God Almighty.

Above is an image of Vanuatu natives worshipping the great god Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Telegraph reports that:

the villagers — all of whom are illiterate — only learnt recently that his birthday falls on June 10.

Ambitious plans are now underway to celebrate the occasion this year. There will be dancing and a feast. Chief Jack Naiva has acquired an immaculate Union flag, which will be run up a flagpole and saluted.

But the celebrations will only really be complete if Prince Philip himself turns up, say the tribes people.

"You must tell King Philip that I'm getting old and I want him to come and visit me before I die," said the white-haired chief, who thinks he is about 80. "If he can't come perhaps he could send us something: a Land Rover, bags of rice or a little money."

For illiterate tribespeople they seem rather canny, trying to persuade their god to give them a Land Rover. Mind you Vanuatu is the home of rather mercenary cargo cults so I suppose this isn't a surprise although if it does work then I shall give thanks to my lord and saviour Bill Gates.

Enlightened Liberals In Action.

One of the reasons for the somewhat self deprecating blog title which I have chosen is because deep down I know that my right wing views are simply the product of my lack of sensitivity and progessive thought. Frankly reactionary knuckle draggers like myself could never aspire to the sophisticated debates that occur on sites such as Crooked Timber, for example this week the great minds at Britain's premier left wing academic blog are debating whether it is okay to respond to disagreements with asian women by clogging up comment boxes with stuff like 'You love me long time' 'sucky sucky' and 'Me so horny!'.

Next week on Crooked Timber- Is it okay to throw bananas at black conservatives and burn crosses on their lawns?

Left Wing Humour.

Q. How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb.
A. That's not funny!

The cliche of the humourless left has been around for so long that I had simply assumed that most of the left were at least aware of the tendancy even if they themselves did not share it. It appears that this is not the case because according to Stephanie Merritt: 'conservatives and satire just don't go'. So presumably PJ O'Rourke, South Park, Evelyn Waugh, Craig Brown, Mark Steyn, Scrappleface, Blamebush, the Modern Parents etc are figments of my imagination. Whilst the Guardian does have columnists who are hilarious it is usually unintentional.

Party Funding.

Party Funding.- Back in October I predicted that the party funding review had been set up with the sole purpose of letting the political parties take public money whilst pretending it is not their idea but an independent commitee's idea. Sadly I was right.

Quack Quashed.

This superb takedown of pretend doctor Gillian McKeith, by Ben Goldacre, has been justifiably receiving a lot of praise. Her obsession with faeces is disturbing as is her bullying of critics through litigation. I was once going to send her something to express my low opinion of her but then I realised that she is the only woman on the planet who would regard a turd in the post as fanmail.

Nutters & Liars Part Two.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.

Lie #2
There was no massacre of Bosniak Men & Boys at Srebronica.

This is one of the most preposterous claims made at Israpundit, one example of the denial will suffice although I could provide further examples if required:

But it is the word “Srebrenica” that represents the most villainous use of this word “Massacre”. There, indeed, there was a ***real massacre, but it happened in the years before the Serbs retook Srebrenica, when thousands of the simplest and most innocent of rural Serbian folk were systematically liquidated, usually at night under cover of darkness, by the Islamofascists in that area. This was ignored by the Media and took place under the noses of the UN “peace” keeping taskforce.

Meanwhile, though, the truth about the Srebrenica Massacre that was pinned on the Serbs was that it did not happen, and not a shred of proof has been produced by Albright and co that it did happen.

Unsurprisingly every factual claim made in that passage is untrue. Evidence for the atrocity at Srebrenica includes:

Testimonies From Survivors.

The testimony of a man who miraculously survived the mass executions that followed the fall of Srebrenica was heard this week in tribunal’s biggest-ever case.Mevludin Oric is believed to be one of only 12 men to have escaped the July 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces soon after they overran the enclave.He said he had stayed alive only because he hid under a pile of dead bodies for hours before fleeing the execution site.

According to Israpundit, Oric must have made this up, and the people he accuses are actually heroes.

There Are Confessions By The Perpetrators.

These are even more damning than survivor testimonies, if you follow the Israpundit line then it must be difficult to explain why men like Momir Nikolic would confess to crimes they did not commit.

Some of the mass graves have been discovered.

No doubt there is a perfectly reasonable explanation why thousands of bodies or body parts have been found in the vicinity of Srebrenica.

The Serbian government admits it!

The Dutch Government Resigned Over Their Soldier's Failiure To Intervene.

Genocide deniers like those at Israpundit point to a Western conspiracy, but why would a government conspire to bring themselves down?

