Raging

I've pretty much avoided the whole Joe thing, despite South Tyneside council being happy playing free and loose with my council tax to encourage the good people of South Tyneside to beef up ITV's bottom line, and line Simon Cowell's pockets. I bet the Taxpayer's Alliance don't touch that one.

However, I do have one thing to be thankful for. I had forgotten all about Rage Against the Machine's classic Killing in the Name.

Next stop, the iTunes store.

Update: actually, it's cheaper at Amazon.

Teh noob speaketh

There's a number of things which are guaranteed to make you look like a complete cock. One is to base your understanding of science on documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Another is to be a mayor and get snapped doing the X Factor cross with your arms.

A great way to look like a total nobend is to wind yourself up into massive moral outrage mode to criticise a console or computer game whilst at the same time have absolutely no clue about it, or gaming culture in general.

Cue Mark Bryant, the Bishop of Jarrow.

The bish, whose religion's core feature is the worship of a man who came back from the dead after a gruesome death, is complaining about a game essentially about people coming back from the dead after a gruesome death. True, Resident Evil's revenant baddies get whacked with extreme prejudice, normally by strong kick ass female characters, who despatch said resurrectants and assorted biologically mutated bad guys created by an evil multinational corporation.

But it isn't all about innocently shooting zombies in the face the bishop says:

"If people spend a lot of time in the company of games that are about the occult, then those influences are bound to rub off."

Wow. The occult. Believing in the supernatural. It's only right that a self respecting man of the cloth would challenge dabbling with spirits, the dead and the undead along with myths of mystical planes of existence. Oh sweet irony.

pwned.


PS - an adult using l33t is a bit nobbish too.

Geek hedonism

Work commitments over the last week have meant that I couldn't stray far from home for long, never mind enjoy the fruit of the vine and the grain. But this last week hasn't been a disaster. Far from it, I've been in geek heaven.

First, last Tuesday saw the release of the long anticipated console and PC game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Despite what gobshite Keith Vaz says, it's a fun way to pass a few hours, and not the moral quagmire the Vazman reckons it is. The section of the game in question is a key part of the plot, driving the context of what's to follow, and not playing it would be like skipping the cock scene in The Crying Game.

Admittedly, the offline campaign is straightforward and short, and whilst the story brought back some old friends, it's the online mode which most people have been waiting for.

A first person shooter addict, I've been a fan of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty games since the first one on PC in 2003. 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare saw me move from PC to console gaming as the graphic demands of newer games started to outstrip my wallet's ability to support the latest graphics cards.

New to the COD: Modern Warfare franchise is a 'Special Ops' co-operative mode, which is good for a short blast of fun with your friends against bot bad guys, but not as satisfying as say Rainbow Six 2's co-op mode, or playing with and against real people online, where kills mean points and points mean ranking up and weapons upgrades. Already at level 20 after four hours online play, I foresee some of my life sucked away working up the ranks.

Then yesterday, my preordered Blu-Ray version of the new Star Trek movie hit the doormat. Not only did it come in all it's high definition Blu-Ray surround sound glory (thank goodness I don't have neighbours), it also came with a 'digital copy' dvd, with a version you can copy to your iPod or onto Windows Media Player. This is a model I hope to see more of in future as it expands the flexibility of options to view your movie without having to jump through (or bend) digital rights management hoops to copy your purchase to other formats.

And the film was pretty awesome too.

Lastly, today saw an Xbox update with some new toys: Zune (Microsoft's media player), LastFM, Twitter and Facebook. Admittedly, most of these are little more than apps that tech heads have already seen on their iPod and iPhone, but it indicates that Microsoft have seen which way the wind is blowing. Sony should take note for the Playstation 3 or risk being left behind.

A quick test of LastFM revealed a stable and fast application (faster than the PC version) with a cleaner and more useful interface than its sibling iPod/iPhone app. Facebook was also competent, despite the lack of keyboard requiring some deft controller work. Once you've joined your Facebook account to your Xbox gamer tag, whenever you're on Xbox Live it shows your gamertag on your Facebook profile page. However, it is disappointing that you can't update your Facebook status with your recent game achievements (or at least I can't find an option to do this) in the same manner as the native Facebook games status update on the PC. Hopefully this will follow.

I'll have a play with Zune sometime, but I'm not sure I'll bother with Twitter yet as it's not something which has grabbed me. Maybe I'll set up an account to see what the fuss is about.

As long as it doesn't eat into the serious business of gaming.

Round three to Singh

It looks like Simon Singh's defence against the libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association has taken a turn for the better for him. His grant to appeal after the ridiculous judgement over the interpretation and context of Singh's original Guardian article by libel judge Eady has been successful. For now anyway.

