Theee Siiiimpsonnnnsss

Tip of the clown wig to Old Holborn.

Ouch!

This is going to hurt us a lot more than it's going to hurt Gordon:

Britain's inflation is heading back to 4 per cent territory ­ as you'd expect with the Bank of England printing money and using the debt to finance government spending. If you create more money, you reduce the value of the money. Citi has done another brilliant research note, which it is putting online, laying out the implications. The punters are facing pay freezes, or settlements below 2 per cent. The cost of living is soaring. Result: misery.

It was bound to happen eventually, it's nearly as immutable as the laws of physics. And we all know what happens when inflation goes up, don't we? Yes, kiddies, interest rates go up. If you thought that people reneging on their debts was on its way out, brace yourself for round two of this little party.

And the funny thing is, if those UTTER CUNTS in the government hadn't indulged in Quantitative Easing, this wouldn't be happening now.

2010 is going to be a very exciting year. For all the wrong reasons.

Blogroll update

I'm afraid I just have to.

Quote of the femtohour

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
-- Mikhail Bakunin

Tip of the clown wig to the ASI.

The voters have spoken

Wow! A non-trivial 400 votes on this one. There was significant support for Harridan "I hate men" Hormone(10%) and 16% each for Tiny "Pretty Straight Kinda Guy" Blur and Michael "The haggis-masturbater" Martin, but the clear winner with 35% is the nutter with the stutter, the manic mincing madman, the Prime Mentalist, Gordon "Feartie O' Fife" Brown.

Tough choice, wasn't it?

Only a fool would bet against it

I reckon Schumacher is going to kick arse again this year. He may not be world champion at the end of it, but by God he's going to set fire to the battle!

Shock bloody horror!

Labour MP says something vaguely sensible!

I'm slightly confused

There seems to be an awful lot of chatter about Uganda outlawing gays. I read calls for sanctions and all sorts of action and facebook groupage and stuff. But there are plenty of countries where sticking your cock into another man's arse (and sometimes even a woman's arse) will get your head cut off.

So why aren't they calling for sanctions against those countries as well?

Good news, bad news!

Good news: the weather is changing, the snow is due to start melting soon.

Bad news: they're now expecting floods.

Hands up, who thought: "this is all due to global warming"? Please go peel your skin off and roll around on a freshly gritted road, if you can find one.

Hands up, who thought: "Bloody government, bet they're not prepared for this either"? You're probably right, they aren't prepared for this either, but why is it the government's concern to be prepared for stuff? It's because we fucking pay them. And why do we pay them? Because they've assumed the responsibility for everything so that we can pay them well over the odds for everything they've assumed responsibility for.

And haven't they done their sums on this? Because they've bought into the global warming scam so enthusiastically, they thought they didn't need to spend money stockpiling salt. So they spent £12M on salt, the carnage wrought by the snow has caused something like £6,000M worth of damage to the economy, all due to the government's ability to pick winners.

Yesterday we had the edifying spectacle of the nutter with the stutter saying that he was calling a "salt summit" to make things better. His approach to making things better is to punish the councils who did stock enough salt by stealing their salt stocks to help out the incompetents who did not. Curiously, most of the salt seems to be heading to London, so that Trougher Central is not too inconvenienced. Lord Arseboners has decreed that roads must be gritted 50% less, which sounds great until you work out that this means they have to keep regritting because the ice overwhelms the smaller grit covering much more easily.

And with all the settled science and claims that global warming could make the UK's weather colder, what is the latest bit of sci-fi tosh that I see?

Most techniques focus on ways of reducing the sun’s rays by blocking them using mirrors orbiting in space or by spraying sulphur compounds into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth.

One proposal is for a fleet of ships that would spray seawater into the sky that would leave behind salt crystals to brighten clouds, reflecting more sunlight back into space.

Now, assuming that any of this crap actually works, what happens if we're wrong? The precautionary principle is fine for warmenists, but what happens if they get it wrong or go too far? How do we get this stuff out of the air if we suddenly find it's all gone Pete? Does the precautionary principle apply to deniers as well? What happens if we do this so the UK stays permanently snow bound but the rest of the world is OK?

