[Editor’s note: Our guest writer today is Keely Bites of ScotGov’s Science, Computing and Advanced Technology office, which was formed in 2012 by the rebranding of The Office of the Witch-finder General]

Good day, it’s great to be addressing you all; I honestly don’t think I’ve been this excited since I got my first letter published in Spectrum User, in 2014.

My team and I have been working hard to capture, in technology form, the buzz going around about the Scottish Government’s efforts to pump much needed money into teaching the Scots language to children and persuading adults that it’s not illiterate nonsense.  We’ve developed a brilliant new plug-in that provides Training, Assistance, Re-eduction and Translation, so we’ve called it…

In layman’s terms TART-in translates your e-mails, documents, tweets, texts and even your Tinder profile into authentic Scots as you type! To ensure that the plug-in meets your every need it has 4 levels of Scots-ness:

Level 1 (“My inner monologue sounds like a 1950s BBC radio announcer”)

This level is ideal for times when minimal Scottish-ness is called for, such as when you’re speaking to somebody foreign or when trying to explain to a police officer that, no, you haven’t been drinking.

At this level, and all levels above this, any spell-checking or auto-correcting tools are turned off, as they’re the invention of the Devil/Imperialist English.

Sample text

“Hoi, Manuel, can I get some gravy wi’ my chips, please?”

Level 2 (David Tennant, when he’s not doing his Doctor Who voice)

This is the perfect level for when you want to tap into the calm and reassuring air that comes with a gentle Scottish lilt and, as such, is ideal for job interviews, making a statement to the police, reading the local news on TV, defending yourself in court, presenting your PhD thesis, answering the question “Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?”, or just flogging shitty TV and broadband packages to people.

It’s basically what Mel Gibson was aiming for in Braveheart, and it’s just a shame he actually landed somewhere in the Balkans.

Sample text

“Aye, ah might live in Bath, but aye’ve gowt the heart of a tru Scotsman an the brain of a child!”

Level 3 (“Gosh! Doesn’t Irvine Welsh’s gritty dialogue paint a vivid picture of the underclass that we here in Oxfordshire rarely get a chance to see?”)

Level 3 may be thought of as ‘standard’ Scots and is perfect not only for gritty novels about heroin addiction on the streets of Edinburgh, but also for needlessly jingoistic articles in Scottish newspapers, “wabsites” that piss taxpayers’ money up the wall, helping the English out with their Sky TV billing issues while wishing them dead, or waxing lyrical about how much you love Scotland and miss it every day that you have to spend in London, where your home and your job are.

The written form of the language is widely agreed to blend the charm of illiteracy with the originality of one of those “Olny fvie prencet of polepe wlil be albe to raed tihs” Facebook posts and the deep joy that you get from realising that some people are knowingly taking money that should be spent on educating kids by claiming to be experts in this shite.

Sample text

“The sweat wuz lashin’ oaffa Sickboy, bu itz owa Nashun what’s sick…an the sickness is called ‘Wastemonster’!  Is tha enuff ta get me pay?”

Level 4 (Glaswegian explaining his many grievances to you at the end of a 14 hour cider-marathon)

This is the nuclear apocalypse of Scots.  Selecting this level shifts the minimum font size to 24, engages caps lock and bolds the text.  It will randomly remove most of the consonants from your text, but add a few extra vowels to compensate.  the only punctuation is allowed is the word “fukin”, which will be sprinkled throughout the text if you forget to do it yourself.

As a means of communication this level is, therefore, completely incomprehensible and we’re particularly proud of how realistically we’ve managed to capture the experience of encountering a native speaker.

Sample text

“UR MEE BESS FUKIN PAL YEE AAR YA CUN AM GAAAN A FUKIN TWAA U YAA CUN”

But that’s not all

Here at SCAT we’re fully aligned with the SNP’s policy of dumping their load of love on you. This means that as well as correcting your appalling, Anglicised writing TART-in also keeps on eye on what you text and say and makes sure that the relevant authorities are informed.

If, for example, you mention in a Facebook post that your lovely children, Rehab and Indy, are feeling under the weather we’ll pop a quick Scots e-mail to their Named Person, who can nip round to check that the problem isn’t that they’ve got visible bruises.  And, thanks to TART-in, you can be sure that the e-mail will be secure, as it will be incomprehensible bollocks to anybody outside of Scotland.

Well, it’s been great talking with you all, and I hope you’ll drop me an e-mail telling me how you feel about TART-in…we can have a wee blether abou’ it (see how great it is!), but now it’s back to work for me.

See you all soon.

Introduction

Afternoon all.  Jeremy Corbyn, leader of -and principle opponent to- the Labour Party here.

