so we realise that the daring, imaginative, revolutionary perspective isn't a wacky sideshow or something reserved for mighty superheroes like Mandela, but that it's something that binds us in the millions and, most importantly, is as real and possible a force for change now as any time in the past.

minus the ads

The internet is a loud and busy enough place as it is, even before we consider the intrusive adverts. Just like the way TV adverts are louder than the programmes, so online ads are more garish and flickery than the pages they're hosted on.

Most people claim not to notice internet ads. But then, most people claim to be immune to advertising.

There is a way to remove adverts from the sites you look at. It's very quick and foolproof. It's also free and there's no catch.

First, stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. It does everything IE does that's any good and more besides, and it's opensource so isn't made by sending all your money to Bill Gates. You can download it free here.

Secondly, install the AdBlock plugin. Alice walks you through how to do it here.

You'll notice a clearer mindset when going online. But more vividly, you'll be amazed what going on other people's computers looks like; a riot of garish consumerist propaganda, especially when they're on things like Youtube and Facebook. You'll then keep asking people if they mind you installing AdBlock on their machines. And then they'll thank you for it.

glad to be gay

In these days of civil partnerships, equal ages of consent and whatnot it's easy to get the impression that the struggle for gay liberation's over.

But although the cops no longer randomly raid gay pubs for 'yes I'll plead guilty to anything if it'll keep my name out of the papers' arrests, and although there is in fact a Gay Police Association who've marched at Pride in uniform since 2003, a Home Office report of 2005 says homophobia is still 'all but endemic' in the police.

As a Welsh rugby hero can come out to universal acclaim, we forget that in the 1990s a Premiership footballer, Justin Fashanu, was hounded to death.

Incidentally, there are several hundred players in the Premiership. How peculiar that none of them appear to be gay. Or perhaps not. It isn't hard to imagine the response if any did come out. Yet the successful effort to stamp out racist abuse from football crowds shows what can be done, if only we decide that racism isn't the worst oppression and other attacks on basic human rights of equality are worthy our attention.

Still, things are undoubtedly better than they were. The struggles of the 1970s and 80s are being forgotten by those who were there, and many of those too young to have seen it have never been told what it was like.

Back in the 1970s, Tom Robinson was the first gay rock star who was out and proud right from the start of his career. His second single, the bitterly ironic Glad To Be Gay, wasa top 20 hit yet its content ensured that it went largely unplayed on the radio.

We need to remember not only the different political atmosphere of the time, but the power of pop music then and the fear it could invoke. This was the country who, a few months earlier, had totally banned the Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen from the airwaves, even fiddling the official chart figures to make it appear that the song had only got to number 2 when it was outselling anything else twice over.

The Britain that Robinson wrote Glad To Be Gay in was a place where, less than ten years earlier, homosexuality didn't get today's shrugs or approval, it got you several years in jail. His focused venom on a version recorded at an Amnesty benefit in 1979 is due to the fact that, even by then, Amnesty refused to recognise the imprisonment of gay people as a human rights issue.

The song was always about the politics rather than the art, and Robinson has frequently updated the lyrics over the years as new issues come to the fore and old references become obsolete.

The impact of Aids in the 1980s forced a major rewrite. Whilst the virus decimated the gay population, the government stood with its fingers in its ears by until it hit straights. Then the backlash began. The public response was to call it 'the gay plague', with letters pages calling for tattoos on queers' foreheads, and Tory politicians suggesting gassing them as a public health measure.

Robinson's released the various versions of the song on live albums and B-sides over the years. I've just completed a website with all the versions on. The lyrics are transcribed, references explained, MP3s are available for download, and I've done a big interview with Tom about it all too.

It stands not only as a piece of under-appreciated musical history, but hopefully as an important lesson in social and political history too.

It's up at gladtobegay.net

thought policing the blogosphere

Seismic Shock is a blog I'd not heard of before today. It concerns itself with anti-Zionist activity and suchlike. They've written some stuff about an Anglican vicar, Stephen Sizer, and apparently accused him of associating with Holocaust deniers.

