Ten ways to live longer or die trying...

Look at Bruce Willis. Or should I say John McClane? Look at that poor fool, he just keeps on living. They're making him do another Die Hard film. A sixth Die Hard film. What the fuck is that about? If John McClane were a real person and he read the Guardian, I'm sure he would have read with some interest the article with which I became disgruntled earlier on today. Ten ways to live longer... He would have asked, at least in my mind he would have asked, where is the companion piece, 'Ten ways to die?'

But I'll come back to that train of thought later on. Firstly, what pissed me off so much about the original piece? Was it how eye-meltingly obvious many of the points were? No. That was to be expected. It was actually how monumentally offensive the overall tone of the piece ended up being. Basically, and I'm summarising here, if you want to live to a grand old age first of all don't live in Britain. Don't have had the misfortune to have been born here and if you did, at least have had the benefit of being raised elsewhere. If you do insist upon being British and living your paltry life here, don't live outside London. Don't smoke, don't drink, don't eat fatty food. Exercise. Etc. Etc. Also don't be stressed. Don't be stressed about the fact that you work too hard in a job that pays peanuts, or worse, that you're currently unemployed at perhaps the worst moment to be so in living memory.

Don't live in the North. Don't be from the North. Exercise. Eat nuts and seeds. Eat nuts and seeds like a bird. You fucking bird. You unemployed London bird. You fucking pigeon. Move to Japan. It's fucking great in Japan. Everyone's old. And happy, everyone's happy in Japan. And Spain. Fucking Spain. It's great, they have olive oil and tapas and it's sunny and people sleep during the day. Go to Spain. Fuck off to Spain. Who is this advice even for? What was the point? Why waste that paper on this crap. Maybe it will be ironically used to wrap up a fish supper.

There exists a tiny number of people who are not already either following all of that advice and, consequently, do not need it, or are too far gone down the road of being Northern or eating chips, drinking beer and smoking fags. They exist. Honest. But they're probably too busy having opportunities to stop and read some guff in the Guardian. So, I conclude, it was for me. It was a warning. I need to stop and think about how I'm living my life. I need to quit smoking and do more exercise. I need to eat less fatty food and eat more nuts and seeds. I need to move to Japan. Or Spain. Or London. Either way, I need to move South. I need to run to the train station and get on any train going South and not get off until I'm living ten years longer.

Oh fuck. Oh fucking hell. Wait a minute here. If I'm going to live ten years longer, I'm going to have to start planning for my retirement. Or am I? If this was twenty years ago, forty years ago, whatever, and I was planning to live to 70+, I would need to plan for my retirement. But this is now, and I'm probably going to have to work until I die, even if I live to 70. So what is the fucking point? The only good thing about living longer is the possibility of taking it easy, moving to the country, enjoying grandchildren occasionally coming to visit in the Summer holidays. But I won't have that. I'll be in a cubicle, nine to five, trying to do data entry with arthritis. Trying to remember the name of my boss who's thirty years younger than me. Trying to remember where it all went wrong.

You know where it all went wrong? I gave up smoking. I ate healthier even though it made me a twat. I exercised even though everyone looks stupid when they exercise. I even moved to Japan for a while, but had to leave because everyone was speaking Japanese. I lived in Spain, but had to leave because it's shit. It's nice for a holiday, but overall, it's shit. Tapas is shit. It's too hot and it's just shit. So I moved to London. You know what happens in London? Industrialised misery. Twelve million of the angriest twats you'll ever meet all crammed into a space that most dormice would find a bit too cosy. And they're all competing with eachother for housing, jobs, food, mates. It's like living in a really badly thought out zoo.

So I ended up back in Britain. Back up North. Working til I die. I have no friends because I had to give up everything that made me a likeable human being. I became an absolute ball-acheing twat and for what? The joy of working an extra few years in some (literally) dead-end job. Fuck you Guardian. I'll take my fags and my beer and my food. I'll enjoy the years I actually have. I'm not going to mortgage the best years of my life so that the worst years can last a bit longer.

On the future of the Halt Bar...

My attention was grabbed today by an online petition to save the Halt Bar on Woodlands Road (as if you didn't know where it is...). I was unaware, prior to this, that the Halt was under threat in any way. But the more I have thought about the situation, the angrier I have become.

