Good News from UK

Despite the overwhelming media support and love he inspired in the public...





Prime Minister Brown has gracefully decided to step down...



Don't let the door hit you on the way out, you commie prick!

Abuse of Power Summarized

There's so much in this article it's hard to know where to start, but it provides a wonderful capsule summary of how power is abused.

The resignation of the conservative Bishop of Augsburg – accused of thrashing orphans with a carpet beater – has given a powerful boost to reformers in the German Catholic Church who are trying to stop the mass desertion of believers

" I beg forgiveness from all those to whom I may have been unfair, from all those to whom I have caused anxiety, " the bishop said.

I can see how being walloped with a carpet beater might tend to make you anxious...

A special investigator and a Munich lawyer are now investigating the claims against him. He has also been accused of using church funds to buy artworks.

"The money was just Resting in my account!" - Father Ted.

Conservative clergy have been trying to maintain a strict boundary between church and state – and thus resist the meddling of state prosecutors in the abuse scandals.

For them church power still rests on its ability to keep its secrets and thus its authority over believers


Prosecutors are annoying like that, how they meddle in cases like theft, murder and buggery. Much better left to be swept under the rug. And as for secrecy... secrecy is power. Without the secrecy and rituals a priest is just a man wearing a frock after all.

Bishop Mixa was for many younger Catholics a symbol of what was wrong.

He seemed to enjoy high-level protection and certainly seemed free to make outspoken comments about society in and out of the pulpit



The religion business sure was good to him! Until now.

Times Are Tough

... even the religion business is suffering. Consider the "Ebenezer AME Church" (wonder if that's anything to do with AMC cinemas?)

The congregation, one of America's largest, has been scrambling to raise funds to save the arena-sized sanctuary from potential foreclosure

Have they appealed to the Holy Trinity for deliverance? Not exactly

it has enlisted national leaders, such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Harvard Law School's Charles Ogletree, who was President Barack Obama's law professor.

2 out of three ain't bad.

At times like these I'd advise the faithful at the Ebeneezer to turn to the book of Jereboth, in the appendix to the Apocrypha. For 'tis written:


There's a guy in the place
He's got a bittersweet face
And he goes by the name of Ebeneezer Goode
His friends call him Eezer and he is the main geezer
And he'll vibe about the place
Like no other man could
He's refined, sublime, he makes you feel fine
Though very much maligned and misunderstood
But if you know Eezer he's a real crowd pleaser
He's ever so good, he's Ebeneezer Goode
You can see that he's mysterious,
Mischievious and devious
As he circulates amongst the people in the place
But once you know he's fun
And something of a genius
He gives a grin that grows around
From face to face to face
Backwards and then forwards,
Forwards and then backwards
Eezer is the geezer who loves to muscle in
That's about the time the crowd
All shout the name of Eezer
As he's kotcheled in the corner,
Laughing by the bass bin

iPad Insanity

Here's the tale of a woman who's sitting in the street for 24 hours to be first in line to buy one of those new Apple iPads.

It's amazing to me how people suspend all reason when an Apple product is involved.

Eight hundred bucks gets you a single-tasking portable computer, so locked down you can't even change the damn battery, or install anything except Apple-authorized programs on it. Is this progress?

Steve Jobs' next product: the iTurd. One of Jobs' actual jobbies, sealed in a glass case, with a little Apple logo on it. $500 at your local retailer. Don't miss this unique chance to get hold of the Jobsian DNA!

Furlough

I've worked a lot with Government as a contractor. Anyone coming from the private sector cannot but be astonished at the culture in Government offices.

Because they get early retirement and decent pensions, unlike the rest of us, from the day they are hired, government workers have a single goal: to stay in post until they collect their pension. This means as long as they don't upset anybody they're sure of a well-funded retirement. The best way to avoid upsetting anybody is to never do anything. And that's what they do. As little as possible. Day after day. Month in and month out. Until retirement.