Some Of The Killings Were Captured On Film.

The video shows men wearing camouflaged uniforms executing a number of young men, two of which were identified this week by their families as missing after the fall of Srebrenica. Four appear to be minors, two in their Thirties.

The tape, which carries no visible time or date, begins with the alleged Serbian paramilitary unit members leading the six captives from a lorry through a wooded area to a place of execution, prodding them like cattle.

The Muslims walk calmly, with their hands tied, their eyes on the ground, looking subdued. The paramilitaries then tell their captives to stop, position them for execution and then shoot them point blank, killing four.

Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica – for a long time staunch opponent of the tribunal – appeared on a press conference in Belgrade on June 2 together with the Hague chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte to announce the arrests, which came after the tape had been aired in Serbia.

Deniers of the Srebrenica massacre have somewhat less in the way of evidence. Indeed their primary source for there claims appears to be the website Emperors Clothes, and its sister site. Unsurprisingly this is not the only conspiracy those two websites peddle (it never is), the editor Jared Israel is also a keen 9/11 truther! Still the truthers look comparatively sane next to the Srebrenica liars at Emperors Clothes who claim, and I swear that I'm not making this up, that what really happened at Srebrenica was that the Muslim population was transported to places like Ireland and Australia by the Red Cross to make it look as if a massacre had occurred, in order for Nato to have a cause to attack Serbia.

It seems as though the Red Cross, the UNHCR, and a host of "western" governments around the world were engaged in hiding the fact that these men were not massacred.

Nutters & Liars.

Oliver Kamm has been writing recently about his encounter with the commentators of Israpundit, many of whom are, to put it kindly, people whom nursey hasn't dosed up fully.

To put it less kindly they are ill informed, paranoid conspiracy theorists who have developed a counter factual fantasy about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in which the principle perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing, particulary the Bosnian Serb army and to a lesser extent the Belgrade government, are portrayed as innocent victims who were caught up in islamist plots to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state. The victims of the genocide are dismissed as either non existant or as having brought their fate upon themselves.

Having once had an unproductive discussion with one Israpundit contributer (Felix Quigley, on another blog), in the wake of Slobadon Milosevic's death last year, I feel obliged to warn Oliver Kamm that things like facts, evidence or logic will be of little use if he is planning on changing the minds of the hardcore genocide deniers but as I am at a loose end I shall take some time to nail a few of the more obvious lies spread by Israpundit's contributers.

Lie #1.
President Alija Izetbegovic Was An Islamofascist.

This is a claim that has been made frequently by various Israpundit contributers. One frequently cited out of context quote (or often a misquote) of Izetbegovic's recurs repeatedly:

there is no peace between the islamic faith and non islamic social and political institutions.

This was from a book he wrote in the 1960s called the 'islamic declaration', which as Noel Malcolm explains in 'Bosnia- A Short History' was specifically referring to countries where an absolute majority of practisin muslims existed, it plainly could not apply to Bosnia wher only 43% of the population were even nominally islamic and of those, according to a 1985 survey, only 17% actually practiced the religion. So only 7% of the total Bosnian population were practicing muslims. As someone who does not not like what Islam itself very much, I must say the vision Izetbegovic wanted, in the 1960s, for islamic societies does not appeal to me at all but he clearly did not think it could be imposed on a society by force and Bosnia was a non starter as Islam was not widely practiced in any case. He explicitly rejects the creation of such a state by physical force.

By the 1980s the views Izetbegovic was expressing was even further removed from those held by islamist extremists, explicitly praising Christianity as a 'near union of supreme religion and supreme ethics' and praising Anglo American culture and philosophy, in a time where the USA was being regularly denounced as the Great Satan in Iran.

Ironically given the fondness of Israpundit for the epiphat 'islamofascist', the man who coined the word, Stephen Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of Izetbegovic, who during the 1990s was being even more explicit in his condemnation of the islamic chauvinism of the Wahabbis and ayatollahs, telling an islamic meeting in Iran that:

The West is neither corrupted nor degenerate. It is strong, well educated, and organized. Their schools are better than ours. Their cities are cleaner than ours. The level of respect for human rights in the West is higher, and the care for the poor and less capable is better organized. Westerners are usually responsible and accurate in their words. Instead of hating the West, let us proclaim cooperation instead of confrontation

Is it even imaginable that the genuine breeds of islamofascism in Saudi Arabia or Iran could utter such words? It would be unthinkable.

The other claim about Izetbegovic is that he recruited for the SS during WW2, this is based on essentially no evidence whatsoever, so I shall not spend any time refuting it, but suffice to say if the people who make the claim had any evidence I am sure it would have been produced long ago.

