The US-Israeli attack on Iran A few thoughts in a 🧵

There is a lot going on in the news at the moment, but there is a story that is consistently being underreported: Russia. A 🧵 (potentially with 🖍️)

In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a South African-American(!) businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He's best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running Tesla Inc., SpaceX & Twitter, and for parroting Kremlin's propaganda narratives. 1/24

STARMAN JONES One of the first, and most important pieces of advice David Bowie ever gave me - and this was in the early 1990s - was to make sure I noted down the names of secretaries and assistants I came into contact with. This would help me later, he explained, when I needed to get through to the important people. Charm, as Albert Camus put it in The Fall, is a way of getting people to say yes before you’ve told them what you want. And Major Tom, or Captain Tom, as Frank Zappa insisted on calling him when Bowie tried to poach his guitarist, had already used his ample portion to get through to the important people. And to the assistants, secretaries and thousands of other women he slept with, sometimes in threesomes and at orgies in Oakley Street in Chelsea, where he lived with Angie Barnett in what was then cutely called ‘an open relationship’. Bowie’s father, who knew a lot about music and was an early encourager - perhaps Bowie's first fan - was head PR at Dr Barnado’s Home For Children. In a sense, Bowie himself always worked in PR, realising early that  the image was everything. Even as a teenager had Bowie learned to make both men and women adore him.  By his early twenties, he had turned to men, sleeping with mime artist Lindsay Kemp and composer of musicals Lionel Bart, among others. A vivacious Kemp, interviewed by GQ editor Dylan Jones in David Bowie: A Life, says that Bowie ‘went out with most people,” including Kemp’s costume designer, much to Kemp’s chagrin, causing poor Kemp to attempt suicide by bicycling into the sea at Whitehaven in an effort to re-recreate scenes from both the 400 Blows and Bicycle Thieves simultaneously. According to Mary Finnegan, his former Beckenham landlady, and herself another forever disappointed suitor - Finnegan wrote Psychedelic Suburbia, a delightful account of her relationship with Bowie in Beckenham, just after he’d left home and had broken up with the splendidly named Hermione Farthingale -  Bart swung down to the South London suburbs in his Roller and disappeared with Bowie onto the back seat for the afternoon. Bowie was an admirer of Joe Orton's cheeky subversion. They both had something of the Artful Dodger about them; Bowie certainly wasn’t averse to putting it about when it came to getting ahead. He had much to put about. Feminine and extraordinary looking, with different coloured eyes, a swan neck, porcelain skin, good hips and a delicious penis, he had it all. I believe his penis was first detailed in print by his first manager Ken Pitt, who Bowie left after Space Oddity became a hit, poetically describing ‘his big penis hanging from side to side like a pendulum of a grandfather clock.’ Fans will be pleased that his member is often commented on in this book and might want to think of Bowie as something from a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, a thin man with a transcendental phallus. Bowie attended the same school as me, Bromley Technical High School in Keston, but ten years earlier. It is important to note what a shithole it was: bullying, violent, with incompetent if not sick teachers. Education, in those days, for working class and lower middle class children, was hardly considered essential or even necessary. We were being trained to be clerks for the civil service, like the dour eponymous hero of H. G Well’s Kipps, a rags-to-riches tale of self-improvement which we studied at school, since Wells was the only famous local artist apart from Richmal Crompton, author of the Just William books. The more imaginative boys, or the ones who could draw, went into advertising, which Bowie did after school, working on a campaign for a slimming biscuit called Ayds. The only decent adult at Bromley Tech was guitarist Peter Frampton’s dad, Owen, who let us use the art room at lunchtime to mess around in with guitars, while complaining how much he hated Steve Marriot’s voice. His son had just joined Humble Pie. It is instructive to recall how little was expected of us kids and how we were patronised. I remember a nouveau riche friend from ‘up London’ walking into our house in Bromley and saying, to mum’s horror, “What a lovely little house you have!” British pop has always been lower-middle-class and came out of the art schools rather than universities, which was where, until recently, all the other British culture - theatre, movies, the novel - came from. Pop was always more lively: the music-mad kids were rebellious, angry and ornery. They always had a chip on their shoulders when it came to class and education. Social disadvantage has always been essential to pop: the hilarious incongruity of kids brought up in small houses without central heating and eating Spam for tea suddenly finding themselves living in mansions after writing a song. Despite Lindsey Kemp’s efforts, Bowie was a terrible mime. But he was a great mimic and loved to do the voices of his contemporaries - Jagger, Bryan Ferry - while pissing himself laughing. This matter of the voice is interesting: as with with a lot of us, Bowie’s accent wobbled and never really settled. The accent known sneeringly as ‘mockney’, used by South Londoners like Bowie and Jagger before they went American, would have been necessary as well as natural at the time for boys brought up among cockneys who’d moved to the suburbs after the East End had been bombed during the war. That accent, which I still do when I’m bad-tempered, would have helped you fit in, saving you from being beaten up at school or on the street, since the locals weren’t keen on anyone who didn’t