The thought of turning an existing pub into a 'gastro-pub' is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Some pubs should serve food. That should be an option open to patrons. I do not object to the concept of a 'gastro-pub'. What I do object to, however, is turning a good pub into a 'gastro-pub'. Allow me to illustrate with a comparison between the Hogshead/Primary/Old Schoolhouse and Uisge Beatha/Dram!

When I first came to Glasgow, the Hogshead was a generic food-pub option that was handy if not particularly memorable. If you were hungry, but wanted a pint also, it was good to have that option available. The place had no real distinctive character, the interior is spacious and the atmosphere is pretty much non-existent. That's fine. In its various subsequent incarnations, the overall vibe of the place hasn't changed. I would not miss it if it closed tomorrow. I can't imagine many people shedding a tear over its passing.

Uisge Beatha on the other hand, instantly became one of my favourite places to go drinking in Glasgow and retained its place in my top-five for all the time I lived here until it underwent its recent evolution from pub to 'gastro-pub'. I remember walking home from town having done some Christmas shopping and I saw the 'new' Uisge Beatha and I was almost overcome with revulsion. I went inside to see if it could possibly be as bad as it looked and it was a thousand times worse. A man outside, a patron, who appeared to be American was loudly extolling the virtues of this place for all to hear. I was sickened by his display. The list of things wrong with Dram! is substantial and it's far from necessary to go into it in depth here. Suffice to say, they turned a real pub with real character into a faceless, homogenised, corporate shadow of its former self. Like when a good friend joins a cult, it's a sad, sad time.

What bothers me more than anything about this shift away from real pubs is how short-sighted it is. Yes, 'gastro-pubs' are in at the moment. People who work in marketing will tell you that it's easier to make more money running one of these enterprises than it is a traditional pub. I will tell those marketing types to FUCK OFF. I will urge like-minded people, right-thinking people, to also tell them to FUCK OFF. If I want to eat and drink in the same place I'll go to any one of the hundreds of existing establishments already dotted around the West-end. If I want to share my drinking space with a shower of arseholes, I'm sure I can find a place (Dram!) where I can do that too. But soon, the marketing types will realise, once all the pubs are 'gastro' that some people want to just go to a cool place and drink. And then they'll realise that it's a hell of a lot easier to put the 'gastro' into a pub than it is to take it out and we'll all be fucked.

Make a stand now, or say goodbye to real pubs. It's as simple as that.

Panic on the streets of London...

I read in the fashion section of the G2 the other day that polka dots are back in. It seems, much like the Pale Horse, the polka dot brings with it hell, or at least the 1980s. Maybe these two events are unrelated.

Ok, so London. Riots. We've been here before. Let's examine the evidence.

1 - Tory government? Check.
2 - Economic recession? Check.
3 - Polka dots? Check.
4 - Need I go on?

Ok, so it seems we're back at this old chestnut. People have no confidence in their government. The vast majority of people are facing up to a future that is at best uncertain and at worst really fucking bleak. Unemployment is severe, we are in a recession, and the message is austerity. Add to that a Metropolitan Police Force that, in addition to several very public fuck-ups and a poor track record for handling protest both peaceful and otherwise, has recently been implicated at the heart of a massive corruption case regarding our old friends at the News of the World, and we have a cocktail most potent.

So who is Mark Duggan? Gangster or peace-loving father of four? Both? Neither? Well, he's dead. Did he shoot first? Hard to tell. Things seem to hinge on this mysterious bullet that was lodged in a police car radio. Early investigations, reported in the Guardian, suggest that the bullet is police issue. Oh dear. But he had a gun right? He shot first? For the sake of the credibility of the Met, I hope so. But I don't really. I'm not a fan of the trigger-happy keystone cops operation that seems to be running out of Scotland Yard these days. They shoot innocent people. They beat up innocent people to the point of near death. They get away with it. They sell information to News International. No, I don't like the Met. But no one can deny, it's been a pretty bad few years for them.

Who else? Well pretty much everybody is on holiday. The prime minister is on holiday, the home secretary is on holiday and the mayor of London, the quite incomprehensible Boris Johnson, is on holiday... You'd think the people of London would at least wait until everyone was home from their vacations before starting the party, but no. Theresa May is coming home. The other two, it looks like, are staying away. Who can blame them? Perhaps the most alarming piece of soundbitery that has been shat out during this whole ordeal is that the mayor of London was advised to stay away, lest his return send the message that the rioters have won. I might not have all rhe details here, but I'm pretty sure that this is not just a "we miss Boris" riot, or a "come home Boris" riot, or even a "let's ruin Boris's holiday" riot...this is a proper riot. Fuelled by tension, heated by mistrust of the authorities and who knows, maybe that mistrust is entirely justified.

