The Angry Exile

A plea

2012-01-28T04:25:00.000+11:00

A plea to both of my readers (hi, Mum). I have been quiet for a while, which is partly due to connection problems but mostly because early in the New Year I moved over to Wordpress. I tried to post to both simultaneously for a bit but I forgot a couple of times and then I ended up being unable to post to either for more than two weeks. This place will remain as it is here but barring anything that Wordpress do to annoy me there will be no further posts. Anyone who has me on a blogroll or RSS feed please update to the new addresses where the usual bile and venom against authoritarians and pricks will continue to be delivered.

http://angryexile.wordpress.com and http://angryexile.wordpress.com/feed.

Ta.

Yet more work

2012-01-03T14:56:00.001+11:00

So I thought I’d imported all my tags from this old place but I see that WP has decided that they’re categories, though having accidentally put a category cloud in the sidebar instead of a tag cloud this isn’t too big a problem right now. It is something else on the list of jobs to do though, and I wonder whether re-importing the old posts might fix it. This is going to have to be done anyway since I’ve just noticed that some of the older posts appear just as titles and the actual post content didn’t make it, which kind of defeats the object of importing them. Bugger it – this is stuff I thought I’d got sorted before I opened the place up. Oh well, pass me that hammer, will you?

Iranian Defence Ministry - same as everyone else's apparently

2012-01-03T05:53:00.002+11:00

Well done, geniuses. And how many battleships are currently serving with the navies of the world? With the Yanks having retired their last ones years ago I think the answer is very roughly approximately none. Yes, America has aircraft carriers to sink, but you don't need to sink one to put it out of business - you just need to do enough damage to bugger its ability to launch aircraft. I'm no expert but I guess that might be the reason the Yanks don't let them sail around on their own but supply each carrier with a bunch of other ships to support and protect it. All of which makes me think this 'sink a battleship' stuff is more about willy waving than anything else. No doubt it will go bang nicely if it hits a ship that gets within the 125 mile range but realistically that's not going to be the US Navy all that often, and it's not going to be anyone with a battleship except time travellers from the past. Tankers and freighters on the way in and out of the Persian Gulf, yes, but why make a battleship sinking missile for that?

No, I think this is more about giving the rest of the world the shits, and the only sensible response is the mature and dignified one. We all run up to the nearest Iranian embassy and yell "H4, H5, H6" at the top of our lungs and then run away again.

More work

2012-01-03T04:54:00.002+11:00

Max Farquar's just brought up my need for an RSS feed button on the new place somewhere. This is one of those things I now see I should have had on here ages ago. Every time I've wanted to add a feed I've just clicked the little RSS button that appears on the right hand side of the URL field in my browser and assumed everyone else was doing the same thing.

Except I've now realised that they'd only be doing that if they used Safari. Firefucks, Opera and Internet Exploder doesn't have it. Sorry, folks. Assuming just made an ass of me alone on this. I know a few people do follow me by RSS and I've no idea how you managed it because I know you don't all use Safari, but I'm putting up a button to make it easier. The only trouble is the goddamn thing hasn't bloody appeared and I don't know why yet. In the meantime the feed address is as follows:

feed://angryexile.wordpress.com/feed/

Hopefully that'll do until I get it to work.

Welcome to the new gaff

2012-01-03T01:36:00.003+11:00

Cross posted from angryexile.wordpress.com

Well, this has been a while coming, and there’s alway an outside possibility that WordPress will lock us all out, but I’ve finally made the move. There’s a few things still to do, the blogging version of pictures not hanging straight and being unable to find the box with the teaspoons in, but I’m in. Admittedly this is pretty slack of me since I was in ages ago and just haven’t made the time to sort it all out properly, so for a while it will be a work in progress with the occasional appeal to those more experienced with WordPress for advice on how to do things. In fact I’ll start with one of those right now – over at the old place one of the things that was starting to annoy me was the increasing length of the blogroll despite my having broken it up into sections and kept feeds only from the regular reads. I’d planned to follow that through even further here and almost have several blogrolls, which you can see over on the right there [well, not the right here, which is looking like it has for ages, but obviously the right at the new place - AE], but ideally I wanted them in drop downs or something similar showing only the first ten or twelve, and to keep those regular reads and residents of the Orphanage as feeds and displayed in recent post order. Anyone know, and does anyone know if I can make this white background that the posts appear on semi-transparent?

On the subject of the blogroll, you may notice that it’s a little longer than at the old place. Several people have been on my RSS for a while but because this move has been in a state of ‘just around the corner’ for months I’ve not added them. One seems to have given up blogging in the meantime but I’ve still added many more starting with the personal blogs of each one of the Orphans of Liberty (with the exception of one who I think only blogs at the Orphanage – Chuckles, if you read this and I’ve got that wrong please let me know and I’ll add yours), and in addition I’ve added links to some fine female bloggers: jredheadgirl, who I discovered only recently via a comment at either Dick Puddlecote’s or Velvet Glove, Iron Fist; Misanthrope Girl, who’s been in my RSS for a while; and Subrosa and Woman on a Raft, both of whom I should have added ages ago and can’t think why I didn’t. There are also additions in the Smokers and Drinkers section (itself an addition, and which includes a few of blogs from the regular reads/Orphanage sections because of some of the content), such as the aforementioned jredheadgirl, Smoking Out The Truth and Stand Fast, and also in the Climate Bloggers and Sites, the Thinkers, Pollies, Parties Etc, and the Other Sites sections. This means that my carefully albeit intermittently maintained pages of A-Z links that I’ve copied over almost verbatim from the old gaff have been buggered and need to be added to the list of tidying up jobs. If the world could arrange for there to be nothing to blog about for a week or two that’d be great, and if there was anyone on the blogroll at the old place who got missed here just wave at the screen and shout ‘Cooeee’ until I pay attention. Or leave a comment or contact me.

Anyway, welcome and do come in. Most of the old furniture is in the virtual garden and there are a couple of virtual ashtrays out there along with a virtual esky full of virtually freezing virtual beer out there. Mi casa es su casa… ooooh, houseplants, lovely. Do go on through, put your feet up and make yourself comfy, but excuse the changes as I try to get things more the way I want them.

Offence seeking déjà vu

2011-12-31T19:45:00.000+11:00

Do you remember the end of 2010? I do. My very last blog post of the year was titled "Last effort for the Offence Seeking Twat of the Year Award" and was about the Top Gear Christmas special outraging literally some people, most of whom were white, middle class Graun readers. Oh, and Andy Choudary.

Needless to say I haven't actually seen Top Gear's "Three Wise Men", and being a Christmas special I expect it'll air here between Easter and late June, but it has already made some news here. And it's all thanks to James May, a rock, a few square yards of black cloth, and bloody Anjem "Is-It-'Coz-I-Is-Slamic" Choudary. It seems that James May brained himself with a rock somehow and that when he came out of hospital, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, this was what he was faced with.
Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond disguised themselves as women by wearing Islamic face veils which only revealed their eyes in a Christmas show filmed in Syria.
Don't fancy yours much.

Andy, with almost gravitic inevitability, was upset because he saw this as an attack on a symbol of his religion, which as far as I could tell the burqa isn't, having been predictably silent over the years about Muslim attacks on the symbols and traditions of other religions.

Still, all to be expected, and so is the nature and level of outrage directed Top Gear's way over this year's Christmas special.

Jeremy Clarkson has been accused of offensive behaviour once again after mocking Indian culture in a Top Gear Christmas special.

Okay, can I interrupt to make a brief point. There's no 'accused of offensive behaviour' about it - if someone was offended then ipso facto his behaviour was offensive. The question is whether that's a reason for doing anything, and since nobody's ever done so much as two fifths of fuck all about most of the things that offend me, and since that doesn't keep me awake at night, I'd say the answer is no, no reason to do anything at all. Being offended is painless and causes no loss unless someone chooses to allow it, which says more about them than what they're complaining about. By all means take offence and say so if you like, but don't tell me it harmed you and the other person must be silenced.

Viewers have complained to the BBC after the outspoken presenter made a series of controversial remarks about the country's clothing, trains, food and history.At one point, Clarkson appeared to make light of the lack of sanitation for poor residents by driving around slums in a Jaguar fitted with a toilet.

And? It's not the wittiest way of making the point but unless it's actually wrong and Indian slums typically have indoor plumbing, piped water supplies and sewers now I don't see the problem. These people are dreadfully poor and literally don't have a pot to piss in. I'm not saying that Clarkson was subtly highlighting the issue of Indian poverty but it's not as if he was saying something that isn't true. Even if he was the appropriate response is rebuttal, not howls of righteous outrage and the usual demand to have him sacked and flogged with broken glass.

And then we have the actual volume of complaints.

A spokesman for the BBC said they had received 23 complaints about the programme, which was broadcast on Wednesday evening.

And how many watched? According to the Graun, who I imagine would like nothing better than the anger of the terminally thin skinned over Clarkson's shoot public sector strikers remark to kill TG's viewing figures, five million people watched and it was the most popular show in its time slot. Assuming every one of those 23 who complained actually watched the show that's 0.00046% of viewers who were offended, and given that about a million people in the UK are of Indian ethnicity it says even more that only 23 complained. Not that all those 23 were necessarily Indian - some are probably white, middle class Graun readers getting offended on behalf of Indians, who presumably don't know when they're being offended. Certainly some of the people taking to message boards and Twatter seem to be.

Owen Hathway tweeted: “Whats wrong with the BBC that they think casual racist stereotyping is acceptable on top gear?”

No idea, Owen, but why don't we leave it up to the million British Indians and the billion Indian Indians to decide whether to be upset. Many of them might think it's some middle aged white guy making a tit of himself and find it amusing. But no, they're clearly mistaken and should be as outraged as the Owens are on their behalf, because it's raaaaaaaacist, see? Raaaaaaaacist!

Which reminds me, where do I write in to complain about this sketch by Goodness Gracious Me from a few years back? I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now thanks to 23 anonymous complainants and an assortment of condescending pricks I now realise that it was mocking English culture and... what was it again? Oh, yes, I remember: casual racist stereotyping.

I mean, what is wrong with the BBC that they thought it was acceptable?

What's good for the goose is for the gander, offence seekers, and you can't have it both ways. Either both are bad and offensive and shouldn't be allowed, or both are fair play regardless of whether someone somewhere is (or just decides they ought to be) offended by it. I'd say the latter because, as I've said before, there is no right to go through life and never be offended, and since one person can be offended by something that is said while another can be offended by it not being said there never can be a right to not be offended.

As someone who's offended by opening the paper and has moved somewhere that has its own special name for the English my advice would be to get offended all you like as often as you like by absolutely whatever you, er, dislike. Just don't sit there fuming and expecting it means you have a right to insist that anyone else has to accommodate your feelings, because a free society can never work that way and all an unfree society can do is to pick sides.

Marvellous end to the year - UPDATED

2011-12-31T01:00:00.001+11:00

I was - and the reason for was rather than am will soon become clear - just getting ready to finally give Blogger the flick over this:

I've ranted about this more than once. I see no need for Google to have my bloody mobile phone number. None. And since I've been nagged about letting them have it for some time and have refused on each and every occasion you'd be forgiven for thinking they might have given up by now.

Oh, no. Nononononono. Now they've added this patronising fucking 'Are you sure about this?' message that appears when you try to skip adding the phone number for the umpteenth time. So, let me see how I can put this politely.....

..... Nope. Can't be done.

Yes, I'm fucking sure. Now stop fucking asking about it.

So that was it for me. I just felt like I couldn't be arsed to carry on saying no to a mob that were persistently deaf to my answer and seem prepared, EU or toddler style, to carry on asking the bloody question until the heat death of the universe or until I cave in. More likely, I feel, it will become a demand and then my choice will be to submit or move, and since I've had a dormant home at Wordpress since I began blogging I've been moving some of the virtual furniture over there in the past few months in anticipation of a permanent move at some point. In fact, I thought to myself, why not make it a New Year, new blogging location?

The only real issue is that there appears to be no easy way to move IntenseDebate comments to a free Wordpress hosted, but just now I thought I'd finally hit on a solution. Somewhat convoluted but it looked worth a shot, and if it didn't work then I'd just begin at the new place with an apology to those whose comments over the past year and a half or so I've been using ID won't show up there until I nut it out. Not the end of the world, I felt. I've never intended to delete this place so they'd all still be here.

So, off to Wordpress I go to test it out, first importing the most recent posts from here, and all of a sudden:

Damn right I had questions and concerns. 'Violation of terms of service' seems to be blogs that are created as search engine whores for marketing reasons or to spruik bullshit get rich quick schemes, and although I link to all sorts of places - because I began this blogging lark admiring the blogs that made an effort to back up what they were saying with sources and to credit quotes by linking to where they were written, and so I've always done the same - it should be pretty clear that this blog isn't about that. The other thing mentioned, and which I suspect I may have fallen foul of, is that WP don't like blogs that consist of duplicated content, and angryexile.wordpress.com is currently 100% duplicated content. However, this seems rather hard to avoid when importing an existing blog in toto into WP, and since it's MY duplicated content I'd have thought the thing to do is fire off an email and bloody asking me about it. Instead WP have gone straight for the nuclear option and shut down a blog that currently isn't open to public viewing anyway.

So, all this has been put into a web form and pinged WPwards in the hope that someone will look at it sharpish and let me back in. Unfortunately it's only 5.45am on Friday in California where (I believe) WordPress.com are based, and it's a bleary 12.45am the next day for me. I'm not getting anything done before I crash out for the night, and with New Year-y things going on tomorrow that's going to cut into my time even if they get onto it and sort things out soon after they get in. I suppose that's one upside for it being yesterday there because at least it's still a workday. If it was here I could be stuffed until Tuesday.

As it is I'm not optimistic of a 1st Jan move, and it seems it's all because of a what seems a disproportionate response by WordPress. It's not as if some kind person noticed the similarity and thought there was someone with a WP blog masquerading as me and ripping off my posts - the place is private and I'm the only one with access apart from whoever or whatever system at WP has decided it's in violation of the Ts and Cs. Disappointing, especially as one of the big appeals of WordPress is this:

“WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for 'uncomfortable thoughts and ideas', in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that."

An admirable sentiment which I'd just love to blog about at my place there. Except I can't, can I?

Fuck.

UPDATE - looks like a fairly trivial thing: in a post about anti-tobacco hysteria and state bullying of smokers there's a quote from an online e-cig seller that WP don't like for some reason. They haven't said and I'm not that interested, though since the notice of suspension mentioned marketing and SEO trickery I wonder if maybe they've had people post/comment spam on behalf of that company. I've had similar things happen here - the most recent being someone apparently in the Philippines comment spamming on behalf of a British clothing company (who never responded when I emailed them to ask why a comment on a post about Australian tee shirts had a link to their page about ladies scarves) - which have caused me to add some interesting keywords to the comment moderation filter.

The trouble here is that I linked only to provide a source for the quote and that's the only place in more than two thousand posts and two long sidebars where I've linked to this company, so I'm worried that if WP have a policy of instant suspension in these situations this could happen again without warning just because I happen to link to somewhere without knowing it's on some kind of blacklist that automatically shuts the blog down. This is causing a rethink of the WP move. As Longrider points out in the comments here I can always self-host, but if I was going to self-host I'd be using the Blogger platform for preference anyway. Well, at least for as long as they don't force their piss-awful new UI on me. And this is the reason why I'm not up for self-hosting at all right now. I don't much like the WP UI and I don't like the UI that Blogger have said they will force on users at some as yet unspecified point. I want blogging to be like driving my car, but WP have so many options it feels more like flying a plane. Conversely the new Blogger UI is like driving a car where the location of half the controls has been decided by someone who is drunk, and the location of the other half by someone who is mad.

Ho frigging hum.

Today's solution to a non-existent problem

2011-12-30T17:54:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Occupy Wall Street activists are developing a social network called The Global Square for the generation of protesters.

"We don't want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists," developer Ed Knutson told Wired.

Of course, because nobody was able to send any messages before Facefuck came along, much less keep the contents secure, were they? Build it by all means, but it doesn't sound like anything that couldn't have been done before. What it does sound like is something that some Occupod-person will take out a patent on in an attempt to cash in. And who knows? Facefuck is looking a little tired these days and I can't help thinking it'll eventually go the way of MySpace and the rest, so if The Global Square became the next big interthing it could move whoever has that patent from the 99% they say they represent to the 1% they oppose.

Image of Jesus seen in picture of Jesus

2011-12-30T07:51:00.001+11:00

Well, it's about the last place the ~~faithful~~ no, gullible and/or desperate for their 15 minutes have actually looked for an image of their lord and saviour, various of them having claimed to have seen him in clouds, random bits of wood, chocolate bars and even ruined cookware.*

Toby Elles, 22, made the discovery after burning the food when he fell asleep while cooking.
After lifting off the scorched bacon Mr Elles, from Salford, Lancs, could not believe his eyes when the Christlike image stared back at him.
The face is complete with eyes, nose, a beard and is framed by long flowing hair.
Well, let's have a look then.

Okay, I'll grant you that it looks kind of like a bearded man, but does that mean it's Jesus and not some randomised scraps of carbonised bacon fat? Not only does it seem unlikely that Jesus, who was Jewish if I recall, would choose to re-appear in bacon fat [and personally] I think it looks like John Lennon without his glasses.

However, let's for a moment assume that this is a benchmark for what the Son of Man looks like, and of course ignore the fact that what Yeshua of Nazareth actually looked like probably wasn't the medieval bearded guy from church windows or the BeeGee lookalike from more contemporary Christian art but a regular 1st century Palestinian male. So, if that's an image of Jesus who's this guy in the sock?

Sarah Crane, 38, said she was stunned when she saw a bearded man staring back at her from the laundry line.
Her boyfriend agreed the crumpled grey "holy sock" bore an uncanny likeness to the traditional image of Christ, and the couple took photographs to show their friends.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm going to regret this, but let's have a look anyway.

Really? Look, firstly that doesn't even look like a bearded man. I can see a face-like pattern, though that's perfectly natural and happens to people all the time, but to begin with I thought it look more like a robot than a human face before finally deciding that actually it reminded me a bit of Eddie from Iron Maiden album cover art.

Of course we're talking about the classic 1980s Eddie

And secondly, even if it did look like a bearded man it doesn't look like the bearded man in the frying pan who, it's suggested, is not John Lennon but our Redeemer, though unfortunately neither of them look a lot like I'd expect an ancient Palestinian to look and nor do they look like Jesus of Marmite Jar or Jesus of Cheap Interior Door.** And of course there's a reason for that: not everyone with a bloody beard is Jesus. I mean look up there at Eddie... see it? Beard. And Eddie the Head isn't even slightly saintly, much less Christ like. I shouldn't need to spell this out but beard ≠ Jesus.

Plus, and I realise this is obvious to both my readers, these things are not Jesus but are the leftovers of a couple of ruined slices of cured pig meat, a cheap sock, a few cents of plastic with some random blobs of yeast extract, and a fucking door. In fact the only three things that links these and any other example of the Jesus-appears-in-random-everyday-object phenomenon is their different looking Jesuses, their essential non-Jesusness that follows from the inability to agree on what Jesus looked like, and their being obsessed over by nutters. And by nutters I don't mean religious believers, though no doubt some are, but dedicated non thinkers who'd rather believe that they've been blessed by an entity whose existence is unproved, and if you ask me pretty doubtful, than that human beings are so naturally predisposed to recognising patterns that they see them in things that are random and patternless.

