Boris Johnson Postpones Paternity Leave – Who Advised Him Against It?

It seems that I was wrong. In the previous article, I claimed that Boris was planning to take paternity leave following the birth of his new baby. This would have meant that his time back at work following his stay in hospital with the Coronavirus would have been a grand three days. But now Boris has said that he plans to put it off until later.

Despite the polls showing that the majority of the British still somehow believe he is doing a good job, the trend is downward. More people are waking up the fact that Boris has done a terrible job of protecting the British people from the disease. Some of this is due to Boris’ sheer incompetence, his complacency in not seeing the virus as a threat, his making Brexit and the British economy a higher priority than human lives and ignoring medical advice calling for an immediate lockdown. But it’s also due to Johnson’s sheer idleness. He was not working all through the night working to defeat the virus, as his spin doctors insist. Rather he missed the first five Cobra meetings and preferred to go away for the weekend rather than work. And people know it.

Hence, Johnson’s decision to defer his leave until later in the year looks like one of his advisers had a quiet word and told him how bad it might look if he bunked off again. However, the two weeks’ leave must be taken within eight weeks of the baby’s birth. There’s no doubt that the crisis will still be going on by then, despite attempts to say or imply otherwise by people like the Torygraph and Tim Martin, CEO of Wetherspoons. On the other hand, as the maximum he would be paid if he took the leave is £302.40, he may well suddenly find reasons why he should stay on and work.

Was Johnson shamed into taking paternity leave ‘later in the year’?

 

After Only Three Days on the Job, Boris Is Off On Paternity Leave

So much for Boris’ big return to work which was greeted with so much loud hullabaloo by the Tories on Monday. Now with the birth of his latest child – no. 6, but that’s only an approximate figure, as he doesn’t know how many he has – Boris has decided to leave work to take paternity leave. That means he’s spent a grand total of three days back at work, if that.

Mike in his article about this points out that if count backwards, it seems that he begat the child around the time he won the Tory election last year. It was what he did to celebrate, no doubt. Mike goes on to speculate that he may have done so knowing full well that it would arrive at about this time, and he’d have a reasonable excuse to go back on holiday.

How many holidays has he had since became prime minister, Mike asks rhetorically. Is he trying to get the record for the prime minister who spent the least amount of work in the role? Mike states that some might say it’s churlish to criticise the PM to take even more time off, but Mike’s reply is that it’s irresponsible of him to abandon his duties yet again.

Indeed. I realise that feminists have been campaigning for men to be given paternity leave for a very long time. I can remember the women’s column in the Absurder publishing articles demanding it in 1984/5. I’m also aware of the new research showing how profoundly a new baby affects the father’s mood and psychology as well as the mother. But I am also aware that Johnson is the head of this country’s government during an unprecedented health crisis. A crisis that is putting the NHS and its heroic staff under stress, and killing people. And it’s a crisis that Johnson has made immensely worse through his incompetence, complacency, his callous decision to put the economy before human lives, and sheer idleness. Mike says

‘We will remember him as the prime minister who created a catastrophe, waved his fist at it, and then ran away.’

Exactly. He also remembers an old comment about people making such a fuss and noise about being in charge, that nobody realises that they aren’t.

But in Johnson’s case, who is?

I think the answer to that one is probably Dominic Cummings, the eminence gristly who’s the real power behind Johnson. An abusive manipulator who demands total obedience from the press and media.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s compare the media’s reaction to the arrival of Johnson’s baby with the way they treated Tony Blair at the birth of his latest child when he was in office. Johnson has been greeted with a torrent of messages wishing him well, and very loud celebrations from the Tory press. While I don’t doubt Blair also enjoyed the public and the media also celebrating his new arrival, certain papers also indulged in a bit of coarse speculation. They published pieces wondering where he and Cherie were when the baby was conceived. I notice that Johnson has not been subjected to similar lese majeste.

