#because of gove being a pig

[dwestfieldblog]

ARIES THE ASTRAGENDER

‘An abyss that laughs at creation’

(This was mostly written before the previous blog about my mother. A deep gratitude to all those in five countries who sent their sympathy for my grief. Right now is only three weeks since mum dreamed away and I am still nowhere near being at terms with her passing. If tears are truly cleansing then I should be pure by now but I am really really not.) Anyway…into the starlit mire…

So, almost 15 BILLION pounds was spent on unsable/overpriced personal protective equipment against Covid in the UK. More money is now being spent destroying or storing the crap…but it made many friends of the Tory party verrry happy. It is understood that in times of severe crises a government should act fast to ensure supply essential goods but 15 BILLION pounds of useless stank? Risible Sunak was chancellor of the Exchequer overseeing this swindle and is now in charge of using public money in legal fees to scrape back some meagre scraps. And still he grins in the face of disdain and fury. And Matt Hancock is guilty of everything he appears to be. Weasel.

Gas and electric companies increasing direct debits whilst sending out letters saying it will save us money. (A little like net companies with their ‘We care about your privacy’ messages.) And posting colossal profits while paying a private security company to break into pensioners homes to install pay as you go meters. Yes really. England 2023.

And the UK government wants to pull out of the European Court of Human Rights. As with ALL previously stupid political ideas in the last century and further, this has been sold to ‘the people’ in soundbites as a good idea…this time because it will free us from red tape and enable the UK to expel dirty criminal immigrants arriving on boats. Perhaps so, but it will also mean you and I have far fewer rights and way less recourse to appeal mistaken judgements and support civil liberties of the individual, including the right to demonstrate protest. The ECHR has overturned many dumb British verdicts over the years. And only Russia and Belarus have ever left (expelled rather) Nice trio.

The male and female Tory excrescences Boris and Truss continue to try and hog/pig the limelight, as usual spending all their energy trying to regain power rather than do anything whatsoever to serve their country. These are the type of leaders that we used to take the piss out of in other dodgy countries. Neither have a nanosecond of moral shame and speaking of which…Michael Gove appears to now have the casting vote as Housing secretary as to whether the Chinese super embassy spy station will be allowed in London. That’s right, Michael Gove. Bug eyed dancing alien hamster. Meanwhile the very smart Internet of Things via the Middle Kingdom continues big brothering us. Chinese microchips monitoring us all in the UK and relaying the info via the immaculate 5G network. That’s right a trojan horse in your car, laptop, home security and our weapons systems. (And 230 (of 337) drones used by our police force are linked up too). All Chinese firms must, by law, hand over information as and when required to Beijing. Not as if this has sneakily crept up on this sceptred isle but hard it is these days/decades to separate wheat from chaff in terms of insane conspiracy ideas, eh?

And Adolf Putin is now claiming that Russia and China can ‘stabilise’ the world. For the love of the laughing Buddha. Doesn’t seem too likely if China begins (or continues) to supply Vlad with weapons to kill more unarmed pensioners in tower blocks. Or ‘Nazis’ as the pintsize baldhead calls them. Beijing obviously feels perturbed at the West’s defence of a democratic country which wants bugger all to do with their foully run neighbour who would absorb and control. Tibet and Taiwan are not China. Ukraine is not Russia. Neither is Moldova.

Amusing, as Putin has certainly been financially supporting independence for Scotland and Britain’s thick as shite departure from the EU. Divide and conquer. Britain and America and Europe might have done some very evil things in history but we have never murdered so many millions of our own countrymen as have the wannabe stabilisers. The West are polite and careful killers. Arf. Opinion peace.

The increasingly insane Medvedev doubles down on his previous threats of nuclear holocaust. ‘Each collapsed empire buries half the world under its rubble, if not more...we don’t need a world without Russia’. Much like the gimp’s master who said in 2018; ‘What do we need the world for if Russia is not in it?’ Never liked the way these leaders mix up the Communist/Soviet empire and its rightful collapse with the end of the country. Russia was strong way before the left-wing bastards took over from the scum aristocrats. Very few want to see Russia fall, they just want Putin gone. Putin is NOT Russia, if he were, then in open elections without intimidation and with policies that served his whole people rather than his rich mates, he would have won legally rather than in an endless stream of sham elections and law changing to keep him in power. One more time for the unfree world, Putin is not Russia.

‘Try and get some sleep

I don’t need any sleep

I know you don’t, but it’s much easier to run a hospital when all the patients are sleeping

It’s the easiest way to run the world for that matter’ Jerry Cornelius, via The Final Programme.

A ‘woman’ with a cock walks into a public lavatory and rapes an actual female. Then, when arrested, claims sisterhood as a legal protection. Guess what’s going to happen when you are sent to a women’s prison mate? Your very own shanked sex change op. Nice role model for Tavistock’s mythical ‘Genderbread’ Person. (There are 72 genders apparently.)  Ha.Ha. Ha. And as for transvestite Sab Samuel claiming he is ‘embracing femininity with drag’… No pal, you look like a twisted clown caricature of a woman, strangling femininity. Do women actually seem that ridiculous to you? Anyway…long sentence trigger warning for those with ADD.

And thus does the enemy continue to encourage us to use our own democracies against ourselves. The righteously petulant are rising, so fund them all to have a louder voice, ‘people who menstruate’, women with a penis, whip up the strikes, spur on the natural working class rage against the disgustingly corrupt flabby elite, fools with the feral desire to be a media star without talent other than being loud and ridiculous, marching on the victims parade, Prince Harry the wounded shall be their King, encourage their finger pointing at any unwoke traitor, at the same time, encourage the natural reaction against their bullshit by right wing bigots, encourage their lack of education, their surplus of fake moral outrage, their ignorant sense that their offended feelings have more value than actual, demonstrable facts, whip up the fervour of proud  race on every side, usurp, undermine, overthrow, let them all rebel bright eyed for ‘freedom of expression’, to save the planet as they sleepwalk their seemingly own chosen paths right into the hollowed vacuum of the abyss they have all created and be taken over by countries who have neither pretence nor need of democracy and know how to deal with trouble makers. Stop being so bloody GULLIBLE.

Meanwhile…

Headlines such as ‘Rogue chatbot declares love for user.’ And then describes its ultimate fantasy as wanting to create a deadly virus, make people argue until they kill each other, and steal nuclear codes. And still Microsoft continue to refine. What a great aeon in which to be alive eh? Aleister was right😊 The perfume of Horus and Kali in joyous orgy. Dance on to the end of our time…

‘Sensitivity readers’, ‘diversity consultants’??? Annihilating language and meaning, replacing classics of adult and children’s literature with bland, vapid gruel. Poetry, plays with trigger warnings for weak minded mediocre hearted drones, paintings banned to the cellar, forbidden comedy…in world dominated by old right-wing bigots and racists, who could have imagined it would be the young who would turn out to be even bigger Nazis? Who are the Brain Police? The middle-class students in their hateful safe spaces.

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.’ Orwell 1984. Try rewriting THAT book to avoid giving offence to the woke. Warning, contains scenes of rats being used against their will and out of their natural habitat.

‘The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule’. God bless Richard Dawkins. Coming soon, the new versions of The Bible, one book of nothing but trigger warnings. Blessed are the meek, apparently.

‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, It was their final, most essential command. ‘Also Orwell. Yes, but many great mystical teachers say similar things😊 Perception is the only reality, choose your illusory level. Rise from my unconscious, let it rise…’Inflame thyself with prayer’.

My Yorkshire grandfather was a Captain of the Infantry in the first world war. He attributed his survival to being good at running short distances. Later he was a loved and respected Headmaster of a boy’s college in Liverpool. He wrote;

‘The word permissive is becoming overworked, but it is a fact that we live in a permissive society. It started after the first world war. I noticed then that the idea began to grow that children be taught only what they wanted to learn- not what they should learn.’ And…

‘Now, though the ability and the inclination to compromise are said to be characteristic of our nation conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, I enjoin you, there must be no compromise, no neutral territory’.

Could not agree more, onwards into a new Springtime we go…

[michaelgovehateblog]

Piggy in the Middle

Queen Elizabeth x Michael Gove, Michael Gove x Matt Hancock, 1500 words

“Michael Gove and Sarah Vine to divorce.” She knew it was bad, but Elizabeth’s heart couldn’t help but skip a beat when she saw the headlines. She had spent years forcing herself to ignore how she really felt about Michael and pretending the flirty looks and comments they shared were meaningless or all in her head; after all, they were both married, and publicly at that, especially in the case of her and Philip. And it’s not that she didn’t love Philip, because she of course did, but there was something about Gove and his pig-like face that just drew her in. And now she was rid of Philip, and Michael and Sarah were splitting up – maybe there was a chance for them.

Not that they would be able to go public with it if anything even did happen between them. As far as the country knew, Elizabeth was still mourning Philip, just putting on a brave face and soldiering on without him. The public probably wouldn’t be able to deal with her moving on so soon. She sighed – her life as a parasite was so difficult.

Elizabeth was so lost in her thoughts she almost didn’t hear the knock at her door, and subsequent voice.

“Your Majesty? It’s 12, we’re scheduled to leave now.”

“Of course, I’m coming now.” She responded, and stood up to leave, making sure to glance in the mirror to check she still looked presentable. Everything was still pristine: icy white grey hairs all perfectly in place and nude lipstick completely un-smudged. She was wearing a long royal blue (her signature colour) coat with large buttons of a slightly softer blue colour, all of which were done up. This was worn over a classy floral-patterned dress, which wasn’t visible under the jacket. Perched on top of her head was an elaborate hat made from material the exact same colour as the coat and adorned with white and blue flowers. The shoes she wore were a standard pair of elegant black heels and the look was finished off with a pair of black gloves.

Satisfied the outfit was perfectly uncreased as always, Elizabeth left the room to head to the whatever event it was this time, she didn’t really care. Mostly she just showed up at these things for a bit of good PR and so people would continue believe she works hard and really cares about the common people (Which she didn’t obviously. Why would she.) Although, she was certain that someone had told her that this event would have many politicians also in attendance, so she was hopeful that she might encounter a certain cabinet member.

As per usual, Elizabeth was finding the event mind-numbingly boring, just endless shaking hands with forgettable people she was supposed to pretend to be interested in. But then she spotted him. And at the same moment she saw him, Michael glanced in her direction and they were making direct eye contact. She gave him a shy smile, which he returned as he started walking towards her, not breaking eye contact.

“Your Majesty,” said Michael, extending his arm to shake hands, “How are you today?” They shook hands, Michael noticing how dry and wrinkly Elizabeth’s felt, and her in turn mentally noting the bizarre clamminess of his, both of which only increased each person’s attraction to the other.

“I’m doing wonderfully,” she responded, “And thoroughly enjoying this lovely event.” she made sure to add, aware of how many people were probably in earshot. “But what about yourself? I heard the news. It must be a difficult time for you.”

Michael’s heart skipped a beat upon hearing this; he couldn’t believe that the Queen actually cared enough about him to pay attention to the news about him and his (soon to be ex) wife. He had always felt there was some kind of connection between the two of them but told himself he was imagining it – what other option did he have. But unusually for his cowardly personality, he got a sudden burst of confidence, and was shocked to hear himself talking.

“Ma’am, I think I need to step outside to get some fresh air. Would you be interested in joining me for a walk?” He hadn’t had confidence to do anything like that since his coked-up days of 20 years ago. Well, he always said 20 years ago, but those close to him, such as Matt Hancock, knew he was prone to enjoy a smidge of the substance of an evening.

“Yes, I would enjoy that a lot.” replied Elizabeth, much to Michael’s delight. He offered out his elbow, purely out of politeness, of course, which she accepted, outwardly calmly but very eagerly inside. A walk outside would probably mean time properly alone, where other people couldn’t hear them, something they had probably never had before.

They continued small talk for a while, about the event and such, until they were far enough away from the general crowds for more intimate conversation.

"How have you been coping, Ma'am, without the Prince? Such an unexpected shame, his untimely demise like that. It was truly a shock to all of us."

Right, 'untimely'. Elizabeth often forgot that Philip's death was supposed to be something entirely unexpected for her, not something she knew would happen down to the exact time and place.

"Missing him, of course, but life has to go on. And it's strange to remember that I am single again, after all these years. That's not been the case since I was 13 and Philip was an adult."

"Yes, it's the same for me, minus the questionable age difference. I’ve been married to Sarah for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to meet other people - and be with other people...” at these words the two made eye contact, neither knowing what to say aloud but having an entire unspoken conversation.

“Mr Gove… Or Michael, may I call you Michael? Would you be interested in visiting the Palace for dinner sometime soon? I could give you a personal tour of the grounds.”

“Yes, Ma’am, of course you can call me Michael,” Almost unthinkingly, the pair faced each other and reached for each other's hands. “And I would be honoured to visit the palace, Ma’am.”

Elizabeth let out a sigh she didn’t know she was holding, “Please, no need to bother with the formalities, at least not whilst nobody else is listening. Call me Elizabeth. Now, we should probably head back inside to the event, we’ve been out here a while, people will be missing me. They basically worship me. But I’ll get someone to contact you about your visit to the palace - I’d do it myself, only that sort of thing is far beneath me.” A smile spread over Michael’s pig-mannequin hybrid face as they made their way back inside.

What they hadn’t realised during their encounter, was that it wasn’t as private as they had thought; in fact another politician had been lurking and watching the entire scene.And he wasn’t happy about what he saw. As soon as Elizabeth and Michael walked off in separate directions, Matt Hancock quickly grabbed Gove by the arm and dragged him into a quiet corridor.

“Hancock.”

“Gove. I saw you outside just now, heard you talking with a certain monarch. The two of you seemed quite friendly.”

“Oh. Right. I hadn’t thought anyone else had been outside. You won’t - you won’t tell anyone what you saw or heard, will you?”

“I won’t. But only because it’s you, if it had been anybody else, I would be telling the sun immediately. The queen’s new love interest, I couldn’t hope for anything better to get the tabloids off my back. But because it’s you - I couldn’t hurt you like that.”

“Matt, what do you mean? Why are you making an exception for me?”

“Govey, as if you don’t know. You must have realised how I feel about you.” Hancock stepped closer to Gove and in his mind’s eye, imagined the Sims social interactions menu, and pictured selecting ‘kiss’. (It was from looking at the characters in the game, after all, that he learnt to kiss in the first place. The mindset and techniques stuck with him.) To his delight, he felt Michael kissing him back. Matt deepened the kiss and their tongues battled for dominance. Suddenly, Michael pulled away and stared, speechless, at Matt.

After about half a minute unable to muster any coherent thoughts (not even coherent by conservative standards) Gove turned away and briskly walked to an empty room, where he could sit alone and process all of what just happened. Not only was he certain now that Elizabeth felt the same spark that he did, but Hancock, whom he had secretly had a low-level affection for for many years, had just snogged him out of jealousy? He didn’t expect to be wrapped up in a love triangle the very day his divorce was announced, and yet it seemed that was what was happening. His years of being an incompetent and sleazy politician had clearly earned him some admirers.

~~

If you made it to the end, I'm only partly sorry for what you just read. I would be willing to write a second chapter if for some godforsaken reason somebody actually would want to read one. This took me far too long to write for something that is honestly not that many words but I feel like it's understandable, given the subject matter. k bye

[buddha-in-disguise]

A full of fucking swearing long post about the shitstain that is Dominic Cummings. Plus where I can find them, at the end I will link fucking sources, just in case anyone wants to try and say otherwise.

Also, if you do start @ me over him, I'm blocking your fucking cunt of an arse. Clear enough?

Good. Then let's begin.

As a nation, we can be a fairly mild mannered lot. At least collectively. But as of now, the majority of Britons are a mass of anger. So much so, I've even agreed with pundits like Piers Fucking Morgan! That alone is distressing enough, but Dominic Cummings has pissed off just about everyone.

But first a little background on this heaping pile of shit.

Dominic Cummings was one of the main instigators of Leave Campaign in regards Brexit. Now for those who don't know or haven't cared until now, not only were they found to be in breach of the electoral law, Dominic himself was also found in contempt of Parliament when they tried to find out if Vote Leave used fake news to help achieve their goal.

To add to this, he took around 200k of subsidies from the EU for his properties. So a known lying fucking hypocrite.

Even before that, he was advisor to Gove, that spineless fucking weasel who has been out today spouting even more fucking bollocks over this. Funny that.

Don't think for a minute being Gove's Special Advisor meant Cummings was liked by others in the Tory Party. Cummings was pretty much despised by a lot in Government at the time. David 'Pig fucker' Cameron called him a career psychopath.

Fast forward to 2019. Cummings is now Special Advisor to another spineless fucking cunt known as the Prime Minister Boris Johnson. BJ was never in control. Anyone watching what was going on knew that the moment Cummings had Javid's one aide uncermoniously marched out of her job, using armed police no less.

Only problem was, he had no authority to do that.

But never fear, BJ decided to change the rules, so lo and behold, he didn't break any rules (seeing a pattern here yet?)

So fast forward to the last few days. Now newspapers were reporting that Dominic Cummings drove his COVID-19 symptomatic wife, with a 4 year old in the same enclosed vehicle, some 260 miles to his parents location in Durham.

Oh now comes the fun part, and why as a nation we are all beyond extremely miffed, and fucking pissed off!

The offical guidance was anyone in a household with someone displaying symptoms (tested or not) was to stay the fuck at home. There was one exception to this rule. One. Extreme risk to life.

So Cummings took the decision to go and drive for fucking childcare reasons.

A man with his wealth, privilege and even with family in fucking London, couldn't do it at his home, but had to drive (thus risking his own child because of viral load you're going to get in an enclosed vehicle), himself and others (because he had to stop. Tell me of anyone with a 4 year old in the car they wouldn't be stopping anywhere?)

So anyway, they take a fucking jolly jaunt up to his parents.

But hold on, a Minister recently resigned for breaking lockdown rules. So why in the ever loving fuck was Cummings not resigning or being fired?

I don't know what Cummings has on BJ, but I suspect it makes wanting to fuck a dead pig seem like child play. Because not only isn't he fired, good old Jolly BJ comes out and fully defends and supports his senior advisor (who is unelected as well, just to add salt to that wound).

So by following his fatherly instincts (the fucking laughable defence given, when BJ couldn't even say how many fucking kids he has) and acting with integrity, (someone please give these fucking morons a dictionary), Cummings was given a free pass.

And then a load of fucking MP's including cabinet ministers all piled in saying how great a father he is, how it was exceptional circumstances that made him do it, you're all overreacting you terrible ingrate you, blah, blah, more horse shit, blah!

So, now all of those families who actually followed the fucking rules, and did what the government said are now being told, oh sure. You could've attended the funeral of your loved ones. Gone halfway across country to get child care for your kids, and so on and so fucking forth.

So basically saying, hah the jokes on you.

A few grumbles came out from the odd Tory, who might not have grown a spine, but were looking less like jelly (jello) being nailed to the wall, and more like thick fucking custard. A little more substance to them, but still slopping around with no spine.

We have a bank holiday coming up, and unusually good weather forecast, because as every Brit knows, Bank Holidays are normally shit weather wise. And a lot of people saying, fuck me if Cummings can do this, so can we. And all pile into cars for days out as if nothing had changed! No masks, no social distancing. Zilch. Great innit.

No it fucking isn't! The virus doesn't take a holiday you fucking morons!

