The White Stars and Celebs Who Punched People Live on TV or at Awards

Much of the news and debate on the interwebs this week was about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars for making a joke about his wife’s baldness. Jada Pinckett-Smith had shaved her head because she has aloepecia. Rock joked about her doing G.I. Jane 2, so Smith got out of his chair, walked up to Rock and slapped him. After sitting back down, Smith told Rock to keep his wife out of his ‘f***ing mouth’. And then the outrage and speculation began. People have condemned Smith for assaulting Rock, who has not pressed charges. There has been speculation that the incident was somehow staged, as the ratings for the Oscars has been falling with something like only 10 per cent of the American public watching the last one. Hence the suggestion that the kefuffle was set up to add a bit of drama and boost viewing figures. I doubt it very much – it all seemed genuine to me. And if it was set up, it hasn’t worked because the figures for the Oscars were still the second lowest they’ve been.

People have also been wondering how much of it was due to Will Smith’s own unconventional marriage and the influence of his wife, Jada. Smith and his wife have an open marriage, though this is due to Jada having an affair with a Rapper called August. Smith doesn’t seem to have done anything to initiate the open marriage, except put up with his wife’s affair. And phone camera footage from someone in the audience shows Jada laughing immediately after the attack. The conservative commenter Matt Walsh has argued that this definitely shows she isn’t a good wife, as part of a wife’s responsibilities are to stop their husbands behaving like idiots and destroying their careers. In this view, a real wife in the circumstances would have told Smith to sit down, not to be stupid and that they weren’t going to the after show part as she wanted to have a long talk with him when they got home.

And then there was the response of History Debunked to all this. Webb put up a video with a title about this being something to do with increased diversity at the Oscars.

I don’t think so, because I don’t believe that people are violent or otherwise simply because of their ethnicity. Whatever the real motives behind the slap were, it definitely wasn’t the result of urban Black ghetto culture. It simply seems to be a man reacting, or overreacting, to a gibe about his wife. And besides, there have been plenty of White stars and personalities, who’ve punch or tried to punch someone either on camera or at an awards show. Here’s four.

1. John Wayne vs Barry Norman.

Way back in the 1970s, John Wayne, the star of so many classic westerns, tried to punch the late, genial host of Film (fill in name of the year). But why, I hear you ask, given Norman’s calm, laid back and generally placid demeanour? Apparently it was during various student protests in America. Wayne, who had very right-wing views, started ranting about Communists. Bazza thought he was joking and started to laugh. Wayne got angry and was about to swing a punch at him when someone pressed another whisky in his hand and he settled down. And why not?

2. Angry Husband vs Bernard Levin on That Was The Week That Was.

This is quite similar to Smith’s attack on Rock at the Oscars. Every so often one of clip shows on TV shows this incident from the classic 60s satirical show, created by David Frost. A man comes out of the audience and walks towards Bernard Levin, one of the show’s other hosts. He politely asks Levin to stand up. Levin rises from his seat behind a desk with an expression that shows he has absolutely no idea what’s going on. The man then punches the Times journo and walks off. He angrily tells Levin that it’s because he gave a bad review to a play his wife was in.

3. Jeremy Clarkson vs. Piers Morgan.

This was at an awards ceremony, though I’ve forgotten what it was about. Clarkson’s talked about this on television himself, and said he’s genuinely not proud of his behaviour. Morgan had apparently walked up to Clarkson and accused him of having an affair. Understandably, Clarkson got annoyed and punched the former Mirror editor. At which point, in Clarkson’s telling of the incident, a crowd formed around them. A man smoking a cigar told them to take it outside. A small bloke suddenly rushed up, tore his shirt off and said, ‘No-one mess with me – I’m from Newcastle’.

4. Argy-Bargy between Guardian and Mirror Journalists at the Newspaper of the Year Awards

This was reported in the ‘Street of Shame’ column in Private Eye, way back in the ’90s. The two groups of journalists from the above papers had already been shouting insults at each other and getting increasingly drunk at the press awards. Things came to a disastrous head when the Guardian/Observer team won an award for best investigative reporting. The Mirror crew, who believed it should have gone to them, stormed the stage and tried to grab the much-coveted glass trophy. This slipped from their hands, fell to the floor and smashed. The evening’s corporate sponsor was understandably not amused, and withdrew their sponsorship. However, it would sponsor Young Journalist of the Year, who they clearly trusted to be better behaved.