Johnson seems to be aiming to be the Prime Minister, who has spent the least time actually governing the country, leaving the job to other people. Perhaps that’s no bad thing, considering the utter mess he’s made of it so far. A few days ago one of the left wing internet news sites reported that Dr Kailash Chand, a fierce critic of the government, stated that Johnson was so negligent and culpable that he should resign.

I’d say he’s right, except that all the members of his government are as incompetent and corrupt as he.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/29/so-much-for-boris-johnsons-big-return-to-work-now-hes-off-on-paternity-leave/

Tribute Next Monday to Tim Brooke-Taylor on Radio 4

This one’s for fans of the Goodies and the radio show, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, ‘the antidote to panel games.’ According to next week’s Radio Times for 2-8 May 2020, Radio 4 are broadcasting a tribute to the late comic actor, Tim Brooke-Taylor, on Monday 4th May at 6.30 pm. The blurb for it in the Radio Times by Simon O’Hagan on page 118 runs

47 Years Without a Clue – A Tribute to Tim Brooke-Taylor

This is going to be so wonderful but so sad – a tribute to the deeply lovable comedy giant Tim Brooke-Taylor, who died last month with Coronavirus at the age of 79. Fellow Goodie Graeme Garden presents, with the emphasis on TBT’s immense contribution to the other great show they teamed up on, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. “The Tim I knew was fuelled by nervous energy,” longtime Clue producer Jon Naismith tells me. “It was this underlying state of mild panic that not only made him enormously relatable to audiences, it led to some of the funniest moments.

Discworld Novels To Come to TV and Film

Good news for fans of the late Fantasy/SF author Terry Pratchett. According to an article on page 3 of today’s I, for 29th April 2020, a special production company is set to develop his discworld novels for the screen. The article simply reads

Sir Terry Pratchett’s production company, Narrativia, is to bring the late writer’s Discworld novels to life in screen adaptations. It hopes to create “truly authentic” features based on the novels, which remain “absolutely faithful” to Sir Terry’s “original, unique genius.”

I saw Pratchett several times speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. He was a funny man, who spoke to packed audiences. Like Michael Moorcock, the author of the cult Fantasy hero, Elric, Pratchett was also critical about the genre in which he wrote. He once said that if you read The Lord of the Rings when you were 13, and didn’t think it was the greatest book in the world, there’s something wrong with you. And if you still think it’s the greatest book in the world by the time you’re 33, there’s something really wrong with you. He also said that Fantasy was dead, and he was a maggot crawling in its rotting corpse.

But this was back in the 1990s, when the state of genre literature I hope was a lot different than it is today.

There have already been a couple of TV adaptations of his Discworld books, I believe. There has definitely been an animated version of Soul Music, about a lad who makes a pact to become Discworld’s superstar performer of what the trolls call ‘music with rocks in’, narrated by Rowan Atkinson. There’s also a TV adaptation of the book Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman,  and starring David Tennant, formerly Dr. Who, by one of the internet TV services. It’s either on at the moment, or it very recently has been. Apart from Discworld and Good Omens, Pratchett also co-wrote a couple of novels with other writers, including an SF trilogy about parallel worlds, which included The Long Earth, and The Long War with Hard SF writer Stephen Baxter, the author of the Xelee books.

I have to say that I only read five of his books before giving up – The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Mort, Pyramids and Reaper Man. I really enjoyed them, but gave up reading him because I simply couldn’t keep up with the man’s colossal output. His novels were hilarious, but many of them also contained among the humour a serious humanistic message. He was also very appreciative of the fans, who made him one of the great giants of modern Fantasy literature.

It’s great that there is a production company set up to try and translate Pratchett’s unique literary creation to TV and film, and wish them every success. After the horrors of the present, we’re going to need a good dose of humour and healthy, intelligent Fantasy.

Boris Johnson: Britain’s Chairman Mao

Boris Johnson finally returned to work this Monday. As he did so, he gave us the benefit of his thoughts in a speech to the nation. This was at 9 O’clock in the morning, when some people furloughed from work may have been asleep.