Two months ago, Sizer reported this to his local police in Surrey. They passed it on to Seismic Shock's local police in West Yorkshire, who sent two officers round to 'have a word'.

Seismic Shock deleted the offending post

"I did it because I felt intimidated," he said. "I felt had to co-operate with the police."

The story has surfaced in numerous parts of the understandably rattled Jewish blogosphere, in one or two places elsewhere due to its implications for freedom of speech in general, and also in the mainstream on the BBC and - thanks to its alleged anti-Israeli content - from Melanie Phillips in The Spectator.

Phillips splutters

Under what legal authority did the police come and feel Seismic Shock’s collar like this? What was the criminal offence he was suspected of committing? Under what authority did they require him to delete his previous blog?

What has happened to the British police when they intimidate a writer for material which other people merely find objectionable?

It's very simple. The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 says you commit an offence if you pursue a course of conduct that harasses someone or causes them alarm or distress.

Section 7 makes the low threshold clear:

(3) A “course of conduct” must involve conduct on at least two occasions.
(4) “Conduct” includes speech.

If that wasn't enough, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 amended the law. A course of conduct was already something done at least twice to one person; now it's a crime if done just once to a group of two or more people.

This part of the Act was specifically aimed at protesters. It specifies that it is an offence to harass someone - ie talk to more than two people - if the intention is to persuade them

(i) not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or

(ii) to do something that he is not under any obligation to do.

The following section makes it an offence to just be outside someone's home if it is likely to alarm or distress them and you're there to try to persuade them not to do something they're entitled to do, or to do something they're under no obligation to do.

It makes trespass an arrestable and imprisonable offence if it's a 'designated site' - ie Crown land or a site that the Secretary of State has designated 'in the interests of national security'. Watch out for that one being applied at power station and airport protests.

The Protection From Harassment Act - which we were told in 1997 was about protecting vulnerable women from dangerous ex-partners - is frequently used to protect vast corporations from people with leaflets and loud hailers.

Judges grant the injunctions after being convinced that protesters are "alarming or distressing" employees, often at emergency legal hearings without the protesters being informed or represented. They can rely on hearsay evidence or statements from police.

Protesters are often unable to challenge the statements, which are sometimes made anonymously. Activists then have to return to court, often at their own cost, to argue for a lifting of the injunction. Protesters can be jailed for up to five years if they break the terms of the court order.

It was the basis of the injunctions granted against SHAC, Smash EDO, Heathrow Climate Camp and at Radley Lakes where Npower had an injunction to protect their alarmed and distressed balaclava-wearing security guards from press photographers. The police take an active role in pushing this solution. For Smash EDO they supplied names of arrestees, even those who'd not been prosecuted. At the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, the police pressurised the power station's owners, Eon, to get an injunction.

Two people complained to police about Seismic Shock's blogpost, so we only needed a single act to be 'a course of action'. It seems to me they have a good case under the Protection from Harassment Act.

Couple that law to our anti-terrorism legislation - if a cop alleges you have been thinking about supporting a group who'd commit serious criminal damage for political purposes, you have to prove your innocence - and anything that offends or obstructs anyone can be covered. All you need is the political will to pursue it.

off my facebook

I won’t be gagged, or tagged and numbered
Won’t have my genes and eyeballs plundered
At my own expense
For a defence
That won’t work
Against a threat
That couldn’t get
Much smaller.
They won’t get my photograph, my details, my age
(So long as they don’t log onto my Facebook page)
- Danny Chivers, Risk Assessment

Even before I read Jim Bliss' alarming background information about Facebook - stuff which anybody who ever knows anybody who uses Facebook should read - I was wary. It amazed me activists would sign up so readily to what is the greatest gift the security services have ever received. People who used to be meticulous about PGPing everything they sent now blithely trumpet the stuff they once encrypted.

For all their talk of nutters trying to blow up planes, MI5 and the semi-secret branches of the police watch a far greater number of unthreatening subversives. In the 1980s it was suburban CND groups and trade union officials, these days it's Climate Campers and the like.