If you've come from a private company with customers who can take their business elsewhere, the atmosphere in government is a real shock. The pace of change isn't glacial, because glaciers do move. Imagine working in a place where nothing happens, year after year. Go back five years later and everything's the same (except a few more people will have joined the ranks of the long-term sick and are now doing nothing at home on full pay).

Former Chicago Fire Chief James Joyce had it right when he heard on his vehicle radio about the fire at 69 West Washington. "It's Friday afternoon in a government building - it's gonna be almost empty".

So it comes as no surprise that in bankrupt states like California they have started letting staff take Fridays as unpaid furlough days. So now staff are getting paid for doing nothing for 4 days a week instead of 5.

Why not just sack the lot of them and move them to the welfare rolls? They'd cost a lot less, while still sucking at the tit of the productive members of society.

Seen While Shopping

Here's a title to conjure with.



"Take one downed US Airman. Marinade in a pit full of pigshit for three weeks. Remove, bind to tree and gently poach in sun for 3 days. Behead and serve!"

Great New Announcement from Microsoft

Sharepoint 2010 is coming out

Strapline: "2010 times the Frustration! 2010 times the hassle!"

In summary:

* More Bugs

* More Bloated

* Even slower

* No backwards compatibility

* 90% of features now officially undocumented - huge new opportunities for bloggers to fill the gap

* Write a custom workflow action in C# in as little as 1,000,000 lines of code

* Minimum system requirement: the computers Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. Should be available around 2020

All you corporate guys, enjoy!

How dumb can you be and still get a job on a national newspaper?

As far as I can see, if it's the LA Times, the answer is pretty f***ing dumb!

The justices don't make *anything* a right.

Our rights as American Citizens come from God.

The US constitution lists what the government is allowed to do. (Unlike constitutions in places like the USSR and the EU where they list what the government allows people to do.)

The purpose of the justices is to interpret the constitution. I'm sure the justices realize that even if the LA Times doesn't. I'm a bloody immigrant and even I know it!

The most fundamental right of any human being is self-defense.

Corrupt tinpot dictators like Chicago's Mayor Daley are happy to subcontract their defense out to a team of heavily armed bully-boys provided round the clock at the taxpayers' expense.

As for the rest of us, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Despite this, Chicago, probably the most corrupt city in the US, has denied its citizens this basic right since 1982.

And now the justices are about to tell Daley to stuff his ban where the sun don't shine.

God Bless America.

Judicial Misconduct

It's not April 1st.
It's not "The Onion".

It's about a guy on Death Row.

But still...

Can you get a fair trial if the judge is/was sleeping with the prosecutor

Here are some quotes which are destined to be cited by legal clerks for decades

“I had a truck that everybody recognized,”
She was “was tired of laying over,” she said, and “getting licked without any input.”

And the conclusion?

Campaign spending may undermine the integrity of the judicial system. The same goes for a gag gift of confectionary genitalia. But a love affair between the judge and prosecutor in a death penalty case is, in Texas, at least, another matter.

How the fuck do you repair a lake?

A car ? I can see that
A TV ? If it's new and expensive enough
A washing machine ? Maybe

But a lake?

The caring sharing Obama administration is going to spend $2,200,000,000 of your and my money on Repairing the Great Lakes

It's a business

More from the NY Times in the section "Studies on the bloody obvious"

This one says 60% of Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students.

As news this has to rank with revelations like "17 year old boys like porn".

Of course education is a business. How did people think colleges paid for all the staff and buildings?

Everything's a business - some very lucrative

Showbusiness
The religion business
The criminal justice business
The politics business
The warfare business
The Security business
The intelligence business

etc. etc.

Scare People And Get Rich

- The Church started doing it 2,000 years ago

- The IT Industry did it with with Y2K

- The Military/Industrial Complex did it with its "Reds under the bed"

- Bush did it with the scary brown bearded folks in his "War On Terror"

- The Drug Companies did it with SARS and H1N1

- And the Climate Change Industry has been doing it for 20 years - setting up a carbon trading scheme to benefit the likes of Goldman Sachs, putting big "green" taxes on gasoline, to benefit the political class, etc., etc.