When my young friend Seumas suggested that I should try a little harder to get with the Zeitgeist I asked if he was talking about the tall chap from the ’85 Soviet delegation…then he reminded me that we’d agreed I wasn’t going to write my own jokes any more, and there was an awkward silence.  Apropos of nothing he asked me what the last film I’d seen was, and that was an easy one to answer. Just last night I had a few friends round to watch Battleship Potemkin.  I don’t mind telling you that I had a few too many shandies and sang The Red Flag too loudly at the end…but my friends left me a copy of Watchtower to read, so it proved to be a very enjoyable evening.

Anyway, Seumas asked me to write a 500-word review of an animated film called Toy Story 3 for some terrible blog (whatever that is). His parting words to me were, “This is a great family film, Jez.  You’re going to love it!”

Toy Story 3, reviewed by J Corbyn

Oh lord, what a depressing film!

Toy Story 3 is classic polemic satire, in the spirit of Orwell Animal Farm and, as with that work, the ruling classes are represented by the whole of humanity.  The animals are replaced by sentient toys, who exist only to be the play-things of their human overlords.

The film opens with the toys trying a desperate ploy to get some attention from their owner.  With Boxer’s interminable spirit they long to work (euphemistically called ‘play’), but they have been cast aside because their master no longer needs them.

When their ploy to get any ‘play’ at all from their owner, Andy, the scene of the depression widens to reveal that he is soon to head to college and that they face an uncertain future.  The leader of the toys, Woody, expects to go with Andy (in a world where toys are “owned” and not allowed to even let their masters to see them moving or speaking independently Woody is very much an ‘Uncle Tom’ figure – he’s even played by an actor called Tom, in yet another example of Hollywood dumbing things down). The other toys are resigned to being tied in bin-bags and thrown into the loft; a perfect metaphor for the suffocating blackness and sub-standard living conditions that come with zero-hour contracts.  They may no longer be cluttering up the house (or appearing on the unemployment roll), but they face the possibility of never “working” again, of never leaving the bin bag (a literal poverty trap) until they’re thrown away or sold on eBay.

I took a call from Ken and missed a bit (“Yes, Ken, I’m sure whatever you say will be fine, but I have to go now…”), but when I started watching again the toys were arriving in day-care; a utopian society where the ‘ruling class’ of humans were transient and ephemeral, more like consumers of the toys’ “labour” than masters of it.  Lotso, the friendly ruler of the community, assures the toys that here they will be “masters of their own destiny”, and I looked forward to watching them work as productive members of this ideal, caring socialist community.

Then it went bad!

If the children were the consumers then it became clear that Lotso was not protecting the toys from the worst excesses of market forces, but rather had, like Orwell’s pigs, succumbed to favouritism and the lure of personal power.  There was even a terrifying monkey, filling the role of the secret police that allegedly existed in Stalin’s Russia.

Ultimately Woody and the other toys cooperated to help each other avoid (literal) economic and political melt-down, only to be given away, like chattels, by their owner.  Shockingly this made them happy.  They longed for the status quo! The day-centre they’d left behind became a better society, but they had no wish to return to it, only to hear via propaganda that it was doing well.  Lotso, who’d forged the society, ended up strapped to the front of a bin-lorry.  He was literally a figure-head for garbage (I genuinely can identify with him)!

There, then, we had the messages of this “kids” film.  Work hard.  Be willingly cast aside if that is what your masters require.  Be suspicious of those who claim to be building a better, more equal, society for you.  Do not collectivise or even speak against the ruling classes.  The way things are is the best possible way. The name of your master may change, but your servitude is eternal.

This wasn’t the chiding, warning, teaching voice of Orwell, this was Tory propaganda wrapped in the soft-skin of a multi-million dollar cuddly toy tie-in.  We asked a huge multi-national corporation to entertain our children and they gave us the next generation of wage-slaves, and for that I damn them to eternal hell!

That’s all for this week. Join us next week when Kim Jong-un reviews Monsters, Inc.

[INTERIOR. CAVERNOUS ROOM SPORTING THE OBLIGATORY MAP OF THE WORLD ON THE WALL AND THE HUGE ROUND TABLE.  ALL OF THE FIGURES AROUND THE TABLE ARE MALE, MANY OF THEM WEAR, OBVIOUSLY HOME-MADE, MILITARY UNIFORMS WITH HUGE NUMBERS OF, EQUALLY HOME-MADE, MEDALS AND DECORATIONS. THE PERIPHERY OF THE ROOM HAS OVERFLOWING BINS, DISCARDED SOCKS AND OTHER DETRITUS. THERE ARE CLEARLY A NUMBER OF CONVERSATIONS, SOME OF THEM QUITE LOUD, GOING ON ROUND THE TABLE]

LEADER: Order!  Order!

[THE ROOM FALLS SILENT]

LEADER: Thank you…I hereby call to order the 50th annual meeting of the Society for the Protection of Endangered Real Men.

[APPLAUSE, WHOOPS AND CHANTS OF “DEFENCE! DEFENCE!” FROM THE REST OF THE ROOM.  THE LEADER WAVES HIS ARMS, CALLING FOR SILENCE]

LEADER: As is traditional the meting will be opened by Number 2. Let us greet him in the traditional manner.

