Blogging slips of the tongue, parapraxes, tells and misspeaks by public figureheads. Supposed to reveal 'repressed impulses', do they lift the veil on the society of power? Let's find out!
I sent a few tweets out during the second Presidential debate, once I realised it was worth blogging. While I missed 'binders full of women', I did note the following, beginning with Obama's clever coup of claiming to have called Benghazi as a terror attack, a confident claim which totally floored the unprepared Romney:
woah, Romney's floored by that, he wasn't expecting Obama to play such a strong hand
I ended up feeling pretty sorry for Mitt.
Anyway, I'll be blogging the third debate over on the Twitter feed, so keep an eye out for that.
Eagle!
UPDATE: I missed the debate, owing to having something better to do, ie sleep. What did I miss? What was it like? Worth catching up on, or should I not bother?
Apologies for the lack of recent updates. The final harvest of the year, and there's been so much going on! Invisible Obama, you didn't build that, Grant Shapps, the 47%, gategate, Mitt's taxes (2011 return released today!).
Seriously, this isn't an SEO post, just an indication that I'm not sure what to talk about in all this.
Reality check: as we live in the equinox between light and dark right now, maybe we should be concerned with things more pertinent to our real lives than the mis-speaks of politicians?
Reality check: OTOH, I started this blog with the intention of chronicling the desires of the powerful through their Freudian slips. These people seek influence over us, over the rest of society. Someone needs to keep an eye on them.
I'd like to broaden that remit a little: not just mispeaks and slips, and other psychological tells (like body language), but what is unintentionally revealed about power, by any means, whether that be by omission, documentary evidence, investigative journalism, or Freudian slip.
On the latter point, I'd also like to explore some of the psychological theories behind the Freudian slip - a contentious issue.
Stay tuned for posts over the next month as I catch up with what's been going on. Meanwhile, I'll work on updating header copy to reflect, and focus, the remit here.
Enjoy the Equinox and I'll wish you all a safe, happy and productive time as we move into the darker time of the year.
Discussing the leak, to the Daily Mail, of the plan to bring back the O Level exam to British schools, Ken Clarke claims he does not believe Michael Gove was responsible for the leak. Clarke cannot resist a smirk however, and stumbles over his words, wrong-footed.
Most tellingly, when Andy Burnham (Labour) comments 'Michael Gove is the best leaker in Whitehall', Clarke immediately replies 'Yeah' before swiftly seeking to blame Liberal Democrats instead. Who knows if it was Gove or a Lib Dem, but interesting that Clarke seems to agree that Gove leaks and leaks often.
Anyone got any information on Michael Gove's record on leaking? If so, please let us know by commenting below.
One of the leading politico-economic stories of the year has been Greece's general elections, and the wider 'debt crisis' involving the Euro, austerity, and all that jazz, in which they have been situated.
Last year, Russia Today's Keiser Report featured an interesting interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, and I was struck by her analysis that Europe does not have a 'debt crisis', rather it is a plan to restructure government according to the needs of the "financial coup d'état":
Yet this situation creates unusual, unpredictable consequences for electoral party politics, particularly in Greece where the establishment parties have lost ground: notably to the 'coalition of Marxists, ecologists and feminists' Syriza, but also to the openly fascist Golden Dawn. The party achieved international notoriety during the election campaign, I would say chiefly for two things: their pledge to attack hospitalised immigrants in Greece, and for a GD MP's physical attack on two left-wing politician on live TV. Here is that moment, with English subtitles:
In a clear display of either paranoia or deliberate obfuscation, Golden Dawn leader Ilias Kasidiaris claimed he was set up, deliberately provoked. According to the Guardian, reporting on the incident
The party's image has been severely dented by continuous replays of footage of the 31-year-old Kasidiaris, a former army commando, striking the middle-aged Communist party deputy Liana Kannelli three times.
Oh yeah? Well, in fact Golden Dawn's share of the vote was only very slightly dented after the incident, its share down from 6.97% to 6.92%. In other words, support for the party has held firm. Clearly, the manufactured economic 'crisis' can be blamed. For our purposes, we note how little the GD spokesperson's public loss of control on TV affected the party's electoral results. What do you think? Was the incident manufactured, not by the TV show but by Golden Dawn itself, a fake loss of control designed to maximise publicity for the group and appeal to a pro-violence tendency in humanity? Or was it a genuine loss of control, spun by the party to portray Kasidiaris as a victim of political correctness?