There's some comfort in that Lord Justice Laws found Eady's judgment "legally erroneous", although to me it seems like a typically understated legal description of an outrageous affront to free expression.

The fact that practioners of treatments which are unproven can sue a critic seems insane, and an indictment of the easy tool that our libel laws are for wealthy interests to silence criticism. The BCA claims that its treatments can help children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying. Imagine if a church decided to sue over someone describing the uselessness of praying or touching a box of holy bones.

This case should never have hit the courts. In countries like the USA where freedom of speech and public interest have much more weight in law (constitution people!) Singh would already have won the case.

The case is far from over, but hopefully Singh will win out - and at the same time shine a light on the BCA's use of illiberal libel laws instead of countering Singh's criticisms with proof.

More on the case at the excellent Jack of Kent blog.

9 out of 10 cats

...think their owners are morons.

I've got to admit that I tend to agree. This might cause outrage amongst fans of the feline form, but I've long held a theory that cat owners who swooningly claim their pet moggies are intelligent are actually conceding that their cats are more intelligent than they are. Whenever I voice my 'stupid human cat owners theory', I have faced either an almost holy righteous indignance or a deadly silence.

Now science has come to back my theory/prejudice, in the form of research carried out at the University of Sussex. The boffins have discovered that pussies use purr power to press their owners' buttons.

The evidence is in. These folk should drop their fascination with the manipulative bird murdering vermin.

And get a dog.

Thought for the Day

I appreciate secular values, but I'm not sure about this one. I listen to Thought for the Day most mornings during the Today Programme, but I find it largely irrelevant and out of place in a news programme, despite it sometimes providing some early morning amusement at some of the eccentricities being espoused as considered religious thought.

There's an argument that if a publicly funded body is giving exposure to religiously influenced opinions, then it should also fairly give space not just to all religions, but to non religious positions too.

I think the best approach for a supposedly objective news service is not to promote any particular political or ideological viewpoint at all.

However, that's not going to happen anytime soon, so I think I'd rather that TFTD, whether including secular and humanist viewpoints or not, should be scheduled just before or just after the Today Programme, out of the way of the serious business of news.

Cashing in on checking out

After Jacko croaked on Friday the mobile phone operators must have made millions out of the joke texts flying around. Now with re-entry into the charts, Jackson is making bucket loads of money again, and with the media only too willing to keep it hyped through speculation over his death, it looks like the cash registers are going to keep ringing for the moment. It looking like it's the best career move Jacko made in years.

Countdown...

To Gordon Brown issuing a statement about Michael Jackson.

This will be a good day to bury bad news. Now we've got at least a week of Jacko media frenzy to face.

No longer walking the earth

Goodbye to the king of kick ass kung fu coolness David Carradine, found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok. A generation of 70s kids like me were brought up with his chilled 'Grasshopper' Caine in Kung Fu and reintroduced to Carradine as the icy and ruthless Bill in Tarantino's brilliant Kill Bill. Ostensibly an action tv series, Kung Fu was threaded with an absolute ethical imperative and displayed a model of personal social responsibility.

An unconventional life ended equally unconventionally.

Beam me up

I've not long returned from seeing the new Star Trek movie, a 're-imagining' of the original series. Loud, fast, colourful, tons of action and with a hefty pinch of tongue in cheek. The science is nonsense, so is the plot and the skirts are back in the Sixties. After the tedium of last week's Wolverine, the new Trek is a real hoot.

It won't win any Oscars and will offend some die hard Trek fans, but the general consensus of people leaving the cinema was positive. It's fun and doesn't mess too much with the original franchise despite some slight changes to the Trek universe.

Best thing? Something that hasn't happened after a movie for a while - I'm still grinning like an eejit.

Tory rottweilers

Today seems to have been a day for Guardian commentators to take apart the dishonest and the dodgy. Polly Toynbee, who I normally can't stand, has done a reasonable job of lifting the stone to uncover the Taxpayers' Alliance. The group is used by the Tories as a kind of off-balance-sheet PR group to bash the civil service or just moan about anything where tax is spent on stuff they don't like.

Often, their claims are repeated in the news media and on blogs without the kind of intelligent skepticism that should be employed with such narrowly focussed special interest groups. Their tactics closely follows those used by similar groups linked with the Republicans in the US. Their purpose is to generate media outrage and provide an opportunity for Tory spokesbods to get their mugs on the telly.

Whilst they rightly challenge public sector profligacy, they are relatively silent when it comes to tax evasion. Don't want to get off message with those donors do they?