ALL (CHANTING): Ha Ha You Said Num-ber Two!

[NUMBER 2 RISES FROM HIS SEAT]

NUMBER 2: Greetings, fraternal brothers. (Pauses to adjust huge array of milk bottle top medals pinned to his chest). The last half century has been terrible for us.

[GASPS FROM ROUND THE TABLE. NUMBER 2 CONTINUES UNABASHED]

NUMBER 2: We founded SPERM to counter the threat to men from the tyranny of feminism…and we’ve lost every battle. No longer can we playfully pat women on the bottom at work and call them ‘Love’ or ‘Pet’. Laws – honest to god laws – have been passed mandating gender “equality”. Sure, we may still get paid a bit more, and hold more of the senior posts in politics and business and still have Page 3, but we’ve lost Benny Hill! Twitter is taking away blue ticks from those who fight for our rights! We can’t even suggest that a famous footballer having a bit of slap and tickle is “harmless fun” or that “she knew what she was doing” without being called names!

[CRIES OF “SHAME”, BOOS AND JEERS FROM THE CROWD, SOMEBODY YELLS “MY MUMMY NEVER LOVED ME”]

NUMBER 2: Today, gentlemen, the tide of names we’ve been called turns against our tormentors.  Gentleman, I present…Sid!

SID: Alreet.

NUMBER 2: Sid smokes, drinks and takes no exercise. He sees women only as potential sexual conquests. Every woman who has even rejected him – and there have been many – has been fat, ugly or a lesbian. He believes that his needs are paramount, and that any women denying them, or suggesting that he restrain himself in any way, is a bitch.  In short, he’s a proper man.  But watch this…

[NUMBER 2 HANDS SID A SHAPELESS DRESS AND A CHEAP WIG. SID PUTS THEM ON AND QUICKLY AND INEXPERTLY APPLIES SOME LIPSTICK.

NUMBER 3, WHO IS WEARING A CAMOUFLAGE OUTFIT AND A TRICORN LEAPS TO HIS FEET]

NUMBER 3: This is bullshit! That isn’t going to fool women! We were lied to by the sacred Carry On films!

ALL (CHANTING): Cor blimey you don’t get many of those to the pound!

NUMBER 2: Sid, perhaps you could answer this?

SID: I identify as a woman.

NUMBER 3: But you’re just a bloke in a dress!

NUMBER 2: And you, sir, are (with relish) a cissexist!

NUMBER 3: I’m a what?

NUMBER 2: A cissexist…I thought you may have questions, so I’ve taken the liberty of adding a definition to Wikipedia (points to the laser-display screen)

[THERE’S A PAUSE, AND SOME MOVING OF LIPS, AS THE GROUP READS THE DEFINITION]

NUMBER 3: What? I don’t understand that.

NUMBER 2: Of course you don’t understand it, it’s a terrible definition, because its purpose isn’t to define cissexism, it’s to appeal to your subconscious belief that if an idea is hard to understand it must be important.  Sid says he is a woman, and if any woman won’t accept that then she’s a cissexist.

NUMBER 3 (angry): But what is a cissexist?

NUMBER 2: It’s a bigot, a bully, a narrow-minded, parochial, idiot who has no regard for the life experiences of others.  It’s a sexist, only worse – because it has ‘cis’ at the front!  If any woman denies that Sid is one of them then you can throw in her face every insult that has ever been thrown at you!

NUMBER 3: But won’t women just ignore him?

NUMBER 2: Sid?

SID: As a woman I demand access to female toilets and changing rooms.

[GASPS FROM ROUND THE TABLE]

NUMBER 3: Women won’t allow him into their changing areas!

[ANOTHER MAN LEAPS TO HIS FEET AND POINTS AT NUMBER 3]

MAN: CISSEXIST!

[THERE’S A PAUSE THEN APPLAUSE BREAKS OUT AROUND THE TABLE. THE ACCUSER SITS BACK DOWN LOOKING VERY PLEASED]

NUMBER 3: This isn’t going to fool anyone, is it? Women have been pretty sharp at spotting when we’re just throwing insults at them, and they don’t stand for it (wistful sigh) not any more.

NUMBER 2: Read the definition again…even pointing out that we’re using cissexism to insult and bully women from the moral high-ground is, itself, an act of cissexism.

[GASPS]

LEADER: You’ve done an incredible job here, Number 2, you’ll receive SPERM’s highest honour for this; the ‘Nice tits, love’ medal.

[ANOTHER WAVE OF APPLAUSE STARTS, BUT NUMBER 2 CALLS FOR SILENCE]

NUMBER 2: You haven’t heard the best part yet.  We’ve had 50 years of feminists telling us the sexism is bad, right?

