Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Fake News!

I have been watching with quite some amusement the inauguration of his highness the grand duke of Trumpton. As a statesman, this man is beyond belief, he and his brother from a different mothers. He and Boris the no-brain shouldn't be let out without chaperones in case they talk to strangers.

Trump has been accused of many things, which I personally wouldn't argue against. They may or may not be true, but he seems capable of all the accusations. When he and his team argued about the size of the crowd at his inauguration he dismissed claims that the crowd were only a fraction of the crowd that turned up for Obama by saying he had alternative facts!

History, it is said, is written by the victors. This of course is true, which makes history interesting. The reason it makes it interesting is because it takes a lot of detective work to find out certain things, but even then you cannot call them facts. Only full physical proof can make a claim a fact. Take our car park King, Ricky 3; he was claimed to be a hunchback by one William Shakespeare, and paintings of him also had him as a hunchback, though they were shown to have been altered. When his skeleton was discovered in a car park in Leicester it was found that he did have a twisted spine, but he would have appeared quite normal with his clothes on, and there was no sign of a hump. So after hundreds of years we can now say that Richard the third was not a hunchback, fact!, And that is yet more proof that history is written by the victors.

So for the benefit of Trumpton, let me explain: you can have a lie, an opinion, and a fact, that's it. If it didn't happen, to say it did is a lie. If it did happen but you can have an opinion on why and how it happened, it happened - that's it! You cannot have an alternative fact. A fact is a fact: that's it. An alternative fact is called a lie. Just what was the country doing voting in this man, who has nothing but his own self-interest at heart? Why do you think he got out of the car to talk to the crowds on Friday? Was it his love of the people or the fact he chose to get out of the car right outside the Trump building with the world's press on him.

As for women protesting against him because of his views on women, why didn't they do that when he was running for presidency? Why don't they march against the world's religions, because of their views on women and their treatment of women? Why didn't they vote for the woman that was running for president? 52% of women voted for him! It has become fashionable to protest against the great combover but, as with Brexit, don't bang on about democracy then start screaming that you want a recount when the vote goes against you. Fight to be heard before the vote!

Fake news is not a modern invention. We have always had it. Why do you think we went into the Gulf war? Do you think Boris the bully really stood aside after the Brexit vote for the good of the country, or could it be he expects Theresa May (or may not) will be pilloried when we leave the EU, and then he can step in like an arse in shining armour. We have been, and always will be, fed a diet of crap when it comes to politics. The truth is there are always someone's interests to look out for, but you can guarantee they will not be yours!

But there is some fake news that I enjoy. I do like harmless pranks played on the press and public. The broadcaster Stuart Maconie, while working for the music paper the NME, once wrote a page giving odd facts about certain bits of the industry. For a laugh one day he wrote that Bob Holness, the presenter of the popular children's show, Block Buster, was the saxophonist on Gerry Rafferty's classic song, Baker Street. 

For some reason this snippet of fake news caught the imagination of the public, who chose to believe it without question. Rafferty himself once said that he was called a liar by a man in a bar who had told him this piece of Maconie propaganda. Rafferty told him it was an urban myth, only for the man to denounce him as a fool. But who's to say that even this story is true?

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