Perambulating Penises

Simon Barnes in the Times shares this um insight.

basketball is mostly populated by 7ft black men. The players tend to shave their heads to resemble perambulating penises...

They Luvvie Subsidies.

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.

As a basic point of principle I dislike the idea of tax payers being forced to subsidise any industry, when it is something as ephemeral as the film industry this is compounded. The usual argument that it is needed to popularise British culture is undermined by the facts that (a) most of the films are by people who hate Britain, such as Ken Loach. (b) Very few of them get noticed by anyone outside of Britain, and (c) Hollywood executives are willing to spend vast amounts of money propagating British cultural achievements anyway, see Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter films for example.

Which brings me on to the discovery that the Department of Culture Media and Sport announced new guidelines to which films are sufficiently British (pdf) for the producers to suckle at the public teat. If the film ticks enough boxes like having a 'Audio Post Product' or a British 'Principle Hair or Make Up Artist' it gets public money. Quite how Britain benefits from this is unclear. Perhaps it is from the artistic joys of such subsidised classics as er... um..... well that's not the point.

PS- is there a list available online of all films which have received subsidies from the British Government in recent years.

Millie Tant Blogs.

Millie Tant is Viz's resident man hating, logic averse feminist. She may seem to be a rather far fetched caricature but reading Squander 2's encounter with a feminist blog, Pandagon, ought to be enough to realise that Millie lives. Finding an idiot on the internet is hardly a great feat but this lunatic isn't a crazy fringe figure within the American left, she is the official blogger of the John Edwards presidential campaign!

Michelle Malkin is highlighting some of Amanda Marcotte's (the woman who writes the Pandagon blog) craziest statements in an attempt to shame John Edwards. However Malkin appears to be unaware that John Edwards cannot be embarrassed, he has an almost sociopathic lack of shame. This is a man who in the 2004 presidential election claimed that when "John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again", this is a man who once stood before a jury and pretended to channel an unborn baby!

Of course Edwards's fetus channelling might embarrass Ms Marcotte into ditching the former Senator, seeing as she and most of her commentators believe that anyone suggesting that a fetus is more than an insentient blob is a knuckle dragging misogynist.

Liberal Slavery.

The Independent's second worst columnist, Johann Hari, makes a "liberal case for the draft". Now I realise that 'liberal' in the USA means 'far left wacko' but in the UK arguing for a liberal case to force people to do what they have no wish to do is bizarre. The two blogs through which I came across this article, the genuinely liberal 'Stumbling & Mumbling', by Chris Dillow and the 'Conservative Party Reptile' both highlight different areas of stupidity.

Hari's astounding rhetorical question 'Would I have (stupidly) supported the war if there was a chance I would have ended up patrolling Basra with a machine-gun?' prompts this response by Dillow:

If you have so little imagination that you're incapable of sympathizing with people, you've no right whatsoever to take views that affect them - especially when the effect extends to killing them. Hey, even I can do this - and I'm borderline Asperger's.
I suspect Johann might have blurted out a pathology of our chattering and ruling classes here. Could it be that these regard real people - soldiers, Iraqis - not as living beings with interests and desires but as mere pawns to be manipulating by their whims?

Oddly enough he seems to have noticed an aspect of Hari's writing that Dumbjon describes as 'Liberal Tourettes' (Jon uses 'liberal' like Hari but hey) which involves obliviously stating out loud what most of his contempories keep quiet about. Party Reptile however focuses on Hari's claim that 'The people fighting the war are overwhelmingly black, brown or poor. Most of us are not.' This is untrue, in the British army only around 1% of personel are from ethnic minorites, so conscription would put more 'black and brown' people in the army. In the USA non hispanic whites make up around 66% of the army and 68% of the Marine Corps. The general population is 69% non hispanic white. These figures took me less than one minute so there are two alternative explanations for Hari's error he either lied or decided that the accuracy of what he writes does not matter in the slightest.

X-Ray Imaging.

The Sun reports that-

As part of the most shocking extension of Big Brother powers ever planned here, lenses in lampposts would snap “naked” pictures of passers-by to trap terror suspects.

The proposal is contained in leaked documents drawn up by the Home Office and presented to PM Tony Blair’s working group on Security, Crime and Justice.

Obviously the Sun is shocked, shocked that these might lead to an intrusion into people's privacy, but the more worrying fact to my mind is that five years after 9/11 the government's counter terrorism policy consists of:

• Put camera in lamp post.
• Wait for terrorist to show up.
  

Rape Conviction Rates.

