Harman vs Whores

Harriet wants to kill a prostitute directory! Oh noes!

Punternet has been going around for ages, when I first started out in IT I had it shown to me for the sake of some giggles. It is essentially a list of 'massage' parlours - always good, and sometimes surprising, to see where the whorehouses are - along with some 'independents.'

Now Harriet thinks this is 'degrading.' Look at some of the rates, I wouldn't call it degrading more than bloody expensive. If these girls can make a living charging men £150 a hour for a shag, then fair play to them - wish I could make a living screwing women for that rate. Certainly make me feel less dirty than some of the IT jobs I've had to do...

I'm also interested in why Punternet has been singled out, it's a bit of an amateur affair when compared to the likes of Adultwork, which is far more slick and has plenty of wank material. If I'm ever going to spend the better part of a days wages on getting laid, it's there I'm going to go and select a tom from there. Want an 18 year old who'll take it up the chuff? You can probably find one. Oriental? Indian? Or a transsexual? All on offer. Perhaps Harriet has shares in AW and wants rid of the competition?

As ever, when it comes to idiot New Labour ideas, the point is missed by some distance. Why are some of these girls on the game? I have no doubt some are victims of people traffickers, bad partners or drug addiction, and those are what needs tackling, not the prositution industry itself.

Legalize and regulate the industry, chase out the dodgy characters and crime lords, let the girls do it for themselves.

Oh, and as equality minister, shouldn't be equally as acerbic over sites for rent boys?

Rape-Rape; Hollywood's Defence Of Polanksi Gets More Surreal By The Day

Whoopi Goldberg, "it wasn't rape-rape!"

South Park couldn't make this up! There's rape and now rape-rape, great, can we have a list of who and were we can forcibly have sex with? I mean, really, this is worse than some scotum-faced, senile old fuck in fancy dress - also called A Judge - proclaiming "she asked for it!"

The whole thing is like watching some retard game of morally ambiguous Twister. He drugged up a 13 year old girl, fucked her in the jacuzzi, and then fucked her up the ass. Other than the 'drugged up 13 year old' bit, sounds rather good, bit of a fun night really, but that 'drugged up 13 year old' bit just won't go away will it? Really ruins the whole 'fun' bit.

There's also the double standards at play, Who else do we know who is famous and fucked 13 year olds? Bill Wyman famously boned Mandy Smith back when she didn't even need to shave down there. Gary Glitter, who took a couple of 13 year old Vietnamese girls to bed with him.

Out of the three, only one is an international pariah who got sent down and had their career nuked from orbit. It's okay to drug up, shag and sodomize a schoolgirl if you're a big shot director, you can nail a schoolgirl if you're a Rolling Stone, however if you're a deeply unpleasant Glam rocker in a wig and a fetish for Bacofoil outfits, get ready to be somebodies bitch in a jail cell when you shell out for an underage threesome.

What kind of message is that getting across? Be nice and popular and have all the fresh underage pussy you like?

At least we're getting to see just how liberal Hollywood is when it coems to defining rape and equality, an arse-showing of epic proportions. But don;t worry about showing your arse Whoopi, you're a bit old for Roman to want to stick his willy in.

Edit: Thanks to Costello for pointing out it was Mandy Smith, not Mandy Rice-Davies that Bill Wyman was boning!

Brown, Teenage Mothers And A Huge Fucking Shark Jumping Moment

From Browns speech:

And I do think it's time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.
From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes.
These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That's better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run.

My flabber is gasted. He's planning a network of urban borstal baby farms? What the fuck? Has he completely lost it? This really is lowest common denominator politics - you've had a baby? Under 18? Come with us miss, we'll look after you... Creepy. As. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, something needs doing about girls who see dropping sprogs as a way out of their homes, but this? This is beyond boilerplate we-fucked-up-society-so-to-fix-it-we'll-fuck-it-up-more New Labour antics, into the hinterlands of outright madness.

For starters, the only reason they look at having kids as a way of progressing as a person is the lack of opportunities, lack of self-respect, lack of hope, lack of ambition, lack of quality education that are the hallmarks of a society branded by New Labours policies. Now, personally, I'd start there, but that may just mean the one-eyed idiot and cretinous colleagues would need to take a long hard look at themselves, their policies and the real life results of their social meddling, profligate spending and attitude of spin over substance. Basically they'd have to admit that they Fucked Up Badly, they haven't managed to do that in 12 years, so I'm not holding much hope for that occurring before they're thankfully shown the door.