I mean, what's the alternative? Yes, the bloke who burned his bacon might like to think how miraculous it was he didn't die in the fire, but other people do die in fires all the time. Are we to believe that the Good Lord saves those who nod off while making bacon sarnies but not from dodgy wiring that they don't even know about? And the others, what do we make of those? Are B group vitamins particularly holy? Blessed are the squeaky doors, for they shall inherit the earth? Is the Bible wrong and Jesus actually say unto Peter "You are my sock, and on this sock I shall build my church" or does he just want to cure corns and verrucas?

Not if the experience of the sock Jesus woman is any indication.

They even talked about creating a shrine to the sock but then the face was lost when they moved it.

I was half expecting the Ascension to be mentioned at this point but fortunately for both my head and my desk it never came up. Instead, and almost as laughable, this:

"We think it's a bit of a sign - but for what we don't know."

Well, I can think of a couple of things that it could be a sign of. One is that you might just be a fucking idiot, and the other is that with electronic media making the space for online news practically infinite every day is a sufficiently slow news day for this stuff to be included, even if it's so ridiculous and embarrassing that nobody wants to put their byline on it.

I hope that 2012 will be the year this guff goes out of fashion in the MSM, but I'm not holding my breath. In fact I'm afraid that if that happens at all it'll only be because the 2012 Mayan apocalypse non-prediction and associated cockwaftery will be taking centre stage instead.

And there's no point saying "God help us" because if he's there at all he's probably too busy laughing.

* For those with the patience of Job or who find the whole thing funny (the only way I cope with this kind of lunacy) The Tele has a whole gallery of this stuff.
** Linking that really went against the grain.

Christmas Down Under

2011-12-30T00:30:00.002+11:00

Many thanks to those who mailed or left comments on Sunday's Happy Christmas post, but in response to the Ambush Predator who said,

Happy hot, beach-bound, BBQ Christmas!

I'd say that while I was happy many others weren't, and it was neither hot, beach-y or BBQ-y round here, as this collection of photos from The Age shows.

And if you're thinking that last one looks less 'Snow Angel' and more 'Hail Mary' then your eyes are clearly over whatever alcoholic pounding they enjoyed with you over Christmas and working well. Which is also the reason why not everyone here had a happy Christmas Day at all.

Yep, on the twelfth day of Christmas Melbourne's true love gave us thunder, lightning, pissing rain, localised flooding and golf ball sized hailstones.

More than 15,000 claims have been lodged with insurance companies after savage storms tore through Melbourne on Christmas Day, as the Insurance Council of Australia today declared the weather event a catastrophe.

About a third of those claims relate to damage caused to houses and businesses in the storms, while the remainder are for damaged vehicles.

Still, on the bright side it may have killed some of the snakes and spiders.

Did someone overdo it on the turkey curry?

2011-12-27T01:14:00.004+11:00

From here, with an alternative version and making of here

I say we take off and nuke
the dunny from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Happy Christmas...

2011-12-25T00:01:00.004+11:00

... to both my readers (hi, Mum) and anyone else who shows up. And if it isn't yet Christmas Day where you are come back in a few hours.

My true love sent to me...

2011-12-24T04:11:00.000+11:00

... a real life Angry Bird! Uh, in some kind of tree, probably not pear.

Do not click image unless you want to be dealing with three of them

Final countdown

2011-12-23T21:05:00.008+11:00

I meant to mention this the other day but what with Christmassy stuff going on it slipped my mind. It's only 363 days until the world doesn't end. Yes, it's also only about half an hour until the world doesn't end as well, but Mexico isn't expecting millions of visitors to arrive any second so as to be closer to the ruins built by the people who are believed to have predicted the end of the world but in fact didn't predict any such thing at all.

''The world will not end, stressed Yeanet Zaldo, a spokeswoman for the Cancun area. ''It is an era.''

Quite. In the same way that when the modern calendar runs out this New Year's Eve the world won't end either. It's just that 2012 will start.

Not that that's stopping some famous(ish) names - George Lucas, Ashton Kutcher and Lil Wayne among them, as I blogged a while back - from seeking New Age wisdom in someone else's ancient history and getting it arse about face. Them and quite a few million other people.

That said, she's helping the area and a few others close by gear up for what is promising to be the region's biggest tourist season ever.

More than 52 million people are expected to visit the Quintana Roo (where Cancun is), Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche regions. In an average year the whole of Mexico only gets 22 million tourists.

And I don't blame them for wanting to cash in on this wave of the cashed up and credulous - I sure as hell would. Look, by all means go visit Mexico if you want to, but if you think the world's going to end it doesn't seem to matter much where you are so you might as well be somewhere that's important to you. If you think it's going to end and you're going to leave home and the people you care about to go get killed in Mexico then I suggest you try some of their excellent drugs while you're there, because if you don't make any sense normally then you might was well try being off your tits on something instead. But I suspect the reality is that almost everyone who goes to Mexico next December will have booked a return flight.

I do hope so because they won't want to miss the real end of the world as (completely not) predicted over 30,000 years ago by the aborigines of south east Australia, which is due to begin at around four in the afternoon on Friday October 25th, 2013, on Wurundjeri Way just west of Melbourne's central business district. Or it might just be the queue for the freeway at the Montague Street junction, who knows? It's probably best to come and see for yourself when the time comes, but bring money. Bring lots of money.

Another New Zealand earthquake - UPDATED

2011-12-23T13:34:00.001+11:00

A police spokeswoman did not know whether there had been any reports of damage or injuries but said the phones were very busy.Anthony Surynt was working in an electrical workshop in Sydenham when the quake struck.

He said it was the biggest one he has felt since June 13, when a 6.3 magnitude hit struck the city.Surynt and his work colleagues estimated it was about a 5 to 5.5 magnitude quake.

Christchurch again, poor sods. A 5.8. Just what you want a day and a half before Christmas when you're still picking up after the last one. Fingers crossed that everyone across the ditch comes out of this one okay.

UPDATE - and a few more since then:

An initial 5.8-magnitude quake sent the airport building swaying from side to side and shoppers scurried from a supermarket as products fell from shelves. It was followed by a series of aftershocks, including a magnitude 6 and two more magnitude 5 or above.

Getting into the Christmas spirit... and doing it properly this time

2011-12-22T02:05:00.003+11:00

For those people I'll be thinking of this weekend as I'm drinking white wine (or, as the case may be, grape juice) in the sun - no list necessary, they know who they are - my favourite Christmas song. The rather atheist-y content might not meet with universal approval with them but for my money it's one of the most beautiful and moving songs there is, and if Christmas is a time for family then Tim Minchin's song fits better than those of Sinatra or Crosby, much less anything the bloody X Factor is going to sick up into record stores.

Love to mine, and sláinte mhaith to you and yours.

Incidentally, I noticed on Tim Minchin's YouTube channel that proceeds from iTunes downloads (link) of White Wine in the Sun until February 2012 will go to the National Autistic Society.

A little light failure from The Teletubbygraph

2011-12-21T02:50:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Please, someone give the photo drones at The Telegraph an atlas for Christmas, or at least help them download Google Earth and show them how to work it. At the rate it's going downhill and screwing up junior school level stuff I'm going to have to stop taking the piss out of The Daily Mail.

Fellas, there's no such place as Forrest Act, but there is a suburb called Forrest in the ACT. This isn't 'Act' being shouted. It stands for Australian Capital Territory. Saying Forrest Act is like saying Port Augusta Sa or Newcastle Nsw or even, to use something the photo drones may have heard of, Washington Dc. Let me put it another way:

Got it, photo drones?

And yes, David and Janean Richards are in the Forrest that's in the ACT because a few seconds on Google found them mentioned in The Canberra Times, so I reckon we can be pretty sure it's not some weird town called Forrest Act since Forrest ACT is within spitting distance of Parliament House. See?

Er... do you think the photo drones know that Sydney isn't the capital?

Quote of the Day, as voted for by 128% of readers

2011-12-20T19:14:00.000+11:00

By Alexander Downer, Australia's Foreign Minister under John Howard, writing on the subject of parliamentary procedure ($) in the Democratic (for a given value of 'democratic') People's Republic of Korea.

I was proudly shown the parliament. They have electronic voting at every MP's desk. You press green if you agree. My guide delicately said that orange is for abstention. And what, I asked, is the red button for? The guide looked at the ground and one of the Australians filled in: "it calls the guards!".

And who knows, perhaps it did. Or maybe none of the buttons did anything at all. It's not like it's ever sounded like they were really needed.

Seasonal Googling

2011-12-20T18:44:00.000+11:00

Type "let it snow" and hit enter. Aaaaaaaah!

All that glitters is not good

2011-12-20T18:27:00.000+11:00

I hate to sound curmudgeonly but what the fuck is it with Christmas cards and glitter. I can sort of understand the idea, though not the appeal, in the northern hemisphere where it makes the front of the card vaguely reminiscent of that sparkle from frost, but why do they still do it on cards here where 'tis the season to be sunburned and wander about in boardies. There's no frost and the closest thing to a light dusting of ice can probably be found on the local crystal meth dealer.

But more than that, even where it makes a sort of sense the fucking stuff is a colossal pain in the arse. It gets everywhere. I think it may have been Billy Connolly who described it as the greetings card equivalent of anthrax, and I completely get what he means. I've just opened several days worth of Christmas cards and there's now so much bloody glitter on the table, the carpet and me that I wish I'd opened them in the garden, possibly with a lead lined box for the cards and some means of getting all the glitter off me before coming back into the house.

It goes against the grain to wish someone would ban the wretched stuff but if the greetings card industry can't come up with a way of making sure the damn stuff sticks permanently to the card I'm going to start sending envelopes full of it to Hallmark. Nothing else, just glitter. And I'll keep it up until they begin spraying some lacquer or something on the cards to keep the damn stuff on, or until the people I know stop buying them.

Advanced calculus for journalists - UPDATED

2011-12-19T22:22:00.004+11:00

Lesson #1:

4 ≠ 3

Police said a 32-year-old Derrimut man was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital with fractures, while a 27-year-old Taylors Hill woman and a Richmond man and woman - both believed by paramedics to be aged 19 - were transported to the Sunshine Hospital with minor injuries.
An Ambulance Victoria spokesman said another man who was injured refused to be treated.

It doesn't equal 5 either.

UPDATE - Lesson #2, from Professor Bucko of the Department of Inadvisable Cervid Power Modifications:

First up we have the story of an unexpectedly low turnout of Christmas shoppers this weekend.

Immediately following that we have the story of an unexpectedly high turnout this weekend.

Less is less. More is more. Less is not more.

Hopefully these aren't too difficult for the subeditors to keep up with.

Free gifts - the next thing to be on the restricted activities list?

2011-12-19T10:46:00.001+11:00

Some things don't mix well, we all know that. Street luging on public roads is one, and we saw yesterday how that makes it a restricted activity you need to get permission for. Another is alcohol and, well, if you took the opinion of every nanny and wowser out there alcohol and practically anything, including life and happiness, don't mix. Certainly at least one will tell you that alcohol and promotions by way of free gifts don't because not everyone is as bright as him, and a handful of people do very stupid things when drunk. So obviously a branding iron that's given away with bottles of Jack Daniels is a bad idea because a tiny number of complete idiots will use them to brand each other.

Yes, this is going to be just like the two guys taking it in turns to shoot each other in the arse with an air rifle to see what it's like, but with extra nannying.

And straight away I feel the need to point out that the men didn't actually suffer burns in the promotion, as the very first line of the article makes clear.

THREE WA men suffered horrific burns after branding themselves with novelty branding irons given away as part of a Jack Daniel's promotion.

See? Saying they suffered burns in the promotion makes it sound like that was either a risk or even the idea of the promotion, or at the least something went horribly wrong. Nope, nothing like that at all. It's just that if you make enough novelty branding irons eventually one will end up in the hands of an idiot.

Cue the wowsers.

Health advocates are now demanding legislation that stops "reckless" alcohol marketing.

Reckless? Seriously? The brand was intended for steaks, as hinted at by the fact it was part of a barbecue set Jack Daniel's were including with a bottle, and what's reckless about branding a chunk of long dead cow? Naff, maybe, but reckless? Hardly, since they must have turned out thousands and thousands of these things, all but three of which have not been involved in any incidents as far as anyone knows.

The men, aged in their 20s and 30s including one who branded his backside...

Pffffft!

... were admitted to Royal Perth Hospital for surgery and emergency skin grafts. The last one was operated on earlier this month.
The others chose to plunge the hot metal rod with the words "Old No.7 Brand", in reference to the Tennessee bourbon, on the back of a hand and a leg.

Okay, sounds like serious injuries, but let's remember that this is part of a barbecue set, and unless you've invited Jeffrey Dahmer nobody, drunk or sober, is going to think it's supposed to be used on living people. But even so, just in case (or more likely as required by some nannying law) Jack Daniel's provided a label on the branding iron in order to state the completely bloody obvious.

... Jack Daniel's brand owner Brown-Forman Australia says it has done nothing wrong because the product comes with a warning [which reads:]

This branding iron can cause serious skin burns.
Do not touch metal parts with fingers, skin or any flammable material.
Branding iron will remain hot long after being heated. Remove this label before first use.

Surely that's enough to keep the nannies happy? Nah, 'course not. Because the nannies want everyone to be treated the same as the daftest person in the country.

[Royal Perth hospital] head of plastic surgery and burns surgeon Mark Duncan-Smith branded the gimmick "an irresponsible cocktail for disaster".

Disaster? What, like the Japanese tsunami or the Christchurch earthquake? Well, it's a stretch but I could accept it as disastrous if hospitals all over the country were getting flooded with victims of these would-be killer barbie brands and the ambulances and burns units were starting to crack under the pressure, but the reality is there've been one self inflicted burned hand, one self inflicted burned arm and one self inflicted burned arse. Disaster? Seriously? In fact even these three victims of their own machismo/masochism aren't complaining, presumably because being daft enough to stick pieces of hot metal on themselves on purpose doesn't mean they're too daft to realise it was their own fault. If so then this, in my opinion, makes them brighter than the one solitary person who did complain.

[Brown-Forman managing director Marshall Farrer] said the only injury complaints he had received nationally were from Dr Duncan-Smith in WA.

I wonder, would this possibly be Dr Mark Duncan-Smith of the Royal Perth Hospital plastic surgery and burns department? I don't think we need to ask.

"You can't stop everyone from doing something silly, but when you are actually providing a method for people to injure themselves, even though it is still their responsibility, it is providing fuel in one hand and a lighter in the other," [Dr Duncan-Smith] said.

No, they get the fuel and the lighter from Bunnings, or the supermarket or the local petrol station or any of dozens of places, and they can do plenty of damage just with those and without a novelty branding iron. But, as with the branding iron itself, almost nobody does. And it's not providing a method for people to injure themselves any more than selling barbecues is providing a method for people to cook each other.

"It is a devastating mix. The combination of alcohol and a branding iron is just crazy. It is a cocktail of diminished capacity and a mechanism to inflict serious damage. I personally think this is madness."

Interesting. I wonder if the doc would say it's more mad or less mad than taking a sample of three idiots - and a self selecting sample at that - and taking that to mean the whole country is just as dopey with a few glasses of JD inside them? Leaving aside the obvious point of Dr Duncan-Smith's hideously paternalistic view of his fellow man this argument makes as much sense as estimating that there are 615 billion cats in Australia based on the sample in this room. It's nonsense, and it's infuriating that Perth Now seem unable to call him on it.

Nor is Dr Duncan-Smith the only one whining, even if he is the only one who actually complained to the company itself.*

McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth director Mike Daube said there was a "glaring gap in curbs on alcohol promotion".
"These are entirely predictable outcomes from an outrageously irresponsible promotion," Prof Daube said.

Oh, really, Prof? Entirely predictable, are they? Well, I'm going to call that claim weapons grade bullshit, though I'd be delighted to eat my words and apologise if you can show us exactly where you predicted it. Because I've done a web search for your name in connection with Jack Daniel's, which I'd have thought would be sufficiently broad to pick any such prediction up if it made it into press or even if you'd put it on the MCAAY (pronounced "Mmkay?" in a South Parkian Mr Garrison voice, I guess) site, and would you like to guess what I found between the beginning of the promotion and the news of these three self inflicted burns cases from West Oz? Go on, have a guess.

Oh, alright, I'll tell you: not a fucking thing.

Entirely predictable, Prof Daube? My unburnt, non-supperating, pristine and entirely healthy arse.

"There are no controls whatever none on alcohol promotions of this kind." He said he would write to the federal and state governments calling for measures to halt irresponsible alcohol promotions.

Look, the range of humanity from stupid to sensible is going to be such a wide bell curve that simply whispering that alcohol exists is probably irresponsible for someone at one extreme end, but you'd have to go to insane lengths to come up with something that's irresponsible even for everyone in the middle, much less the Spock-like people at the far end. A free pallet of booze for anyone who drives themselves to the bottle shop having snorted more coke than Tony Montana might qualify, but some piece of tat for branding your steaks certainly doesn't.

And so we turn, but only because we're forced, to the politicians. You just know it's not going to turn out well, don't you?

State Mental Health Minister Helen Morton, who is also responsible for drug and alcohol issues, supported regulation changes on alcohol promotions, but said it was a federal matter.

Well, of course she does. She's a politician seeing an excuse to get a bit of media, possibly encouraged by some of the people in her ministry who've just seen a half-arsed justification for extending the remit of their department or by people who just want to extend the role of the state in our lives in general. It's as Reagan once said, the instinct of governments is that if it moves they should tax it, if it keeps moving they should regulate it and if it stops moving they should subsidise it - they never look and think that maybe they should just leave it the hell alone. And I don't take any comfort from a state politician bouncing it up to the federal government because the federal government is likely to take one look and either tax it, regulate it or subsidise it, possible even all three at the same time, regardless of whether it moves or not.

But what I really find bizarre is that the WA Health Minister understands something about people and governments and legislation. Something most people understand, even the ones sticking branding irons in the barbecue for a bit before trying to make their own gluteus the property of an American drinks company.

"However, at the end of the day, how can we legislate against that level of stupidity," she said.

You can't, Helen. It's an exercise in futility, and that being so what the hell's the point of regulation changes on alcohol promotions? Accept that a tiny number of people will do something daft with practically anything we can imagine, and that an even smaller number of people will remove themselves from the gene pool in the process.

But never forget that the vast majority of people won't.

* I wonder if he writes to car manufacturers every time he has to hide the scars on someone who was injured because they or someone else was screwing around while driving? Or is it just alcohol that lights up his brain's complaint node?

Václav Havel 1936-2011

2011-12-19T04:53:00.000+11:00

Václav Havel, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, writer and poet, died at the weekend. He was also a man who seemed to understand liberty and individual freedoms well, perhaps through having not had them himself for so much of his life.

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems — human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

For me that's dream as worthy as Martin Luther King's. May the late Václav Havel become as well remembered for it.

Treating adults as children

2011-12-18T01:46:00.000+11:00

Do you ever get that thing where you're reading something in the paper and a throwaway phrase not directly related to the article sends such a chill through your soul that the rest of the article is momentarily forgotten? I had one of those this afternoon reading a story about a woman who died in Queensland in a street luge accident. My bold:

A 50-year-old woman and mother, who is a respected IT executive in the Brisbane community, has been killed riding a luge board down Mt Cootha this morning.

The woman, who was travelling downhill at high speed, has gone too wide on a corner and tried to brake, losing control and sliding into a guard rail.

