A bit OTT

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Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper just to run them over? I ask only in the spirit of inquiry and not because Lord Ahmed (and dangerous?) spent time in jail a couple of years back for fatally injuring someone on the motorway.

Lord Ahmed firmly denied offering a bounty, but said he had told the meeting that Mr Bush and former-Labour prime minister Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes.
Speaking from Pakistan to the Press Association he challenged the Labour Party to provide evidence for the suspension.
He said: “They have suspended me? That’s a surprise to me. I did not know.
“I never said those words. I did not offer a bounty. I said that there have been war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and those people who have got strong allegations against them – George W Bush and Tony Blair – have been involved in illegal wars and should be brought to justice.”

Yeah, whatever, Ahmed. Even if you’re innocent, and even though I have little love for Bush and even less for Blair, it won’t make me think any better of you – you’ll always be an arsehole in my eyes.

Free speech and the fabulously rich and famous

It’s that time of year again. No, not Mother’s Day (or it it Mothers’ Day, I’ve never been sure if it was for mothers in general or just one), which down here is in actually in the middle of May anyway. No, I’m talking about the beginning of the Formula One season, which means over the past several weeks Melbourne’s Albert Park has gradually been closed to local residents, the poor bastards whose local taxes I imagine help pay for the park they use and who are tapped a second time along with everyone else in the state because of the government subsidising it to the tune of $50 million or so, and is by now humming and thrumming to the sound of highly tuned engines hurtling around the park’s main road. It’s the time of year when fans of motor racing, like me, are derisively called revheads by all the people who hate the race and/or the sport, even though I’m sure I’m not the only motorsports fan who objects to both the government subsidy and the use of a public park for the event.

I’m not going to blog about that because I’ve done so more than once before, such as here and here and here and here, and if you follow those links you’ll see that I don’t particularly care if it’s a sport I happen to like. If it needs subsidising by government, which ipso facto means forcing people who have no interest in it to contribute money as well, then either it’s not worth having at all or someone’s getting rich of off it. I’ve long felt that sports promotion of any kind should not be a function of government, especially given that picking winners in any industry is something they tend to be pretty bad at, and the fact that so many of them spunk away huge sums of money doing so anyway is just another reason to distrust and despise governments of all stripes. I haven’t changed my mind and I’m not going over the same ground again today.

Instead I want to say that another effect of the Formula One circus being in town is that F1 personalities seem to get a lot more press and attention around this time of year, including the little big man himself, Bernie Ecclestone. One bit of extra attention he, or in actual fact his daughter, has received has come from Labor federal MP Kelvin Thomson, who represents the seat of Wills just a bit north of central Melbourne, and who spoke in Parliament a couple of days ago on the subject of the Grand Prix’s cost and the Tamara Ecclestone reality TV show, saying:

One thing I am absolutely sure of: there are better ways to spend $50 million, year in and year out, than bankrolling Bernie’s billionaire bogan.

There’s a great deal that Kelvin Thomson said in that speech that I don’t agree with. As you’d expect of a left wing politician his thoughts were occupied on what Victoria’s government could spend that $50 million a year on – schoolsanospitals were a given, natch, as well as ‘undergrounding’ power cables (is ‘underground’ even a verb, and if so is it a better one to use than ‘bury’?) to reduce bushfire risks* – and never once did he mention the opportunity to end the compulsory tapping of every Victorian for about twenty bucks each to pay for it. Never once did he mention the possibility of simply telling Bernie that the Grand Prix must pay for itself and that incidentally, Parks Victoria is going to start charging rent just like the owners of any other venue do when someone wants to use it for an event. I assure you, in the highly unlikely event he wanted to hold the race in my back yard I’d charge him for it even though I’d be thrilled at the prospect, and I can’t see why so many governments can’t grasp this simple concept of being paid for providing the venue. Instead there’s the inexplicable queue to fellate him with mouthfuls of money, mostly taken from taxpayers. Kelvin Thomson does not seem to me to be particularly against the principle of fellatio with mouthfuls of taxpayers’ money but just objects to doing it for certain people and things, so naturally I’m going to disagree with most of what he says because he’s clearly just another politician who forgets whose bloody money it really is.

However, having not seen the reality TV show about Tamara Ecclestone, and feeling like I’d rather blind myself with an oily con rod than seek it out, I’m in no place to disagree with Thomson about her being a bogan, though naturally protective and unnaturally diminutive daddy did. Once someone explained to him what ‘bogan’ means.