Then we have logistics. There are an awful lot of these babymothers, and this network of urban borstal baby farms (UBBF for short?) is going to need to place them somewhere. Social housing, and the like, you know what Labour have consistently failed to build for 12 years. Now, I can guess where they're going to put them - awful lot of Buy To Let apartments empty in city centres, however not all are what you'd call quality. Ask RenterGirl. Nevertheless I see some Compulsory Purchase Orders bringing them into the local Councils ownership, or handed over to a private sector housing company, and then lots of teenage girls getting shipped in.

I have mentioned in the past that these cheaply built monuments to the concept of caveat emptor, will end up being the hellhole tenements of the 70's, and lo and behold Labour seem to have all the cards to accelerate that process just nicely. Towers of frightened, screaming, catty teenagers, bringing up screaming babies in flats where the walls are thinner than Victoria Beckham. What could possibly go wrong? Anyone want to guess which way the suicide stats would trend?

Low quality housing, crappy management, teenage girls, social workers and screaming babies. The whole mix screams tragedy.

I hear people talk about the Evil Tories, but really, when Labour are coming up with policies like this, the true evil lurks in the heart of fuckers like Gordon Brown - too prideful to accept that they can err, so they destroy lives rather than admit their faults. Sickening.

Edit: Guido notes this actually filched from the BNP and calls it 'Gulags for Slags', and Charlotte Gore notes it's a return to the poorhouse.

If I Had Any Doubts The EDL Were Anything But Hooligans...

They are now thoroughly dispelled.

Now, there's a saying - don't blame the messenger, which means you don't condemn the messenger for the message they have carried. The converse of that is don't praise the messenger when you approve of the message. There are a lot of people in blogland who are trying to defend the EDL on the basis they like what they say about stopping militant Islam. What's not to like about that message? The messenger on the other hand...

We already know they consist of football 'firms' and 'casuals', and these are people who get their jollies from agreeing to meet up on match days and start a fight. We're not dealing terribly enlightened folk here.

Now one of these local firms, the FYC, have joined the EDL. Now way before Panorama and the rest of the press thought they'd use Oldham as an example of the Evils Of Drink, back before we had reports of knife fights at the bottom of Yorkshire Street, we had the FYC occasionally smashing the place up. Funny how when the place was busier, had more drunks and a whole load more violence the BBC and the rest of the MSM cretins were nowhere to be seen.

They pretty much hate anything 'different' and regard it as something that needs to be hit. There are some real nasty bastards in there, people I would not want to get on the wrong side of, but by dint of who I am, already are.

They take delight in organizing fights, and getting dragged off the police - they're 'representing the town.' If blogland wants to defend these messengers on the basis of the message, well it's going to get fleas.

I know a couple of members, I know their views and opinions, and they are not of people who intend to peacefully demonstrate, they're the people who want to "kick the fucking pakis in."

I actually understand that view. The local Asians tend to pack together, whereas whites have all their little separate cliques and gangs, the Asians will put aside anything like that to form a united front. It's frightening. It's like a scene from fucking Zulu, and it calls to a deeply tribal part of the human brain which redefines them from neighbour to enemy. It's why there's so much animosity towards the Asian communities.

Seeing a single woman, whose had a car accident with a taxi, suddenly surrounded by another 10 or so taxis, and the drivers acting very domineering and threatening, and all Asian, is the sort of thing that entrenches a certain view.

Getting attack by an Asian at school, and any response meaning you're suddenly surrounded by 30 of their mates, is going to make feel a certain way about them.

Having a knife placed to your throat and informed to leave the area is unlikely to make you feel very multicultural.

I know people these have happened to, and I know they're not isolated incidents. I know why these people hate the Asian community so.

They're not a solution to any problem though, they're just another problem. They are a response to utter failure of this government to tackle Islamic extremism, the failure of the local council and police to do anything about Asian gangs and racist attacks on whites, and the failure of Asian communities to reign in their unruly youth.