Some people have said that the wealth of information involved in social networking sites makes it hard for the forces of darkness to sift through; there's so much noise it obscures the signal. But once they have a target named from whatever source, Facebook lets them be followed like nothing before. No amount of phone-taps or blokes waiting outside your house with notebooks could yield the volume and fine detail that can be readily culled from five minutes on Facebook with your password cracked.

Who knows who, how familiar are they with each other, the precise detail of their political persuasion (what sort of weblinks do they flag up, what links of other people's do they click 'like this' on), photos, times, dates, dates of birth, family background, employment details, the works. It's a cornucopia of data that the Stasi would have creamed their kecks at. And I'm starting to feel left out.

About five, maybe seven years ago it became a severe social impediment not to have a mobile phone. Social etiquette changed, plans were things that could change at the last minute, even made at the last minute, and everyone was up to speed. Except, that is, for the weird types who didn't have a phone, sat there like a lemon at the original agreed meeting point, feeling like the Amish kid who doesn't know what the other kids are raving about when they talk of TV shows.

Large numbers of the kind of switched-on political thinkers who'd have done blogs now just post their stuff on Facebook. Significant discussions that I'd have really liked to be part of have taken place between friends and their friends, all of them assuming that anyone with anything decent to say has heard about it. Last weekend's hilarious mass snowball fight between several hundred people on Leeds' Hyde Park was a Facebook thing. When the Christmas number one can be righteous and a Facebook meme, it's time for us non-users to feel locked out.

Some try to avoid exposure on Facebook by not using their real name and having some witty obscure avatar. It's certainly a tactic that protects bloggers from the ultimate nightmare. It's effective on Facebook too, until your friends use your real name, tag you in photos they upload or spot, and then you respond with all manner of identifying information.

I'm well aware that activist bloggers volunteer a lot about themselves to the security services, and I'm surely no exception. But there's still a sense of awareness, of control, of restriction. I choose which information goes up. I'm not giving every last detail of my life, and more to the point I'm not encouraging every one of my friends to do it either. Were that so, it'd feel very different and pretty wrong. But this is now to be weighed up against the exclusion that non-Facebooking enforces. It's starting to feel like refusing to use a phone or write anything down in case it's intercepted.

I'm already peeking over the shoulders of Facebook users and chipping in to their musings. I can feel myself slipping...

number ones

Danny Chivers' recent post on A Daisy Through Concrete says

It's getting so you can't type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into a search engine without my leering face popping up in front of your startled eyes.

The delicious irony is that, like a serpent eating its own tail or the first chicken coming from its own egg, he's self-fulfilled. If you type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into Google it comes up with one result - Danny's post.

A while ago commenters on a post over at Five Chinese Crackers mentioned being number one in Google for "pubs in leeds belgian beer", "Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks grapple fake hookers" and 5CC's own "Paul Dacre's robot arm".

It's something I've brought up in conversation with a couple of bloggers since, and I think it's time to start a meme.

Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase, as it's fairly easy to be top of the heap for 'post-marxist dialectics in contemporary radical discourse' than it is for summat like 'fisting shaven catholic teens'.

Bristling Badger's number one for:

"An old man wanking into a sock"
"Caviar enemas"
"Fuck you liberal democrats"
"Baboon in a bucket"

and - a matter of considerable personal pride - I also get number one for Strawberry Switchblade.

What about you;

A Daisy Through Concrete
Chicken Yoghurt
The Quiet Road
Dreamflesh
Alice In Blogland

bullshit detectors

You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you *reckon* something. So why not tell us what you reckon? Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uniformed, ad-hoc reckon.

Having open-access comments on websites is technically very democratic, except that it allows the quickiest to be heard loudest, and discourages people who don't like being insulted.

George Monbiot lamented the way this fouls discussion, saying that the Guardian environment site is especially bad. I beg to differ. On reading that I went to a random Guardian news article - it was about Michael Jackson's funeral - and found the same level of brazen ignorance and vitriolic venom there. I think perhaps we think comments are worst at the place we read them most.

But the prevalence of climate deniers at the Guardian site made me realise why, conversely, the Daily Mail site often has surprisingly good comments. People go to where they can beat their chests. It is far easier and more pleasing to talk at length about things you dislike than things you like. So, pick the newspaper or columnist most opposed to your perspective and you'll likely be welcomed into the warm bosom of sympathetic commenters there.