[...]

Acting Inspector Chris Pemberton said the woman was luging, or street-sledding, down Sir Samuel Griffiths Drive around 6.15am when she lost control of her board and crashed against a guardrail on the north side of the mountain.

Acting Inspector Pemberton said luge was a restricted activity and required a permit, and it is believed the two riders involved this morning had not been granted permission for the activity that led to the tragedy.

Now up to the last paragraph I quoted there I was thinking how sad it was that someone had died doing something they enjoyed and that 50 is no age to go and what a tragedy it is for her family. But then I saw the phrase 'a restricted activity' being dropped in there without comment, like it's no big deal that being a restricted activity. Like it doesn't matter because there are so many restricted activities what with there being so many things that are potentially lethal (unlike life itself, which is certainly and unavoidably lethal). Like our governments - and don't think for one moment it's just Queensland or Australia - believe we're incapable of deciding anything for ourselves anymore, even to the point where they want to be involved in our diets in case we choose a cheeseburger over a salad. And like the infantilisation of adults in western nations hasn't been going on long enough to mean that sometimes they're half right.

That's the greater tragedy in this article.: the unspoken assumption that there are restricted activities that us proles may only take part in with permission from the nannies, and that there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying that street luge is safe or sensible on public roads when someone's just died doing it and the whole idea of lying on an oversized skateboard and rolling under gravity down a hill that fat Aussie cars and utes are coming up under power is sufficiently cuckoo to keep the Bavarian clock making industry going for decades. No, I'm not disputing the Acting Inspector (who sounds like someone employed by RADA with the power to fine people for hamming it up) when he says that street luge and public roads aren't a good combo.

But lots of things aren't a good idea. Are you telling me that there's no other option but to have a list, no doubt growing all the time, of restricted activities? Clearly when it can affect someone else it's not just down to the person doing the restricted activity, and in the case of street luging there's the obvious question of what happens if they collide with another road user. The obvious answer is that someone whose head is at wheel hub height is probably going to come off worst and is quite likely to come off dead, but the other person may have damage to their vehicle or bike and may even kill themselves trying to avoid a luger, and I don't know if many have third party damage insurance. But isn't there tort law for that kind of thing, and isn't there some very basic road law that covers the use of inappropriate vehicles? For heaven's sake, if under Australian laws a bicycle is legally a vehicle when ridden on public roads how can a street luge not be? And if cyclists can be fined, and heavily, for not having lights or wearing a helmet - again, not having a helmet really affects only that individual but nonetheless places cycling in the restricted activities category - much less running red lights or disobeying other road rules, then why not someone on a street luge?

I really can't see any reason why this kind of thing can't be dealt with by something rather less Orwellian than keeping a list of restricted activities, but sadly I suspect that so many people will have read that article and not had that creepy phrase leap off the page at them and scream in their faces that adopting a simpler approach, for instance just prosecuting and fining the idiots and fuckups and letting people who can do something without affecting other risk their own necks as they choose, is probably a vain hope.

Is this the same Nick Clegg?

2011-12-18T00:46:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

On Friday night, François Fillon, the French prime minister, interrupted an official visit to Brazil to call Mr Clegg to "clarify" his recent comments that Britain's credit rating should be reviewed.
The Deputy PM told Mr Fillon that his recent remarks and those by other senior French figures had been "simply unacceptable and that steps should be taken to calm down the rhetoric".

Yeah, I know. Being told off by Nick Clegg. It sounds like being savaged by a kitten that's been quite heavily sedated, doesn't it? But you know, I reckon he meant it. He might even have meant it more than Cameron meant to say 'no' to the Merkozy being last week, and I wouldn't rule out Clegg going for the full diplospeak version of je t'encule in the future.

Because I think Cleggy boy has noticed something. His reluctant BFF next door has suddenly become more popular with the electorate. Undeserved, perhaps, but even if Cameron stood up to the EU for Britain by complete accident he'd have got some political capital out of it, and Cleggy probably fancies a little of it for himself. Hang on, he may be thinking to himself, there's votes in this Euroscepticism thingy. And let's face it, for a man who's only a liberal or a democrat as and when it suits him it's not impossible that he might decide to be a Europhile only when it's worth his while as well.

To paraphrase Marx - Groucho, that is - these are Nick's principles and if you don't like them he has others.

That's not a hack - this is a hack

2011-12-17T15:10:00.000+11:00

As I mentioned back in July The Age, the Melbourne based sister paper of Sydney Morning Herald, was all over the News of the Screws phone hacking scandal like flies on a piece of shit.

The thing is that Gingery Dullard, unlike the Yanks, may have rather more cause to investigate the Aussie media. And interestingly it's not the Murdoch owned mob but their competitors, the Graun friendly, lefty-loving, phone-hack hating Fairfax group, who have been accused of being up to no good.
THE editor-in-chief of The Age, Paul Ramadge, has refused to detail his personal involvement in the newspaper's unauthorised access of an ALP database now being examined by the Australian Federal Police.
And how did this happen?
The Age accessed the database from its own computer terminals using an unauthorised password provided by an undisclosed source.
"This story came through entirely appropriate journalistic methods," Ramadge said. "Entry to the ALP database came via a whistleblower who raised concerns about private information held on it.
"This whistleblower had authorised access to this material and we reported in the public interest."
[...]
The Age used material obtained from the database to inform a story run in the final week of the Victorian election campaign about Labor keeping a "secret" file on citizens. Several people whose details were accessed were contacted by the newspaper before publication. Others, such as Mr Faris, were contacted after publication and assured their information would not be stored or misused.
Okay, so they may have had good reason but it sounds like it's fair to ask the question. And even if they have good reason if they commit a crime in the process does it somehow un-crime it? I'm not sure a good reason would let me off something as trivial as a speeding offence - actually I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - so I can't help thinking that if a crime has been committed with good intentions it's probably still a crime and that there'd be a case to answer.

And this week a police investigation looks more likely as the body overseeing elections in the state have got involved at the same time as a member of the public has placed the blame squarely on the newspaper that was so tumescent with joy when bashing the Murdoch rags in distant country for listening to people's voicemail.

A VICTIM of The Age's hacking of an ALP database has come forward claiming the newspaper breached her privacy, as The Weekend Australian reveals the Victorian Electoral Commission asked police to investigate the claims of illegal activity.
Claire Watson, 24, has expressed her concerns about how and why The Age accessed personal information about her, which she had agreed to share with a local MP but not with the newspaper. The public servant, who appeared in a story by Age journalist Royce Millar last year as part of the broadsheet's investigation into the ALP database, said her views had been "distorted" and "words had been put in my mouth".
"I feel my privacy has been breached by the journalist, not the ALP," she said. "I agreed to share information with the ALP, but not with The Age. He seemed dodgy and was pleased with himself. He was so indignant with the ALP, but it is clear he was hacking my file. He was trying to whip me into outrage about it."
[...]
"The journalist kept trying to put words in my mouth; he was saying it was outrageous, but I didn't think it was outrageous," she said. "The whole thing was weird. I tried telling him I wasn't outraged as I understood large organisations keep that sort of data. I think it is reasonable and good practice to keep the data."
She said she was more concerned Millar had then accessed the information.
"He knew a lot about me - my date of birth, where I lived, my phone number, opinions I had shared with a local MP . . . he was hacking into my file."

As with the voicemail thing 'hacking' seems to be an inappropriate term for what looks awfully like a simple, old fashioned leak, but for whatever reason people seem to want to believe that any electronically stored information that isn't given out voluntarily must have been hacked. I think this is a bit like insisting that when you can't find your car it can only have been stolen rather than thinking that you just forgot where you left it or you parked in a tow away zone, but the real point is that if this is all hacking how did The Age have the front to throw so many stones at the Murdoch media for the phone not-hacking when they too had been accessing information they had no bloody right to? Was the temptation to throw those stones and hopefully damage their competition at the Melbourne Herald Sun and The Australian so strong that they forgot they lived in a greenhouse?

An injunction by The Age against Victoria Police to stop the removal of computer equipment remains in place since Thursday's eight-hour raid. Two detectives from the e-crime squad remained at The Age overnight to ensure none of the computer equipment, which had been pulled apart, could be tampered with.
A spokesman for the Victorian Electoral Commission confirmed to The Weekend Australian that it had been the first to raise the issue with police.
Electoral Commissioner Steve Tully is believed to have been concerned about the manner in which the database was allegedly penetrated by The Age.
[...]
The Weekend Australian believes that police have been given access to ALP records and computer equipment but that there are mixed views in the party about how to handle the hacking issue. This is because of the potential blow-back on the Labor Party if The Age were to campaign against the party. "It's not something we wanted. There are some senior people who just want it to go away," a source said.
However, the fact the VEC approached police means investigators will have to push ahead with their inquiries. Either way, it appears police were honour-bound to proceed given the potential offences at stake and the role the VEC plays as an independent and impartial statutory authority.

And as I said back in July, since The Age isn't part of the Murdoch press and is fairly strongly left leaning politically this is not something British readers can expect to see in The Grauniad. You kind of get the impression that bashing lefties for their misdeeds and alleged misdeeds is against some kind of lefty journo code, but it's only fair to give The Age a little credit for running the story themselves.

Click for link - incidentally, I don't know if Paul and Royce Millar are related

Now, remind me. In all those column inches in The Graun slagging off companies for perfectly legal tax avoidance and minimisation was it ever mentioned that Guardian Media did the same thing or did we have to find out from Guido?

Terrifying

2011-12-16T23:38:00.000+11:00

At Douglas Carswell's:

The Treasury’s policy of “Continuity Brown” means we look set to borrow more money in this Parliament than Gordon Brown managed in 13 years.

I've long since stopped trying even to estimate the number of times I've said this, but this ConLib Cobbleition government really is as bad as Labour, arguably with the additional down side that if the whole house of cards has to come crashing down before it can be unfucked and rebuilt Labour's incompetence in general and Gordon Brown's lunacy in particular might have brought that day a little sooner. The Cobbleition seem to be there with the purpose of prolonging the agony in the hope of winning power and prolonging it for another five years, and for that I despise them.*

* Actually I despise them for quite a lot of other things, all of which they share in common with Labour. But tonight it's just the insane profligacy.

Ill windmills

2011-12-16T20:02:00.000+11:00

In case either of my readers (hi, Mum) were wondering the lack of posts this week isn't a sign of anything more than that I've been a bit busy. I certainly haven't suddenly started believing that all is right with the world after all because clearly it isn't. I just haven't had the time to seethe about it at length in the blogosphere and have had to settle for occasional quiet seethe-lets in the car instead.

And I can't offer much this evening either for the same reason, but I just wanted to point out this from The Daily Mash the other day:

Chairman Lord Turner said: "The only problem we can possibly foresee is if it's not as windy as we think it's going to be.

[...]

The report was welcomed by the large energy providers who said that if they were going to pick a figure of out of thin air for how much more they felt like charging people then they would probably have chosen £110 as well.

Lord Turner added: "It's not that green technology is, in itself, massively expensive, it's that if it doesn't actually work then you have to get the energy from somewhere else. Usually from people who aren't very nice.

"So you end up with an expensive thing that doesn't work all the time plus expensive energy from horrid people. And that is massively expensive.

"But it's fine, because it's going to be windy."

Yes, and just the other week we saw that they're just as good when it's a bit too windy, didn't we?

QOTD

2011-12-13T04:52:00.000+11:00

Via the Zanzibari Kittie Counters, this:

Obama has been compared to Spock, but he’s more like GlaDOS. Acts cold and aloof, but is childish when angered. Promises cake we’ll never see.

As Sam Duncan at Counting Cats says, there are people who don't play videogames and there are people who'll look at that and go, 'Hey, yeah, he is, isn't he?'

Seeing the light

2011-12-12T17:24:00.001+11:00

Click for linky

Shoulder mounted laser? Wow, like the fucking Predator. We'll show those little pond-life estate scum next time they get a bit fighty, eh lads? What they gonna do when we've each got a las... er... oh.

Expect laws restricting the purchase of welding goggles and mirrors to be around the corner, affecting only the law-abiding, non-rioting majority who won't simply steal them when they want them.

/ facepalm

Do you have to be a European to believe the Euro is not all but dead?

2011-12-12T06:09:00.002+11:00

And does the head in the sand approach mean greater problems when it finally keels over? Some certainly think so.

TOP US military officer General Martin Dempsey has admitted he is ''extraordinarily concerned'' about the euro's survival, pointing to potential civil unrest and the break-up of the European Union.

''The euro zone is at great risk,'' the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, giving the strongest indication yet about the depth of Washington's concerns over Europe's financial tumult.

''We are extraordinarily concerned by the health and viability of the euro because in some ways we're exposed literally to contracts but also because of the potential of civil unrest and break-up of the union that has been forged over there,'' General Dempsey said.

I can't help feeling that if the US are getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved they're very, very worried over there. We all know that Americans aren't allowed to die for any reason at all any more, and there are many tens of thousands of them in Europe at any one time. Warnings from economists may carry the weight of expertise but when a major power's military starts talking about it it sounds like someone somewhere now expects the worst.

Junket science

2011-12-12T03:08:00.001+11:00

Dial up the euphoria and forget the failure of the last junket, er, meeting to agree anything because a major 'climate deal' has been done at Durban. So says the Graun, Age, Aunties Beeb and ABC, and all the rest. But forgive my scepticism when I read things like this:

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute "huddle to save the planet".
[...]
... the 16-day talks were effectively over, with a commitment by all countries to accept binding emission cuts by 2020.

Or this:

Every single country in the world has committed to an agreement to take effect from 2020.

Or this:

Talks on a new legal deal covering all countries will begin next year and end by 2015, coming into effect by 2020.

Or this:

Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says it is an "historic breakthrough".
"The idea is that after 2015 countries would start ratifying the new agreement and it would take effect from 2020."

So - and I'm looking at this as I would if I were a true warmista, convinced of the danger of catastrophic warble gloaming - after this dramatic twenty minute huddle, followed by that equally dramatic two hours of tense negotiation, all of which had been preceded by more than a bloody fortnight of presumably equally tense negotiation, everybody agreed to kick the fucking can down the road for another few years. And that's supposed to be a result? Jesus, what do you guys do for an epic failure? No, don't tell me... begins with a C, doesn't it? Cancun? Copenhagen? Email me if I'm getting warm, heheh. Sorry, that was insensitive of me.

Forgive my cynicism but having failed, even by what I'd call pretty low standards, in Cancun and Copenhagen and having just had the embarrassment of Climategate 2.0, which looked a lot like it was timed to damage the Durban circle jerk, there needed to be something positive and preferably scene stealing to feed to the media's headline writers. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if that was the very first thing that was decided, very likely behind the scenes and quite possibly before the conference even officially began. And fucking hell if a unanimous agreement to put off any hard decisions until later and otherwise maintain the status quo isn't good enough if spun right, even if it'd spin the whole world right off its axis if done much harder.

So in practical terms the great success achieved at Durban is that everything stays exactly the same as it was before all those thousands of delegates got on planes and carbon belched their way through the sky to get there, and everyone has agreed to agree on something more meaningful in four or five years to take effect four or five years after that. Well, it might be good news for the campaigners, researchers, climate change departments and ministers, renewable energy companies, greenwashery makers and all the other rent seekers, but otherwise it seems like a resounding 'Meh'.

Frankly I'm tempted to get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars and any deity that has even the faintest possibility of existing that I'm a climate sceptic. Because if I was a catastrophist warble gloaming believer I'd be shitting myself.

And then they came for the... Jesus Christ, popcorn eaters? Is this right? - UPDATED

2011-12-11T19:44:00.002+11:00

Okay, this is just specific subset of 'And then they came for the salad dodgers' really, but Jesus fucking Christ on a state approved dietary regime, popcorn? Seriously? Well, since Velvet Glove, Iron Fist is taking a look at a comment piece in the Independent entitled 'Filling your face with popcorn is not a human right' one has to assume that it is serious. And so insanely authoritarian that even the normally restrained Chris Snowdon has seen red.

...it's clear that many people find it hard to resist fatty food and cheap alcohol, which leaves government intervention the only serious option.
Well, let's not be so hasty. Are we sure that all the other possibilities have been exhausted? Have you, for example, considered the option of fucking off and leaving us alone?

Quite. It's a thorough fisking and not wishing to steal his thunder I recommend you go read the whole thing there. There's little I can add except for two points. First, and I'm getting a bit personal here, if one person cannot be free to smoke or drink or eat popcorn then why should another be free to walk around with a face like a dropped pie? That's not personal abuse aimed at Joan Smith - well, okay, actually it is really, but it's not just personal abuse. The point is that if it's okay to be so judgemental about certain people's harmless habits then why not others? Why not be as judgemental about who they play hide the sausage with as you are about how many sausages they eat? And why not other aspects, even physical imperfections? It's not like it hasn't all been done before by various other bunches of mad left-wing authoritarians with hard ons both for improving health and for the cost to the public purse. You can sound the Godwin alarm all you like, I don't give a rip. Because it's fucking true, d'you see?

"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmarks
during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too." - Wikipedia.

Secondly I'd expand on something else Chris Snowdon says:

Once we have accepted the healthist world view, no principled and logically consistent objection can be made against photos of rotten teeth on soft drinks. Those who welcomed the 85% sales tax on cigarettes are in no position to oppose an 85% sales tax on bacon. They can only wriggle and squirm and hope the puritans tackle their pleasures last.

And so, in a sense, I welcome the likes of Joan Smith and Jonathan Waxman for finally coming clean and alerting us all about what is afoot.

Yes, but I think they should also be welcomed simply for reaching these insane levels of wanting to regulate popcorn intake and put health warnings on bangers and mash (also a wank fantasy of another a revolting authoritarian cunt - the aforementioned Waxman - and also fisked at VG,IF). If something is going to derail their plans, if something is going to halt the marching of those nasty little boots, then it could well be when the owners of those boots strap them onto a surfboard before going and jumping a shark.

UPDATE - Oh, Jesus, this is just so fucking depressing. How can people understand liberty when it comes to people inclined to bump uglies with someone of the same gender but be unable to grasp the concept when it comes to everyone deciding what food to insert in the other end of their bodies?

Could it be simply that they're not supporting gay marriage for reasons of liberty but because they've been they've been made to think they should, just as they've been made to think that the government should be doing all their thinking for them?

Baaaa. Baaaaa.

I say we take off and nuke Disneyworld from orbit...

2011-12-11T16:42:00.000+11:00

... it's the only way to be sure.

Getting into the Christmas spirit

2011-12-11T04:01:00.000+11:00

Bah humbug!

Heh

2011-12-11T02:02:00.000+11:00

From this week's Cracked! photoplasty competition

Quote of the Day... Week... Weekend... Thing

2011-12-10T20:20:00.000+11:00

Gerry Reynolds again, he of the "people who complained about Jeremy Clarkson saying strikers should be taken out and shot should be taken out and shot" blog post (which in case you haven't noticed the correction in the update was not a council blog as I'd mistakenly said but a personal one by the ironic name of The Censored Blog), which had another bit in it that didn't make the MSM at all. And that's a shame because it was the best bloody bit.

As a striker myself, I have to admit that when I heard Clarkson had said that we strikers should be lined up against a wall and shot, I simply smiled and got on with my life. I didn’t collapse in tears, I didn’t consult my lawyers, I did not ring up Sky to comment, I just smiled.