I think people are angry. I believe that their anger may well be justified. I do not think that these events are indicative, as members of the government have suggested, of base criminality. I think that it would be a grave mistake to dismiss them as such. People are angry, I say burn the whole stinking metropolis to the ground starting with New Scotland Yard.

The nuts are taking over the nuthouse...

I am, for the most part, a reasonable man. I like to think that, up to a point, people should be free to have their beliefs, no matter how strange they may seem. I believe that there's even place for dangerous beliefs in a rational and civilised society. We need them. We need them to keep us honest, as it were. We need them to maintain the balance between sanity and insanity. In an ideal world, insane people would have total freedom to believe whatever nonsense they like, and to do so in a benign way that has little impact on the functioning of society. We do not live in this world. Yes, this makes me angry, but more than that, it makes me feel disappointed. I've expressed similar disappointment in the human race before, but the feeling is starting to overwhelm me. The events in Norway at the end of last week should give us all a cause to reflect on the kind of world we have made for ourselves. I'd like to think that for the majority of people, this kind of quiet contemplation can lead to a new resolve to prevent these kind of things happening in the future. For that to have any hope of happening, there are a few nutters that need to be taken care of first.

1. Glenn Beck.

Oh Glenn, where do we begin? Devising a strategy for attacking Glenn Beck is a challenge. Very few people have ever been quite so vile in quite so many ways. I'll take the cherry-picking approach, thank you.

'Glenn Beck likens Norwegian dead to Hitler Youth'.

Oh Glenn...who else hear the words 'Summer Camp' and automatically jumps to the Hitler Youth? Who? Really, I'm genuinely interested. Who? Ok, so it was a politically orientated Summer Camp. It was organised by that great enemy to civilisation, the Left. But was it in any way similar to the Hitler Youth? No. Not in any way. But Glenn...you made the connection. I wonder why... Maybe it's because you just wish you could have grown up in 1930s Germany. And I sympathise, Glenn, I really do. There are plenty of times in the past that I kinda wish I could go back to and relive my own youth in a different circumstance. San Fransisco in the late 60s perhaps. Chicago in the early days of House music. Paris...the list goes on. For you Glenn, maybe Germany in the 1930s. You probably feel unappreciated in your time. Even Fox, who will give the name 'news' to pretty much any shit that comes out of a right wing arsehole, gave you the boot. You're reduced to radio, like that other shit-spewing arsehole Rush Limbaugh. You're a voice in the ear now; like a wasp. Like an irritating buzzing wasp just flying around getting angrier and angrier going more and more insane. Someday you'll get fired from your radio show and then you'll really be fucked. You've even managed to piss off the Tea Party Movement (henceforth TPM) and they're pretty fucking out there. And how come they're pissed at you? Even after you held a rally for them, supported their brand of insanity publicly and privately...how did you fuck that up? Well, you said that those Norwegian kids who were brutally and senselessly murdered by an individual who aside from the fact that he was born in Norway instead of America is pretty much Glenn Beck v.2.0, reminded you of the Nazi Youth. And your TPM also happen to have similar ultra-right wing Conservative hyper-Christian indoctrination camps of their own. So what happened was, you accidentally drew attention not only to the now obvious fact that you're a truly hideous human being, but also to the fact that your beloved TPM is pretty much doing the exact thing you accused the Norwegians of doing.

Well fucking done Glenn Beck.

2. Melanie Phillips.

Yeah, she's the English Glenn Beck. She's like what you would end up with if you managed to accumulate and distill all the hate and bile in the world and then fuse that with a human embryo and have it be born and then give it a pen and tell it get writing, because hate speech just doesn't write itself (that is it didn't until the News of the World phone-hack random story generator machine was invented). This woman hates gay people. She hates Arabs. She hates the NHS. She hates Barack Obama. If she weren't so prominent, she'd be a humourous parody of the political and social Right, but sadly, she is a newspaper columnist and author. People who for whatever reason don't know any better actually buy into the toxic crap that seeps out the moral wound that is her, figurative, mouth. She is like gangrene. A flesh eating bacterial infection in British print journalism. She even hates the Archbishop of Canterbury. The only people she likes are Jews. Now, obviously there's nothing wrong with liking Jewish people. Unless they're twats, in which case, it's perfectly fine not to like them. So allow me to rephrase. She doesn't so much like Jewish people as reserve the most poisonous of her toxic comment, the most bitter of her hatred, for anyone (and I mean anyone

