The Dutch are stopping accidents with this one weird trick

If you're a car driver, situational awareness shouldn't end when you turn off the ignition key. Between 2011 and 2015, carelessly-opened car doors killed eight people and reportedly injured 3,108, according to UK government figures. Fortunately, you can be part of the solution, if you just do this:

...[Cycling UK is] urging ministers to have the "Dutch reach" taught in driving tests. This manoeuvre involves the driver or passenger on the right-hand side of the car opening the door with the left hand - forcing them to turn and see if anyone's approaching.

It's a mandatory part of Dutch driving tests. 

It's simple, it works, and I can't imagine why anyone would object to making this tiny modification to their car door-opening behaviour.

Of course, there's bound to be some aggrieved motorist out there who'll go off on some mad rant about how he's* used his other hand all his life without dooring a cyclist, how it's always cyclists who are a menace to all law-abiding road users and how we wouldn't need this latest example of health and safety gone mad if all other road users except him weren't idiots.

It shouldn't need pointing out that this sort of whingeing is nonsense, but it probably does. Part of the problem is the tribal "us and them" mentality which unites some motorists in their hatred of cyclists (and vice versa). The thing is, you can always find individual examples of somebody else on the road behaving badly, including cyclists - the recent case of the wanton and furious cycle killer, Charlie Alliston, comes to mind.

The Alliston case, in turn, generated this headline in Cycling Weekly - "The media coverage of the Charlie Alliston case should be disturbing for cyclists everywhere", as if criticism of one person's selfish irresponsibility needs to be toned down, lest it reflect badly on the rest of the cycling tribe.

The thing is, like a lot of people, I'm sometimes a pedestrian, sometimes a motorist, sometimes a cyclist, sometimes a public transport user. I am large, I contain multitudes. None of these identities is a problem if I behave with care and consideration. Any of them might be if I don't.

The differences between the various forms of transport shouldn't be tribal. The only distinction which matters is an ascending hierarchy of responsibility, related to how much damage your chosen form of transport could do. An individual cyclist might be as careless as an individual motorist, but it seems beyond obvious to me that the motorist's carelessness is a bigger problem, because you can do more damage with a motor vehicle - there's a reason why there have been several terrorists attacks involving motor vehicles being deliberately driven into crowds, but none involving disaffected misfits deliberately trying to create mass carnage with a push bike.




*It might be a she, but I'll bet folding money that it will be a he.

The stork has landed

Well, Nigel Farage’s new best friend has turned out to be a real charmer, hasn't she?

Just in case you missed it, Beatrix von Storch, the MEP from the German far-right AfD party who invited Nigel Farage to address the party faithful at the Spandau Citadel, got into a spot of bother last year. She reportedly said that police should be allowed to shoot women and children trying to enter Germany illegally.

It seems that her comments were reported correctly, since she subsequently issued a weird, impersonal retraction, saying “the use of firearms against children is not permitted”, which she immediately qualified by adding “women are a different matter”.

"The use of weapons against them can therefore be permitted within the narrow legal framework."

Well, I'm glad she managed to skilfully defuse that potential controversy with a hilarious Adolf Eichmann impression.

Her Trumpian clarification was apparently good enough to satisfy the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group, which was jointly led by Nigel Farage. An EFDD source disingenuously claimed that “Beatrix has agreed to uphold the charter of the group, publicly apologized and issued a statement that neither AfD nor herself want to shoot people at the border", when what she'd actually said was that the police weren't technically allowed to open fire on women AND children - just the women.

There's your banality of evil, right there.

Inspirational spiritual quote of the day

"My spiritual side took over and I kicked her in the face.”

Abdullah Cakiroglu, explaining how the sight of a 23-year-old nurse wearing shorts on a bus left him with no alternative but to attack her.

Fortunately,  the assault was captured on CCTV,  so Mr Cakiroglu will be able to continue his exploration of the ineffable during a spiritual retreat of three years and ten months, spent in the contemplative atmosphere of a Turkish prison cell.

"Exceptional performance" Leviticus-style

I partly agree with universities minister Jo Johnson that there's something deeply wrong with a higher education system that combines massive payouts for superstar vice-Chancellors with massive lifetime debts for students. But, under current circumstances, I can't help thinking that the Jo Johnson's chosen metric for assessing a vice-Chancellor's worth is a bit topsy-turvy. When you turn his value metric upside down, by slightly re-writing this Telegraph article, the comparison seems fairer:

The Government faces fines if it fails to justify paying the Prime Minister more than university vice-Chancellors

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) will unveil plans today that will see the Government forced to demonstrate that a prime ministerial salary of over £150,000 represents value for money.

The announcement comes amid growing concern about the largesse of Parliament where a lame-duck Prime Minister now enjoys substantial remuneration with a grace and favour London home, travel perks and a gold plated pension.