[GENERAL MURMUR OF AGREEMENT FROM THE ROOM]

NUMBER 2: Well, if we can convince them that cissexism is just as bad as sexism, or even worse, then I think we can get feminists to defend us while we’re using it as a stick to beat women.  We can actually get real, honest-to-goodness women to tell other women that they’re bad feminists for not giving men what they want!

[THE MEN RISE TO THEIR FEET, CHEERING AND CLAPPING, MANY HAVE TEARS OF JOY IN THEIR EYES, A SMALL GROUP SPONTANEOUSLY STARTS SINGING ‘DING-DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD’]

[AS THE MEETING STARTS TO BREAK UP THE LEADER TAKES NUMBER 2 TO ONE SIDE]

LEADER: You’ve certainly proved yourself a worthy Number 2.  When I finally retire nobody is going to stand in the way of becoming the next leader.

NUMBER 2: Thank you, sir. It’s a great honour, and I hope I’ll get to serve you for many more years.  But you should get a move on – your plane is waiting for you.

LEADER: Indeed, and a sterling job sorting me out with a new pilot so quickly as well.  You really are worth your weight in gold.  I’ll be in touch soon.  Bye.

[THE LEADER LEAVES]

NUMBER 2 (TO HIMSELF): Oh yes, the new pilot.  Well…he certainly identifies as a pilot.  Have a safe flight, sir.

Confession, they say, is good for the soul.  In that spirit I confess that part of me wants Donald Trump to win…and not just to clean up on Super Tuesday, or win the Republican nomination, but to actually win the whole thing; keys to the White House, leader of the free world, stumpy little fingers on the nuclear trigger, face in the side of Mount Rushmore (more likely than not).  The full shooting match.  Possibly literally.

I realise this is a terrible thing to say, but there’s a good reason.

It’s because my car is grey.

Also, recently, my car (as well as being grey) has started to make some strange, not good, noises, as I’ve previously written about.  So bad have the noises got that I’ve decided it’s time to replace it.

Its replacement has to be capable of exactly 3 things:

1. Doing the school run with my two kids every morning
2. Getting me the 12 miles to work when the weather’s too bad for me to want to use the bike, but not so bad that I take the train
3. Have space in the boot for my two dogs when they need to go to the park, the vets, the kennels, etc.

My wife would also appreciate it if it was reasonably fuel efficient and didn’t cost a fortune in tax and insurance, as that would give us more money to spend on family things instead of running a 2nd car that we barely need.

Based on these criteria I’ve decided that what I need is a 10 year old Subaru Impreza WRX.

Objectively this is as sensible a choice as putting a bullshitting, fag-butt fingered, racist, rug-sporting, fact-dodging, idiot into the presidency.  The rational part of me knows that the kids and I will end up walking to school because the car will be awaiting expensive repairs or will have been borrowed by a local scrote to help liberate the contents of Bargain Booze’s window-display.  It would vastly increases the odds both of one of my inclement weather commutes ending up upside-down in a ditch and that the dogs will incur skull fractures as I turn their trip to the park into a real life enactment of ‘Colin McRae Rally’, with my enthusiasm a poor understudy for the driving talent I never had.

I cannot deny the truth of these things.

But my car is grey!

Specifically it’s a grey 2004 Mazda 6 TS 2-litre.

It has central locking, electric windows and cruise control.  It has five doors, two cup holders, pockets in the back of the front seats and a light in the passenger-side sun-visor.  It has a grey velour interior.  Despite the strange noises it starts and stops with depressing reliability.

It is the car my dad would buy.  Actually, as I inherited it from him when he traded up to a newer Mazda 6 it is, literally, the car that my dad bought.

The Subaru might be terrible and might crippled me financially, emotionally and, quite probably, physically, but it wouldn’t be boring.

President Trump also wouldn’t be boring.  That’s not the same as being good, but it’s a lot more attractive a prospect than ‘meh’…and so many people of my generation are sick of ‘meh’.

The first UK general election I was eligible to vote in was won by John Major.  John Major!  My generation’s great rebellion was voting for Tony Blair, and we hate him now.  Not because of Iraq -that’s just a pretence- but because he turned out to be just another fucking politician.

Part of me even supports Corbyn.  Specifically the same part of me that thinks ‘Bugger the Subaru – I should get myself another Capri, like I used to have when I was 20!’

Even Farage and Boris tap into this desire for excitement; admittedly they’re more the large-engined Ford Mondeos of politics; predominantly sensible with a impressive sounding, but ultimately disappointing, bit of extra grunt that doesn’t quite compensate for their innate blandness.

Cameron or Clinton, in contrast, have the whiff of the low tax-band, the sensible insurance group, the impressive MPG figures that would appeal to me if I were being in any way rational.  It’s easy to know they’re what we need, but hard to convince ourselves that they’re what we want.

In that spirit then I say, “Go Trump!”, and I’ll see you all in the ditch.