Mr Ecclestone said federal Labor MP Kelvin Thomson’s comments had been “stupid” although he questioned what he had meant by ‘bogan’.

“I didn’t know what that means, does he speak English?” he asked on radio station 3AW.

Informed that being called a bogan implied his big-spending eldest daughter Tamara had no class, Mr Ecclestone suggested the insult was more suited to Mr Thomson.

Okay, well let’s look into that in a bit more depth than ‘takes one to know one’. First let’s get the dictionary definition from Macquarie (no link, subscription only).

bogan
/’boʊgən/ (say ‘bohguhn)
noun Colloquial (mildly derogatory) 1. a person, generally from an outer suburb of a city or town and from a lower socio-economic background, viewed as uncultured. Compare barry2, bennie, boonie, Charlene, Charmaine, cogger, feral1 (def. 9); Especially Qld bevan (def. 2); Chiefly Qld bev-chick; WA bog3; ACT booner; ACT charnie bum; Tasmania chigger2; Riverina gullie; Melbourne Region mocca; Victoria scozzer; Chiefly NSW westie.
2. a stupid person. Also, bogon. [origin unknown; ? from BOGAN]
–boganism, noun

On the one hand we have someone who’s been variously a lawyer, public servant and politician, and who favours the kind of politics that talk about robbi, sorry, taxing the rich to pay for nice things for the poor, but invariably ends up meaning taxing rich and poor alike, or would if some of those inconsiderate rich people didn’t keep buggering off with their money to lower tax regimes. I can think of many unpleasant and abusive things to call him, but ‘bogan’ isn’t one of them. And on the other hand we have a woman who, if Thomson and The Age are to be believed, has a home with an elevator for her Ferrari, motorised shoe racks, a bowling alley with crystal studded bowling balls, its own nightclub, a $1 million crystal bathtub, and wardrobes for her dogs… whose hair and nails are done regularly at Harrods… like you do. Whether all that’s sufficiently class free to be called bogan is probably up for debate, but I’d suggest there’s one thing about her that certainly qualifies, possibly to the point of überbogan-ness.

She’s got her own fucking reality TV series!

However, all that’s still a matter of opinion, and if Bernie Ecclestone disagrees that’s fair enough – he wouldn’t be much of a father if he didn’t speak up to defend his daughter. But I don’t think that defence extends to wanting someone sacked for voicing the opinion that she has less class than a derelict comprehensive.

“Who was the half-wit who said these things … he should be fired because he’s a bit of an idiot, he obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking [about].”

Oh, he may well be an idiot and he wouldn’t be the first politician not to know what he’s talking about, but he shouldn’t be sacked for several good reasons. For one, it was said in Parliament as part of a debate on state funding of the Grand Prix, and by extension Bernie Ecclestone and his family. It might not have been high quality debating but in parliament a politician should be free to make his arguments however he or she wants to. For another, even if he’d said it to some news crew in the street outside he’s as entitled to his opinion as anyone else. He gets to call Tamara Ecclestone a bogan and even label her old man a subsidy sucking goblin if he wants, which wouldn’t be OTT for a country with a proud history of political insult throwing (my favourite is ‘a shiver looking for a spine’ although I can’t remember who said it or to whom). And in return Bernie gets to call him an idiot if he thinks that’s a better idea than refuting it and justifying why taxpayers, few of whom attend the race, are made to throw 50 million bucks at him every year. For a third, how long he stays in his job is, at least in theory, entirely up to the people living in those Melbourne suburbs that make up his constituency. It’s a very safe Labor seat so in practice it’s also down to the Australian Labor Party, but for damned sure it’s not down to the whims of Bernie Ecclestone, who incidentally seems confused about what kind of political systems allow or encourage free speech.

“You’re not a communist state there are you?” he queried.

No, see, Bernie, in a communist state you’re not supposed to say unpleasant things about the wealthy and powerful because they might demand, and get, retribution in the form of getting you fired or assigned to some shitty work, or even charged with some bullshit offences in the most obscenely illiberal places – Bexley, for example. Which seems to be kind of what you want when you say that Kelvin Thomson should be fired. In Australia and Victoria, while currently leaning left of centre and while also technically lacking what I’d call real freedom of speech, this generally will not happen.

You can ask the locals all about it this time next month when you’re in Shanghai.

* I understand burying power cables is expensive and comes with its own issues relating to losses and insulation. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise – if it was easy to bury high voltage transmission lines they’d be doing it more already. When it becomes the better choice, perhaps through some breakthrough in superconductors or something, then you can expect they will, though I imagine that maintaining a buried cable will always be more work than a suspended one. In any event, I’ll always hate hearing it called ‘undergrounding’.