Here's a sharp analysis of the election results to ponder in the meantime. Also, in a thematically related incident from America, here's a video about an alleged assault on Ron Paul by another Republican politician that seems to have been imagined.
My take? Rather than an physical assault, this in fact seems to be an example of a psychological assault using body language commonly employed in the society of power to express seniority and hierarchy within that society.
By the way, in the interests of balance I should point out that T-mobile are one of the many networks implicated in the Carrier IQ spyware story.
Back in April, on Holocaust Memorial Day, President Obama made an halting speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In the video below, at 1:33, Obama makes a slip regarding technological surveillance and repression. He's talking about his administration's intent to 'institutionalise the focus' on the issue of potential genocides today. In particular, Obama talks about the current crisis in Syria, and announces new sanctions on those who 'abet' Syria 'for using technologies to monitor and track and target citizens for violence'. A finger wag comes in at 1:20, as Obama says the word 'today'. Then, as he begins to talk about the new sanctions, his hand makes a pincer gesture, as if to dramatise sanctions closing around the Assad regime, but the gesture continues, to emphasise the monitoring, tracking and targeting of citizens for violence.
Then comes the Freudian slip: raising his finger once more, to emphasise the point, Obama states 'these technologies should not be used to empower...' and then he stumbles as he realises his mistake. As he moves to correct the statement, his hand once more makes the encircling gesture, as he says 'technologies should be in place to empower citizens not to repress them'.
What are we to make of this? I want to hear your views. Is this a revealing slip, a politician stating his real, if unconscious view, on the era of technological surveillance Internet-based technologies have brought to bear? In particular, does the body language add a particular layer of interpretation to this parapraxis?
We can possibly detect a little suppressed smile as Obama corrects his slip, almost as if the accidental meaning of his statement triggers a brief moment of amusement for him. Here's an animated gif showing the moment he realises his mistake and corrects his statement.
One final point: earlier on in the speech, Obama mentions new technologies, stating 'we will strengthen our tools across the board...and create new ones'. He states that they will work with technology companies to this end. He states 'alert channels will ensure information about unfolding crises, and dissenting opinions, quickly reach decision makers - including me'. In other words, technology will be used to funnel information to the government. I'm interested in theories as to why Obama feels the need to add 'dissenting opinions', which he does rather quickly, to this stipulation. Dissenting from who? Presumably, the President is expressing the need for a diversity of information about 'unfolding crises' to reach his ears, not just the standard view. It's a fine point, but why could it not be implicit in the phrase 'information about unfolding crises'? In other words, maybe the purpose of these new technologies will be to monitor 'dissenting opinions' in general?
Here's the video capturing that moment, so you can judge for yourself.
Stories catching my eye recently
Many of you will have heard Obama's statement that he has 'evolved' into someone who supports same-sex marriage, and publicly affirming his personal support for gay marriage. It turns out one figure surprisingly not yet mentioned on this blog, American VP Joe Biden (who is famous for gaffes, slips and plagarism in public speaking) appears to have precipitated the affirmation. The story goes that in a typical Biden blunder, he jumped the gun by making a similar statement off the cuff, thus forcing Obama to make his statement - arguably, a case of the off-message
mis-speak of a loose-lipped politician making a little bit of history. The Slate analysis is archly titled The Audacity of Evolution.
“I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
Meanwhile here's a pre-emptive exposure of Cameron, courtesy of Armano Iannuci's Time Trumpet.
Local councillors are so funny sometimes.The Right Ear has a hugely entertaining report on the twitterstorm created by an apparently pro-EDL councillor who, despite claiming not to have realised the EDL were racist in her subsequent apology, had previously tweeted such gems as 'if you don't like it here go back to where you came from' to someone on the basis of their funny foreign name. The post is valuable as an archive of tweets deleted by the councillor concerned.
Happy Mayday! The story of the origins of Mayday can be a contested one, anarchists and pagans claiming the festival as their own, attempting to wrest the festival away from its usage by the state.
