Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a phobia of long words.
Month: July 2020
Wiley should have been a bit more wily on social media
I’m not familiar with this Wiley person, he’s apparently a Grime artist. I’ve just listened to 10 seconds of what is apparently his most popular track and it was a pile of wank.
But I have just been reading about his social media racism and the piss poor response by Twitter’s censors who are apparently ok with a black supremacist anti-Semite calling for genocide against the Jews.
This Wiley character believes that black people are the original Jews and that the current people who call themselves Jews are usurpers denying black people their birth right. He has called for Jews to be shot and for black people to go to war with them.
This is a criminal offence but Twitter have allowed him to stay on their platform as long as he deletes the offensive tweets. Utterly unbelievable but so predictably unsurprising as a black Labour-supporting celebrity.
He has been reported to the police by the Campaign Against Antisemitism who have also asked the Cabinet Office to withdraw his MBE. I won’t hold out any hope for justice.
Interesting facts: radioactive bananas
Bananas are radioactive. They’re rich in potassium and about 0.012% of potassium is potassium-40, a radioactive isotope.
Don’t worry though, you would need to eat 10,000,000 bananas in one go or 274 bananas a day for 7 years to get a fatal dose of radiation. There is even a measure of radiation called the Banana Equivalent Dose.
Brexit Party will campaign to abolish devolution in Wales
The Brexit Party has announced that it is contesting the Welsh elections next year on a flagship policy of abolishing the Senedd.
The Welsh Assembly – now called the Welsh Parliament, or Senedd in Welsh – was established in 1999 following a referendum in 1997 in which the Welsh people voted by a majority of just 6,721 votes to introduce devolution in Wales. A further referendum in 2011 on increasing the powers of the Senedd produced a rather more emphatic 219,752 vote majority in favour.
It’s more than a little bizarre that a political party established entirely on the premise of forcing the British government to respect the result of the EU referendum would base a whole election campaign on overturning the results of two referenda in Wales.
The latest polling Wales suggests that 22% are in favour of abolishing the Senedd, 24% want to leave it as it is, 20% want to give it more powers and 16% want Welsh independence. It looks like the end of the road for the Brexit Party’s four Senedd members.
It’s time to defund the BBC
The BBC was once a great institution, envied and influential around the world. Now it’s facing a massive public backlash over its cultural and political bias and looks likely to lose its power to criminalise non-payers.
Former BBC Director General, Mark Thomas, admitted that the BBC has a history of “massive left wing bias”. Former BBC presenter, John Humphreys, said the BBC has “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-left image”. BBC presenter, Andrew Neil, described the BBC’s Mash Report as “self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged Left-wing propaganda” and the Now Show as “contrived ideological commentary”.
The BBC is removing the TV tax exemption for over-75s on 1st August. Only those in receipt of Pension Credit will be eligible for the rebate going forward as the cost is covered by the Department for Work & Pensions. The BBC estimates that it can squeeze an extra £700m from pensioners which will help pay for the £100m it is planning to spend on “increasing diversity” in programming to ensure minorities are over-represented on TV.
There is a campaign by a pensioner’s group to block up the TV tax system by encouraging anyone over 60 to cancel their direct debits and standing orders and contact the BBC to inform them that they will only deal with them by post and will only pay by cheque or cash. They’re hoping that this will bring the system to its knees.
More effective, though, is the campaign to Defund the BBC by cancelling your TV licence. I cancelled mine about 3 years ago and stopped watching broadcast TV. We mainly watch Netflix but also subscribe to Amazon Prime, NowTV and Disney+. I have no interest whatsoever in watching the BBC or any other broadcast TV.
The BBC repeatedly tells us that it is good value for money and that its research tells them that the majority of people are happy to pay the TV tax but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t work for the BBC who thinks it’s value for money. If the BBC is so confident that the public thinks it is value for money they should have no concerns about abolishing the TV tax and switching to a subscription model.
The fact that the BBC won’t entertain the idea of a subscription model speaks volumes, as does their opposition to decriminalising non-payment of the TV tax. About 1 in 10 cases that go before magistrates in the UK is for non-payment of the TV tax and about three quarters of those taken to court are women. Non-payment of the TV tax accounts for about 30% of all convictions of women.
Based on current trends, by the time the BBC celebrates 100 years of broadcasting in 2022 it will be haemorrhaging about a million TV taxpayers per year. That’s assuming the TV tax lasts another two years. The BBC needs to change fundamentally and the only way that is going to happen is to stop funding them.