When I saw a reviewer say: “What follows is a kind of modern Depression comedy - a bit like /Sullivan’s Travels/, set in Silicon Valley. Dick eventually sinks to day labour with Mexican illegals. Jane becomes a guinea pig for dangerous pharmaceutical testing.” I honestly thought Jim Carrey might be going for the jugular with Fun with Dick and Jane.  Its good—maybe “great” by Hollywood standards for political satire—but no jugulars were opened.  A clue:  Ralph Nader made a cameo appearance as himself.  But they missed so much potential fun…

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At odd times when I’ve got nothing better to do – which, being a blogger, by definition I often don’t – I find myself wondering about the Selfless Ones who rule so wisely over us.  What lies behind the media image?  What are they really like in their private lives?

For example, just now I am wondering what Britain’s top policemen, the Chief Constables, are like in mufti.  What kind of chaps are they after the last funny handshake of the day, when they can go home and set down the dizzying burden of power?

Are they, for example, basically just the ordinary bloke who likes a beer in the clubhouse after eighteen holes on a Saturday morning?  Or are they more the type who disappears into the loft for hours at a stretch to be alone with his complete collection of dog-eared 1950’s Parade magazines.

I feel entitled to wonder because, as was rumoured five weeks ago, these Chief Constable chappies have been doing a lot of wondering about what you and I do.  And now they’ve hit upon one (devilishly complicated and expensive) way of getting at the answers:-

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Not content to sit on his laurels, Alex Zeka has contributed a second article to the blog.  In this one, the new leader of the British Conservatives gets the treatment.  I’ve told Alex this is the last time I am prepared to extend the Guest Blogger facility to him.  Sorry, from now on he’ll just have to do the same as everybody else, and post the stuff himself as a full MR contributor.  I only hope he doesn’t write too noticeably better than I do.

GW

Ex-Etonian, ex-Oxonian, self-styled man of the people David Cameron has kept his political proposals very much a secret. No doubt thinking policy details simply too gauche for a fully paid up member of the aristocracy to get into, he has preferred to reassure us that he believes neither in irresponsibility nor selfishness.

Such a happy state of affairs could not last indefinitely, and the Tuesday before last (13th Dec.) one of his advisors, Nick Boles, had to “come out” in front of the Adam Smith Institute.  Not about his sexuality, you understand - that’s been known since his failed campaign for Parliament- but about his boss’s political philosophy.  Reports the Spectator’s blog:-

While the hope of many Conservatives has been that Cameron is “really” on the Right but would use better PR to sell a Thatcherite agenda, Boles made clear to the audience that they would be disappointed.

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Observing the reproduction of emperor penguins in March of the Penguins got me thinking.  Did paleolithic white males suffer a similarly high mortality rate during winter?  If so mating-age gender ratio may be the most under-rated controller of white fertility.

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Thanks to Michael R for the link to this interesting survey of US media.

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co?author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

One can, I guess, query the utility of the left-right model.  But one can’t query the utility of a formal measure of bias that pitches even supposedly right-wing media in the centre or left-of-centre.  It’s what we’ve always known - liberalism is endemic and the bulk of those who consider themselves on the right aren’t.

The full report will be published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, due out any day now.

Filed for The Guardian by Trinidad N’siswe

Of 536 same-sex couples of all ages who tied the knot in December 2005, after same-sex civil union became law in the United Kingdom, almost half are now divorced or living apart.

Research published by the Social Policy Foundation suggests that male same-sex civil partnerships are far more likely to fail than female, and both exceed the rate of failure of heterosexual marriage.

Male same-sex partnerships are ten times more likely to split up within the first year of a relationship than heterosexual marriages.  Female same-sex partnerships are three times more likely to see a separation within the same period.

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I am somewhat bemused to find three men in cassocks stepping into the ring to take on the “silly bureaucrats” and the “minority in leadership who want to privatise religion”.  But that’s what has happened today.

First off, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams put his name to a piece in The Mail On Sunday saying:-

What makes some people suspicious of Christmas these days is that it’s too religious. This year there seems to have been even more stories about the banning of Christian images and words by silly bureaucrats.

Right on cue the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, weighed in during GMTV’s Sunday Programme with:-

“We must avoid the kind of political correctness that is creeping in and undermining the public expression of the Christian faith.”

He said he was concerned about “a worrying hostility towards Christianity and all religions by a minority of people in leadership today who want to privatise religion, push it to the boundaries, not allow a voice in the public arena.”

Meanwhile the Bishop of Lichfield, the Right Reverend Jonathan Gledhill, declared his diocese to be fighting back against the politically correct approach to Christmas with a new poster campaign:-

“There have been reports from all over the country about local authorities, businesses, retail centres and even central government trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, claiming Christmas is offensive.

“They seem to want to make Christmas history - the Diocese of Lichfield wants to make Christmas His story”

Ordinarily, we would say these churchmen are part of the liberal problem and preside over an emotionally feminised version of Christianity.  However, even they have limits.  They have, it seems, noticed that the silly bureaucrats and the mysterious minority in leadership have none, and will go on chipping away at every surviving outcrop of Western culture until nothing remains.

The “hands-off” declarations of today reveal a fault-line between religious liberals and committed egalitarian activists.  In essence, the former are drawing a line in the snow.  They are refusing to let their faith be marxised out of existence - which is a point I have made many, many times in respect of Western Man in general.  When all roads lead to extinction, resistance will be the only recourse.

Tamsyn Lewis is an Australian runner, currently preparing for next year’s Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. She is undeniably attractive, and gets a fair bit of media attention here in Australia.

Earlier this month, Tamsyn revealed that she is still haunted by a nightmare experience which occurred in England in 2002, when she was preparing for the Manchester Commonwealth Games.

She was short of money at the time and so decided to base herself in the London suburb of Brixton. It was not a good choice. Not only were two people down the road murdered and her neighbour held up at knifepoint, she herself suffered two attacks during her brief stay.

On one occasion she was at a bus stop when a man leered at her. She told him to go away and he smashed a bottle and threated to cut her and kill her with it. Another time, she was walking along the street when a man tried to pull her into a parked car. She fought him off and ran away.

Brixton is, of course, one of the more multicultural suburbs of London. We are always being told how much our lives will be enriched by the multicultural experience, but clearly Tamsyn does not feel at all rewarded by her time in Brixton. She remains frightened to this day by her experiences there.