I would apply, after all I’m quite suited to the Mail.
I can write beautifully, as this blog can attest to
I’m not bothered about immigrants one way or another, although if I’m paid I’m sure it can’t be too hard to work up a bit of angst.
I’m all for the betterment of wimmin. Especially through the careful use of fear and criticism, including but not limited to commenting on how much weight they might have lost/gained and reminding the little ladies of the consequences of leaving pregnancy too late because of selfishly pursuing a career.
I don’t trust doctors and haven’t had my children vaccinated with the MMR – or I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t forgotten and accidentally took them down to the doctors surgery at their appointment time.
I think it would be quite fun working for the Mail. The only thing that’s stopping me from applying is, well, what category does the Mail fall into?
Does working for the Mail give you cancer or does it cure cancer?
Christmas has been banned by the Red Cross from its 430 fund-raising shops.
Staff have been ordered to take down decorations and to remove any other signs of the Christian festival because they could offend Moslems.
The charity’s politically-correct move triggered an avalanche of criticism and mockery last night – from Christians and Moslems.
Christine Banks, a volunteer at a Red Cross shop in New Romney, Kent, said: ‘We put up a nativity scene in the window and were told to take it out. It seems we can’t have anything that means Christmas. We’re allowed to have some tinsel but that’s it.
‘When we send cards they have to say season’s greetings or best wishes. They must not be linked directly to Christmas.
‘When we asked we were told it is because we must not upset Moslems.’
Mrs Banks added: ‘ We have been instructed that we can’t say anything about Christmas and we certainly can’t have a Christmas tree.
This Christine Banks woman needs to learn a bit more about the seven fundamental principles that make the Red Cross what it is and allows it to do what it does. To be fair, she probably has done now.
All seven of those principles, especially the neutrality one, mean that it can be trusted by *everyone*. Because they have that trust it means they can get to people in need that other organisations can’t get to. The Red Cross isn’t a Christian organisation that might surreptitiously try and convert people from other religions. The Red Cross doesn’t have a political view, making dictators or aggressors in wartime stop them from visiting prisoners. If you want an example of what the Red Cross’ fundamental principles enable it to do then look at Dafur. No other aid agency is allowed in except for the Red Cross.
This neutrality and the trust it brings with it is very special to the Red Cross and consequently all the people that it helps. The Red Cross couldn’t carry on as it is without it.
By not having Christmas trees or other decorations the Red Cross isn’t trying to be politically-correct. Well ok, maybe it is but only in the sense that it can’t afford to show allegiance or favouritism towards one form of dogma over another. Being apolitical and areligious is the best and easiest way to stay neutral.
The Red Cross could celebrate the birth of Christ, but to maintain their impartiality and neutrality they would have to celebrate every single other religions special day. You’d struggle to do that in your own home, never mind in such a large organisation. The chance of getting something wrong or forgetting a date and being accused of insulting such-and-such a diety is immense.
The Red Cross doesn’t ‘do’ Christmas, but it certainly hasn’t banned it, as you’ll note by visiting this page.
That article by the Mail is not a recent one, though. It could’ve been written yesterday, but it wasn’t. The Mail is still pushing the ‘Christmas is banned’ line and they still read the same today as they did ten years ago. That article is from December 2002. It is not dated, the only thing that gives it away is the mention of Sangatte, the French refugee camp near Calias, which was closed in 2002.
Why is it relevent now, after eight years? Well, because this story about a misunderstanding between the Red Cross and one of their volunteers is still haunting them…
Yesterday, we started getting some comments on our Facebook page from people angry with us for ‘banning Christmas’, which we haven’t, and the story now seems to be spreading on some American websites.
And what is the result of this anger? Cancellations of donations. A volunteers time may be free but the equipment and other resources the Red Cross needs certainly isn’t. The Red Cross needs those donations so it can carry it the work it needs it’s impartiality for. This article, *eight years* after it was written, is still having a damaging effect on both it’s finances and it’s well deserved and much needed reputation.
There is a claim common to all tabloids that nobody believes them. This is proof that that claim is wrong. People do believe them. Not only do people believe the lies, people act on them too and that is why the media needs to be more accountable to the truth.
Whoever’s compiling the statistics for the Department for Work and Pensions could do worse than get the Mail and Express involved as they seem to have the inside knowledge.
1.6m benefits claimants have never had a job ‘because it does not pay to work’
The article underneath doesn’t back up this claim, presumably because the headline can be a total lie and still be ok with the PCC. As FullFact.org state…
Unfortunately there are no statistics available for the reasons why people have never worked. Although the Labour Force Survey does record a person’s reason for currently being out of work, this would not necessarily be the reason they have always been out of work.
Therefore there is no way of knowing precisely how many of the 1.6 million have never had a job due to caring responsibilities or disability.
The headline is only the bit of the article that gets read by *everyone* that looks at it. Not everyone reads to the bottom of articles. Nearly everyone reads past the first couple of paragraphs, but *everyone* that looks at that article reads the headline.
It doesn’t matter that there are no figures for why people have never had job. The Mail doesn’t even say how many of those 1.6 million are claiming any sort of benefit. It’s just pulled the headline out it’s arse.