Yes, absolutely, and that's the reaction of a sensible adult who can tell the difference between hyperbolae and something that's meant seriously, a reaction which is becoming all too bloody rare in these oversensitive, angstrom thin skinned times. So I withdraw any suggestion that Gerry should be taken out and shot, not because I've changed my mind about what he does for a living but because I hope that he spreads that attitude as far and wide as possible. I'd go so far as to suggest that there might be enough money even in a much reduced and drawn down state apparatus to hire someone like him in the role of Encouraging Everyone To Just Harden The Fuck Up A Bit Manager.

Gerry's post 'Shooting the Complainers!' can be seen in all its uncensored glory at The Censored Blog, and I recommend nipping along and having a read of the whole thing.

Then they came for the drinkers... redux

2011-12-09T22:38:00.000+11:00

How long have I been banging on about this? Bloody long enough, I reckon, and other blogger have been at it far longer. Smokers? Pah. Oh, don't get me wrong, they're still very much in the firing line, very much the modern untermenschen. But the battleground has shifted and the current main target, whether they know it or not, are the drinkers, and quite a big gun has just been fired right at them. Less than three months ago I blogged about the tell tale signs that this gun was being loaded and remarked on how it was a gun that had been shot at smokers several times. Well, now it's gone bang and it only remains to be seen how much damage it does. En bloc - my bold.

State and territory ministers have signed off on the introduction of mandatory pregnancy warning labels on alcohol.

Ministers responsible for food regulation met in Melbourne today to consider their response to former federal health minister Neal Blewett's review of food labelling.

Dr Blewett's most controversial recommendation, that a "traffic light" system be introduced to help consumers make healthier food choices, has been rejected.

The traffic light system of colour coding would tell a consumer, at a glance, if the food had high, medium or low amounts of fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt.

Instead, ministers have agreed that public health, consumer and industry groups be consulted in the development of an alternative front-of-pack labelling system, which is to be considered in June and hoped to be in place by the end of next year.

They also want to give industry two years before making pregnancy warning labels on alcohol mandatory.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand is drafting a standard for nutrition and health-related claims and ministers also agreed to the development of a national nutrition policy.

The federal government has come under fire from public health and consumer groups for opting not to pursue the traffic light system, but the food manufacturing industry has welcomed the move.

Does this sound at all familiar? It certainly should, and it will to smokers. Anyone want to bet that it'll stop there and will not progress towards huge pictures of diseased livers covering two thirds of the label of whatever's your preferred tipple? Any takers? No? Yeah, thought not.

Don't get smug about this being more Australian nannying. It is, but I think it's as much to do with Australian politicians having less on their plates than their counterparts in some parts of the world, especially Europe and the US, and so more time to listen to the whining of the nannies, moralists, control freaks and wowsers. Wherever you are, this is coming to a label near you soon.

And I can't help but feel that if more people had stuck up for the smokers it wouldn't be happening at all.

Hero of the Day - UPDATED

2011-12-09T22:18:00.001+11:00

In a small way Gerry Reynolds is a minor hero today for speaking up in support of Jeremy Clarkson's freedom to be as hyperbolical as he likes.

He said: “I have decided that if I am ever put in charge that I would like to line all the UK’s copycat complainers up against a wall, tell them that I have had enough, and shoot them myself.”
... “Of course, that is a joke, I don’t own a gun, never want to, and would rather use a sledgehammer.
“The reason why I want rid of these people is simple. Just as I take the freedom to walk across a picket line as seriously as the right to stand on one, the freedom to express jokes and opinions is very dear to me.
“The moment creativity is constrained by the opinions and values of copycat complainers, religious fanatics or people trying to sell newspapers, we are in seriously deep trouble."

Good for Gerry Reynolds for understanding this very important point about liberty, and good for him also for ignoring the inevitable offence seeking, freedom-phobic handwringers who promptly complained and demanded the comments, made on a ~~council~~ blog, be removed as well as the editor of the blog who said he didn't see anything wrong with what Gerry Reynolds had said.

“It’s a blog and it is personal opinion. I don’t agree with all he says, or with his high opinions of Jeremy Clarkson. There is a comments box if anyone wanted to put forward an opposing view.
“He is not writing this as a council officer, and he is not representing Northings or Hi-arts. It is a person blog.”

In fact about the only thing a reasonable person could have against Gerry Reynolds is that he too is a public sector employee, occupying the position of Events and Promotions Manager at Highland Council. And since I feel that events and promotions management should not be a function of any level of government I'd suggest that his reward should be to be taken out and shot. Or possibly just his job since he sounds like someone who'd find something in the private sector without too much difficulty.

UPDATE - Gerry Reynolds himself has ducked all the gunfire going on to leave a thanks and a FYI that his blog is not a council one but a personal one on which he avoids talking about anything to do with his employer. Fair dos, correction noted.

Has David Cameron grown a set?

2011-12-09T21:58:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Or could he see that capitulation would leave him even more unelectable than Gordon Brown was? Still, as plenty of other bloggers have pointed out it's probably not enough and he'll either be railroaded into it later or be forced to think the unthinkable and talk about leaving the EU.

My money's on the first one. I'm sure the Civil Service do his thinking for him.

Tell me this isn't a coincidence

2011-12-09T21:51:00.003+11:00

First, there's this:

A chief examiner at one of Britain’s biggest exam boards was recorded boasting about the lack of substance in the company’s tests – and their disbelief that it has been cleared by the official regulator.
Steph Warren, in charge of Edexcel GCSE Geography, said that teachers should pick her company’s exam because “you don’t have to teach a lot”.

And then there's this:

Now I do realise that these are from different countries but the UK and US have quite a lot in common, including the modern sleb culture and persistent worries about dumbing down of edumacation - 'dumbing down' is an American phrase, after all. If you want a more UK-centric example of sleb-fascination as an alternative to news you don't have to look far. Looking at The Daily Mail's site now their sidebar consists of the following (and I really don't blame if you don't read every line of this):

Something about Sinead O'Connor getting married again
A story about the average weight of British women
Something about Anna Nicole-Smith, who is apparently still dead
Something about Angelina Jolie
Something about Jennifer Lopez
Something about X-Factor judges who are apparently called Gary, Kelly and Tulisa (who, who, who and who gives a fuck?)
Something about someone called Selena Gomez and Justin fucking Bieber
A story about a single father raising twins
Something by Jan Moir about someone called Caroline Flack
Something about someone called Kimberley Walsh
Something about someone called Irina Shayk
Something about Charlize Theron's clothes
Something about someone called Chelsee Healey
Something about someone called Kate Upton
Something about Prince William's wife's clothes
Something about Declan Donnelly's car
Something about Katie Price
Something about someone called Lea Michele
Something about someone called Kris Jenner being upset about something Daniel Craig said
Something about someone called Alicia Douvall
Something about something called a Kardashian (who are apparently not Star Trek aliens but real people... for a given value of real)
Something about someone called Amanda Seyfried
Something by Jizz Loans
Something about someone called Harry Judd
Something about Paris Hilton
Something about Beyoncé whatsername
Something about Twiggy
Something about Salma Hayek's tits
Something else about that Caroline Flack person again, but not by Jan Moir
Something about a coat owned by Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and someone called Kristen Stewart
Something about someone called Anna Massey in something about a loony in Broadmoor
Something about someone called Amy Childs
Something about Ray Winstone being in something
Something about David Jason being in something
Something else about Angelina Jolie
Something about someone called Jacqui Ainsley
Something about Louise Redknapp's shampoo
Something about Sacha Baron Cohen
Something about someone called Kara Tointon
Something about Venus Williams
Something about someone called Kelly Rowland and someone called Amelia
Something about something called JWoww (who seems to be a person but sounds like a cleaning product)
Something about someone called Jennifer Hudson
Something about someone called Kitty Brucknell
Something about a transexual trying to turn him/herself into Barbie (just more plastic, I assume)
Something about someone called Jennifer Garner
Something about one of Michael Jackon's kids being in a film or something
Something about someone called Christine Bleakley
Something about that Grilled Bear bloke meeting Mrs Queen
Something about someone called Andrew Garfield
Something about someone called Pat Sharp and her daughter, and someone called Mark Wright
Something about Andie MacDowell's daughter
Something about someone called Rachel Crow
Something about another one of the Kardashians
Something about someone called Kris Humphries
Something about someone called Dianna Agron and someone called Sebastian Stan (almost current affairs in that he sounds like he might be a country)
Something about Shakira
Something about someone called Coco Rocha
Something about Jessica Alba's sprog meeting Santa
Something that might be about sexual abuse in Mormon communities, but might be more about some Mormon piano group
Something about someone who's someone's widow being angry with Alec Baldwin for whatever he did on that plane
Something about Michael Jackson's doctor getting a prison visit
Something about that Katherine Heigl who used to be in Grey's Annoying Me
Something about that Tiff Needell who used to be in the old Top Gear
Something about someone called Toni Collette
Something about Kirstie Alley's current size
Something about Demi Moore's daughter's arse
Something about something called Chord Overstreet (who seems to be a person but sounds like gameplay from Guitar Hero) and someone called Emma Roberts
Something about someone called Demi Lovato (who seems to be a person but sounds like musical notation)
Something about someone called Jennifer Hudson
Something about that Amy Childs again
Something about someone called Selma Blair
Something about Jessica Alba
Something about Lady Gaga
Something about Gwyneth Paltrow
Something about Cheryl Cole
Something about Christina Ricci
Something else about Katie bloody Price
Something about handbags
Something about shops
Something about shopping
Something about Tom Cruise
Something else about this Demi Lovato
Something else about this Emma Roberts person having a tattoo like the one in that book about the girl with a tattoo
Something about bridesmaids wearing tuxedos
Something else about Tom Cruise
Something about someone called Kendra Wilkison
Something about someone called Kevin Federline
A story about a fake doctor doing bad cosmetic surgery in the US
Something about new Top Shop branches coming to your local high street, providing you live in Australia
Something about someone called Abigail Breslin
Something about someone called Danny O'Donaghue and Tom Jones
Something about Jersey Shore
Something about Brad Pitt's hair
Something about someone called Ali Larter's son
Something about cocaine and Charlie Sheen and someone called Brooke Mueller
A story about how Christmas drives everyone fucking nuts
Something about that horsey woman from Sex and the City
Something else about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
Something about a body scanner, but at clothes shops to help you buy stuff rather than airports to help delay you while you're treated as a suspected terrorist
Something about some people called Arg, Mark and Dougie
Something about Lindsay Lohan
Something about Nigella Lawson
Something else about Emma Watson, but apparently not her coat this time
Something about someone called Adele
Something about money and divorces
Something that might be about sexual abuse in Mormon communities, but might be more about some Mormon piano group, and appears to be exactly the same something as the something about sexual abuse/Mormon pianists from earlier
Something about someone called Jeff Probst and someone called Lisa Ann Russell
Something about someone called Patrica Klanic whose husband is a soccer player and has been accused of rape
Something about Blur
Something else about Andie MacDowell
Something about Cameron Diaz
Something about David Cameron's hair (for fuck's fucking sake I'm fucking losing the fucking will to fucking live here)
Yet another fucking thing about this Caroline Flack and someone called harry Styles
Something about Prince Harry and his brother's wife's sister, except not really because they're only lookalikes (that's it - when I'm finished with this I'm going to book a holiday where I'm legally allowed to shoot things)
Something about Katy Perry
Something about that woman who looked all upset when Jeremy Clarkson said he wanted to shoot strikers and how she used to have a damp spot for Jason Donovan
Something about a model who's going bald
Jesus H. Christ in a fucking mothership, something else about Tom fucking Cruise
Something else about a Kardashian, possibly one of the ones from earlier but I'm so far past fucking caring at this point I just asked Mrs Exile to hold a mirror up under my nose
Something about Prince Charles not understanding Peter Kay's jokes or something
Something about Madonna likeing Prince William's wife's clothes
Something about someone called Gamu
Something about someone called Zac Effron kissing Michelle Pfeiffer
Something about Dawn French's clothes

For those that skipped much of that list it's 125 articles, 95% of which involve slebs, and close to 0% of which involve actual news. Okay, sure, they do put a lot of shite in the sidebar and more newsy news in the main bit, but even there Sinead O'Connor puts in an appearance along with one or two things about house prices (wouldn't be the Mail without them, would it?) while the story about exams being made easier appears nearly halfway down the home page.

Coincidence? I find that hard to believe. Whether it's just an effect of successive governments prioritising the appearance of educational success over actually educating or whether it's a deliberate attempt to create Orwell's proles, the undereducated 85% who were conditioned to have little or no interest in the world but were easy to manipulate. As always I tend to go with Hanlon's Razor and assume stupidity and cupidity over conspiracies, but sometimes I do wonder.

Free energy from the wind

2011-12-09T08:59:00.001+11:00

Well, I suppose if it fell on your house like that it'd warm the place up.

Click for link

Yes, this is indeed a different one

Let's be honest, if it wasn't for the warble gloaming catastrophism and the way so many governments, not least the UK's, have indulged various associated rent seekers these bloody things would be used in those rare locations where it's not economic to connect to the grid. Instead Britain is expected to rely increasingly on a form of generation which, if it's a bit too windy, can turn the generator into a £2 million sparkler. Or just knock it down. In fact the only positive thing I can think of right now is that they're not as useless as they could be.

Give it a few years and and someone will scale this up

Why men aren't meant to do laundry

2011-12-08T17:59:00.002+11:00

Because sooner or later we think of doing something like this.

Cuts, Spanish style vs British style

2011-12-08T02:28:00.000+11:00

Click images for links.

The northeastern region has been ordered to rein in its deficit and has embarked on a series of stringent austerity cuts.
The latest edict issued by the region’s ministry of education instructs state schools to cut “excessive consumption” of toilet roll among pupils and limit the quota to a maximum of 25 metres per child per month.
This most recent penny saving measure comes amid widespread cuts to education budgets across Spain that has led to regular protests in the streets by teachers.

Okay, not nice, and even though you can always give your kids some bog roll to take into school with them toward the end of the month I can't help feeling there's probably a better place to make savings than on bog paper. On the other hand they are at least trying, whereas...

Officials in the Department for Transport have found the extra cash from other spending along the 100 mile £32 billion proposed route.
The change to the plans will mean that a final decision on whether to give the green light to the HS2 project will now be delayed from this month to mid-January.
The High Speed Rail 2 connection, which would be built between 2016 and 2026, will cut the journey time between the two cities by 35 minutes to less than 50 minutes.

To save half an hour? Why not bin the fucking thing and save £32 billion? Is Gordon Brown still running the country? Because the amount of government profligacy makes it fucking look that way.

This is one for the smokers

2011-12-08T01:35:00.000+11:00

Fans and friends of the weed - not that weed - I present to you one of Australia's Big Things...

... The Big Cig.

And yes, it is a factory chimney (of the Tobacco Co-op in Myrtleford, Victoria) which means that like everything else the bloody thing is upside down and would have looked like someone lit the filter end. Sadly Australia's tobacco industry has been killed off and buried and after standing empty for a while the buildings are now a flour mill, the chimney having apparently been repainted a while back. Presumably it was thought to give the whole state 4th hand cancer or something just from looking like a giant cigarette, but probably the real reason was that knowing it was there was giving the antis conniptions.

Now I remember why I was thinking of Schrödinger's Cat earlier

2011-12-07T23:05:00.000+11:00

It was the return of SeeMikeDraw last month.

Updating Schrödinger's Cat

2011-12-07T06:52:00.000+11:00

A cat can be both asleep and hungry until it observes you observing it, at which point the wave function will collapse and it will become either asleep or hungry.

But usually hungry.

Timely

2011-12-07T00:28:00.000+11:00

Via the Eye.

Gissa currency

2011-12-07T00:18:00.001+11:00

Actually 17 currencies might be better. You could call them Francs, Marks, Punts, Pesetas, Drachmas.....

Sloppy filter

2011-12-06T23:47:00.000+11:00

I haven't blogged on the proposed webnanny/internet filter/Great Firewall of Australia plans down here for a while because things have gone a bit quiet. There have been enough colours nailed to masts, reputations staked and interests vested that I'm not all that hopeful that sense has been seen, particularly when it needs to be seen by a Communications Minister whose paternalist streak might be coming from both religious beliefs and leftie-ness, but it may be that it's been realised that a filter that promised much and failed to deliver would be worse than none at all. And I'm quite confident it would fail. Much of the illegal stuff is being shared by P2P anyway, and the filters proponents were forced to admit almost from the start that it couldn't do a thing about that. And then there's TORs and VPNs - basically it'll affect people who don't google for a way around the filter before the thing goes up, which is more or less everybody that doesn't need a filter because they won't be searching the web for baboon porn or whatever in the first place.

More interesting if you're a baboon, I imagine

But it's not just that because ISP level filters will be under attack from the other side too, as TalkTalk in the UK and some of its customers have found out.

Britain’s third-largest broadband provider has been promoting its new “HomeSafe” security product to its 4.1 million subscribers as a way of blocking pornography, viruses and other potentially harmful content.
Unlike the child safety products offered by other providers, it operates at the network level so parents do not need to install or maintain any software. The approach has attracted praise from MPs and campaigners seeking to restrict the availability of pornography on the web.
But for more than a week the system has failed to restrict access to Pornhub, which offers thousands of free explicit videos and is ranked as the third largest pornography provider on the web.
The failure was discovered by Cherith Hately, an IT expert and mother of three teenagers in south London, who tested the service last week. She found that on the Pornhub website the HomeSafe blocking page had been relegated to a small box normally reserved for advertising, leaving its adult content fully accessible.
“The ‘you have been blocked’ page has been diverted to an advertising slot within the Pornhub homepage thus opening access to it,” she said.
“The HomeSafe barrier has been knocked down, technically and literally. TalkTalk should inform all their HomeSafe customers that their children are still able to see pornography so that parents can supervise more.”

Far be it from me to tell me how to bring up your children, Cherith, and I'm sure you've already had the awkward conversation with your teens about which one had visited that site, but I'd say that parents should take this as an indication that the best filter system is the parents themselves.

A spokesman for TalkTalk acknowledged the failure and said technicians were working on a fix. He was unable to say whether the HomeSafe system had been deliberately circumvented by pornographers.

Perhaps not, but it occurs to me that if it had been to circumvent another filter that worked the same way it could affect TalkTalk too. In the Aussie context since what the nannies want is effectively ISP level filtering under government supervision all ISPs would have the same filter, and when a website manages something similar to what Pornhub's done to TalkTalk's HomeSafe this single point of failure would mean it won't affect just Telstra or iiNet or Optus customers - it'll be everyone. Hardly the end of the world because we'll be about where we are right now, but it does make the whole exercise seem a bit pointless.

“As the only network-level filter, TalkTalk’s HomeSafe is the most effective way of protecting children from content parents consider harmful,” the spokesman said.

No, I repeat: parents are the most effective way of protecting children from harmful content. The filter can't unplug the computer, withhold their pocket money or threaten to stop paying the broadband bill so there's no service whatsoever. But it can create a false sense of security.

“While no technical solution alone is able to solve the issue of child internet safety or be a substitute for parental supervision, we firmly believe that HomeSafe is a step in the right direction.”

Providing that false sense of security doesn't take over leading parents to assume that the filter is doing its job and little or no supervision is necessary, because when you concede that there's no substitute for parental supervision that would be a step in the wrong direction. Not that Britain's nannies are any more clued up about that than Australia's.