I've singled out these two people because they fucking deserve it. They have no concept of the fact that the work that they are doing is acting to bring about hatred, war, suffering, injustice, intolerance, violence, abuse and just all the general non-specific shit of humanity. They don't seem to care that in a room full of reasonable people talking quietly amongst themselves, they're the ones naked, screaming, rubbing themselves in their own shit and scrawling "THE END IS NIGH" and "REPENT" on the walls. It reminds me of the scene towards the end of David Fincher's Se7en. Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey are all in the car driving to the scene of the film's climax. Brad Pitt asks Kevin Spacey if, in a moment of clarity, he ever stops to notice just how crazy he actually is. To me, that is the voice of the sane Left. We're just amazed at how insane the Right actually is. And yes, sometimes it is horrifying. It's horrifying when Melanie Phillips spits hateful bile over the corpse of Steven Gately. It's horrifying when Glenn Beck spits hateful bile over the corpses of innocent Norwegian children. It's horrifying Sarah Palin incited the attempted assassination of a fellow politician. You know, the list goes on.

In my brighter moments, when the world and everything in it takes a break from weighing me down, I can just about make out a glimmer of hope somewhere on the horizon. I can imagine, if I try really hard, a future where the sane people win and the Glenn Becks and the Melanie Phillipses of this world are given a pleasant space with a soap box in it and they're allowed to shout their madness for all the passers-by to ignore. And no one shoots innocent children and no one commits heinous genocide. And then, the clouds erase that hope and reality comes crushing down and I realise that the Right will win. Insanity will always triumph over sanity becasue where we sit and debate and discuss they just go out and do. And what do they do? They blow shit up. They shoot people. They don't even care who they're shooting, or who they're blowing up because other insane people are allowed to occupy prominent positions in the media so that they can turn whatever's going on into a rallying cry in support of it, but also, paradoxically, in condemnation of it. It's all a bit confusing, but they don't mind, because they're mad.

What the fuck is up with Disney?

In the Guardian Film and Music section today, there was a piece about someone called Selena Gomez. I freely admit to having no knowledge, prior to reading that article, as to who she is or what she does. I discovered that she is the most recent creation to have rolled off the production line at Disney. And it really is a production line. Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers all came before her. Right now, in a lab somewhere, there's a foetus developing in a jar that in nine or ten years will star in a breakout role in a Disney film and then go on to recording contracts with Disney's record label, a TV show on the Disney Channel, made-for-TV movies, straight-to-video releases, and then, aged sixteen or some such, that child will be embroiled in a scandal and will be jettisoned like spent fuel from the Disney ship of dreams.

This does not bode well for Selena Gomez. Sure, it's all good now. Riding the wave of global celebrity. Well, sanitised celebrity anyway. So sex, no drugs, no rock and sure as shit no roll. A sell-out tour, legions of adoring (if barely pubescent) fans, platinum albums, a movie career, a hit TV show. For a regular human being, that is one not synthesised in Disney's secret lab, this kind of success in the entertainment industry is unheard of, impossible, the stuff of dreams and peyote hallucinations. But not for Selena Gomez. For her, this is the reality into which she was born (in a manner of speaking). Say what you like about Disney (and, be sure, I am about to) they plan ahead. Gomez is a 1992 vintage. She has, it might be argued, been aged that bit longer than normally would be the case. Perhaps this is due to the persistent success of her predecessors. Perhaps the formula was deemed to have required adjustment. Who knows? Well whoever does, they're not telling anybody about it.

So...what's my point here? Where am I going with this? Well, a lot has been written lately about News International and massive corruption, phone-hacking, political conspiracy, monopolisation of the media and so on, and I'm not going to add to that here. That dead horse has been flogged quite enough for the time being. But Disney...now there's a whole other kettle of fish. What concerns me is that I would, one day, weather permitting, like to have a child. I believe it to be a wonderful adventure and I look forward to passing on whatever wisdom or otherwise I might have gained from my own life etc, etc. But I worry. Yes, I worry that if my child was abducted and murdered that a newspaper would hack into her phone and then use that to fill me with hope that she was still alive and then print the story of my 'new hope' and so on...yes, I worry about that. But more than that, I worry that my child will fall victim to a corporation far more devious and insidious than News International...I worry that they would fall under the control of Disney.