It's no surprise that the Taxpayers' Alliance has aligned itself with fundamentalist road group the Association of British Drivers. The ABD, another group not unfamiliar with getting itself in the press, is pretty much against anything they consider to be anti driver. The ABD has bought into the religion of climate change denial and rabidly challenges any road safety initiatives which could slow down drivers.

Like the Taxpayers' Alliance, the ABD is named so as to give the impression that they represent a body of society, when in reality they have no such remit. Like the Alliance, their press releases are treated with undeserved reverence and unquestioned trust by the media.

Lobby groups like these are formed, or used by, political interests to build an angry and outraged consensus. They offer simple messages which are easily picked up and cut and pasted into articles, where real context, too complex to fit into the average news story, is lost.

Perhaps many journalists and bloggers don't want to, don't have the ability or don't have the space, to critically examine the output of these groups to an adequate extent. Or perhaps they are so blinded by political allegiances that such material, no matter how badly manipulated, is too good to waste.

Pied Piper Peston

Today, BBC journalist Robert Peston sat before MPs and denied any responsibility for the start of the run on Northern Rock.

Bollocks.

The BBC reporter's breathless exclusive of Northern Rock's application for a loan facility from the Bank of England started the media frenzy and subsequent run on the Newcastle bank. I remember the Newsnight and early morning Radio 4 Today programme where Peston was wetting himself with glee at the attention. I'd never heard the word 'unprecedented' used so much by one person. And to think the shit the Today programme got for the 'sexing up' Iraq affair.

From then on, if there was bad news in the finance industry, Peston was the man to deliver it.

There's no doubt that Northern Rock's board and executive ran a risky and ultimately unsustainable business model. Borrowing short to lend long is always going to come unstuck, especially when borrowing from the developing basket case that was the US financial sector. But while the money rolled in and share prices were healthy no-one complained.

Peston's mealy mouthed excuse that the run was exacerbated by what he claimed to be poor branch capacity and website infrastructure doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Few, if any, retail banking organisations could stand the sudden onslaught of a media driven panic that Peston wrought. I remember on the morning after that first report television journalists hanging around outside Northern Rock branches asking customers if they were worried and thinking of closing their accounts. This was wag the dog reporting in action.

Peston's evasions in the committee today suggest that he was fed the Northern Rock loan story. He's certainly not facing the possibility that his exclusive was intended to bring Northern Rock down to be picked up by another hungry bank at a bargain basement price.

There needs to be a full accounting of the whole debacle, from the lax regulation, over confident boardrooms and fickle and greedy investors, to the media panic machine fed by the likes of Peston, and the people who fed Peston his exclusive.

Peston wasn't responsible for the run, but he holds some responsibility.

DEC for Gaza

These folks, an umbrella group of aid organisations, were instrumental in the recovery after the Asian Tsunami, and this is the video which the douchebags at the BBC and Sky refused to air.

Klaatu barada nikto

Among the the many sci-fi films in my extensive collection, 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of my most treasured. Thought provoking, intelligent and civilised, they just don't make them like this any more. It was one of those movies that I had to get on DVD when the video format changed (plus I'd worn out the VHS tape).

So when I heard that The Day the Earth Stood Still had been remade my thoughts were mixed.

Remakes are often a mixed bag. The Coen brothers' remake of The Ladykillers was okay, but they shouldn't have touched such a classic which couldn't be bettered. Same with I am Legend (The Omega Man). Get Carter I couldn't bare to watch more than thirty minutes. The Italian Job was a mild diversion, but ultimately pointless.

But then there's Scarface, Eldorado and Ocean's Eleven which bettered their predecessors.

Charley and the Chocolate Factory, The Magnificent Seven and Fistful of Dollars (both remakes of Kurosawa classics) equalled their forbears.

The Day the Earth Stood Still comes under the best left alone category. It missed the original's anti war message and 1950s optimism out of adversity ethos that has survived the passage of time. Robert Wise's 1951 film is what the term 'classic' was invented for.

This new version won't be joining my dvd collection. Keanu Reeves as Klaatu just does his wooden thing, with none of the measured compassion and cold reason of Michael Rennie's Klaatu. Although it starts well as a re-imagining of the story, the new film tries too hard to be current, with climate change (although not mentioned) being the reason for our destruction. Klaatu comes to our planet to kill us off, to save the planet and all the other species living here from our excesses. Some great special effects as robot Gort starts taking apart the fabric of human civilisation, the manner of which is slightly remiscent of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Ultimately though, it's disappointing, the ending morally ambiguous with a preachy paternalism that bordered on dictatorial.

At least it's not as bad as Indiana Jones crystal skull whatever.

It's all gone quiet...