speak like them, or, God forbid, showed an interest in anything artistic. The commmunity was always aspirational, but determinedly downwardly mobile when it came to culture. You wouldn’t have wanted the lads to see you in a dress. Fortunately, Bowie’s schooling didn’t interfere with his education. Almost everyone remarks on Bowie’s everlasting curiosity, ‘self-improvement’ and wide-ranging intelligence. After reading Robert Heinlan’s sci-fi epic Starman Jones [1953], as well as collecting from movies, poetry and the numerous artists he admired, he constructed himself and his numerous aliases from a range of sources. As obvious precedent Oscar Wilde writes in Dorian Gray, “Man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature...” Bowie was more Don Juan than Dorian Gray, a woman’s fantasy rather than a narcissist. It is well known that he made himself up but much in him remained constant. Unlike Iggy Pop or Lou Reed or even his schizophrenic older brother Terry, he was born cheerful and was never truly nihilistic or even depressed. Like most of us, he worried he might go mad, but he clearly never did, despite his best efforts. He was unembarrassable and could be blokey and laddish in the English manner, adoring jokes, TV shows: Larry Grayson, Peter Sellers, Pete and Dud and The Office. Bowie wasn’t one to waste anything. Even his period of self-destructiveness yielded some of his finest work, which, like the Beatles’, was that incredibly difficult thing - both experimental and popular. He told me that cocaine almost killed him several times, his friends putting him in a warm bath just to keep his circulation moving. However, he was always concentrated and was never not serious about his career. Both otherworldly and extremely practical, when he had a new album, he’d make the terrifying move of playing it to you, sitting opposite in a kimono with a pad and paper, ready to make notes, seeming to believe believing he could learn from you. I met Bowie through a mutual friend and asked if we could use his songs on the sound track of the BBC adaptation of my first novel the Buddha of Suburbia. He agreed, and said he also had some ideas for some original music. When he was composing this, and I expressed fear that some of the music was either too fast or slow, I can’t remember which, he hurried back to his pad near Montroux in Switzerland, spending the night re-doing everything. He'd never composed for film before: he had wanted to make the score for The Man Who Fell to Earth but was too knackered after filming to get down to it. In his Bowie: A Life, Dylan Jones uses a collage or dialogical method, collecting the voices of those who knew or worked with Bowie and running them together chronologically. It is a pleasure to hear from everyone: lovers, managers, musicians, journalists, Croydon girl Kate Moss, musicial figures such Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick, Mike Garson, and Tony Visconti. And we hear all the Spinal Tappish gossip. The time Jimmy Page spilled beer on Bowie’s silk cushion and blamed Ava Cherry; when a clearly envious Paul McCartney invited him over and then couldn’t bear to talk to him, but got Linda to instead. The time Bowie and John Lennon went on holiday to Hong Kong and were determined to try monkey brains. And, when Bowie’s shows had intervals he’d sit in the dressing room watching Coronation Street on VHS. More importantly, as a more-or-less single parent, Bowie brought up his son, the film-maker Duncan Jones, impeccably, and it is amusing to think of he and Lennon talking together about being good fathers. Bowie always said that Keith Richard was less out of it than he liked others to believe, being an ace at Trivial Pursuit for instance, but the same was true of Bowie himself. Many Bowie stories are as familiar as tales from the life of Jesus, but what is impressive about the useful biographical method which Jones uses, are the accounts by then youngsters like Nick Rhodes, Neil Tennant, Siouxie Soux and Dave Stewart suddenly seeing Bowie as Ziggy on Top of the Pops and understanding something about their lives and what they would go on to do in music. Bowie appealed to those who wanted to get out of Bromley or anywhere that resembled it - most of Britain in the 70s. His kids’ song Kooks really is wonderful; he was liberating, and did want to ‘let the children boogie’. Bowie and Iman came to visit Sachin and Carlo, our twin sons, when they were born, bringing gifts. That night Paul McKenna, who was a pal, tried to hypnotise Bowie into quitting smoking, but he clearly didn’t want to be hypnotised and didn’t want to quit, but he pretended for Paul. After, I remember him standing on the steps of my house, begging me to get him some fags. “Can’t we go together,” I suggested. “But I can’t go anywhere,” he said, gesturing at Shepherd's Bush. Being flattered and fawned over your whole life isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be, and, in his last years in New York, he gave up pleasure for happiness. It seemed he returned to the blessedly ordinary satisfactions of being a good parent and husband. Not that someone like him could give up being an artist; unlike most pop stars, his last albums were a development. If, inevitably, this story is sad at the end - Bowie never seemed the sort of person to die on you - it is inspiring to hear what he meant to so many people. He always sent a birthday card, which, characteristically, he made himself. He was our starman and he knew it. He did it for us, always prepared to be the hero we wanted, a real star, not a musician in jeans and a T-shirt with dirty hair, but a glorious glowing beauty like Jean Harlow, Marlon Brando or Joan Crawford, someone who lived it all the time, and who was never bored or ordinary for one moment. Anyone, anywhere, who has ever listened to pop and danced in their bedroom, will have listened to him and always will. -- If you wish to preorder my forthcoming memoir, Shattered, you can do so by following the links provided here: linktr.ee/shatteredH