A follow up

Fake captain ranty has just commented again pretending to be Pat Nurse.

So having made it clear in the updated comments policy that I’ll consider such comments as legitimate targets I’ve altered it to read like he’s wearing a ball gag.

Future comments will be be treated similarly if I have time and inclination to entertain myself by editing it to make it sound like he enjoys sex with musical instruments or something and deleted if I haven’t. Mostly they’ll be deleted for the foreseeable future. Life’s too short, me old fuckpot. Get your own blog and slag off Ranty, Pat, Leg-iron and whoever else you feel has pissed on your chips. I’m all for that. Better yet, stop slagging them off long enough to form arguments explaining why they’re wrong. But just stop fighting on other people’s lawns. Every time I find it here I will delete or bastardise the comment.

And to both my real readers, since moving I have occasionally been lazy about signing in to comment on other people’s blogs. Well, partly lazy and partly because I’m struggling to sign in reliably with this WP login using OpenID which seems only to work when it feels like it. So I’ve been filling in my name and URL in much the same way as “captan ranty”/”pat nurse” appears to have been doing. Having called him out on it I expect similar treatment so this habit will stop right now. To those using Blogger, if I can’t sign in with WP then I will sign in with my still working Blogger ID and put up with the fact that it points to my old place instead of here. To those using WP I will only comment when logged into WP. If in doubt about whether a comment is mine or not you’re welcome to check, though I’ll add that the next 2-3 weeks (more if I’m lucky) are going to be really fucking busy for me so I don’t anticipate doing much blogging and probably little if any commenting. I’m just not going to have the time.

Dear “captain ranty”…

Let me be very clear that that’s not – repeat not - Captain Ranty the libertarian and lawful rebellion advocate, but “captain ranty”, someone who seems to have got his cock in a knot with the true occupant of Ranty Barracks for some reason I’m not remotely interested in finding out about and to such an extent that he’s using his ever diminishing time on this planet to leave comments in the Captain’s name and with a copied gravatar with people on the CR’s blogroll:

Thanks for your contributions to my blog in the past, i have decided i do not want any more of your comments as they are not in the style and have the content i require in order to advance “lawful rebellion” in a new direction.

thanks again.

captain ranty

Presumably the hope is that the recipients of these comments will get the hump with the Captain and remove him from their blogrolls, although I have to say that if so then it’s an overly optimistic hope given the piss poor impersonation. There were a few things that shouted ‘impostor alert’ and one in particular made it certain, but even before looking at those there’s the fact that species as yet undiscovered on the bottom of the oceans can probably manage a better Ranty impersonation.

Anyway, I digress. I just wanted to make it absolutely crystal clear that this post is to “captain ranty” rather than Captain Ranty.

 

Dear “captain ranty”

I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what your beef is with Captain Ranty, and I honestly don’t give a remote fuck about it. I do care that rather than debate whatever it is with the Captain at his blog or your own you’ve taken your row to other people’s. While I can’t speak for anyone else it’s not welcome here.

Why? Well, let me put it like this. Imagine this isn’t the internet but the real world. Now imagine that I came and stood outside your home with a loudhailer yelling all the reasons I think that Andrew Demetriou is a dickhead, or even yelling that I am Andrew Demetriou and I don’t ever want to see you anywhere near me or anything to do with me ever again. Probably you’ll be wondering who the hell Andrew Demetriou is but almost certainly you’ll be wishing the tool with the loudhailer at your gate would go away and tell it to someone who cares because nobody appreciates someone else’s fight taking place on their lawn.

That, buddy, is what you’re doing. You’ve come here claiming that you’re someone else and asking me not to contribute to their blog. If you want to use me to get at someone for you at least have the fucking courtesy to offer to pay me for it. I’d turn you down flat but I’d have a little respect for you. Not as much respect as I’d have if you just blogged why you think the Captain is wrong about whatever the fuck it is you’re at war with him over, but a little. Not knowing what what arcane aspect of lawful rebellion is involved I may or may not agree, though I’d be lying if I said that doing what you’re doing doesn’t prejudice me against you because you seem to prefer it to making a convincing argument. But far more likely I still wouldn’t know about it because, at the risk of repeating myself, I’m not fucking interested.

So, paraphrasing Mr Wolf, pretty please with sugar on top… just fuck off.

Unkind disregards,

The Angry Exile.