Mike was one of those who watched it, and assured those who had slept through it that they weren’t missing much. It was mostly just flannel and platitudes. Johnson did manage to say something sensible. In comparing the current situation to an attack by an assailant, Johnson warned people that although we had got on top of the situation, this was no time to relax the lockdown. Even if you had your attacker on the ground, he was still dangerous and you wouldn’t take your hands off him to allow him back up in case he returned to the attack. It was the same with the lockdown and the virus.

That wasn’t what struck Mike about Johnson’s peroration, however. What he noticed, and which justifiably left Mike outraged, was our clown prime minister’s statement that we were successful in tackling the virus. What? Successful! How? The death toll is at 21,000, excluding those in care homes and at home. We have the worst death toll in Europe, above Italy and Spain, the two countries worse hit. We have our front line medical and care workers dying of this wretched disease because they don’t have the right PPE. They’re going to work in bin bags. And this is because Johnson and his cronies didn’t take the pandemic threat seriously, didn’t want to update the plans and preparations previous administrations had made for such an eventuality, and prioritised Brexit and the economy over actually shutting the country down as soon as possible to save lives. Far more could have been done, especially if Johnson had got off his well-padded, Eton-educated rear end and attended a few more Cobra meetings and actually did some work at weekends.

But the Tories and their fawning media lackeys have been falling over themselves to hail the great man’s return to health and work. Yesterday Zelo Street put up an article comparing this outburst of praise and good wishes for Boris with the official praise and acclamation given by the Chinese to Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao was hailed by his supporters as ‘the great helmsman’, and Johnson too was being lauded by the Tories in similar terms. Zelo Street reproduced a series of Tweets from the Tories stating how wonderful it was to have Boris ‘back at the helm’. Zelo Street did this to make the point that, despite claims to the contrary, this country was capable of a cult of personality similar to Communist dictatorships like North Korea and China.

Precisely, but we’ve seen it before, of course. Thatcher over here and Ronald Reagan in America have cults among their parties which can easily be compared with the Soviet cults of Lenin and Stalin. As for Mao, he was responsible for the Cultural Revolution during which 60 million Chinese died, many of them from famine caused by the party’s failed policies.  In the ten years of their government, the Tories have killed over a hundred thousand people through benefit sanctions and work capability tests, and thrown a quarter of a million people on to food banks to feed themselves. More children are growing up in poverty, homelessness has got worse and a record number of Brits are faced with the choice of whether they eat or heat their homes, ’cause they can’t do both.

And at least 21,000 people have died because of the virus, assisted by Johnson’s mistakes, complacency and sheer, bloody idleness.

So Boris certainly is Britain’s Chairman Mao in cult of personality and in the number of deaths he and his wretched party have caused.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/boris-is-new-mao-zedong.html

This is what Boris Johnson calls winning: the second-worst Covid-19 death rate in the world

 

Is This the Most Insulting Comment Aliens Have Said to an Abductee?

I’ve just finished reading Dr. David Clarke’s The UFO Files, a history of UFOs in Britain from the phantom airship scares of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the abduction experiences from the 60s onwards, the 70’s craze created by Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right up to the years immediately preceding the book’s publication in 2009. The book was written to accompany the release of the government’s files on UFOs by the National Archives, and is naturally based on the records compiled by the MOD, the Air Ministry, RAF and armed forces, and the Airmiss inquiry group, which investigates near misses between aircraft.

It’s a fascinating book that shows that UFOs have been around for over a century and that the government and the British military don’t really know any more about them than anyone else. The aliens haven’t established secret bases in Britain, and neither to the RAF or anyone else for that matter have alien bodies stashed away in a secret hangar somewhere. The official government line, repeated over and again, is that UFOs or of ‘no defence significance’, and they really don’t want to get involved unless it’s absolutely necessary. They’ve therefore investigate UFO sightings and encounters when it affects national security, such as if the UFOs may actually be foreign planes. The last government report on the phenomenon concluded that most of them were generated by people wrongly identifying a variety of artificial objects and natural phenomena. Those that couldn’t be properly identified, were probably poorly understood meteorological phenomena, electromagnetic plasmas, which could also create hallucinations through interfering with the brains of witnesses. This part of the report was, however, attacked by scientists on its release as pseudoscience.