Under government pressure the rest of the big four internet providers – BT, Virgin Media and Sky – recently agreed to offer all new customers software to restrict which websites children are able to access, but stopped short of implementing network-level filters.
TalkTalk’s approach is meanwhile supported by the campaigners, and MPs including Claire Perry, a Conservative backbencher who is leading a parliamentary inquiry into online child protection. As well as network-level filters she wants broadband providers to switch them on by default.
“When I started campaigning to make access to internet pornography an 'opt-in', many industry experts said it was technologically impossible to provide a network-level filter,” Mrs Perry said.

You idiot. Of course it's impossible, we've just bloody seen that. This looks like it was circumvented at the other end without any effort on the part of the person sitting at home, and it's not like the person sitting at home doesn't have ways and means anyway. Look, I can't put it any better than an Australian blogger, Stilgherrian, put it nearly four years ago (my bold):

Real-world experience in everything from spam filters to the record industry’s futile attempts to stop copyright violations always shows that filters only block casual users. Professionals, the desperate or the persistent will always get through.

However if a politician demands a filter, pretty soon a shiny-suited salesman will appear, ready to sell him a box with “filter” written on the front. It’ll work — well enough for the demo, anyway.

“Look, Minister! Nice Minister. Watch the screen. See? Filter off, bad website is visible. Filter on, bad website gone. Filter off. Child in danger. Filter on. Child happy and safe. Filter off. Voter afraid and angry. Filter on. Voter relaxed and comfortable. Cheque now please.”

When elected nannies like Stephen Conroy here and Claire Perry in the UK wrap their heads around this and stop spunking taxpayers' money at things which at best will work until someone defeats them and at worst will never work at all they might start giving out useful advice. Advice along the lines of: the government can't stop your kids from seeing tits and arses and rooting baboons online...

... but if you get off your arse and look at what they're doing you can.

A thought to chill governments

2011-12-06T22:57:00.000+11:00

Just ran across this article on 3D printing and a bit near the end caught my attention (my bold):

Hardly a week goes by without headlines about 3D printing, a technology that’s going to change the way you live. Welcome to the next industrial revolution.
[...]
But what has changed is that 3D printers are becoming cheaper, smarter, better and more ubiquitous. One of the more remarkable developments came from Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, with RepRap, which stands for ''replicating rapid-prototyper”, on which I reported for this paper. RepRap had first been honed to print out everyday plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. The machine works like a printer but, rather than squirting ink on to paper, it puts down thin layers of molten biodegradable plastic which solidify to make objects.
Three years ago, however, the machine had succeeded in copying all of its own 3D-printed parts, which could be assembled into a new RepRap machine.
RepRap marked the birth of a domestic machine, a revolution analogous to that which saw the mainframe computer give way to the desktop PC. Recently it became available in kit form and Bowyer has already sold 100. All the while, the software and other ingredients are getting cheaper. There are rival kits, from Bits from Bytes to MakerBot. There are hackers adapting and improving them. As the technology mutates and evolves, the quality of the objects they can make gets better.
... We might get to a point where individuals can make all the things they want (including, of course, the RepRap machine that does the making).”
He likes to think of it as a new kind of home-grown movement, but for goods rather than food. “Your attic room will be your machine kitchen-garden, making everything from door handles to mobile phones. And if you have an actual kitchen garden as well, you can grow the plastic for RepRap - that’s polylactic acid, which is made from starch. You’ll have a self-replicating machine making useful goods from a self-replicating material supply.”
And here’s his revolutionary parting shot: when the day comes when we can all use 3D printing to make our own, we will have less need for money. “Where money doesn’t flow, it’s very hard to levy taxes.” Vive la revolution!

Not only does it hold implications for the levying of taxes but it would end a great deal of the scope for control through IP law. Who's to know if you printed off something that's patented if you just use it quietly around your own property and don't make a scene? And if you can make the 'ink' out of something that can be grown in your own garden and all the component parts of the printer from the printer itself it's not like there's a lot of scope for controlling supply of either the printers or material.

Is it a step closer to post scarcity? I honestly don't know, but if it is bricks will be shat in capitals the world over.

Justice is also a dish best served cold

2011-12-06T01:37:00.001+11:00

Over at Max Farquar's blog and one or two others is an horrific story of a very young child, a baby in fact, who has been brutally raped. As yet few details are known - even the baby's gender isn't certain and whether the poor kid is critical or has in fact died from the injuries is also up in the air. Other than that a really nasty assault with some terrible injuries has taken place and that the parents were arrested and then bailed far more is not known than is known.

Max, who I have a lot of time for as I agree with much of what he says, wrote this:

North Kent police have said that a 35-year-old man was subsequently arrested, on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and rape, along with a 33-year-old woman. They were both from the Gravesend area and were detained in a North Kent police station. However, they have now been released on bail.
Released on bail?
WTF! A one month old baby has been raped!
Who is the 35-year-old man, that is walking free after raping a one month old baby? Is he the father or is he the boyfriend of the 33-year-old woman that has also been released on bail? Do we presume she is the mother? Someone, somewhere out there must know who these loathsome, disgusting and unbelievable evil people excuses for human beings are!
It’s time to name and shame.

Here's my problem.

With respect to Max, we don't as yet know that anyone's walking free after raping a baby and so no it's not time to name and shame. It's time to thoroughly investigate, identify the guilty party(s), build an absolutely watertight case with extra attention to detail given to all the human rights - yes, I know, but hear me out - of any initial suspects and the eventual accused. And there are two reasons - first is that we all know the police screw up from time to time and arrest the wrong people, and right this second we can't honesty say that those arrested are guilty of anything. Suspected, yes, sure, but right now they haven't even been charged and in law they are innocent 'til proven guilty, just the same as everyone else. This is not a triviality. This is not showing more concern for the human rights of the perpetrators, who I repeat are not as yet known to be the perpetrators, than it is for the victim. This is absolutely essential for law to work at all. As Bolt's Sir Thomas More put it:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

The second reason is more prosaic. I'm appalled by this crime and I want to know that someone is punished for it. I want to hear that they got the bastard, that he was tried, convicted and locked away like an animal. And if he appeals I want to be confident that he's got no hope at all and the Appeals Court will reject it in very short order because the police and CPS did a thorough job, cutting no corners and respecting the accused's rights at every step of the process. I said they were important, and that's why - it's not just that some accused really are innocent but also that you don't want it to become a get out of jail free card for the guilty ones later on.

Naming and shaming now, if the eventual accused is indeed the one who gets named, puts that all that at risk if the defence persuades the court that it's prejudiced the jury and a fair trial is no longer possible. And before we start launching into defence barristers, see above - if you'd been charged and you were innocent you'd be wanting the barrister to do absolutely everything, play every angle at every stage, to get you out of there and back to your life, and if we want that for innocents accidentally put on trial or maliciously fitted up then it's got to be done for the crims too. It's not perfect but that way we know. If there's no trial, no guilt can ever be proven, and I don't trust British mobs to get it right when people have been known to attack the house of a paediatrician.

The disgust I feel over the idea that someone of technically the same species could do this to a tiny baby meant that I struggled to blog anything right away. There is no just punishment for this, none. There can't be. We're not a society that tortures people to death over extended periods anymore, and we're the better for it, but even if we were I'm not even sure Leg-iron's suggestion of hacking their legs off at the knee and standing them in salt is enough. Death certainly isn't, and not just because it'd be sending him off to a hell I don't believe in but because even if I'm wrong and there is one the bastard would get the opportunity of absolution before he got the rope or the needle or whatever. Spending the remainder of his miserable existence hearing the whispers, knowing from the beginning that the first beating - and worse - will come sooner or later, and then over the years learning from the less than gentle ministrations of fellow prisoners that the most frightening sight is an absence of screws and the worst sound is the small metallic click of a door that should remain shut being quietly unlocked, being moved for his safety and living in terror of the moment that who he is and what he's in for will become known in the new prison, that might well be the closest thing a civilised society can do for a just punishment.

We should want as many waking moments of this creature's remaining life as possible to be filled with nervous fear, and as many filled with terror and pain as other guests of Mrs Majesty's prison system are able to supply. The best chance of all that happening is to name no names except to police officers. If folks on the blogosphere or Twitter or Facebook blab enough to screw up a trial, or even any chance of there being a trial, then they'd almost be accessories to the crime. Because the perpetrator of this evil will go free and those who named him will all have helped. Jeez, if he gets a new ID and life somewhere at taxpayers' expense the blogs and twitterers and facebookers might as well have clubbed together and bought the bastard a ticket abroad and a clean docs.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Quite often so is justice.

Taking the Pepsi challenge

2011-12-05T20:26:00.000+11:00

Apparently Coke drinkers buying cans with polar bears on, all to promote the believed perilous situation of a species that has gone from 5-10,000 individuals half a century ago to about five times that number now and which must have survived warmer climates in the past, prefer the cans to be red rather than white. It's not said whether they prefer the contents to be completely flat and fizzless so as not to release the few grams of carbon deathoxide that will escape genie like from the tin and rush north to hold the heads of a few bear cubs under water, but I suppose that's less important than the look of the thing.

The cans featured the company's iconic logo in red, set against an all-white background and featuring a picture of three polar bears plodding through the snow, in what the company described as a "bold, attention-grabbing" move to publicise conservation efforts by the World Wildlife Fund.

I think I'll start buying supermarket own brand.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for Kyoto type polices

2011-12-05T20:06:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Global carbon emissions reach record 10 billion tonnes, an increase of almost 50 per cent in the last two decades, according to the team at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

I'm not going to go into the University of Email Context and the less said the better about beginning an article with an opening sentence that reads more like a headline.* Instead I'll just note that the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to stabilise atmospheric levels of some 'greenhouse gases' by reducing emissions, that it was bloody expensive, and that emissions went up anyway. In other words even if you buy into the argument that CO₂ emissions are a problem the solution, although to be fair it was touted as an initial step, has been an abject failure.

And in case that's not convincing a few days ago a post appeared on Watts Up With That entitled 'What Didn't Kyoto Do?' which made a similar point with some interesting additions.

The entire goal of Kyoto was to drop total country emissions (not per capita emissions) to 1990 levels. Since the population has gone up since 1990, to drop total emissions back down to 1990 levels means that per capita emissions have to drop even further, to well below 1990 levels. Kyoto was supposed to encourage the EU folks to undertake some serious reductions of emissions.

But at the end of the day, despite all of the noise and all of the fury, the US did a better job at reducing per capita emissions (down 14% compared to the 1990 values) than the EU27 did (down 12% compared to the 1990 values).

It is also interesting to compare the absolute values of the changes. In the EU27 with Kyoto, the emissions dropped since 1990 by 1.1 tonnes per capita. Remember that this includes Germany, which artificially decreased the average emissions. Bear in mind as well that one effect of Kyoto was to move energy-intensive industries outside the EU27, which also artificially decreased emissions.

In the USA without Kyoto, emissions dropped since 1990 by more than twice as much, a reduction of 2.8 tonnes per capita. The US had no Kyoto incentives and punishments, didn’t drive out energy-intensive industry, and despite all of that had larger emission reductions, both in absolute and in percentage terms, than the EU27. Go figure.

Indeed, but that's only the half of it.

Meanwhile, Chinese emissions went up, not down but up, by a whopping 4.6 tonnes per capita … and there’s a whole lot more capitas in China than there are capitas in the US and EU27 combined. China by itself wiped out all the gains of the EU27, and all the gains of the US, and turned them all into a net increase. And that’s just China, doesn’t include Brazil and India and all the rest of the developing world.

So, hands up everyone who's for more of the same? Those who've profited so handsomely off the back of Kyoto I don't need to answer.

* Telegraph readers may guess that the article is by Louise Gray without following the link, and they probably won't be surprised to hear that the photo beneath the subhead about carbon emissions shows some cooling towers emitting water vapour.

Cain unable

2011-12-04T20:38:00.000+11:00

I don't know the truth behind the allegations against Herman Cain, though I suspect there's at least a small element of how dare a black guy be a Republican among some who believe that minorities are supposed to be Democrats. Whatever, enough mud has been thrown that he's dropped out of the contest for the GOP nomination. So, thinking back to that vote matching thing I was playing with last month, who'd get most of Cain's support, Paul or Perry? And will the media there let Gary Johnson get any attention now?

Probably no to the last one but out of interest I went back to that vote matcher and gave the same answers as last time but dropped Cain, and this was what I got.

That's 4% more for Ron Paul and Michelle Bachman, and everyone else remains unchanged. Not what I expected at all.

Too bad

2011-12-04T18:58:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Cynthia Crawford, who worked as Lady Thatcher's personal assistant from 1978, said the Hollywood biopic was likely to upset her friends and family.
She said the opening scenes of The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep, were likely to be particularly distressing as they show her suffering from dementia.

I have exactly the same thing to say to offence seeking right wingers as to their offence seeking left-wing oppos. There is no right to not be offended and there never can be such a right because I for one would find the imposition of it extremely offensive (and no, I'm not saying that to be bloody difficult but because I'm a fucking adult my skin's thick enough that I don't need some paternalist twats wringing their hands on my behalf). If someone says something you don't like, don't listen. If they say something you think is wrong then debate it. If they make a film that you think is unfavourable to someone you admire in that it portrays them with dementia, even though they really do have dementia in real life, then just don't go and watch it. And so on.

This is not rocket science. Grow up and get over yourselves.

It's not wrong if lefties doing it - UPDATED

2011-12-04T14:45:00.001+11:00

Compare and contrast. First, something that needs no source and which the Righteous and right-on are saying is very, very bad, though as we should all know by now is lacking in context.

Frankly, I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.

Second, via Churchmouse writing at The Orphanage, and which he notes has gone entirely unremarked and without complaint by the Righteous and right-on in general and Unison in particular, something from the Birmingham Mail reporting on the public sector strike activity in their area.

A small group of protestors carried a mocked up guillotine with images of Nick Clegg and David Cameron, with a slogan saying "heads will roll".

I do hope that's cleared things up for everybody.

UPDATE - Churchmouse has left another example at the Orphanage, this time of an overdrive of leftie foam-flecked. outraged, offence seeking because some student Conservative Society burned an effigy of the Obamessiah, preceded three years ago by a deafening silence when someone else burned an effigy of Sarah Palin. And not forgetting that Camermong/Clegg guillotine thing.

That what's good for the goose is also for the gander is something the left and right alike struggle with, though I'll credit the right with less absurd examples of hypocrisy, while those libertarians who've been similarly hyperbolic have tended to be consistent and asked for enough lengths of piano wire to string up left and right wing statists all at the same time.

Silencing of dissent

2011-12-04T02:44:00.000+11:00

Yesterday the Snowolf put up a video that was put on YouTube, apparently by the European Central Bank if the user name is any guide, in celebration of the Euro and its forthcoming tenth birthday. Wolfers suggests that with Europe's current financial problems and the part the single currency has played no small amount of chutzpah must have been needed to post a video celebrating that, but he notes something else interesting.

Perhaps a little surprisingly (or not) the owners of the video have decided to disable comments on it.

No room for dissent, Comrades.

No room indeed, though when has the EU or its institutions ever shown much interest in what people think? However, in the spirit of freedom of expression, as enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, I've re-uploaded their video with commenting enabled and the following message:

Original video by YouTube user ecbeuro at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0YrRM7yee0
The European Central Bank has chosen not to allow comments on its video, and given current issues within the EU I feel this is disappointing and undemocratic from an institution ultimately dependent on taxpayers. Accordingly I'm re-uploading the video with comments enabled, which I feel is fair dealing under the law where I currently live (Australian Copyright Act 1968 - for the purpose of criticism or review (s41, s103A)) and fair use in the US where YouTube is based.

All rights to the video and soundtrack remain with its creators. I will happily remove this copy if the original opens to criticism/review in the form of YouTube comments.

Will YouTube take it down and give me a smack on the wrist over copyright or will my bit about the undemocratic lack of comments on the original and appeal of fair dealing be enough to keep it where it is? If it goes it'll reappear on EyeTube, though not if the ECB enable commenting on theirs, but I hope YouTube will see what I'm getting at. In the meantime you can watch the ECB version either at Wolfers' or at the link above, and if you want to be able to comment on the single currency then you can do it on the one I put up instead. At least for the time being.

You know something's in bad shape when...

2011-12-04T01:29:00.000+11:00

... when its creators begin to turn against it. Ladies and genitals, I give you former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors, who believes the Euro is fucked.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission, claims that errors made when the euro was created had effectively doomed the single currency to the current debt crisis

Admittedly he doesn't actually say it's fucked and he is saying that it would all have gone swimmingly if it had been done his way, but all the same there's quite a bit he says that a lot of people would agree with.

Mr Delors claims that the current crisis stems from “a fault in execution” by the political leaders who oversaw the euro in its early days. Leaders chose to turn a blind eye to the fundamental weaknesses and imbalances of member states’ economies, he says.
“The finance ministers did not want to see anything disagreeable which they would be forced to deal with,” he says.

Can't argue with that, and nor can I argue with some bits from the interview proper because they sound very similar to what I've said more than once myself.

It is a fault in the execution, not of the architects, which he claimed to have pointed out in 1997 when the plans for introducing the euro finally came together. At the time, he says, the best of the eurosceptic economists, whom he refers to as “the Anglo-Saxons”, raised the simple objection that if you have an independent central bank, you must also have a state.
Mr Delors thinks “they had a point”, but the way round this problem was to insist on the economic bit of the union as much as the monetary. As well as creating a single currency, you also had to create common economic policies “founded on the co-operation of the member states”.
I get the impression from Mr Delors that he thinks Mrs Thatcher would have agreed with this view. She certainly would not have agreed, however, on the Delors version of what that co-operation should produce — the harmonisation of most taxes, plans to deal with youth and long-term unemployment, and that social dimension for which he always called...

And when the Euro finally goes tits up the call will be for exactly that and possibly more. I've said it in comments on several other blogs as well as once or twice here - the former colonies in America formed the United States first and created their single currency later, and there will be Europhiles and Eurocrats who will seize on this as evidence that the EU attempted to put the cart before the horse and call for the full and immediate federalisation of Europe so that Son-of-Euro can be launched as quickly as possible. A United States of Europe wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if it was a federation of competing states, but does anyone think that's even a remote possibility if it's constructed on the foundations of what's now the EU?

Not. A. Prayer.

We make jokes about the EUSSR now, but I reckon it's not half as bad as it could be if formal union were to occur any time soon. It's already been pointed out before that the European Commission and Parliament are not unlike the Politburo and Supreme Soviet, and if all the borrowed money had to be repaid it won't even look as cheery as 1980s Gorky in the winter.

If they fail and the Euro fails with them it might only be the silver lining round a nasty looking cloud. The breakup of the EU is being warned, but if that sounds good to you my advice would be not to get your hopes up. More likely it'll be patched together to save egos and careers as the architects of half a billion people's misfortune say that the death of the single currency is not proof that Europe should remain a continent of independent nations but proof of the need for a federal Europe.

Heh

2011-12-03T19:26:00.000+11:00

There have been a couple of suggestions made about Climategate 2.0 and what quote will turn out to sum things up. My favourite so far was spotted by the Pedant General over at Devil's Kitchen:

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

But "The Cause" comes up a lot too. Granted, it's used without initial caps, but when it appears this many times does it really need them to get the message across? Some people from Minnesota don't think so.

H/T WUWT.

