Editorial Bear

I don't blame McDonalds for finding Charles' statement disappointing. It is.

While child obesity is a very real problem, levelling all the blame on a single company seems impossibly naive. Especially when you consider that McDonalds have reconfigured their company profile to combat that. Besides, there are more companies selling high sugar, high fat products than just Chateau McDo.

Ice cream, chips, cookies, cake, crisps, chocolate, candy, fried chicken, kebabs... You can buy them from supermarkets, burger vans, corner shops and kebab houses... The world's obesity problem cannot be laid at McDonald's door. That's like blaming all smoking related lung cancer on the Marlboro Man, ignoring the input of Silk Cut, Winston and all the other hundreds of tobacco companies.

Besides, while McDonalds products are full of sugar, fat and empty calories, the problem is not the products themselves - it's the people who eat them and HOW they eat them.

Morgan Spurlock attacked McDonalds before Prince Charles thought it was fashionable, with his brilliant documentary Supersize Me, in which he lived off nothing but McDonalds food for a month and recorded the weight gain and health issues that resulted... But what Spurlock's documentary failed to mention is that NOBODY should eat nothing but McDonald's products for a month - or even a week.

Like a hot dog in the park, or a burger at the races, a McDonalds is a treat. The high calories and sugar from one treat should be balanced out by a decent diet for the rest of the week. In fact, it's even simpler than that. Healthy eating is pure mathematics. To combat obesity, people simply need to consume fewer calories than they exhert.

If people can do that, they can eat at McDonalds every day - like trim 12 stone American Dan Gorske, who eats two Big Macs a day.

Prince Charles suggestion that they ban McDonalds is horribly simplistic. There are families who eat at McDonalds far too much, but amongst poverty stricken people, there's a reason for that. To prepare a healthy meal for one person from the supermarket takes several pounds. Fries and a burger from McDonalds are 99p.

One of the major reasons for obesity - and the reason it effects poorer people - is because healthy food is expensive. These days, healthy eating is a fad and you can buy all sorts of healthy products - but like organic food, there is a premium attached.

People used to be trimmer and healthier because a regular, healthy meal could be prepared cheaply - more cheaply than going to McDonalds. These days, that situation is reversed.

This indicates that there's a bigger problem than can be cured simply by banning one particular restaurant chain.

But banning things is Britain's answer to everything. It's naive and it doesn't work. Human beings are individuals and are responsible for making their own decisions. If you ban McDonalds, how long will it be before you're banning ice cream, chocolate and cake? In fact, banning the Big Mac would start us towards a future in which all 'meals' are government approved and probably come pre-packed, with no variety.

That's not a democracy. That's a police state, straight out of Orwell's worst nightmares.

I enjoy my wine and I enjoy my food. But if we live in England, how much longer will I be allowed to enjoy them for? There are already talks about banning commercials for alcohol. Will pubs be next? Or alcohol entirely?

People ask me why I want to move to the United States. Maybe it's because they still appreciate individual choice out there and have learnt their lesson from the 18th Amendment.

Now during the race for Congress and the Senate, I was pretty keen on getting some democrats in there. The Republicans absolutely dominated the political circus for far too long and we needed some contrast and conflict to keep things real.

Fortunately, if the Democrat/Republican balance is going to be preserved, the Republicans have two pretty good candidates running for the presidency. John McCain is considered a bit of a Republican maverick and although, at 72, he'd be the oldest US President in History I know for a fact that some septuagenarians are sharper than the average 29 year old.

My favourite has to be Rudy Giuliani, though.

After Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani is the most famous candidate for the 2008 Presidency. He's known as "America's Mayor" for his amazing leadership during 9/11 and for transforming New York City into the shining beacon it is today.

What I like about Rudy is the fact that he's an individual, not just a 'Republican.' In fact, Rudy started his political career as a member of the Democrats.

Rudy's political beliefs fit neatly with mine. He's really a centurist, rather than a Republican. What's more, he's got real personality. A working class boy from Brooklyn, he scrabbled his way to the top and has never let politics get in the way of what he believed in - like the time he ejected Yasser Arafat from the Lincoln Centre during a do for the United Nations.

My experiences of America are actually quite limited. I really only know New York. But from what I know of New Yorkers, you could do a lot worse than a self-made kid from Brooklyn in the White House.

It would be a delicious contrast to the last two terms. George W. Bush was born into spectacular wealth. Rudy's father was an ex con. I think Giuliani will bring a down to earth attitude to American politics that the Bush legacy could never match - despite Dubya's cowboy pretensions.