But very many of the UFOs reported over the years have been people mistaking a variety of normal objects and phenomena for alien craft. During the First World War, an anti-aircraft crew at an army base in Cumbria fired at what they honestly believed was a German Zeppelin. Except that an officer, arriving at the scene, reported that he saw them staring at a star. It was discovered during the Second World War that flocks of migrating birds could make radar trails very much like approaching enemy aircraft, although the airmen sent up to intercept them would find no-one except themselves up there. During the Cold War, UFO reports were generated by the Americans releasing the Mogul spy balloons from their base in Scotland, as well as later flights by spy planes like the U2 and SR-71. These were so secret, the Americans didn’t inform their NATO allies in the countries across which the planes and balloons traveled on their way to the USSR. As a result, RAF jets were scrambled to intercept these unidentified aircraft, while there was a spate of UFO reports along the German border.

Some UFO sightings were also caused by particularly spectacular fireball meteors burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. One of these was responsible for the Berwyn mountain crash, dubbed by some ‘the Welsh Roswell’. A series of meteors were seen over England, followed by an earthquake measuring 4-5 on the Richter scale centred in Bala. It was feared that a military plane had crashed on the mountain, as several had done so previously. The RAF therefore sent up a mountain rescue squad, which found nothing and came back down again. This was subsequently inflated into stories of the RAF’s retrieval of a crashed UFO and alien bodies.

Other sightings were caused by the re-entry of Soviet spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere. This is believed to be the cause of the Rendlesham Forest incident, ‘the British Roswell’, in which a group of American squaddies from a USAF base entered the forest to encounter a triangular UFO in 1980. It seems that the Americans seen the rocket for a Soviet Cosmos spy satellite re-entering, and then the lights from a nearby lighthouse, believing they came from an alien spacecraft.

One MOD scientific/intelligence officer believed that most UFO reports could be satisfactorily explained if they had been investigated immediately they occurred, rather than sometime afterwards. Nevertheless, there are encounters that are still genuinely perplexing. Such as the report a trucker driving through Devon in the ’70s made at a local police station. He had been driving along the main road there when a craft shaped like a mushroom descended, landing on the road ahead, out of which came six short figures wearing uniforms. After gesturing at him, the creatures eventually got in their spacecraft, which lifted up into the air and flew on, leaving the trucker shaken by the experience.

And then there’s the encounter reported by a gent in Basingstoke in 1968. The fellow had been walking down by the canal one morning when a UFO descended and he was taken aboard by their occupants. They examined him, before telling the poor chap, “You can go. You are too old and infirm for our purposes.” Popular SF, which seems to have strongly influenced the content of UFO encounters, has been full of tales of evil aliens coming to other to conquer and enslaved humanity, and carry off people off for breeding purposes. It’s usually females, as in the SF B-movie Mars Needs Women, but sometimes men as in the 1949 Hammer flick, Devil Girl from Mars. This episode occurred around about the time of the Villas Boas encounter, when a Brazilian farmer of that name had been abducted by aliens and forced to have sex with a red-headed alien woman. Possibly the crew of the Basingstoke UFO also had something similar in mind. If so, both they and the poor bloke they abducted were out of luck. Or perhaps they had in mind something far more unpleasant, in which case their intended victim was lucky. The Contactees, who met peaceful aliens in the 1950s, and the abductees from the 1980s onwards, were given messages by humanity by the aliens they encountered. These tend to moralistic sermons preaching international and intergalactic brotherhood, peace, an end to nuclear weapons and concern for the environment. Sometimes they include descriptions of the aliens’ own planets and their societies. Sometimes they’re even whisked away on journeys to these distant worlds. This poor fellow didn’t get any of that, just the blunt statement that he was too old and infirm for them. He was spared the horror and humiliation of being examined and experimented upon, but their comments still seem just a tiny bit insulting. They could have put it a bit more tactfully.