I've banned smoking in the road outside my house

2011-12-02T22:09:00.001+11:00

Of course I've done no such thing really. Smoke in here and I'll tell you to put it out, go outside or just leave. If you take the last option I must accept that once you're any measurable distance at all from my gate, even if its in millimetres, I have no right to tell you to stop. Well, that's how I see it, and I don't feel that's anything to do with being a libertarian and a fan of property rights - it is, but it's mainly just being fair and reasonable.

But of course not everyone is prepared to be fair and reasonable with smokers, the twenty-first century's designated primary untermenschen (drinkers and salad dodgers being the next down the list). Three months ago I left a slightly off topic comment over at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist on a post about smoking establishments starting to reappear in places in Europe. I said this:

Slight tangent, this. I saw a sign in a office building doorway here in Oz recently that said something like 'No smoking with 5 metres of this doorway'. Might not have been 5 metres (I didn't think to get a photo) but I remember looking at it and thinking that that applies to rather a lot of pavement and even a bit of road that I very much doubted the building's owners had any legal control over.

I should have added that I thought the idea was not only a bit iffy from the property rights angle, what with it setting rules on land the rule maker doesn't own, but that it was completely ridiculous anyway - I've been a non-smoker long enough to have grown to dislike the smell, but I find that a couple of paces is all that's needed and sometimes not even that. Metres plural? Several metres? That's just being silly.

A quick google image search suggests that these X metres away from the door restrictions are springing up everywhere now as I found examples of signs in Canada and the US plus a UK site selling them them in 5, 10 and even 20 metres of self righteous bastardry. What I haven't found, except in Queensland where they are mad and have banned smoking 4 metres from entrances with a $200 fine (PDF) if you're closer than that, is any indication that these things can carry any legal force where that area is both open and public, much less owned by someone else. Even in Queensland footpaths are going to be less than 4 metres wide often enough that this is a problem, and where the smokophobes have demanded the right to make rules over an even larger area of property that doesn't belong to them it can become significant. How significant I noticed last weekend on a trip into South Melbourne.

The buildings I've highlighted here form the Spotlight Centre, a small suburban shopping centre consisting of Spotlight, a supermarket, a pharmacy, a few small stores and cafes, and a gym in the larger building on the right, and an Aldi and a Dan Murphy's liquor store in the one on the left.

Smoking is, of course, prohibited inside according to state law, though this only came into force in July 2007 and I very much doubt smoking was allowed inside before then. I can't remember having seen a shopping centre anywhere that permitted smoking in their buildings even before the law banned it. However, the Spotlight Centre has gone further and has decided that they don't want nasssty smokersss gollum stinking up their entrancesss, no preciousss. And so there are signs on the doors which say, among other things, 'No smoking in centre or within 10m of entry', though for reasons which I'll come to I don't have a photograph.

There are three entrances on different streets to the main building and one to the smaller building (there looks like there will be a second when a currently empty unit is filled). I've marked out the rough size and extent of the no smoking zones that result from Spotlight's banning of smokers a full ten metres - nearly 33 feet in old money - from their entrances, first as they are and second as they'll be whenever that last main unit with its own entrance is occupied. Embiggering is possible on both images.

Yes, not only do the owners of the Spotlight Centre not want you to smoke inside their buildings, which is perfectly reasonable and absolutely up to them even if there wasn't a stupid law demanding they do what they'd almost certainly do by choice, but they're so insistent that even their doors are protected that they demand the right to ban smoking in cars parked outside or even driving past. 'No smoking in centre or within 10m of entry' is what it says and there's no mention of an exception for people who are within that distance but are inside their own property, much less on public property.

Of course the reason for this new phenomenon of pushing smokers even further away is as simple as it was predictable. Give the smokers a place to go, as was the policy in the past, and they'll go and smoke there. Take it away and they'll smoke wherever there's a bit of shelter instead, and often that means doorways and entrances where 'normal' people - or 'tomorrow's victims of denormalisation' as I like to think of them - have to go in and out. This is particularly true of workplaces, which generally used to cater for smokers and non-smokers alike and would often set aside a room or an area for the smokers if there was space. The law then said they had to stop doing that so of course the smokers ended up going outside, and if the weather was poor naturally they'd stay as close as possible to the door. Incidentally, this is the reason why there's no photo of the Spotlight's Centre's sign informing of their 10m exclusion zones - I did take one but I didn't realise that a member of staff who was standing a couple of metres behind me having a cigarette was reflected in the glass, and such casual defiance of an unreasonable rule didn't deserve to be rewarded with evidence put on the interwebs for anyone to see.* For all I know it's a sacking offence, so just take my word for it that it really does say 10 metres.

The effect is clear. Wherever there have been smoke bans in certain buildings there are now smokers who want or need to use those buildings dragging the life out of their smokes around the entrances rather than relatively evenly spread around, and having been brainwashed into increasing levels of terror at the sight of a lit fag much of the non smoking public have kicked off often enough that some now feel they can apply their own in house rules beyond the boundaries of their property. Currently this is not enforceable anywhere I know of apart from Queensland, where, as I mentioned, they are mad but also rich enough to be able to hire thousands of Zone Enforcement Response Officers (or ZEROs) to roam around with 4 metre tape measures and books of fine forms.** Sadly it's only a matter of time before somewhere else follows suit and introduces legislation too, and if it's here in Victoria there'll be close 170 feet of non-smoking pavement on one South Melbourne road which you won't even know about until too late because the damn signs are attached to the bloody doors ten metres inside the zone. Worse, a piece of footpath on which you can smoke today could be turned anti-smoking simply be someone knocking a hole in the wall and putting a door in.

And as usual with all anti-smoking measures that will be cheered by some non-smokers when it should really be feared by smokers and non-smokers alike. Because when someone else gets rights over property they don't own the can is open and the worms are wriggling everywhere. Don't believe me? Well, as Leg-iron and Bucko have just pointed out coffee drinkers look like joining the ranks of smokers, drinkers and salad dodgers, and while I don't currently have any desire to ban even strong smelling coffee being consumed by someone who happens to be walking past my house it happens that I am a tea drinker, you see... ***

Can't happen? Yeah, I expect the smokers who'll be walking out into roads all over the world to avoid getting too close to someone's door thought that too.

* Or maybe it wasn't defiance but the rain that kept the mystery smoker near the door. It was pretty wet that day, but I doubt that's an excuse so I'm still not using the photo.
** My mistake. Queensland is $53 billion in debt and would be even deeper in the hole if it hand't sold some state assets. And I made the ZEROs up, though that doesn't mean something like them doesn't really exist.
*** Coffee too, but that spoils the point.

Hell hath no fury like a public sector union ridiculed

2011-12-02T16:53:00.001+11:00

Oooh, Jezza, you are in trouble now. It was one thing having a pop at the Prime Mentalist of Britain and his eyesight, though I felt the term 'one-eyed Scottish idiot' just served to identify exactly which of the 600 or so idiots was being talked about in case anyone didn't catch the name, but how very dare you use a typically hyperbolic expression that only a attention seeking moron with a Pavlovian response to take offence to almost anything would take literally when talking about the heroic public sector workers.

Heroic workers

Within hours, public servants had bombarded the BBC with more than 4,700 complaints, but Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, took matters further. He said Clarkson’s “revolting” comments were “totally outrageous, and they cannot be tolerated”.

Okay, more than 4,700 complaints from the two million or so that Dave Prentis claims were striking. I make that less than a quarter of one per cent who got sufficiently bent out of shape about it to complain. Or who knows, perhaps a quarter of one per cent is about the number who complained when they were told to by Dave Prentis? Or any combination of the two.

Or is it 4,700 out of the six million or so people in Britain who are either in the public sector or who depend on it for a living, making it well below a tenth of one per cent? Or should we go the whole way and just say that it's 4,700 out of the 50 million or so adults in the UK, making it less than one per cent of one per cent. I suppose given the minority rule model of democracy practised in the UK and favoured by left and right alike, but I feel especially the left, acting on the wounded feelings of one person in every ten thousand seems almost reasonable.

Clarkson should be sacked by the BBC, he said, adding that the union was “seeking urgent legal advice about what further action we can take against him and the BBC, and whether or not his comments should be referred to the police”.

Britain having long since given up any pretence of free speech. Look, Dave, this is a phrase that's been used by people in the same exaggerated style for decades. as pointed out in The Tele by James Delingpole.

... he was employing it as a figure of speech. I know this won't mean much to half the morons who complained to the BBC yesterday, but the English language is an extraordinarily rich and nuanced thing. Sometimes, when the speaker says that someone should be shot, he really does mean it: if, say, it's an officer giving orders to a firing squad about to shoot a deserter or a looter in 1915. More often, though, he doesn't. For at least the last fifty years "they should be taken out and shot," has been a socially acceptable, perfectly unexceptionable way of expressing colourfully and vehemently one's distaste towards a particular category of unpleasantness, be it striking Unison workers, revolting students, poorly performing members of your football team or the Lib Dem members of Cameron's cabinet. Context is all.

And that's easily confirmed by googling variants of the phrase and setting filters to exclude all the stuff from the past couple of days. In a couple of minutes I'd found people who'd said that health nuts should all be shot, jobless hippies should all be shot, fairweather motorbikers should all be shot, people who like Elvis Presley should all be shot, and somewhat ironically, someone who'd said journalists should all be shot. Jeremy Clarkson, having certainly started out as a journalist and I expect technically still being one, would Dave Prentis and the 4,700 complainers be leaping to his defence in the belief that he's about to be killed?

And calling in the police? For heaven's sake, Dave, do you have any idea how ridiculous that looks to people in the real world? If Clarkson had control over people who both had the means to take strikers out and shoot them and were willing to do it then maybe, just maybe, it might have been incitement. But Clarkson doesn't control the judicial system, police and military, does he? He doesn't even control what he describes as the pokey little motoring programme of which he's a third of the presenters, much less its entire fan base - very few of whom in the UK would possess guns and even fewer of whom would think his comments were anything more than his usual over the top style.

It's not a crime, Dave - no, not yet even in non-free speech Britain - if no rational person would take it seriously, and on that point what does it say about you and the 4,700 complainers that you do seem to take it seriously? I mean, if they really think a right wing bigmouth like Clarkson would mean it when he says he'd have people shot and could follow up on it would they themselves be dragging people into the street if Ed Milivanilliband had said it?

And now before I go any further, a mandatory blog warning in the spirit of regulations that don't yet exist but might one day. Readers with recent surgical stitches may be advised to look away now.

In a rant worthy of Clarkson himself, Mr Prentis suggested children watching the programme “could have been scared and upset by his aggressive statements”.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahahahaha. Ahahah. Hoohoohoohoo. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahaha.

Dave, are you that desperate to score a point or are you actually clinically delusional? Look, this is how the BBC describe The One Show: "Magazine show with topical reports, features and interviews from around the UK."Do you really think any child of the narrow age group that is old enough to understand what was said but too young to recognise it as nothing more than exaggeration for cheap laugh (which of course was the reaction it got in the studio, and is probably the kind of thing that helps children learn what not to take literally) would be watching? I don't mean in the room at the same time it was on, I mean looking and listening and paying attention to the content. I'd suggest the number to be hovering right around zero with even less remembering it by the next morning, though I'll concede that there might be a few whose heads were turned to the TV by loving but very PC and extremely fucked up parents who whispered, "That nasty man on telly says he wants to take mummy and daddy away from you forever." They might still be upset because some tool of a union boss keeps bloody going on about.

Seriously, Dave, this is almost the right-on version of Godwin's Law. "Won't someone think of the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren" is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and when someone resorts to it it's a good sign that their argument holds less weight than a paper bag that's been left in a puddle of piss for a month and won't smell much better. For that reason alone I think Dave Prentis loses any credibility and forfeits the argument.

We could call it Lovejoy's Law.

Just as well cats and dogs can't read

2011-12-02T01:18:00.000+11:00

Because if they could they might not be all that happy about what they're being given to eat, even if it does apparently stand for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food. I wonder if they export to the US?

Misanthropes speak

2011-12-01T19:36:00.003+11:00

Yesterday I mentioned that there seemed to be disappointment in some areas - oh, alright, it was The Guardian - that 2011 has not seen record temperatures and warble gloaming is not baking us all to death in our revolting, right wing, miserable selfishness. It's no great surprise that they're not alone, being in the company of none other than Phil Jones. Yes, him again.

>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009

Tim, Chris,
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
record, 1998!
[...]

When you profess a belief that warming will be catastrophic and kill millions that's a really lovely thing to hope for, Phil, you great humanitarian, you. And did you even consider how unlikely this actually is to happen? At the time you wrote that, January 2009, you must already have been aware that in your own HADCRUT3 record the nine years 1999-2007 inclusive all failed to exceed your desired record, and since there are only sixteen years from 1998 to 2014 that was mathematically impossible even if 2009-14 all broke it. It should already have been crystal clear when you wrote that email that what you were hoping for simply would not, could not, happen. Expressing the hope that it would might suggest getting some primary school level maths wrong, or it might suggest that jigging the figures to make some of the years that weren't quite warm enough just a little warmer was being considered. Wouldn't be as good as real warming, which if I understand the warmist ideology is not good but bad yet is also good if it's bad for people, but it might be good enough if it persuades people to support policies which are bad for them. Or something.

I'm not going to speculate which of those is more likely, but I will say this. A bloody good dose of global warming might be just the thing needed to help Phil Jones thaw out his fucking heart.

H/T Watts Up With That.

Is he allowed to say that?

2011-12-01T18:17:00.001+11:00

Via Guido.

Funniest part for me was not Clarkson's usual hyperbolic style, which is normally amusing but rarely to be taken too literally, but the look on Alex Jones' face. At first it seemed as if she was wondering if anyone was allowed to say such things and was apologising for this crazy man with the grey pubes on his head who doesn't say the kind of things BBC employees are supposed to, before switching to a stony expression suggesting she was as quietly appalled as if Jeremy Clarkson had said he wanted to put kittens in a blender. I've no idea if this impression is accurate or fair as I know nothing about Alex Jones or her politics and even had to google to find out her name, but I suspect that even if she didn't feel embarrassed and appalled at Clarkson's latest failure to be right-on and PC there will be many, many people at the BBC who do.

A question for the public sector strikers

2011-12-01T16:53:00.000+11:00

Yeah, but why is it that for most people you can only get one if you join the public sector?

Greengrocer's in the public s'ector s'trike

2011-12-01T01:53:00.000+11:00

H/T Nanny Know's Be'st

The sky is angry

2011-12-01T00:39:00.000+11:00

Or so says Britain's Meteorological Office and The Graun. In fact they're telling us it's almost as angry as it's ever been in the history of everything (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold).

Is it me or do I detect a note of disappointment?

As spring bulbs burst into life in gardens around the UK, and plants break into a late second bloom, this autumn has seen balmy temperatures prevail across the UK and many parts of Europe.
Despite these unusual scenes, however, this year overall is not likely to be a global record-breaker.

Again, that slight sense that the Graun feel let down by this failure of Gaia to punish us more severely for our sins against her.

Figures from the Met Office published on Tuesday show that 2011 stands at 11th place in the list of warmest years ever, in global mean temperature records stretching back to 1850.

Ah, now did I imagine it or was 1998 declared the absolute hottest year it's ever been in the history of everything ever (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold)? Why, thanks to a handy table on the Graun's article I can see that it was no figment of imagination and that the Met Office did say exactly that, and presumably stand by it if it's still going into articles now.

Today's data confirms the overall warming trend, however: of the 10 warmest years on records, nine occurred since 2000.

But looking at that table I can see that it can be put another way: that 13 years after the hottest year ever (since 1850) it's now the 11th hottest year ever (since 1850). There may be a warming trend, though of course arguments still rage over the reliability of measurements, especially when 2010 is listed as almost as big a scorcher as 1998 despite a bitter northern hemisphere winter which the warmists either forgot to mention or didn't see coming (not for the first time), but there's no getting away from the fact that the warmists themselves say that the hottest year was just over a decade and this year is ranked only 11. More interestingly every year of the last decade apart from 2008 was warmer than this year.

Naughty Gaia. People won't be nearly frightened enough by this. My God, er, Gaia, they might even start to think temperatures have peaked. This just won't do. I don't know, you just can't get the Earth Mother figures these days. Look, just move over and leave it to someone who gets paid for this.

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said that[...]
Basic problem is that all models are wrong, not got enough middle and low level clouds.

No, Phil, don't tell them that. You're not supposed to let people know of uncertainties. Oh, look, now you'll have to reassure everyone that all the research into warble gloaming is open and honest and transparent and that there's nothing going on.

I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.
[...]
I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.

Oh dear, this isn't good at all. Even if Gaia carries on as she/it has for the last 4.5 billion years the Graun will be very sad if the whole warble gloaming narrative goes into a decline. Never mind - you can always ask Phil to hide it.

Who'da thunk it?

2011-11-30T06:15:00.000+11:00

Apparently Anders Breivik is a nut. Yeah, it comes as a total surprise to me too.

Questions to which the answer is "No"

2011-11-30T03:40:00.000+11:00

Cick for linky

... the question arises, should the rest of the world take over management of Europe to prevent or mitigate disaster? Specifically, should the US Federal Reserve assume leadership as a monetary superpower and impose policy on a paralyzed ECB, acting as a global lender of last resort?

And for the answer I think we should turn to one of those well worn graphical illustrations of how deep America's debt rabbit hole goes. This one is an excellent example from usdebt.kleptocracy.us. The first image shows the approximate US public debt by the end of the year if it was a piles of actual size $100 bills compared to quite a famous landmark, and the second shows that plus its unfunded liabilities.

If you've read the captions on those images (you can embiggerfy, or better yet go look at the original where you can see a similar representation of the US budget for 2011) you'll have noticed that the first of those, the $15 trillion pile, is roughly the size of the Gross Domestic Product for the entire United States. In fact the captions are a little out of date - US debt will not now reach 100% of GDP by Christmas 2011 because that happened four weeks ago.

So actually the answer to the question of whether the US Federal Reserve should act as Europe's lender of last resort is not just "No" - it's "With what?"

Midair shock death-risk sex horror Qantas outrage

2011-11-30T02:11:00.000+11:00

Although I've not mentioned it for some time both my regular readers (hi Mum) will probably be aware that I think the Australian press have a bit of a thing for slating Qantas and that they do sometimes over egg that particular pudding. And here's another prime example of a classic media beat up involving Qantas, all from the online pages of the Murdoch owned papers, and all with near carbon copies of the same article.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot's amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

EXCLUSIVE: A Qantas pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger during a long-haul flight to Australia.
Passengers in the first class section of QF32 from London were stunned at the pilot's amorous antics with the woman.
He was seen sitting on her lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the Qantas A380 jet before things became quite steamy, sources told the Herald Sun.

A QANTAS pilot is under investigation over a mile-high scandal with a female passenger on a flight to Sydney.
First class passengers on QF32 from London to Sydney were stunned at the pilot's antics with a woman in seat 2A. He was seen sitting on the woman's lap during the flight in the luxurious premium section of the A380 jet before things became more heated.

Shock! Outrage! Disgust! How dare this individual leave the controls of the aircraft for a bit of a sweaty fumble. Not only is it a disgraceful dereliction of duty but also an issue of demarcation - everyone knows that with Qantas it's the stewardesses responsibility to have sex with the passengers.* Not an unreasonable reaction to those headlines, but on further reading it turns out that nothing like that actually happened.

The pilot was off-duty and not in uniform at the time of the incident.

