Carr Tax

Jimmy Carr is obviously a monumental hypocrite for seeking to avoid taxes while satirising people who avoid taxes.

That said who is worse for the British tax-payer, celebrities who aggressively avoid paying taxes on the one hand or a luvvie who diligently pays every penny asked of him, but whose work is largely funded by the tax payer in the first place?

Jimmy Carr makes close to 100% of his income privately and gives maybe 2% to the public coffers.

Compare him to a film director subsidised by the state who gets 100% of his livelihood from the public and gives 50% back.

It's not the Jimmy Carrs of this world who are depleting the public purse.

The Guardian's New Penn Pal

It's sometimes assumed that Guardian readers give a pass to anyone no matter how stupid provided they are sufficiently left wing.

Sean Penn demonstrates this is not the case.

The Guardian is trolling it's readers by publishing this tripe.

They're also being unkind to Sean Penn by giving him a platform to humiliate himself. They know full well that he is not an intelligent man* but have flattered his ego by persuading him he can write- his prose includes sentences like: 

"This is not a cause of leftist flamboyance nor significantly a centuries-old literary dispute. But rather a modern one, that is perhaps unveiled most legitimately through the raconteurism of Patagonian fishermen."

 It is not actually any different from how the tabloids used to exploit Jade Goody.


* Not simply speaking beyond his competence like Bono or George Clooney, but genuinely lacking in even modest intellectual ability. An drug addled, wife beating high school drop out- if he weren't part of Hollywood's aristocracy he would be unemployable.

"Shut Up" He Explained.

The far left's approach to winning arguments:

An open call was issued Jan. 12 for owners of Sarrazin's book to turn in their copies at galleries and museums across the country. The books are to be on display and then, according to the artist, "recycled for a good purpose" at the end of the festival, which runs from April 27 to July 1.

 No, not like book burning at all.

There is a broader point to be made about the tactic of trying to make certain positions simply off limits rather than matters of debate. This happens a lot- albeit usually in a less Hitlery fashion than Martin Zet does here- with speech codes, pressure on newspapers not to report certain topics etc. To do this requires a huge ego- as it assumes that your own position is not only right but that it is impossible for you not to be.

Can You Get Geo-Thermal Powered Range Rovers?

The Telegraph reports that:

Novellist Winterson in 'screaming rant' with neighbour

Best-selling author Jeanette Winterson has been embroiled in a confrontation with a neighbour after accusing him of damaging her Range Rover, it is claimed.

This is obviously a bizarre mistake. Jeanette Winterson would hardly own a gas guzzling Range Rover given her passion for saving the environment, as she has explained on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions:

WINTERSON
 
I think everything that we're talking about tonight keys into much larger questions about what these so-called values are that we want to uphold, how exactly we want to live, what sort of people we think we are. We said we want a good health service but do we want to pay for it? We want to reduce our environmental footprint but we don't want to have bin collections every fortnight, we want them every week, so that we can go on making as much rubbish as we've always made, and piling it up outside the front gate. If anybody suddenly says make less rubbish we say but that's interfering with my civil liberties, I must make as much rubbish as I like because I live in the rich West. So some where there are a lot of contradictions which need to be straightened out and we do need - we need less packaging, we need less rubbish, we need to be a lot more conscious about what we're doing to the planet, to the environment. But in order to do that it can't just be about us putting stuff out in the bins at night it has to be about supermarkets and packaging which is a huge issue [CLAPPING]. I've been a member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for the last 25 years and we used to do those symbolic protests where you unpack everything at the checkout and just chuck it all back at them and you have at least two bin bags worth full before you've even eaten anything. That is a big problem and I think we should all start addressing that and be going in there and saying we don't want all this crap and then we could have fortnightly collections but it's up to us to change things and no you can't keep putting your rubbish out every week you know, we're all in here going to have to change our ways. [CLAPPING]
....
WINTERSON
 
This is a very tricky question and James Lovelock, a scientist whom I have a huge amount of respect as you know, is a proponent of nuclear energy and really thinks it's the only way forward. And it is someone we have to take seriously. I am trying to wade through the mass of evidence information on this to make up my own mind because it's tricky. However unlike James I do find wind farms rather beautiful. And I would rather see as much power as we can get coming from renewables rather than go down the nuclear route. But again it's back to what - how much are we prepared to give up, will you use less power, less electricity? I've just put in a geothermal system underground for my electricity which is fantastic but it costs £12,000 and Gordon Brown took seventeen and a half per cent VAT off me in order to put it in. That doesn't help the householder to help the planet. But there's a lot that we can do ourselves but we are going to have to rein in, pull back a little bit. We can't just say this is a problem for politicians, it's bigger than us, it's not bigger than us, it's about us in our homes tonight, so switch the light off. [CLAPPING]

Jeanette is a passionate environmentalist who spends £12000 on geothermal energy systems (more than you peasants spend) and has been a member of both Greenpeace & Friends of the Earth (not just one or other) for over a quarter of a century yet the Telegraph expects us to believe that she has a carbon spewing Chelsea Tractor. They should apologise.