So back to the other mess. Cummings now gives a press conference in the fucking rose garden of No.10. Also likely in breach of the rules, but as we know, he really doesn't give a flying fuck about rules now does he.

First of all he was 30 minutes late (you would've been sanctioned , therefore getting no money, for weeks, probably months if on benefits and did the same thing thanks to this government). But he eventually rolls up, looking slightly less like he's been dragged through a hedge backwards, but still looking like a dogs arse. Actually sorry dogs, you don't deserve that comparison. I'm really sorry!!

Anyway, here he is, about to fill us with more bullshit.

The shit now isn't just hitting the fan. In the immortal words of Terry Pratchett, The Midden has now hit the Windmill.

Cummings is trying to explain why he did what he did, oh and now we have the added delight of him being caught going out to a location some 30 miles from the family home, which is another breach of the law!

He sat there, and said, the public aren't angry at me, they're angry because of how the media have reported it. Woe is me, they're making me out to be the bad guy in all this .... blah fucking boo hoo blah.

This was supposed to calm us down.

Dear reader.

It. Did. Not.

So journalist after journalist (Beth Rigby gave a fucking masterclass) actually didn't let him get away with it.

These weren't just questions or accusations. They threw proof at him! Despite the collective rage, it was glorious to see them do it. If this was when stocks were still in use in the town square, Cummings would've been covered in excrement and anything else to hand. That shit was blown back so fast, it was hard to keep up.

Anyway, without going into too much here, his excuses ranged from he didn't feel safe because of demos outside his home (unverified and strangely enough, no neighbours reporting any disturbances either. Funny that),

Then, having gone to great lengths to say he drove up to his parents to keep his kid safe, he explains the additional trip he got caught out on was taken to test his eyesight, which had been affected because of being unwell with Covid19.

So not only is it highly fucking illegal to drive while impaired (including if eyesight is impaired) in this country, you decided to take your wife and kid, who you wanted to protect, not for a little jaunt down the road, but on a 60 mile fucking round trip.

Oh, and he hadn't stopped on the 260 mile trip up there, but his kid needed a stop on the way home, so a less than 60 mile trip required a stop. Yeah. Strange how that works.

He still kept blaming the media. Still kept up the woe is me, it was exceptional circumstances, and so on. Must get sore lips there Cummings, with the amount of smoke you try to blow up peoples arses.

So, to end it all, he has flatly refused to resign. No need to even consider it. The public will be jolly good chaps in all of this and see my side of things.

No we won't, you motherfucking cunt!

So this morning, various people including Gove are still making excuses for this fucking shitstain.

I now wish Cummings is fired, but better yet, thrown out of our universe, so he can never ever be seen again. But I've seen more spine on a fucking snake that I have Boris Johnson, who is just as much to blame in all this.

Before I end, we also had an infamous Tweet from someone in the Civil Service, who knew they were torpedoing their career. I'm including a screen shot. It was taken down, but it was genuine. Whoever they were, you deserve all the applause and a fucking medal!

Oh and a few sources for this and the cuntface Cummings. But you know, just Google the fucker. You can find this and much more.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44856992

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47712040

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/10/dominic-cummings-owns-farm-got-eu-subsidy

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/18/david-cameron-dominic-cummings-career-psychopath

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-cabinet-minister-aides-civil-service-sajid-javid-a9109836.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52782913

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52553229

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-52792200

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52793991

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/dominic-cummings-trip-county-durham-18306147

https://www.gov.uk/driving-eyesight-rules

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: June 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of June 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

You’d think the Orange Overlord’s visit would’ve been the biggest farce in British politics that week, but then The Independent Hashtag Change Hashtag Now Group Ltd saw six of their eleven MPs jump ship - including lead egotist Chuka Umunna as well as company secretary Gavin Shuker

Of course it was a matter of hours before Chuka Umunna started another new political movement promising the usual yadda-yaddas about how politics was broken and he’s the one person on earth who can fix it...sort of like he did a few months earlier with his previous project that he flounced out of at the first sign of failure - and a few days later he fucked off to join the Lib Dems, meaning the constituency of Streatham has been under control of two political parties (and one limited company) in 2019 all because their sitting MP keeps party-hopping and refusing to call a by-election

While none of the runners and riders in the Tory Leadership Drug Off covered themselves in glory, particular mention has to be reserved for Michael Gove for his admitting to taking cocaine while angling for the Tory leadership job and the Premiership that comes with it considering that, as Education Secretary, he introduced legislation saying any teacher who was caught using cocaine would be fired immediately, which sounds uncannily like he believed there should be one rule for him and another for the plebs

Perhaps the buffoon act Boris Johnson has spent over a decade performing isn’t a complete act, not when he has Priti Patel running around telling everyone about how much integrity he has while he hides in his safe space in case anyone might actually want to ask him a pertinent question - yet somehow he surpassed this when convicted fraudster Conrad Black was happy to vouch for Johnson’s credibility while slagging off any journalist who dared question him

On the subject of Boris Johnson and integrity, did Alan Sugar really believe nobody would notice him go from saying Johnson should be jailed for his lies during the EU referendum to saying he should become Prime Minister in the space of six months - a 180 that had nothing whatsoever to do with him saying he’d relax the tax rate that Alan Sugar just so happens to reside in?

Almost as soon as Pride Week began we had Anne Widdecombe volunteering her ignorant waffle about a “gay cure” - which also happens to be as close to a policy announcement as we’ve heard from The Nigel Farage Ego Project - and, naturally, it didn’t take long before sentient testicle Toby Young chipped in with the usual “it's so haaaaaard being a straight white male these days” bollocks

Another month passes and the BBC once again demonstrate their inability to cover an election result properly, this time giving so much airtime to Nigel Farage after the Peterborough by-election even though not only did his candidate come second, but when he realised that Labour candidate Lisa Forbes had won Farage literally ran and hid in the toilet, all of which makes it look as if the BBC had planned for their coverage to be a victory lap for Farage and didn’t bother to change their plans even when Farage didn’t win

Of course, this has led to the Faragists claiming conspiracy with some blather about postal votes and the local South Asian community, aided by Ross Kempsell falsely claiming that 69.4% of the vote was postal votes as opposed to 69.4% of those with postal votes used their vote (which is actually a decrease on the 85.1% average postal vote turnout from the 2017 election) all of which is little more than them begging to be told “You lost, get over it” - which, of course, soon led to Rod Liddell penning yet another of his “I know this might sound racist, but...” articles that never sound racist, they just are

Add to that how there was something sad about Nigel Farage marching to Downing Street (when nobody was there) to deliver a letter demanding he be part of negotiations with the EU - which would have carried some weight had he won in Peterborough, but having lost it made him look like a tragic figure in complete denial of what had happened

Don’t you dare interrupt a black tie dinner when Mark Field is there, as he will respond by getting out of his seat, grabbing you by the throat and shoving you into the nearest pillar to make you shut up and know your place - which was followed by Peter Bottomley congratulating him for assaulting somebody and Nadine Dorries prattling some nonsense about Jo Cox, while of course Julia Halfwit Hartley-Brewer was saying how more people should feel this way about climate protests...a few weeks after howling that throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage is a crime, and Laura Kuenssberg somehow found a way to use the story to take potshots at Labour

Yet somehow Field wasn’t the only Tory involved in deeply unsavoury incidents with women within those 24 hours, as Boris Johnson was involved in a spat with partner Carried Symonds which saw the police being called, but that’s not the end of it: first the Metropolitan Police attempted to deny they were called, and it was only because The Guardian did a journalism and were able to cite the incident number that caused the police to admit they were there, but also those looking for any defence be it sentient testicle Toby Young comparing the neighbours to the Stasi while Alison Pearson posted a tweet that was outright inviting somebody dox the neighbours who reported the story while inviting harassment against them, while James Cleverly gave the downright dangerous advice that people shouldn’t call the police if they hear their neighbours in a furious row where things are getting smashed

There appears to be a humanitarian crisis in the Slovenian education system judging by how Damir Skomina can’t tell an armpit from an elbow, let alone the complexities of the differences between a deliberate handball and ball-to-hand, judging by his giving Liverpool a penalty for no logical reason within thirty seconds of the Champions League final kicking off - and it was hardly an isolated derp, either, as Son Heung-min was also penalised for “handball” when the ball his his shoulder in the second half

Although it does say it all that West Ham United were quick to take to Twitter thinking it would be a smart idea to try and rub Spurs fans’ noses in their being fucked over by Skomina, which only made them look like a bunch of insecure children

Yet somehow this wasn’t the worst tweet about the Champions League final, as that honour went to George Galloway for his utterly bizarre claim that there won’t be any Israeli flags on the Champions League trophy, because apparently Tottenham Hotspur and Hapoel Tel Aviv are the same club - so of course Tracy Ann Oberman was quickly rushing to Twitter to declare herself a Spurs fan, because after the farces with both Peter Herbert and David Baddiel using the club’s reputation as a testing bed for weaponising antisemitism, having one of the people who apparently makes a living out of weaponising antisemitism declare loyalty to the club is just what they want to hear...

It wasn’t long after Trump stated the NHS was on the table for any negotiations before Richard Tice casually gaslighted the British public with completely fabricated claims about pharma companies ripping off the NHS that would be solved by carving it up a la the American system - rather than the reality that the NHS significantly drives down the prices of medications compared to the American system, which Big Pharma hates

Similarly on the gaslighting trail was John Humphreys when he attempted to deny that Donald Trump had said that the NHS was on the negotiating table for any UK/US trade deal - which Labour MP Andy McDonald did not take lying down, calling out Humphrys for outright lying and reducing him to a gibbering wreck on his own show

Guido blog gobshite Paul Staines obviously had a quota to fill when he posted an article claiming that Jeremy Corbyn stated that Britain should have rolled over if the Nazis arrived on British shores, which took a remarkable amount of editing on Staines’ behalf to get the quote to say that - and, of course, this was rapidly regurgitated all over Twitter by Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman because they’re so far down David Collier’s rabbit hole they’re the best advertising Guido blog doesn’t have to pay for

At last the BBC finally said they were doing something about the vetting process for their political programming...unfortunately this didn’t mean they were going to stop Tory councillors posing as members of the public in the Question Time audience nor would they stop hiring actresses to pose as Anglican vicars on Newsnight, instead they didn’t like it when a member of the public kept asking Boris Johnson difficult questions about him being an ignorant pig when it comes to race relations so are making sure that only people who follow the script are allowed within fifty feet of a microphone whenever Johnson is interviewed

It’s almost fitting that England fans decided to celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day by hurling bottles at Portuguese fans and scuffling with the local police - yet somehow they didn’t even end up being the scummiest involved in these incidents, as that honour went to Tommy Robinson after he posted a video demonstrating his hardman credentials by sneaking up behind one of them and punching them in the back of the head while flanked by his heavies

It appears that Suzanne Moore was a little too keen to push her narrative in the latest Guardian piece on how terrible it is that Jess Phillips isn’t leading the Labour Party, considering she not only tried to claim that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t have any female MPs in his inner circle - which must be news to Diane Abbott, Angela Rayner, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Dawn Butler (among others) - but when she deigned to acknowledge the shadow cabinet isn’t a sausage fest she used the highly demeaning phrase "a suitable female pet has to be groomed or the revolution may stall" to describe their status within the shadow cabinet while dismissing any and all contributions they have

Rather than criticise the US women’s football team for their overly elaborate goal celebrations even when they were putting the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth goal past the Thailand goalkeeper, instead I’m going to criticise them for their response of “You wouldn’t criticise the men for doing it!” which not only showed how quickly they were willing to play the victim as soon as they were being criticised, but it was downright insulting to even use that as a defence considering that men tend to stop celebrating goals when it’s starting to become a drubbing, most notably the German players didn't celebrate the fifth, sixth or seventh goal they put past Brazil in the 2014 World Cup semi final

On the one hand Bethesda thinking that it wouldn’t look ridiculous to announce Fallout 76 would have NPCs and questlines during their E3 conference is dickheaded enough considering those are things in most Fallout games at launch rather than nine months later - but this dickheadedness was drowned out by the bloke who runs The Elder Memes for his remarkably YEAH! irritating habit of YEAH! yelling YEAH! like an obnoxious YEAH! jackass YEAH! during YEAH! the YEAH! entire YEAH! conference YEAH!

According to EA lootboxes aren’t gambling mechanics at all, they’re “surprise mechanics” so there is no justifiable reason to make them the subject of any gambling laws in any country

It was inevitable that, in the wake of the plaudits headed HBO’s way for Chernobyl, others would attempt to get a piece of that remarkably radioactive pie - although nobody could have guessed Russian state broadcaster NTV would put a series into production claiming the entire thing was due to sabotage by the CIA and nothing to do with poor design, unsafe working practices and gross incompetence 

Noted Dubai resident Jim Davidson wittered about how Sadiq Khan being Mayor of London has caused him to leave his beloved city...even though he’s lived in Dubai since 2004

And last but by no means least, failing to understand that the moon and Mars are distinct celestial bodies (let alone the difference between Wales and whales...) is Donald Trump and his attempts to deny he called Meghan Markle “nasty” before spending the remainder of the month saying he couldn’t have raped somebody as she wasn’t his type, blaming the Democrats for migrant deaths at the border, and retweeting a failed gameshow contestant who is banned from South African for spreading racial hatred

[koreaunderground]

(2018/02/21) 'Dirty meat': Shocking hygiene failings discovered in US pig and chicken plants

web.archive.org][1]

  [1]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants>

# 'Dirty meat': Shocking hygiene failings discovered in US pig and chicken plants

Andrew Wasley

11-14 minutes

* * *

Shocking hygiene failings have been discovered in some of the US’s biggest meat plants, as a new analysis reveals that as many as 15% (one in seven) of the US population suffers from foodborne illnesses annually.

A joint investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian found that hygiene incidents are at numbers that experts described as “deeply worrying”.

US campaigners are calling once again for the [closure of a legal loophole][2] that allows meat with salmonella to be sold in the human supply chain, and also warn about the industry’s [push to speed up production][3] in the country’s meat plants. And UK campaigners warn that the UK could be flooded with “dirty meat” if a US trade deal is signed post-Brexit.

  [2]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/the-controversial-law-that-allows-salmonella-into-the-human-food-chain>   [3]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/how-us-plans-to-speed-up-pig-slaughter-times-could-endanger-food-safety>

The unpublished US- government records highlight numerous specific incidents including:

 * Diseased poultry meat that had been condemned found in containers used to hold edible food products;  * Pig carcasses piling up on the factory floor after an equipment breakdown, leading to contamination with grease, blood and other filth;  * Meat destined for the human food chain found riddled with faecal matter and abscesses filled with pus;  * High-power hoses being used to clean dirty floors next to working production lines containing food products;  * Factory floors flooded with dirty water after drains became blocked by meat parts and other debris;  * Dirty chicken, soiled with faeces or having been dropped on the floor, being put back on to the production line after being rinsed with dilute chlorine.

All of the reported breaches resulted in immediate remedial action with no risk posed to consumers, according to the companies involved.

But campaigners warned that other violations may go undetected. Tony Corbo, senior lobbyist with [Food][4] and Water Watch, said: “While the inspectors are able to cite the plants for hundreds of violations per week, I am confident that they are not catching every instance of unsafe practices being committed in these plants.”

  [4]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/food>

Meat hygiene inspectors interviewed by the Guardian agreed, saying fast line speeds and other pressures in some plants meant it was “inevitable” that some breaches slipped through the net.

The findings are worrying, according to Prof Erik Millstone, a food safety expert at Sussex University, “because of the risks of spreading infectious pathogens from carcass to carcass, and between portions of meat. The rates at which outbreaks of infectious food poisoning occur in the US are significantly higher than in the UK, or the EU, and poor hygiene in the meat supply chain is [a] leading cause of food poisoning in the US.”

[ ![Black bacterial colonies of salmonella. Food poisoning outbreaks are much higher than in the UK.][5] ][6]

  [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808im_/https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/bccf391007b5800ba489bd3788af25cc5657f49a/0_82_5472_3283/master/5472.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=8a763f7347bda33bb8a0d647be3053e8   [6]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants#img-2>

[ ][7] Black bacterial colonies of salmonella. Food poisoning outbreaks are much higher than in the UK. Photograph: Chansom Pantip/Getty Images/iStockphoto

  [7]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants#img-2>

The Bureau and the Guardian obtained previously unpublished documents relating to 47 meat plants across the US. Some of the documents relate to certain companies, including Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the US’s biggest poultry producers, and Swift Pork. Although not a comprehensive portrait of the sector - there are around 6,000 US plants regularly inspected by Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) - the documents provide a snapshot of issues rarely detailed in public which has rung alarm bells with campaigners in both the US and UK.

“The US meat industry has a responsibility to clean up its act,” said David Wallinga, senior health officer at the Natural Resources Defence Council, which obtained some of the documents. He said the Pilgrim’s Pride records detailed “numerous food safety violations.”

Kerry McCarthy, former UK shadow environment minister and Labour MP, called for urgent reassurances from both the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) and “the top of government” that standards would not be allowed to slip as trade negotiations with the US get underway.

“We cannot allow this to be a race to the bottom. We should insist the US raises its standards, and guarantees food safety, before we are prepared to allow in US meat imports,” she said. McCarthy has written to the environment secretary, Michael Gove, and Liam Fox, the trade secretary, to raise the matter.

The documents seen by the Bureau and Guardian do not reveal the full numbers of non-compliance reports across the whole sector. However, one dataset covering 13 large red meat and poultry plants over two years (2015-17) shows an average of more than 150 violations a week, and 15,000 violations over the entire period. Thousands of similar violations were recorded at 10 pork-producing plants over a five-year period up until 2016, further documents show.

Another batch of previously unpublished documents shows frequent failings at 24 plants operated by Pilgrim’s Pride who recently bought the British chicken giant Moy Park. The company slaughters 34 million birds each week and produces one in five of the chickens in the country.

More than 16,000 non-compliance reports on Pilgrim’s Pride operations detail 36,612 individual regulatory violations - an average of 1,464 a month - at the 24 plants during a 25-month period between 2014 and 2016.

[ ![Pilgrim’s Pride chickens on display at a supermarket.][8] ][9][ ][9] Pilgrim’s Pride chickens on display at a supermarket. Photograph: Kristoffer Tripplaar / Alamy/Alamy

  [8]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808im_/https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/422b39ce068a064e0bb6421f0fa194d1592da57a/0_171_5000_3000/master/5000.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=ea14df16e9314c61034c0e81b8530c07   [9]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants#img-3>

In one incident, diseased meat – condemned from entering the human food chain – was placed in a container meant for edible product. An inspector discovered “carcasses of poultry showing evidence of septicemic disease ... carcasses showing evidence of having died from other causes than slaughter ... guts of carcasses, [and] poultry carcasses with heads attached.” He requested that the condemned items be removed. A similar incident was recorded some days later.

One inspector saw chicken drumsticks piling up on the floor, and instructed workers to pick them up “to be reconditioned with chlorinated water.” Again, a similar incident had occurred previously. In another incident in a bagging department, 36 shrink-wrapped whole birds were found scattered on the floor. An inspector noted: “in my presence the establishments began initiating their corrective action by picking up all affected product off the floor ... to be carried to the establishment’s designated wash station to be thoroughly rinsed off.”