 

Hello, and congratulations on your decision to vote [Leave/Remain] (delete as applicable) in the forthcoming EU membership referendum, I think we can all agree that you’ve made the right choice.

It’s not just about arbitrarily picking a side and spending the next 4 months wallowing in your own confirmation bias, no, it’s about you having the insight as to what is best for a diverse nation of 60 million people over the next 50 years – that’s 6 billion people years!

Nor is it just about sticking it to those [Eton posh-boys/unelected bureaucrats] (delete as inapplicable).  No, look in your welcome pack now for all of the latest facts and figures (1.5 million migrants over 5 years, £9,000/household/year – that’s £30k per British household per million migrants per year, compared with the national average salary of £26.5k/annum…astounding value or terrible rip-0ff, I think we know the answer to that, right?), comparisons with other countries that are in or out, with little or no contextualisation (Alexander the Great conquered the known world without joining the EU, but his empire couldn’t survive his death – an important lesson for us all on why you’re right).

We’ll list some celebrities who you like and who agree with you, dismiss some you don’t like, but who agree with you, as just being in it for their own gain, point out why some you like that disagree with you are making a rare and terrible mistake and completely ignore the ones that disagree with you that you didn’t like anyway.  Twats.

We can all agree that George Galloway is wrong, although independent observers may not agree on why he’s wrong.

We’ve devoted pages and pages to predicting things that are hard to predict and putting them into graphs to  make them science. At the back of the booklet there are 8 pages of assumptions, printed in 4-point font with no white-space…unless we dropped them for another couple of photos of what-do-you-call him smiling like a smug little shit.

There’s talk of trade deals that could be better, or worse, because you’re smart enough to know all about those trade deals, who we’ve got them with, who we might have them with, whether we’ll be stronger or weaker in the future.  That’s your specialist subject, isn’t it?  No way are you just waving a finger in the air and, bugger me, the wind’s blowing the way you want it to.

How about hospitals and schools and roads and trains and airports and weather and houses and bin collections and shops on the high street that aren’t just charity shops?  Are there enough of these things?  Or are there too many already?  Will there be more or less if we do what you’ve decided to do anyway?  We’re going to say “yes” and hope you don’t ask any more questions.

Oh god, you’re still reading! Can’t you just accept that you’ve make the right choice?  Look, Turkey’s coming in, Norway’s voted to stay out (twice), but then they might have to obey the rules anyway, Iceland killed all of its bankers and is now a paradise on earth, according to that Facebook meme you saw, if we’re out Scotland’s off and in, but maybe Greece will be OK, or something.

The final section of your [Remain/Leave] (don’t bother deleting, the arguments, these packs, the views, the level of rationality are all absolutely interchangeable) tackles the tricky questions, such as ‘Why did I form such a strong opinion about this?’, ‘Does anybody actually have a good grasp of this?’ and ‘Why are we wasting (a) drinking time and (b) the very minutes of our all too finite lives discussing this?’ (and if you can think of any reasonable answers to any of those questions then please get in touch for the next edition).

Finally, a warm welcome to the campaign.  We’re sure you know best.

There comes a time in almost every life when you have to face up to the inescapable truth that you might be ordinary.  You’re never going to achieve, or even run for, high office, beyond those required by your mind-numbing job you have no special talents, you’re not about to break into Hollywood, people aren’t going to fill stadiums to hear you sing or speak, that time you won ’employee of the month’ three times on on the trot was eight years ago and the only written down element of the generation-defining novel you’ve been plotting in your head for a decade is “Bob was dead good at fighting”, and you’re not even sure that’s a proper title.

What if you didn’t have to be ordinary?

What if there were a world-spanning conspiracy that controlled every aspect of the lives of billions of people across the globe; controlled what they saw, what they heard, what they believed, what they thought?

What if you knew all about it, but most people didn’t?

You’d be pretty fucking special then, wouldn’t you?

All it takes is the decision on your part to simply believe any old shit you’re told.

Well, not any…you don’t want to be having truck with that stuff that gets reported via the Main-Stream Media (MSM), which is to be automatically assumed to be false.

For example, here are some bad sources of information, spewing out lies for the purposes of deceiving the sleeping masses:

• BBC, ITV or C4 news
• Newspapers that other people have heard of
• Any magazines that are ‘peer reviewed’
• People with genuine qualifications
• Web-sites affiliated with any of the above
• Web-sites that look like they were designed by somebody competent, post-1998
• Books from the non-fiction/grown-up sections of the library/bookshop
• People who disagree with you (see ‘Shills’)

And some good sources of information, telling the truth to the wise, in the face of mass opposition:

• Russia Today, especially during their ‘George Galloway rants until his underpants are full’ segments
• Newspapers/magazines that have to be ordered specially
• Newspapers/magazines that are only on-line and don’t list their staff, sources or reference any articles other than their own (and use ‘As we’ve previously explained…’ to introduce a lot of their links)
• People who have qualifications from correspondence colleges, or no qualifications, or great qualifications in an unrelated disciplines, or who change the subject when asked about their qualifications, or who have had their qualifications deleted by men in black helicopters.
• Books that 8 year olds would describe as ‘cool’
• Books that read like they were written by 8 year olds
• YouTube ‘documentaries’
• Bloke down the pub
• Things you dream
• Websites that look contemporary to ‘Dancing Jesus’

Once you switch from bad sources of information to good sources, and throw yourself open to believing any old shit (which you can rationalise as ‘being open-minded’) you’ll quickly realise how blind you were to the way the world really works and just how special you’ve become compared to the ordinary people.  Well, they do say it’s bliss.

