Bear in mind that I work in fraud. Someone sent me this email today, hoping to fool me.

Dear Account User

This Email is from Hot mail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hot mail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestion’s due to the anonymous registration of Hot mail accounts so we are shutting down some Hot mail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending this email to you so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.

Your User name, password, date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.

Yeah. Good effort.

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My name is Red. My other name is Jolt. This name doesn’t mean anything. It is a name I chose, and decided I liked, and have, as such, stuck with.

Some of you will be reading this as a way of deciding whether you will enjoy my writing, some of you will be reading it because you’ve read my writing before and not been able to pin down my personality, and some will be reading it because I told them to. Regardless, this is basically a little explanation of myself.

Officially, I was born in 1988 in West Yorkshire. However, the truth is quite different. As many people may know, I was not actually born. I am the result of years of internationally collaborative research into mood condensation. In the same way that the Jedwards were created in an attempt to manifest pure deposits of annoying twattery, which is a mood, definitely, I was created in laboratory conditions as a crystalline deposit of cynicism, which was then hewn into a vaguely human shape, brought to life using SCIENCE, and then programmed to do the bidding of a mad scientist named Dr. Karl Power. Unfortunately, Dr. Power is an incredibly indecisive man, and is still trying to work out what he would like me to do. As a result, I have mostly free will, although expect one day to drop into a waking coma, pick up a poisoned umbrella, and go murder the fuck out of a dissenter.

My basic political views are basically based around necessity. I don’t believe necessity should dictate everything in life, which is why I own a cold war era gas mask (the kind worn by the SAS), but I do believe that it should dictate policy. Basically, my view is, unless we don’t need anything, the government can’t have things we don’t need.

My interests include avoiding difficult questions, being incredibly angry, writing an outlandish comedy script that I’ll never have the balls to get made, and listening to music you don’t know or like.

Things that anger me are… well… the list is far too long for here… it would actually take up most of the internet, but religious music, Glee, quasi-scientific commercials, and those dickheads from hair product commercials are big up there, all being eclipsed by my enormous, incandescent, apocalyptic, Wagnerian hatred of television news and its abject incapability of reporting on anything even approaching the truth, preferring instead to make people scared or angry about things that aren’t scary or angering.

Well, that’s me, anyway. There’s probably more to tell but I’m not going to. HAH.

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Do you see what you’ve fucking done, you stupid cunts?

Between you you’ve not only managed to ignore what I fucking told you to do, you’ve also managed to take a man who is 80% meringue-based dessert and 20% mutated fucking gila monster, a man with an ego the size of a small to medium sized galaxy, a man whose idea of relating to the voters is just to string together a fucking random selection of words his communications officer heard on fucking skins and blurt them in no particular order interposed with the word ‘guys’ at random intervals at kids who have all the mental dexterity of a nematode worm in a persistent vegetative state, and then fucking vote for this cunt in a general election. And you thought this was a good fucking idea?

Oh, I’m sure you’ve all got your fucking excuses. “Ooh, I didn’t want Labour to get back in.” “Ooh, I didn’t want to vote Lib Dem because it would have been a wasted vote.” “Ooh, I’m a colossal fuckhead who doesn’t deserve the right of representation in any country with more than one political party and doesn’t understand the slightest fucking aspect of electoral process, but decided to vote because despicable programmes like Britain’s Got Fuck All Talent and despicable cunts like Simon Fucking Cowell have convinced me that it’s cool.” You know what? FUCK YOU ALL.

I don’t care if it is a fucking hung parliament. Right now, Nick Clegg is in talks with the conservative party about forming an alliance government. Well THERE’S  a fucking rosy future for us all. A country ruled by a combination of a cunt and someone nobody voted for because he might not have won, which, as a statement of logic is up there with “I don’t like this programme, or the thing that’s on after it, but I’m not going to change the channel because the batteries in the remote might have run out”.

The entire thing is a massive clusterfuck of Wagnerian proportions, and I just don’t care anymore. If you want to live in a country ruled by a 43 year old man-child who probably only gave up the teat because his mummy was too busy giving pointless interviews about her son, then so be fucking it. But don’t come crying to me when it’s all gone wrong, which I anticipate should come some time within the next 3 months.

To close, I’m going to call on my muse, Mr. Spider Jerusalem, to sum up voting.

“You want to know about voting? I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. YOU like to put your feet up and watch “Republican Party Reservation”. THEY like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns and brand new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome.”

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I understand there’s some kind of election coming up.

Now, I’m not entirely sure whether I’ll be voting, and that sure as hell isn’t out of apathy. Anyone who’s read more than one of my pieces will be abundantly aware of my opinions regarding, for example, the Bendy Nihilist Party, whose voters I personally feel should be forced to undergo some kind of political re-education course, possibly involving a slide made out of razor blades and scorpions, or for another example, the “Christian Party- Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship”, my opinion of which can be seen below.

See?