The EDL comes to Manchester on the 10th of October, I'm expecting that when the FYC return to Oldham afterwards they won't be in a good mood as the idiots of the UAF and angry Muslim groups challenge them and use violent means of their own. I'm expecting another riot before long, perhaps a week on Saturday we'll see one?

Another Gangland Killing In Oldham

Old news now, but worth commenting on I feel!

I've mentioned previously that there have been problems with Asian gangs, primarily drugs, for some years, but the council and police have refused to deal with it for fear of provoking the communities. Dealing with the idiots on Limeside is easy, unlike the Asian community they don't all gang together and riot. If they did, I strongly suspect the core of Oldham would resemble one of the more gang-infested suburbs of Los Angeles by now. Small mercies and all that.

"Word on the street" is that this was a contract killing, where the two arrested were hired by someone to kill Amran Khan, then their employer dumped them in the river, where they were arrested. It's amazing what you can overhear around town!

There's always been violence - I know of someone who barely got out a friends house when a rival gang came calling with machetes - but we're actually getting into something a little nastier than normal. The council have allowed Oldham to turn into an armpit - if you burnt down some of the flats in Werneth with the resident still in, you'd probably three-quarters of the heroin market - and the police have allowed the gangs to thrive unchecked.

You reap what you sow, and right now that's gun crime and a town rapidly becoming synonymous with gang crime. The situations not irretrievable, not yet, but unless something is done the fascists are going to get more bees for their bonnet, and Oldham will become the poster child for a failed community.

I just don't see either the police or the council making the decisions needed.

You Bugger Off For A Few Days...

And various shits hits various fans! Baroness Scotland, more local killings, any thoughts I had that the EDL aren't a collective of thugs dispelled, and Martin McGuinness visiting the Grand Hotel. Oy!

I need to do some catch-up posts

Back In London For A Bit

*sigh* I should move here, back dahn sarf, so blogging shall be light...

Science, Not Guaranteed To Give Us The Answers We Like

Debating earlier on Letters From A Tory's Blog, and it got me amused by how we all - and I do include myself in this - try to weasel out of scientific conclusions if they don't suit us, or align with our prejudices.

Take Global Warming, the pro crowd will do practically anything to snuff out debate, whilst the anti crowd cheerfully throws out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to the science. Neither side seems overly keen on the actual facts that much, mainly because there are no hard numbers, no simple models, no definitive ability to predict.

Global Warming itself isn't a science, it's a confluence of various disciplines, creating a hugely complex system that is inherently unpredictable. But those disciplines that comprise it? Most of those are scientific, and their results do need looking at. Sadly we're too far into some retarded ideological war to do that in an adult fashion.

It's not just that though. The problem with science is that's horribly big, and we're pretty small. We can admire pictures made by the Hubble Space Telescope, what we can't do is imagine evolution in action. We can understand adding 1+1 equal two, but we find it hard to understand adding another atom of CO2 adds more than one extra atoms heating effect.

We live in a crazy and wild universe, where there could be magnetized particles with just one pole, where understanding many fields require insanely complex tensor equations, and we all want to try and boil it down into something easily understandable.

That's why we invented Gods and Demons, to try and put all the chaos into some form of context. But we need to accept that it's complex - we're not children any more, scrabbling around in the dirt, we've grown into a species capable of leaving its motherworld - and we need to accept that science sometimes comes up with answers we don't like.

I'm not saying accept the science blindly, it needs fisking, it needs arguing, it needs proving - but don't try to hide in the gaps, because all you're doing is painting yourself into a corner, and for what? A comfort blanket against cold, hard reality? If you do need that, no need to make your own - civilizations past and present have an entire pantheon of them ready to wear.

Jimmy Carter Makes An Arse Of Himself

Don't agree with Obama? It's all down to Teh Racism!

Now Carter has a reputation, that of a fine man, but who was one of the lousiest presidents ever, and comments like this endanger that reputation - not being a crappy president, but being a decent man.

Elsewhere this new it's all about the racism attitude has been described as the new McCarthyism, a way of stifling debate. Barry O is in danger of becoming Ali G - is it cos I is black?

There are elements of racism where Obama is concerned, but that is no reason to discard opposition to his views and regard the opposition, simplistically, as mere racists.

Obama was happy castigating Kanye West, will he now tell Jimmy Carter to keep it zipped?