In the light of the rejection by judges of the government's proposals to change the law regarding rape I have been thinking about the oft cited low conviction rates for rape allegations. The proposals themselves are as ever with this government extremely silly and involve things like redefining rape to include things like having sex whilst drunk. Six percent does seem like a remarkably low proportion of convictions to allegations but is it necessarily so or is it merely poor statisitical reasoning to assume it is so?

Suppose a test for a disease is 99% accurate, ie if 100 people with the disease are tested 99 will be shown by the test to have it and if 100 without the disease are tested then 99 will be shown to be clear. However if the disease affects only 1 in 10000 people then how likely is someone who is diagnosed with the disease to actually have it? The answer is of course not 99%, in fact because 1% of the results are wrong and the disease is rare the person who tests positive is around 100 times more likely to be negative for the disease.

So at first a conviction rate of 6% appears extremely low, but because far more women are not raped during a given period than are raped this is not necessarily so. Suppose 500 women are raped in a month and one in 5 report the crime. Suppose also that 10 000 000 women are not raped, but for whatever reason one in 100 000 decide to make a bogus allegation to the police. In this situation half of the rape allegations received by the police would be bogus, despite the fact that only 0.001% of women are anything other than completely honest about the situation.

Now these figures are obviously random, but no more so than the various ministers and columnists who assume that a 6% conviction rate means that the other 94% are examples of the system letting rapists get off. It certainly does not justify newspaper columnists screaming "Any man reading this article can go out tonight, pick out a woman, force her into sex, and be almost entirely certain he will walk free"

There is a strand of thought amoung political extremists that no one ever lies about being raped but recent high profile cases like the Duke Lacrosse case or the Warren Blackwell case or Timothy Gee demonstrate that this is simply preposterous, people lie about all sorts of things. This is why the disturbingly widespread belief that the normal standards required for a fair trial should be dismissed in rape cases is so very wrong.

"Yeah She's A Whore"

I was reading the story about the Toulouse rugby player, Trevor Brennan, attacking a fan, the Guardian reports that:

One eyewitness yesterday claimed that Brennan, who runs a bar in Toulouse, reacted when fans began to chant that his pub was a load of rubbish. Toulouse contend that a section of Ulster fans was chanting: "Brennan, your mother is a whore," a version backed yesterday by the player's uncle, George Brennan.

[italics mine]
She might well be a whore but it seems like bad manners for the uncle to publicly back the claim.

Priorities.

Labour- Investigate Celebrity Big Brother!

COMMONS Leader Jack Straw today encouraged media watchdogs to launch an immediate investigation into alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother.

Mr Straw said Ofcom had the power to act now and warned it would be "risible" to wait until the show finished.

Labour- Don't Investigate The Sale Of Peerages!

Senior Labour figures were quick to criticise Scotland Yard's tactics after officers arrived at the home of Ruth Turner at 6.30am on Friday.

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and former cabinet colleague David Blunkett both said they were "bewildered" and others accused the police of "theatrics"

N.I.N.A. or M.O.P.E.?

In the Guardian Edward Pearce writes about how much less racist we all are nowadays, one of the points he makes is:

The contemplation of a final solution in Ireland makes those job advertisements, familiar well into the 1940s, "No Irish need apply", seem quite temperate.

However the No Irish Need Apply advertisements would only have been familiar to the sort of people who also see fairies at the bottom of the garden. American historian Robert J. Jensen has examined this in quite some detail as has not been able to find any genuine NINA notices anywhere, as his article "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization explains.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, 2 archivist, or museum curator has ever located one 3 ; no photograph or drawing exists. 4 No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one.

It doesn't seem much of a mystery to me, some cultures tend towards self pitying fantasies to explain their failiures and justify their aggression towards society as a whole and wildly exagerrated stories of persecution which don't stand up to scrutiny have occurred amongst the Irish in the USA, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is in many ways reminiscent of the wave of phony islamophobic hate crimes that occurred in the USA after 9/11 which will no doubt be remembered in 50 years time as genuine events.

Adult Bedwetter Confesses.

I curl down deep in my bed, because the nights are strangely damp

- Robert Fisk.

Jade Goody- Worse Than Hitler?

Big Brother's Jade Goody is it seems world renowned as racist bully because of her behaviour towards Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. Effigies have been burnt. Peter Briffa is maintaining the News of the World CBB blog which is worth a read if you are interested in the programme (which shamefully I am). One aspect which I find bizarre is the debates about whether the bullying is racially motivated or not, surely that is a side issue at best, would a non racial motive make this kind of bully less repellant? I sincerely hope not. Meanwhile here is one of the Jade effigies being scorched: