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!