Why does Germany buy fewer games per head than the UK or France:

[Germany] is the third-biggest market for video games in Europe, behind the UK and France, with PC titles dominating the market.

This from a story about the PS3′s new PVR capabilities: BBC News

It would seem to me that Germany’s cultural similarities concerning alcohol and free time would make the number of games bought there similar to in Britain… But obviously not.

And we have Jeremy Paxman who, for all his critics, does it to every political wing!

South of the Tweed, the backlash is starting
By Alan Cochrane
A weekend in England is all it takes; all it takes to confirm that “they” are not going to put up with “it” forever. “They” are the English and “it” is devolution.
Now, you may think you’ve heard this before; after all, people like me have been hunting for the English backlash ever since the Scottish Parliament opened for business.
And, frankly, it has been a long time coming. But coming it most definitely is. I was talking to a senior MSP yesterday and his assessment was an accurate one. “They (the English) seem to have gotten really annoyed about this student fees business.”
Last week’s announcement by Fiona Hyslop, the new SNP Education Minister, that, henceforth, Scottish students – and only Scottish students – would be excused their back-end payments for attending Scottish universities, appears to have been the last straw south of the border.
Perhaps it’s because of the manifest unfairness of it, certainly in a British sense, or maybe it’s because it primarily affects their off-spring – anything that hits your kids always brings a more emotional response – but the English taxpayers appear to have taken more exception to this bit of business than much else that’s happened in the last eight years.
And it has allowed them to add it to their long list of other “grievances” where the largesse of the devolved Scottish administration has given the residents on this side of the Tweed a better deal than those south if it. Things like free personal care for the elderly, free eyesight checks,
free bus passes and free access to better drugs.
All of this on top of what is seen as a small army of Scots in the Cabinet and, from June 27, a Scot as their new prime minister, without, it seems, so much as a by their leave.
Some English commentators claim that the incoming Nat administration in Edinburgh is bringing forward new acts of discrimination as deliberate provocation. They’re not. It’s not provocation, merely recklessness.
The Nats are determined to shore up their vote wherever they can – at the taxpayers’ expense, of course – and the students’ fees decision will do them no harm at all with the youth vote. Ditto with the so-called “grey” vote, following the announcement that free personal care allowances are to
be uprated. However, if in buying those votes, the Nats infuriate the English, then they’re not going to lose sleep over it, now are they?
All of which made my trip to Birmingham recently all the more interesting. There, in the tranquil surroundings of the house where Elizabeth Fry founded what we now know as the Quakers, I came face to face with the other side of the devolution coin – the English nationalists.
Mind you, the leaders of Campaign for an English Parliament are an incredibly mild-mannered bunch of revolutionaries. They are, also, extraordinarily polite.
In spite of all the slings and arrows that devolution has thrown their way, they bear no ill-will towards the Scots; they just want their own piece of the action. They acknowledge, as do most opinion polls, that the majority of Scots reckon that bones of contention such as the West Lothian Question should be addressed.
They have a long and hard fight on their hands, much of it down to indifference from the English media.
The reason I was in Birmingham was to make a programme about the demands for an English parliament for BBC Scotland, which is to be broadcast today.
Incredible as it may seem, there has not been even the slightest flicker of interest in this perfectly legitimate cause from the various arms of the BBC in England. Needless to say, however, one of the staunchest supporters of the Campaign for an English Parliament has been Alex Salmond.
I cannot imagine that this apathy from mainline broadcasters and newspapers will last, especially as every day of the Nationalist administration in Edinburgh appears to bring with it a new sense of outrage
from the ordinary voters of England.

• Home Rule for England is on BBC Radio Scotland at 11.30am today and is repeated at half-past midnight.

See, told you we’re not bad guys.

I would take issue with the author’s implied blame of Scottish Nationalists. The problem is most definitely Scottish and English British Unionists, not Nationalists of either country. The Scottish Nationalist Party should not be blamed for using the power it has been granted in favour of Scottish people — it is the lack of similar power for England that gets my back up.

And now be aware of another blogbreak of perhaps up to a week!

“Mr Cameron has, so far, ridiculed the case for lower income tax, proposed higher taxes on air travel, denounced the Government’s modest health reforms as ‘frenetic’, suggested that hoodies need to be ‘loved’ (though not, now it seems, hugged), campaigned against public expenditure control, down-played the Atlantic Alliance and refused to back the overwhelming case for nuclear power. The party’s self-hatred is truly amazing. It has gone to such extraordinary lengths to express regret that it has even re-written history in the process.” – Robin Harris, former Downing Street advisor to Margaret Thatcher

Let’s start embracing right-wing thinking shall we?

So if you don’t have, for example, a Lancashire accent, if you’re not white, if you’re not an agnostic Christian, if you don’t think pantomime is the purest form of comedy, you are still English.

But no-one’s told the (typically useless) Home Office that. They thought that someone with a Lancashire accent, a Blackburn birth certificate and a European Union, United Kingdom passport was more than likely Pakistani. You can see why: they had a Lancashire accent and everyone knows that’s the one you learn when you join Pakistani spy school; they had a British passport, and we all know how trustworthy government databases and identity-verification documents are… So why not think that?

