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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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A Welsh woman was convicted yesterday of racially abusing her father's mistress by calling her an 'English cow'. Prestatyn magistrates heard that Elen Humphreys, 25, went to Angela Payne's house in Rhyl to collect some of her father's belongings and told her 'Leave well alone, you English cow'.
 
Humphreys was convicted of racially aggravated harassment and was ordered to pay Ms Payne £50 in compensation and given a 12-month conditional discharge. She pleaded guilty.
 
This is, of course, totally ridiculous. The epithet “cow” is insulting, certainly, but it's common enough and has no racial connotations. Except possibly to cows.
 

A Welsh cow

 
But “English”? How is that racist? It was a statement of fact. The GOS is English, and if someone used this word about him he wouldn't feel even slightly aggrieved. If anything, he's proud of it. Or do we all have to be careful now about using any word that describes nationality? Is “American” offensive to an American? Would a Frenchman punch you on the nose if you used the word “French” in his hearing? And do newspapers risk legal action for headlines like “German economy in the doldrums, says IMF”?
 
When this story was printed in the Daily Wail, readers wrote comments like “I despair of this country ....”, but they're wrong. It's not just this country, not by a long chalk. Here are some stories from the other side of the Atlantic, from ... oh, I forgot, I mustn't name the country in case it's racist. Let's just say “from the Land of the Free”. Is that OK?
 
1 DON'T HELP THE POLICE OR THEY'LL ARREST YOU
Michael Keeley and his wife owned a house that they rented out until August 2012, when they realised that their tenants were running a meth lab, which wasn't exactly specified on the lease. The tenants were arrested, and the police cleared out the rental house.
 
But when the Keeleys returned to the house to get it ready for the next tenants, they discovered that someone had broken back into the house, removed a wall mirror, and stuffed eight more bags of meth into the wall cavity.
 
Michael Keeley promptly called the police and left the premises, as he figured the perpetrator could still be lurking around. When he returned, he found the police already there. He calmly walked them through what he had found and explained how the former tenants were, you know, arrested already for possession of meth, and that this was probably related.
 
The Keeleys were arrested on the spot. As one of the arresting officers said to Michael's face, "We know no one broke into your house. You did it yourself."
 
The police separated the Keeleys and interrogated them in different rooms. Meanwhile, their young son was left outside in the car crying for his parents. As his mom tried to comfort the child, a police officer told them to get someone to take care of him or they would call child services to take him away.
 
The Keeleys wound up being thrown in jail for several days before they were able to post bond, leaving their child with a close relative. The charges were later dropped. Presumably some judge asked the police, "What are you, stupid?"
 
2 THE LIFEGUARD SACKED FOR SAVING A DROWNING MAN
When lifeguards see somebody drowning, they don't usually stop to flip open the rule book to figure out what the protocol is in this situation. Florida lifeguard Tomas Lopez understood his duty very well: when he spotted a man drowning in the summer of 2012, he did exactly what anyone would expect a lifeguard to do and saved the guy's life.
 
But he had forgotten to check whether the man was drowning in an acceptable drowning zone because after he completed his deed for the day, his employer fired him. The victim had been swimming in the "swim at your own risk" section of the beach, and when they put that sign up, they really f*cking meant it. Lopez lost his job for rescuing somebody who wasn't drowning within his allocated rescue zone, and two more lifeguards were fired for defending Lopez's actions. Several other lifeguards quit in protest.
 
Needless to say, it wasn't long before the employers realised that they might have made a bad PR move, and reversed their stance on the matter, admitting they had been "hasty" in their original decision. The response of the former employees at being offered their jobs back involved one artfully extended middle finger.
 
3 PARAMEDIC CHARGED WITH GIVING A COLD MAN A BLANKET
Jeff Gaglio was a paramedic working in Detroit, Michigan. Serving with the fire department, he was called to a house fire, where he found a house burning down and its elderly resident standing outside in nothing but his underwear in the freezing cold night.
 
So Gaglio did the sensible thing: he gave the man a blanket. Several weeks later he found himself brought up on charges. Apparently it wasn't his blanket to give - it was a work blanket, belonging to the city. The crowning idiocy is that the blanket was almost certainly donated, and not bought by the city council. Gaglio still awaits his punishment.
 
4 DON'T HELP THE POLICE OR YOU'LL LOSE YOUR JOB
All right, this time it wasn't actually the police who were at fault.
 
George Daw is a school bus driver in Long Island, New York. On August 1, 2011 a severe thunderstorm blew in, and while most drivers weren't keen on braving the weather, Daw had teenagers he needed to get home, and he took his bus driving job very, very seriously. So seriously that when he drove past a police car that was stranded and sinking beneath the waves, he rescued the officers like some kind of bus driving Bruce Willis and drove them back to their precinct.
 
He was promptly fired.
 
Apparently, the Educational Bus Company that employed Daw takes bus driving very seriously as well. Their rule is that you can't just deviate from your route to pick up a bunch of unscheduled passengers, not even if they're police officers. Not even if they're police officers trapped in a sinking car in the middle of a hailstorm.
 
The bus company took refuge in the usual mealy-mouthed way: they hid behind the children's safety. They released a statement simply stating that it's against company policy to pick up unscheduled passengers in the name of the children's safety.
 
In the face of some pretty bad publicity, the company did eventually give Daw his job back.
 
5 IF YOU THWART A TERRORIST ATTACK, YOU'RE PROBABLY THE TERRORIST
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics a security guard named Richard Jewell spotted an unattended backpack beneath a park bench. Discovering that the backpack contained three fully active pipe bombs set to go off, Jewell was thrust into the kind of situation that is a bit above a security guard's pay grade. But rather than collapse into a quivering, hysterical mess Jewell calmly took the lead in alerting authorities and evacuating the area without the kind of organ-trampling panic that usually accompanies the word "bomb."
 
Unfortunately the bomb went off before people got clear, and one woman was killed. A cameraman died from a heart attack, and 111 people were injured.
 
Jewell was hailed as a hero, but became a “person of interest” in the FBI's jargon. Though he was never arrested, the home where he lived with his mother was searched and his background exhaustively investigated, amid a media storm that had cameras following him to the grocery store. A former employer made allegations to the FBI and newspapers that were, according to Jewell's lawyers, false and misleading. Eventually he was exonerated, but that didn't help much: he had already lost his job and suffered a crucifixion in the media. There was no big moment of vindication for him, and he never got the hero status he deserved. It was 10 years before someone finally stepped up to thank Jewell, even after they caught the real terrorist, an anti-abortion loony named Eric Rudolph – and it took several more bombs and at least one more death before they managed it.
 
All right, that's enough poking fun at the Amer ... those people over there. To redress the balance, one more little lunacy from Engl ... from where we live. A nursery nurse has been sacked from her job at Little Folks Nursery in Birmingham after she smacked a child on the bottom for being naughty.
 
The child was her own daughter.
 

 
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