So what's the big deal and why the lurid headlines? Basically what we have here is a pair of passengers, one of whom happens to be an employee of the airline and whose job is to fly planes, got frisky in First Class and had to be told to pack it in a few times before the cabin crew ended up separating them. Probably happens all the time, and the only thing that makes this any different from any other incident where a couple of passengers have to have the mid air equivalent of a bucket of cold water thrown over them is that the guy's a pilot for the same airline and should reasonably be expected to know that that behaviour isn't tolerated on their planes. As a result of that he's under investigation, but it sounds more like an internal Qantas investigation than anything official - The Telegraph headline may say 'court hears' but neither their article nor either of the others mention any court at all, just what sounds like a Qantas in-house disciplinary. And of course if the guy hadn't worked for Qantas there wouldn't even be that. Hell, if he'd been ground crew he'd have had the same investigation but the papers wouldn't have bothered to report it because there's no much value in headlines like this:

Qantas check in guy gets steamy midair

Qantas baggage handler's wild blue wander as ~~court~~ hears of mile-high scandal

If you'll pardon the pun, they don't exactly fly, do they? But because it's a pilot we can go crazy with the headlines and make it look like it was one of the blokes flying the plane who decided to leave the flight deck and try entering the cockpit instead, at least until people get down to paragraph four when it's finally mentioned that the guy wasn't actually working at the time and had no more to do with flying the plane than the fat guy trying to sleep back in 56G or the bawling child kicking the back of his seat. It seems it's not always about what's newsworthy but about making something newsworthy out of something irrelevant, especially when it comes to the Aussie media and their national carrier. Just you wait and see how they'll cover a real emergency, like one of the toilets running out of soft paper and having to use that horrible cheap shiny stuff instead.

* Kidding, of course. It's been a while since I last flew but when I've used Qantas I've found the cabin crew to be polite, helpful, professional and incidentally pretty easy on the eye, but none of them have ever offered me sex instead of tea or coffee. Maybe you just have to be Lord Voldemort. This is in contrast to the booking departments of several airlines which have certainly fucked me in various ways, generally involving the words 'extra charge'.

They just can't stop, can they?

2011-11-29T21:33:00.000+11:00

Click images for links.

In his long-awaited Autumn Statement, the Chancellor will outline a £650 million scheme to provide free “early education” for about 40 per cent of two year-olds.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will today announce a £1 billion scheme to pay firms more than £2,000 for each young unemployed person they hire.

And all this at a time when some think the UK is already back in recession and may need a decade of austerity to really recover. So what's the Cobbleition's response? Copy the policies of the deranged madmen who fucked the country into this hole in the first place, that's what.

I can't carry on with this, I really can't. I've said umpteen times that they're as bad as the last lot and that there's no appreciable difference between the the main parties anymore with the possible exception of how quickly they're going to fuck the country into a hole. The issue of how deeply they're going to fuck it into a hole has long had cross party support. If I blog this again anytime soon something is going to get fucking broken. Instead I'll just point out that Douglas Carswell, the Tory party's favourite for MP Least Likely To Be Given A Front Bench Job, has been wondering what the government would be doing right now if it was still a Labour government with Gordon Brown leading it. His list looks depressingly like the actual policies of the Cobbleition.

Economics lessons for children

2011-11-28T20:58:00.000+11:00

Money doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

From See Mike Draw

Pots and kettles

2011-11-28T20:11:00.002+11:00

Half inched from Zerohedge.

From the Mail:

Countries will be forced to submit their budgets for EU approval before they go to national parliaments, will have to sign up to strict new rules on the size of debts and deficits and will be sued for any breach in the European Court of Justice.

Mrs Exile comments, wondering if this would be the same EU that hasn't had its books signed off by the auditors for 17 years in a row. Damn good question. But in the absence of any sane answer I'd say that countries all over Europe can look forward to seeing headlines like the Irish did a couple of weeks ago.

Unless the whole bloody Euro train wreck finally comes off the rails first, of course. Who knows, that might even have happened by the time this post goes up.

Oh, God, is this still on?

2011-11-28T15:00:00.001+11:00

I've just realised that the UK is still doing I'm A Non-Entity, Revive My Career, filmed down here in Oz among its lethal luxury hotels and aggressive world class restaurants (or at least nearby). I don't doubt that it's still mind sappingly bad TV but I'll give them credit for being better than the just-won't-fucking-die zombie that is Sleb big Brother in one respect - I've just seen who's in Non-Entity and I actually recognise just under half of them.

PS - I've also just realised that this is post number 2,000, not counting a handful that I put up at the Orphanage but haven't put up here. I can't believe my two thousandth blog post was so trivial. Sorry. No. 2,001 will be more serious.

Where's this money coming from?

2011-11-27T19:39:00.000+11:00

Click for linky

Of course we know exactly where it's coming from. There are just shy of thirty million individual taxpayers in Britain, and of those about 6 million are public sector employees whose pre-tax salaries are paid out of other people's taxes anyway, leaving 24 million people. This ~~govern~~mental generosity is funded by them to the tune of £42 each - and think how you'd feel if someone just shoved you up against a wall and nicked your wallet with forty quid in - unless they go for the alternative of adding it to the nation's debt to be paid by future taxpayers. This latter choice is increasingly popular because it means the government does not have to shove you up against a wall and take your wallet, thus making you and everyone else much less likely to balk at what it's being spent on, but since the government has no money or income of its own it's a lot like going to an expensive restaurant where you can't possibly afford to eat and then running up a massive tab by shouting for all in the bar and ordering the best stuff on the menu while hoping like hell that you'll be joined by people with money before the coffee and liqueurs come.*

So what are you getting for your money? Well, not a damn thing, obviously, but what are the Africans getting for it?

Among the projects to be funded will be schemes to help African farmers insure their crops against flooding and drought while other projects include installing solar power in rural villages and building slurry pits that can produce gas to power generators.

In themselves these don't seem like terribly bad ideas, not least because they don't seem to be about appeasing the angry sky gods so much as acknowledging the fact that things don't always stay the same and adapting to it. Oh, and the very worthy goal of getting power to people who don't have it, or not much of it, at the moment. But...

The move, however, is expected to attract intense criticism at a time when the UK economy is struggling to recover from recession.

Indeed, and every other thing I blog at the moment seems to be about Britain's government spending money it hasn't got as fast as or faster than even its recklessly profligate predecessor. And I hadn't even got round to Cleggy's latest brain fart about jobs for da yoof paid for by, you guessed it, the taxpayer. Maybe later, or maybe I'll be too despondent to blog it at all, but for now it's enough to state that that's yet another billion pounds. Now back to Huhne-hoon and his bounteous munificence with your money.

One of the countries which will receive money is South Africa, the most economically advanced in the continent. Last year its economy grew by 2.8 per cent, while Britain's economy rose by 1.8%.

A little misrepresentative, this. By just about any metric, GDP nominal or PPP and absolute or per capita, the UK is much wealthier than the RSA. But then the UK has run up far greater debts than the South Africans have, again in both absolute and relative terms, and how much wealthier Britain really is after allowing for the phantom wealth that's come from living beyond its means for so long is tricky to say. On top of all that Britain's likely to go back into recession soon, which makes all these billion here and billion there stories more than a little worrying. So why... ?

The timing of the announcement, however, is being seen as a cynical attempt to "bribe" African nations into signing up to international deals being backed by the British Government at the climate change negotiations in Durban.

Ah, now it's becoming clear. The UK government, like that of many western nations, has caught the religious warble gloaming zeal and is determined to show its faith by righteously fucking its own economy hard in the arse until its well and truly buggered, but hasn't become quite so insane that it thinks its own citizens won't go nuts if they don't see developing nations - the ones that turn out to be causing more of the problem that we don't really know is a problem - making sacrifices too.

Oh well, I suppose the government bribing other people with your money is at least a change from bribing you with it.

* But no cigars of course. The restaurant's long since been forced to go all non-smoking.

Brings a new meaning to the term 'joystick controller'

2011-11-27T19:24:00.000+11:00

I just don't know what to say about this but I'm slightly surprised that some feminazi isn't screaming that it's sexist because it's been designed to exclude women, sorry, wimmin.

Personally I suspect the feminists are keeping quiet because they've had their own videogames in the ladies' lavvies for years, and they're much better games with multiplayer modes. This is why they always go to the loo in pairs and take so bloody long. Powdering your noses? Yeah, sure. You're just trying to level up before the husband/boyfriend/significant other wants another drink.

A great untruth

2011-11-27T18:46:00.000+11:00

Wrong. It always means the same thing: you're not paying enough attention to a cat who wants something.

Appropriate music track

2011-11-27T08:05:00.001+11:00

Because this:

British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.As the Italian government struggled to borrow and Spain considered seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible.
Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad through a banking collapse and even riots arising from the debt crisis.
The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way.
[...]
Recent Foreign and Commonwealth Office instructions to embassies and consulates request contingency planning for extreme scenarios including rioting and social unrest.

So this:

Well, that didn't take long

2011-11-27T01:50:00.000+11:00

I've been meaning to get round to blogging on the actions of John Pike, the American cop who calmly sprayed capsicum directly in the faces of some of Occupy protestors sitting peacefully in a row offering no resistance. On the one hand I'm not a huge supporter of the Occupy mob and think that many of them are aiming at the wrong target (business rather than government) and protesting something that doesn't truly exist (the free market). It all rather smacks of the anarchists for a bigger government protests in London last year. However, free speech and association and all that, as enshrined by our American cousins in their Bill of Rights, which makes it troubling that it was in America - Land of the Free, etc - in which a cop unloaded a canister full of capsicum spray right in the faces of some protestors sitting Gandhi style, unresisting and offering no violence.

However, not for the first time events have overtaken my blogging efforts and John Pike, whose identity and contact details quickly made their way online, has now become an internet meme. Those UK readers who are old enough to remember Tony Hart's gallery music can start humming it now.*

Do-duh-do-duh-do-duh-dooo, do-duh-doo-dooo, do-duh-do-doo-doo-doooo...

John Pike, aged 39

But my personal favourites this week are these three, by John Pike, 39, John Pike aged 39, and finally 39 year old John Pike, all of the University of California, Davis, police department.

Clever reference

A meme within a meme

No comment necessary

* For the benefit of non Brits the late Tony Hart presented a couple of art TV shows for kids when I was little, at least one of which had a gallery segment of drawings and paintings sent in by kids and which was accompanied by that piece of music. The bastards never showed any of mine.

Quote of the Day

2011-11-26T16:40:00.000+11:00

A sound reason to cave in to public sector srikes.

Businesses also fear that if public sector workers’ demands aren’t met, they may look for jobs in the private sector, costing billions in incompetence-related mistakes.

The Daily Mash, of course. Where else?

Happy sights, happy thoughts

2011-11-25T16:18:00.001+11:00

Click for linky

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not gloating. Well, to be honest actually I am gloating a bit, but not all that much. That partly because it's not happened yet and we should keep the champagne on ice until it does, and partly because I'm not philosophically opposed to the idea of single currencies or federalisation as such. I think living in a federation of competing states (with a small 's') has got a lot to be said for it providing they really are competing to attract citizens, and as far as I'm concerned people can do business in Altairian Dollars, Flanian Pobble Beads or the Triganic Pu, or even a single currency with a stupid name if they want, as long as both parties agree to it. What I find so objectionable about both the Euro and about EU federalism is the attempts to impose both on half a billion people whether they want them or not, and the lack of any real efforts to make either really worth wanting much.

The only note of caution I'd sound, and this is aside the view of the experts that the whole process is likely to be painful and bloody even for nations not directly connected, is that I suspect the death of the Euro will lay the grounds for the next battle. "We know what went wrong," they'll say. "We should have done it like the Americans did when the USA was born: political union first and monetary union second." Prepare yourselves, Europeans, because this might not be the beginning of the end, but just the end of the beginning.

In Soviet Russia finger fires you

2011-11-25T07:28:00.001+11:00

What's Russian for 'Gissa job?'

REN TV, a privately owned channel controlled by associates of Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, said on Thursday it had decided to take her off air calling her actions "unacceptable" and "unprofessional".
"On 14 November during the 'News 24' programme the presenter Limanova made an unacceptable gesture that was a synonym for an offensive expression," it said in a statement.
The channel, which is broadcast to 120 million people, claimed the gesture was intended for her colleagues in the studio rather than for President Obama.
"It had no subtext and was not linked with the news that Limanova was reading at that moment," it said.
Nonetheless, it said it had been left with no choice but to fire her.
"A decision has been taken that T Limanova cannot and will not continue to work on the REN TV channel as a presenter," it said.

Shame. She got REN TV a hell of a lot of free publicity and it seems a harsh kind of thank you to blow her out, especially if the middle finger really was aimed at the crew at a point when she thought she wasn't on screen. The BBC would probably have promoted her even if it was unambiguously intended for the presi... oh, wait. No, that'd be the last president, wouldn't it?

Anyway, someone hire Tatyana Limanova and make her Europe correspondent. She could raise fingers all day long and most of the continent wouldn't argue.

Doesn't add up

2011-11-25T01:22:00.001+11:00

Douglas Carswell shows us exactly how bad governments involving all three main British political parties have been at primary school level arithmetic.

Here's a thought; spending to prop things up cost us £390 billion we do not have. Abolishing corporation tax entirely would have cost the Treasury less than half that amount - £140 billion - in lost revenue over the past three years.

Or it could have been of personal taxation or a mix of things. Either way people would have had money in their pockets to spend on things they needed or wanted. Instead of which a few banks which should have gone down the swanney survived.

Whoopee.

The attitude alone should be worth an extra couple of years - UPDATED

2011-11-24T18:27:00.002+11:00

Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, presumably accepting imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences: you will go to prison for five years.
From the titles of Porridge

Of course that was from both fiction and another time. These days an habitual criminal can look forward to having to write a letter, and even though that's likely to be a tortuous exercise with many products of the British educamakayshun system at least one burglar has treated it with the contempt it deserves and not even taken the trouble to disguise his equal contempt for his victims.

Now on one or two levels he's actually doing everyone a favour. You can't argue with the advice of a professional thieving little bastard as far as things like curtains and open windows go, and since we can expect his attitude towards this so called punishment - apparently described as the most rigorous form of non-custodial sentence for young criminals, which I guess means there's no help with the spelling and punctuation - to be shared by many who do take the trouble to hide it and go away smirking to themselves this guy's open display of contempt tells us what a pointless waste of fucking time it is for someone like him. It's probably not intentional but in effect his twisted form of honesty is a kind of public service, so he probably deserves some kind of thank you.

I'd suggest a few years bed, board and possible buggery in HMP Slade.

UPDATE - Same with more serious crimes if the Ambush Predator's latest post is any indication.

"Mr Hussini was punched by two of them, who then held him back while the defendant leant forward and stabbed him in the stomach."
Yes, you heard that right – they held him while this little savage stabbed him in the stomach.Is that not attempted murder?
The boy handed himself in to police the following day and pleaded guilty in court to wounding with intent and possessing an offensive weapon.

Sentencing the youngster to a two-year detention and training order, Judge Hamilton said: "But for the fact that there was a surgeon living nearby, the man you stabbed would have died."
A two-year detention and training order. For stabbing someone in the stomach…

This country is doomed.

This Private Frasier-itis I've come down with seems to be catching, but perhaps we're being unfair. I suppose it's not attempted murder if someone is only slightly stabbed. /sarc

In Soviet Russia the news make you - UPDATED

2011-11-24T15:37:00.002+11:00

Heh.

I don't care if Tatyana Limanov's fuck you finger was for technicians who were putting her off, if there's any more to that than knee-jerk denial of the 'Niet, we haff no tanks in Czechislowakia' variety. The timing was sensational and if it really was aimed at the Obamessiah then fair dos, all I want to know is if she's going to top it when she reads out something that mentions David Cameron and if so whether it'll involve mooning the camera.

UPDATE - YouTube's already pulled the video, by the sounds of things after a copyright dummyspit from the holders, REN TV. I've just changed it to one that's still up but I expect that'll get taken down before long too, so here's a screencap for posterity.

MOD cutbacks starting to bite

2011-11-24T02:11:00.000+11:00

Via the Filthy Engineer.

Oranges are not the only fruit death kill weapons

2011-11-24T01:24:00.001+11:00

I know people on supermarket checkouts haven't been hired to think, just to swipe barcodes over lasers for hours at a time, and I do realise that must be pretty mind numbing but surely something's badly wrong when staff lack the initiative to question anything the till tells them. F'instance:

A chef was stunned to find she was almost banned from buying two limes from a supermarket - because they could be classed as a weapon.

Can I just repeat that the woman is a chef. Have you seen the knife collection the average chef has?

They keep them bloody sharp too, and since they're for professional use I'd bet they can carry them around without getting arrested so much.

Marisa Zoccolan, 31, popped into the new Asda supermarket close to her home in Wallsend, North Tyneside, to pick up some groceries, including the citrus fruits.
But when she tried to pay for them at the self-service checkout, the message 'amount exceeded, authorisation required' flashed up.
An assistant then came over and told her that more than one lime was deemed a weapon - because the citric acid could be squirted in someone's eye.

Would that be the same stuff Asda sell in convenient quarter litre bottles for less than 50p?

Marisa, a self-employed caterer said: 'I thought they were taking the pip, but the assistant told me the same applied to lemons."

Nope, I think you'll find that lemons are a special case, and Asda sells the ammo for those too.

Or is it just plastic ones with 'Jif' written down the side?

Thankfully for Ms Zoccalan, who lives with partner Jacqui Nicholson, 37, and dog Doobie, the assistant allowed Marisa to eventually buy both of the fruits.
'Yes, they vetted me and let me buy them."

Oh, God. Not "They thought about it for about half a second and realised that since the whole bloody thing was patently ridiculous the best thing to do was apologise and get a supervisor to come and override the till." No, they fucking vetted her. What this involves we're not told, but I'm guessing Marisa Zoccolan told them she was a chef and that limes were not weapons but ingredients - it not being all that hard to find recipes that include the instruction "take the juice of two limes" - and they then asked her for something that showed she was indeed qualified to handle such lethal objects and safely make interesting desserts out of them. If it was anything even vaguely like that then that's barely any better than refusing point blank to let her buy the limes and sticking with the retarded belief that a small green citrus was significantly more dangerous than a zillion other things kicking around the average home or office.

And in a way it's a shame they're not really a practical weapon because I know the perfect place to become the world's first citrus supervillain. I'd have got away with it if it hadn't been for those Asda kids.

The Big Orange in Berri, SA. Photo by Bilby.

Tip of the Akubra to Nanny Knows Best.

Quoted Quote of the Day

2011-11-24T00:26:00.000+11:00

More from Climategate II: The Chinny Reckoning. At the Devils's Kitchen the Pedant General has spotted an absolute gem:

The hunt is now on for the snippet that crystallises the whole thing, the "Hide the decline" moment if you will. My favourite so far:
<1682> Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

Earlier I repeated Deep Throat's advice to follow the money, but I've mentioned before when talking about Big Eco that there are several reasons to keep it going. Protecting a reputation that's been nailed irrevocably to a particular mast is also a very strong incentive to keep holding that mast up no matter what.

