The Daily Zeitgeist

When I posted this map – a screen grab from Fox News – a few days ago on Twitter, I had no idea it was going to go viral.

Just two days later, it has had over 170,000 views, my Twitter inbox has gone ballistic and I’ve been inundated with crazy, right-wing rhetoric from those in the US defending Fox and calling me a “liberal” (well,duh!) and suggesting that I had faked it -of course, Fox News can do no wrong in their eyes! But I’m afraid to say it’s genuine.

As for the suggestion of “liberal bias” – I would not hesitate to ridicule the BBC were they to make such an elementary mistake, too. In fact, the BBC should know a LOT better than Fox, so in a way the crime would be worse should they do it.

Many actually misread my post and thought I had said “most Americans can’t find their own country on a map” and insisted they could find it. Well, I actually said “a lot of Americans” – not “most” – and I stand by that characterisation. (Please, if you’re American and CAN find the US, good for you. But I don’t want an email about it. Just accept you’re cleverer than many in your country and feel happy!)

It seems that I have caused a bit of an international incident!

To the intelligent, thinking Americans: I unreservedly apologise. But I do feel sorry for you – after all, study after study does actually show that your fellow countrymen actually are NOT aware of the rest of the world, and your country’s place in it.

A study by National Geographic of young Americans found that half – that’s right – could not even find New York on a map. Other notable data reveals:

• 74% think English is spoken by the largest number of people in the world (it’s Mandarin)
• Only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map—though U.S. troops have been there since 2003.
• 6 in 10 young Americans don’t speak a foreign language fluently.
• 20% of young Americans think Sudan is in Asia. (It’s the largest country in Africa.)
• 48% of young Americans believe the majority population in India is Muslim. (It’s Hindu—by a landslide.)

But it’s not just the youngsters who appear to be so unaware – the US government’s OWN statistics show that just 37% of the population as a whole currently hold a passport. (Add up the last ten years stats for “passports issued” HERE.). That means that just under two-thirds – a whopping majority – cannot even visit Canada (unless they have certain WHTI other documents instead: but a passport of required for air travel) and Mexico, two countries with a land border with the continental United States. This compares with around 80% of the UK population and similar rates in Europe. Sure, Europe is a smaller place and the countries close, so travel is easy, some say. The US is a huge country and it’s expensive to go elsewhere. Well, that doesn’t seem to bother Australians – probably one of the most isolated countries in the world – where close to 70% have passports. That’s almost twice as many as Americans.

But back to the Fox map – I copped a lot of criticism on Twitter by those defending Fox who said that this graphic was from 2009 and therefore had nothing to do with Egypt. Huh? Firstly, I never said the graphic was current – I merely posted it to demonstrate the ideas I’ve developed above, and I”m sure that the error went unnoticed by the vast majority of Fox viewers.

But irrespective of when the graphic was actually broadcast, no matter how the Fox apologists try to spin it – it doesn’t make it correct!

LAST week’s Tribune was full of letters from local Labour candidates, including someone who is in fact the Labour parliamentary candidate for Tunbridge Wells in Kent but who also wants to be a Labour councillor in Islington (No place for party politics in campaign to save A&E, March 19).

They all seem to want to wash their hands of Labour’s responsibility for proposals to close the accident and emergency department at Whittington Hospital and to run down NHS services in London.

Of course, they don’t want the rest of us to view the campaign to oppose closures at the Whittington as “party political” – that’s odd because, in the past, Gordon Brown and Labour claimed credit for the slightest “improvement” and said they were the “only party who could be trusted with the NHS”.  Stranger still how they now deny the proposed closure is anything to do with them, but instead blame the “NHS bureaucrats”, as if the tail was wagging the dog.

It’s really very simple – everyone knows that it’s the Labour government that has run the NHS for over a decade and the Labour government that now has to answer for the threat to Whittington Hospital.

(Read the published version HERE)

Islington South and Finsbury

There’s a war going on in the streets of Islington South and Finsbury.  With just 484 votes separating Labour and the LibDems in the Westminster constituency, both parties have all to play for and it was bound to get messy.

Quoted in today’s Guardian, an unnamed Labour member states that the Tories might come second in this seat.  I don’t know what seat they’re referring to – it’s certainly not the same one I’ve been campaigning in for some time!  Having been out canvassing on many occasions lately, I can tell you that I counted the number of Tory voters on one hand, and most of them say that they’ll be voting tactically for us to get rid of Labour. The Tories came a distant third in Islington South at the last election with just 14% of the vote – so what’s Labour up to?

Read the rest of this entry »

In the summer of 1888, the Tory Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury was probably oblivious to the fact that a gruesome murder in Whitechapel in London’s East End was the first of a number of killings that were to be linked to Britain’s most famous serial killer of all time. No-one at that stage knew the name Jack the Ripper, but he had taken his first victim – a woman by the name of Mary Ann Nichols.  Horrific murder certainly seemed quite routine in Whitechapel that year, if statistics of the time are to be believed.

OK, I admit, the headline of this blog post was deliberately intended to be a little sensational – but no more sensational than David Cameron’s recent remarks on the state of British society, so I think that makes us even. Evil and deranged people have existed in all societies in all eras of history and modern Britain is no exception. This is all the more reason why Cameron’s pronouncement that the recent case of the sadistic abuse of two children by a couple of young boys indicates we have a “broken society” is so patently absurd. If what he says is true, then Britain has clearly been broken for quite some time.

Read the rest of this entry »