Blah Blah Flowers

I'm not well-inclined towards Gary Glitter, his behaviour since his fall from grace would suggest he's fairly unrepentant about being a paedophile but when he's got News International following him around what likelihood is there of him changing? He's fled the country once after all. This article, like a lot of the drivel put out by the spawn of Murdoch, is difficult to justify journalistically.

Parents should study our pictures well. For the child abuser - who is on the sex offenders register - is still a constant danger and threat to innocent kids.

Yes, parents who live in Brighton, Birmingham, Cardiff or Newcastle need to be informed about this London-based paedophile. And what evil, paedophilic things has he been doing?

* LEERING at pretty young waitresses.
* EXPLOITING his hearing problem to get them leaning in close.
* ATTEMPTING to pick up young women on the street.
* STAGGERING home drunk and trying to lure young people up to his flat.

So, behaving like most blokes you see out on the street then. Of course, the NotW has no proof that Glitter has been after any children, the best they can manage is

He left the shop alongside two young Asian girls - one in white socks and school uniform the other clutching a cuddly toy.

But they are clearly nothing to do with him, on such evidence almost everyone in the world is a paedophile. Their insistence that evil Glitter has disguised himself as Rolf Harris, complete with a photo of Rolf so you can compare and contrast, is the only amusing part of the story.

But this is all unjustifiable plop of the worst kind. Paedophiles are to NotW what the MMR vaccine is to the Daily Mail, an excuse for the worst kind of non-stories ignoring all the research that children are most often abused by family members. Best case reading? News International want a reader who happens to live where Glitter lives now to kill him. Worse case, Glitter goes underground with no reason not to start attacking children. The NotW openly appeals for murder. Is this how our media should really work?

Labels: media scares, News International, paedophiles, Rupert Murdoch, The Sun

I talked on Sunday about not believing the media about the 'swine flu' epidemic because they were wrong about 'avian flu'. Ben Goldacre says that's wrong but understandable.

All people have done is raise the possibility of things really kicking off, and they are right to do so, but we don't have brilliantly accurate information... Someone has said 120 million could die. Well I suppose they could: I'm sure it was done on the back of an envelope, by guessing how many would be infected, and what proportion would die, but I don't think anyone's pretending otherwise... By Tuesday, pundit-seekers from the media were suddenly contacting me, a massive nobody, to say that swine flu is all nonsense and hype... I assumed they were adhering, robotically, to the "balance" template... [he said] "Yeah, but you know, it could be like Sars and bird flu, they didn't materialise, they were hype." Simon Jenkins suggested the same thing. It's not true, I said. They were risks, risks that didn't materialise, but they were still risks. That's what a risk is. I've never been hit by a car, but it's not idiotic to think about it. Simon Jenkins won't be right if nobody dies, he'll be lucky, like the rest of us.

New Scientist have an expert analysis which seems hopeful at the moment but also reminds us that there just hasn't been sufficient time for detailed analysing to be done yet.

Labels: Ben Goldacre, health, media, media scares, newspapers

Following on from what I said yesterday about 'swine flu' scares, xkcd has their take.

Labels: health, humour, media scares

I don't know if, like me, you were disappointed when the giant Flupocalypse of 2003 didn't wipe out all the life on the planet that had worked out how to get the fire out of the rocks. We weren't prepared, we didn't have enough vaccines, Osama Bin Laden was working out how to teach ducks with a cough to hijack planes, and yet, we survived, we go on, and we wonder whether Joss Whedon will ever make another TV show that goes beyond a series. But don't worry, just because Avian Bird Flu didn't get us, those dirty birds have teamed up with pigs and, it would seem, Mexicans? to give us a new killer virus to worry about. This does lead to the interesting question: Has Michelle Malkin already reached the maximum that she can hate Mexicans or will this enable her to take her racism to new heights? We'll wait and see.

The comments on this article are typical of the great minds of the world vomiting forth into the electro-ether.

I strongly feel that children and elderly people will be at risk from this killer flu the most.

Harpreet, Stafford.

Everyone seems to have decided to ignore the second page of the article, where it says:

Avian flu, which has killed 250 people since 2003

Look at that. The media went batshit-mental back then, convincing us we were all going to die and, like the MMR vaccine scare, it turned out not to be the case. Two hundred and fifty people? That's nothing. Somali pirates have killed more than that, and they bankrupt themselves in millet seed for their parrots. So I see no reason for keeping on keeping on and not worry that we're going to all be killed until, perhaps, people start falling ill?

These medical sounding scares based on absolutely no evidence are one of the many reasons why I don't bother to pay for news any more.

Meanwhile Tory MP Nadine Dorries sues someone over something. Nadine Dorries is a fairly obscure MP only well known to followers of the Westminster soap opera that is the House of Commons for her Sarah Palin-like ability to seize and repeat the stupid in any subject that gets her interest. She's normally pretty quiet between bouts of conservative Christian sponsored attempts to get the date by which a woman can have an abortion put back to eight months before her own birth. I'm not sure if she can successfully sue someone over suggesting to someone else that they spread a rumour she had an affair if they don't do it, even if the only reason they didn't might be because they were revealed to be thinking about it, but her primary reason for this bout of legal action is presumably to keep it in the news as long as possible in the lead up to the next general election. Of course, one doesn't need to tell lies in order to recognise them...

The Sindy has more positive news, namely that the BNP is as equally messed up a party as the proper political groups full of burned-out members who are just bitter and more likely to fight with one another than the vast majority of people who they think shouldn't be in the country. Less comforting is the comments, in which it seems that a cadre of BNP supporters have taken up residence, you might need the Independent Livejournal thread if you want to see them though, they have a tendency to keep vanishing from the 'proper' website.

Labels: abortion, BNP, Conservatives, Fundamentalists- Christian, media, media scares, newspapers, science