Film Subsidies- Finally Giving The Children Of A-List Actors The Chance To Appear In Movies

As has been explained before the massive funding given to the UK Film Council was never intended to promote good art or good investments but merely to buy the support of greedy luvvies:

Stephen Frears recalls meeting him soon after [Gordon Brown] had announced a big increase in money for films. "Do you know what you've done?'' the movie man asked. "Created a rush of absolutely terrible British films?'' the benefactor replied, laughing.

So it's no surprise to learn that most of the films funded by the Quango failed to return their investment. Even spectacularly successful films like The Queen didn't repay the money that they had borrowed.

Still the supporters of continued subsidies have a new argument to make:

"Not all of the ones that have been released have started to recoup," explained the BFI spokesman. "The rationale for investing in films is not necessarily on the cultural strength of them. A large part of it is for developing new talent.
"Donkey Punch was invested in under the Warp X new talent initiative – it's new talent, a new director, and one of its cast, Jaime Winstone, has gone on to do new things, and to make a name for herself."

I don't begrudge Jaime Winstone a successful career but as her surname suggests she is the daughter of Ray Winstone, so she was not some undiscovered talent who would never have an opportunity to make a name for herself in film without a half a million pound subsidy for a crappy British film like Donkey Punch.

How Government Works

To mark the passing of actor Pete Postlethwaite, John Prescott pens a moving tribute to the courage, decency and effectiveness of..... John Prescott. He writes how Postlethwaite influenced him:

His character, band leader Danny, after spending his life wanting to win the national brass band trophy, symbolically turns it down because he knows it's the only way he can get publicity for the 1,000 miners who were sacked from his pit.

The line that got me was: "This government has systematically destroyed an entire industry – our industry. And not just our industry – our communities, our homes, our lives. All in the name of 'progress'. And for a few lousy bob."

You can watch it here. I defy you not to cry.

These communities had their heart ripped out by successive Tory governments. 200,000 were thrown on to the dole and were just left to rot. That led to increasing rates of worklessness and despair.

It made me so angry and I thought we must do something. I then realised I was the minister in charge!

So presumably if  Prezza had watched Toy Story he would have directed his ministry to create a programme to tackle the problem of old toys being discarded when children get newer, shinier ones.

Oink Oink

Why is that the word "greed" is seldom used to describe subsidy junkie like this? Create your own sentence using the words and phrases "snouts", "troughs", "special pleading", "whining" and "luvvies", this will save me the trouble of writing anything more.

Subsidising British films has led to 100s of crap movies that no one wants to see and serves little purpose but to keep Danny Dyer occupied in shitty gangster flicks.

I've used this quote before but it remains telling:

Stephen Frears recalls meeting him soon after [Gordon Brown] had announced a big increase in money for films. "Do you know what you've done?'' the movie man asked. "Created a rush of absolutely terrible British films?'' the benefactor replied, laughing.

Fake Statistic Watch.

How many people watch the Oscars? I don't know anyone who does yet the most cited figure for the events ratings is:

• "a predicted billion people watching the Oscars"
• "You always have to be apprehensive when you stand up in front of a billion people"
• "the one billion who are said to watch the Oscars worldwide".

This is complete and utter bullshit that narcissistic Hollywood types tell themselves to convince everyone that the world is transfixed by them.

First of all that is more than 1 in 7 of the world's population, and when you consider that many people on the planet are from countries where Hollywood is not the dominant film producer or where English isn't the first language or where televisions are rare or from places in really inconvenient time zones then that eliminates a most of the planet.

Furthermore even in the strongest market for the event, the USA, scarcely more than 1 in 10 of the population watch it.

Finally there is no organisation that provides viewing estimates for international events anyway (even for genuinely popular events like the World Cup the supposed viewing figures are nonsense).

Anyway with only aroung 30 million viewers in the USA it is highly unlikely that the global figure is over 100 million let alone anywhere near a billion.

Breaking News: Long Term Labour Supporter Supports Labour For The Long Term.

Ex Dr Who actor David Tennant backs Gordon Brown for PM on the grounds that:

"I would rather have a prime minister who is the cleverest person in the room, than a prime minister who looks good in a suit."