My own feeling is that UFOs, when they aren’t misidentified normal objects or phenomena, are internal visionary experiences drawing on the imagery of Science Fiction, but expressing deep-seated human fears and needs. I don’t know what generates them. I think some are probably the result of poorly understood psychological states, such as sleep paralysis. But I also wonder if others are genuine encounters with something paranormal, something that in previous centuries took the form of fairies and other supernatural beings, and now takes the form of aliens and spaceships as images more suitable for our technological society.

While David Clarke’s done excellent work researching the government’s UFO archives, and has shown that very many of them have entirely rational explanations, there may still be something genuinely paranormal out there. But it didn’t want the man from Basingstoke it encountered on that day in 1968.

Bristol South Letter about Leaked Report and Its Inquiry to Labour Party

The officers of my local constituency Labour party, Bristol South, sent a copy of a statement they had written to the national party attached to the email update they sent to members. In it they expressed their concerns about the leaked report into the plotting and sabotage of Labour’s election campaign and the forthcoming inquiry into it on behalf of the constituency party’s members. It runs

Statement from Bristol South Constituency Executive Committee members to:
Keir Starmer MP Leader Angela Rayner MP Deputy Leader and Labour Party Chair,
Andi Fox NEC Chair and Jennie Formby General Secretary

The undersigned members of the Bristol South Constituency Executive are extremely
concerned about the alleged pattern of extensive misconduct in the 851 page document leaked last week. The document outlines how some Labour Party staff members have made a concerted effort to undermine our democratically elected Leadership, compromise our Election Campaigns, even wishing or working for our defeat, and contributed to or impeded the fight against anti-semitism, racism, bullying and sexism within our party.

Labour Members have contacted us expressing their frustration, anger and feelings of being let down by these alleged actions and factional behaviours within the party. So many members have volunteered their time, money, skills and energy to get Labour representatives elected at all levels, in order to build a better society, only to find that their efforts have apparently been mocked and nullified by the very people who should have been supporting them.

The report does document the improvements in complaint handling and proactive work against anti-semitism since Jennie Formby was elected as General Secretary, and whilst we appreciate the recently announced independent investigation by the Leadership Team, we call for:
 The NEC as our ruling body should hold an emergency meeting to set out the terms of
the independent inquiry and a transparent process for investigating the alleged
misconduct
 To publish a timetable for that inquiry and when it reports, that reflects urgency and a
quick turn around
 The full report on the independent investigation to be made available to Labour Members along with any and all recommendations for action
 Administrative suspension, pending investigation be applied for alleged gross misconduct for those named and documented in the report
 Accountability for alleged misuse of funding
 A commitment to cultural and procedural change in the party at national, regional and
local levels

We are concerned about the wellbeing of members who the document has shown to be abused and members who are distraught at its contents, whilst recognising the rights of those accused. The Labour Party needs to work together if we are to be successful; we all need to work to build a more inclusive, democratic, and accountable party at all levels where all members can feel safe and free from the kind of bullying that this report documents. 

This is an opportunity to learn lessons; the membership and our voters need to be shown thatchanges have been made to ensure this can never happen again.

Mabel Hahner, Chair David Meacham, Vice Chair Membership
Jane Britton, Vice Chair Zoe Goodman, Campaign and Data Co-ordinator
James Tuite, Secretary Lee Starr-Elliott, Disability Officer
Gwyneth Brain, LGBT Officer Hribhu Mendiratta, Youth Officer
Bianca Rossetti, Policy Officer Ajay Kumar, Political Education Officer (share)
Ted Powell, TULO Officer (share) Victoria Coddington, Social Media Officer (share)
Thomas Pearce, TULO Officer (share) Geraint Evans, Social Media Officer (share)
Lynn Parfitt, CLP Fundraising Officer Corey Miller, Political Education Officer (share)
Daisy Carter, Women’s Officer Mohammed (Ajmal) Miah, BAME Officer

The local party’s chair, Mabel Hahner, states in the email update itself that it is regrettable that unredacted versions of the report containing people’s identities and their locations are circulating, and states that she nor the local party have passed around copies of the report.