In the ancient pantheon, the Greek Maia, mother of Hermes, was identified with the Roman Maia, a figure associated with growth and the earthly. According to Wikipedia,
the month of May (Latin Maius) was supposedly named for Maia, though ancient etymologists also connected it to the maiores, "ancestors," again from the adjective maius.
Here's a representation of the Greek Maia, with Hermes:
Mayday as a workers day is dated by anarchists from the late nineteenth century, and is intimately bound up with the fight for an eight-hour working day, the Haymarket riots and subsequent martyrdom of several men executed by the state in the aftermath.
6 years go, Democracy Now talked about these events in some detail:
Watch the whole show.
So that's the origins of Mayday from a modern perspective. Taking a longer view, the festival is as ancient as agriculture probably, maybe older. As the year's mid-point between spring equinox and summer solstice, this time is known as Beltain when the light and heat in the North is halfway between equality with dark and cold, and supremacy.
The vulgar right-wing journalism of our old friends the Daily Mail holds that:
May Day as a festival is thought to have originated as a day of Roman dancing on which youths would celebrate the coming of spring and pay homage to Flora, the goddess of fruit and flowers.
Read more.
The Mail here seems to want to downplay any grass-roots origins of the festival, and thus any authentic association with a people's history, instead preferring the Roman Empire as the secret origin. It appears far more likely the Roman Floralia was added to the British Beltain.
This process has been repeated over and over, the day repressed or co-opted by the state as time moves on.
Last month I blogged that police are just another gang, children fooling around with guns. Today a similar story has emerged with regard to another privileged, state-supported group in society.
Who is Pippa Middleton? I had to ask myself this question today when I saw this tweet:
I thought the name sounded familiar - perhaps a BBC newsreader? But no, apparently she is the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, who is married to Prince William.
Middleton was in Paris for some mock-18th Century Versailles-style parties with various aristos. While she's driving around the city of lights in a German convertible, the driver decides to point a gun at paparazzi. What larks! Er...yes, but they're paparazzi, mate. That means the whole world can see what an asset you are to society:
Let them eat lead.
In a gift for newspaper copywriters, this incident comes shortly after deadly shootings in Toulouse, exposing these more privileged gun-fans to accusations of 'bad taste'. The Sun report, which has a further three pictures, points out that even waving a fake gun publicly in Paris carries a potential custodial sentence.
From our point of view, we are interested in what this story reveals about the normal workings of power. The non-coverage by the BBC does reveal something about how that channel's pro-aristo, pro-state bias and self-censoring norms persist despite its sometimes radical, investigative history. For other organisations, I guess the potential revenue from covering the story, and any prestige from claiming the public interest high-ground, outweighs any
bias they too have towards the powerful. Step outside the British media and the coverage becomes marginally more explicit. But let's not assume that bias and censorship has disappeared. Here's NBC:
The report is keen to tag this as a 'strange incident' straight away, immediately precluding the possibility that this is normal, if usually hidden, behaviour. And is it really 'unclear' who the men in the car are? Or do the Sun know exactly who they are but prefer not to say?
NBC's sources claim that police don't know anything. Whether that will change is moot, but notice how the report, on no evidence whatever, that the gunman 'may'facing questions from police. How do they know? He could be over the border by now. The effect is to reassure the viewer that the gunman will face the legal consequences, while in fact there is no guarantee of that. Despite covering the story, they don't want us to get too angry about it, or know the names of suspects. The bias is still there.
No one is asking why these people didn't realise that their act would be interpreted as bad taste in the light of the Toulouse shootings. It's a terrible gaffe, but with such bad timing one assumes it did not even occur to these people that the two incidents would be connected in the public mind. Its as if these people believe they live in a rarefied strata of society that has nothing to do with the fall out of recent foreign policy that the rest of us have to deal with. The incident in Toulouse - if they were even aware of it at all - was probably filed away as beneath consideration. The grubby world of plebeian gun-crime has nothing to do with them. These people are proud to be able to brandish guns in public, as you can see. It is their birthright and their pleasure.
It's interesting that despite the BBC non-coverage, this is public knowledge now. The Crown's PR people will presumably be doing whatever damage limitation they can right now. Expect a contrite-sounding public apology from Middleton soon. Aristos will keep their guns hidden for a while. But the power behind it carries on regardless.