Because you see, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, they're not harmless entertainment for so-called 'tweenage' girls. They're marketing tools. They're machines for extracting money from parents and turning innocent children into mindless zombies. They do this through their music, TV shows, films, advertising endorsements, magazine interviews, live concerts, shows and public appearances. The article I read began with the story of three young girls who had skipped school to wait outside a London hotel for the appearance of Selena Gomez. This is what I'm talking about. This is not harmless. This is very fucking dangerous and no one seems to give a shit. It's like we've already given up on this generation. They're already lost to the power of Disney. And what kind of message are they getting from their adoptive corporate parents? Well I'm glad you asked, because this is where it gets a lot worse.

Once a child has been absorbed into the collective consciousness that is Disney, they become susceptible to the kind of messages that are encoded in all the products, songs, movies and TV shows. Their belief structure, the belief structure that as a parent, you may well have worked hard on helping them to develop, becomes Disney's belief structure. If my child came home wearing a Promise Ring, spouting that hateful nonsense, I would cry. I would scream out the name of the Beast. I would lament the loss of my child's free spirit. I would do everything in my power to undo that spell. But it's worse, because many parents see it as harmless. Some parents even see it as being a good thing. They encourage it. They buy them tickets to mass occult gatherings like Jonas Brothers concerts. They drive them there, and leave them. They willingly sacrifice their own children to the false gods of children's entertainment. Now I am no fan of organised religion, but wouldn't it be less damaging for a child to hear this crap coming out of the mouth of a Sunday School teacher, someone they're practically pre-programmed to ignore, someone boring and old who probably likes kids a little bit too much...

OK, so maybe I'm advocating handing your child over to a possible sex offender rather than take them to a Jonas Brothers concert...but I think I'm on to something here, so I'm going to run with it. To the modern child, a slightly touchy-feely priest is no figure of authority. A healthy mistrust of religion and the people who practise it is something that I would plan to instill in my own children, although allowing one of them to be molested might be going a bit far. But that's easy. Getting your child to mistrust Disney is surely much harder. The closest thing to a theme park that the Catholic Church possesses is the Vatican City aka Dullsville. The youngest priests are close to a hundred years old. The best looking ones, merely life-size puppets made out of old ball sacks. They're no competition for Jonas Brothers. Where are the friendly, down to earth, sixteen year old girl priests who seem like they live next door even though they inhabit a maximum security compound outside of Los Angeles? You get passed the collection plate in a Church, how much to you give? A pound? A few dollars? How much to you have to spend to satisfy the hunger of Disney? A tenner for a CD, twenty for a DVD, forty for tickets, not to mention the holidays to theme parks. You're talking hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. And all for a moral guardian no more suitable to the needs of a child than a paedophile.


Also, did I mention Walt Disney was an anti-Semite?

Why we should all be ashamed of ourselves, Part Three: 'Who's to blame for Gillian McKeith?' and other questions...

There can be precious little debate surrounding the fact that the more attractive you are, the healthier you will be, the longer you will live, the more successful a career you will have and so on. I can't see a counter-argument. This is why people aren't spread equally around; why you don't see fat people on South Beach and why you don't see a supermodel in Maryhill. Sadly, many of these factors are genetic. Good looking people, with good looking parents meet, fall in love and make good looking children. Since good looking people are more successful, healthier and live longer, their children will do likewise. At the other end of the scale, predictably, the opposite happens. So...what happens in the middle? And who's to blame for Gillian McKeith?

I'll get to that first question later, but first...who is to blame for Gillian McKeith? Let's get this straight: Gillian McKeith only exists in order to satisfy some obscure need that people have developed. I say developed, because there was no Gillian McKeith before, and now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of facsimiles. What is Gillian McKeith? What does it do? Well for a start it harasses fat people. It points at them and calls them fat. It finds out what they eat and forces them to acknowledge that they're fat because of it. It then forces them to change their diet, bullies them into exercise, makes them cry, vomit, shit into a Tupperware box, divulge intimate details of their elephantine sex lives and for what? The sorry individual who is the subject of this torment gains nothing. At the end they're still fat, they've just had to endure a week of torture and eating bird food at the bony hands of a woman who is not even remotely qualified to do this. So no, they don't benefit at all. What about our old friends the attractive people? Again, no. They're too busy having soirees on yachts and eating organically produced fresh food to be concerned with a 19 stone call centre operative from Crewe with a gastric band.

