After a good decade of being repeatedly thrown a metal plate of shit off through the hatch which audiences are expected to dine on – ANOTHER series of Big Brother and endless US shows like Storage Wars (one of the few times you’ll see American working-class people on the telly, and you’re supposed to laugh) – our appetite for current reality pretended right in front of us has taken in one of our worse flavours of the 21^st-century: war.

Last night NBC debuted Stars Earn Stripes.

The cast includes Jessica Simpsons’ ex, Nick Lachey, Todd (husband of Sarah) Palin and Terry Crews, filling the role of hard-talkin’ ghetto jive from every Vietnam film ever made. Shit gon get fragged.

In a brilliant moment Lachey asks: “Why did I let me agent talk me into this?” His answer, like everyone else’s on the show, should be that none of them have a career. Which is the only funny thing about this.

There’ll be tears, some laughter and plenty of talk over strings about good ole American Joe fighting the good fight in the Middle East. Humbling, they’ll say.

We should all be humbled. NBC have made all those Starship Troopers mock-adverts from way back when almost come true. Just don’t mention anything about men with guns walking into temples.

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Photo credit: qthomasbower

Buddhism isn’t something readily associated with the north-west of England. Football, yes. Music, contemporary art, flat caps, the labour movement – but not Buddhism. It’s something I would expect in the trendier corners of the south-east, alongside classes teaching people to cope with the spiritual emptiness that comes from immense wealth and knit-your-own-hummus lessons.

But it’s a rapidly growing scene in many of the north’s major cities, with thriving Buddhist centres in Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. Why are people turning to meditation and alternative spirituality now? I’m attending a six-week class to find out.

What had always put me off attending Buddhist meditation classes was, frankly, the clientèle. At the posh-ish university I went to, the people who went were typical gap-yah-in-Indiah stereotypes who I’d usually cross the road to avoid.

So I was a little nervous about the group I’d meet on my introduction to meditation. My classist prejudices turned out to be misguided, though – what struck me about the first class was that everyone seemed so normal.

No ageing hippies or posh squatters – everyone I talked to seemed to have a normal job in admin, retail and hospitality.

I asked why people had become interested in meditation. Was it the spiritual element? An alternative to the consumerist mentality fostered by successive UK governments as an alternative to political choice? (I didn’t use those exact words. I’m not Noam Chomsky, alright.)

What came through initially was a general dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the UK. People have done everything they were told to do – get a degree, get a job, get a house – and still they are stressed, unhappy, struggling for cash, not feeling fulfilled or satisfied.

Apart from a handful of people who were there because of advice from their therapist (including one gimlet-eyed man with anger management issues who I kept half an eye on throughout), almost everyone expressed the same problem: they had too much to worry about and they hoped meditation would help them calm down. Nearly all of them were worried about money.

The government has just released its first happiness index, the Orwellian-sounding Measuring National Wellbeing Programme. Responses by 165,000 people in the annual population survey reveal the average rating of “life satisfaction” in Britain is 7.4 out of 10, whatever that means.

But the anxiety amongst people I met on the first week of my Manchunian meditation course suggests this may be a bit of an optimistic estimate. I’m hoping to find out why in the next few weeks.

Fearghus Roulston will be back next week with more Meditating on the Recession.

But the paparazzi/tabloid machine that undeniably played a role in her sad end is harder to find this July.

Last week Pete Doherty ran away from his 1,345^th rehab clinic in Thailand. And nobody gave a drug-addled toss. Are we sick of hearing about rockstars on hard drugs, or just Pete Doherty because we’ve bloody well grown up, gone to uni and come back again with him as the music industry’s most consistently inconsistent smackhead. He’s become the decrepit bloke that pisses himself in the corner of your local pub – but much less likeable.

Photo credit: Gruenemann

But Amy Winehouse was likeable – loveable even – and that made her death the worst casualty of tabloid fame. One year on and things have gone quiet. It might be that a lot of Fleet Street finally feel guilty (might be). Maybe it’s one of the positive “chilling effects” from the Leveson Inquiry. Or it could just be because the press don’t have a star like Amy to play with at the moment. You try and get something interesting out of One Direction that doesn’t involve waterboarding and you get journalists’ problem.

So really today is a celebration. So here’s one for Amy and here’s another one for the gutter press in remission.

Last week Substance featured a little Twitter debate between us and The Commentator – the free market, pro-Israel website which broke last week’s story about the BBC omitting Israel’s capital city in its Olympic profiles page.

