Wednesday 23 January 2008

Jan 23rd

Science

One thousand people are to have their complete genome mapped as part of a major new study. The first volunteer will be Jade Goody. The lead scientist says she has been deliberately chosen to save time since they have already mapped the code for the fruit fly.

Health

Ministers have told the food industry that labelling is the key to tackling obesity. Really? You don’t think it’s getting people to eat less crap? I mean I don’t know many fat people who are there going “I don’t understand how I’ve gotten so heavy, I guess I must have misunderstood the label on that rich chocolate truffle gateaux – I thought it counted as one of my five-a-day”. The best way to use labelling to combat obesity is to make the labels on all food over 100cals weigh 20kgs. Then carrying the food home would burn of the energy.

Now I agree that food labelling is terrible. These days if your food wasn’t made on farm equivalent of a Guantanamo bay isolation cell there’ll be a special label to tell you so. But if it was, then they just, aaah, won’t mention it.

Politics

George Bush has spoken at an anti-abortion rally in the US. His words clearly had a big impact with two thirds of those who saw him saying they now believed abortion should be compulsory. What he said at the rally was “You’re here because you know all life deserves to be protected. I’m proud to be standing with you.” What he meant was “I’m going to need a lot more cannon fodder for my illegal wars”. He went on to say “America [can do] better than this” which is exactly what most Americans have been thinking since the day he took office. He went on, “We will continue to work for a culture of life”, then he popped out, authorised a few executions, did an oil trade with king Abdullah and told his defence officials to stop wasting all that money on body armour for the troops in Iraq. When he got back he decided to bamboozle the crowd with science, this time saying “Each unborn child is a separate individual with his or her own genetic code”. Sure but a bacon sandwich has it’s own genetic code. And if you’re definite right to life on the basis of unique genes then it’d be ok to kill one of each set of identical twins. Although if you’ve seen as many horror films as I have, you might be up for that – why do they never cast the twins as the nice ones?

Lifestyle

A survey whose results were released today says more people are comfortable with the idea of pre-marital sex than ever before. The survey conducted by Brad Pitt and Abi Titmuss revealed 70% of the population had “no objection” compared to only 48% in 1984 when John Prescott conducted the survey.

A disgusting 30% of the population described themselves as prejudiced against other races, amazingly the same percentage as ticked the box for “I read the Daily Mail”. The authors of the report (that’s Brad and Abi, pay attention) say they put this down to the reaction to Sept 11th the reaction of the press that is.

Papers

Daily Express headlines today include “Girl Attacked by Frenzied Knifeman” as though most knife attacks are very casual affairs with breaks for tea and muted applause for particularly complicated artistic stabs.

Then on page 34 their headline screams “We’re Breeding A Generation Of Teenage Killers”. Which is interesting, and ironic, because if anyone is trying to engender a culture of poverty and panic, it is the Express. Also if that’s true – if we are building a secret murderous child-army, surely that’s big enough for the front page. Instead the front page says Britain’s Muslims are Too Extreme. I’d love to have seen them out on the streets surveying people “Would you like your local Muslims (a) Very extreme, (b) quite extreme or (c) not extreme at all?”

The story behind it is that Iraq’s deputy prime minister visited a Mosque in the UK and said that the preaching and books used were shocking and “would be illegal in Iraq”. And Iraq has such a better track record on law and order than the UK. We should definitely follow their example.

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