Hmmm. Gordon Brown is only the cleverest person in the room because he is sitting in an empty office having scared all his colleagues off with flying mobiles.

"I think David Cameron is a terrifying prospect," added the 38-year-old star.

Yeah I mean he might lead the country into financial meltdown and a couple of mismanaged wars or something.

Quote Of The Day.

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein who is currently circulating the Free Polanski petition, defends Hollywood against accusations of being amoral:

"Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion," Weinstein said. "We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe."

[via]

Luvvie Scum.

Some idiot has made a film glorifying an IRA hunger striker, because obviously the first 465 IRA apologist movies weren't enough. The deeply stupid producer Leni Jan Younghusband pompously declares:

"We think it is an awful situation in Guantanamo but we had exactly the same situation here. Let's remember we were doing this before Guantanamo. The film asks so many questions, including, 'What is the point of this kind of incarceration?'."

Yeah what is the point of incarcerating a member of a death squad who had been caught possessing weapons, I can't think. Even if you take the risible claims of the terrorists themselves, then the greatest indignity they suffered was being treated as what they were, criminals. Now personally I suspect much of the complaints about Guantanamo Bay are hyped up, but I doubt that Younghusband is making that point. Not intentionally anyway.

Naturally this piece of propaganda for a member of a fascistic terrorist group is being funded by Britain (the publicly owned Channel 4), does any other country do this?

There is an especially self loathing side to a large part of the British establishment, they despise this country and glorify it's enemies (yet are all too willing to suck up subsidies, greed outweighs the self loathing). It is probably a form of projection, they hate us because they hate themselves, but couldn't they learn from Max Moseley about how to channel those feelings in private instead of making a very unedifying spectacle of themselves in public?

{ Via David Vance at ATW, who is as unimpressed as I am}

Update: In the comments 'db' points out that the film is being promoted by the British Council.

Quote Of The Day.

Most artists aren't very smart. They like shiny stuff"

Quite.

Why Actors Are Stupid.

I see that the recent 'Best Actress' winner Oscar winner Marion Cotillard has outed herself as a truther. She's hardly the first thespian to be revealed as a halfwit and she won't be the last. In most lines of work being dumb is a severe handicap to one's job performance but the interesting thing about luvvies is that it is often very good ones who are short of a few braincells, as well as Cotillard the list of actors and actresses who are attracted to idiocies like far left politics or Scientology is vast, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Gwyneth Paltrow are all very successful at what they do but an interview with any of them is enough to confirm that they are utter airheads.

My belief is that the lack of intelligence is what makes them good at their job, credulousness is part of their job. I'm not being facetious but I honestly think that some of them are good at letting directors mould their on screen personalities because they are highly suggestible. If they were highly intelligent they couldn't act.

The Enchanting Robert Mugabe,

In an interview in the Sunday Telegraph, luvvie king Richard Attenborough says:

I wonder, though, whether he still has kind things to say about Robert Mugabe, who visited the set regularly when he was making his film Cry Freedom, about the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. 'I thought Mugabe was the cat's whiskers at the time. We would go to his house and drink tea out of bone china with him and his wife, Sally. They were an enchanting couple. He said that the future of Zimbabwe was in this film, that the whole concept of a dual relationship between black and white was an absolute prerequisite. Then Sally died and I think this drove him insane. I think he went mad, turned into a bastard. A shit. That's my superficial reading of the situation.'

Cry Freedom came out in 1987 so was probably filmed in 1986. This was slap bang in the middle of Robert Mugabe's campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland. Attenborough too busy filming a denunciation of racial oppression to notice that his 'enchanting' host was busy oppressing racial minorities as he filmed.

Dissent Crushed (Again)!

Seeing as I'm not gay I didn't watch the Emmy awards last night and was in fact completely unaware that they had occurred. That was until I learned from insane progressive weblogs that the chill wind of repression had once more touched the thespian community. Actress Sally Field's acceptance speech was faded out by Fox when she launched a truly incisive antiwar message:

“Surely this [award] belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised. Especially to the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait. Wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm’s way, and from war. I am proud to be one of those women. If mothers ruled the world, there would be no god damned wars in the first place….“

The highlighted words were removed before the speech went to air, no doubt to the relief of the White House. Of course Fox apologists claim that since the speech was only on a five second delay that the explanation that the editors with his finger on the button at the time wasn't sure whether the FCC would object to the phrase "god damned" is more likely. If only that were true, this is in fact the latest in a long line of phony shocking crackdowns on free speech of late.

And to think that some people actually have the nerve to accuse lefties of being whiny and hysterical!

Rushdie & The Ruskie.