In a speech at Westminster, IPSA Chair, Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, will say that he aims to curb the “spiralling" growth of prime ministerial pay packets and that “exceptional pay can only be justified by exceptional performance.”

This means that the Prime Minister will have to demonstrate that she is providing the UK with a high quality of leadership and a plausible chance of good economic prospects, as opposed to merely holding office in order to divert blame for a series of catastrophic errors away from her ambitious colleagues, who are currently preparing to sacrifice her just as soon as she has served her purpose as collective blame-magnet.

Professor Kennedy is currently working on an updated pay scale for Powerless Sacrificial Victim In-Chief, based on the closest industry equivalent, a goat. This would equate to a prime ministerial allowance of around one to two kilos of hay per day, minus whatever she might forage in fields of wheat. 

There, fixed it for you, Jo.

The six children of Pope Jacob the First

The MP [Jacob Rees-Mogg] joked that as a Catholic male he is eligible to become Pope, and that if the holy ghost called upon him to do so "I will do my duty".

I guess they'll need to squeeze a few extra beds into the Papal Apartments to accommodate Jacob's wife, Helena de Chair, his six children, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan, Peter Theodore Alphege, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher, along with their long-suffering nanny, Veronica Crook.

Although The Birmingham Mail assumed that Jacob Rees-Mogg was joking, it's also plausible that the obsessively Eurosceptic Catholic knows as little of the actual rules and procedures governing the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church as he does of those pertaining to the European Union. Which would explain the holy mess his lot are making of this Brexit malarkey.

Mind you, there are precedents, of sorts. There are passages in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as in the Epistle to the Corinthians which suggest that Saint Peter was married, and Pope Honorius IV, who died in April 1287, was the last pope to have been married (albeit before he entered Holy Orders). Several pontiffs, most notoriously Alexander VI, are known to have fathered offspring, some of them while in office, so maybe the Moggster's right to consider a position even more elevated than leader of the Conservative Party.

Treason and plot

It's twenty years since Princess Diana's car crash induced a section of the UK's public to let it all out in a well-publicised display of unrestrained public grief. This surprised a lot of people who thought that we were all far too restrained and stoical to behave like that.

Twenty years on, the Brexit car crash has triggered a similar emotional ketchup burst, with the crucial difference that what's now being unbottled isn't tears, but an incoherent howl of rage. This furious screed against "the EU side – and their treacherous Remoaner allies", by Yorkshire Post hack Bill Carmichael, is fairly typical.

Any idea of the UK as a place of calm emotional understatement has gone out of the window again, now that the newspapers, which once pronounced us united in collective sorrow, are hurling frothing accusations of treason around like confetti.

Treason is a serious charge, so should I start being worried?

Technically, probably not - I'm not currently planning to murder, conspire against, or declare war on, the monarch or her family, seduce Prince Phillip, the Duchess of Cornwall, or Princess Kate, "injure or alarm the sovereign", kill specific VIPs like "the chancellor" (of the exchequer?), or a high court judge.

It's a pretty solid defence in actual law, but I don't know if it would stand up in the revolutionary court where the Brexiteers are already busy pronouncing the judgement of history on the designated enemies of the people.

What I do know is that I'm technically on safer ground than those Sun readers who declared in a recent poll that that they don't want our fuddy-duddy royal heir Prince Charles to succeed to the throne and would like him to step aside for his media-friendly son Prince Will, with his charming wife and photogenic sprogs. The Treason Act 1702 specifically says that it's treason :

...if any person or persons ... shall endeavour to deprive or hinder any person who shall be the next in succession to the crown ... from succeeding after the decease of her Majesty (whom God long preserve) to the imperial crown of this realm and the dominions and territories thereunto belonging. 

Here's a simple propsal - instead of trying to shoot the messenger whenever their pet project seem to be running into trouble, why don't the Brexiteers turn their large-bore rage cannon against this peculiar succession narrative being propagated by the foreign-owned Murdoch press and their treacherous Wilhelmine allies? Just a thought.

Update
Just to drive the point home, this is where we end up when the idea of treason stops being a joke about the obscure offences the Queen might send you to the Tower of London for and starts being thrown about  as a serious accusation.

Five serving members of the British army have been arrested on suspicion of being members of the recently banned neo-Nazi group National Action...

... The slogan on its former website was: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain,” which was the only statement given in court by [Jo] Cox’s murderer, Thomas Mair.

Nice company Bill Carmichael's keeping.

A degraded ecosystem

Tom Pride has written one of the best takedowns of one of the worst pieces of journalism we've seen so far this year.

This was a case where the mainstream press mangled the basic facts about a vulnerable child and the temporary foster parents who were looking after her into a inflammatory, sectarian fairy story as fake as anything the Breitbart propaganda organ's autofellator-in-chief could have made up.