...at the South Tyneside Alliance website. The website has been down for at least a week now with a 404 Not Found error. The whois lookup says the address is still registered until June 2009 so possibly it's a technical fault.

Although perhaps a cynic might say that given the coverage that the Gazette lavishes on the Alliance, and the proxy smear tactics of the monkey, they don't need a website.

State of the media

Punkscience covered the original article, which has now been removed from the Observer/Guardian website. The article was another example of the media in bed with the state, the piece painting a menacing picture of a 'growing threat from eco-terrorists', despite there being no evidence to back the story.

However, it's unfortunate and telling that the Observer's retraction didn't have the same exposure and sensationalist headline as the offending article.

It's more disquieting than you might at first suppose. By using the brand label 'eco-terrorist', the government has manufactured a framework for the police to arrest demonstrators using the Stalinist laws they've been provided with. Couple that with the issue of taser guns, and you have more ingredients for a police state with not just the laws, but the PR and the weapons with which to control the populace.

Eagle Eye

I went to see this movie last week, by accident, as I was too late for my intended Burn After Reading. Think of this as a kind of dumb Enemy Of The State meets a dumber The Forbin Project meets needlessly wordy and clumsy 2001.

I love movies. This year, easily the worst and most disappointing movie I've seen is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the... whatever. Who cares. I'll never get that time back. Perhaps the hype was too much, but for me it's become this year's lowest bar and so far I haven't seen a new release which matches the utter crapness of Indie.

Spoiler!

So Eagle Eye is not as bad as Indie. By a long mile. Neither is it excellent. A standard popcorn action thriller with CCTV society paranoia thrown in. The twist is guessed early on and Shia LaBeouf (also in Indie) does what he does. He plays a kind of harmless genius slacker who is pulled into a plot by a nasty supercomputer to kill the president and his cabinet . The female-voiced supercomputer is miffed that the president and his poodles are randomly bombing innocent villagers in foreign lands against the pissed-off pc's advice.

This computer is no ordinary nutty HAL; it uses the US Declaration of Independence as it's moral compass and concludes that killing innocent folk breeds terrorism and attacks on the US so the government is failing its duty to keep its people safe. Realising that the electoral system is ill-placed to resolve the situation, the supercomputer decides to bin them with extreme blowingupedness.

After a lot of running around by LaBeouf and his screen squeeze, I got to a point where I couldn't care less for them. I started rooting for the bady guy. Or girl, computer, whatever.

In the end the computer gets it's plug pulled, the Pres is saved by LaBeouf after a ridiculous chase and everyone was happy. Except me.

I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a message or moral to this story. If there is, it's that governments should be allowed to get away with murder and it's every American citizen's responsibility to defend that right.

It's fast, plenty of action, fun stunts and enough explosions to keep any popcorn muncher happy.

I just wish the too-cute kid got wasted.

Burn After Reading

I've long been a fan of the work of the Coen brothers, and find most of their movies hard to fault. Their new movie Burn After Reading is excellent.

Funny, brilliant characters and sudden acts of violence. Typically Coen brothers. They really know how to merge comedy and tragedy.

The film follows a familiar Coen theme: ordinary dumb schmoes (played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) get into a situation way too deep for them. A disc with spook data, a bed hopping bodyguard (George Clooney) and a dirty divorce are ingredients in a recipe for disaster. In an almost Shakespearean prophesy, disaffected spook John Malkovich predicts repercussions the schmoes are unable to comprehend.

Go and see it. After the bleak No Country For Old Men this is a pick me up. If you're a fan of the Coen brothers you won't be disappointed.

Kind heart and Kerr nets coverage

Councillor Alan Kerr must have taken a leaf out of David Miliband's PR book.

There's nothing like a bit of modest charity to help your media profile. Well done Alan!

Land of the free

I don't usually really fuss much over US elections, although a chance that Palin could literally be a heartbeat away from the presidency is a bit of a worry. In practice there'll be little policy wise between the two main candidates. The Obama-McCain business bailout pact is an example.

Despite this there's great excitement in the US when the televised debates start. Such is the strong partisan element of US politics. But voters get to watch debates between two candidates among whose top corporate contributors are the financial institutions who have screwed the banking system.

It's pure theatre.

US voters don't get to see the third or fourth parties in the debate. This is because the televised debates are stitched up by and between the Republicans and Democrats not to allow any third parties into the game. The debates are structured beforehand and subjects decided upon to leave the viewer with little more than a press conference with rehearsed spin and catchy sound bites.

Such manipulation is as cynical and undemocratic as Putin's fiddling of the Russian presidential elections, where opponents to his heir were refused coverage or given airtime when no-one was watching.

The United States claims to export democracy. In the US presidential elections, democratic choice is a fiction.