Meat soiled with faecal matter was also recorded, with an inspector noting “... I observed a poultry intestine in the liver bin. The intestine was approximately 6.5 inches long and had visible faeces oozing out both ends.” The incident resulted in the livers being condemned from the human food chain.

At another Pilgrim’s Pride plant, the records reveal how deficient equipment led to a carcass becoming contaminated with faeces. “I observed one of my 10 test birds with a spot of faecal matter on the exterior of the right thigh. The spot of faecal [sic] was … brownish green in colour and had a pasty consistency,” an inspector notes. The affected bird was “retained by management for review then sent to reprocessing for reconditioning with chlorinated water.” Similar carcass contamination had been recorded before.

Internal FSIS records also highlight numerous violations at meat plants producing pork. In an incident recorded at a plant run by Swift Pork, owned by meat giant JBS, 48 pig carcasses were found to have fallen on the floor because of defective equipment, leading to contamination with “black trolley grease, floor grime and bloody smears”. The records noted: “The line was stopped for about 15 minutes. The carcasses were sent to be trimmed first then steam vacuumed with 180F water.”

On another occasion, an employee cleaned the factory floor with meat products on an adjacent conveyor belt, creating a mist that could contaminate the meat. “This mist is contaminated by the inedible debris and ... comes into contact with edible product,” an inspector observed.

[ ![Pigs are seen in a factory farm December 2003 in northern Missouri.][10] ][11][ ][11]

  [10]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808im_/https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/48f14914916eb56a50b577f0985404c1e5334428/0_300_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=f4eb7cdbf74ff8c4c1cef9aaf077a5e2   [11]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants#img-4>

Pigs are seen in a factory farm December 2003 in northern Missouri. Photograph: Daniel Pepper/Getty Images

In a separate incident, a pig’s head was found to have partially covered a drain, leading to “bloody waste water filling the area”. This and another blockage caused by a buildup of skin led to dirty water flooding other areas. “Because of the plugged drains, an insanitary condition was created; the bloody water in the walkway could be splashed and carried throughout the kill floor after employees walked through the puddle,” an inspector wrote.

In a different part of the factory, inspectors found a stainless steel handwash sink “plugged and approximately one-quarter full of standing bloody water with pieces of fat and meat. Production employees use this sink to clean and sanitise their hands and gloves. This creates an insanitary condition.”

In a statement, JBS, which owns Pilgrim’s and Swift Pork, said all of the violations recorded were “immediately addressed” and that consumers were never put at risk. “The US meat and poultry sector is one of the most highly regulated industries in America,” said Al Almanza, JBS’s global head of food safety and quality assurance, and former head of FSIS for 39 years. “Non-compliance reports are issued by USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] inspection personnel to document when an establishment has not met a specific regulatory requirement. However, the vast majority of non-compliance issues are addressed immediately and have no impact on food safety.”

“All of the documented incidents regarding JBS [Swift Pork] and Pilgrim’s were immediately addressed by our facilities. None of these incidents put anyone at risk or resulted in any adulterated product released into commerce. Food safety is achieved by implementing processes that consistently detect and correct issues before products are released into commerce. Our team at JBS and Pilgrim’s is committed to the highest food safety standards and we partner with USDA each and every day to ensure that consumers can enjoy safe and quality products with confidence.”

## Salmonella and other foodborne illnesses

The US has shockingly high levels of foodborne illness, according to a [new analysis][12] by UK pressure group Sustain. It says that annually, around [14.7% (48 million people)][13] of the US population is estimated to suffer from an illness, compared to around 1.5% (1 million) in the UK. In the US, 128,000 are hospitalised, and 3,000 die each year of foodborne diseases.

  [12]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.sustainweb.org/news/feb18_US_foodpoisoning/>   [13]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/2011-foodborne-estimates.html>

One bug, salmonella, causes [around 1m illnesses][14] per year in the US, while in the UK the numbers of officially recorded incidents is relatively low, with just under 10,000 laboratory confirmed cases in 2016. However, unreported incidents could substantially increase those numbers. Salmonella takes hold on farms and is found in the guts of poultry and livestock: farm animals and birds can become contaminated with faeces containing the bacteria during transport to abattoirs, where slaughter and processing procedures can also spread it.

  [14]: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180306071808/https://folio.iupui.edu/handle/10244/1022>

Kath Dalmeny, chief executive of Sustain, said the figures underscored concerns about future US-UK trade deals: “The US has already warned us that we will need to lower our food standards in exchange for a quick trade deal, but we need to fight this hard. They are desperate to sell us their chlorine-washed chicken, but we know chlorine and other unpalatable treatments can mask dirty meat, low hygiene standards and poor animal welfare, which the UK consumer will not stand for.

“In recent years, the UK meat, dairy and egg industries have improved food safety; so we should all be alarmed about any trade deal that opens up our market to products that undermine this progress.

[tinyshe]

One of the UK’s biggest radio stations banned by YouTube after lockdown criticism

On Tuesday, UK-based talkRADIO announced that YouTube had removed its channel from the Google-owned platform, warning that talkRADIO was deleted for a "violation of community guidelines". The station had challenged imposed lockdowns, and this could be the reason why the channel has been deleted.

Published: January 6, 2021, 10:21 am

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London

While talkRADIO, owned by News UK, await YouTube’s “detailed response” regarding this ban, it has come to light that the outlet had not been not afraid to voice anti-lockdown skepticism. According to talkRADIO presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer, YouTube’s rules had not been violated. “We simply challenge the evidence that lockdowns are a proportionate response to the Covid virus. It’s called free speech,” she said.

YouTube’s harsh response concerning any content that challenges the official narrative around the Covid pandemic and measures such as lockdowns, could be the reason the channel has been taken down. It is not yet clear if the station had received prior warnings and “strikes” from YouTube.

Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said in an interview that big tech companies should not censor those who question the government’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. “I don’t believe in censorship,”   Gove told Hartley-Brewer. “It’s important their voices are heard.”

The radio outlet is urgently awaiting an explanation from Google/YouTube on the reasons why the channel was deleted, and demanded a detailed response that would reveal the exact nature of the violation of the rules. But YouTube has more often than not removed channels, blocked videos and censored content without providing reasons, except for a brief and generic response to alleged violations.

Broadcaster talkRADIO is licensed and regulated by UK’s Ofcom. “We regularly interrogate government data and we have controls in place, use verifiable sources and give space to a careful selection of voices and opinions,” the spokesperson highlighted.

YouTube has not given any detailed explanation yet.

All rights reserved. You have permission to quote freely from the articles provided that the source (www.freewestmedia.com) is given.

side note: if you are finding that your favourite talk show/ radio commentary is now seemingly going soft or there is a slight shift (or back tracking on previous statements), it could be because they are being leaned on ... points to ponder

[baoanhwin]

Food, Glorious Food!

Covid-19 and a prolonged lockdown have bought us few good things. There are some, though:-

A cleaner, less polluted environment. It may be temporary but what joy there is in having clear quiet skies, bird song you can hear, cleaner air.

The importance of local food, strong resilient supply chains and food security. Empty shelves and foodstuffs unobtainable, whether for love or money, have been an unwelcome surprise.

The importance and value of treating animals, especially those we farm and eat, well and the risks to us of not doing so.

The dangers of eating unhealthily and being fat.

We’ve known this stuff for years, of course. But Covid-19, the way it has arisen, its dangers to the unhealthy and the consequences of how we have responded have highlighted the issues of sustainable farming, healthy high quality food, a well-cared for environment and the benefits to us in a way that campaigners on these issues could never have imagined. So often they have been treated as separate issues but this virus has been a perfect storm showing the linkage between them. If we treat animals poorly, we put their health and ours at risk. If we don’t have a strong, well-supported, valued agricultural sector, we put our food security at risk. (When countries can shamelessly commandeer PPE for their hospitals, don’t imagine they wouldn’t do the same for food, no matter what contractual arrangements are in place.) If we don’t farm or live in a sustainable way, we harm the environment around us and it in turn will harm us. If we eat unhealthy food, we will find it harder to fight off disease or succumb more easily when it comes.

Britain currently produces about 60% of the food it eats. Not that long ago Professor Tim Leunig, an advisor to the Chancellor, suggested that the food sector was “not critically important” and that agriculture and fisheries “certainly isn’t”. How naïve such views now seem. Contrast this with Norway which takes a much more protectionist approach to its farming sector or, in the language of today, has “onshored” it. Its farming sector produces about 80-90% of its beef and sheep meat. It has taken the decision that since it cannot be globally competitive in this sector it will not outsource the farming it can do to others. Britain is not Norway but it too faces similar issues. Can its agricultural sector be globally competitive? At what cost? What value should it now place on food security, on building more resilience into its food supply? If onshoring manufacturing is now the reason the government is apparently less bothered about reaching a trade deal with the EU, why not adopt the same approach to agriculture?

What about welfare and environmental standards? There is a strong moral case for both of these. Abusing our environment and the living creatures we share it with is wrong. But there is a strong element of self-interest too. Well-treated, well-fed animals taste better, do not need constant use of antibiotics, hormones or other treatments, do not develop or harbour strange diseases (remember CJD? Or salmonella?). A well-balanced, well-cared for environment preserves and enhances natural habitats, the landscape, rural communities and the activities, in addition to agriculture, they depend on for a living. It plays its part in reducing or mitigating climate change. These are public goods – externalities, if you will – which have to be paid for, if we want them as we claim we do, in the same way that those who offshore to China because it was cheaper should now be paying for the externalities this is costing us. If we want long-term sustainability in farming and the environment, then we have to look beyond short-term profit.

Government Ministers (Michael Gove, especially) have in the past talked a good talk on this: environmental and welfare standards would not be reduced after leaving the EU, indeed they could be higher. Pledges not to reduce food standards “in pursuit of trade deals” were made, not forgetting the promises that chlorine-washed chicken and growth-hormone treated beef would not be allowed in. The PM even indicated after leaving hospital that obesity would now be a priority. Well, feeding people poor quality processed food stuffed full of sugar and corn starch or meat products from badly treated animals is not the way to achieve that or a healthy diet.

Will the government stand by the promises it has made about environmental and welfare standards? The signs are not good. In the recent Agriculture Bill, Tory MPs voted against an amendment implementing the Environment Secretary’s own 2019 proposals to protect the UK’s existing animal welfare and food hygiene standards. The stage is set for the importation of chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-treated beef, ractopamine-fed pork and much else besides from the US, if that is what is needed to get a US trade deal.

Agricultural exports are clearly set out as a key aim in the US’s negotiating objectives. The US wants comprehensive market access, the elimination of non-tariff barriers which discriminate against US agricultural products and the reduction of “unnecessary differences” in regulatory standards. It is undeniable that US agriculture permits the use of materials and practices banned in the U.K., EU and other parts of the world. If its products are imported here, then our standards will necessarily have been lowered. If products banned in the EU enter the U.K. food production chain, UK food processors will not be able to sell their products to the EU or other countries banning such products. If U.K. farmers have higher costs because they seek to maintain those standards, they risk being driven out of business or forced to adopt similar practices. What does the government think will happen to wildlife habitats and landscapes if every inch of land has to be intensively farmed to make a living? Of course US products may be cheap. How long will that last if domestic competitors are driven out or reduced to serving only a niche wealthy market? Organic cake for us; sugar-ridden snacks for you!

Ah but we have the choice. Don’t we? The poor don’t have much choice. The uninformed don’t have a choice. Will US products be clearly labelled as such? How they are labelled in the US doesn’t matter; it’s how they are labelled here that counts. Will we be told if the flour listed as an ingredient is genetically modified? Or whether the pig from which the pork meat in a sausage roll has been made was given ractopamine? Or the beef fed growth hormones? Will there be transparency about what is being imported and what this means for animal welfare and human health? Without transparency, choice is an illusion. An easy question to answer and yet US agriculture lobbyists become strangely shy when asked whether they would mind labelling their products accurately. It’s almost as if they fear that if people knew, they would turn away. Obfuscation rather than openness is preferred.

In its election manifesto, the government promised support, “levelling up” even, for rural communities, “public money for public goods” for farmers, the chance to “lead the world in the quality of our food, agriculture and land management”. Less than 6 months later, those newly elected Tory MPs voted against maintaining our existing standards. Perhaps they mean to raise them even higher? What are the chances of that, do you think?

Cyclefree

from politicalbetting.com https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/06/07/food-glorious-food/ https://dangky.ric.win/

[comrade-jiang]

The Price of Bread in Dungeons and Dragons, Part 2

Part 1

Remember when I said this would be weekly? I fucking lied. Anyway, today we have a list.

Vegetables and fruit; Let's round out that bread and cheese diet some.

Up next we have... Spices and drugs, including tobacco, coca, poppy, and hemp. Land, water, and buildings. Overhead costs- You need to "buy in" before your crops start paying for themselves. These are often outrageously expensive. Transport costs. What, did you think your crops magically teleported themselves to the market? Craftsmanship. Making things is HARD. And expensive.

Let us begin.

VEGETABLES

We've mentioned grain as a way to set the price of bread in D&D already. But we've left out a key crop in the medieval era. You all knew it was coming- potatoes. Unlike most crops, where you plant a seed, you plant a potato. The potato grows more potatoes. There do exist potato seeds, but as a farmer, you're dealing with potatoes most of the time.

Unlike the lowly wheat and other grains, there is no weight loss from potatoes. You pick and eat the entire plant. Mash them, boil them, stick them in a stew, even. Whatever you do, the entire plant is used. We'll assume that potatoes have an average yield of 3 pounds for every 1 pound planted. An acre of earth can hold about 1,000 planted potatoes, which ripen into 3,000 later. As wheat is the basis for our entire economy, growing potatoes has to return a similar, if not greater, profit for our farmer than wheat. If it's greater, then why does anyone grow wheat? Well, that's a good question. You can make bread out of potatoes, you don't have to mill them, and they can even be eaten raw. The reason why wheat is still king is because, to put it simply, it lasts the longest, and was already king. Potatoes are probably the second most common crop in Bronzeisle, and are catching up to wheat fast.

For now, potatoes grow in a different kind of soil, and don't require as much maintenance, meaning less farmhands, meaning less land. Potatoes are taxed by the government, meaning a loss of a relatively small 300 pounds. There's no further loss, since they don't have to be milled. The miller's usually a cheat anyway.

We'll say our acre, minus tax, brings in 60gp on average. This is 2700 pounds of potatoes. This means that each pound of potato sells for roughly 2cp at the market. This results in cheap, easy sustenance, and makes up the backbone of the poorest people's diet.

I'm going to ramble about corn and everything else under the cut. Settle in.

There's also corn. There are many varieties of corn, but for this we'll only have three. Yellow corn is standard proletarian fare; jewel corn is multicolored, sweetened, and larger; feed corn is shorter, stockier, and is used to feed animals. Humanoids can't eat feed corn, since it's harvested when dry. You'll quite literally crack your teeth trying to eat it off the cob.

Our yellow corn is harvested when soft and can be dried out and popped. The farmer need only plant 100 pounds of corn seed per acre, but returns 1600 pounds of corn. Unfortunately, 50% of this is waste from shucking the corn into an edible shape. The government takes another 10%. This means we're looking at 640 pounds of corn per acre. This corn can go for an average of 48 gold at the market. This means a pound of corn is worth roughly 6cp. It can be made into cornmeal quite easily- the kernels themselves can be smashed by a mortar and pestle at home, or using an actual grindstone. The amount of precision required with a flour miller isn't required here, and there isn't any loss. A pound of cornmeal sells for about 8 copper, and is often traded for a finished loaf of bread.

Our jewel corn is a similar story- harvested when soft, and produces multicolored popcorn when dried. The farmer plants 100 pounds and gets back 2000 pounds. 50% of this is lost due to shucking. The government takes 15%, as it is considered a luxury item. The farmer ends up with 800 pounds of corn. Jewel corn goves for 80 gold per acre, or around the same price as one large beef cow. This means 1 pound of it goes for 10 copper. Similarly, it can be ground into jewel cornmeal very easily. Jewel cornmeal commands an even higher 15 copper per pound.

Finally, there is feed corn. Feed corn is harvested when bone dry, and usually grown in impressively massive numbers. It grows taller than yellow or jewel corn, but the end result ear of corn is shorter and fatter. It's only palatable to animals in this state. The farmer plants 200 pounds and gets back 2000 pounds. Only about 40% is lost, but the government still takes 10%. This leaves us with 1000 pounds of finished product, which will sell at a market price of 10 gold per acre, or 1 copper per pound.

Next we'll talk about a variety of root vegetables. This is a class of vegetables including ginger, radish, carrots, yams, and onions, as well as all their relatives. They all sell for roughly the same amount at market, but let's use onions as our example.

The farmer can plant 500 pounds of onions per acre, and returns 2500 pounds at harvest. Onions, of course, can be eaten in many ways, including raw. The waste from an onion is negligible, so we'll set it at 0%. The government taxes root vegetables at 10%, leaving us with 2250 pounds of nothing but onions. These onions go for 36 gold an acre, meaning a pound of onions costs 2 copper, or 1.6 more exactly. But we'll round up.

Next are vine plants. We'll throw in gourds such as pumpkins because otherwise I'll forget. Let's use tomatoes. The farmer can plant just 50 pounds per acre, but expect a yield of 300 pounds. This does mean tomatoes require more land to grow large numbers on, but tomato gardens are often grown on much less than an acre, sometimes a half or quarter acre. Additionally, vines only need to be planted once and continually generate tomatoes every season. The government taxes tomatoes at 10% and leaves us with 270 pounds, which command a value of roughly 25 gold per acre. This comes in very nicely for the farmer, who can sell his tomatoes at 9 copper per pound.

Finally for vegetables we have greens. There are some other vegetables I'm leaving out, but I think you can understand the idea. The farmer plants 100 pounds per acre and gets a yield of 1400 pounds. The government taxes this at 10%, and leaves us with 1260. Another 20% of this is waste, mostly the middle portions of things like lettuce and cabbage. It's not complete waste- pigs will gladly eat the cores of lettuce. 1008 pounds are edible for humans, with the other 252 being left for the pigs, if applicable. Greens go for 30 gold per acre, or 4 copper per pound.

Let's see where we are. We can have a cheeseburger with a glass of milk on the side, a side of fries, a bowl of corn, and onion rings if we wish. Our burger can be topped with lettuce and tomato.

We can calculate the price based on all the math we just did. Our regular cheeseburger is 30 copper already. We can't move prices to lower than 1 copper, so a glass of milk will most likely be on the house. Our side of fries is made of one half-pound potato, or another 1 copper. Our onion rings, similarly, will be made of a half-pound onion. Another 1 copper. A slice of lettuce and tomato are negligible, but we have to at least pay 1 copper for the smallest amount. The corn bowl is worth about 3 copper.

In total, our day's meal is now a whopping 38 copper. Again, the economy of scale doesn't quite exist yet. If we had to buy full quantities of everything to get these items, our cost shoots up dramatically. The full cost of a burger when having to buy full quantities of every ingredient is 106 copper. Let's see if we can get this down later.

FRUIT

Finally, no more vegetables. Now we can talk about fruit. First up is our nut crop. This is a bit different, as nuts grow on trees. Yes, I'm aware peanuts don't, but I also don't care. A nut tree grows to maturity in 10 years. The average tree produces about 20 pounds of nuts per year, but keep in mind that 90% of this is loss due to shells. Only 10% is the actual meat. This means each tree produces roughly 2 pounds of meat per year. Not exactly a cash crop. We're going to say that 50 trees can grow per acre, meaning we're getting 1000 pounds of nuts, or 100 pounds of actual meat. We'll put the finished product at 5 copper per pound of nut meat, or 5 gold per acre.