Well I'll tell you who's responsible... it's those people in the middle. They're not fat, or ugly or poor. But nor are they thin, beautiful or rich. They're solidly mediocre in every way, and while this is comfortable, it is also staggeringly tedious. They benefit from the long, relatively healthy life but are equally cursed by it, knowing that they have to spend the fittest, healthiest, best looking times of their lives planning for the shit times ahead. They will have no villa on the Riviera to which they can retire. No chateau in the Loire. No yacht. No cabana. This makes them...actually this makes us very fucking angry. We can't live our life in the moment like Fatty McPoverty because we're going to live to be eighty-fucking-five. We don't have the luxury of dying young. And we can't very well go around harassing rich people because they're smarter than us, better looking, and they have lawyers. So we go after Fatty. We torture Fatty for every year past retirement that we have to live in suburban misery. We torture them for every weekend we don't spend at someone's delightful little place outside of Nice. We torture them for the freedom that we are denied. And we enjoy it. Why Gillian McKeith? Because for this kind of job, she's perfect.

And it gets worse. Much worse. As if it wasn't enough to hunt down fat people and torture them in their own homes for our amusement, we hunt down unfortunate looking people who we then subject to public ridicule only to then subject them to extensive surgery so that they're less hideous. Television is pretty much an endless parade of society's rejects being expoited for entertainment. And for every variation of every format there is a Gillian McKeith. Do you wear crappy clothes? Well here's Gok Wan to cackle at you and then dress you up to look like an older, fatter version of himself. The list is endless. No stone is left unturned in our insatiable hunt for freaks to prod and poke and make fun of. And all because we're bored.

And it gets worse. Much worse. Nothing, it seems, delights us more than when someone who was once wealthy and attractive suffers some unspeakable personal tragedy and loses their money, fame and looks. They get their own channel (ITV2) where all their reality shows can run, uninterrupted, like a morphine drip into the arm of society. Reference Kerry Katona. I personally have no idea where this person came from, but without even having seen any show about her, just by existing in the same space as ITV2 and gossip magazines, I know that she's suffered cocaine addiction problems and has been in and out of rehab. What appears to me to be serious psychological problems have been mined by Heat magazine and ITV for all their pathos which is then chewed up and regurgitated, half putrefied in the process, into the gaping mouths of viewers and readers who chew it up like cud around their water coolers. It happens so often that these people blur into one amorphous blob of pseudo-celebrity gossip from which stories and hour-long Channel Five specials can be drawn at will.

And it gets worse. Much worse. It doesn't even stop when they're dead. Psychics exploit grieving family and friends and we lap that up too. Charlatans ply their sinister trade in prime-time. We love to laugh at the credulous. We might not be the brightest bunch but fuck me, at least we don't believe that John Edwards is talking to our dead mother. How shallow and insecure are we that we demand this? How insatiable is our appetite for human suffering that we need to have it televised and broadcast into our living rooms? Or, perhaps more worryingly, what are these shows protecting us from? Could it be that without Jeremy Kyle around to shout at junkies we'd all pick up a two-by-four and head out into the concrete jungle and beat one to death ourselves? If we didn't have Gillian McKeith to do our dirty work, would we resort to chasing fat people down the street with a chainsaw the second they look longingly at a McDonald's? If we didn't have '10 Years Younger' would we drag ugly people into our basements and perform the surgery ourselves? Have we lost our minds? If we didn't have John Edwards would we be forced to crash funerals and openly castigate mourners? Where does it end? Where is our sense of decency?