Read the rest of this entry »

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This week’s entry is this fucking joke from the Sun’s website. It is a video which “shows” two fighter jets ‘persuing’ what they’ve described as an orb, but is clearly a disc over a service station in the midlands. Except it isn’t. It’s a very obvious fake. Some prick has computer-generated a video which shows a “UFO” (an expression which I LOATHE), and some even bigger prick at the Sun has decided that it’s definitely true, and that it deserves an article.

This is basically a story about a lie.

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I’d like to do something controversial. I’d like to talk about something serious.

Last Wednesday, a young girl was killed in a bus crash in weather conditions described by every news agency’s overstatement staff as ‘horrendous’. This is a very sad, but frankly quite mundane occurrence, or it would be if it hadn’t been on a school trip. Now, every newspaper, parent, teacher, TV presenter, “news man” and opinionated twat in the street is having an emotional dick-waving competition to see who can make the school look like the biggest cunt for causing this apparently unprecedented event.

However, as is so often the case in these situations, blame is being attached wrongly.

Back in the shadowy past of 2002, a ten year old boy named Max Palmer drowned during a school trip to the Lake District. Again, this was very sad, but the main thing that came through in the news coverage, apart from their semi-sincere, slightly difficult to believe sympathy, was that the school was very much to blame. As a result of this, field trips and the like dropped off in frequency with massive effect. Schools, as public bodies, couldn’t afford the potential legal recourse and subsequent costs. But it is rather presumptuous to blame the school. In this case, yes, the teachers were found ultimately responsible, but that can’t be applied to every single situation, a concept which the news media doesn’t quite seem to have grasped.

So here we have this latest situation. The most common phrase used is “The real question is; Why was the bus allowed to leave?” or words to that effect, and as such, people are asking each other this. But I can answer. The bus was allowed to leave because the driver turned up, and said they were alright to go. Teachers aren’t supposed to be weather experts. It shouldn’t be their responsibility to say whether or not a road is safe for someone else to drive on, and yet that’s very much what people are saying. The problem is, the school aren’t talking. And with very good reason. There isn’t actually a response they can give that doesn’t incriminate them or make them look callous.

Basically, it’s just another case of the news media stirring things up, like that malicious little specky kid telling the school bully that you’ve been calling his mum a slag.

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A lot’s been said about nuclear energy over the years. Unfortunately, the vast majority of it has been said by Greenpeace spokespeople, who have about as much scientific training and common sense as the average pebble. We hear all the time about how EVIL it is, and how DANGEROUS it is, and how IMPRACTICAL it is, and how EXPENSIVE it is, but to be honest, bollocks. Read the rest of this entry »

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Once upon a time, some bright spark sat down and decided that what would be a really good idea would be to have schools. Schools, he reasoned, would be a dead good thing to have, because they would raise the collective knowledge, and let people do more than just farm crops or be village idiots.

But then something else happened. Someone else, this time an incredibly dull spark, so much so that he wasn’t so much a spark as just a piece of metal flying through the air, decided that schools were ok, but the problem with them was that they were too factual. They didn’t teach anything that was complete and unequivocal bullshit. And so, he reasoned, there should definitely be a kind of school that teaches a few facts, but then backs them up with what is essentially lies. And lo, the faith school was born.

For a few years, these beacons to massive idiocy shone out across the country without causing too much visible damage, although I’m sure in a few years time when the science wars break out we’ll start to regret it. The chief liars imparted everything they knew about whatever novel it was they followed blindly in the course of their everyday lives, and the children, being children, believed them.

But recently, and quite suddenly, everything’s ballsed up a bit. Ed Balls, that is, the schools minister.

I’ve met Ed Balls, and he is, as I keep telling people, a thoroughly nice chap. Unfortunately, he’s also a massive political bellend. Which is presumably why recently, the implication has come across that he intends to allow faith schools to opt out of the sex education curriculum, and teach whatever the fuck they want in its place. And you know that as faith schools, they’ll certainly be responsible on that front.

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I heard on the news the other day that President Obama has announced to NASA that they’re no longer allowed to go to the moon again, or even make plans for a Mars landing. Very sorry, but that new rocket, crew module, lunar module, series of spacesuits and lunar rover are now completely surplus to requirements. And personally, I think this is very sad. Yes, astronomic exploration IS largely pointless, but who cares, really? It’s bloody brilliant.

However, the important thing to remember is that it’s not as sad as it could be, because people have been to the moon before. Yes they have. YES THEY HAVE. SHUT THE HELL UP, THEY HAVE, ALRIGHT??

Right, now we’ve got that sorted out… YES THEY FUCKING HAVE… we can move on.

I’m well aware that this is a fairly dodgy issue, but today you’re all going to finally agree with me that they have been.

Some of you may be familiar with the expression ‘Occam’s Razor’, which basically means that the simplest explanation for an event or situation is probably the correct explanation. An example of this is if you hear hoofbeats, you could assume that it’s the sound of horses, zebras, or the extinct quagga, back from the dead. But it’s probably horses, so why not just say horses? And it’s exactly the same with the moon landings. YES IT IS.