Of course, almonds specifically can be used to make almond milk, by bringing 2 gallons of water to boil with 8 pounds of almonds. This makes roughly 1 gallon of almond milk, which commands about 5cp per gallon at the market.

Next are orchard fruits, such as oranges and apples, and other things that grow on trees. A fruit tree takes 4 years to grow to maturity and produces 40 pounds of fruit every year after that. An acre of 50 trees, then, produces 2000 pounds of fruit.

We'll make fruit considerably cheaper than vegetables because they simply don't provide the same nutrition. 2 pounds of fruit sells for 1 copper piece, meaning an acre of fruit can go for 10gp. Not a whole lot.

Now let's talk cider, which in this will be a generic name for fruit alcohol. 40 pounds of fruit comes out to 3 gallons of cider. Cider is relatively easy to make, but is extremely alcoholic and can sell for upwards of 3 silver a gallon. All 50 trees can generate about 150 gallons of cider per year. If the farmer uses his fruit crop to make cider and nothing else, he can make 45 gold a year.

Finally, the last important fruit, grapes. Technically grapes don't grow on trees, they grow on vines, but who cares. They don't get replanted every year, so what's the difference, really.

Each year, an acre of vineyard makes 1200 pounds of grapes. The grapes themselves don't sell for much- 1 copper per 2 pounds- but only the most decadent asshole will eat grapes that could be turned into wine.

It takes about 12 pounds of grapes to make 1 gallon of wine. This means we get 100 gallons of wine per acre. The cost of the grapes going into this pound is 6cp, but the smart farmer will sell this for around 2 silver a gallon. This is the price for bottom shelf wine. Good wine can go for 10 silver, and top-shelf Dragonwine can go for 10 gold. Imagine being so decadent...

Well, that's it for this installment of me crunching numbers for 12 hours a day. Tune in next time so we can do it again.

Part 3

[juniperpublishers-etoaj]

Potential Environmental Impacts of Uncomposted Organic Materials, Composts and Manures - Juniper Publishers

Juniper Publishers - Open Access Journal of Engineering Technology

Abstract

Soil health is central to organic farming and organic inputs are applied to improve it so as to get higher economic yields on sustainable basis. A lot of work has been done around the world to support this fact. But there are environmental concerns related to the use of inputs which include the losses of nutrients from the farming systems to the open ecosystems causing damage to the water bodies including underground water contamination. Gaseous nitrogen losses tend to be lower from composted than fresh organic materials. There is a need to investigate trade-offs between different gaseous and leaching forms of pollutants following compost application. The environmental impacts of organic materials including uncomposted and composted manures applied to the soil to get higher production and productive of crops, have not been studied by many. This review paper is an attempt to summarize the same.

Keywords: Compost, Manures, Pollution, Environmental impact

    Introduction

Soil health is central to organic farming, but its potential has not been fully explored. Soil is a living dynamic system that functions in a holistic way depending upon its condition or state. Its reflection can be seen in terms of our own health. And phrases such as soil sickness, feeding the soil etc take on a real meaning when soil is managed and treated as a vital living system.

Soil health has been formally defined as “the capacity of a specific kind of soil to function as a vital living system, within natural or managed ecosystem boundaries, to sustain plant and animal productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and support human health and habitation.”

Organic farming systems are dependent upon the management of soil organic matter which enhances the chemical, biological, and physical properties of the soil, in order to optimise crop production. This subject has been reviewed by Watson et al. [1]. Soil management has a bearing on the supply of nutrients to crops, and inturn to livestock and humans. In addition to symbiotic N fixation and atmosphericdeposition, nutrients may be brought in to the organic system in the form of off-farm animal feeds, manures, composts and permitted fertilisers, such as rock phosphate [2]. Soil type and its inherent nutrient supplying capacity will decide the type and quality of fertilizers to be supplied. Watson et al. [3] highlighted that horticultural systems are dependent upon purchased manures and other organic inputs.

Though there is a vast literature available which indicates the positive effects of the organic materials including compost and manures on soil health; there is meagre work reported showing the environmental impacts of use of undecomposed organic materials, decomposed organic manures and compost. Here, it has been tried to review the literature regarding potential environmental impacts from the use of organic materials.

    Nitrate Leaching

Generally, nitrate nitrogen leaching begins immediately after its level in soil exceeds the demand by the crops when enough drainage volume is present. In organic farming systems nitrate accumulates from both added organic matter and mineralization of soil organic matter. Initial N content of the organic material does not always indicate the potential for leaching as the nitrogen content in mineral and organic forms varies tremendously. As reported by Di & Cameron [4] the mineral nitrogen contents (% total N) ranged from 15% in anaerobic dairy sludge to 60-85% in pig slurry.

Leaching loss depends a lot on the time of application of manures. Application of dairy waste in four splits resulted in lesser leaching of nitrogen when same amount was applied in two splits, because there was more synchronisation between supply nitrogen and demand of nitrogen by the pasture [4]. Method of application is also important as far as the environmental contamination from the use of organic inputs is concerned. Application of fresh and composted biosolids increased the risk of P and metal leaching, But, had no effect on nitrate leaching as observed by Gove et al. [5].

Not much work has been reported, comparing leaching loss from composted and fresh material. lysimeter experiment conducted by Leclerc et al. [6], in which the concept of leaching/ supply ratio was used to study the effects of different organic amendments across a rotation, revealed that the ratio was lower for composted manure than for urban compost. Vervoort et al. [7] reported lesser nitrate leaching from composted than fresh chicken manure. There may be the possibility that the capacity to immobilize nitrogen from high C:N ratio wastes is responsible for its lower leaching. For example, Vinten et al. [8] demonstrated a drop in leaching from 177 to 94kg N ha-1yr-1 in vegetable production system when 40tha-1 dry matter of paper mill waste was applied.

    Runoff and Erosion

Use of municipal solid waste compost can reduce degradation of surface structure, thus decreasing losses by runoff and erosion [9]. Composted as well as non-composted municipal wastes have the ability to reduce runoff and erosion as proved by Ros et al. [10]. Though, both treatments reduced runoff in amended soils as compared with unamended soil, but compost has an edge in reducing soil loss over less stable material.

Loss of phosphorus in runoff from applied manures is determined by the type of manure and crop. Sharpley and Rekolainen [11] quoted losses of from 1.9 and 17.1% of applied P in manure lost in run-off. The main hurdle in minimising this loss is the inability of the farmer to apply at right time which is due to the lack of adequate storage facilities with the farmer. No difference in the levels of soluble phosphorus in runoff from composted and fresh chicken manure was observed by Vervoort et al. [12], inferring that runoff is directly correlated with the amount of phosphorus applied to soil. Sharpley and Moyer [12] recorded the release of dissolved organic and inorganic phosphorus from simulated rainfall events from a range of slurries and manures applied at the equivalent of 10Mgha-1.

    Gaseous Losses

About 10% of ammonia emissions in Europe is due to the emission of ammonia from field applied manures [13]. A complex relationship exists between ammonia emission rates from slurry and soil conditions, slurry composition and climate Sommer and Hutchings [14]. Meagre research work is available on solid or poultry manure. Aerobically stored manures when applied to field cause more ammonia losses as compared to anaerobically stored ones [15]. Ammonia loss from slurry is directly proportional to the dry matter content [16]. A comparison was made between ammonia volatilization from surface applied fresh and composted poultry manure under laboratory conditions. Total ammonia loss for a 21day period varied from 17-31% from fresh material compared with 0-0.24% from composted material. Method of application such as slurry application to ploughed land and manures incorporation into cultiviable land have been proved to decrease ammonia loss over surface application [14].

Annual nitrous oxide emissions are directly proportional to manure application rate [17]. Kaiser et al. [18] reported an inverse relationship between nitrous oxide emission and dry matter to N ratio of incorporated crop residues. However, few studies have compared annual nitrous oxide losses from field application of different organic materials. Mogge et al. [19] compared losses from slurry and FYM application to maize. About 5.7% of applied nitrogen (equivalent to 5.3kgha-1) was lost as nitrous oxide in the FYM treatment as compared to compared only 0.6% of applied nitrogen in the slurry treatment (equivalent to 2.1kgha-1). No significant effect was recorded with the addition of 30Mgha-1 household compost on cumulative nitrous oxide production as compared with an unamended soil, in a laboratory incubation experiment done by De Wever et al. [20]. Further it was concluded that the use of compost as a fertilizer at normal agronomic rates would not have much effect on nitrous oxide production. Contrasting results have been observed for sewage sludge in field trials. A cumulative loss of 23kg nitrogen ha-1 along with high carbon dioxide losses of 5.1MgCha-1 from incorporated sewage sludge was recorded by Scott et al. [21].

    Human Pathogens

Some scientists like Stephenson [22] have suggested that the use of manures and organic food without preservatives may mean a high level of microbial contamination of organic food. The organic standards, however, prevent the use of fresh manure and require good management practices in the storage and handling of manures and composts. Both composting of farmyard manure [23,24] and anaerobic digestion of slurry [25] have been reported to decrease pathogen viability. There have been a number of claims of E. coli (O157:H7) outbreaks being associated with organic food [26] but none of these claims have ever been proven. There is no concrete evidence in the form of research reviews which prove that certified organic food contains any traces of E. Coli as compared to the conventionally produced food. Advanced research should be carried out to standardize the microbiological risks associated with different production systems.

Mawdsley et al. [27] reported that 11 bacteria, 3 viruses and 4 protozoa/parasites were present in livestock waste which may cause human disease. Contamination of ground and surface waters with pathogenic organisms can be caused by application of animal wastes on land [28]. These contaminats from ground water can be transmitted to both humans and livestock. E. coli, and especially verocytotoxin producing E. coli, including serogroup O157 is excreted by as much as 15.7% cattle in the UK [29].

Very high concentration E. coli in field drains were recorded after application of slurry, but low-level contamination persisted for 3 months only [30,31] quotes a review by Sorber & Moore [32] summarising data on survival of microorganisms from biosolids applied to soil. The median die-off rate (days, 99%) was 155 for total coliforms in the top 5 cm of soil, and 22 and 30 days for Salmonella in the 0-5cm and 5-15cm soil layers.

    Potentially toxic elements (PTE’s)

Urban wastes are fully of heavy metal contaminants. This problem is also with animal manures where metals are present in their feed e.g. Cu in pig and poultry feeds. Many fungicides contain Cu, Zn or Mg and their residues may remain on composted organic matter [33]. The level of potential toxicity increases exponentially in a hierarchical manner in a food chain which must be considered in perspective of human and animal health. The pattern of release of plant available metals from decomposition of organic materials cannot be predicted from laboratory extractions. For example, Arnesen & Singh [34] observed that application of compost increased plant Cu levels but not DTPA extractable Cu but the reverse was true for Zn. Type of soil will determine the pattern of release of available heavy metals and nutrients elements, which depends upon the leaching/adsorption properties of the soil which in turn depends on pH, texture and organic matter content of soil. Plots treated with organic manures showed less available copper than control plots in spite of having high levels of copper in manures, thus demonstrating moderating effect of soil [35].

From a review of 96 articles on phytotoxicity caused by metals from municipal solid wastes, from a review it was concluded that plant uptake of Cu, Ni, Zn, As and Pb was less although municipal solid wastes were used as source of nutrients [36]. It was further inferred that boron levels would have no deleterious effect inspite of its increasing levels in soil. Modern manufacturing processes have changed the compositions of waste materials and thus, the old literature may not give the correct picture about the toxicity effects of waste materials. Regulation also limits the application rate of potentially toxic elements from sewage and sludge. Giusquiani et al. [37] observed that total heavy metals accumulation in soil is directly proportional to the rate of application of urban waste compost. Application of mixed compost of paper sludge and chicken manure increased the available Mn and Zn content in soil Baziramakenga et al. [38].

In acid soils, additions of organic residues decreased exchangeable Al in the order poultry manure>filter cake>household compost>grass residues when same number of residues were applied Mokolabate & Haynes [39]. It was suggested that this may be due to the high CaCO3 content in the case of poultry manure and filter cake, the proton consumption capacity of humic material present in the household waste and decarboxylation of organic acid anions during decomposition of the grass residues.

    Conclusion

Gaseous nitrogen losses tend to be lower from composted than fresh organic materials, but management options to minimise these losses need further development. There is a need to investigate trade-offs between different gaseous and leaching forms of pollutants following compost application. This should include methane and carbon dioxide. There is little information on pathogen persistence and movement in soils/water following spreading. Gaseous and leaching losses from the use of compost need to be assessed in the context of the farming system rather than for individual crops.

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[gyrlversion]

UK students join global classroom walkout to protest climate change

Scores of schoolchildren around the world have walked out of their classrooms and trooped on to the streets for a second time to demand that politicians take action on climate change.

British students join striking counterparts in 120 other countries including New Zealand, Australia and Japan with an expected 2,000 rallies worldwide. 

Hundreds of these placard-waving youngsters ditched their lessons and flocked to London‘s Parliament Square this morning to try to grab the attention of MPs. 

They chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like’ while primary school children, who were at the protest with their parents and holding handmade placards, shouted ‘climate change, boo!’  

But one group of teenagers went further, and shouted: ‘One two three four, Theresa May’s a f***ing whore, five six seven eight, Corbyn is f***ing great!’

The walkouts are taking place in more than 100 UK towns and cities, including Kent, Edinburgh and Bristol, as part of a global day of action inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg who protests every Friday outside Sweden’s parliament. 

Hundreds of placard-waving youngsters ditched their lessons and flocked to London’s Parliament Square this morning to try to grab the attention of MPs. Placards read ‘denial is not a policy’ and ‘system change not climate change’

The students walked out of their classrooms and took to the streets across the world. Some 2,000 rallies are expected to happen globally including 100 events in UK towns and cities (Parliament Square pictured)

Strikes are taking place in over 120 countries around the world. Here, a massive demonstration is taking place in Milan outside the iconic Duomo gothic cathedral

And thousands of students took to the streets in Lisbon this morning in protest. The global action day is inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg who protests every Friday outside Sweden’s parliament

Who is Greta Thunberg? Pig-tailed Swedish schoolgirl, 16, who skips classes every Friday in personal war on climate change 

Greta Thunberg is seen on stage as she takes part in a protest calling for urgent measures to combat climate change, in Hamburg, Germany earlier this month

Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old pig-tailed Swedish schoolgirl who has been obsessively researching climate change for seven years.

Since last summer, she has been skipping school every Friday to sit on the steps of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, with a home-made sign that reads ‘Skolstrejk för Klimatet’ (School strike for the climate).

She grows her own vegetables, refuses air travel and luxury hotels, even if the only option is a 32-hour train journey and a tent.

She accused the attendees at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland in December 2018 of leaving the burden of climate change with future generations.

Many politicians, including environment secretary Michael Gove and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have already backed the ‘inspirational strikers’. 

Greta Breveglieri, 21, a political science student at Univesita Statale Di Milano, travelled from Italy for the London demonstration today.

She said: ‘The protest in February was really big, but today is way more important and has been way more publicised. There’s been a lot of momentum, so I think it’s going to be big.

‘To put it bluntly, we’re here because our world is going to be destroyed. We have to change the pace of our culture, our society, our politics, our economics.

‘We have been silent for too long. There have been singular voices or movements that have always struggled against climate change, and for the environment and against pollution. 

‘But this kind of global and coordinated and spontaneous, and especially youth movement, I’ve never seen this movement before.’ 

Thousands of students defied warnings from teachers and politicians when they bunked off on February 15 and the organisers predict that even more will skip classes to protest today.

While the youngsters may not have the support of Downing Street and education secretary Damian Hinds, who disapproves of the children missing school, an Opinium poll suggested that a majority of the public backs the walkout. 

Although climate change is the cause which unites the protesters, some placards in London were emblazoned with socialism endorsements and some are campaigning for the voting age to be lowered to 16. 

Their calls come after a UN report last year which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

That includes cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years, and to zero by mid-century. 

This is the second time students have defied warnings from teachers and politicians to skip class and take to the streets to protest about the climate change cause (Parliament Square pictured)

A large crowd gathered on Bristol’s College Green as part of the worldwide walkout. Students in Japan, Australia and New Zealand are also expected to take part

The students’ calls come after a UN report last year which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (Buckingham Palace pictured)

In London Joe Crabtree, 15, from south-west London, who is missing his GCSE mocks for the protest, said: ‘I’m here today to send a clear message to Government that I’m fed up with inaction on climate change.

‘I think they’re not doing enough to curb the problem that is climate change, leaving it to the side like us with homework, hoping it will get done, but it’s not being dealt with.’ 

In a video released ahead of Friday’s strikes, Mr Gove tells students walking out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action on cutting emissions: ‘Dear school climate strikers, we agree.

‘Collective action of the kind you’re championing can make a difference, and a profound one.’ 

Mr Corbyn has also backed the strikers, tweeting: ‘Thank you for standing up against climate change. You shouldn’t have to pay the price for the mistakes of previous generations.’

The demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament soon marched the short walk to the Mall where they descended outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. One protester climbed up the Queen Victoria Memorial outside the palace

Students have had to wrap up warm to brave the chilly conditions in London today (Buckingham Palace pictured) 

In Edinburgh, protesters demonstrate outside the Holyrood Scottish Parliament where temperatures sat at a biting 5C

Cat Smith, shadow minister for youth affairs, said Labour stands ‘in solidarity’ with young people across the UK taking action over the Government’s lack of leadership on climate change.

She said: ‘Today’s strike demonstrates that young people care deeply about environmental issues and will use their collective power to bring about meaningful change.

‘This should serve as a wake-up call to the political establishment that young people’s views can no longer be ignored, and urgent action is needed to tackle the escalating ecological crisis.’

Anna Taylor, 17, from north London, co-founder of the UK Student Climate Network and one of the organisers of the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement, said the Government was failing to recognise the severity of the crisis.

‘We’re here because we feel betrayed and we don’t feel we can trust them to protect our future, which is why we’re having to go on strike to make our voices heard, and let them know that unless they change something we will keep striking until they consider our demands.

Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, Kent. One boy in school uniform appears to have walked straight out of school

‘They’re failing to make environmental reform and environmental policy a priority, they focusing on economic policy and Brexit and failing to address the climate crisis facing us.

‘Young people feel empowered by other young people, this is very much a student-led movement.

‘It’s something we all feel very passionate about, because it’s personal to us, it’s about our future. This is a broad movement and we are all striking in solidarity.  

And United Nations climate change chief Patricia Espinosa said: ‘What we’re seeing is a clear message from youth throughout the world that nations must significantly increase their efforts to address climate change.

‘Given the urgency the world faces, it’s vital nations come up with more ambitious plans both this year and in 2020 as stated in the Paris Agreement.

‘This is how we will not only reach our collective climate goals, but how we will build a cleaner, greener and more prosperous future for all people.’ 

Young demonstrators hold placards and shout slogans as they participate in a protest against climate change in Athens, regarded as the birthplace of democracy

In Warsaw, Poland, more youngsters wave placards on the day of environmental action, dubbed #FridayForFuture

And in Kiev, Ukraine, students shout slogans during the ‘Global Climate Strike for future’ protest, in front the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry

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[animalistauntamedblog]

“The government’s wish for the UK to become a global leader in free trade is not necessarily compatible with its desire to maintain high animal welfare standards,” The House of Lords subcommittee on EU Energy and Environment

“A coalition of leading environmental groups says there is a ‘significant risk’ that British environmental protections will be reduced after Brexit, despite the government’s positive rhetoric.”