Brown Starts To Get Real, Bob Crow Doesn't

Well, Gordon Brown has finally had to do a U-turn and admit that cuts need to be made in his speech at the TUC, sadly though not all the union leaders are reading from the same hymn sheet, Bob Crow said:

"Both Labour and the Tories have committed themselves to cuts and privatisation and the trade unions have to take the lead in mobilising resistance and we should start preparing right now, here in Liverpool."

So get ready for some strikes then. Hopefully before the General Election, given that Labour have done more to build a state-based apparatus it seems fitting they get on receiving end of it going rabid.

Brown still showed that he doesn't seem to understand how disliked he is, claiming that "He said he believed the choices his government had taken were the choices of the British people. " Yeah. That's why you're riding so high in the opinion polls you great lumbering imbecile.

He's also still trying to play the 'nasty Tory cuts' angle, although that's not going to cut much ice with the unions who seem to think the people who pay for them - the private sector - should suffer alone. Claims of preserving vital frontline jobs don't hold much water, not against the backdrop of a government whose made so many notjobs and empowered quangos.

I know neither party are going to make the needed cuts - the DfID needs simple excising like the lump it is, around half the quangos can go, charity funding needs to be no more, and much of the NHS middle management can be safely flung into a skip without affecting frontline services one iota - simply because they're going to be advised by mandarins with their own little empires to preserve.

IT failures like ContactPoint and the ID Card farrago will be good to see gone, and we don't need a replacement for Trident just yet. But overall, we need a much smaller public sector, the unions whose existence are pretty much beholden to the public sector - private sector union membership is something like 15% - so their leaders can afford their champagne socialist lifestyles, will not take this lying down.

We may yet have a winter of discontent, and if the strikes happen with the Tories in power, god help us - I really can't see Cameron having the spine to challenge them. The unions are in the way of this nations recovery, out of purely selfish reasoning, and if they aren't prepared to help then they need to be smashed.

More 'Quality' BBC Reporting

The continued decline of BBC journalism really is a gift that keeps on giving, today's little balls-up - hat tip to El Reg - has Ford apparently installing the worlds most advanced radar system into a family car.

Due diligence is obviously not something BBC reporters have recently heard of, and seem quite content to repeat whatever crap some marketing droid will hand them. Which, it would appear, covers claims that classified military technology, which can't be exported out of the US, can be installed in soccer moms cars. Iran is probably ordering some online as I type.

It reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon, where Dogbert hands a piece of paper to a presenter before saying "apparently he'll say anything I hand to him"

What If I Don't Want To Pick A Side?

The Muslim Fundies vs English Hoolies conflict continues apace I see, over at Old Holborn we have Anjem Choudary spouting crap again. Choudary has quite a history of talking utter bollocks, and is representative of all that is wrong with the extreme edge of Islam.

This hateful character, and what he stands for, is the type of idiot stopping people seeing the English Defence League for what it is, Leg-Iron seems to think they're an apolitical anti-Islam group. Be nice if that was the whole truth.

The EDL are a group of Casuals. These are not nice fluffy people with the UK's best interests at heart, they're not some kind of miscontrued group defending the British way of life, they're a group of barely reformed football hooligans with a lot of white-power connotations.

We used to have some round here, still have a few dangling around, but they used to hang around the local skinhead pub, a little National Front clique consisting of some very nasty people. They'd on occasion pop round the pub next door, filled with students, and kick off, simply because they were students. Skrewdriver was the music of choice.

There were times they'd start at one end of town, and work their way down, kicking, punching and bottling people they didn't like the look of. They'd arrange meets with other firms, and just lay into each other until the police arrived to separate them. Out and out hooliganism really, born out of rage, frustration, boredom and a desire to belong. I can sympathize with their anger, just not their solution.

We have massive issues with Islam in the UK - not least the powers of this country being utter fucking cowards about tackling its darker nature, not dealing with the creeping influence of extremism, and giving its adherents an easy ride until they have no choice but to take action - but don't look to the EDL for salvation.

So if I'm going to be asked to pick a side, then my answers neither. There are better ways of dealing with the creeping Islamification of the UK than turning to the kind of people who have shamed England in the past. They're not the solution, just another problem.