Nicholson Baker's fascinating article about Wikipedia talks about vandalism on the site, which is surprisingly low compared to other high-volume open-access sites. Partly it's due to the fact that lots of people are patrolling Wikipedia, but there's something else at work.

Wikipedia's a reference tool, the Guardian is a news site. If you manage to skew the first wave of comments on a news article, you've effectively neutered the ability to debate. Who goes back to a four month old news article to start a discussion? Thus, it's worth the climate deniers while setting up Google news alerts and then rushing to blather loud and long and unintelligibly when something in their sphere of interest is published.

There's no such rush to read a Wikipedia article. Your stupid comment will probably be wiped before many people have seen it, and certainly it won't stand there attracting responses and making you feel important. So, even though Wikipedia is such a popular site, the news services are the main focus for the hard of thinking.

As seekers of knowledge we have a relatively new task. Before the 20th century - arguably up until the internet age - the problem with getting good information was finding where it was. These days, it's right there in front of you, but getting it is about filtering it out from the bullshit.

So, whilst it may appear a bit of an obvious fish/barrel/firearms jamboree to have a blog devoted to stupid things said on the BBC's Have Your Say pages, there's a very profound point being made. It keeps your mind sharp, it reminds you that just because lots of people say something online doesn't mean many people actually think it at all. The blog - newly added to my sidebar - is called Speak You're Branes, named after the segment in the priceless Day Today where a member of the public gives an idiotic vox-pop.

I'm finding that blogs like Speak You're Branes, and the ones like Enemies of Reason and Five Chinese Crackers that take apart newspaper bias and made-upness, are forming a key component of my reading these days. It's almost as if I've got to get some of that attitude on as armour before wading into the news media.

Being able to discern between the various calibres of information presented is the only way we'll make sense of the world. A finely-tuned bullshit detector is the most essential tool of the 21st century.

xtranormal

Last week, when it still seemed like Nick Griffin was going to go to a do at Buckingham Palace, the excellent Five Chinese Crackers posted a funny little animation of Griffin and the queen.

It finished with the words 'if you can type, you can make movies. www.xtranormal.com'.

It's a real tin-claim/actual-effect match. I haven't looked at any instructions or anything, and it's quick and easy to make these weird lego-people animations.

Whilst I'm sure it'll have great purpose in satire and whatnot, my first impulse was to make it sweary. Let's make computer voice software say the words of Ice-T's Straight Up Nigga and be responded to by a woman saying all manner of filth.



Then, let's recontextualise the Theme From Shaft.





It's really easy, it's free, no catches as far as I can see. Apart from the fact that's it's probably going to be the biggest distraction time-hoover ever invented.

Have a go.

xtranormal.com

=========================

UPDATE:

Having encouraged friends to have a go, I've been sent a link to this masterwork

on this deity

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.
- Kurt Vonnegut

It's a truth that all of us who write recognise.

Dorian Cope, however, is one of those people who can do it without so much of the revision and editing, she can just lay it out off the top of her head. Look what happens when she's interrupted on her way somewhere by a randomer who asks her about the MC5.



Dorian is the wife of the indefatigable Julian Cope. As he releases an album more than once a year and has written a swathe of effervescent groundbreaking scholarly books on history and music, it must take a mighty intellect and a bold character to keep up with him at close quarters, let alone to encourage, inspire and criticise as he creates. Dorian does all that and more, so it's long past time that she started publishing stuff herself.

She's now doing a blog called On This Deity, marking anniversaries of events in history. And not the history of kings and presidents but the other history, the history of dissent and rebellion. It's got the classic Cope mix of vision, fresh interpretation and an understanding of music as central cultural force and key part of radical history.

Each post is an illuminating piece, but there's a powerful composite message too. As we see that these events have gone on - every day, all around the world, year in year out for centuries - so we realise that the daring, imaginative, revolutionary perspective isn't a wacky sideshow or something reserved for mighty superheroes like Mandela, but that it's something that binds us in the millions and, most importantly, is as real and possible a force for change now as any time in the past.

into chernobyl's dead zone

In writing that piece about Mark Lynas and nuclear power, there was a something he said about the Chernobyl incident that resonated with me.

Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims - especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently - the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone.

If ever there was a bit to cut from an article - on grounds of flimsiness as a defence of nuclear power, or for unnecessarily feeding into the stereotype of environmentalist misanthropy - it's that one. But it dredged something up for me, I remembered a website I saw a few years ago where a Ukrainian had taken a motorbike trip through the Chernobyl dead zone.

The site is still up, considerably expanded, and it's every bit as enthralling as I remembered. I'm not plugging this as any comment on the wisdom on future nuclear power, just as a bit of mesmerising travelogue and social history.

In the last few years Elena Filatova's made numerous trips into the dead zone. There are now hundreds of photos, needing only a little captioning, yet even in that she provides a great historic and poetic insight.

Usually, when they talk about the dead zone, they talk about area that is 30 kms around reactor.

What about this towns and villages? They are 60 kms from reactor.

The Wolves Land is bigger than many think and it keeps on growing. Now days, it spread on 300 kms from South to North and on 100 kms from East on West.

There are more than 2,000 dead towns and villages within a radius of 250 kms (155 miles) around Chernobyl reactor. Each year I travel, I see more and more ruined places.

This barbed wire marks the limit of the '30km' zone, but according to the site it's over 50km from the reactor.



She visits a sizeable ghost town, Pripyat. One of the spookiest aspects is the Sovietness of it.



Not only are there relics from the Soviet Union, but the accident happened in late April. The towns were evacuated on April 27th, four days before the Mayday celebrations.

At first glance, Ghost Town seems like a normal town. There is a taxi stop, a grocery store, someone's wash hangs from the balcony and the windows are open. But then I see a slogan on a building that says - "The Party of Lenin Will Lead Us To The Triumph Of Communism"......and I realize that those windows were opened to the spring air of April of 1986.

It is safe to be in the open air in Ghost Town. It is inside the houses where the real danger lies.

Taking such a walk with no special radiation detecting device is like walking through a minefield wearing snowshoes.

People had homes, garages, cars, country houses, they had money, friends, relatives cats and dogs. People had their lives. Each in own niche. And then in a matter of hours, their entire world fell to pieces.

After a few hours trip in an army vehicle, they stood under a shower, washing away radiation. Then they stepped in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no dogs, no money, no past and with a very doubtful future.

Inside a school building there is the added eerieness of discarded toys and other childrens items

There are hundreds of little gas masks, a teachers diary and a last note saying that their walk on Saturday has been canceled due to some unforeseen contingency.

This is the highest building in town. On the day of disaster, many people gathered on this roof to see the beautiful shining cloud above the Atomic Power Plant.

She goes to the top herself and the power plant is clearly visible.




Away from the town, she passes through villages, towns and vast areas of reclaimed wilderness. The modern maps don't show the roads or deserted villages. Consequently, she doesn't know the names of many of the places she finds. Some of the larger towns have big concrete signs as you enter, but smaller places have metal signs with the placename rusted away.

Along the Ukraine/Belarus border area, the towns are not only often de-named, but you don't even know which country a town is in.

We are on the border and the sign welcomes us in all fifteen languages of former republics of Soviet Union

In one village she see a monument, a grave of the unknown soldier from the Great Patriotic War (known to us Westies as World War 2). How odd for a monument to spend its life unseen and unvenerated, stranger still that it's an unknown individual who's become part of a wider monument, an unknown town.



On previous visits she left a few logs across roads to see if anyone moved them. returning several years later they're in place, meaning nobody else has travelled the roads in the meantime.

Year after year it becomes more difficult to reach those distant towns and villages of Chernobyl; roads overgrown, trees falling and bridges collapse.

Nature is relentless at reclaiming the land. In some hundred years all signs of humanity will be gone from here. Radiation will stay long after that.

She's compiled pictures from several visitors into a book called Pluto's Realm. Proceeds go towards buying supplies for the few people who still live in abandoned villages in the dead zone.