These incidents aren’t at the same, global level of the Oscars, but they definitely show that irate members of the public, film and TV stars and journalists have been trying to cause bovver on TV and at awards ceremonies long before Smith and Rock. Race doesn’t have anything to do with it. If there’s any common factor here, it’s often men getting angry at what they consider to be outrageous attacks on their wives or marriage, or, in the last case, simply a mixture of intense professional rivalry and copious amounts of alcohol. Which may also have played a factor in Smith’s case.

Flooding Somerset for the Frackers?

Image from the Guardian article ‘Fracking the Nation: the Dash for Gas beneath rural Britain’ from 28 June 2013. The picture is captioned ‘From this to this … ? The village of Compton Martin in Somerset, left, and a Cuadrilla shale gas drilling rig near Blackpool’.

In my first post attacking Cameron for his lies about the floods in Somerset, I received this comment from Amnesiaclinic

The DM found the 2008 document put out by the EA to comply with the EU directive on habitats. There is also the trojan horse of Agenda 21 stalking in the shadows. The general idea is that areas are left to go back to nature (costs less) without letting the locals in on what has been decided. So dredging and pumping, very expensive are out as they are expensive and unnatural. So I say stop all the flood defences for london – far too expensive and let them sink or swim.
Also, there were lake villages in Somerset with houses on stilts – that might be useful! Plus coming together as communities and buying up all the EA equipment and doing it themselves.

People are very angry as they have seen this coming.

Other commenters concurred. Kathrynd posted this comment, pointing to an article from the Central Somerset Gazette

Barry is probably spot on. http://www.centralsomersetgazette.co.uk/Somerset-flooding-EU-plan/story-20556464-detail/story.html.

This links to an article reporting the arguments by Richard North, who runs the Defence of the Realm and EU Referendum blogs. North argued that there was a deliberate policy by the Environment Agency to allow increased flooding in Somerset and elsewhere as a form of flood management. This was intended not just to replace flood defences, but also to replace intensive farming with new, and diverse forms of managing the countryside. Part of this was the intention that part of Somerset’s wetlands should be allowed to regenerate naturally and revert to the wild. This new environment was to be termed ‘washland’.

The policy was first proposed at an EU meeting in Warsaw in 2003. This seems to have influenced a Defra document, published the next year in 2004, entitled Making Space for Water, setting out the same policy. On page 23 the document acknowledged that the same issues were being discussed in the EU. The EU’s policy was published in a COM final (2004) 472. The policy then became European law under directive 2007/60/EC of 23rd October 2007. This stated in recital 14 that as well as preparation, protection and prevention, river management should also be conducted “with a view to giving rivers more space, they should consider where possible the maintenance and/or restoration of floodplains, as well as measures to prevent and reduce damage to human health, the environment, cultural heritage and economic activity”.

North then goes on to make the following points

Just so that there should be no doubts as to where the policy thrust law, DG Environment in 2011 issued a note, stressing that flood risk management “should work with nature, rather than against it”, building up the “green infrastructure” and thus offering a “triple-win” which included restoration (i.e., flooding) of the floodplain.

By then, the Environment Agency needed no encouragement. In its March 2008 plan it had decided that, “providing a robust economic case for maintenance works on the Somerset Levels and Moors remains a challenge” (p.131).

We believe, the Agency said, that “it is appropriate to look again at the benefits derived from our work, particularly focussing more on the infrastructure and the environmental benefits, which previous studies have probably [been] underestimated”.

We have, they said, “international obligations to maintain and enhance the habitats and species in the Somerset Levels and Moors, and it is within this context that all decisions have to be made”.

And, with that, they were “doubtful that all the pumping stations on the Somerset Levels and Moors are required for flood risk management purposes. Many pumping stations are relatively old and in some cases difficult to maintain. It is necessary to decide which ones are necessary particularly in the context of redistributing water”.

Of six policy options, the Agency thus adopted the sixth, to: “Take action to increase the frequency of flooding to deliver benefits locally or elsewhere, which may constitute an overall flood risk reduction”. This policy option, they said, “involves a strategic increase in flooding in allocated areas” (p.141). The Levels were to be allowed to flood, as a matter of deliberate policy.

