world wide waddie
Jul 02
Jun 30
Jun 08
“ The BNP is not increasing its votes. In both Yorkshire and the north-west, its total number of votes fell from 2004. This absolutely does not mean that more people are being seduced by the BNP’s propaganda. It means that Labour’s share of the vote collapsed and went to other parties, thereby helping the BNP under a proportional system.
Jun 06
“ I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.
May 25
“ The leader of the UK Independence party (Ukip), which wants to lead Britain out of the EU, has taken £2m of taxpayers’ money in expenses and allowances as a member of the European Parliament, on top of his £64,000 a year salary. Nigel Farage, who is calling on voters to punish “greedy Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem MPs” at the European elections on 4 June, boasted of his personal expenses haul at a meeting with foreign journalists in London last week.
May 22
Shellac of North America @ All Tomorrow’s Parties: Saturday, Centre Stage ATP curated by The Breeders (Weekend Two 2009) 15th - 17th May 2009
Apr 28
“ Public health crises tend to focus the public on the usefulness of things like science, international cooperation, government coordination. You know, the sort of thing that liberals think are necessary. Something like that simply doesn’t fit into the conservative worldview. They see all problems and challenges in schoolyard terms of good guys and bad guys. This kind of challenge (like global warming) falls outside the paradigm by which they organize their world. Pandemics, like hurricanes, can’t be dealt with by using tough talk and threats. So, they are lost.
Apr 20
Apr 17
“ The air stank of patchouli, cheap rolling tobacco and wet dogs. Gut punched by nausea, I turned and pushed my way through the packed black-clad mass of wild-eyed and horribly jiggly neo-hippies, eventually spilling out on to the pavement where I collapsed and dry-heaved like I’d just been kung-fu kicked in the nads by a mastodon. Which in a way, of course, I had.
Apr 11
“ This isn’t Doctor Who. It isn’t even sophisticated enough to qualify as fan-fic.