And like all the other scares you know it's a crock of shit when an article calling it out for what it is appears on the BBC of all places

Latest from the UK

From Maidstone in Kent an answer to the question: what do British schoolkids do all day? Well if they were in class they'd be learning peace studies in Urdu or all about climate change. That's why a good number of them prefer playing truant and hanging around shopping centres swigging cider, smoking and robbing passersby.

This lad, however, is more of a throwback to his forebears 100 years ago who at age 16 would likely be navigating a battleship or working down a mine.



Predictably there are howls of outrage all around the web from people who say he could have been killed. Well that's a matter for him isn't it? He's obviously got a lot of bottle - and in his case, unlike most of his classmates, it doesn't contain White Lightning

The American People Have Spoken

They said: We don't want a National Health Service



A typical British Hospital

Climategate

It's long been known that the best way to get money out of people is to scare them. Advertisers do it by making people feel they won't be "hip" without the latest sweater. More seriously, the Church has been doing it for 2,000 years. Bush did it with his 'axis of evil', and the climate change mafia have been doing it for the last 20 years.

When watching a politician on TV you may find it helpful to turn down the volume, and mentally add a subtitle "I am a lying corrupt scumbag, I loathe average working guys like you, but me and my cronies need your cash", and leave it there as a useful aide-memoire while he's talking.

Have you heard about "irregular verbs"? For example:

"I give off the record press briefings"
"You leak"
"He is being charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act"

Now thanks to the Times we have another one

"I misled the world"
"You did not tell the whole truth"
"He is a lying scumbag"

So it turns out that the Himalayan Glaciers are not going to melt after all because all the data was made up

Big surprise there to anybody not born yesterday!

Agents Provocateurs?

There's an excellent article over at Salon by Glenn Greenwald. It's about some flunky of Obama's with a plan for the U.S. Government (i.e. taxpayer) to employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government.

This is nothing new in the UK. The overwhelming majority in the UK want to pull out of the European Union, which has destroyed millions of jobs and indeed entire industries, such as fishing, while swamping what little business remains with red tape. If they don't in fact want to pull out, most people in the UK would prefer the EU to be what it was originally sold as - a common trading bloc - and not the de facto government of the country, which is what it has become.

But the three leading political parties are all pro-EU. The one party which represents the majority view of the British people - the UK Independence Party - is constantly defeated at the polls. One reason of course is that the UK establishment is firmly behind the three main parties (which are so similar you can barely tell them apart) so they always get plenty of airtime on the media. And the other reason is that UKIP has never been able to stop internal fighting and get its act together. Many people, including me, believe that UKIP was set up deliberately to be useless and to soak up the resources of the Anti-EU crowd, in the same way that an intelligence service will often offer one of its own to a rival agency as a "defector", when in fact the aim is to confuse the enemy and waste his time with false and misleading reports.

Don't forget that the UK has been around a long time. Although the British Secret Service started officially in 1909, in practice the establishment has been up to its neck in the "great game" for at least 500 years.

Back over on this side of the pond, in recent memory the CIA actually owned various publishing houses for propaganda purposes - not a conspiracy theory but a demonstrable matter of fact.

So don't think this is new --- and don't believe everything you read in chat rooms!

They Never Learn

You couldn't make it up. Obama's expression says it all.

When are they going to stop this lunacy? Or bomb somewhere that really deserves it like France?

Next up:

US Moves Border 100 miles North in surprise overnight move - Obama welcomes 33,000,000 new Americans

Nice

Here's an excellent vehicle they use for fighting fires in the Mont Blanc tunnel. Since they had to start hiring women firefighters they were finding the amount of time it took them to do a 3-point turn and get the vehicle pointing the right way resulted in an unacceptable number of casualties. They therefore came up with this!