 
Not what I would prefer to be blogging on a Saturday afternoon, but necessary. As a result of this the comments policy has now been updated. The class of comments I will remove as soon as I’m aware of them is now as follows:

• Spam, whether porn or otherwise
• Anything blatantly libellous and which some fuckwitted legal system somewhere will hold me responsible for even though someone else actually said it
• Impersonators of other bloggers/commenters attempting a bit of social engineering

P.S. I won’t delete “captain ranty’s” comment on the last post as it was made before this addition to the comments policy, but I will tinker with it a bit. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

P.P.S. Or maybe I won’t seeing as I’ve just noticed that on top of everything else the knobber’s misspelled the word ‘captain’ in the name. I’m not sure I should fuck with it when I can’t improve on the original.

P.P.P.S So much for me thinking that it’s a falling out over some fine detail of lawful rebellion. From one of the Captain’s tweets it seems he’s just another wowser.

@Sir_Olly_C He is just another anti-smoking ringpiece. They are incapable of anything remotely clever. Sorry for the disruption.

— Captain Ranty (@CaptainRanty) March 2, 2012

Let’s all just savour this one

Not much needed in the way of comment, really.

So now Cameramong and Cleggie need to sort out a replacement Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, which sounds like a matter of urgency since it seems like for the fourth or fifth winter in a row the UK is again covered with a thick layer of crisp, white global warming. I don’t suppose there’s much chance of the two being split, or better yet the Warble Gloaming bit of the ministry dumped with the work it does (yeah, I know) being pushed over to the Department for the Environment, Tesco and The Archers, but we can hope.

Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on your way out, Chris. And be safe driving home with all that snow on the roads.

Chutzpah overload

David Cameron, not so much a gift that keeps on giving as a hypocrite who keeps on talking.

David Cameron has attacked the “madness” of European regulations and taxes in a speech to global business leaders in Davos, Switzerland. The Prime Minister said Europe is still at a “perilous time” because of its debts and must stop throttling growth with excessive bureaucracy.

Ahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

He said European leaders must stop destroying jobs and growth by “tinkering” with regulations and “hoping we’ll drift to a solution”.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.Oohooo.

He said: “In the name of social protection, the EU has promoted unnecessary measures that impose burdens on businesses and governments, and can destroy jobs.”

Come on, Davey boy, this is pots and kettles meeting motes and beams and settling down to raise a nice little family of über-hypocrisy. You’ve got a national debt that has grown so mindfuckingly huge even by conservative estimates that wrapping your head round it is only possible by means of weird thought experiments, you’ve got huge numbers on the rock and roll because they don’t have skills and their labour is worth less than the six quid an hour – as someone at Davos has kindly pointed out – you’ve got heaps of rules, laws and regulations, more than a few originating in the EU and gold plated by Whitehall to a standard of stupidity not actually demanded by Europe in the first place, all making life for small businesses just that bit more difficult when compared to their large competitors who can more easily hire an extra body or two to deal with red tape… and all that’s before we get to taxation and the 50% income tax rate that probably isn’t putting anything extra into the kitty and looks like it’s being kept for political reasons, import duties that are keeping manufacturing jobs abroad, and a shitty rate of 20% for VAT. Oh, and contrary to popular belief the Cobbleition hasn’t cut a single penny of expenditure and is in fact going through money even faster than Gordon Brown’s government.

Now, we all know that much of this is how it is because that’s what the Cobbleition inherited from Labour, so I’m not having a go at them for causing it. I’m not even having a go at them for failing to fix it, or not as such. I’m having a go because, as I’ve said numerous times, they’re doing much the same bloody things as Labour did and that there really doesn’t seem to be a fucking Rizla paper between them. Yes, they’ve planned to spend a little less than Labour had planned to spend, but when you’re two to four trillion in the hole and the economy’s in the shitter then something has to give, so I think it’s pretty likely that Labour would have scaled back those spending plans in the unlikely event they’d won. Other than that the government is basically pro-EU while talking tough on Europe, pro-tax and redistribution, pro-regulation and state control (though against regulation and control of the state, of course), pro-nannying and paternalism, and against letting people get on with their lives. Oh, and by their inaction I assume they’re anti-undoing even the most egregious legislation of the previous governments (Great Repeal Bill? Where’d it go?). Different on some specifics but broadly much the same breed of authoritarian cock sockets, and here we have the authoritarian cock socket-in-chief ripping into his counterparts for doing more or less what he’s either doing off his own back or carrying on from the Brown days through not having any better ideas.