Two more points about the Rushdie gong:

He is no martyr for liberal freedoms.

In the rant of his I linked to in my previous post, the one where he argues that Britain has imported a new empire to dominate with poor non white victims like him, which incidentally means he saying that we are all evil imperialist bastards even when we stay at home and mind our own business, he says:

And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multicultrualism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradication the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.

The threat of implied violence in that paragraph strongly implies a threat of violence if you will forgive the tautology, albeit only in the form of radical chic posing, if evil white people don't do what he says.

I'm really going to have to perform a more thorough fisking of Rushdie's drivel at some point.

The second point about the knighthood is that it has overshadowed a far more deserving recipient, Oleg Gordievsky, who two decades ago put himself in far greater peril than Rushdie was ever in to defect to Britain. As a KGB agent he had been working for Britain for years before he was rumbled.

Sir Salman Rushdie.

Crap author Salman Rushdie has been given a knighthood much to the delight of some otherwise sensible people and the chagrin of various apologists for islamist totalitarianism. As a statement that we won't be intimidated by religious nutters in Iran and Pakistan it has a lot of merit, but the fact remains that Rushdie is a complete tosser. He was one of the 'wankers, whiners and whingers' behind Charter 88 ( a grotesque parody of the Czechoslovakian Charter 77, which tried to equate democratic Britain with Communist era tyranny) , he is a graceless oaf who has never apologised for his typically humourless description of Margaret Thatcher as 'Mrs Torture' despite the fact that she immediately provided armed police bodyguards for the lowlife when Iran put a bounty on his head after 'the Satanic Verses' came out. Once Iran dropped it's bounty in 1998 and he no longer needed the bodyguards he pissed off to New York, arguably the greatest service he has ever performed for Britain, a country he despises.

if we want to understand British racism-and without understanding no improvement is possible-it's impossible even to begin to grasp the nature of the beast unless we accept its historical roots. Four hundred years of conquest and looting, four centuries of being told that you are superior to the Fuzzy-Wuzzies and the wogs, leave their stain. This stain has seeped into every part of the culture, the language and daily life; and nothing much has been done to wash it out.

This man has all the intellectual sophistication of Dave Spart.

lBritish society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It's still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.

Watching Salman Rushdie have to endure frivolous accusations of 'islamophobia' is perhaps

evidence that there is such a thing as karma.for the colonized Asians and blacks of Britain, the police force represents that colonizing army, those regiments of occupation and control.

This is in Cindy Sheehan territory isn't it, the equivalent of her demand for US forces to withdraw from New Orleans. Read the whole cliche ridden thing, as they say.

Iconography Unprotected.

Last year the unfunny comedian Stewart Lee explained why it was alright for him to satirise christianity but unacceptable for Danish cartoonists to satirise Islam.

I don’t think that the cartoonists have appreciated the massive taboo that you cross by having an image of Mohammed. There’s no historical precedent for that. So I think really in the West Christianity relinquished the right to be protected of its icons the day that they put Virgin Mary snow globes on sale in the Vatican, but in Islamic culture it’s a very different thing... The iconography of Christianity is up for grabs the iconography of - to use a corporate image - Islam’s always been a lot more conscientious about protecting its brand and so I think you need to engage with it as a satirist on its own terms.”

Like a lot of people I believed that the enthusiam for offending christians but not muslims was down to two reasons, firstly there are a small but dangerous minority of muslims who are willing to kill to silence criticism of their religion and secondly because satirising Islam doesn't earn anyone brownie points from polite society. However it turns out that even Lee's point about Islam being more protective of their 'brand' that christianity is nonsense in any case, this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about the 'Shrine of Imam Reza' in Iran which apparantly attracts more muslims pilgrims than Mecca explains that:

The shrine has for centuries intermingled faith and money, collecting donations of cash, land, jewelry and works of art from the devout. Today, it is not only Iran's most sacred religious site but also, by some reckonings, the Islamic republic's biggest and richest business empire.

Companies in its corporate portfolio make everything from city buses to pizza strudels to growth hormones for caviar-producing sturgeon.

So Stewart Lee now has the opportunity to prove all of us who thought that he was simply a coward wrong, because by his reasoning Islam has 'relinquished its right to be protected'.

Another Remarkably Trivial Post.

I was just watching the Graham Norton programme on BBC2. The guests included the elf Orlando Bloom, early in the show Legolas started twittering on about the enviroment and Al Gore's documentary, and how he had been to Antarctica to see the effects of global warming, including a rather flowery comparison of ice bergs to dinosaurs.

Twenty minutes later he was telling a luvvie anecdote about what a great time he had with Johnny Depp on Depp's private jet.