Sally Nugent, a television sports presenter, was recently drafted in to present the BBC Breakfast News and attracted a few headlines for accidentally saying 'cock' when she meant to say 'pocket'.
The Daily Record claims
viewers took to Twitter to point out the embarrassing gaffe during a report about fake pound coins.
Sally said: “When you’re walking around with a couple of pound coins in your cock – um, pocket...”
Eleanor Head tweeted: “Oh, Sally Nugent.. your first time giving BBC breakfast news and you say cock rather than pocket on live television! freudianslip.”
And Tim Marben said: “Four pound coins in your cock...” Oh, BBC Breakfast, you please me no end.”
A quick search of Twitter reveals no user by the name 'Tim Marben' exists; there are a number of users called Eleanor Head but none of them tweeted about Sally Nugent.
It appears that the Daily Record decided to add an angle to the story by pretending people were talking about it on Twitter. Which they are not. There's only one tweet about Sally Nugent, to do with her legs. She's the new Angela Rippon it seems.
Here's an edited version of the moment:
Slips by female newsreaders that get a lot of publicity often relate to sexuality, usually penises. From earlier in the year this was getting a lot of attention:
Meanwhile this newsreader seems to associate policing with masculinity:
Male newsreaders also enjoy explicitly referring to the penis:
A Catholic priest is 'co-operating', with an investigation into an "inadvertent" display of gay porn, apparantly caused by an auto-loading memory stick left in a laptop, during a presentation at a primary school in County Tyrone.
Father Martin McVeigh projected the images onto a screen during a meeting for parents in Pomeroy in preparation for First Holy Communion.
According to the head of the Catholic church in Ireland:
The priest has stated that he had no knowledge of the offending imagery. The archdiocese immediately sought the advice of the PSNI who indicated that, on the basis of the evidence available, no crime had been committed.
"He was visibly shaken and flustered," said the parents. "He gave no explanation or apology to the group and bolted out of the room"; the co-ordinator and the teachers then continued with the presentation. The meeting continued in his absence, however, the parents who viewed the pictures were horrified and distracted.
"Twenty minutes later he returned, he continued with the meeting and wrapped up by saying that the children get lots of money for their Holy Communion and should consider giving some of it to the church."
Concedes his racism that is, but with this one he may as well concede the race. Seems fairly clear that he was about to say 'nigger' while criticising Obama's supposed Socialist Peacenik credentials:
The Young Turks have this interesting analysis:
One blog, Addicting Info, argues racism towards Obama has become apparent across the Republican board:
Gingrich has called President Obama the “food stamp President.” Santorum once said he didn’t want to make black people’s lives better. Rush Limbaugh has referred to the President as “Barack the magic Negro.” And conservatives have made efforts to pass birther bills all as a response to the color of our President’s skin. Though Santorum managed to stop himself, the damage has already been done. For any Presidential candidate to even come close to using such a word on the national stage is unacceptable. It not only reveals the rampant racism and feelings of white supremacy residing in Santorum’s twisted soul, it reveals the rampant racism and white supremacy feelings that have taken over the Republican Party.
They may have the backing of the state but they act like just another street gang fooling around with guns.
A story today in the Daily Mail, the well known Hitler-supporting newspaper otherwise known as the Hate Mail, reports some armed officers in Manchester have been 'ordered to leave their unit after the discovery of a picture showing them fooling around with a shotgun'.
It has especially riled, according to the Hate Mail, the family of Pc Ian Terry who was killed, shot in the chest, on a training exercise with Manchester police. The BBC report of the time quotes Garry Shewan, Assistant Chief Constable of GMP:
Since Ian's death
we have made a number of changes to the way in which we train officers
to ensure that all firearm training exercises are carried out in the
safest possible way by reinforcing procedures and existing policies.
Well it looks like a TV studio. Apparently its the White House where a 'clearly reluctant' President sings.
Meanwhile, who knew the Hufington Post has a collection of Obama's most religious statements! That's like Letterman's Top 10, only even more likely to be boring this week.
Anyway, the earliest they could dig up implies it was the communitarian side of the religion which got Barack O's God-trance going:
From the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6, 2009
"I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a
father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who
were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was
skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most
spiritual person I've ever known. She was the one who taught me as a
child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want
done.