I think maybe I won't be in Britain much longer, I fear for its direction and the fact we have weak, fearful governments and systems. Muslims see a soft underbelly they can use to change what being British is without bothering to ask the natives, the Little Englanders see any change as something to fear despite the fact we, as a nation, have historically embraced change when it's been better and discarded the crap.

There will be civil war between Muslims and Little Englanders in years to come, and those of us who just want to get with out lives - fuck your religion, and fuck your rose-tinted faux-history - will be ground between those two opposing forces. I reject both sides, I choose freedom.

Public Transport: Still Shit, Especially Northern Rail

Fucking Northern Rail. They certainly know how to inconvenience passengers at will don't they?

Thursday I was going into London for the day, it being around a 2 hour journey down to London from Manchester, it's now somewhere you can go shopping for the day, enjoy a couple of beer and head on home late evening.

Now all Northern Rail had to do was get me from Oldham to Manchester. Not a big difficulty you'd think. Jump on train and off you go. Or not.

I picked the train that would get into Manchester Victoria and leave me over half an hour to make my way to Piccadilly, grab some water and some breakfast. Easy? No. They cancelled the fucking train, so I had to wait over 10 minutes for the slower train, thus leaving me just over 15 minutes.

Luckily I was at a manned station too, otherwise I would've been fucked as the conductor's ticket machine wasn't working. That would've meant a good 5 or so minutes having to buy a ticket at Victoria, simply because they haven't managed some kind of system where the fucking machine has a recharger on the train. And that would've meant I missed my train to London.

Luckily I just got my train, no time breakfast or water, just pick up my ticket from a machine and jump on the train to London. Phew! Sweating like a bastard I was.

Most annoyingly, Northern Rail have a record on this. When I used to go up to North Yorkshire a lot, my train from Oldham to Manchester got cancelled so often I just set off really early and got the bus. A lot less convenient than a train, but at least of a frequency where if ones cancelled you can always grab another.

I still think the best was when the guy manning the station offered me an alternative route that got me into Victoria some 2 minutes before my other train set off from Piccadilly. I was going to run a mile in under 2 minutes was I? Do I look like Usain Bolt? No. I look like someone who enjoys his beer and has a pretty sedentary life.

Worse still, used to be you could speed up the journey to Piccadilly by getting the tram - but oh wait, all the tracks are being redone in the city centre, so no.

Cars can be problematic with roadworks and the like, but you have such an option of alternative routes, with public transport you're held hostage to the whims of the operator. And then you have the other passengers. I really want to hear Dizzy Rascal played tinnily through a phone at 8 in the morning, oh go on you little bastards, play it louder! Or the time a guy's dog had a streaming huge shit on the train.

Fuck public transport, up the arse, with a red rubber dick.

Alcohol and Joined Up Government

Others have said how I feel about the recent hoo-ha with BMA opening it's mouth, and fakecharidee Alcohol Health Alliance wading in with demands to remove alcohol advertising, and the general righteous screams about the eeeevils of alcohol.

Scotland has been busy trying to implement minimum prices, stopping promotions (a rule which is already being circumvented) and generally being very down on alcohol in general. And now we have this, the Scottish Government desperate to keep the Johnnie Walker bottling plant open in Glasgow. 900 jobs will be lost, and I doubt there'll be anyone other than the state looking to open up employment opportunities there.

So here we have the Governments problem, it hates alcohol - well, unless it's them drinking it, hence the subsidized bars - but there's the rather inconvenient fact that it keeps quite a lot of people in gainful employment, and brings in no small amount of tax revenue. Oops.

So there we are, joined up government at it's best - one hand limbering up for an all out assault on our love of the booze, the other doing it's damnedest to keep people in the booze industry employed there.

Something has to give.

Relationships

I need to get this off my chest, and I suppose writing on my blog beats ringing up my friends at half eleven at night. Sort of thing likely to annoy them...

As I mentioned a few days back, recently broke up with my better half, and well, not dealing with it too well. Missing her. Love is a real pain like that.

So I've sent her roses, and a message telling her how much I love her. I've even placed some lyrics from Take That's 'Back for Good' because that's how I feel.