As long as the firefighters remember to get in the correct end, they can be speeding to the rescue in seconds!

If the same engineering was applied to the Honda CRV, Chrysler Town & Country, etc., imagine the time it would save in your local Target parking lot.

Surely some mistake?

I think it's only one cop, but I could see how you could make that mistake

New Green Fuel

So in the UK with all the "climate change" legislation, fuel is set to become more and more expensive as higher and higher taxes are levied to discourage its use.

This doesn't affect members of the laughable government as they sit in their cosy warm offices and in the backs of their limos and private jets.

In the real world, however, the UK is having the coldest winter in years. Not that you'd know from looking at the UK Meteorological Office weather forecast - in the UK, even the weather is politicised!

In fact it's so bad that old people are having to burn books to stay warm

This might be no bad thing. You could order a bunch of books from Amazon and keep warm all winter - it'd be cheaper than all that imported Russian Gas!

May I suggest starting with this one?

Nigerian car thief targets Woody Allen

This story is a wonderful encapsulation of modern Britain where the law-abiding are ripped off and completely failed by an institutionally socialist state.

Modern cars are exceptionally difficult to steal due to the electronic immobilisers they use. There are, therefore, two options for a determined thief in the UK with a pressing drug habit who is running low on cash. Both involve getting hold of the car keys.

First option: What do a lot of people do when they come home? Drop the house and car keys on the hall table. British homes have letterboxes in the front door where mail is placed. The enterprising thieves use a hook at the end of a pole to reach through the letter box and hook the keys from the table. I included the link to the Police website because this sort of thing sounds like an urban myth.

In the case of an elderly homeowner or a very fit burglar the second option is a more direct approach, where the victim is robbed and murdered in-home and the keys taken (in the UK a 'life' sentence for murder is about seven years)

And in the event that the homeowner resists, the trusty shield of British justice is there to jail the homeowner for defending his property

Famous filmmaker Woody Allen has a thing for the UK. He's a smart businessman, so my guess is he likes the fact that the actors and crew he hires there are desperate for the work. And some of the locations can be made to look nice on film if the bums are cleared away and the trash swept up first, and the actors filmed under bright lights to make it look like the sun's shining.

He's paying about $17,000 a week for an upscale home while filming. Next door is a bunch of squatters - people who break into unoccupied homes to live for free. Recently they spotted a guy who sounds like a Nigerian illegal immigrant trying the bamboo pole hook on Woody's house.

So this story has everything
- A state which can't keep out foreign criminals
- People living in an upscale house for free
- Even paying $17,000 a week doesn't get you a home free from the anarchy
- And a justice system which enables the above

Sherlock Holmes Movie Report

Most movies today are aimed at mentally challenged, deaf, 14 year old boys. Today's directors like Michael Bay lower one's expectations to such a degree that you're relieved when a film turns out not to be completely unwatchable. Such was the case with "Mockney" Guy Ritchie's new film Sherlock Holmes (or since the whole thing was a set up for a franchise should that be "Sherlock Holmes 1")

Naturally as a Brit I can't watch anything Sherlock Holmes without comparing it to the definitive portrayal of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce:



I re-watched "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1939) last night and I have to say that as far as mood, atmosphere and the ability to understand what the actors are saying is concerned, it's better than Ritchie's effort.

Having said that, I think Ritchie did a good job. The studios need everything aimed at 14 year old deaf retarded kids of course, and he kept that in mind, with some martial arts and some explosions. But he also threw in some stuff for us old farts to enjoy as well.

The special effects were outstanding, especially the way they included Tower Bridge when it was still under construction.




Less impressive was how they had the heroes running around in the cellars under the Palace of Westminster and yet emerge at said Tower Bridge, three miles away.

The Thames was also not known for its shipbuilding industry! And the river is too shallow for a large boat to sink and completely disappear.

Well, at the moment it is, anyway...