It is really Plutonium that will reign here for thousands of years. It is extremely toxic and highly chemically reactive, half-life of Plutonium-239 is over 24,000 years. Plutonium is appropriately named after Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.

The pictures here are a tiny fraction of what's on the site and by no means the most remarkable. You can spend hours being spooked, thinking about time, nature, industrialisation, politics, resilience and more.

muppet music

Over on my MP3 blog I recently posted a Stevie Wonder track, and embedded the Youtube video of a mindblowing 6 minute version of Superstition that Stevie did on Sesame Street.

That sent me off on a bit of a Youtube trawl. I mean, if they can have straightforward funk heaven, what else did Sesame Street and the Muppets have? Not in terms of celebrity guests, but in terms of really good music.

The glowing gem is REM doing Shiny Happy People, with the lyrics altered to Furry Happy Monsters, sung by Stipe as he grins and bounces in simplistic kindergarten fashion.



Here's Alice Cooper doing - somewhat confusingly for a show with an explicitly educational brief - School's Out.



How about Scarborough Fair being done by that talented duo Simon and, er, Piggy?



Then Simon was back, serenading some muppets with a straight rendition of Long Long Day from One Trick Pony.



The muppets also played the man's material without him, doing a 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover. Which is nowhere as unlikely as their straight covers of For What It's Worth or While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Miss Piggy had other singing partners. Here she is doing Jackson with Johnny Cash!



Cash seems to have taken up residence on Sesame Street. He was there again in 1992, with - kinnell! - Big Bird and The Count miming to his vocal.



Cooler still, in this one there's not only Johnny doing duets with a muppets, and there's a cartoon of Johnny too.



There's surely a proper DVD to be done.

sunday drinker wine reviews

Harry Hutton's blog, Chase Me Ladies I'm In The Cavalry, remains one of the funniest things I ever read. Usually - but not always - making a point and - always - with a great comic slap. His recent post on the cost of the Iraq war observed

If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do.

In turn, Hutton's taste in other people's work is superb. He posted an embed of a Sunday Drinker wine review without comment, as it needs none. However, there are a further two Sunday Drinker wine reviews of equal comic calibre, so I hereby give you the lot.

onion tv

I've long adored The Onion's humour. So sharply observed both in its choice of targets and in the use of media language. The smaller items like Concert Ruined By Guy Enjoying Himself get me, but it was that post-9/11 issue that showed the Onion to be real genius. They published every week, but after 9/11 there was nothing for two weeks, followed by the greatest satire I've ever seen.

It could've gone so wrong. Emotions were running very high, yet they managed to ridicule the hi-jackers and the wars that followed in one go whilst being very, very funny.

God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule was the lead item, with Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell leaving me literally gasping from laughing so hard.

I don't know why, but it's taken me a while to get round to its TV stuff. That attention to the use of language in the written word is applied across the board in the dress and mannerisms of presenter, the studios and graphics of the TV news channels, utterly plausible production values that leave the mighty Day Today looking somewhat heavy-handed.

Jim from The Quiet Road pointed me towards this superb panel discussion


In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

The Richard & Judyesque Fat Kid Successfully Avoids Ridicule By Swimming With Shirt On perfectly apes that daytime on the sofa show, but the one that flattened me was this, which says everything my last post was trying to say only much funnier.


Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

hate my tory

For a very long time - in internet terms - there's been a website called Hot Or Not. People upload pictures of themselves (or people they know), and the (utterly bored but got the internet at work and on an hourly rate) viewer rates the sexual allure of the picture on a scale of 1 to 10. Each vote brings up a new picture. There are adverts on the screen which make the site's owners wealthy. Simple.

Then other ratings sites emerged. Running on the same principles but concerning itself less with your body than with what was recently expelled from it, there was Rate My Poo.

It quickly got sister sites, Rate My Boobies and Rate My Kitten.

Shit, tits and cats, I don't get the link. Except that perhaps most people would like to see endless pictures of at least one of them. Although I'm sure a small but select band would pay handsomely to see pictures involving all three and really, what else is the internet for?