What have we become? How did things get so shitty? When did peeking through net curtains at our neighbours turn into butchering ugly people in the name of entertainment? When did a little curiosity turn into phone-hacking? When did our need to put a little money away for a rainy day turn into hedge-funds and sub-prime mortgage crises? How did we get here? And, more importantly, can we ever get back? Can we ever get back to a time when celebrities were either A-list or no-list? Can we get back to twitching net curtains and variety programmes? When I see clip shows of what television was like before Rupert Murdoch, before Sky, before 150 channels of base degredation, I think how innocent it looks. These people on gameshows from the 1970s look absolutely ridiculous, yet they're not being mocked or bullied or strapped into a dentist's chair to fix their overbite, they're just accepted as the way people are. Now, you end up on Deal Or No Deal being forced to perform every flickering emotion like a dancing bear (which for humanitarian reasons we banned) only for Noel Edmonds...Noel Fucking Edmonds...to sneer at you like some kind of geriatric Mephistophiles in a shirt made out of curtains. Really? Is this where we are now? And if it's not him then it's Simon Cowell who were it not for the existence of other more likely candidates (Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch, the Bush Administration, George Osborne, Sting, Glenn Beck among others) would be my bet for the current incarnation of the Devil himself. It's all our fault. We made a deal with them. We told Rebekah Brooks that hacking phones was fine as long as it was only our fake celebrities. We bought Rupert Murdoch's Sky packages, we read his newspapers, we absorb the media slurry of Fox News like it's going out of fashion. We elected Bush (once). We elected David Cameron (kinda). We allow Sting to fly about the world in a private jet hosting lavish 'fundraising events' and 'rock concerts' while at the same time permitting him to lecture us on the fucking environment. We gave Glenn Beck a platform from which to spout hate speeches against anyone who dares exercise the most basic of human freedom of expression. We created Sarah Palin for fuck's sake. And for what? Can we go back? No. We let the cat out of the bag. We opened Pandora's box. We made a deal with all of these latter day devils and they've collected our souls in return. Now we walk the Earth like zombies until we die, miserable, alone, knowing that John Edwards is pretending to contact us so he can milk our grieving relatives for all they're worth.

Why we should all be ashamed of ourselves, Part Two: Why we need the News of the World

Supply and Demand. How could something so simple, so pure, lead to so much misery? It links the smallest pleasure to the greatest pain. It is death by a thousand tiny cuts. It supports the global trade in licit and illicit materials. It upholds the questionable regimes that enable that trade. War, slavery, apartheid, holocaust can all be traced back to individual people making seemingly inconsequential decisions. But each of those decisions is taken at the expense of something. Each time we choose convenience, each time we think first and foremost of ourselves, we empower the forces in the world that when unleashed bring forth devastation. Our deference towards supposed authority has empowered crusades, holy wars, 'civilising' missions, the conquest and annihilation of indigenous peoples, the destruction of the natural world and the dominion of the machine age. We made this world in the name of convenience. We chose far too often not what was right or good, but what was easy. It is easier to anaesthetise ourselves with religion and television than it is to face the world we've made. We are appalled by the deeds of the bankers and the tabloid journalists not because of what they did, but because of what we allowed them to do. Supply and Demand.

So, the News of the World. Hacking phones. Very bad. And what was it all for? Information. Pure and simple. Information that we demanded as payment for having made the 'victims' of phone hacking - that is to say, for the most part, dubious celebrities - famous in the first place. People come along with ambition and we feed it and fuel it and make them a star, but we know all along that it's a hollow fame. We know, likewise, that they have a shelf-life. We impose it on them. We lure them in, make them comfortable, lay our trap and lie in wait and then pounce like jackals, like wild dogs on a stricken animal. Then there comes a feeding frenzy and then only a carcass, stripped bare of all its flesh, remains to testify that anything had ever happened there. Our celebrity blood lust drives the stakes of the game ever upwards. It used to be enough to have blurred photos shot with telephoto lenses from far away. But as we made more and more celebrities, as they rolled off the production lines of Big Brother and the X Factor, we demanded more and more from our bounty hunters. We began to hound them in the street, lurk outside their homes and then, eventually, inside their homes with hidden cameras.

They were paying the price of their own vacuous celebrity. We made them who they are, we should be able to know everything about them. It's only fair, right? But it all went to shit. They took it too far. The News of the World went after a 'real' person, one of us. A missing (murdered) teenage girl no less. The straw that broke the camel's back? I sincerely doubt it. More like the anvil that broke the camel's back. In a way it was bound to happen. There was no way we could control the force that we'd released upon the world. But will we learn? No.

We never learn. We never learn that if you allow banks to operate with anything other than total regulation, they will end up running amok and bringing our national, and now global economies crashing to the ground. We have never learned this. Nor have we learned that media needs to be in some way controlled in order to prevent the News of the World hacking into mobile phones and Fox News spreading actual lies twenty-four hours a day. We will not learn that when times are tough, we must think of the greater good rather than selfishly taking the easy way out. As a species, we're doomed. Doomed to be consumed by the rampant forces that we, ourselves, have empowered. Congratulations are in order I think, and more billion dollar bonuses on Wall Street.