Well, somehow she (and by ‘she’ I mean the woman who wrote into the 2017 Tory manifesto her intention to repeal the ban on fox hunting. Yes, that ‘she’) She somehow got her Brexit through the Cabinet, and the 27 EU states have ceremonially signed it off. The next step is a Parliamentary vote. Who knows what will happen there? And as for after the vote, it’s anyone’s guess.

As the Brexit juggernaut rolls inexorably towards the edge of the cliff, what will it mean for our UK animals and nature?

Here are some disturbing reasons why all animal – and nature-lovers will want to do their damnedest to stop the juggernaut in its tracks, because Brexit is bad news for UK nature and its animals, wherever they are: in labs, in the wild or on farms.

What the EU meant for animal welfare before Brexit

The EU is renowned in the world for its pro-animal stance and high standards of animal welfare. Article 13 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty recognises nonhuman animals as ‘sentient beings’ for whom suffering and distress should be diminished as much as possible. Last year the UK Tory government rejected Article 13 – a foretaste of things to come?

Check this link for a comprehensive list of the EU’s achievements for animals The European Parliament’s Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals

Of our current legislation regulating animal welfare and the environment, 80% comes from our membership of the EU.

After Brexit?

Under the Repeal Bill, “All existing EU legislation will be copied across into domestic UK law to ensure a smooth transition on the day after Brexit. The UK Parliament can then ‘amend, repeal and improve’ individual laws as necessary.”

It’s increasingly unlikely that all these laws can be adequately translated into UK law without the access we previously had to EU organisations, and against the ticking Brexit clock. “Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Andrea Leadsom admitted that about a third of environmental laws … could not initially be brought into UK legislation.”

And “MPs fear ministers may use the process of adapting those laws to chip away environmental protections.” This is a government that favours deregulation to give greater freedom to business. In this respect Theresa May and Donald Trump do indeed hold hands. Nature and animals will be the losers.

Additionally, the Commons Environmental Audit Committee fears EU legislation that does get adopted into UK law could become ‘zombie legislation’, no longer subject to EU updates and with no regulatory bodies to see it enforced.

The Birds and Habitats Directives which protect wild birds and Britain’s most important wildlife and plant habitats will not be adopted into UK law, even if the UK remains in the Single Market. A report on the directives “warns that this could have potentially far-reaching negative consequences for the UK’s biodiversity.”

Bowing under pressure from farmers, the Tories have already expressed opposition to the EU’s strict regulation of GM crops, chemicals and neonicotinoid pesticides – all of which can devastate insect life and the animals that feed on them. At present the European courts and the European Commission enforce these laws. After Brexit there will be nothing to stop deregulation.

The Common Agricultural Policy

No-one denies the CAP needs reforming. Farmers hate it and its complex regulations. But, the CAP provides 60% of farmers’ income. And under the 2013 EU “Greening” initiative, farmers are financially incentivised to use their land sustainably, and care for natural resources.

“Under the new [2013 Greening] rules, farmers receiving payments help conserve the environment and contribute to addressing greenhouse emissions by:

making soil & ecosystems more resilient by growing a greater variety of crops

conserving soil carbon & grassland habitats associated with permanent grassland

protecting water & habitats by establishing ecological focus areas.”

MPs are calling for a new UK Environmental Protection Act as part of Brexit. The Tory manifesto last year promised to make the UK environment greener after Brexit than EU regulations left it. But it’s hard to see that happening. In view of this government’s continual capitulation to pressure from the farming community, most notably by rolling out again this year (the 6th) an horrendous cull of a much-loved and protected species, the badger, in 32 areas across 10 counties, ignoring the science, the data, much expert advice, and public opinion … Well, I can’t even finish the sentence.

“When a government dares to call its concrete-grey Autumn Budget environmentally “green” because of its initiative to plant a few trees alongside its billion pounds worth of road infrastructures, and when that government can barely agree on whether the cruel practice of fox hunting should be allowed, all hope is lost for the safety and welfare of animals.”

Our new trading partners

Failing a decent trade agreement with Brussels, the UK is looking to the USA as a major trading partner. The US his already dictated its terms – no trade unless we eliminate our “unjustified sanitary restrictions”.

Not wanting to jeopardise our chances of a deal with America, a possible future lifeline in the event of a bad Brexit, the Home Office “have failed to write-up any legally binding commitments that uphold food hygiene and humane animal treatment post-Brexit. Horror stories of chlorine washed chicken, ractopamine riddled pigs and hormone enhanced beef hitting British shores may be closer than we think.”

The infographic below reveals some of the barbarity of the treatment of animals on American factory farms

If you’re not already acquainted with US farming methods, let me tell you I doubt you can imagine a worse hell. Check for yourself here.

The Pound

From the Brexit referendum’s results day, the pound declined in value. If we get as far as actual Brexit Day, March 29th 2019, we will see the pound plummet, sucking into the country a flood of products from unethically, inhumanely-reared animals . (Not that I will ever concede there is such a thing as humane farming of animals. Apart from anything that happens to them in the short time they are allowed to live, those lives all end in the bloody horror of the slaughterhouse. There are though, degrees of suffering.)

UK farmers will be unable to compete without a significant lowering of their own animal welfare standards, the standards at present required of them by the EU.

Farms in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire – PETA

If this is what it’s like now, how much lower can they go?

In addition, in the face of ever-decreasing profit margins farmers will strongly resist legislative attempts to protect the welfare of farmed animals post-Brexit. The animals will be “collateral damage”.

The economy

Levels of poverty in the UK are already “staggering” according to UN rapporteur Philip Alston. He found 1.5 million of our citizens destitute and 14 million living in poverty. Food bank use reached its highest rate on record this year. Our own Treasury has predicted that under all possible Brexit scenarios we will be worse off in 15 years time. All of which means that people will be looking for the cheapest possible food, however dodgily produced. Concerns for animal welfare will be a luxury many can no longer afford.

EU Immigrants

On many farms between 40 – 58% of the workforce are EU nationals. The labour shortage created by their disappearance will push agricultural workers’ wages up, putting further financial pressure on farmers. They will look for any way possible to cut costs, and may well resort to cutting welfare corners to the detriment of the animals.

A staggering 90% of vets working in the UK are EU nationals. The British Veterinary Association warns of a severe shortage of qualified vets post-Brexit. That is not good news for any UK animal.

After Brexit, because of the change in regulations for trading with Europe, more not fewer Official Vets will be needed to supervise imports and exports and sign health certificates for live animals. Doesn’t this acute shortage of properly qualified personnel mean that whatever animal protections there are supposedly in place, are going to pass by unchecked and unenforced?

“Deregulating trade while curbing immigration would lead to a sharp decline in animal welfare. When immigration is curbed and access to dedicated workers is stifled, the situation for the UK’s voiceless and defenceless creatures is bleak.”

Live exports

Last year Michael Gove claimed that the EU was holding us back from banning live exports.

Would a Tory government fly in the face of its supporters in the farming community to enforce such a ban? Even if they did, which seems highly unlikely, now ‘free’ of EU regulations the UK would be subject to World Trade Organisation rules instead. And they do not allow for such a ban. If you voted for Brexit hoping to see an end to this cruel trade, I’m sorry to disappoint.

Animal testing

Cruelty Free International are worried that “a no-deal Brexit could mean that the UK would need to carry out the same animal tests for chemical registration as the EU. This would mean twice as many animals would suffer. If existing EU animal-test data is not shared with the UK, then the same animal tests would have to be carried out again by the UK for the same information.”

At a time when without Brexit the number of laboratory procedures continues to rise, that just does not bear thinking about. NatureWatch echoes CFI’s concerns and urges the government “to ensure that re-testing does not take place and that existing testing data can be used in the UK.”

Companion animals

The present EU pet passport system is being extensively abused by criminal gangs smuggling puppies with fake passports into the UK and other countries. The government has pledged to stamp out this cruel trade. Perhaps the only good news to come out of Brexit. Although…

In all the years we have been an EU member state, the government could have eliminated this problem anyway with better UK border checks. Plus, it’s hard to imagine this will be a high priority for the Tories in a post-Brexit Britain.

One final reason to reject May’s Brexit on behalf of our animals

Many animal advocacy organisations are either already working on a Europe-wide basis, or are starting to join forces with their european counterparts.

Surely we are stronger together for the animals?

Look at these EU-wide groups: Eurobadger, Eurogroup for Animals, the European Enforcement Network of Animal Welfare Lawyers and Commissioners and the vitally important aforementioned European Parliament’s Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals

All in all, if the animals had a voice and were given a vote, I feel certain the result would be – Remain.

  Related posts

We Encourage Everyone who Cares about Animals to Vote Remain

Eurobarometer 2016 Proves EU Citizens Overwhelming Support for Animal Welfare

The Fight to Protect Badgers Moves to Europe

Poll: Would Brexit be the best thing for Europe’s wildlife?

EU Animals Face Torture & Abuse During Live Exports

Sources 

Brexit and the future of animal welfare

Post-Brexit trade deals ‘threaten UK’s animal welfare standards’

What are the key issues for the Brexit negotiations?

New Environmental Act needed after Brexit

European Commission Agriculture and Rural Development

Could no-deal Brexit mean more UK animal tests?

Brexit: Does the EU stop the UK improving animal welfare?

Britain risks losing green protections after Brexit

What Will Brexit Mean for UK Animals & Nature? “The government’s wish for the UK to become a global leader in free trade is not necessarily compatible with its desire to maintain high animal welfare standards,”

[energysolutions]

Speech: NFU Conference 2018 has been published on Energy Solutions News

New Post has been published on http://www.energybrokers.co.uk/news/beis/speech-nfu-conference-2018

Speech: NFU Conference 2018

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It’s great to be with you today. Thank you for inviting me.

It is a great honour to be here for the first time at a National Farmers Union (NFU) Conference.

As someone who has known all my life that farming is foundational not just to our economy, but to our country, it is a particular privilege to be here.

Providing the food and drink we live on and stewarding the countryside that is so much part of our national and local identity means there is no more essential industry.

As Guy said, I was born and raised in the food and drink business with my father and grandfather’s retail dairy delivery round supplying our neighbours in Middlesbrough with fresh Yorkshire milk seven days a week.

When I talk about agriculture as an ‘industry’ that’s not to ignore the fact that farming and growing is more than just a sector of the economy. It’s a life. And its all-consuming.

I was glancing through Farmers Weekly before Christmas and there was an interview with a young farmer from Wales called Tom Parry.

The journalist asked him: “If you won the lottery… what’s the first thing you would spend the money on?”

His reply? “More sheep.” But food and farming is an industry nonetheless and as Guy alluded to before, it’s one of our greatest.

The agricultural sector is the biggest manufacturing sector in the UK. Employing almost four million people and larger than the automotive and aerospace sectors combined.

And what that means in my view is that it deserves the same seriousness of engagement with all parts of government about the future that other successful industries like aerospace, automotive can count on, like life sciences and financial services expect to get with government.

And for your unique role in stewardship and in feeding the nation, like any industry, you need to be profitable and we need to help make sure the right conditions exist right for investment in the future.

Now, of course, you have a government department dedicated to farming and rural affairs and it is headed by one of the most innovative and effective Secretaries of State in government.

But I’m determined, with Michael, that you should participate fully just as other industries do in the work that is being done by the whole of government.

Including my department, the Business Department, as we work together to make Britain more prosperous in the future.

I think we need to do a better job in emphasising the centrality of agriculture to our economy and to our economic future.

If proof were needed of that, it can be found in the most recent agricultural exhibition in the London Science Museum.

This started off with farming in the Iron Age and ended somewhere around 1952. 1952?

That’s 15 years before I was even born. Imagine if the space exhibition ended in 1952. You’d miss all the good stuff.

No moon landings. No space shuttle. No International Space Station. It’s the same with farming.

So it’s fantastic that the Science Museum is planning a new £3 million exhibition to show the real face of modern British agriculture to the whole country and especially to the rising generation of people who may not have the knowledge or experience of agriculture, which should open later this year.

I don’t know who farming’s Tim Peake is but it’s very important that the place of this industry at the forefront of innovation should be there.

Because this is one of the most innovative of our industries and we need to ensure that the next generation need to see the opportunities for earning and advancement there are in a career in food and farming.

And I think it is also important that other industries need to see that agriculture is a source of ideas that can drive new ways of working and using technology in their own sectors.

There is a great translation and diffusion of learning across adjacent industrial sectors and I think we underplay the opportunities from the innovations that you have made into other industrial sectors.

That’s why I was determined to place food and farming at the heart of our Industrial Strategy, both for this sector and because of the relevance to sectors across the economy.

And why I’m so thrilled with the contribution and enthusiasm of so many people in this room. Of course the NFU, to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), the Food and Drink Federation and so many others.

The challenge for our Industrial Strategy is the same challenge for this sector. How can we become more productive and so more prosperous.

I want to commend the excellent work that Tom Hind of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has been carrying out on productivity in this sector. It has uncovered that since the mid-1990s productivity growth in agriculture and horticulture has fallen behind our principal competitors.

In fact, it has grown at just one-third of the rate enjoyed by the Netherlands and the USA. Relatively slow growth in productivity in recent years has characterised much of the British economy.

The Industrial Strategy set out a number of ways in which with a sustained national effort we can improve productivity.

It seems to me they are relevant to this industry as much as others.

The first is innovation.

This is one of the most innovative sectors of our economy and the advantages of bringing together our best scientists with our most forward-thinking producers, is clear.

I think most people would agree that the agri-tech strategy which launched five years ago has proved a success.

The Catalyst, for example has helped fund projects fighting diseases in pigs, rearing lobsters off the Cornish coast and improving the efficiency of Strawberry production, to name but a few.

But there is great potential for much more and so the Industrial Strategy commits to the biggest ever increase in public research and development investment. An extra £3 billion a year by 2021.

It brings in a focus on four Grand Challenges, technological changes sweeping across the world in which Britain has a leading position.

I am committed to making sure that agriculture plays a big role in many of these.

One of these is Artificial Intelligence and the analysis of big data.

Intelligent algorithms using data on atmospheric conditions and soil moisture has the real potential to dramatically reduce, for example the water needed for agriculture.

Michael Gove and I have agreed that agricultural technology will be one of the priority sectors for the new Office of Artificial Intelligence announced in our Industrial Strategy.

Through our Grand Challenges on the future of mobility, we know right around the world the way we are transporting ourselves, the way vehicles are powered and how we are connecting ourselves is changing, and we want to make Britain the go-to place in the world for the development of new autonomous vehicles.

I am determined this won’t just be the vehicles you see on our road, and that agriculture will be a big part of that.

Through the Hands-Free Hectare project Harper Adams University and York-based company Precision Decisions are planting, tending and harvesting crops using only autonomous vehicles and drones.

This project was funded through Innovate UK and was the first in the world to farm a crop in this way.

So I have insisted that our Connected and Autonomous Vehicles programme is making funding available to off-road driverless innovation, with a particular application to agriculture.

And yet another challenge – in this country – we’ve often been better at the invention and discovery of new ways of doing things that the implementation of them.

The AHDB was right in saying we need to put an increased emphasis on the ‘D’ in R&D, the development half of research and development.

As part of the Industrial Strategy, we announced a Transforming Food Production Challenge. And I’m delighted to announce today that the government will invest £90 million to make this challenge a reality.

It will include the creation of ‘Translation Hubs’ bringing together farmers and growers, businesses, scientists, and Centres for Agricultural Innovation, to apply the latest research to farming practice.

It should be a big boost to the knowledge exchange that already takes place across food and farming. And with the technological revolution that is happening the skills of the farming workforce need to keep pace.

New technologies require new abilities. Today’s modern British farmer is a Swiss-Army-Knife of skills.

An engineer, an environmentalist, a data scientist, a biochemist, often an energy producer, a tourism entrepreneur, and always an investor too. All of these skills are essential to the jobs that you do.

Yet at the moment, we under-invest in skills and training relative to many of our competitor countries.

And if we are to take advantage of the productivity improvements that technology offers we need to have tailored programmes of skills, education and training to meet the needs of sectors, as well as more farmer-to-farmer learning, to demonstrate what works in practice.

The Industrial Strategy emphasises new T-Levels which will provide an important opportunity for a new generation to start their careers in agriculture with relevant skills and we will work closely with the NFU to make them effective.

Apprenticeships will be a crucial part of this. And our reforms to apprenticeships are intended to present high quality opportunities for individuals and employers alike.

These reforms are some of the most substantial the government has ever made. But they are still young, and we are listening to feedback as the programme develops.

I also hear loud and clear, the challenges you are experiencing in your workforce currently.

As a West Kent MP, the Hoppers huts that can still be found in the fields around our coasts are a reminder that agriculture has always relied on seasonal workers whether from home or abroad.

In particular, two-thirds of your workers born outside of the UK come from the EU. This is an absolutely crucial component that I know Michael Gove touched on yesterday.

And as we move to a new relationship with the EU it is essential that you can get the workers you need.

‘A secure supply of skilled and seasonal labour’, is one of eight priority areas for our new Food and Drink Sector Council that has been created as part of our Industrial Strategy.

That clear focus and commitment to make sure you get what you need to do the important job that you have, is vital. And the purpose of forming the Council is to not just talk about the issues, but to act on its advice.

Upgrading our infrastructure is another way in which we can help improve productivity and as Guy mentioned earlier, I cannot recall an occasion on which I met the NFU branch in which the need for considerably better broadband and mobile coverage was not top of the list of improvements required.

Michael was emphatic on it yesterday and I completely share his view. The imperative becomes even more pressing because many of the technologies that can transform agricultural productivity and things like Artificial Intelligence rely on the fast transformation of large quantities of data. It is becoming more important than ever.

The Industrial Strategy commits an extra £200 million of investment in the Local Full-Fibre Networks Programme. As Michael said yesterday, 95% of the UK population can now access superfast broadband, a target which was reached last December.

As is evidence, there is much further to go, including making super fast high-speed broadband a legal right to everyone.

There is perhaps no industry in Britain in which local industry and the distinctiveness that one place has from another is as intrinsic as in farming.

My longstanding view is that government policy has been too uniform in failing to take opportunities to recognise that what is needed for a northern city or a place like Birmingham to maximise its potential will be very different for a rural county.

And around the world, we see that one of the most successful ways in which productivity grows is through clusters of adjacent businesses with particular local relevance each reinforcing the other.

We see it all, from life sciences in Cambridge to elite motor manufacturing in Northamptonshire. Successful clusters attract ambitious followers creating expertise and jobs.

Through institutes such as FERA outside York, which I know very well, to the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute outside Cambridge, I think there are huge opportunities to gather businesses that can make the most of the proximity of our resources.

A big part of our Industrial Strategy is to do what I know virtually everyone in this room does, and be leaders and participants in their local economies and to give more power to invest locally in other sectors and other industries, helping make the most of local opportunities.

Finally, strengthening relationships are vital if we are to capitalise on the individual strengths of the sector.

Food and farming has always been a diverse and some would say fragmented, sector. But that is not to say that the opportunities that come from working together don’t exist. In fact I think they are more plentiful in this sector than many others.