The BBC has since responded by altering the page: Jerusalem is now Israel’s “seat of government” although – it adds – “most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.” The page for Palestine has also been changed. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mark Regev have both spoke out against Israel being “discriminated against” by the BBC, arguments have been had, articles written. Some corners of the Right seems to be in agreement: rather than an honest mistake or a cowardly attempt to circumnavigate controversy, the BBC acted in an anti-Semitic way.

And yet not one of these reports referred to More Bad News from Israel by Greg Philo and Mike Berry. The landmark study uses an impartial source – fact – to demonstrate bias against Palestine in the Western media. By analysing 4,000 lines of text from evening TV news bulletins between Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 and the 2011 flotilla attack, Philo and Berry (like the noir detective team their name sounds like) assessed the frequency of words and phrases that implied a bias, skewed history of events, as well as the disproportionate weight given to Israeli over Palestinian sources. One of the two sources for the book was the “anti-Semitic” BBC.

The view most journalists enjoyed of Operation Cast Lead, due to Israel's press blockade. Photo credit: Prince Roy

The book even claims that two-thirds of the British population were unsure whether Israel occupied Palestine or vice versa. As former BBC journalists have already claimed, Israel has been known to keep in regular contact with those reporting on it, and not in a nice way.

If you thought getting a phone call off Kelvin MacKenzie bollocking you for an off-message story sounded bad, imagine getting it off a nation state. Some journalists have told of “waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis” (i.e. embassy-level or higher). The country also employs its National Information Directorate to higher the stakes in the Middle Eastern information war, helping to create a misinformed and pliant international community less able to accurately challenge Israel’s actions in the region. This means two-thirds of Britain are unable to place illegal settlements, attacks on civilians, occupation, administrative detention and a humanitarian crisis in their proper context.

But does this get a look in? Words and phrases like “bollocking” and “complained” reveal an anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian basis, don’t they?

Instead The Commentator used its own measure of “proof.” Two pictures side-by-side – one of Palestinian youths throwing rocks with the caption: “Palestinians have strenuously resisted Israeli control”; the other of an IDF soldier shouting at a man with the caption: “Israelis and Palestinians have been at loggerheads for decades.”

"Israelis = bad. Palestinians = good." Photo credit: PSP Photos

What does this mean? “Israelis = bad. Palestinians = good,” according to The Commentator. “It’s just that black and white to them [the BBC].” By reversing the website’s own order of preference, The Commentator is simply encouraging an either/or media narrative of an honourable Israel under attack from a radical, bloodthirsty Islamist Palestine. Their conjecture – not fact – is just as unhelpful and wrong as anti-Semitism itself.

The BBC should be a source of national pride. That doesn’t mean it should be free from thoughtful and well-intentioned criticism: quite the opposite. But using small incidents for political capital and selective outrage are not the way to go about it.

Tom Rollins

Yesterday a small protest outside Scotland Yard against the acquittal of PC Simon Hardwood – the man charged with manslaughter for the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 London protests in 2009 – wasn’t going to turn too many heads.

Despite an inquest from May 2011 finding Harwood guilty of “unlawful killing” and the infamous video clearly showing his attack on Tomlinson (who died shortly after), a jury found him not guilty.

What’s more interesting is that Harwood has an alleged history of knocking innocent people about. He left the Met in 2001 after accusations he’d tried out an illegal off-duty arrest on a man in a road rage incident, later tinkering with his notes of the event. While at another force in Surrey, Harwood faced allegations of a martial arts how-to-guide length list of violent offences while in uniform.

The jury result seems odd after the public outcry against Tomlinson’s death. A 2010 YouGov/Sunday Times poll found 51% of people thought it was wrong that nobody would faces charges for Ian Tomlinson’s death (compared to 31%) who agreed with the initial decision.

British juries don’t tend to convict on-duty police crimes. There hasn’t been a successful manslaughter charge against any police officer in 25 years, despite a string of allegations, the deaths of 1,433 people while in police custody (or recent contact with the police) since 1990, and video after video of swinging batons, stop-and-searches, horseback charges at 18-year-olds, day-long kettling and even pulling a protestor from his wheelchair.

But what could be more an affront on our nice sceptr’d isle with its multi-coloured democratic traditions than legally reprimanding a police force acting above the law?

Just this week “pre-crime” arrests were enshrined in legal precedent after the Charing Cross 10 lost their appeal having been arrested on their way to a republican demonstration on the royal wedding day.

Likewise, protest has been stifled in the run-up to the Olympics. BoJo’s bye-laws banned carrying placards, associating in large groups and chanting in Parliament and Trafalgar Squares. How are we supposed to cheer on Jessica Ennis now?

But this isn’t about just the Olympics. After the tourists go away we’ll still have the same police force. This is about precedents being set by our police that threaten our ability to demonstrate against them, our safety, and our access to free and fair justice.