For all of us who love freedom, I guess that we're still prisoners of our hearts. For all the chains we cast aside to walk tall, there are those so dear to us we don't mind the chafing, the restrictions, because there are times when it's better to bend than to break, and we gladly accept the restraints.

And those we love may not be perfect, may not be the ideal we think we want, but what we need - we don't get to choose who we love, it just happens.

So I've cast the die, and now to see where it lands.

Another Big Hairy MoD Cock-up

Given the brouhaha about equipment and public expenses, you'd think the MoD might have a crack at getting something right, but that's not how the MoD works. They're constantly trying to hide the issues with Bowman radio system, but it seems they've had no alternative but to admit - in as many weasel terms as possible - that the Cormorant system is, well, shit.

We spent £114 million pounds on a system designed to be launched in 2002 and last 20 years, it eventually surfaced in 2004. 5 years into it's operational life, and it's already creaking to the point we're having to bring in Israeli technology to supplement it. Let's be honest, it's not going to make it to 2022 is it?

There's that old saying about the American military - "all the gear, and no idea" - usually highlighted in war games when the British tend to run rings around them, and it's a crying shame we cannot get our troops the correct equipment, or at least worthwhile equipment. We spend billions on crap.

In the 80's the Mujahadeen sent back our rocket launchers on the basis they didn't work very well. These are the same ones we equipped our troops with, something a bunch of angry goat-fuckers wouldn't tolerate. That's the level of caring the MoD have for our troops. You can feel the love.

Governments for years - Tory and Labour - have taken the piss our of our troops, equipping them with substandard equipment in order to maintain British and European jobs.

And it makes you wonder what kind of testing goes on. Take the SA80 family, riddled with faults for years until the A2 variant was finally modelled - the MoD tried to ignore the problems for years, deploying troops, with the rather important bit of equipment that is their rifle, not entirely up to the job.

Even now it has some issues in hot, dry sandy places. Like Iraq. Or Afghanistan.

I've never wanted to be in the military, and really seeing what our troops have to deal with, it just highlights what a wise choice I made being a civilian.

Understanding Property Rights in a Libertarian World

Over at B&D they have something a bee in their bonnet over freedom of speech, mainly down to them taking issue with how obsequious some folk are over Guido Fawkes which led to them getting booted off Anna Racoon's blog.

Now whilst inter-blog handbags are incredibly tedious, it does lead to the whole 'freedom of speech' vs 'property rights' question. Now it's not terribly hard, if property is public then it's beholden to the laws of the land, which in a Libertopia would be fairly slim. If property is private then it's down to the owner of the property to define the rules, with two important caveats:

• Activities must be between consenting adults
• Activities must remain on the owners property, or others property if previously agreed.

That means if I want to burn my house down, I can. Any smoke, flames, ash or anything else that exits my property I will be liable for however. It also means I cannot rape you, tie you and torture you or oppress you in any way, unless you've agreed to it.

It also means I can tell you what you can and cannot say. My property. My rules. You entered in full knowledge of that, voluntarily and willingly, you can request changes, point out where I may be wrong, but at the end of the day I get to be the final arbiter.

If you don't like that, well, bye now.

On your property, you set the rules. You can as free or as restrictive as you feel like, personally I favour freedom over restrictions, but that's just me.

It also works that way with businesses. If two shops offering the same service open, but have different rules, well that's fine - maybe they're after different demographics. If they're directly competing however, well the one with the house rules most attractive to customers will win.

I heartily approve of B&D's decision to be so open on their blog, but they need to respect others property rights who may have different views on what they find acceptable on their blog. It's the libertarian way.

The US/UK 'Special Relationship'

Iain Dale is again playing Chicken Little with claims of the 'special relationship' between the US and UK has been permanently damaged over the Lockibie Affair, this time with a little help from the News of the Screws.

Much gets made of this 'special relationship', which only exists in the minds of people desperate to cling on to America's coat-tails. We're the defeated to them, they were one of our colonies who shucked off our dominion and then took our place on the world stage. We're now a collection of curios, a holiday destination, a fascinating history and a useful tool to them.

And that is the extent of it. Our governments are useful fools to them, to be offered scraps in exchange for their unwavering loyalty to the pax americana. Our resources are regarded as little more than extensions to their own, and being on the UN Security Council we make for a handy extra vote at times.