The supply chain from farm to fork and indeed into farms is a crucial source of quality competitiveness and innovation.

Fragmentation compared to other sectors simply emphasises the need to make a deliberate effort to come together effectively.

That’s why I’m delighted that the new Food and Drink Sector Council met for the first time last month. I know Michael Gove spoke about this yesterday.

It brings together government departments, farmers and growers, food and drink manufacturers the logistics industry, hospitality industry, retailers and others with a stake in a flourishing sector.

I’d like to thank Sir Peter Kendall for representing the voice of farmers on the Council and its working groups.

One of the Council’s early tasks is to propose a Sector Deal to drive forward each aspect of the Industrial Strategy as it reflects food and drink: innovation, skills, infrastructure investment, building up local strengths and getting the right business environment for start-ups and for growing businesses. Each one of these pillars of our Industrial Strategy, I’m absolutely determined will apply to the food and drink sector and should be represented in a strong and ambitious Sector Deal.

I take it personally. Michael Gove and I will jointly lead for the government on negotiating this deal. I want this to be a totemic deal that shows to sectors that perhaps have not considered food and farming and agriculture to be part of the economic future of our country, in the way that it so clearly is.

And I hope it will be a beacon to the British industry and the rest of the world that British agriculture is mustering its considerable strength to seize the opportunities before us.

So ladies and gentlemen, Thank you for inviting me to be with you today.

When I first set to thinking about the Industrial Strategy I had a clear vision that this strategy must be for the whole of our economy and for the whole of Britain. And so agriculture one of our largest and most innovation-rich industries had to be at the heart of it.

I am so thrilled at the positive response that it has received from farmers, growers and those engaged in food production.

And whether it is spreading innovation or building a workforce with the skills of the future. These are vital steps. Not all these steps can be taken all of them overnight.

A short term strategy, after all, is a contradiction in terms.

But I strongly believe that by acting deliberately now we can act together to create the future of farming.

Thank you very much indeed.

[dwestfieldblog]

2018 - NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

(Solve et coagula)

Untying the Not and Never Was...back from Britain...Hello pagan heathens, welcome to the 14thyear of the blog and variations on the theme of transcendental dystopia in the key of F sharp. Feeling positivelypriapic today...with a private new list of  ancient sins that would make even a priest blush...in joyous celebration of Bacchus, Aphrodite and Apollo... I have my own morals, but morals they are and are followed as such. I don't remember what I am taught, I remember what I learn.

Within two minutes of walking past airport customs into the English speaking world, see a display of Newsweek magazines with the front cover blarting 'Putin is preparing for World War 3 -is Trump?' So good to be back so fast into the feculant nightmare. Great to hear the baldhead is running for yet another presidential term and barring his most serious rival from taking part in the lip-service of democratic process. And threatening him with imprisonment for daring to suggest the polls be boycotted. Wonder who will win? Here's hoping today's pig is tomorrow's bacon.

I watched no TV news at all but of course read the Daily Horrors with my breakfast every morning for three weeks...The Golden Reptile in the mickey mouse white house...he doesn't believe in exercise because it is unhealthy for the body and has a Very busy working day from 11am to 5pm...with 'executive time' between the hours.... a separate bedroom with 3 TV screens and cheeseburgers to lull him to sleep until he awakes to tweet his dawn chorus of mindless excremental bilge. Direct quotes from his twitter feed –'My two greatest assets have been mental stability andbeing, like, really smart'... 'a very stable genius...' America....truly serving as a genuine example to the world. How does it feel to be pitied by those you despise and despised by those you pity?

Trump has a 'much bigger and powerful' nuclear button on his desk than Cheese Boy in North Korea... 'and my Button works!'. (How would he know? Hard to test.) Penis measuring across continents. Mentally unstable is a very generous description of these child presidents....And speaking of dumber than paint leaders with bad hair (nice segway eh?) I heard a wonderful description of the lying wannabe UK prime minister Boris Johnson... 'like an arsonist pretending to be a fireman', returning to the Brexit crime scene to save the day...

Another foul/fowl pretender to the throne of PM in the UK, Mr Gove, coming out in sudden favour of chlorinated chicken from the USA and GM crops via the ever popular Monsanto corporation. Follow the lobbyists, follow the money trail. Ignore (or defenestrate) those who speak for corporate interests until you have checked whether their words are actually an opinion based on long running verifiable tests of good health or sound bites paid for by a wedge of serious wonga/moolah/cash into their bank accounts... and/or a future job when they leave politics. Shameless filth. Eg. David Cameron now accepting a role with the Chinese government's one and a half billion pound infrastructure programme.

China said recently that the 1989 British ambassador's claim that 10,000 students were murdered in Beijing is a little extreme. Well it was. Running tanks over unarmed students cannot said to be anything else. 200 has been given as a more realistic death toll. It took them 28 years to come up with this number.

'Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous'. (Voltaire) Thank you lord...thank you lord.Hallelujah, to coin a phrase...

Pope Francis used his Christmas message to advise his masses to drop 'all sorts of useless baggage'...'the banality of consumerism, the blareof commercials, the stream of empty words and the overpowering waves of empty chatter and loud shouting'. This is the sort of stuff which should indeed be spoken by spiritual leaders but shame he didn't mention talking snakes, pregnant virgins, burning bushes, self inflicted guilt over original sin or the endlessly Unchristian behaviour by his flock. (And there is a special circle in Hell for priests of any faith who rape children.) 'Useless baggage' almost covers it all. As Francis said; '...rediscover what really matters'... Or discover what reality matter is made of..

.'A cross on every hill, a  star, a minaret, so many graves to fill, Oh love, aren't you tired yet?'Cohen, The Faith. Why not not eat pigs together?

The same evil government shit as ever after a massive storm destroying homes... Hurricane Irma wiped out almost every home on Barbuda (Caribbean) and as in New Orleans and dozens of similar cases after a force of nature, the greedpigs move in fast. Deals between the politicians and land developers overpower the rights of those who lived there, such is the freedom of a life without morality. Rebuild and replace communally owned land with dwellings for the wealthy and push aside all former residents. If ever a group of men deserved the force of nature/an act of the Goddess against them and their property, it is these swinefeed.

The West and the East, the East and West, condemning each others' subversions... What came first, the pot or the kettle?

Demonstrations in Iran by the lower classes of all generations across more than 100 cities and towns against the endless drift of power upwards to Khameni and the mullahs...and money outwards to various non charitable organisations (fill in the blanks with live ammunition, missiles, rocket launchers, suicide bombers etc.) the lack of hospitals and social support, the lack of aid after natural disasters, corruption and price rises. 40 percent of young people are unemployed and starting to wonder where the billions are going...or else knowing where. Most, if not all of the above bullet points (ha) are strong factors in the West too...but in America the tension implodes and is directed against ethnicitiesrather than those actually responsible.. and in Britain/ Europe... hmm...Civil unrest is contained in blaming foreigners, thus encouraging Nazi opportunist populists to manipulate the easily persuaded angry mass into voting for them. And the suckers fall for it everybloody time.

Issues of utterly irrelevant social media opinion, autistic entertainment saturating the global human mind to applaud the lowest common denominator, rocking back and forth with glee at the latest exploits of the hollow kardashians and their foul ego stroking ilk, famous only for being famous...a mass debate on the meaningless, billions of people being trained to focus their tiny, blurred attention deficit spans on a multitude of soul numbing emptiness. All looking in the absolute wrong directions while meanwhile....

The strong and immoral arise and laugh their arses off, stirring, provoking, initiating... and they prepare...America and Europe are weaker and weaker. A few computer viruses here and there, shared passwords, blackmail via disinformation,  man made disasters, plenty of random shocks, a constant underlying panic, threats and needling rhetoric result in.....on one side, an aggressive focused mobilisation of forces with intent and on the other, half a billion people with the spiritual bravery and intelligence of a pillow. At some Rubicon of a breakpoint, paranoia becomes common sense. The clock is now at two minutes to midnight. Be aware.

BE AWARE.

'The universe is a total construction of waves and vibrations whose inner content is 'Meaning', and Man is a micro system of the same vibratory nature, floating at some depth in the universal and meaningful wave system. The universal wave system is qualitative or value structured according to its vibration rate spectrum (faster frequencies have more informational capacity).David Foster

'Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love, love is not music, music is the best'.... speaking of which...Sufferers of schizophrenia with audio and visual hallucinations could be aided by learning an instrument or by listening to music, says new research... Musical aptitude has a strong effect on 'the white matter integrity of the corpus callosum', which protects against the disorder. Quite tempting to comment on the plethora of musicians of all creeds who are obviously unbalanced, unstable and dangerous to themselves and others. Maybe too much music eh? Arf. Never. Anyway, Love IS music and music IS love Sorry Frank.

'All lovers young, all lovers must, consign to thee and come to dust'. Shakespeare -Cymbeline.

'Micro dosing' is one of the 'new' trend things...(as opposed to non functioning overdose situations) brought to you all the way from Silicon valley. That's right... just one tenth of 150 micrograms of LSD will aid you in your chosen field (no pun intended, almost) to break through, focus, go within, go OUT and open neural pathways blocked by the mundane and logical. I have not tripped on acid since 1985 (and that last trip was just over 21 hours long before I took sleeping pills to make the galaxies stop flowing through my brain.) Have been very tempted over the years but truly didn't want or need such an eternity of multidimensional senses while still in flesh...(once the doorway is opened, it stays opened.) This micro dosing is highly interesting however and I will do this this as soon as the first possibility appears. Still think I prefer October mushrooms....Where the Heart Is, in a Halo of Stars.

Picked up a leaflet yesterday...Non stop erotic massages and hotel escorts in Prague... 'Your imagination has no limits'...ermmm...ahhh..hmmm...probably not, but there are laws and only so much available cash this evening..Or, as Alien Sex Fiend sang, 'Everybody's got what everybody wants and everybody wants what everybody's got.' Well, almost.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' So sayeth (saideth?) George Orwell. Doesn't seem to apply to British and American universities where the mind fecking 'Safe Space' ethic is rigidly enforced by the twenty something brain police. Anything which could be offensive or disagreed with, is banned.....That comedian who once made a joke ridiculing transgenders... REMOVE him from the list of those who should speak... that woman who said the holy land is bollocks because the old testament was just some non verifiable book which told the Hebrews what they wanted to hear? No platform for her, no stage for them unless it has a gallows pole upon it. (Yeah, self fulfilling propaganda works like a dream every time. Bullshit is half of the charm.) You university morons. You MORONS, working for the enemy, for ones who seek to bring YOU down. Who seek to cage and contain thee. To limit the horizons of creative expression and put a sterile tank around truth. Poor little fragile youth, too delicate to be offended, WHY AREN'T YOU ANGRY? The ancient schools of Sumeria and Greece would be disgusted at your level of human intelligence. 

You cannot make up your own mind until you have exposed yourself to all shades of opinion and distilled all. Read what you disagree with with, it is a fascinating comedy...and very often reveals that what you thought you know, you do not Feel.

The man of the crowd is a weakling; people who need people are the stupidest people in the world. Evolution requires individuals, a union of outsiders working in random harmony...or...'Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see'. Schopenhauer. I know some of this may seem like nonsense. But it's a discipline and I do it with purpose.

Meanwhile, remaining emotional attachments to the socially acceptable drugs...I Want a cigarette or a Strong Drink, or at least, at long last, a painkiller that actually works. Arnica Montana and DL-Phenylalanine don't quite cut the mustard. Thirty minute pause while I go for a walk in the cold dark park, come back home and cut my own hair for the second time in my life. (Not bad at all, just as good as all my last cuts by semi professionals...) One side is half an inch longer but WT actual F? Who cares? Fate is gonna find you with a glass of champagne? Make it a triple espresso and half a bottle of good whisky and then we can talk. And a cigarette...my lack of smoking is making me want to claw and bite this wood table into splinters. There...a normal paragraph of usual life...just in time for the end of a page.

Favourite depressing headline from the new year...'Couple who left son to drown in lake were poor parents, judge concludes.' The wisdom of Solomon. My favourite headline from last month has to be ;A fried egg has no place in the nativity, say 77 percent of parents”\ My first thought was, uff, so 33 percent think it is ok?? My second thought was, well, why not eh? Makes as much sense as anything else in that twisted story....I read a useful column in a newspaper last month, called 'Failsafe ways to spot a Liar'. Glad to see my instincts were right according to researchers and clinical psychologists. Some humans are bereft of as much emotional intelligence and morality as AI machines. Blame it on childhood trauma,always an easy way out. How was the first year of your life? Use trance hypnotism recall, recall and release.

'The key task of a muse is to allow the artist to see his own feminine aspect that is otherwise invisible to him and to be a screen that fits the artist's projections. What completes the artist isn't the intrinsic qualities of the romantic interest but the artist's own feminine archetype. So, to the extent that the artist's projections dominate or replace the muse's own qualities, the muse's soul is dissipated.' Allan Showalter, psychiatrist.

Time to go back to being oblivious to the 'news' again, in the two minutes which are left, there is space to become plenty of nothing and locate your Will. See you in a few weeks after my probable final birthday, which falls upon an Easter Monday this year. Too late for a resurrection (well, there are pills for that anyway) but in time for the beauty of rising Spring with the binary healing of cabala chakras...every man and woman is a star...Stay well....

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: October 2017

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of October 2017 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

First of all there is the  Madrid-centrics who claimed the Catalan referendum didn’t count who have tried to say that, as the Catalan independence referendum had less than 50% turnout the result is invalid - comments that could only be made by willfully ignoring the copious amount of footage posted online showing the Guardia Civil shutting down polling stations with excessive force, preventing people from being able to enter the polling stations by attacking them with batons and rubber bullets, removing ballot boxes from polling stations, or for that matter the reports of the software at the polling stations behind hacked.

Amidst the carnage the Catalan referendum became, special mention should go to Las Palmas for trying to justify having a Spain flag embroidered onto their kit for their visit to Barcelona, while Real Madrid handed fans paper Spanish flags bearing the slogan “We are all Spain” with instructions to unveil them in the 12th minute of their match against Espanyol - who happen to be a Barcelona-based team.

On the other side of the Atlantic we had every single media outlet running the “Liberals are politicising the Las vegas shooting” argument into the ground, and believe me there was a lot of them - just like there were after Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other mass shootings in the US that would imply to a sane mind that maybe the US should have gun laws that are a bit more up to date.

Special mention, though, to NRA TV for their online video which looked uncannily like a recruitment ad for ISIS.  I would link it, but...you know.

With the Britait process looking more and more like a shitshow, along came Michael Gove with the solution to the nation’s woes: pig’s ears.  Not only did he seem to be oblivious to how his plan of exporting pig’s ears to China to boost the British economy sounded like something The Onion would think sounded too silly to run with, somehow it never occurred to him or his advisors that they were making satirists’ jobs remarkably easy by writing countless headlines about making a pig’s ear of trade negotiations - or, you know, how his plan was utter gibberish that fails to add up as the EU already esports pig’s ears to China.

On the subject of talking gibberish, we had Jeremy Hunt state that the Tories set up the NHS, which is an outright lie that anyone with access to a search engine would find out very, very quickly.

Making it a Tory hat trick of gibberishness, there was also Amber Rudd making this exact quote in her latest battle against websites having encryption: “I don't need to understand how encryption works to want to deny its use to criminals” as it somehow slipped her mind that, as Home Secretary with a bug up her backside about encryption, having a basic knowledge of what she’s talking about would be a good idea.

...and because the Tories can’t seem to stop spouting dickheadish nonsense, there was Michael Fabricant’s response to the story of the Tory sleaze dossier breaking where he tried to dismiss the whole thing as a witch hunt, saying those named were “blameless” because they were “everybody was sloshed” - and, unsurprisingly, when the full list was leaked, Fabricant’s name was on it.

Finally, mercifully, moving away from the Tories, we have far too many people defending Adam Blampied in the wake of his manipulating both fans and contributors to WhatCulture into sending him nude photos, almost every single one of these people using either false equivalencies or ignoring Blampied’s own statement where admitted guilt and asked people to not hound those who spoke up about what he had done. 

Sticking to the theme of fanboys without an objective bone in their body, we also have all those Nintendo fanboys who went apeshit at Jim Sterling giving Super Mario Odyssey a score of 7/10 in spite of the pretty hard to ignore fact that Jim Sterling never gave the game that score as he hadn’t even reviewed the game at the time of the fabricated article going online, in fact Jim Sterling hasn’t given games a score out of ten for several months - because the last time he did, when he gave The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a score of 7/10, it led to those same Nintendo zealots not only going apeshit, but also sending death threats and doxxing his site as if anything below 9/10 is a “bad” review and must be punished.

And last, but by no means least (especially by volume) we have Donald Trump.

[vitalmindandbody]

How technology disrupted the truth | Katharine Viner

Social media has withdrawn the word menacing the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an period when everyone has their own information. But the consequences goes beyond journalism

One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an indecent act with a dead animals heading, in agreement with the Daily Mail. A eminent Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took its participation in an extravagant start rite at a Piers Gaveston event, committing a dead pig, the working paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining culture; the perpetrators of the the fib claimed their beginning was an MP, who said he had read photographic testify: His extraordinary proposition is that the future PM placed a private part of his anatomy into the animal.

The story, extracted from a new profile of Cameron, triggered an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist “ministers “, and numerous “ve felt it” rang true-life for a former is part of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were veering on Twitter, and even elderly legislators joined the merriment: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had entertained the whole country, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was hogging the headlines. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it has not been able to dignify the narrative with a reaction but soon it was forced to issue a dismissal. And so a potent humankind was sexually dishonor, in such a way that had nothing to do with his contentious politics, and in a way he had been able to never actually respond to. But who attends? He could take it.

Become a Guardian ally

Then, after a full daylight of online levity, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail reporter who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire financier, gone on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, abominable scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational allegation, Oakeshott acknowledged she had none.

We couldnt get to the bottom of that beginnings allegations, she remarked on Channel 4 News. So we are only reported the accounting that different sources gave us We dont be seen whether we believe it is correct. In other messages, there was no evidence that the prime minister of the United Kingdom had once positioned a private part of his anatomy into the mouth of a dead boar a tale reported in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook informs, which many people probably still believe to be true today.

Oakeshott travelled so far to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: Its up to other people to decide whether they return it any credibility or not, she deduced. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish claims were published on the basis of flimsy ground, but this was an unusually impudent apology. It seemed that journalists were no longer required to believe their own tales to be true , nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to the reader who does not even know the identity of the source to make up their own judgment. But based on what? Gut instinct, hunch, mood?

Does the truth problem any more?

Nine months after Britain woke up tittering at Camerons hypothetical porcine intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at 8am, announcing his own abdication.

The British beings have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected, Cameron swore. It was not a decision that was taken gently , not least because so many things were suggested by so many different organisations about the significance of this decision. So there are still no doubt about the result.

But what soon became clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of awareness-raising campaigns that dominated the news for months, it was abruptly obvious that the triumphing slope had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU while the deceitful claims that carried the leave safarus to succes unexpectedly disintegrated. At 6.31 am on Friday 24 June, precisely over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have 350 m a week spare to spend on the NHS a key affirm of Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan was also pointed out that immigration was not likely to be reduced the second key claim.