The statement was not marked ‘confidential’, so I believe I can post this up here. I’m doing so because it shows very clearly that my local party, and no doubt very many others, want there to be a genuinely fair inquiry into this matter.

I must say, however, that I differ from the local officers in that I strongly believe from the conduct of those making the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, his supporters and indeed the Labour party itself, as well as the excellent character of very many of those accused, that the truth was the complete opposite of the impression of rampant anti-Semitism under Corbyn’s leadership. There has been ample testimony from pro-Corbyn Jews and Jewish organisation, like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour, Shraga Stern, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and too many others that these allegations were false and entirely politically motivated. Many of them were personally victims of this witch-hunt, along with the entirely decent, anti-racist non-Jews like the Black anti-racism activist Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and my brother, Mike Sivier. I find it absolutely abhorrent that those people, Jews and gentiles, should be viciously smeared and libeled by a corrupt, right-wing political and media establishment.

I personally wish that there was also a will genuinely to tackle and refute the anti-Semite witch-hunt, which would exonerate and restore the memberships of those unfairly libeled and expelled. This may well be far too much to hope for under Starmer’s leadership.

Nevertheless the letter from the local Labour party shows how strong feelings about this affair are in our constituency party and no doubt very many others, and there will be pressure on Starmer and his team to conduct a fair inquiry.

 

 

Starmer’s and Rayner’s Zoom Discussion with Labour Members

Last Monday, 20th April 2020, I got an email update from the local constituency party here in south Bristol letting me and the other members know what was happening with the party. This included nationally as well as locally. This included the news that the previous Wednesday the new leader and deputy leader, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, had held a meeting over Zoom with 10,000 party members, answering their questions. Those discussed included

• How do we hold the Tories to account – related to the deaths of frontline workers

• How do we unite the Party in the light of the leaked report

• Can the green new deal be used to help rebuild the post pandemic economy

• How can we encourage more women in leadership

• A question about schools, keyworkers, PPE and tracing/testing

• Asked if Labour Party could push on the gaps for support for workers e.g. recently formed small business

• What about nationalisation post pandemic

• How to we stop the frontline workers being relegated after the crisis

• How will we oppose austerity

I am no fan of Starmer. He’s a right-winger, and the indications are that he will attempt to undo the gains for the left made under Corbyn and return to the party to the Conservative policies of privatisation and dismantling the welfare state under Blair. But the questions indicate that many members are still serious about nationalisation, the Green New Deal and opposing austerity, as well as placing more women in positions of leadership, alongside immediate, life and death issues such as holding the Tories to account for the deaths of front line workers.

Unfortunately, Starmer’s and Rayner’s answers aren’t recorded, so I don’t know what they were or how they intended to tackle these issues. But at least those issues are still live.

Paul Joseph Watson Butthurt Berserk ‘Cos Piers Morgan Won’t Debate Him

More hilarity now, though it’s unintentional and comes courtesy of Alex Jones’ British pal, Paul Joseph Watson. Jones is the bonkers American conspiracy theorist responsible for Infowars. This was the internet show that told its audience that the globalists were going to take over the world, stripping us of our freedoms and even our humanity. Obama was going to declare a state of emergency and force Americans in FEMA camps, commencing the mass cleansing of the population. The Democrats were all secretly Satanists and paedophiles. They and big business were in league with aliens/ and or demons to take over the world and create the one-world Satanic superstate of fundamentalist Christian end times theology. Barack Obama was declared to be the Antichrist because he smelt and had flies buzzing round him. Hillary was a lesbian cyborg, who practised witchcraft. NASA was running child slave labour camps on Mars. Feminists and gay rights activists are transhumanists, who want to turn everybody into gender neutral cyborgs. They’re coming to take away Americans’ guns. And the government is putting things in the water that ARE TURNING THE FRICKIN’ FROGS GAY.