People point to Lend/Lease - which even the lightest fisk will tell you wasn't done from the purity of the heart. For starters, the number chosen - not randomly, but purposefully chosen - for the bill was H.R. 1776. Any historians recall what happened in that year? Hmmm? Anyone? The Declaration of Independence was signed and it was the start of the American Revolution.

That was rubbing our noses in it. Prior to that we'd had to pay, up-front and in cash, for any materials purchased from the US to fight Nazi Germany, and it was only when we were near bankrupt and in danger of our war effort collapsing that the US stepped in to help.

Even then, Lend/Lease was used to destroy our post-war economy and provide the coup de grace for the British Empire. We were not allowed to sell on items, or export similar items to those acquired via lend/lease, even if we'd had entire industries doing so pre-war. Even when the prospect of a Nazi Europe was coming perilously close to a reality, our relationship was so damn special they played politics to ensure Britain was hamstrung after the war.

That's the 'Special Relationship', a powerful America condescendingly nursing it's abusive parent in it's dotage.

People like Iain Dale need to take off their rose-tinted specs. It's okay to be pro-American - I certainly sing their praises - but from a point of liking their culture and ideology, not from some retarded lie peddled through ignorance and wishful thinking.

Alien vs Predator, Birmingham Edition

Seems the idiots from United Against Facism have once again clashed with the English Defence League.

Can we not stick these two groups into a big cage, filled with weapons - think Mad Max's Thunderdome - and just video them beating each other to death? It's not that big an ask surely, and would make a wonderful replacement for Big Brother in C4's schedules.

We could even have a swing-o-meter showing how the UK's average IQ increases every time one of them is despatched to the next life.

Mind you, if they destroyed Birmingham we could then replace it with something nicer. Even a landfill would be something of an improvement...

Government Lied Over Piracy Stats

Seems the government's figures for illegal downloaders are a Big Fat Lie.

Now we know Labour lies a lot. We know Gordon Brown lies a lot. We know Mandelson lies in the same way most other people breathe. So I guess I shouldn't be shocked.

Shouldn't be too shocked that BBC News swallowed the lies either I suppose, quality journalism is quietly dying a death there. It actually fell to the BBC4 program More or Less to fisk it.

Let's have a look at the figures, the government said it was 7 million people, based on the following math...

In a 2008 survey, of 1,176 households, 136 people said they'd used file sharing software. That's 11.6%.

That was bumped up to 16.3% for unspecified reasons, but we're supposed to believe it wasn't extracted from any rectal passageways.

The next assumption is that there are 40 million internet users, however the BPI, who have a vested interest in saying Piracy Is Bad, came up with this figure, despite official figures from the ONS showing there are 33.9 million.

So even if you took a sample size of just over a thousand as representative, using the values actually provided you get under 4 million. Even accepting the 16.3% rate puts you just over 4 million.

Lies, damned lies and statistics indeed!

The Justice System is Criminal...

Following on from my little rant over the VOO, and how we seem to have disassociated punishment from crime, the current issue of Private Eye (No. 1244) gives us this little nugget on page 9, under Prison News:

Even villains given short sentences of just a few weeks are now qualifying for the new end-of-custody licence (ECL) - a jail 'discount' of 18 days introduced last June to create space in a creaking system. Thus NAPO learnt last week of one inmate, sentenced to 28 days for theft, who was told that he was, like all prisoners (except lifers), entitled to automatic release after serving half his sentence, ie 14 days. But then it was pointed out he also qualified for ECL - this he was actually 'owed' 4 days and could leave immediately. Some are even qualifying for the £56 discharge grant. Brilliant!

I think qualifies for a "What The Fuck" award. Essentially sentences of a calendar month or less are 'get out of jail free' cards, so what is the actual point of giving such a sentence? It's hardly going to deter them from future criminal endeavours is it? If the message they want to get across is "our justice system is an utter fucking shambles, a total joke and ripe for taking the piss out of" then mission accomplished!

Is it any wonder recidivism rates are high? For the career criminal, prison has gone from a something to avoid to becoming a minor inconvenience.

Perhaps Jack Straw could start doing his fucking job?

After a brief respite

Not blogged too much as had to get some stuff out of my system after a relationship break-up, so obviously I also need to get some anger out my system... Back in the saddle today though!