See, the thing is, you’re probably sitting there now thinking ‘pah, the most obvious explanation is that they DIDN’T go to the moon!’, but you’re oversimplifying, you twat. What you have to consider is that if they didn’t go to the moon, they must have gone to Mars or something. Think about it. They built several Saturn V rockets, at a cumulative cost over nine years of production and development of US$6.5 Billion, develop the lunar excursion module, train two teams of three men to use all this gear, pile it all up together, ship it to a launch pad, fill it with RP-1/LOX fuel (yes, I’ve been doing my research again), and launch it into space, whereupon the tiny podule of people would have to, according to the people who don’t believe in the moon landing, randomly scream around in space, not in earth orbit, or else the Russians would have known about it, and then fall back to earth. And if they went and orbited the moon, why wouldn’t they have landed on it? People frequently use the argument that NASA claim not to have the technology now to land on the moon. There are two problems with this. First, what that means is that they can’t land a self sustaining life support unit containing two men and scientific equipment on a tiny planetoid under their current operating guidelines, ie, it can’t just be piloted in manually by a badass pilot like Neil Armstrong any more, and second, it’s bollocks. NASA never said that. Someone said they had, and then some people believed them.

And as for the soundstage theory, what are you suggesting? That they built a mockup of the lunar surface inside a vacuum chamber? Cause they did that gravity test on the moon, and that can only work in a vacuum.

SORT IT OUT.

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Unless you’ve been living in a poorly furnished cave for the last 30 or so years, you’re probably aware that the news these days seems to serve one purpose and one purpose only. To make a really half arsed effort at scaring the arse off the entire world. There is, apparently, no good in the world. You’re going to die. You’re going to contract swine flu, bird flu and the FLESH EATING BACTERIA (dramatic music), come home to find an Iranian nuclear warhead in your front room, and then be killed in a terrorist attack, although the distinction between a middle eastern country attacking us and terrorism is probably not one that most people can comprehend.

This is but one of the many, MANY problems with the modern news media today.

Now, I’m very much aware that Mr. Charlton Brooker off of the telly has already covered this concept pretty well, but when have I ever let that stop me?

Up until roughly the mid-80s, “the news”, such as it was, was just people in various shades of grey/beige clothing listing slightly dull facts about equally grey politicians and the inevitable horrors of all-out nuclear war with the commies. But then suddenly, some bright spark decided that people needed to be more interested in the news. So they started to do a thing called a “vox pop”.

Now, I’ve got a small amount of journalistic training, and can tell you with some authority that 1; Vox Pop is short for ‘Vox Populi’, meaning ‘the voice of the people’, and that 2; they’re complete, total, unequivocal bollocks that serve literally no purpose other than to make the news look like it cares, and make people who are just innocently walking through one of the country’s various Arndale centres suddenly burst into a 5 minute soliloquy about how bloody awful everything is and how young people these days are disrespectful and how it was better during the war and how they actually know slightly less than FUCK ALL about what you’ve asked them about but that isn’t going to stop them from giving you some kind of ill-concieved piece to camera about a combination of what they heard on the radio in someone’s car as they drove past, and what they “reckon”.  I’ve done a few vox pops before, and they were all fucking fiascos. Especially the ones I had to do about the Market Rasen earthquake. Two theories I got were ‘It’s global warming’, and ‘I think it’s all these rockets they’re sending up.’

There is one good thing about vox pops though, and that is that they highlight the inherent fault in news and information transfer. They’re like a kind of exam. If a person can’t give you a reasonable explanation of a news story in a vox pop, then it proves that the news is not achieving its goal of informing the people. But people don’t fucking know that, do they. They just think that what Tony, a bricklayer from Heckmondwike thinks is fucking canon, and go about their day perpetuating this collection of vaguely thrown together ideas pertaining to the news and a right wing political agenda unprecedented in bricklayers the world over.

Then, there’s the problem of sensationalism. Now, I don’t mean the overblown worst case scenario style stories that I touched on at the beginning of the post. I’ve already mentioned the wonderful paragon of truth Charlie Brooker (and that wasn’t sarcasm), so I might as well link in to this clip explaining roughly what I mean. There’s a distinct need for news reports to be like small, cheap and unbelievably shit movies, which detracts from the importance of the actual story.

See, the thing is, the argument for this is that it’s what the public want. The problem is though, you can apply this argument to almost anything that exists. The public want shitty vox-pops and boringly edited, unoriginal VTs, yes. They also want those awful celebrity magazines, and gutter journalism such as is found in the Sun, Mail, Express, etc. They also want the X-Factor, and Dancing On Ice, and Strictly Come Dancing, and Big Brother. However, the public ALSO want flying cars, free public transport that stops outside your door, no taxes, MPs not to have expense allowances, climate change to stop or go back or whatever, and Osama Bin Laden to be found and brought to justice, but also for this to bring a complete end to all Islamic ultra-fundamentalist extremism and terrorism.

People say the public don’t know what they want, but that’s total bullshit. They know exactly what they want, they’re just never, EVER going to get it.

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