It’s a fair question whether Jones actually believes any of this rubbish, or is just exploiting it for the sake of viewers. He was one of the major purveyors of the batshit insane conspiracy theories that are a genuine threat to decent political life. Thanks to Jones’, the bereaved parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre have been subject to abuse because Jones declared that the massacre didn’t happen and they were just ‘crisis actors’. A Boston pizza parlour has also been subject to abuse and even an intrusion from an armed man after Jones declared that it was at the centre of a Democrat paedophile ring and that the abuse children were kept in a dungeon in the basement. It isn’t, and there is no basement and no children. The gunman had been taken in by Jones’ bilge, and  had come to free the kids he genuinely believed were imprisoned there. After being shown he was wrong, he gave himself up peacefully. It’s a mercy that no-one was killed.

Thanks to antic like the above, Jones has been thrown off a series of internet platforms so that his public profile, and his income, have taken a massive hit. And Paul Joseph Watson, after hanging out with him, has returned to Blighty. He was one of the three, who managed to destroy UKIP under Gerard Batten. When he and another two internet personalities from the far right, Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin joined UKIP, prompting those of more moderate views to walk out. The party was already losing members to Farage’s latest vehicle for his colossal political ego, the Brexit Party, and the entry of Watson, Benjamin and Meechan just about finished it off.

Coarse jokes have been made about the precise nature of the relationship between Jones and Watson. One theory is that Watson split from Jones because of the latter’s views about Britain’s NHS. One commenter to a video about Jones and Watson jokingly suggested that Watson was over here because he was tired of being the object of the sexual attentions of Jones and one of the others at Infowars. But whatever the reason, Watson is over here, he’s looking for attention, and he’s angry. And to everyone else, it’s hilarious.

Zelo Street has posted up a rip-roaring piece about Watson going berserk at Piers Morgan on Twitter. Watson wants to debate him, but Morgan’s got better things to do like torment the government in interviews, and has simply blocked him. This has sent the man dubbed ‘Twatson’ by his detractors into what Molesworth used to describe as ‘a fearful bate’. And so he’s poured forth a stream of abuse directed at Morgan on Twitter, beginning with this delightful message.

“Cowardly little bitch. Afraid of the fact that I’m more popular and definitely more attractive than you. Mercenary twat. Debate me, you yellow belly crusty boomer sellout fraud cuck wanker dickhead”.

And there’s more, much more. He rants that Morgan is afraid to debate him because he’s more intelligent, youthful and handsome. And his spirit animal is some kind of bird of prey. He’s not a misogynist, because when he was at school his mother and grandmother would beat up any kid who picked on him. Nor is he an INCEL. He has no trouble picking up girls, especially Muslims. That still doesn’t alter the fact that he is anti-feminist, and has very islamophobic views.

One of the staples of comedy is a character massively losing their temper, like Donald Duck in some of the Disney cartoons. There’s a similar comedic value in watching Watson explode at Piers Morgan’s refusal to get drawn into debating him. Although perhaps we shouldn’t laugh. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, don’t mock. Doooon’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’  But faced with such a massive tantrum, it’s very had to follow Howerd’s command of ‘titter ye not’.

Zelo Street concludes their article about this with ‘Piers Morgan is, for all his faults, successful and well-off. And Paul Watson … isn’t.’ And it’s sending Watson up the wall to the immense amusement of everyone else.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/prison-planet-manhood-meltdown.html

 

 

Bad Taste Movie Alert! Charles Band’s ‘Corona Zombies’

Readers of this blog will know that I have a taste for Science Fiction, and some Fantasy and Horror, as well as movies that are so spectacularly bad or trashy that they’re hilarious or simply weirdly entertaining. It’s a type of cinema that’s been dubbed ‘Badfilm’ or ‘psychotronic’, and consists largely of low budget B-movies and their imitators. In recent years there have been a number of SF, Fantasy and Horror comedies that have deliberately parodied these films. Enough people love horrendously bad movies to have made The Room into a hit film despite it being judged one of the worst films of all time.

