The Offensiveness Of 50cent

50cent is a moderate rapper but it turns out he is also a deeply offensive man.


One of his latest tweets says this:

If you a man and your over 25 and you don't eat pu**y just kill your self damn it. The world will be a better place. Lol7:57 AM Sep 30th via ÜberTwitterRetweeted by 100+ people

• Reply
• Retweet

50cent

I'm assuming that this tweet was by the actual 50 Cent, his account is verified by Twitter.
Let's look at a few statistics to put his silly little comment in perspective.  Studies have shown that lesbian, gay or bisexual adolescents are between two and three times more likely to attempt suicide than straight adolescents.  The Health Education Authority says this:
A large study has confirmed earlier research suggesting that gay and bisexual men face a higher risk of considering and attempting suicide, and of killing themselves. The researchers interviewed nearly 3,000 gay and bisexual men between 1996 and 1998. They found that 21 per cent of the men said they had previously made a plan to kill themselves, and 12 per cent said they had attempted suicide.
With this in mind, 50cent's offensive tweet becomes downright dangerous, given the level of hero worship that there is for 50cent among young people, particularly in the USA.

Just To Show They're Still Sincere. They Sing The Red Flag Once A Year

All eyes will be on Ed Miliband today during the Labour conference singing of the Red Flag.  Tony Blair always looked uncomfortable during this bit (at times doing a passable impression of John Redwood singing the Welsh national anthem).  



The right wing tabloids will be seeing the fervour with which the ridiculously named 'Red Ed' sings the old Socialist anthem.


It all reminded me of the old song, 'The People's Flag Is Palest Pink, part of the genius of Leon Rosselson, amongst others.  The first line of that song goes:


The people's flag is palest pink
It's not as red as you might think


Probably an interesting analysis of those who think that opportunist Ed is really a reincarnation of Nye Bevan.


The most apt verse for the present state of the Labour Party is the second one though.  Union barons (note not Labour Party members or MPs) have decided that the working class are best represented by a privileged, middle class, liberal intellectual from North London.  Ed Miliband probably represents one of those middle class intellectuals derided by Tony Blair in his autobiography as not understanding ordinary working class people or working class aspiration.  He is one of those Hampstead liberals who has an idealised version of ordinary working class people, while being happy to constrain their ambition or aspiration.


As Matthew Parris says in The Times today:


"He is one of those North London Labour intellectuals who find it genuinely difficult to believe that there could exist people of sound mind and humane instincts outside the circle of light in which the intelligent Centre Left feel they are bathed."


Of course, the Labour establishment and the trade unions rejected Andy Burnham, the one candidate who does genuinely understand working class aspiration and the one candidate who could genuinely have connected and empathised with aspirant voters.





Still, as the second verse of that old song said, the liberal middle classes always think they know what is best for ordinary working class people anyhow:

The cloth cap and the woollen scarf

Are images outdated

For we're the party's avant garde

And we are educated

So raise the rolled umbrella high

The college scarf, the old school tie

And just to show that we're sincere

We'll sing The Red Flag once a year

Cadbury's Dairy Milk and The Absurdity Of European Rules

Apparently, Cadbury's Dairy Milk will no longer be able to use the slogan "a glass and a half of milk in every bar" on its wrappers.  





EU rules apparently mean that Cadbury's will, instead, have to use the slogan, "the equivalent of 426ml of fresh liquid milk in every 227g of milk chocolate."  Not quite as catchy is it?


Isn't this just petty and nonsensical?  Is there any wonder that ordinary people across Europe are becoming increasingly detached by the unelected, meddling monolith that is the EU?


It's a shame that Cadbury's didn't decide to hold on to its heritage, rather than caving in to the bureaucratic nonsense of EU rules.

Daylight Robbery On The East Coast Main Line

I'm a regular user of the East Coast main line.  Working in London, but spending a lot of time in my beloved North East, I find that the train remains by far the best way of heading North.


The line can be very expensive and you occasionally get the impression that East Coast are trying every trick in the book to get as much money out of you as possible (the same went for GNER and National Express).  Passengers are treated like suspected fare avoiders during heavy handed ticket checks and the mark ups for food and drink can be pretty excessive.  Penalty fares are excessive, fares are excessive and the passenger is almost always presumed wrong.


Jobsworth is often a phrase I would use for the ticket collectors on the East Coast. 


I wasn't, therefore, surprised to read this story of the man fined £155 for getting off at Darlington rather than Durham.  Such a fine is staggering, shocking and disgraceful but it is probably justified in one of the 'war and peace' sized rule books that always seem to be heavily weighted away from the passenger and towards the monopoly train company.