But hold your horses! Before you run to your nearest Internet and start shouting absurdities at Al Murray you should really get your story straight. Perhaps start by asking yourself who’s behind it all.  There are so many choices, the world is full of shadowy organisations, real and imagined, quasi-governmental agencies, secret planners and schemers, groups that…oh, you’ve already decided it’s the Jews. Right, whatever, I’m sure the chosen people can take another one for the team.

Still, it’s important that you come across as a genuine seeker of truth, and not as, say, a massively racist piece of shit spouting lies to support their hideous anti-Semitic platform.  That can be tricky.

Check out this quick guide on how to give your deep-pile carpet, that’s played host to a million dog-shit stained jackboots, a lovely squirt of Febreeze…

Don’t say…	Do say…
“Jews”	“Zionists” (or “Lizards”, if you prefer)
“Jews are lying about the gas chambers”	“It’s important that the Holocaust is subject to proper historical scrutiny”
“Jews have all of the money!”	“The influence of international banking families is huge”
“And all of the land”	“Zionist policies are strongly expansionist”
“Jews done 9/11!”	“Official accounts leave many questions unanswered”
“Jews are mind-controlling my dog to spy on me having alone sex!”	Er…you’re on your own with that one, mate

Now that you’re the guardian of extraordinary knowledge and above the common herd there’s not much point just sitting on your own, smugly basking in your own superiority; you have to get out there and let the common herd know just how common they are.

Before the Internet this would have meant arguing down the pub, with a very real chance of getting your lights punched out good and proper.  It’s no coincidence that the word ‘sheeple’ didn’t appear until most arguments moved to cyber- (or ‘non-punchy’) space.

You should be prepared for a lot of people disagreeing with you. Don’t view arguing with them as a careful game of chess, think of it more as an endless game of draughts…in a draughts factory…where you have access to all of the draughts…and can just dump more and more draughts on the board to replace any of yours that are taken…and you don’t understand the rules of draughts…and fuck the other guy, because you’re right and will never, ever admit that you’re wrong.  If your opponent shoots down one of your ‘facts’ then hit them with another one – there’s always another web-site claiming something crazy, always another YouTube video offering undeniable proof, always another loaded question to ask.

Conspiracy belief is never saying “sorry”…or “I’m wrong”.

After all, you’re special.

For anybody outside of Scotland Spannergate is incomprehensible and nobody really cares about it, like the Scotch people themselves, but, also like the Scotch people, it’s creating a lot of noise and refusing to go away to sleep it off.

To help out those who are struggling to keep up here is a quick summary of the story so far…

It all started with J. K. Rowling, who isn’t just the richest woman in Scotland not to be running a mortgage scam or skimming off public donations, but is also the creator of Hogwarts – the model for all Scottish schools, where only one child a year meets a violent death and nobody ever asks about the maths or English results.

Because of her status as national treasure Ms Rowling was nationalised in 2014 and is now governed by the Rowling (Permissible Activities) Act of 2015. On the evening of Thursday 28 January freedom-loving SNP outcast, Natalie McGarry, noticed that the terms of this act may have been breached by Ms Rowling communicating via Twitter with somebody who the SNP had declared an un-person, the now infamous Brian Spanner.

Spurred on by a genuine desire to make Twitter a nicer place for all women Scottish Nationalists immediately set to work ignoring the beam in their own eye and searching through Brian Spanner’s 78,000 tweets for 16 that they could sell to the national press as being vile and misogynistic.  These tweets were published on the web-site of economics guess-monger and 4’7″ fountain of eternal hate, Wings Over Scotland, who is widely agreed to be both objective and fair in all matters relating to J. K. Rowling.

Around this time people began to realise that annoying someone who can afford to employ both of the lawyers in Scotland might not be a great idea, and that it was probably best left to the politicians to dictate to a woman who she can befriend on-line without damaging women’s on-line freedom. And so attention turned to Spanner…

Despite the fact that there has never been a recorded case of anybody receiving real-life abuse, threats or actual violence, or having their employment threatened because of on-line spats, Spanner appeared to be posting under a pseudonym for no reason at all. From this revelation the train of logic was as inescapable as it was worthy of Holmes himself…

• If ‘Brian Spanner’ is an alias then there must be a real person behind the account!
• Because the Nationalist cause is so self-evidently right and righteous there couldn’t possibly be somebody opposed to it who wasn’t already in the pay of the evil Tories.
• Most of Spanner’s Twitter feed is words and pictures; do you know who else likes communicating in words and pictures? That’s right, journalists!
• There was evidence that both Rowling and Spanner had read things written by journalists.  They even followed some of the same journalists.  The same Unionist journalists.