I really can't see anything going wrong with geo-engineering Earth, something we've never done before and with no idea of what the actual consequences will be.

No, really, I can't. Those who are promoting these ideas are far wiser than I.

Blogroll update

How did I not know about the UK Libertarian?

It goes without saying ...

... that he's still going to vote Labour.

Quote of the day

Norman Tebbit shows his class:

It seems to me that our masters these days are willing to use a carrot and stick approach, but they almost always use the stick on the poor old donkey’s nose and inflict a terrible indignity on the beast with the carrot at its other end.

Do go read the whole thing. It's excellent!

Me too!

Pisces (20 FEB-20 MAR)
In a world without rules, when humanity is on the brink of survival and all hope rests in the hands of one individual, I really, really hope to Christ it isn't you.

Some things are just entirely beyond me

Like this, for example.

Get yerself a tasty new laptop ...

... here.

Seriously though, £1111 per fucking laptop? Are they cunting Macs or something?

I love guns

Tip of the old clown wig to Dizzy.

DING!

Wellington Dave makes an excellent point in the comments of another post:

The Tories need to actually "get" this, before it's too late.

The various current nicknames for Dave don't do this, so I propose he is universally named "Ding" as in "Dave is not Gordon". Because, that is just about the only reason for a Tory lead in the polls right now.

If they are serious about giving our NuLabour Soviet Overlords a thorough kicking then it's time to cut out crap like this and the rest of the big/more government bullshit.

So, DING it is, and let's all start DINGing right away!

It's enough to make you weep

iDave dishes out some major facepalmology:

Sure Start children's centres would move away from providing universal services for all parents with young children and focus on the most disadvantaged and 'dysfunctional' families, under Conservative party plans for 'a new generation' of Sure Start centres.

Conservative leader David Cameron said that the new model of Sure Start would focus on early intervention, with staff paid partly by results.

Oh for fucking fuck's sake: let me guess who decides who's the most disadvantaged and dysfunctional families - could it possibly be those wonderful Mongoloids in Social Services who brought us cases like Baby P and Victoria Climbie? And instead of offering a simple payment mechanism to market providers, the state is going to be employing not only the people to do the work, but crucially, 87 layers of management bureaucracy, all paid top whack rates ... by you and me.

And doesn't your soul just wither at the idea of another area in which the government is going to focus on "early intervention"? It's either going to be too early or not early enough, because individual cases have individual requirements and individual requirements require a lot of resources - much more that the government will actually provide. So it will be a once-size-fits-all "solution" that gets delivered.

More government is iDave's solution - whatever the problem. I can't wait to be shot of the Gorgon, but really, iDave will be no different to the last 12 year of Labour's nannying, hectoring, bullying, clusterfuck incompetence. He hasn't even won yet and I already fucking hate him.

Guest post: Turing 100 in 2012

Reading University is participating in TURING100in2012 - celebrating 20th century mathematician Alan Turing through a special Turing Test contest in his centenary year, 2012. Turing100in2012 is part of the Alan Turing Year 2012.

The Turing100in2012 team includes Professor Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah - members of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), Ian Bland, Chris Chapman and Marc Allen.

Turing100in2012 aims to repeat the Turing tests organised by the University of Reading in 2008:

• BBC news video: 'can robots 'think' like humans'
• 2008 Turing tests / Loebner Prize results page

Other Alan Turing links:
The Alan Turing Year Homepage
The Turing Digital Archive
The Turing Archive for the History of Computing

You can follow the Alan Turing Year on Facebook here and here, follow Turing100in2012 on Twitter or read the blog.

New movie release

Saying it again, but more clearly

I had a go at this, but I think the Pedant General has made it even more straightforward.

Demolishing the threat of terror

Vulture Central has a fantastic demolition of the pointless airport security theatre here. I do strongly recommend that you read the whole article, but the executive summary is this:

Don't worry about terrorism next time you take a flight. There is a very small risk, as an airline passenger, that you will die violently before you land, but it has nothing to do with terrorists. It is entirely down to the chance of an accident.