Half the world is in lockdown because of the Coronavirus crisis, but this hasn’t stop the masters of schlock horror producing their wares. I am therefore very pleased to inform you that the master of low budget ‘Orror’, Charles Band, has released his latest masterpiece of bad taste: Corona Zombies. I found a review of it and a trailer on the excellent website, Moria, which is an encyclopaedic collection of reviews of SF, Fantasy and Horror films.

It’s plot is very simple. A young woman, Barbie, comes back to her home in a trailer park to put on the news, where she learns that a special police unit, Corona Squad, has been formed to investigate the hijacking of a consignment of toilet paper. In the course of doing their duty, they’ve been attacked by a horde of ravening zombies. The film was completed in the very short space of a month, and the original footage shot for this epic only has three actors – the woman playing the heroine, a bloke who appears at various points in makeup as a zombie, and another woman, who’s just a voice at the end of the telephone when Barbie phones the authorities wondering what’s happened. The rest of the movie – 75 per cent of it – is made up of old footage from the 1980 Italian horror movie, Zombie Creeping Flesh. Which has been taken by Band and redubbed to give it deliberately silly dialogue. Band also recycles a few pieces of footage from one of his movies, Zombies vs Strippers.

Band first appeared in the 1980s when he formed Empire Pictures and then Full Moon. He’s responsible for a string of low budget schlock flicks, such as Ghoulies. However, Empire were also responsible for a couple of excellent ’80s horror movies by Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, Re-Animator and From Beyond. Loosely based – and very loosely at that – on short stories by the cult SF/Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, these had very good creature effects and went in for over the top splatter, so that they didn’t take themselves too seriously. Both Re-Animator and From Beyond have become classics of ’80s Horror. Re-Animator was praised by critics at the time for its wry humour. It starred Jeffrey Coombs as mad scientist Herbert West, who has discovered a serum to reanimate the dead. In one scene West makes a deadpan joke about getting parts as injects a severed head and its former body.

Band himself, however, doesn’t seem to have risen to these cinematic heights, and simply continued to grind out his low-budget epics, often using old footage from his previous movies. He’s not alone in this. Roger Corman used to do it. So did Herschel Gordon Lewis and Samuel Z. Arkoff. I think it was Arkoff, who used to buy up foreign language European movies, edited and re-dubbed them, and then released them to unsuspecting American public as completely new movies. I’ve got a feeling one of his works of staggering genius was Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. He was certainly responsible for Sign of the Gladiator. This was originally an Italian sword and sandal epic set just after the fall of Rome. It had nothing to do with gladiators, but movies about them were in vogue at the time and one of the characters had been a gladiator. So he bought it, changed the title, did a bit of editing, and behold! Another masterpiece to wow the paying public. Band here seems to have followed their methodology.

Lewis and Arkoff released their movies as serious films, but Band is different here in that the film’s meant to be funny. There are apparently a lot of jokes about toilet paper shortages, as well as the new vocabulary that’s come in with the crisis, such as ‘flattening the curve’ and ‘social distancing’. The Coronavirus crisis itself isn’t funny, but it is important that people all over the world keep morale up. It’s why there’s a short film in between the programmes on the Beeb most nights in which an unseen narrator recites a poem about how we should all keep our spirits up, while inspiring images of ordinary British life, including Dad’s Army, flash by. It’s one of the reasons why every Thursday we’re all out on our doorsteps clapping for the NHS. We can keep our spirits up by laughing. And one of the ways we can do that, is through trashy films in deliberately bad taste. Like Corona Zombies.

Moria gave this splendid example of American cinema a single star, meaning that it’s rubbish, and warned that although it was the first of such movies, it wouldn’t be the last. Which to aficionados of badfilm is probably an endorsement of a promise of lots of similar horrific goodies to come. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Unfortunately all the cinemas are close, so I have no idea where you’d see it. On DVD or streaming service, perhaps.

The Morie review of this work of cinematic genius is at:

Corona Zombies (2020)