As plainly as jet fuel not burning hot enough to melt steel beams Spanner had to be an anti-Nationalist (i.e. anti-Scotland) journalist.  Even if you’re not the sort to believe in conspiracy theories you have to admit that there isn’t a single gap in that logic.  The key suspect, Euan McColm, hasn’t explicitly denied being Brian Spanner, even though the Cybernats have taken a break from calling him a cunt to ask him politely to do so.  Damning!

That brings us up to date.  Nationalists are raging impotently against something they are billing as a conspiracy against them, which is exactly what they were doing before Spannergate as well, but about something different, and everybody else is getting on their lives.

As letting go and moving on are the two key strengths of Scottish Nationalists this is likely to be the last we hear of the matter.

[This space reserved for links to Spannergate parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Scottish election night Spannergate special, 7a, 7b, 8 thu 91 and Spannergate: A retrospective on life before the nuclear winter]

There’s been a lot about political polling in the news recently, and while 99.5% of the general public believe that polling companies are honest, trustworthy and staffed by the most handsome and witty people in all the land, it does seem that the jig might be up.

So, as an insider, let me tell you a few secrets about political polling…

The most important thing to realise is that the first consideration is that, obviously, you have to get the result that the client wants, but you have to balance this against what the shadowy cabal that runs the world will allow you to tell people.

Naturally, as a a matter of professional discretion, I can’t say if that shadowy cabal is the government, the Masons, Zionists, neo-cons, the liberal elite, the New World Order or the Illuminati…but let’s just say that’s 7 groups I’ve listed there, and there are 7 days in a week!

Take, for example, the May General Election.  By January 2015 the…powers that be…had already decided the final result, a small Tory majority, but the right-wing media (e.g. the BBC) wanted to show a big Labour lead, to encourage right-wingers to get out and vote, while the left-wing media (e.g. the BBC) wanted to show a Tory lead, so that they could bleat on about human rights and the NHS being at risk.  Meanwhile, if you just went out and asked people who they were going to vote for then 85-90% of them would say UKIP.

In early February all of the parties came together at the HQ of the UK Poll Fixing Council  (inside a small volcanic island about 2 miles East of Douglas) and agreed that we would show the result as being neck-and-neck, with a hung-parliament and another coalition government being the likely outcome.  Just to make sure it wasn’t too obviously a fix it was also decided to get the result about right for Scotland, because there’s very little interest in politics there anyway, so who cares?

Once the result has been decided it’s just a case of getting it. In the past 5-10 years the industry has moved away from nonsense such as reading chicken entrails or rolling dice, and simply making up the results wholesale is somehow seen as lazy and dishonest, so instead we use special polling science, called “mathematics”.

Say, for example, we’ve polled 10 people (this is about the norm for a political poll) and 8 of them are planning to vote UKIP and 1 each for Conservatives and Labour.  We’d “weight” the non-UKIP voters to, say, 330 people each.  We’d also weight the UKIP voters, but only to about 20 people each.  This would give us a “sample size” of 820, so we’d round that up to close to 1,000 (not exactly, though, people get suspicious of round numbers, so we’ll probably make it 1,036 or something) and attribute the rest of the votes to ‘Don’t know’ or parties that no-one cares about, like the Greens, BNP or the Lib Dems – it’s not like anyone is ever going to check that shit out – because there are probably some of them out there, so it’s only fair that we mention them.

Once we’ve knocked up some draft data tables we’ll fax them round our “competitors”, to make sure they roughly match their results, and to the media, to make sure they support the story they’ve already written, and then we’re good to go.

And that’s pretty much it.  If Lord Foulkes had just kept his nose out of it then we’d have told you something about “shy Tories” or “lazy Labour” and life would have rolled on.  Right now, even though we know that 80% of adults still intend to vote for UKIP, and the other 80% strongly support Jeremy Corbyn, we’d be telling you that the Conservatives are more popular than ever, that Labour are unelectable and that Brexit is neck-and-neck, and you’d have no reason to doubt us.  Sure, Twitter polls and other easily accessible on-line survey methods may look like they threaten us, but it’s always easy to knock them down as “unscientific”.

This then is the last stop for the gravy train. Thanks to Lord Foulkes’ brilliantly deducing that he can use the law to regulate an industry which has absolutely no vested interest in delivering accurate results or being seen as independent.  Really the only question that remains is whether the public will support his plan.  I wonder.