"I didn't become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to
the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of
indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after
month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who
were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they
came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those
neighborhoods, that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It was there
that I felt called to a higher purpose -- His purpose."
Of course this must be Obama's most famous religious statement.
As he tries to explain, what he was trying to do is defend McCain from accusations he insinuated Obama is a Muslim. But maybe Obama's faith encompasses a general Abrahamic perspective, revealed by the slip?
For years now I very much enjoy reading freewillastrology.com, horoscopes by Rob Breszny which, when he's on form, really delight with their unexpected angles and metaphors.
His paragraph for Pisces this week uses a figure bound to make a reappearance on this blog: John McCain.
Pisces (February 19-March 20)
Gawker.com notes that American politician John McCain tends to repeat himself -- a lot. Researchers discovered that he has told the same joke at least 27 times in five years. (And it's such a feeble joke, it's not worth re-telling.) In the coming week, Pisces, pease please please avoid any behavior that resembles this repetitive, habit-bound laziness. You simply cannot afford to be imitating who you used to be and what you used to do. As much as possible, reinvent yourself from scratch -- and have maximum fun doing it.
Wondering what the joke is? It's not worth much. According to the gawker post in question, the joke invariably runs that as Congress' approval rating falls so low, "we're down to paid staffers and blood relatives." Something about this must appeal to McCain. Check the NY Mag list of each quote. I guess it shows us who McCain thinks can be relied upon in adversity: the remunerated and the blood line - volunteers and in-law relatives never get included in the joke.
I love this one because it shows how newsreaders are so often on auto-pilot, detectable from that special 'newsreader' tone of voice which appears to encode ideology through interpellation. The slip is made by the anchor on the left of your screen:
What is happening here is that a story about a blind man climbing a mountain is misreported as a gay man climbing a mountain. Its as if the newsreader drops in something from the stock mainstream categories of 'unusual' or 'disabled'. So, in this case, the auto-pilot slip allows us to speculate on how this mainstream media might regard homosexual love as an impairment, or at least as a category not normally associated with 'normal' enterprises like mountain climbing.
I think the key lesson here reminds us the media considers newsworthy abnormalities, even when they get it 'right', as part of a stock list, a social construction of conciousness. For once, the existence of ideology encoded in standard news speak is revealed by this slip, since both 'gay' and 'blind' appear to be on this list.
Well, twitter has exploded today thanks to Labour leader Ed Milliband's extraordinary slip up. It began when Diane Abbot, Labour MP, was having a Twitter conversation in which she tweeted, amongst other things:
White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism
So far, so boring. Then Bob Holness, a broadcaster well known in the UK for hosting 80's game show Blockbusters, died, and Milliband tweets:
Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters
Oh dear. Some feel this may have been a deliberate ploy to take the heat off Abbot. Most people view it as a typo, probably by someone who tweets (or used to) on Milliband's behalf. But coming as it does after the Abbot incident, it's a fascinating slip. The Telegraph argues "the slip-up suggests yesterday's 'race row', in which Miliband was compelled to rebuke Diane Abbott, is still weighing on the Labour leader's mind" - or the mind of his tweet-monkey. A reasonable argument given how difficult it is to mistake a for o on the keyboard, even on a phone. Let's try and unpick it a little more. It seems obvious to suggest a relationship with the Abbot controversy, and if that connection holds it does suggest unconscious racism on Milliband's part, having only 24 hours earlier himself 'busted' a well known 'black'. Another factor of interest is that Holness was a white South African, born there, raised in the UK, but returning there to begin his broadcasting career right at the beginning of the apartheid era. Did that obscure fact play into the slip too?
#Blackbusters is now a trending topic on twitter, as well as people complaining of a storm in a tea cup. It will be interesting to see how much this damages Milliband in the long term, compared with say Gordon Brown's incident in which he was recorded describing a member of the public as a 'bigoted woman'. Will this embarrassment stick to Milliband, despite the voices of reason and calm? Can he live it down? An interesting test case for public slips.
The video highlights choice slips from Michele Bachmann's speech earlier today. Apologies for the rough edit!