I couldn’t stand Gordon Brown and still hold him in great contempt, but I really am coming to loath David Cameron with a passion.

That didn’t take long

Back at the blog for only a couple of days and already someone has destroyed another cognitive dissonance meter.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, [Permanent Secretary for Tax at HMRC] Dave Hartnett says that householders have a duty to ensure that other people do not evade paying their share of tax.
Paying a builder or cleaner in cash, allowing them to evade VAT or income tax, will result in even deeper government cuts to public services, he says. People who contribute to the cash economy cannot then complain about austerity measures, he adds.
“Tax provides the funding to run the country: hospitals, schools and everything else,” he says. “Every time someone pays cash in order not to pay VAT, the nation gets diddled.”

Oh, is that so, Dave? Well, do tell us how you’d describe the state’s regular spunking away of billions of pounds on unnecessary shit, necessary shit that’s overpriced and doesn’t work properly, quangos, clampdowns on victimless crimes, subs for EU membership and more recently the use of taxpayers’ money to prop up private companies which through their own mistakes should naturally have gone to the wall. Plus the interest payments needed because all that on top of the cost of actual public services comes to rather more money than you can raise through tax anyway.

And while you’re scratching for an apt description – you could use ‘diddled’ again though I’d suggest ‘fucking ripped off’ – you might also tell us how you’d describe coercively taking half of what people earn, much of it before they’ve even get their own hands on it in the case of those on PAYE and under threat of violence for those doing returns, with no better justification than a vague assertion that you’ll be handing it over – minus that needed for your ≈£160K salary and £1.7M pension that you’ll be retiring several years early to enjoy, natch – to people who at best have vague good intentions to spend it in ways that benefit those from whom it was forcefully taken. ‘A sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces’ is one oft repeated description, though I don’t see what’s wrong with something like ‘legalised theft’. No doubt you’d call that ‘duty’ (badoom tish!) as well, eh, Dave?

Prick.

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

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.

Then they came for the drinkers… redux

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.

It’s not wrong if lefties doing it – UPDATED

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.

Hell hath no fury like a public sector union ridiculed

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.

Where’s this money coming from?

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 governmental 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.

Come back, Gordon Brown… UPDATED

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.

All I’ll want for Christmas…

… is a new cognitive dissonance meter. After replacing the one destroyed by Deborah Arnott earlier this year my shiny new one has just exploded after reading Quiet_Man’s most recent post over at the Orphanage.

In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black Labour have accused the government of intending to borrow more than they originally intended. This would be the same Labour party behind the tax and spend initiatives which have pretty much left the country bankrupt and needing to borrow in the first place.

BBC.

The government could borrow over £100bn more than it planned to up to 2015, according to Labour.
The party compared Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts from November 2010 with the latest estimates.
Labour said it showed the government’s plans were “reckless” but Economic Secretary to the Treasury David Gauke said the claims were “nonsense”.
Meanwhile, Labour leader Ed Miliband will later urge ministers to change course away from economic austerity.

So we have a case for Labour accusing the government of borrowing more and the leader of the Labour Party calling for an end to austerity economics, which I suspect would mean the government borrowing more. Clearly a case of open mouth, insert foot, after all if I can see it, what are real economists going to think?

Yep, if anyone’s going to display meter wrecking cocknitive dissonance it’s going to be politicians, and Labour are the league champions at it. I suppose it’s my own fault for buying a cheap one. While I go look for a replacement do pop over to the Orphanage and read the rest of Quiet_Man’s post if you haven’t already.

The best weapon against smokophobic nannies

Good quality piss taking, as ably demonstrated by The Daily Mash in response to the anti smoking mob again trotting out the tired and demonstrably ridiculous line about smoking in cars (see Velvet Glove, Iron Fist).

JAGUARS are not the only cars with fully opening windows, doctors have been told.

As the British Medical Association called for a ban on smoking in cars, experts said the windows on cars like the 1998 Ford Focus or some grubby little Astra went right the way down into the door.

Dr Bill McKay, a GP from Peterborough, said: “Are you absolutely sure? Well, I’m afraid that if poor people’s cars can do the same things as our cars then we are going to need more money.”

[...]

Smoker, Tom Logan, said: “I don’t have kids and in the interests of my health I don’t allow kids in my car.

“And if an adult is sitting in the passenger seat when I light up they can either open the window – because my car is one of the ones that does that – or they can get the fucking bus.

“Because it’s my car. D’you see?”

Gold. Do go and read the whole thing.