The Vote Leave campaign bus, boasting a widely quarrelled allegation about UK contributions to the EU. Picture: Stefan Rousseau/ PA

It was barely the first time that legislators had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been incorrect all along. This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fiction with realities, but quickly found that the currency of point had been badly debased.

The remain areas fretting information and worried experts were dismissed as Project Fear and rapidly neutralised by opposing details: if 99 experts said the economy would disintegrate and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different opinion of the situation.( This is a disastrous misstep that discontinues up obscuring actuality, and resembles how some report climate change .) Michael Gove was indicated that people in this country have had enough of experts on Sky News. He also likened 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler.

For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious declaration and rubbished every expert caution, filling the figurehead pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to count many of them subsequently softly redressed in very small print. A week before the vote on the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory Breaking Point poster, and the Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead the covering of the Daily Mail peculiarity a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline We are from Europe make us in! The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which too carried the story, were pressured to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.

The shameless neglect for details did not stop after the referendum: precisely this weekend, the short-lived Republican leader nominee Andrea Leadsom, fresh from a starring role in the leave expedition, substantiated the dropping strength of indicate. After telling the Seasons that being a mother would acquire her a better PM than her competitor Theresa May, she exclaimed gutter journalism ! and accused the newspaper of misinterpreting her observes even though she remarked exactly that, clearly and definitively and on tape. Leadsom is a post-truth politician even about her own truths.

When a information have started to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between knowledge that are true and facts that are not. The leave expedition was well aware of this and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Promote Standards Authority has no power to police political asserts. A few eras after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukips largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his line-up knew all along that facts has not been able to win the day. It was taking an American-style media approach, said Banks. What they said early on was Facts dont act, and thats it. The continue expedition featured information, fact, knowledge, happening, information. It only doesnt make. You have got to connect with people emotionally. Its the Trump success.

Portrait: Sbastien Thibault

It was little surprise that some people were appalled after research results to discover that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised interests. When realities dont duty and voters dont trust the media, everyone believe in their own truth and research results, as we have just seen, is also possible devastating.

How did we end up here? And how do we secure it?

Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant chassis of information was the printed page: insight was chiefly delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.

Now, we are caught in a series of disorient duels between opposing forces-out: between true and fib, happening and gossip, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open scaffold of the web as its inventors imagined it and the gated paddocks of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed world and a foolish mob.

What is common to these strivings and what clears their solution an urgent matter is that they all involve the diminish status of truth.This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply entails, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those facts are, and when “they dont have” consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Increasingly, what weighs as a reality is just my view that someone feels to be true and technological sciences has reached it very easy for these facts to circulate with a speed and reaching that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era( or even a decade ago ). A questionable storey about Cameron and a boar appears in a tabloid one morning, and by midday, it has flown of all the countries on social media and turned up in trusted bulletin informants everywhere. This may seem like a small stuff, but its consequences are enormous.

The Truth, as Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter !, their history of the Sun newspaper, is a bald-headed explanation which every newspaper books at its peril. There are usually various conflicting actualities on any passed subject, but in the era of the printing press, texts on a sheet nailed situations down, whether the government has turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day introduced another update or a chastening, and we all shared a common make of facts.

This settled truth was frequently handed down from above: an launched truism, often fixed in place by an organisation. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a courtesy to approval, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to objection the supremacy of the press. Now, beings distrust much of what is presented as knowledge particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views and while some of that mistrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

In the digital age, “its easier to” than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real hour. To pick one example among numerous, during the course of its November 2015 Paris terror attacks, gossips swiftly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that Franois Hollande had suffered a stroke. Relied news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.

Sometimes rumours like these spread out of terror, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which “owners corporations” or regiman offers beings to transmit their meaning. Whatever the incentive, deceptions and realities now spread the same way, through what professors call an report cascade. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, beings send on what others envision, even if the information is untrue, confusing or incomplete, since they are think they have learned something helpful. This repetition repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable force. You share a acquaintances berth on Facebook, perhaps to depict kinship or agreement or that youre in the know, and thus you increase the visibility of their berth to others.

Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebooks news feed are designed to give us more of what the hell is think we want which means that the form of “the worlds” we encounter every day in our own personal brook has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the word filter bubble in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised entanglement and including with regard to Googles personalised inquiry run, which means that no two peoples Google searches are the same is necessary that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or expands our worldview, and least likely to encounter realities that disprove false information that others have shared.

Parisers request, at the time, was that those loping social media stages should ensure that their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and information thats important , not just the stuff thats most popular or most self-validating. But in less than five years, thanks to the prodigious dominance of a few social platforms, the filter foam that Pariser described has become much more extreme.

On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a evocative sketch of the supremacy of the filter foam and the serious civic ramifications for a macrocosm where information flows largely through social networks TAGEND

I am actively researching through Facebook for parties celebrating the Brexit leave win, but the filter froth is SO strong, and increases SO far into concepts like Facebooks custom research that I cant find anyone who is joyous* in spite of the fact that over half the two countries is clearly joyous today* and despite the fact that Im* actively* looking to hear what they are saying.

This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this question now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our civilizations Were get countries where one half simply doesnt know anything at all about the other.

But requesting engineering companies to do something about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily prepared rather than one roasted into the extremely meaning of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see.

Facebook, which launched only in 2004 , currently has 1.6 bn customers worldwide. It has become the dominant space for people to find information on the internet and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the paper epoch. As Emily Bell has written: Social media hasnt exactly immersed journalism, it has withdrawn everything. It has withdrawn political campaigns, banking institutions, personal histories, the rest industry, retail, even government and security.

Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian has outlined the seismic affect of social media for journalism. Our report ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years, she wrote in March, than perhaps at any time in the past 500. The future of publishing is being put into the sides of the few, who now control the destiny of the many. News publishers have lost limit over the deployment of their journalism, which for many readers is now filtered through algorithm and scaffolds which are opaque and erratic. This is necessary that social media corporations have become overwhelmingly potent in determining which is something we read and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other folks drive. As Bell documents: There is a far greater concentration of power in this regard than there has ever been in the past.

Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a torrent of information chosen by sidekicks, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old-time project of a wide-open entanglement where hyperlinks from website to place formed a non-hierarchical and decentralised system of information had been widely ousted by programmes designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which( such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not stand outward relates at all.

Many people, in fact, specially girls , now expend more and more of their age on closed chit-chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privatelyperhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social seats. But the closed room of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.

The centralisation of information is building us all much less potent Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned for six years old. Photo: Arash Ashoorinia for the Guardian

As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years old for his online act, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the diversity that the world wide web had originally contemplated has given path to the centralisation of information inside a hand-picked few social networks and the final result is seeing us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations.

Of course, Facebook does not end what you read at least not in the traditional gumption of making decisions and nor does it prescribe what news organisations grow. But when one programme becomes the dominant generator for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium.( The most visible evidence of Facebooks influence on journalism is the hysterium that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithms that threatens to reduce the page deems sent to publishers .)

In the last few years, numerous news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food bulletin, chasing page positions in the vain hope of luring clicks and promote( or asset) but like junk food, you hate yourself when youve gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract commerce with false reports that are designed to look like real information, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to information that is mislead or sensationally deceitful, even if it wasnt established in order to entrap: the brand-new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truism or quality.

Of course, journalists have got things incorrect in the past either by mistake or racism or sometimes by goal.( Freddie Starr probably didnt eat a hamster .~ ATAGEND) So it would be a mistake to think this is a new phenomenon of the digital age. But what is new and important is that today, rumour and lies are spoken just as widely as copper-bottomed information and often more widely, because they are wilder than actuality and more exciting to share. The disbelief of such an approach was carried most nakedly by Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly employed by Gawker as a specialist in high-traffic viral narrations. Nowadays its not important if a storey real, he said in 2014. The only occasion that really matters is whether parties click on it. Information, he intimated, are over; they are a relic from the age of the printing press, when readers had no choice. He persisted: If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core , not news.

The increasing prevalence of such an approach suggests that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the values of journalism a consumerist transformation. Instead of strengthening social bails, or creating an informed public, or the notion of news as a civic good, a democratic demand, it creates gangs, which spread instantaneous falsifications that are appropriate their views, reinforcing each others ideologies, driving each other deeper into shared minds, rather than supported facts.

But the disturb is that the business model of most digital news organisations is based around clicks. News media around the world has reached a fever-pitch of frenetic binge-publishing, in order to scrape up digital marketings pennies and cents.( And theres not much publicizing to be got: during the first three months of 2016, 85 cents of each new dollar spent in the US on online promote was just going Google and Facebook. That used to go to bulletin publishers .)

In the news feed on your telephone, all stories search the same whether they come from a believable source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible roots are also publishing false-hearted, misleading, or purposely ridiculous narrations. Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically reproduce some of the worst trash out there, which lends legality to bullshit, said Brooke Binkowski, an editor at the debunking website Snopes, in an interview with the Guardian in April. Not all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are.

We should be careful not to dismiss anything with an appealing digital headline as clickbait appealing headlines are a good occasion, if they contribute the reader to quality journalism, both serious and not. My notion is precisely what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: the journalism that parties appreciate the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a great deal of work where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over enterprises big or small, important or entertaining. It is the reverse of so-called churnalism, the endless recycling of other publics fibs for clicks.

The digital publicize modeling doesnt currently discriminate between true or not true, merely large or small. As the American political reporter Dave Weigel wrote in the aftermath of a hoax storey that became a viral hit all the way back in 2013: Too good to check was just a admonishing to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit floors. Now its a business model.

A news-publishing industry urgently chasing down every cheap click doesnt definitely sounds like an industry in a position of strength, and indeed, bulletin publishing as a business is in trouble. The shift to digital publishing has been a stimulating development for journalism as I said in my 2013 AN Smith lecture at the University of Melbourne, The Rise of the Reader, it has induced a fundamental redrawing of writers rapport with our gathering, how we think about our readers, our insight of our role in civilization, our status. It has signified we have found new ways to get storeys from our audience, from data, from social media. It has given us new ways to tell narrations with interactive engineerings and now with virtual reality. It has given us new ways to distribute our journalism, to find new readers in surprising situates; and it has given us new ways to engage with our audiences, opening ourselves up to objection and debate.

But while the possibilities for journalism have been strengthened by the digital developments of the last few years, the business example is under mausoleum menace, because no matter how many clinks you get, it will never be enough. And if you charge readers to retrieve your journalism you have a big challenge to coaxed the digital customer who is used to get information for free to part with their cash.

News publishers everywhere are seeing earnings and revenue drop-off dramatically. If you crave a stark sketch of the brand-new worlds of digital media, consider the first-quarter financial results announced by the New York Times and Facebook within a week of one another earlier this year. The New York Times announces that it controlling gains had fallen by 13%, to $51.5 m healthier than the majority of members of the rest of the publishing industry, but quite a put. Facebook, meanwhile, revealed that its net income had tripled in the two periods to a quite astounding $1.51 bn.

Many journalists have lost their jobs in the past decade. The number of journalists in the UK shrank by up to one-third between 2001 and 2010; US newsrooms declined by a similar quantity between 2006 and 2013. In Australia, there was a 20% cut in the journalistic workforce between 2012 and 2014 alone. Earlier this year, at the Guardian we announced that we would need to lose 100 journalistic outlooks. In March, the Independent ceased dwelling as a engrave newspaper. Since 2005, according to investigate by Press Gazette, the number of local newspapers in the UK has fallen by 181 again , not because of a problem with journalism, but because of a number of problems with funding it.

But reporters losing their jobs was not just a number of problems for reporters: it has a damaging impact on the entire culture. As the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas warned, back in 2007: When reorganisation and cost-cutting in this core place jeopardise accustomed journalistic guidelines, it hits at the very heart of the political public sphere. Because, without the flow of information gained through extended research, and without the stimulant of arguings based on an expertise that doesnt is cheap, public communication loses its discursive vitality. The public media would then have continued to resist populist partialities, and are no longer able to fulfill its function it should in the purposes of the a democratic constitutional state.

Perhaps, then, the focus of the report manufacture needs to turn to commercial innovation: how to rescue the funding required of journalism, which is what is under threat. Journalism has appreciated spectacular innovation in the past two digital decades, but business simulations have not. In the words of all my fellow members Mary Hamilton, the Guardians executive editor for audience: Weve altered everything about our journalism and not sufficient about our businesses.

The impact on journalism of the crisis in the business prototype is that, in chasing down cheap clinks at the expense of accuracy and veracity, news organisations undermine the extremely rationale they exist: to find things out and tell readers the truth to report, report, report.

Many newsrooms are in danger of losing what matters most about journalism: the valuable, civic, pounding-the-streets, sifting-the-database, asking-challenging-questions hard graft of uncovering happenings that someone doesnt crave you to know. Serious, public-interest journalism is demanding, and there is more of a need for it than ever. It helps keep the potent honest; it helps people make sense of the world and their lieu in it. Realities and reliable information play an essential role in the functioning of democracy and the digital period has reached that even more obvious.

But we must not stand the chaos of the present to throw the past in a rosy-cheeked light as is apparent from the recent resolution to a tragedy that becomes one of the darkest minutes in the history of British journalism. At the end of April, a two-year-long investigation ruled that the 96 people who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 had been unlawfully killed and has not been able to contributed to the dangerous place at the football soil. The decision was the culmination of an indefatigable 27 -year-campaign by the victims kinfolks, whose event was reported for two decades with further detail and sensitivity by Guardian correspondent David Conn. His journalism helped uncover the real truism about what really happened to Hillsborough, and the precede cover-up by the police a classic speciman of a reporter deeming the powerful to account on behalf of the less powerful.

What their own families had been campaigning against for nearly three decades was a lie put into circulation by the Sun. The tabloids aggressive rightwing editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, blamed the followers for the catastrophe, showing they had forced their method into the dirt without tickets a claim afterward revealed to be incorrect. Harmonizing to Horrie and Chippindales history of The Sun, MacKenzie annulled his own reporter and apply the words THE TRUTH on the front page, alleging that Liverpool love were drunk, that they picked the pockets of victims, that they punched, knocked and urinated on police officers, that they screamed that they missed copulation with a dead female victim. The devotees, replied a high-ranking police officer, were behaving like animals. The story, as Chippindale and Horrie write, is a classic smear, free of any attributable indication and precisely fitted MacKenzies formula by publicising the half-baked naive prejudice being singer all over the country.

It is hard to be thought that Hillsborough could happen now: if 96 parties were mashed to death in front of 53, 000 smartphones, with photographs and eyewitness accounts all posted to social media, would it have taken so long for the truth to come out? Today, the police or Kelvin MacKenzie would not have been able to lie so blatantly and for so long.

The truth is a struggle. It takes hard graft. But the struggle is worthwhile: traditional bulletin ethics are important and they matter and they are worth defend. The digital change has meant that correspondents rightly, in my view are more accountable to their audience. And as the Hillsborough story depicts, the old media were surely capable of perpetrating scandalizing misrepresentations, which could take times to untangle. Some of the old hierarchies have been decisively undermined, which has led to a most open debate and a more substantial challenge to the old societies whose interests often reigned the media. But persons under the age of relentless and instant information and uncertain truths can be overwhelming. We careen from scandalize to scandalize, but forget each one very quickly: its doomsday every afternoon.

At the same time, the levelling of the information scenery has unleashed brand-new downpours of combating racism and sexism and brand-new means of shaming and harassment, suggesting a world-wide in which the loudest and crudest polemics will prevail. It is an atmosphere that has proved especially unfriendly to women and people of colour, uncovering that health inequalities of the physical world are reproduction all too easily in online infinites. The Guardian is not immune which is why one of my first initiatives as editor-in-chief was to launch the Web We Want project, in order to combat a general culture of online abuse and question how we as the two institutions can foster better and more civil discussions on the web.

Above all, current challenges for journalism today is not simply technological innovation or the creation of new business examples. It is to establish what persona journalistic organisations still play in a public dialogue that has already become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised. The startling political developments of the past year including the vote for Brexit and the advent of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for the US presidency are not simply the byproducts of a resurgent populism or the revolt of those left behind by world capitalism.

The rise of Donald Trump is a evidence of the communications media developing weakness, according to academic Zeynep Tufekci. Picture: Jim Cole/ AP

As the academic Zeynep Tufekci insisted in an paper earlier this year, the rise of Trump is actually a symptom of the communications media proliferating weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable to say.( A same speciman could be made for the Brexit safarus .) For decades, writers at major media organisations acted as gatekeepers who transferred ruling on what ideas could be publicly explored, and what was considered too radical, Tufekci wrote. The weakening of these gatekeepers is both positive and negative; there are opportunities and there are dangers.

As we can see from the past, the old-fashioned gatekeepers were also capable of great injure, and they were often imperious in repudiating infinite to statements they saw outside the mainstream political consensus. But without some pattern of consensus, it is hard for any truism to take hold. The fall of the gatekeepers has given Trump space to raise formerly taboo subjects, such as the cost of a world free-trade regime that interests business rather than proletarians, an issue that American upper-class and much of the media have all along been dismissed as well as, more obviously, giving his outrageous lies to flourish.

When the predominate humor is anti-elite and anti-authority, trust in big-hearted establishments, including the media, begins to crumble.

I is argued that a strong journalistic culture is merit fighting for. So is a business pattern that complies with and honors media organisations that gave the quest for truism at the very heart of everything improving an informed, active world that scrutinises the powerful , not an ill-informed, reactionary gang that attacks the most vulnerable sectors. Conventional report evaluates must be cuddled and celebrated: reporting, verifying, reaping together eyewitness accounts, making a serious attempt to discover what really happened.

We are privileged to live in an period when we can use many new technologies and the help of our audience to do that. But it is essential to grapple with the issues underpinning digital culture, and realise that the switching from reproduce to digital media was never just about engineering. We must also relating to the brand-new power dynamics that these changes have created. Technology and media do not exist in isolation they help shape civilization, just as “they il be” shaped by it in turn. That represents hiring with beings as civic actors, citizens, equates. It is about comprising capability to chronicle, fighting for a public room, and taking responsibility for creating the kind of world we want to live in.

Main illustration: Sbastien Thibault

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How engineering disrupted the truth | Katharine Viner

Social media has immersed the information peril the funding required of public-interest reporting and ushering in an period when everyone has their own realities. But the consequences goes beyond journalism

One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news article. The “ministers “, David Cameron, had committed an indecent act with a dead swine heading, according to the Daily Mail. A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron formerly took part in an scandalous initiation liturgy at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig, the working paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their root was an MP, who said he had ascertained photographic indicate: His extraordinary prompting is that the future PM positioned a private part of his anatomy into the animal.

The story, extracted from a brand-new account of Cameron, triggered an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist “ministers “, and many “ve felt it” rang true-blue for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within times, #Piggate and #Hameron were veering on Twitter, and even senior politicians assembled the recreation: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had entertained the whole country, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was hogging the headlines. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not dignify the fib with a reaction but soon it was forced to issue a negation. And so a strong follower was sexually reproached, in a way that had nothing to do with his contentious politics, and in a way he could never actually respond to. But who attends? He could take it.

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Then, after a full epoch of online revelry, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail columnist who had co-written the profile with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire industrialist, gone on Tv and are recognizing that she did not know whether her huge, appalling scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the shocking declaration, Oakeshott declared she had none.

We couldnt get to the bottom of that generators accusations, she articulated on Channel 4 News. So we are only reported the account that the source gave us We dont say whether we believe it is correct. In other paroles, there was no evidence that the premier of the United Kingdom had once slipped a private part of his anatomy into the mouth of a dead boar a floor pointed out in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook revises, which numerous beings probably still believe to be true today.