But then thinking that someone’s from a different country is a bit different to trying to deport them. Worse, imrprisoning them for two months while you try to find evidence that said English person is actually Pakistani.

I think the Guardian, in their low-key article a couple of months ago has done an injustice to this story. If we cannot trust our governors in this case not to abuse their powers when it comes to depriving people of their liberty, why do we entrust them with so much power?

And if this was an isolated case it would be slightly more tolerable, but the Guardian reassures us that it is not!

I have just one question: Why did the Guardian say “British Asian”? Surely the fact that he was British was key? The British Asian label is as bad as saying ‘nigger’ in my opinion. The relevance is clearly there — and could be highlighted in the story — but the fundamental point of this whole story is that the government is imprisoning its own people without justification.

The fact that his parents (or, by the “British Asian” definition that, frankly, the BNP would be pleased with, any one of his earlier ancestors) were Pakistani must not take away any of the horror or shock that any reader of that article should feel.

Joy of Curmudgeonry has an excellent Fewtril up today which is a succinct answer to the question: X is amazing, how can it not be created by God? The truth is there might be a God, and there may not. You, my loyal and in some cases new, readers will have your own beliefs and while that doesn’t affect me I’ll let it pass. I am not an evangelist for non-theism.

But you’ll also know I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I should be allowed, were I so insensitive, to stand on a street corner and proclaim my beliefs. I should be allowed, through the new media and old, to tell people what I think without fear of state-sponsored censure. I should expect, if I were to say unpopular things, to lose an election and I should expect people not to like me; but I must be allowed to say them.

I think most people would agree with that. But where does that line end? If I were to call a friend a name (whether it is true or not) I may expect to lose that friend. And if I call a stranger a name, I should expect them to be unhappy with that too. But if I criticise an opposition politician (whether intelligently and accurately or not) should the media get involved? Should the media investigate the item or should the media stick only to facts?

The news is unable, due to time constraints and competing stories, to give much more than the headlines of a particular story. If a complicated scientific report is released in Nature, Science or any other journal and if the broadcasters consider it interesting, then the equivalent of a headline will be given to the public (see also yesterday’s post).

Headlines or truth?

But how often does the public get the wrong idea from that? How many times has a broadcast implied that some scientific breakthrough is around the corner or that the result of a particular study was D when it was actually somewhere between A and G? It has been said many times before, and it will be said, I suspect, forever, that the media has responsibilities and that it does not manage them well.

I have an alternate suggestion:

Rather than reporting the headlines or trying to explain complex discoveries etc. in a too-short period, the news should just advise its readers/listeners/viewers that a new scientific paper has been released and explain to people how to get a hold of it. Spin in politics has created the mess that the UK and EU are in right now, and it could be argued that spin in science has misled many thousands of others. But there is a difference: Spin in politics affects everyone only because there is no alternative — I know very few people who care enough about politics to know enough to be educated in their opinions.

But it is orders of magnitude worse when we are talking about science; whether we are discussing evolution, global warming or SARs. The media must not mislead or even, if their intentions are pure, try and extrapolate.

This is the future of TV… It really is.

But the Devil’s Kitchen has some alternate observations.

Please note – the Wiki has been “locked” for the time being to prevent editing.
Thanks to everyone for their interest so far – do visit again and continue the discussion. In the meantime, you’re welcome to read the comments and materials submitted.

What were they thinking? Everyone who knows a fraction of our government’s actions on the environment know they are no serious. As Devil’s Kitchen has rightly pointed out on the site, there’s little to suggest that humanity is the sole or even the main cause and there’s little we can do anyway that couldn’t be regarded a waste of money when people are laying in their own urine in nursing homes across England.

- The government allows green Segway’s to be illegal on the nation’s pavements and roads (though I wouldn’t want to use one on a road).
- Bio-fuels are taxed as if they were bad for the environment.
- Etc.

Gah! Mr Miliband, if you’re reading, sort out the above before preaching about the environment.

Darfur isn’t peaceful — the unrest has continued now for three years — but you could be forgiven for thinking that nothing more was happening there. According to CNN rapes are higher now than at any other time during those three years.

Russian troops are still fighting terrorism and committing atrocities in Chechyna. There’s a typhoon approaching China that has caused over 400,000 people to flee. The Gaza Strip, which was where the first Israeli soldier kidnap occurred before the current hostilities, is no longer reported upon. The Tamil Tigers are still murdering their fellow Sri Lankans. And, perhaps most importantly from a historical perspective, Fidel Castro is dead (though no-one’s been told that yet).

That’s not to say that the actions of Islamic terrorists supported by their Islamofacists are not worthy of media focus, just to remind everyone that there is more going on in the world, and some of it is important from a global perspective too.

I have said before that Islamism (as opposed to the Islam faith that all my Muslim friends and acquaintances believe in) is not compatible with Western civilisation. Our media is reporting poorly, but is reporting on the most important story of our time. Let’s just also hear what the more balanced news providers around the world report upon. This is a call, I guess, for an Indian or other former-Empire (and so English-speaking) country’s media organisation to set up shop in Britain, take a Freeview slot and start broadcasting some real world news.

So it is great that Google gives us translation tools. Read this French article:

Hezbollah propaganda.

The point of the article, really, is that the bodies of civilians have been planted at the scene of the Israeli bomb.