Consider this, if you don't believe it. The year 2001, which saw four entire airliners destroyed with total loss of life on 9/11, was not in fact a particularly dangerous year to go flying. More airline passengers died in the year 2000; nearly as many died in 2002. Twice as many were killed flying in 1972, despite the fact that many fewer people flew back then, because airliners were far less safe.

Terrorism simply isn't a visible factor in your chances of dying while flying, or indeed while doing anything else: it is insignificant, a problem that has been almost totally eliminated for Western citizens since its not-very-serious heyday in the 1970s and 80s, and you shouldn't worry about it. It would make absolutely no noticeable difference to your or my chances of violent death/injury if terrorism was eradicated overnight.

All of which makes me wonder why there is so much brouhaha from the one-eyed trouser snake to try and "fix" this "problem". Who is benefiting from all this security theatre if it's not us?

Mrs Robinson

Tip of the Clown Wig to Dave's Part.

He made me do things, awful things...

Tip of the the clown wig to Al Jahom.

The state is not your friend

Fuck's sake!

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.

What the cunting fuck is wrong with the fucking police? Have the motherfuckers gone completely fucking insane?

This advice sounds scarily apt:

The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.

If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as possible no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).

And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.

Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.

Unintended consequences of those wise government policies. And yet people still insist that we need more goverment. Smarter government. The right kind of government.

Wake up folks, it's all crap. Just like the only good socialist is a dead socialist, the only good government is a dead government. They are all fucking cunts.

Picking winners again

I weep when people say that we need the wise government to decide how best to allocate resources. And yet, they keep saying it, in the face of every bit of evidence of the serial stupidity, favouritism and general cuntishness of government:

The demand for road salt has reached such heights that there are now police cordons around the salt mine yards to control the endless stream of lorry traffic, not to mention the punch-ups. Contractors are desperate to get road salt, but in many cases it is a forlorn hope – not because the market has somehow failed, but because the government is trying to control it.

It is the same pattern we have seen before. Any sign of a problem, and Downing Street butts in and says that it is stepping in. Not that it is doing a very good job of it. In their buyers' market, besieged by lorries, the salt producers tell me that they would rather like the government to tell them exactly who they should and should not serve. (And local authorities, punch drunk from public criticism, would probably rather like Gordon Brown to tell them which streets and pavements to grit and which not to – a task that should keep him busy for a while.)

What people don't realise, though, is that the government has already decided the priority customers. And the priority customer is – you guessed it, the government. Rock salt suppliers tell me that right from the start of the cold spell, they have been telling private contractors that they can only supply government users, like local councils, health authorities, and the military. So contractors I know of have been reduced to buying food-grade salt in 25kg bags to spread in their contract areas.

Not only that, the local authorities have been instructed to spread what salt they have very thinly. So the gritters are out every day (for which, of course, the government is happy to take credit), even though they are not doing much good. Council officers tell me that what you need to do is to put down plenty at the outset to prevent roads icing up, then renew it as needed.

About the only people who are content are the drivers of the gritting lorries, some of whom, I'm told, are netting £1000 a week thanks to – you guessed – public sector wage contracts. When authorities decide to do preventative gritting at the end of the day, well, that is after their scheduled hours, so it is double time. Or when they go out early it is double time (and it stays double time for as long as they are out). Then Saturdays and Sundays are double time again.

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

Job offer

There's a very interesting job offered at W4MP:

A new group called 'Direct Democracy' is being launched to research and campaign for better democratic institutions and more accountability in Britain. It will be independent of any political party or group and will be financed by voluntary donations.

The ideas driving the campaign have been extensively written about in The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain (Carswell & Hannan, 2008) and Total Recall: how direct democracy can improve Britain (Civitas, 2008). It is currently being established under the leadership of Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, and drawing on the research expertise of Civitas and the campaigning expertise of the TaxPayers' Alliance.

We are seeking a Director to take overall responsibility for running Direct Democracy, reporting on a weekly basis to a small executive committee.

I'm almost tempted to apply myself!

Twatsy Hewitt: serially disloyal cunt

Jesus, what a slag!

The UK and the USA

Two cuntries united by a common cuntery!



Tip of the clown wig to the Whited Sepulchre.

Something for Mark Wadsworth

Here.