Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Light the blue touchpaper…

...and retire to a safe distance, giggling. Don't tell me the Mail doesn't know what it's doing when it writes an article about the top 10 surnames in Britain. What is that top 10, by the way?

1. Smith 545,707
2. Jones 418,534
3. Williams 294,865
4. Brown 264,052
5. Taylor 253,481
6. Davies 214,263
7. Wilson 194,940
8. Evans 172,166
9. Thomas 159,402
10. Johnson 151,429

But as Frail Little Heart points out, that's not the story the Mail wants us to think about - they want us to think about those evil foreigners coming over here and overwhelming our surnames. Remember about 10-15 years ago, Patel, Singh and Khan were going to overtake Smith and Jones? Hmm, still haven't, have they?

Commenter "IK from North Wales" gets the ball rolling:

Are we supposed to be pleased about this? There is an inference that we were all immigrants the usual lefty pc stab at white caucasians whose northern european dna is considered to be worthless nowadays. Excuse me if I for one don`t feel anything other than a sense of loss and despair for the people of the northern lands whose contribution to culture and science has become invalid. We are a dying species.

There we are. The Mail knows how to poke its readers gently with the shitty stick to stir them into action.

Alone in the Dark, meanwhile, notices how the Mail's Liz Jones manages to miss the entire point of what she's talking about, yet still concocts several hundred bloody words of nonsense and somehow gets paid real money for it*.

No Sleep Til Brooklands was one of the bloggers who covered the Dunblane story and did a sterling job, so it's worth reading this follow-up. I have a feeling this may not be the last time that bloggers mobilise against the dead-tree press, who still fail to get it, no matter how hard they try.

Septicisle has a different kind of Jade Goody tribute. Don't get angry at it - he's made the point before that the media made an astonishing 'reverse ferret' when it came to Goody, turning her from the most pointless woman to have ever lived into a New Queen of Hearts (tm).

Terrorism next with Craig Murray. I saw the new posters as I came to work today - "these smiling white people are still alive thanks to someone shopping a shifty-looking geezer"; that kind of thing. The nonsense is on the radio too, asking us to be wary of terror and terrorists. Is there something the government know that they're not telling us? Is it the balance of probabilities or is all the publicity about something else, justifying ever stricter powers?

Speaking of more powers, police are getting more potentially lethal tasers, a story that doesn't fill Henry North London (or indeed me) with much hope.

If you haven't yet read the Guardian report on war crimes in Gaza (from the IDF and Hamas, before anyone starts chuntering away at the back there) then that's well worth a look. A lot more facts are trickling down into the public now. The thing is, do the public really care? Or has the passing of time detached us from the events?

And finally, this chucklesome story from every newspaper everywhere ever strikes me as smelling of bullshit. How did the kid get up there? How did he paint such an enormous cock and balls? Why isn't it magenta? Where are the bollock hairs? Where's the spray of ejaculate arcing through the air? Why is it so neatly drawn? Why didn't I do anything like this when I was 18? Why hasn't it faded away in the course of a year? Why has this story conveniently turned up at a time when Google Streetview stories are hot property? Answers on a postcard.

* I have no evidence that Liz Jones gets paid real money. It's quite possible they pay her in seashells, or buttons, or just give her somewhere warm to sit for a couple of hours, for all I know.

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