Inconvenient untruth

2011-11-23T18:32:00.000+11:00

Anyone who watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth will remember the claim that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting due to warble gloaming, though people who've done much reading of sceptical blogs and publications will have long been aware that this was complete nonsense. In fact even people who just watch news even from pro-warmist sources like the BBC should already have been aware that that particular claim was constructed on sand, as the reporting of this court case makes clear:

Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

And from Son of Climategate we found that certain others were aware of it too.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”

Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson”
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil
<>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

WUWT also points out that it's interesting that Dr Lonnie Thompson's opinion, as reported in emails, on the cause for ice loss on Kilimanjaro seems to have been quite different from that given in more public fora, such as a PR right before a big climate meeting in one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

Contrasting receptions

2011-11-23T17:50:00.001+11:00

Peter Costello, former Liberal party MP and Federal government Treasurer for the Coalition under John Howard, writes in The Age on an interesting difference in receptions given to US Presidents.

When the American president addressed joint Houses of the Australian Parliament back in 2003, Greens Senator Bob Brown interjected. In fact so worked up was he that the Speaker ordered his removal from the chamber. He was yelling about Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

This time Brown joined a conga line of MPs clamouring to shake hands with the President, Barack Obama. He had to jostle with Greens MP Adam Bandt (who has a PhD on Marxism) to get his chance. Both of them were beaming. It was a good speech. The President declared America's commitment to a military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, including a new proposal to train up to 2500 marines in the Northern Territory. One can only imagine what Bob's reaction would have been had George Bush announced that 2500 US marines would be stationed on Australian soil. They would have had to cart him out of the House of Representatives.

[...]

Bob Brown was all worked up about Guantanamo Bay when George Bush visited Australia, but he does not seem to worry so much now that Obama is in charge. Julia Gillard used to complain that Australia was subservient to America. Now she claims she has made our alliance stronger than ever before.

In opposition, Labor harvested votes on the left. In government it wants to appeal to conservatives....

[...]

Labor MPs may feel happy to see Obama and Gillard standing in front of troops in the Northern Territory - it is a great photo opportunity for their side of politics. But alliances are between countries. They are designed to outlive the political office-holders of the day. In the future it could be Newt Gingrich and Tony Abbott standing there being cheered by US marines in the NT. The principle is either right or it is wrong and it doesn't turn on who happens to be in office.

That is why it is so useful to have the left of Australian politics now locked in to traditional Coalition policies. Bipartisan support has been firmly established. And in the future if there is ever a complaint about marines based in Australia, just pull out the footage of a beaming Bob Brown grasping the hand of the president who announced it.

Some excellent points made there, and while I have no more love for Peter Costello's party than the ALP - in one sense rather less love because the bastardisation of the word 'liberal' to describe a party of paternalists that like telling other people how to live their lives simply infuriates me - I can't argue that Leftists can be pretty inconsistent if not hypocritical when it comes to the US. The bottom line is this: all the things I disliked about George W Bush, the wars, Gitmo, the loss of individual liberties, cosying up to big business and lobbyists, have by and large continued under Obama.

I'm aware some that Rightists care less about what is done than that it's one of their men doing it - witness David Cameron's actions of late and the deafening silence from his supposedly right of centre party - but if anything it seems to be even more true of Leftists. Is something bad done by a right winger made less bad when a left winger takes over and carries on?

Big Eco getting caught out again?

2011-11-23T13:00:00.001+11:00

And in more ways than one. I've been blogging on other things so I've not mentioned the BBC as brought up by Bishop Hill here. And here, and here, here and here. Do go and have a read, though you might not be terribly surprised at what Auntie's been up to. However, that looks like being overshadowed by what's already being called Climategate II. Yep, more stuff that the R&D department of Big Eco would rather not have had out in the open has emerged and is being gone over by sceptical bloggers everywhere. Very early still, but Bishop Hill's initial take is here, Jo Nova here, Watts Up With That here and here but mostly here, and in the MSM James Delingpole here. I'll leave you with Delingpole's summary and a few of his preferred quotes as I've got popcorn to make. Do go read the rest.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be.
[...]
<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
[...]
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

P.S. a thought's occurred, and I doubt I'm the first one it's occurred to. The last time this happened as around this time last year, shortly before the COP15 climate junket/meeting in Copenhagen (will these fuckers lecturing us all about emissions from travel ever teleconference one of these things?) and here we have it all happening again just a few days before COP17 in Durban. Interesting timing. Does Big Eco's R&D section have it's own Deep Throat, unhappy at something going on there and carefully choosing content and times to leak for maximum effect? I can only speculate, but the advice of the original Deep Throat still applies: follow the money. How many of the people sending, receiving or CC'd in on these emails would be out of a job if man made catastrophic warble gloaming turns out to be nonsense? And that's just the R&D parts of Big Eco - the same applies to those involved in marketing, admin and production. Hell, if my career and future income depended on everyone believing the sky was going to burn I'd be saying it too.

And that's when the fight started...

2011-11-23T12:46:00.000+11:00

Via email.

The year before last I bought the mother in law a plot at the cemetary for Christmas. Last year I didn't get her anything. When she asked why I told her that she hadn't used the gift I bought last year.
And that's how the fight started.

--------------------------------

We were sitting at a table at her high school reunion and she kept looking at this guy getting drunk on his own at a nearby table. I asked if she knew him, "Yes," she said. "He's an ex-boyfriend. I heard he started drinking after we split up all those years ago and he hasn't been sober since."
"My God," I said. "That's a hell of a long time to go on celebrating."
And that's when the fight started.

--------------------------------

We were in bed watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and I turned to her and askd "Do you want sex?"
"No," she said.
"Is that your final answer?" I asked.
She didn't even bother looking and just went, "Yes."
So I said, "Can I phone a friend?"
And that's how the fight started.

--------------------------------

My wife sat down on the couch next to me as I was flipping channels.
She asked, ‘What’s on TV?’
I said, ‘Dust.’
And then the fight started.

--------------------------------

My wife was hitting about what she wanted for our anniversary. She said she wanted something shiny that went from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds, so I bought her bathroom scales.
And then the fight started.

--------------------------------

When I got home the other night my wife demanded that I take her somewhere expensive, so we got in the car and I took her to the gas station.
And that's when the fight started.

Can Cameron really be this stupid?

2011-11-23T01:03:00.001+11:00

Click for linky

Dave? Do you think that this might possibly have something to do with the fact that you haven't stopped spunking away money by the billion as fast as you can tax it off of the current workforce and borrow it on behalf of their children? Fucking hellfire, in the last couple of days we're told that you've blown half a billion on the Northern Rock sale, granted perhaps unavoidably, and that you've decided to throw almost the same again at the building industry while underwriting all the mortgages of first time buyers. Not only have you not cut public spending you're actually spending even more than Labour did, and incidentally failed to get the public sector to stop thinking of that as a cut as well as failed to get them to stop hiring for bullshit jobs instead of people who actually provide useful services. You've carried on taking money that could have paid down some of the UK's eye watering debt and handing it to the EU, IMF and international aid, and you've continued Labour's wars at significant cost and embarked on a military adventure of your own. The bonfire of the quangos was at best a barbecue of a handful of them - one of those small barbecues made of thick tinfoil that you get from petrol stations, and for which you probably paid in cash and told the attendant to keep the change from a million quid. And you've failed to create growth because you've refused to provide the conditions for it to occur. That's just off the top of my head and I'm sure I could think of more given time and find out more still if I started looking. And here you are scratching your arse - it apparently being interchangeable with your head - and wondering why the plan's not working.

I'll tell you why, David. It's because it's basically the same fucking plan that Gordon Brown was using, you hopelessly inept cunt. How the hell did Britain come to this? It's had some dim politicians and not a few dim PMs, but how in Christ's name did it get landed with you: a PM whose extraordinary dimness must surely result from being so dense that light can't escape if it falls into his head? It's not madness that is doing the same thing and expecting different results, it's stupidity. And that's actually the generous alternative because if I thought you knew what the fuck you were doing I'd be describing you as evil.

I hate to go all Private Frasier again, but if these fuckwits aren't dragged out and chained to something solid where they can't do any harm - the Lusitania for example - I really do think the UK is doomed.

Better than some performances you'd see on X Factor

2011-11-22T17:03:00.003+11:00

I know he/it is miming but I'd say it/he is still more entertaining and talented than a lot of what you'll see on musical talent shows at the moment, especially that ridiculous hair from Brighton with the stupid twat attached to the bottom. Frankie Cocksocket or whatever it's name is. Give me about 250 bucks of rubber and components and $29,750 of R&D any day of the week, especially when it manages to look like it's paying attention.

More Keepon video here and about Keepon here.

H/T Skepticlawyer.

A modern parable

2011-11-22T12:31:00.000+11:00

Spotted by Fausty.

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of nowhere. Parliament said, "Someone may steal from it at night." So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Parliament said, "How does the night watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.

Then Parliament asked, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Parliament said, "How are these people going to get paid and administered?" So they created the following positions, two time keepers and three payroll officers, and then hired four human resources consultants and five health and safety executives.

Then Parliament said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created an administrative section and hired fifty people including administrative officers, assistant administrative officers, legal secretaries and a chief executive on £250,000 per annum.

Then Parliament said, "We have had this in operation for over one year and we are £25,000,000 over budget, we must cutback the overall cost."

So they laid off the night watchman.

True, that.

Come back, Gordon Brown... UPDATED

2011-11-22T00:11:00.003+11:00

All is not forgiven by any means, not even remotely. But when the Cobbleition are doing things that are just as stupid as those Gordon Clown himself did there's a case to be made that you might as well put the lurching, snot munching, cyclopean horror with the faecal Midas touch back in charge and be bloody done with it.

The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages.

Dave, Nick, say it ain't so. Tell us that even you aren't so monumentally stupid that you can't see that it's precisely this kind of policy - using taxpayers' money to underwrite loans for overpriced housing to people who are at higher risk of being unable to repay them - that led with grim inevitability to the fucking subprime mortgage crisis in the fucking first place. And what did that lead to in its turn? Oh, yes, that'd be adding to an unsustainable bubble with a bonus prize of a banking crisis, wouldn't it? And you two freak shows are now standing here telling us that you want to fucking do it all over again in the deluded belief it'll get the economy moving. Folks, I think this year's Jeff Buckley Award for being the Public Figure Most Hopelessly Out of Their Depth may end up being shared.

They also propose subsidising the construction of 16,000 homes by giving £400 million of taxpayers’ money to property developers.

Oh, why not just round it up to a neat half billion? It's only money, after all, and of course you don't need to worry because it's not yours anyway. Listen, you morons, every bloody pound of subsidies - every penny the government spends, in fact - is a pound that must be taken off someone's disposable income either now or in the future. You're taking money away from people who might otherwise be able to put it towards the deposit for a house, d'you see? Or a car, or a meal out, or a newspaper or any number of things. They might even decide to stick it in the bank and save it if someone gives them an interest rate that can't be described as comical. Now tell me I'm wrong but if you want the housing market to pick up does it really make sense to take money away from people who need it to buy houses with? The very people that are currently worrying you because they're not buying houses because lenders aren't all that happy with the risks at the moment? Dave, Nick, please try to understand this: more disposable income + lower house prices = more houses being sold. Okay? And conversely less disposable income + higher house prices = ... want to take a guess? Do you see now, you pair of utter fucktroons?

And pardon me for asking, but what the hell does the government need the housing market to pick up for anyway? It was overpriced. It still is. It doesn't need 'unblocking' like it's a toilet that Gordon Clown and his badger faced sock puppet left bunged up after a particularly nasty dump - it needs the very correction you idiots are trying to forestall. Nobody disputes that the British economy needs reviving, but if there's a lesson to be learned from the last government, and Christ knows there's more than just one, surely it's that an economy that's running on a spending boom fuelled by a combination of cheap credit and appreciating house prices making people feel richer than they really are is not an economy that will run indefinitely before hitting trouble. Yet, Dave and Nick, this seems to be pretty much what you want to do.

In a further move, ministers are working on a scheme under which billions of pounds of money in pension funds will be used to finance the construction of power stations, wind turbines and roads.

What? WHAT? WHAT? Are you fucking serious? On top of everything else have you two started channelling Robert Maxwell or something?

Treasury sources said talks had been conducted with pension fund managers for months. They are hoping to attract managers to invest in infrastructure schemes because they provide a better rate of return than government bonds.

Oh, no shit? And the Cobbleition government, unlike its predecessors of all stripes, has suddenly got good at picking winners and reckons that the best investments around at the moment happen to be the things that it does and taxes people for because... uh, because there's rarely profit to be made in them.* Oh well, at least they're not talking about using Labour's idea of helping themselves to money in old accounts, even if that's probably just because they've already cleaned them out.

Look, Dave and Nick, the government already lighten the pockets of the British motorist to the tune of some £45-50 billion, in return for which about a fifth of that is spent on the roads, and now you want to fill in the few zillion potholes you've missed with the contents of their pension funds? Oh, and erect a few more bird mincing white elephants that are, to use Malcolm Tucker's phrase, as much use as a marzipan dildo, and so uneconomic that nobody in their right mind would build even one if not given someone else's money to offset the otherwise certain losses. And no, I'm not just saying that because Phil the Greek thinks so. Might I suggest that if you want more to be spent on road maintenance and other infrastructure (but not bird mincers) you stop spending money somewhere else? It's called living within your means, which is a concept that even plankton in the oceanic depths could probably wrap what passes for their heads around - in the depressingly likely event that you can't find anyone in Whitehall who understands go out and find a real person to explain it to you.

As for power stations, again I feel there is a lesson that should have been learned from the Labour years - just get out of the bloody way and let someone build the fucking things. Seriously, it's not like a power station doesn't produce something that people need and for which a ready market exists - Christ, even wind turbines have got that much going for them, they just can't produce it steadily and reliably - so there should be a return on building them providing the initial costs aren't prohibitive. That means not having interminable inquiries before graciously allowing someone to begin work on building something that people need, and then telling them to stop again because some middle class white kid with dreadlocks and a dream of erasing the memory of the silver (plated) spoon by not washing has found a pond, and look, there's like all tadpoles in it, dude. It means, as I mentioned, the government doing it's best just to get out of the fucking way.

Separately, Lord Heseltine, who advises the Government on growth, said MPs should waive through critically important infrastructure projects to get the economy moving.

It pains me to agree with a man who still wants Britain to sign up to the currency version of Heaven's Gate but that's kind of the thing I'm on about, though as an aside this isn't:

The former Cabinet minister said the Government could work with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, to agree on which major projects to push through.

Yes, very good, Michael, a government of literally all the twats. Wonderful. Nurse! He's out of bed again.

But really, why not? The Cobbleition really are as bad as Labour, and we all know Labour were pretty shocking. But I've lost count of the number of times I've ranted and raved and railed at some new piece of pettiness or authoritarianism or nannying or incompetence or lack of backbone (especially with regard to the EU) or just plain epic fuckwittery. I've lost count how often I've said that it's just like Labour never left office. I even began this rant with the observation that if this is what Dave and Nick want to do then Britain might as well give up and bring back Gordon Brown to finish the demolition job he started. And if all the main parties are bent on Britain's self destruction and disagree only on the speed at which it should happen, if the only long term hope is to rebuild from the ashes, then it's starting to look to me like the petrol and matches and matches may as well be given to the worst nutter of the lot.

The alternative, of course, is to get rid of the whole bloody lot of them and replace them with sane people, but for some reason this doesn't seem to have very broad appeal in the UK. I'm sure the millions attached firmly to the tax tit and the millions more brainwashed to believe that this is how it has to be haven't got anything to do with it.

'Kinell!

UPDATE - Trust The Daily Mash to get to the essence of it.

The prime minister said: "This package will help to reinflate the house price bubble and give mortgages to people who can't really afford them. Unless anyone has any better ideas?"

Wonderful caption on the picture, too: "If it's broke fix it with the thing that broke it."

I feel like Private Frasier.

UPADTE 2 - Also blogged superbly and without all the swearing over at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

* That often there's rarely profit to be made precisely because government is involved probably doesn't occur to them.

Flying looks about to get a whole lot... er, similar

2011-11-21T07:01:00.000+11:00

Great news! You can go on holiday and take liquids with you. Medicines, baby milk, drinks bought away from the airport at considerable less than ludicrous prices, all will soon be allowed through the ring-piece of steel at international airports in Australia, and no doubt other nations.

International travellers will no longer have water bottles, perfumes and other liquids confiscated as they board planes under a radical overhaul of airport security.

Radical overhaul. Sounds good, sounds like it could be what's been needed for a while now.

The easing of restrictions will begin next year as Australia's international airports begin rolling out new explosive detection equipment.

Ah. Now it just sounds like another machine to queue up for.

The shake-up, to be announced by the federal government today, also promises to cut waiting times for passengers by easing bottlenecks at security gates.

Er, but if we've got one more machine to queue up for how's that going to cut times?

The new technology, which has been trialled at Sydney airport, would enable authorities to detect the smallest trace of explosives in liquids.

Okay, and what happens if someone decides to take a pint of the stuff into the queue for the machine and detonate it before they get there? In the queue. You know, attacking the people in the fucking queue instead of screwing around with the impossible task of getting it on a plane. Well, sort of impossible.

January 7th 2011, undercover French journalists are reported to have smuggled a dismantled 9mm pistol through security at two French airports and were able to assemble the gun in the toilets on the plane.
February 21st 2011, in the US a female undercover TSA agent is reported to have carried a handgun through Dallas/Fort Worth airport body scanners in multiple tests by hiding it in her knickers.
[...]
June 13th 2011, it is reported that 30 staff at Honolulu International Airport are fired for not having screened luggage properly.

Still, long as somebody has got a nice big market for their feel good bomb sniffing machines and governments can carry on acting as if they're doing something, eh?

"It will make air travel easier and less stressful for passengers as well as free airport security staff to better focus on their core screening responsibilities without the distraction of having to confiscate items from people's bags," [Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese] said.
"While preventing acts of terrorism remains our number one priority, we're also determined to minimise the disruption and inconvenience experienced by passengers as they transit throughout major airports, including by deploying the latest technologies."

Sorry, Tony, but if you're really serious about that I still think you should be looking at how the Israelis do things. In the meantime one more bloody thing to queue up for having already queued for check-in, the X-ray, the metal detector and the bollock baking body scanner and/or professional groper does not tempt me back into flying anywhere except as a last resort.

You'd move house, wouldn't you?

2011-11-21T06:16:00.000+11:00

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That's you lot told

2011-11-20T01:17:00.000+11:00

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Wolfgang Schäuble said that, despite the current crisis in the eurozone, the euro will ultimately emerge as the common currency of the entire European Union. He said he “respects” Britain’s decision to keep the pound, but insisted that the survival and eventual stabilisation of the euro will convince non-members to join the currency club. “This may happen more quickly than some people in the British Isles currently believe,” he added.

The message to the UK is obvious - it's not your country anymore. But there is another way of reading it, another subtext below the one which really barely qualifies as subtext: we've nailed our colours to the Euro mast and its unravelling, and we're hoping like hell another big economy jumping on board will manage to keep it going and save our careers and/or reputations. I'm not sure that isn't a bit optimistic given Britain's level of debt and the fact that the Cobbleition government are really no less profligate with other people's money than their predecessors, but from here it seems like time is running out. The Euro car had a dodgy handbrake and was parked on a hill by a cliff, and now the bugger's rolling toward the edge and everyone who helped pay for the car is running like hell after it hoping to stop it in time. Getting a country with a good credit rating on board (though fuck knows why the UK still has a good rating) might buy them some more. Either that or when the car reaches the cliff Britain won't have an advantage over those that kept running after it right over the edge.

The alternative is pretty clear. Herr Schäuble must be told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off.