There will be some people that have never had to work because they have a spouse that earns enough for them not to work. There will be others that cannot work because of disability or are carers. There will be a bucket load of teenagers that are included in this that aren’t in full-time education that have never worked because they haven’t had chance to get job, despite wanting one.
But no. Every one of those 1.6 million people are lazy, workshy scroungers sponging off the state because ‘work doesn’t pay’. Or as I like to put it, capitalism sucks.
Now about that headline, this is the paragraph where I make it ok by stating that an expert says that, no, Daily Mail headlines aren’t truthful. They’re a load of bollox, isn’t it?
*the Express is not quite as forthright as the Mail, but still goes on in the same vain.
Istyosty is a proxy service that seems to be dedicated to providing a way to read the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Express, but nothing else, without giving the papers the hits.
This is what they say, it might explain it a bit better…
WTF?
This site was set up after reading this. I thought it would be more fair to the statistics if only people who actually liked the daily mail appeared as a “hit” on the site. We are a proxy service enabling users to view that particular site without necessarily visiting it. Pages are cached here for a few days so many hits on a particular story will only count as one initial hit on that website (until the page is re-cached). Hits to the homepage however, are updated every few hours to keep it reasonably current. This system has the added advantage of providing anonymity from their invasive tracking and the advertisements from companies that should know better (we strip the ads, referer information and the javascript by default).
… and they say it’s legal.
So, if you’re linking to one of these three rags and and don’t want to increase their hits, because as far as they and their advertisers are concerned every hit is an approving hit, use an Istyosty link.
Do you notice anything a little out of place in the following Twitter timeline?
A timeline full of links to the Daily Mail itself, since it started on Twitter and then, *pop*, a tweet to somewhere else.
Ooh, curious, I thought. It didn’t sit right. News outlets, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, the Sun etc, all use twitter as a broadcast medium, as variation on the RSS ‘thingy’. They are simply there to give a link to a news item. They don’t retweet, they don’t #ff and they don’t direct you to anywhere except their news pages.
There are exceptions to this, for example Guardians Comment is Free Twitterfeed has an actual person manning it that replies to you and everything, but that isn’t the main feed for it’s news items. The feed for the news item is always just a broadcast.
So when a link to somewhere not the Daily Mail appeared it made me think wonder what’s going on. Had the Mails’ feed been hackedcracked compromised? Has a Mail employee got his own site to promote and thought he’d get a few hits from the Mails followers?
Nothing quite so exciting, I’m afraid.
thisismoney.co.uk is the website for the Mails’ City & Finance section of the paper and they’re running a competition, obviously, to win an iPad.
To enter you’ve got to fill in a load of details about money stuff and search for an independent financial advisor. Once you’ve found the advisor nearest to you, you can enter the competition. Presumably you’ll also get a call from said advisor in the very near future as well (as the whole thing is in the ‘advertising-feature’ section of the site, as indicated by the URL).
So, it may be nothing dodgy going on but what does it say about the Mail when the only thing it can tweet about that isn’t sending you to it’s main website is not how to reduce your mortgage or how to play the stock market but a competition.
What an easy life they have in prison. Spoiled they are. TV, excercise, three square meals a day. *We* feed them. Out of *our* taxes and they dare moan and whinge and complain when they get poisoned.
Never mind that they do not have a choice about where their meals come from, they should be lucky that they are getting fed at all. Fucking ingrates.
Half a million pounds of *our* taxpayers money. That’s what the wasters are going to get. Not each, thank Christ. but shared between 300 prisoners and “quite a few of the prison wardens”. So in reality that’s less than £1,600 each. Still, if you’re a prisoner that has been poisoned by some twat who can’t cook properly, that’s quite a windfall.
If those lackies had been on the straight and narrow they wouldn’t be getting any money at all. Who says crime doesn’t pay, huh?
Fathers who are involved during pregnancy could help reduce the risk of infant mortality during their child’s first year of life, a new study says
First the obvious. As always with this kind of reporting and/or study, how does the baby know that the father is involved and not an imposter pretending to be the father? Does it reduce the risk of infant mortality if it is an imposter?
What level of involvement would bring about this reduction in risk of infant mortality?
Father involvement was defined by the presence of the father’s name on the infant’s birth certificate. While this measure does not assess how much the father was around during pregnancy, other studies have established that a father named on the record was likely to have been involved to some extent before the birth.
Huh? A scribble of ink on a piece of paper is all that is needed? Oh if only it was that easy.
So this study just looked to see if there was a name on a birth certificate and because other studies found that this meant the father was ‘likely’ to be involved, came to the conclusion that a fathers involvement in pregnancy reduces the risk of infant mortality. Hmm. Highly scientific, then.
Dr Alio said paternal support could decrease the mother’s emotional stress, which has been linked to poor pregnancy outcomes.
Fathers-to-be could also encourage mothers to live a more healthy lifestyle. The study found women with absent partners were more likely to smoke during pregnancy and get inadequate prenatal care.
It’s fathers that help remember. Not partners, same sex or otherwise, or having a big bank account, or which country or area of a country that helps. Fathers do. Woo hoo! Aren’t fathers special, eh?