North is obviously a Eurosceptic, highly critical of the Green movement and its environmental policies in Somerset. However, there is another possibility why the floods have been allowed to occur, quite apart from environmental concerns: fracking.

Owen Williams suggested this in his comment

I don’t suppose I’m the only one thinking about the coincidence that the Somerset Levels sit on top of a large Shale Gas deposit, am I? Can it really be pure coincidence that the Levels have been allowed to flood so severely – and it has been allowed, the EU edict more or less confirms it – just as the Fracking industry rears its head in the UK? I’m not saying that the Government deliberately flooded the Levels – no man can control the weather – but that they knew that the Levels would eventually flood with such severity as they have, and that they seem too well-prepared to exploit the opportunity.

What happens next will be as simple as it will be brutal to the people who live on these flood plains: the Government will make the requisite level of noise about helping these poor souls, while actually doing nothing at all; this will be to first encourage them to leave of their own accord, before setting up a buyout scheme to relieve people of their property and ‘help them to move on’; the people will only be offered a mere fraction of what their land or property is actually worth in its damaged state. And then, finally, the Government will issue a Compulsory Buyout Order to forcibly grab the land, and take action to remove those who can’t or won’t leave on their own. They’ll then quietly auction off the rights to commence the fracking process on the land, in return for a share of the profits, all of which will line their own coffers, rather than go into the public purse.

In short, the Somerset Levels will become an industrialised disaster area poisoned beyond repair by fracking, and the people who’ve lived there for however many generations will be unjustly displaced and robbed of their livelihoods with no-where to turn. The Government will continue to sit pretty above “commoners’ problems” as it always does, and Big Industry will continue to profit off the backs of people’s misery.

Meanwhile, down on earth, everyone else loses everything horribly, through no fault of their own.

What a pleasant country we live in. ¬_¬

When I replied to Owen, I thought it was unlikely that this was a deliberate policy, but found it quite credible that the fracking industry would move in after the area’s population had been cleared out due to the disaster.

Now I’m inclined to believe that Owen’s right, and that there may indeed be a definite policy at work here.

I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she recalled reading an article in either 2003 or 2007 – she couldn’t remember which – in which it was stated that the affected areas in Somerset should be abandoned to flooding so that fracking should begin. This confirms what Owen said in his comment.

Now without any documents to prove this, it’s all just hearsay and speculation. The memory does play tricks on people, though not as often as it appears to affect members of the Coalition, who regularly deny having said or done anything that conflicts with their policies. However, as the picture at the top of this post shows, there is a campaign to begin fracking in Somerset. This has provoked angry opposition from local people, concerned about the possible effect on the environment and drinking water.

The proposed fracking fields at the moment are in the Mendips, as shown in the map below

This covers a long list of communities and villages in Bristol, Bath and north-east Somerset. A list of them can be found at this website here: http://somersetfrackgate.blogspot.co.uk/p/coalbed-methane.html. Proposed sites for fracking include Keynsham, a small town between Bath and Bristol and the hometown of the comedian Russell Howard, and near Chew Valley Lake, a local reservoir in the Whitchurch and Chew Magna area just down the road from South Bristol. Among the groups campaigning against fracking in this part of Somerset are Frackfree Somerset, based in Saltford and Keynsham.

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Fracking, almost needless to say, has the backing of David Cameron and the government. More sinisterly, the Somerset County Gazette reported in its 27th January 2014 issue that the government was considering reforming the trespass laws so that fracking companies can drill under people’s homes without their permission. This contradicts the Conservative stance on both sides of the Atlantic that, apart from big business, the stand for the property rights of the small businessman and ordinary people. Remember all that stuff Margaret Thatcher used to say about small businesses and how she remembered living above the shop when she was small? I also remember Clint Eastwood stating that part of the ideology of the Western was having your own land. This disproves it. The Conservatives stand only for the property rights of big business. Like the corrupt cattle barons fought in Westerns by the likes of John Wayne, they’re quite prepared to use any and all means to force others off their property so that they can move in.

BBC News this morning reported that some of the victims of the Somerset floods wish the government to buy their properties at market rates. I don’t know if this will happen or not, though I’m sure that the government will buy their land, and then start to develop it. And it’ll be interesting to see if this includes fracking.