@2:20 She'll fight to keep her country 'se-cr- great - er- free'. Interesting one that - unsure whether to say 'safe' or 'great', she elides the words into 'secret'. She reverts to 'great', then to what she was apparently supposed to say - 'free, safe and sovereign'.
@2:27 Listing her pet hates, 'excessive government regulation' is mis-spoke as 'rec-ess-essive'. Recessive has a different meaning to excessive: 'tending to go, move, or slant back'.
Rush Limbaugh, a well known talk radio host, made this slip early in 2011.
tl;dl: Commenting on an article in the NYT, Limbaugh says 'white right wing media' instead of 'right wing media'.
Limbaugh already correctly uttered the phrase 'right wing media' once, which could account for the sheer speed with which Limbaugh corrects himself - it's like the error and the correction merge into one word : 'whiteright'.
Blogging this, Jason Easly does assume the slip reveals something of Limbaugh's unconscious. There is a debate as to whether slips do reveal the unconscious, as psychoanalysis after Freud theorises, or whether, as some cognitive psychologists contend, they are simple processing errors. I am agnostic on this issue, and I'll be blogging about it. For now though, it doesn't really matter if you believe the theory or not - I certainly believe such slips open the space to tell our truths, the truths we know. Who cares if Rush Limbaugh has repressed awareness of white bias in right-wing media, and that awareness has found a way out, through parapraxis? We're not here to psychoanalyse Rush Limbaugh. We're here to see if his slip can inform us about what's hidden behind the veil he represents. Easly's response continues:
Rush Limbaugh’s slip of the tongue was actually the truth. People
like him and Glenn Beck aren’t the right wing media. They are the white
wing media. They are preaching to an overwhelmingly older, white
audience. The white wing media serves as the information network for the
angry vastly majority white faces who scream that they want their
country back. Limbaugh appeals to this audience by using Obama’s skin
color to delegitimize him often. Everything from his frequent references
to the President as a man child to his featuring the song Barack The
Magic Negro on his show is an attempt to divide by race.
The purpose of the white wing media is to divide. Republicans learned
from the previous two decades that they can’t win or maintain power if
the nation is united, so since the election of Obama they have worked
day and night to once again fracture our nation 50/50. They view a
return to the last two decades as politically beneficial, and if they
have to divide the country along racial lines to achieve their goals,
that is exactly what they will do.
Limbaugh preaches conservative versus liberal, but the subtext is
also white versus black. That’s what the white wing media does. They
help those white conservatives who can’t handle their loss of political
power and standing in a society that is becoming more diverse, feel
powerful again by attacking change, progress, and diversity.
This video, posted on www.mediaite.com and tweeted by CNN themselves, shows CNN's coverage of the Republican Iowa caucus, which by 1.30am was getting a bit loose as the newsreaders and pundits struggle with the new studio tech, and find themselves in one of those live TV moments of chaos.
But check out the parapraxis by pundit Ali Velshi at 2:54. Explaining why Ron Paul is the most popular candidate on Twitter, he says "we know he's been attacked - attracting a younger audience'. Mistaking similar sounding words is a common enough parapraxis - in this case he misses out the 'r', to make 'attacked' - yet perhaps this reflects an underlying sense of hostility towards Ron Paul, balancing the positive news of his popularity on the microblog?
Anyway, news is Mitt Romney has won the caucus by eight votes. Ron Paul was third, according to the Guardian:
Romney and Santorum both ended the night on 24.5% of the vote, Paul 21.5%, Newt Gingrich 13%, Rick Perry 10%, Michelle Bachmann 5% and Jon Huntsman 1%.
Paul's campaign team claimed it was now down to a two-man race between himself and Romney because Santorum did not have the resources to mount campaigns in other states.
Paul's national campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, said: "The Ron Paul campaign is celebrating a great victory tonight … This is now a two way race between establishment candidate Mitt Romney and the candidate for real change, Ron Paul."
Micro-blogging, through services like twitter and identi.ca, has becme famous for slips, such as the public blogging of a message intended to be private. This appears to have happened today - @EinyShah, an 'advisor on young people' who works with the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, tweeted this earlier:
well it's been a fucking pr disaster for us - thank god for the rain...
— Einy Shah (@EinyShah) January 3, 2012