Then came Rate My Boner and Rate My Finger. The latter features some quality bird-flipping, the former got taken down after threats from the US government. Not for anything to do with obscenity. That would've been a difficult and lengthy trial. No, on weird tax regulations about income from the ads.

Notably, they left tits and kittens and whatnot alone. Reminds me of the way the feds got Al Capone, mass murdering gangster thug, on tax evasion.

Anyway, the winning formula has been redeployed. Step on up and click on through to Hate My Tory.

Fuck me, have you seen John Corrie?



And isn't that Steve Coogan with Sebastian Coe?



Jesus, we had Sebastian Coe and Gyles Brandreth as MPs in that runaway train of jackbooted lunacy know known (or, more accurately, dimly remembered when reminded) as The Major Years.

Anyway, the site's shaping up well, although it still needs a few pertinent facts on some of the Tories. Frankly, the fact of them being a Tory gives them all a 10-score for me.

And therein I find the one real problem. I mean, you've just given a 10-score to Iain Duncan-Smith (you remember him, slaphead, leader for a while... no not that one, another one), then up comes someone you hate even more, Zac Fuckin Goldsmith or Oliver 'Puppy Killer' Letwin or Michael 'Prison Works' Howard (you remember him, slaphead, leader for a while... no not that one, another one).

Where can you go from your previous 10-score? We need Nigel Tufnell as webmaster so it can go one harsher.

I shall, of course, be submitting Debi Jones shortly.

freshly sharpened

A long-time member of my sidebar's blogroll, The Sharpener is a group blog that pools the talents of about 30 political writers.

They cover a broad range of perspectives, yet aims to have a consistently intelligent, informed approach. It means you get to read stuff by people who you don't necessarily agree with and really test your (and their) thinking.

I've been flattered by being invited aboard the good ship Sharpener.

I just published my inaugral post there, Seeing Red, about Bono's consume-to-give Red campaign. Bono edited a promotional issue of The Independent last Tuesday, whose message can be summed up in a line from the Zane Lowe interview Bono included; 'The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations.'

In order to keep the discussion in one place, posts on The Sharpener are not cross-posted on the author's own blog. However, I will always put a notice here whenever I post there.

an old man wanking into a sock

Harry Hutton's blog Chase Me Ladies, I'm In The Cavalry is unusual in many ways. Most glaringly, he lacks the anger, dullness and/or self-righteousness that seem common to many of us.

He is instead tremendously funny whilst occasionally doing a really well-informed political post.

For instance, there's this:

I AGREE WITH ABU HAMZA - UP TO A POINT

I was leafing through Abu Hamza’s sermons on the beach this afternoon. OK, he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I wouldn’t vote for him myself. I disagree with him about the need to blow up London; nor do we see eye to eye on the subject of flying airliners into buildings (he’s for, I’m against.) But in his wider argument that the UK is a moral cesspit and that the British are filthy drunken animals, I thought he made some valid points.

"They want only to look at nude pictures, go to football matches, have a few pints and go to sleep." This is not an ignorant ill-informed caricature; it is actually quite accurate, and the only riposte I can think of is that it beats blowing yourself up.

I post you this nudge because his new correspondence with Boris Johnson had me literally slapping my table with laughter.

I'm starting a new political party, and that is why I am writing. We could use a guy like you. We are looking to attract people disillusioned with the Tories. The modern Conservative Party is an old man wanking into a sock. You have to admit that. And look at Howard. A husk of a man, despised by all, prematurely bald from self-abuse. Is this what we fought the Falklands for? If we love our country, he must hang.

dust on the stylus

My Badgerly self has been busy elsewhere in cyberspace (is 'cyberspace' an outdated term yet? You really don't see it around as much as you used to).

That posting about Rachel Corrie has been expanded into an article that's been published here.

Also, I've started an MP3 blog. As someone who has spent years in quasi-religious appreciation of records, I've a lot of peculiar little corners in my record collection and, having been getting quite heftily into other MP3 blogs, I've launched out with Dust On The Stylus.

There'll be a new MP3 every few days, could be anything I think is obscure yet worth hearing, mostly stuff from the vinyl era with, I suspect, a bit of leaning towards 1980ish to 1992ish. But we'll see.