I'd be very interested to hear what tickets you'll be backing for 2008. Please comment below.

This has to be the most ridiculous thing I've heard for a long time.

After a spate of brutal shootings in London, the Home Secretary decides to target - you guessed it - replica guns.

Now let me just fill you in on a little fact about replica guns. They aren't real. They don't shoot bullets. In fact, all they do is look like real guns.

No, I'm not saying replica guns are perfectly fine things to own. I'm well aware of the fact that people commit robberies with them and police accidentally shoot suspects who are holding them.

But the fact remains. Since the invention of the replica gun, the worldwide death toll from replica-gun inflicted deaths has remained at 0.

Replica guns can't kill anybody.

So when the Home Secretary is faced with a very REAL and very DANGEROUS problem of gun crime in London, it seems a pointless exercise to focus on replica guns. It seems almost like a knee-jerk reaction to a problem, intended to divert attention away from the real issue and make it look like the government's DOING something.

What I have to ask is: How stupid does John Reid think we are?

Apparently the anti 'politically correct' are up in arms about this. Now normally, I'm the first to campaign against this sort of thing - I'm certainly against signs in Spanish being put up all over New York.

But the fact is, a large number of the Spanish speaking immigrants to America are illegal. To pander to their needs by supplying signs in their native language is ridiculous. REAL immigrants (like myself) have to prove a working knowledge of English (I just scraped through.) However, like immigration and even criminal laws, this is another American law that illegal immigrants seem to think doesn't apply to them.

It's a completely different story in England.

We're part of the European Union. Polish, Dutch, Spanish... Whatever EU nation you're from, you have FULL rights to live and work in England. Britain is no longer a truly sovriegn nation. We're part of something bigger - Europe.

If the Polish immigrants number sufficently to make Polish signs a requirement - they should be erected. It's NO DIFFERENT to there being signs in English all across France, to cater to the growing number of Brits who've had enough of England and decided to head abroad.

I've mentioned several times how having ginger hair places you in a very nasty situation. In this ridiculous country, you can't even enjoy a pint without some clod swaggering over to you and sneering: "Oi, Ginger."

I've backed down from confrontations several times - but this shocking story reveals that I'm not the only person to have dealt with this curiously British racism.

Surely that's what it is - racism. How come the attacker hasn't been jailed for committing a hate crime, like he would have been if he'd attacked somebody for being black or Asian?

A Saudi run school in Acton, London, has cheerful textbooks brainwashing kids about the evil Judeo Christian subhumans.

Considering it took only a few weeks to brainwash the previously admirable blokes who became Britain's first suicide bombers, imagine what a hardcore hatred for Christians and Jews the students at this school must be developing?

THIS explains what's happening in Britain - how extremist Islam is clawing more and more of a foothold in 'this sceptered isle,' perverting and brainwashing the children of those muslims who came to England to escape the backwards governments of their native fundementalist muslim countries.

Those muslims came to England to seek a better life - yet some of their children are joining the ranks of those who want to tear down and destroy everything bright and positive about the country they escaped to.

Mahathir Mohamad, former premiere of Malaysia, who's regime was criticised for brutality and torture, hosted a conference in Kuala Lumpur today in which he accused Tony Blair and George Bush of war crimes.

In order to maintain complete impartiality and objective bias, a macabre 'house of horrors' was set up for the 2,000 so called 'peace activists' at the summit to enjoy, including scenes depicting torture at Guantanamo Bay, including scenes of nails being driven into prisoner's flesh.

Speakers at the conference included former U.S. lawmaker Cynthia McKinney and former U.N. assistant secretary-general Hans von Sponeck, who obviously assumed the allegations of torture must be true if an unrepentant torturer like Mahathir Mohamad was making them.

It's laughable, if it wasn't so distasteful.

This former brutal torturer has made a fairground ride based around the fictional crimes of the USA's and UK's leaders (the torture scenes represented weren't just exaggerated - they were fictional.) We're supposed to take his allegations seriously?

I'm no fan of Guantanamo Bay, which is disgustingly unAmerican. The Abu Gharib scandal was a wound that will forever scar the American conscience. But instead of using evidence of actual wrong doings, Mahathir Mohamad prefers the safety of propaganda and lies.

If Cynthia McKinney and Hans von Sponeck really want to help sort out the mess in the middle east, they'd be better off associating with the people who matter, not discredited Media Circus performers like Mahathir Mohamad.

Check it out here.

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