How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language? I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards. “Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it. Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me: Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities. I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!” At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off. In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss. That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere. On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on @YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably. But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview. Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”. Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond. I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else? Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply. As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all. The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”. Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society. “Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born. A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts). Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents. Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them. O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2 2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2 2= 5, it’s getting close. 2 2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point? But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other. Originally Posted on Evening Standard

We still don't know who this fly-tipper is - someone does. Please re-tweet. Many thanks. @SayeedaWarsi @kelvmackenzie

🚨 BREAKING: The River Lim in Dorset has been declared 'ecologically dead'. The amount of sewage overflowing into the river has TRIPLED in under a year.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood rehearsing in town @babylonpink boss mate

Sir Mark Rowley previously was responsible for the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command unit singled out in Baroness Casey's report He tells @MishalHusain enough progress 'clearly' wasn't made & reflection is needed on why issues weren't seen bbc.in/3mYytTK

Hello @CCfunkandsoul , what was that mix of David Essex's "Rock On" that you played at the weekend? Can you share? Thanks.

Slick wholeheartedly endorses this excellent tome from @DrHConniff

I reported a theft to @MetCC nearly a week ago. I still don't have a crime reference number. What next?

I reported a theft to @metpoliceuk nearly a week ago. I am still waiting for a crime reference number. What do I do next @metpoliceuk?

Ok - so the govt has elected *4pm immediately before a four day weekend* to put out a major update on its combustible cladding regulations. Here is a quick breakdown of what it has done.

Asking again...gig is tonight. Nothing from @seetickets either.

Slick says that it's always a pleasure working with staff at @ChelwestFT

Hi @O2ForumKTown , just checking that the @ViagraBoys gig is going ahead on 11/05/22 and that my tickets originally purchased for 16/06/20(!) remain valid.

Here’s the problem. Right here:

At the end of his evidence, Pickles refers to "the nameless, I think its 96 people who were killed in the Grenfell fire. I think it's them we should think about when we're arguing the toss". There were 72 deaths at Grenfell. None of them were nameless.