Professor Evans, who was the victim of the wrongdoing by the rail company, said:

“Anyone would understand that you’d be liable to pay extra if you stayed on the train too long. But if you get off early, you have not used all the product you have paid for...The whole process made me feel like a wrongdoer from the start and that disgusted me more than the money itself.”

And now it seems that East Coast is going to charge passengers to use the previously free wireless internet service.  Again, that is not on.


It's about time that the passenger is given a fair deal by East Coast. 

How All Labour MPs Voted In The Leadership Election

I have long been a fan of transparency in public life and you have to take your hat off to Labour for publishing the voting preferences of each of their MPs and MEPs in the leadership election.

All of the information is below:

http://www2.labour.org.uk/leadership-mps-and-meps

It is intriguing that Labour make this kind of information public.  Maybe the level of transparency ensures that MPs are far less likely to switch horses mid race (as happened in the Conservative election a few years ago).

Time For Sunderland To Take The Next Step

It was a great point for Sunderland against Liverpool.  Indeed, given without absurd refereeing decision we probably would have won.  This comes hot on the heels of a richly deserved draw against Arsenal last week (nothing is quite as relieving as a 95th minute equaliser).



Good to see Darren Bent remaining in devastating form after his ridiculous omission from the England squad for the World Cup that Fabio Capello will long live to regret.

The big point is, though, that we are getting points out of games from which we were expecting none.  What we need to be doing is getting three points from the games we are expecting to win.  Last season, we got some great results against some big names, only to come to a juddering halt against some of the lesser lights of the Premiership.  We cannot afford to do the same this year.

Sunderland have the talent, the management and the regular goalscoring flair to make the next step and hit the top 10 of the Premiership this year.  If we continue to play as we did yesterday, then that is where we will end up.

There Is Only One Thing That Is Bennite About Ed Miliband

The right wing popular press have already christened Ed Miliband as 'Red Ed'.

Bagehot takes up the point here:

According to the newspaper narrative, Ed Miliband, the younger brother and former cabinet minister in charge of climate change, is significantly to the left of David Miliband, the elder brother and former foreign secretary. I have seen the word Bennite bandied around, in homage to Tony Benn, the former Labour cabinet minister who really was a proper lefty in his day, advocating capital controls and the wholesale nationalisation of British industry. It is true that the pair have been sending little hints and signals since the contest became a two horse race, indicating that MiliE is to the left of MiliD (as some call them) and is more tempted than MiliD by some form of core vote strategy to woo back disaffected Labour voters and former Liberal Democrat voters who are disgruntled by the Con-Lib coalition. But Bennite? Come off it.

There isn't much Bennite about Ed Miliband.  He is still, seemingly attached to the idea of unelected European Commissioners having more power than elected politicians.  As far as I'm aware, he isn't advocating unilateral disarmament, or capital controls, or industrial democracy, or withdrawal from the EU.

There is however one thing that links Ed Miliband and Benn together.  That is the sudden transformation of their worldviews after an election defeat.  Michael Foot told the story of the Benn transformation brilliantly in his 'Loyalists and Loners':

"Tony Benn was once an up and coming, middle of the road Labour MP with an excellent chance of becoming Prime Minister... in the attitudes he adopted on questions of policy, there were not so much as a list towards left-wing demagogy.  He gave every impression of being a good administrator and was always a good defender of his Department in the House of Commons.  He was a strong supporter of Britain's entry into the Common Market.  He backed... In Place Of Strife.  He was not notable for protesting against the Wilson Government's support for the American war in Vietnam... He had never been a member of the Tribune group or the Keep Left group or the Victory for Socialism Group... he did vote for Gaitskell in the 1955 leadership election... However, during the decade of the 1970s he was transformed - the word is too weak; reincarnated might be better - into a different political animal altogether."

Such a transformation seems to have occurred to Ed Miliband over the past few months.  From Brownite minister, he has transformed himself into some kind of keeper of the Bevanite flame.  The man criticising the New Labour establishment was, after all, the man who depended on that establishment for his advance.  He did serve, without showing any open signs of disloyalty or hostility, under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.  He did serve as an adviser to New Labour for many years before that.  He did, after all, write the election manifesto in 2010.

I'm not of course suggesting that the younger brother's sudden volte face on a number of issues is an opportunist one.  It has, though, been almost as sudden as the Benn conversion of the 1970s.  Benn suggested that it was "his experience as a Labour Minister" that brought about his transformation.  Similarly, Miliband claimed [in today's Guardian] that he had been "liberated to say what he finally believed."