Forget the fact that the BBC have posted an article claiming that £40+ of food can be had for less than £5, even if that is the kind of thing you might hope would be picked up in the editorial process. How did Mr Milligan, personally, suppress the massive cognitive dissonance involved in writing the article? How do you persuade yourself to write the subhead ‘Day 4: Amount spent 91p’ when you know that the items listed under it cost a total of £11.80? Even if he believed that readers wouldn’t add the figures together, how on earth did he persuade himself that no-one would spot that the day’s shopping list includes one single item priced at £2.40? I’m astonished he ever thought he could get away with it. I’m pleased to note from the comments that he hasn’t.
The thirst for urine can be traced to the military’s 1971 Operation Golden Flow, aimed at detecting druggies among Vietnam veterans. Launched in response to rumors of heroin addiction, the test disproportionately netted marijuana users, since one byproduct of marijuana, carboxy-THC, lingers in the body longer than that of harder drugs. (In contrast, the body flushes out the byproducts of harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, within a day.) Nevertheless, before long, all service members were required to urinate in a cup at least once every two years.
Who’d have thought the US military could have a sense of humour? Be sure to read the part where one of the drug warriors regularly has her own adult sons drug tested too.
Nevertheless, her ideology, like her geo-political activities, never approached consistency. Mrs Thatcher’s politics was a visceral thing, formed of a belief in a natural order, in the assumption Britain needed restoration, and in a nostalgia for some never-defined golden age. She was, in the purest sense, a reactionary politician. Hence her failure, for long decades, to take apartheid seriously, and her willingness to dismiss Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. Hence her revulsion at the very idea of trade unionism. Hence her embrace of the casino economy.
She had the streak of vanity usual in prime ministers, one enlarged by three election victories. Her statements, in power and after, suggest Mrs Thatcher believed herself indispensable. She enjoyed the unlikely idea of the Iron Lady, a suburban Britannia, the politician who was “not for turning”. She felt entitled to invoke Churchill, as though “Winston” had been a blood relation. In truth, her sense of destiny was near-Gaullist. And she had no sense of humour: laboriously, her speechwriters had to explain the Python dead parrot joke.
Tony Blair has criticised people who held parties to “celebrate” the death of Baroness Thatcher, saying they were in “pretty poor taste”.
The former Labour prime minister urged critics of his Conservative predecessor to “show some respect”.
Don’t worry Tony, your time will come. Once you die there will be parties too. And don’t fucking talk about respect, when you’re the architect of an illegal, immoral, unnecessary war that killed well over a million peoples, you wanker.
“We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more.’ Really, that was it,” Hayes says. “Always, constantly just counting. Monitoring the diversity of the guests along gender lines, and along race and ethnicity lines.” Out of four panelists on every show, he and his booking producers ensured that at least two were women. “A general rule is if there are four people sitting at table, only two of them can be white men,” he says. “Often it would be less than that.”
If they did end up booking a show that featured a majority of white men, they’d call it “taking a gender hit.” Hayes explains, “and then we’d be like, well, we have to make up for that either in the second half of the show or on the Sunday show.”
Sandra would’ve approved: Eddie Mair fillets Boris Johnson, showing the real Boris hiding behind his carefully nurtured image of the goodnatured buffoon.
Some are praising this guy’s sudden awareness that maybe gay people can be human beings too as a triumph of family love or, at the very, most minimal, least, a “baby step”. But is it? Will Senator Portman be able to examine this feeling and logically extend it? “What if my son were poor? What if he were in need of basic healthcare? What if he were a woman?” We can all hope, but it seems unlikely. No less a monster than Dick Cheney is all for gay marriage, and for the same Gay Kid reason. Doesn’t change anything else about him.
Being able to accept your son is gay is about the minimum required to be a decent human being; you shouldn’t get a cookie for that. Nor should you be proud of the fact that the only reason you suddenly realise that gay people deserve human rights is because somebody you know is gay, as most people can reach that conclusion without necessarily knowing an out gay person.