 

I read an article the other day about how Labour could rid themselves of Corbyn. I forget the exact mechanics, but it was something to do with MPs being brave enough to sacrifice their parliamentary careers in order to…you know what, it doesn’t matter how they were doing it.  It might have been to summon the shade of Lady Thatcher to drag Corbyn beyond the veil of death or to make a Tory MP fall down stairs, through a combination of overexertion laughing at Labour and the tremors from the all-night port sessions, and land on him – it’s not important.  The point was that the first step was politicians risking their careers and the following steps didn’t mention anything about dealing with the hundreds of thousands, maybe more, who really, really like Corbyn.

If Corbyn’s politics are never tested in a general election then a great many people are going to remain convinced that they are popular, vote-winning policies (we don’t trust polls any more, remember).  These people will either keep demanding Corbynesque leaders or will form the ‘Real Labour Party’ (or something equally wanky) to fracture the left, possibly until the Tories get so sick of being in power that they start putting actual rats up for election, just to see if they’ll still get in.

Neither can we just ride this out with Corbyn in charge until 2020, because if he loses (and all of the data suggest that he will do, comprehensively) then his supporters have the narrative that he lost because ‘traitors’ to the Labour party didn’t support him, and we get right back to left-wing politics being split and the new MP for Huffingshire South being a stuffed squirrel in a bikini.

Anyway, who are those who are left-of-centre, but right of Corbyn going to vote for?  Labour’s shift to the left has torn the heart out of the Greens, a Lib Dem vote in 2020 is going to be nothing more than a proxy Conservative vote and nobody really wants to vote UKIP.

The choices then are a ‘Yes, I’m fine with all of this’ cross for the Tories, or a ‘This is worse than the time I moved back in with my parents and all of my teenage band posters were still on my bedrom wall’ vote for Corbynite Labour.  To make it worse we have to be happy about the Labour vote. We have to end the paranoia about Red Tories. We have to support Corbyn. Applaud his brilliant political manoeuvres. Cheer on this week’s shadow cabinet.  The alternative is the boot stamping on the human face, forever.

Mind you, when Orwell wrote that line he probably never imagined that we’d have to think about whether that really was the worst option.

 

Good morning and welcome to my live blog of my experiences trying to live blog my attempts to give up smoking.

[Goes and Googles picture of inhaler for later on]

The dec-[puts kettle on to boil]-ision to take up smoking was made by 17 year-old me back in the late eighties and, frankly, is just one of the many reasons that I resent 17 year-old me.[Makes coffee]

Back then 10 Benson & Hedges cost 69p [checks Twitter] and living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse was still an attractive option or, at least, an option.[Sucks on inhaler, like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a tiny floating piece of debris][checks Twitter]. Twenty-seven years later cigarettes cost around £4 for a pack of 10 and [makes a rewrite to para 3] despite having given up smoking many times before, sometimes for years at a time, I find myself having to do so again.  This suggests that 44 year-old me isn’t fundamentally any brighter than 17 year-old me.

So I have this…

[Inserts picture of inhaler][Writes inset about inserting picture][[Writes the previous inset about writing the inset]][Sets recursion to OFF]

…a little plastic doohickey, about the size of my thumb, into which I can insert a nicotine capsule.  I have this because vaping isn’t far enough removed from smoking for me to give up (if I use electronic cigarettes then, sooner or later, I switch back to real ones), the patches irritate my skin, I don’t like the gum and I can’t just go cold turkey because I have a family [checks Twitter] with whom I have to spend the day and who I am not legally allowed to murder!

[Goes to make breakfast for youngest child]

[Wipes dog paw-prints off the sofa]

[Changes ‘dohickey’ to ‘doohickey’]

[Stares vacantly at McDonald’s ad on TV]

The problem is that my brain doesn’t want to [corrects typo in last insert] try to suck nicotine vapour from a plastic cylinder, it wants [edit last word, which I first typed as “wasn’t” then edited to “want’s”, FFS] me to drive to the petrol station and spend about eight quid on a packet of fags and smoke them one after the other while it works out rationalisations for committing suicide in a manner that’s more expensive than [watches kids’ cartoons for a minute, slack-jawed] buying a brand new Ferrari and driving it off a cliff as fast as you can.

So as I try to get [checks Twitter and Facebook] through the day my brain rebels by making it almost impossible [re-reads last para] to focus on anything. [Tidies away youngest’s breakfast stuff] “Just pop out for a smoke! Things will be better after that!” it tells me [has another slack-jawed stare at kids’ TV that extends to several minutes], “Otherwise you can kiss goodbye to being able to get anything done today!”

[Watches Go Compare ad]

Fortunately I was one step ahead of my own chemical deprived brain [stands in front of fridge, eating grapes] and did all of the jobs I needed to do yesterday.  Today I can be as rambling and unfocused as I like.  All I have to do is write this blog…but look what a fucking mess I made of that!  Still, it’s all [crosses fingers] true.