Tom lists the ten most outrageous lies, along with the real facts of the case as we know them, and thinks that the journalists responsible have been so malicious and/or incompetent that they clearly deserve to be sacked.

I wouldn't be sorry to see the backs of the hacks in question, either, but I'm also sceptical about the idea that chronic misinformation from the press is a problem that can be solved by chucking out a few bad apples.

As far as I can see, the problem isn't just bad hacks beating proper journalists in a straight fight for possession of a level playing field. The problem is a news ecosystem where sensational lies can quickly bloom and flourish, crowding out the slower growth of conscientious, fact-checked journalism.

While sacking spectacularly bad journos might feel good in the short term, only a system that supports journalists in general will allow producers of good-quality information to flourish. And at the moment, it sounds ridiculously hard to flourish as a good journalist.

The horrible examples here* are from the USA, but they're quite consistent with what I've been reading about the state of UK journalism for years (ever since Flat Earth News).

A chronically insecure profession, which denies professionals the time and resources to do a good job is a bad place to be, if you're conscientious, curious and questioning.

It's probably a better place to be if you're an over-confident compulsive bullshitter, happy to obediently fill blank spaces with a generic infotainment product, mindlessly reflecting your employers' brand values, without unprofitably wasting too much the day checking out those messy, time-consuming and frequently off-message things called facts.

You can see how such an insecure, pressured environment might favour groupthink, corner-cutting and reflexive deference to unreasonable authority, while selecting against the slower processes of analytic thinking, fact-checking and questioning received opinion, which are the basis of what any reasonable person would call good journalism.

That's bad enough in itself, but the effect is amplified by the encroachment of an invasive species into the news ecosystem - the Greater Public Relations Weasel.

As Roy Greenslade, pointed out last year, the 64,000 people working as journalists in the UK are now outnumbered by the 84,000 people working in public relations. And we know that a lot of what journalists do isn't objective, factual reporting of what the journalists themselves think is important, but mere recycling of press releases and infomercials from a members of a larger, well-funded profession which has no claim to objectivity, or to any value more public-spirited than burnishing the image of its clients.

The effect is further amplified when the the lies made up by bad journalists, or mindlessly copy n' pasted from press releases are propagated by public service broadcasters. The BBC doesn't just do its own journalism in a vacuum, but reflects back the news agenda spawned in the incestouous hothouse of sloppy, journalism and public relations spin.

As an example, take Radio 4's flagship morning news programme, Today. On weekdays, it kicks off its broadcast at 6.00am sharp, with a rundown of its own headline stories (one, or more, of which will frequently have started life as a story from elsewhere in the mainstream press), followed by a weather report, then a round up of what the British newspapers have decided to put on their front pages that day.

In this way, poisonous nonsense like the "Christian child forced into Muslim foster care" scare headline, complete with sensational details about a crucifix being forcibly removed and the child being told to learn Arabic are laundered into the national discourse,  via the supposedly respectable, fact-based BBC ("We're only reporting what other people are saying").

Wake up to our unbiased national broadcaster and the day's newly-minted lies can be churning round your brain before you've gulped down your coffee and breakfast cereal.

Of course, people can try to refute provable untruths, but thanks to the backfire effect, this may only succeed in hammering home the original lies more firmly.

And there's an even more insidious feedback loop going on. The act of fact-checking bad journalism has created the idea that fake news comes from the mainstream media (which it sometimes does). So now,  notoriously shameless liars like Trump, Johnson and Farage can bellow "You're fake news!" in the face of any journalist who dares to hold them to account, or sneeringly dismiss easily verified facts as "project fear." It might sound ridiculous coming from people like that, but when they play on distrust of the mainstream media, the partisan, slipshod mainstream media really do bear some of the blame.

And the feedback loop gets loopier still. When more reasonable, non-fanatical people hear blustering Trumpist ninnies raging about how they're being unfairly misrepresented by the crooked, dishonest mainstream media, their natural reaction is to categorise anyone who points out media bias as a blithering loon who can safely be ignored for ever.

And if such media sceptics are ignored, the mainstream meda can continue to churn out the sort of inaccurate, vindictive rubbish that helped create the low-trust environment which spawned the whole Trumpist brand of post-truth politics in the first place...

It was just one story, about one little girl who's had a tough life, but the way it's been distorted and weaponised shines a light on a whole bunch of stuff that touches every one of us, from which voices get heard, and which are suppressed, or misrepresented, to the hollowing out of respected professions and their replacement by toxic bullshit jobs, to the awful politics that we get when mere facts can be drowned out by whoever has the loudest foghorn, to the question of who, ultimately, benefits from the seemingly exponential growth in mistrust, insecurity and chaos.

*via