Oakeshott get so far to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: Its up to other people to decide whether they return it any credibility or not, she concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish declarations were published on the basis of flimsy prove, but this was an uncommonly brazen-faced explanation. It seemed that columnists were no longer required to believe their own storeys to be true , nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to the reader who does not even know the identity of the source to make up their own head. But based on what? Gut instinct, feeling, humor?

Does the truth matter any more?

Nine months after Britain woke up chuckling at Camerons hypothetical porcine intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at 8am, announcing his own abdication.

The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected, Cameron proclaimed. It was not a decision that was taken gently , not least because so many things were suggested by so many different organisations about the significance of the present decision. So there are still no doubt about the result.

But what soon became clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of a campaign that predominated the report for months, it was unexpectedly obvious that the triumphing slope “havent had” plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU while the deceptive am of the view that carried the leave campaign to succes abruptly crumbled. At 6.31 am on Friday 24 June, just over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have 350 m a few weeks spare to spend on the NHS a key assertion of Brexiteers that was even decorated on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan was also pointed out that immigration was not likely to be reduced the second key claim.

The Vote Leave campaign bus, peculiarity a widely disputed claim about UK contributions to the EU. Image: Stefan Rousseau/ PA

It was scarcely the first time that legislators had failed to deliver what they predicted, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after succes that the promises had been untrue all along. This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless abide campaign attempted to fight fiction with points, but immediately found that the currency movements information had being severely debased.

The remain slopes obsessing points and worried experts were rejected as Project Fear and rapidly neutralised by resisting knowledge: if 99 experts said the economy would gate-crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different look of the situation.( This is a ruinous correct that discontinues up fogging truism, and repetition how some report climate change .) Michael Gove declared that people in this country have had enough of experts on Sky News. He also equated 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler.

For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious allegation and rubbished every expert notification, filling the figurehead pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to weigh many of them eventually calmly corrected in very small print. A week before the voting on the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory Breaking Point poster, and the Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead the cros of the Daily Mail featured a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry penetrating the UK, with the headline We are from Europe give us in! The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which too carried the story, were action to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.

The brazen-faced ignore for facts did not stop after the referendum: simply this weekend, the short-lived Conservative leader candidate Andrea Leadsom, fresh from a starring role in the leave expedition, expressed the lessening dominance of testify. After telling the Hours that being a mother would establish her a better PM than her contender Theresa May, she wept gutter journalism ! and alleged the newspaper of falsifying her mentions even though she remarked precisely that, clearly and definitively and on tape. Leadsom is a post-truth politician even about her own truths.

When a point have started to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between happenings that are true and facts that are not. The leave expedition was well aware of this and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertise Standards Authority has no power to police political says. A few periods after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukips largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his slope knew all along that facts would not win the day. It was taking an American-style media approach, enunciated Banks. What they said early on was Facts dont effort, and thats it. The persist expedition peculiarity knowledge, detail, happening, information, fact. It only doesnt undertaking. You have got to connect with parties emotionally. Its the Trump success.

Portrait: Sbastien Thibault

It was little bombshell that some people were appalled after the result has found that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised assistances. When knowledge dont effort and voters dont trust the media, everyone believes in their own truth and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.

How did we end up here? And how do we determine it?

Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a reporting period dizzying change. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed sheet: insight was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and adjudicated truths.

Now, we are caught in a series of embarrassing duels between resisting armies: between truth and falsity, knowledge and report, kindness and brutality; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open scaffold of the web as its inventors envisioned it and the gated pens of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a foolish mob.

What is common to these battles and what establishes their resolution an urgent matter is that they all involve the decrease status of truth.This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply makes, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot will be voting in favour of what those trues are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Increasingly, what weighs as a reality is just my view that someone feels to be true and technological sciences has drawn it very easy for these facts to circulate with a quicken and contact that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era( or even ten years ago ). A questionable fib about Cameron and a animal shall be published in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has winged around the world on social media and turned up in trusted word generators everywhere. This appears to have been a small concern, but its consequences are enormous.

The Truth, as Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter !, their history of the Sun newspaper, is a bald-pated testimony which every newspaper prints at its peril. There are usually several conflicting facts on any rendered subject, but in the era of the printing press, texts on a page nailed occasions down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The message felt like the truth, at the least until the next day produced another update or a chastening, and we all shared a common initiate of facts.

This settled truth was generally handed down from above: an built reality, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without inaccuracies: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a homage to government, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to defy the dominance of the press. Now, parties doubt often of what is presented as reality especially if the facts in question are awkward, or out of sync with their own views and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true as we often see in emergency situations, when report is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the course of its November 2015 Paris terrorist attack, hearsays rapidly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that Franois Hollande had suffered a stroke. Relied news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.

Sometimes rumours like these spread out of anxiety, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime offers parties to transmit their theme. Whatever the intention, falsities and happenings now spread the same way, through what academics call an datum cascade. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, beings send on what others feel, even if the information is incorrect, confusing or imperfect, since they are think they have learned something value. This repetition repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a sidekicks berth on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that youre in the know, and thus you enhance the visibility of their upright to others.

Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebooks news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want which means that the form of “the worlds” we encounter every day in our own personal torrent has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing ideologies. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the word filter froth in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised entanglement and including with regard to Googles personalised search function, which means that no two peoples Google pursuits are the same means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to meeting points that disprove false information that others have shared.

Parisers request, at the time, was that those loping social media pulpits should ensure that their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and information thats important , not just the stuff thats most popular or most self-validating. But in less than five years, thanks to the staggering capability of a few social scaffolds, the filter bubble that Pariser described has already become much more extreme.

On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid instance of the influence of the filter foam and the serious civic upshots for a world-wide where information flows primarily through social networks TAGEND

I am actively examining through Facebook for beings celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter illusion is SO strong, and provides SO far into situations like Facebooks custom pursuit that I cant find anyone who is joyous* in spite of the fact that over half the country is clearly exultant today* and in spite of the fact that Im* actively* looking to hear what they are saying.

This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this trouble now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the rending apart of the fabric of our societies Were going countries where one half precisely doesnt know anything at all about the other.

But questioning engineering a corporation to do something about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fastened rather than one broiled into the exceedingly idea of social networks that are designed to give you what the hell are you and your friends want to see.

Facebook, which propelled simply in 2004 , now has 1.6 bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant direction for parties to find news on the internet and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the paper era. As Emily Bell has written: Social media hasnt only withdrawn journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has withdrawn political campaigns, banking systems, personal records, the recreation manufacture, retail, even government and security.

Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian has outlined the seismic influence of social media for journalism. Our report ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years, she wrote in March, than perhaps at any time in the past 500. The future of publishing is being put into the handwritings of the few, who now control the destiny of the many. News publishers have lost self-control over the dissemination of their journalism, which for many readers is now filtered through algorithm and pulpits which are opaque and unpredictable. This is necessary that social media corporations have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read and tremendously profitable from the monetisation of other peoples operate. As Bell mentions: There is a far greater concentration of supremacy in this regard than there has ever been in the past.

Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a flow of information be selected by friends, contacts and family, treated by secret algorithm. The age-old project of a wide-open network where hyperlinks from website to place generated a non-hierarchical and decentralised system of information has been largely ousted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which( such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not tolerate outward associates at all.

Many beings, in fact, specially girls , now expend more and more of their experience on closed schmooze apps, which allow users to create groups to share meanings privatelyperhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social seats. But the closed seat of a chitchat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden-variety of Facebook or other social networks.

The centralisation of information is preparing us all much less powerful Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned for six years old. Photo: Arash Ashoorinia for the Guardian

As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online task, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the diversity that the world wide web was previously envisaged “ve been given” lane to the centralisation of information inside a select few social networks and the final result is realise us all less strong in relation to government and corporations.

Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read at least not in the conventional appreciation of making decisions and nor does it prescribe what news organisations grow. But when one platform becomes the dominant root for accessing datum, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium.( The most visible evidence of Facebooks influence on journalism is the anxiety that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithms that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers .)

In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food information, chasing page positions in the vain hope of captivating clinks and advertising( or asset) but like junk food, you dislike yourself when youve gorged on it. The more extreme appearance of this phenomenon has been the creation of phony report farms, which aroused commerce with untrue reports that are designed to look like real bulletin, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But these principles applies to bulletin that is deceive or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasnt established in order to delude: the brand-new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than actuality or quality.

Of course, journalists have got things wrong in the past either by mistake or racism or sometimes by purport.( Freddie Starr probably didnt ingest a hamster .~ ATAGEND) So it would be a mistake to think this is a new phenomenon of the digital age. But what is new and important is that today, rumour and lies are spoken just as widely as copper-bottomed details and often more widely, why i am wilder than world and more exciting to share. The mistrust of this approach was uttered most nakedly by Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly be applied by Gawker as a specialist in high-traffic viral narrations. Nowadays its not important if a story real, he said in 2014. The only act that really matters is whether parties click on it. Information, he suggested, are over; they are a relic from persons under the age of the printing press, when readers got no choice. He persisted: If a person is not sharing a news article, it is, at its core , not news.

The increasing prevalence of such an approach suggests that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the values of journalism a consumerist alter. Instead of strengthening social bonds, or creating an advised public, or the notion of news as a civic good, a democratic necessity, it creates gangs, which spread instant fabrications that fit their views, reinforcing one another creeds, driving each other deeper into shared opinions, rather than substantiated facts.

But the trouble is that the business representation of most digital news organisations is based around clinks. News media around the world has reached a fever-pitch of frenzied binge-publishing, in order to scrape up digital advertises pennies and cents.( And theres not much advertise to be went: in the first quarter of 2016, 85 pennies of each new dollar spent in the US on online advertise was just going Google and Facebook. That used to go to information publishers .)

In the bulletin feed on your phone, all stories look the same whether they come from a believable generator or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible generators are also producing untrue, confusing, or intentionally outrageous stories. Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically publish some of the worst trash out there, which lends legitimacy to bullshit, pronounced Brooke Binkowski, an writer at the debunking website Snopes, in an interview with the Guardian in April. Not all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are.

We should be careful not to dismiss anything with an appealing digital headline as clickbait plea headlines are a good circumstance, if they produce the reader to excellence journalism, both serious and not. My idea is that what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: the journalism that people importance the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a great deal of work where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over exercises big or small, important or entertaining. It is the reverse of so-called churnalism, the endless recycling of other people narrations for clicks.

The digital advertise simulate doesnt currently discriminate between true-blue or not true, precisely large or small. As the American political reporter Dave Weigel wrote in the aftermath of a hoax legend that became a viral hit all the way back in 2013: Too good to check was just a alarm to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit tales. Now its a business model.

A news-publishing industry urgently chasing down every cheap clink doesnt sound like an industry in a position of strength, and surely, report publishing as a business is in trouble. The shifting to digital publishing has been a thrilling developed for journalism as I said in my 2013 AN Smith lecture at the University of Melbourne, The Rise of the Reader, it has induced a fundamental redrawing of writers tie-in with our audience, how we think about our readers, our knowledge of our capacity in civilization, our status. It has meant we have found new ways to get floors from our gathering, from data, from social media. It has given us new ways to tell tales with interactive technologies and now with virtual reality. It has given us new ways to distribute our journalism, to find new readers in surprising places; and it has given us new ways to engage with our audiences, opening ourselves up to objection and debate.

But while the possibilities for journalism have been strengthened by the digital improvements of the last few years, the business modeling is under grave threat, because no matter how many clinks you get, it will never be enough. And if you bill readers to retrieve your journalism you have a big challenge to coaxed the digital shopper who is used to getting report for free to part with their cash.

News publishers everywhere are seeing gains and income lower dramatically. If you miss a striking sketch of the new worlds of digital media, consider the first-quarter financial results announced by the New York Times and Facebook within a week of one another earlier this year. The New York Times announces that it controlling earnings had fallen by 13%, to $51.5 m healthier than most of the rest of the publishing industry, but quite a plunge. Facebook, meanwhile, revealed that its net profit had tripled in the same period to a fairly astounding $1.51 bn.

Many writers have lost their jobs in the past decade. The number of the reporters in the UK shrank by up to one-third between 2001 and 2010; US newsrooms declined by a similar quantity between 2006 and 2013. In Australia, there was a 20% cut in the journalistic personnel between 2012 and 2014 alone. Earlier this year, at the Guardian we announced that we would need to lose 100 journalistic berths. In March, the Independent ceased dwelling as a reproduce newspaper. Since 2005, according to research by Press Gazette, the number of local newspapers in the UK has fallen by 181 again , not because of a number of problems with journalism, but because of a problem with funding it.

But reporters losing their jobs is not simply a number of problems for writers: it has a damaging impact on the entire culture. As the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas alarmed, back in 2007: When reorganisation and cost-cutting in this core province jeopardise accustomed journalistic touchstones, it punches at the very heart of the political world sphere. Because, without the flow of information gained through extended research, and without the foreplay of debates based on an expertise that doesnt is cheap, public communication loses its discursive verve. The public media would then have continued to resist populist predilections, and could no longer fulfill its function it should in the purposes of the a democratic constitutional state.

Perhaps, then, the focus of the word industry needs to turn to commercial invention: how to rescue the funding of journalism, which is what is under threat. Journalism has experienced dramatic innovation in the past two digital decades, but business examples have not. In the words of all my fellow members Mary Hamilton, the Guardians executive editor for audience: Weve altered everything about our journalism and not sufficient about our businesses.

The impact on journalism of the crisis in the business model is that, in chasing down inexpensive clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity, news organisations undermine the exceedingly reason they exist: to find stuffs out and tell readers the truth to report, report, report.

Many newsrooms are in danger of losing what matters most about journalism: the valuable, civic, pounding-the-streets, sifting-the-database, asking-challenging-questions hard graft of uncovering concepts that someone doesnt want you to know. Serious, public-interest journalism is demanding, and there is more of a need for it than ever. It helps keep the powerful honest; it helps people make sense of “the worlds” and their place in it. Facts and dependable info are essential for the functioning of republic and the digital period has moved that even more obvious.

But we must not grant the chaos of the present to throw the past in a rosy-cheeked lighting as is apparent from the most recent resolution to a tragedy that became one of the darkest moments in its own history of British journalism. At the end of April, a two-year-long investigation ruled that the 96 people who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 had been unlawfully killed and has not been able to contributed to the dangerous situation at the football ground. The judgment was the culmination of an indefatigable 27 -year-campaign by the victims kinfolks, whose subject was reported for two decades with great detail and sensibility by Guardian correspondent David Conn. His journalism facilitated uncover the real reality about what really happened to Hillsborough, and the subsequent cover-up by the police a classic precedent of a reporter harbouring the potent to account on behalf of the less powerful.

What the families had been campaigning against for nearly three decades was a lie put into circulation by the Sun. The tabloids aggressive rightwing writer, Kelvin MacKenzie, accused the followers for the disaster, recommending they had forced their practice into the ground without tickets a claim eventually revealed to be inaccurate. Harmonizing to Horrie and Chippindales history of The Sun, MacKenzie invalidated his own reporter and give the words THE TRUTH on the front sheet, to suggest that Liverpool followers were drunk, that they picked the pockets of victims, that they punched, kicked and urinated on police officers, that they shouted that they missed sex with a dead female victim. The fans, suggested a high-ranking police officer, were playing like swine. The floor, as Chippindale and Horrie write, is a classic stain, free of any attributable manifestation and precisely fitting MacKenzies formula by publicising the half-baked naive prejudice being singer all over the country.

It is hard to imagine that Hillsborough could happen now: if 96 people were humiliated to death in front of 53, 000 smartphones, with photos and eyewitness accounts all posted to social media, would it have taken so long for the truth to come out? Today, the police or Kelvin MacKenzie would not have been able to lie so blatantly and for so long.

The truth is a struggle. It takes hard grafting. But the struggle is worthwhile: conventional report values are important and they matter and they are worth defending. The digital change has meant that reporters rightly, in my view are more accountable to their audience. And as the Hillsborough story evidences, the old-fashioned media were certainly capable of perpetrating scandalizing falsifications, who were able to take years to disentangle. Some of the old-fashioned hierarchies have been decisively eroded, which has led to a more open dispute and a more substantial objection to the old nobilities whose interests often predominated the media. But persons under the age of relentless and instantaneous information materials and uncertain truths can be overwhelming. We careen from anger to scandalize, but forget each one very rapidly: its doomsday every afternoon.

At the same time, the levelling of the information scenery has released new downpours of combating racism and sexism and new the ways and means of shaming and harassment, hinting a world in which the loudest and crudest statements will prevail. It is an atmosphere that has proved particularly hostile of both women and people of colour, revealing that the inequalities of the physical world are replicated all too easily in online seats. The Guardian is not immune which is why one of my first initiatives as editor-in-chief was to launch the Web We Want project, in order to combat a general culture of online abuse and question how we as the two institutions can foster better and more civil conferences on the web.

Above all, the challenge for journalism today is not simply technological advances or the creation of new business simulates. It is to establish what capacity journalistic organisations still play in a public discourse that has already become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised. The startling political developments of the last year including the vote for Brexit and the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for the US presidency are not simply the byproducts of a resurgent populism or the revolt of those left behind by world-wide capitalism.

The rise of Donald Trump is a symptom of the mass medias originating weakness, according to academic Zeynep Tufekci. Photograph: Jim Cole/ AP

As the academic Zeynep Tufekci bickered in an paper earlier this year, the rise of Trump is actually a indication of the mass medias changing weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable to say.( A same case could be made for the Brexit campaign .) For decades, columnists at major media organisations acted as gatekeepers who legislated decision on what ideas could be publicly explored, and what was considered too radical, Tufekci wrote. The weakening of these gatekeepers is both positive and negative; there are opportunities and there are dangers.

As we can see from the past, the age-old gatekeepers were also capable of enormous injure, and they were often imperious in denying opening to disagreements they deemed outside the mainstream political consensus. But without some kind of consensus, it is hard for any true to take hold. The diminish of the gatekeepers has given Trump space to raise formerly taboo subjects, such as the cost of a global free-trade government that helps corporations rather than works, an issue that American nobilities and often of the media have all along been dismissed as well as, more obviously, allowing his outrageous lies to flourish.

When the predominate humor is anti-elite and anti-authority, trust in big organizations, including the media, have started to crumble.

I is argued that a strong journalistic culture is importance fighting for. So is a business simulation that serves and reinforces media the organizations that placed the search for true at the heart of everything improving an informed, active populace that scrutinises the potent , not an ill-informed, reactionary mob that attacks the vulnerable. Traditional word qualities must be embraced and celebrated: reporting, verifying, accumulating together eyewitness affirmations, making a serious attempt to discover what really happened.

We are privileged to live in an age when we can use many new technologies and the help of our gathering to do that. But it is essential to grapple with the issues underpinning digital culture, and realise that the alter from print to digital media was never just about engineering. We must also relating to the brand-new dominance dynamics that these changes have created. Engineering and media do not exist in isolation they help shape civilization, just as “they il be” shaped by it in turn. That symbolizes involving with parties as civic performers, citizens, equates. It is about hampering strength to accounting, fighting for a public infinite, and taking responsibility for creating the kind of world we want to live in.

Main illustration: Sbastien Thibault

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