Tuesday, 23 March 2010
The SNP's Orwellian vision of Scotland's future...
Monday, 22 March 2010
Headline of the week
From the Times:
Comedian hired as Home Office adviser
As with last week's edition, the story more than lives up to its billing:
The Home Office has been accused of wasting public money in the build-up to the Budget by hiring Ruby Wax as an adviser to its staff.
The Times has learnt that the one-time comedian and talk-show presenter has become a regular visitor to the department’s Whitehall headquarters, where she provides senior civil servants with lessons in leadership and communication.
We really are beyond fucking parody now, aren't we? Let us repeat this for emphasis: the Home Office is taking lessons in leadership from Ruby Wax.
This should be the totality of the Tory election campaign: posters on every street, bus shelter, train station and public toilet from Penzance to Pittenweem: These cunts are paying Ruby Wax from your pocket to give them leadership lessons. Even with Dave's disturbing moon face plastered all over them, it would be a fucking landslide.
Her workshops include clips of interviews with Madonna and practical exercises to highlight the difference between talking at someone rather than with someone.
"to highlight the difference between talking at someone rather than with someone"? Well, it's not fucking working, is it?
One Home Office official described a morning with Ms Wax as “thoughtful and thought-provoking”. The official said: “Ruby provided some real insights, relevant both to work and wider life. I think having Ruby was very important. It maximised the impact for the long term.”
"It maximised the impact for the long term"? What does that even mean? What does it mean?
The official added: “This was more like a workshop or a masterclass than anything I have experienced since I joined the Home Office. It provided me with direct lessons and tips around communicating and focus but, perhaps of more value, it has caused me to look harder at some of my habits, behaviours and attitudes.All Hail benevolent General Krull!"
Oh, this is utter horsecock. It's the "perhaps of more value" that finally gives it away; some panicking Home Office drone desperately gabbling jargon-laden bullshit down the phone at the Times hack as Sir Humphrey stands over him, holding a letter opener at his sweat-slicked temple. "Tell him that Ruby Wax's expert self-visualisation masterclasses have been a powerful driver in the ongoing process of re-evaluating our benchmarking process for cascading joined-up 360-degree, customer-facing outcomes throughout the organisation", he hisses. "Say it!"
I hate them all.
Labels: Burning our money, Nu Lab
The Scottish Blogging Roundup, which I had the pleasure of editing this week, is now up. Enjoy.
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Line of the day
Clarkson on the BA strike:
I like Virgin. And I flew Singapore Airlines recently, which was out of this world. But there is nothing quite so joyous as leaving the hustle and bustle of a superheated Third World hellhole and being greeted on the big BA jumbo by a homosexual with a cold flannel and a refreshing glass of champagne. Take that away from us and we may as well all be Belgian.
Fuckin' A!
Labels: ...what he said, Hacks
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Surprising claim of the week
Either that, or a slightly odd choice of verb from the Telegraph today:
South Africa has hired extra shark spotters to patrol beaches to ensure that football fans are not attacked during the World Cup.
Patrols have been strengthened along South Africa's coastline amid fears Great Whites could target foreign tourists during the event.
..."target foreign tourists"?
Labels: Hacks, Idiotarians, Sport
Malcolm Tucker's election briefing
Looks like a weekly series in which Malc gives his advice to the Labour campaign. This one's a cracker:
Talking to the manifesto children in the war room, they are all very excited about optimism. I don't know where they found it but now they've opened the pot they want to smear it over everything. The New Britain. An Internet. A train like those we have seen on our holidays, that goes. A knowledge-based carbon-fibre tennis-racket economy. A windmill. A new dawn. Give our nuclear subs to the French.
My take is – yeah, fine. Maybe. But remember your key attributes: not JFK skipping through the flowers spraying Clinton juice all over everyone. No – the glowering maniac in the boarded-up house who, if we're lucky, people might just about believe is the only one who can remember where the bank statements are kept. That's the core strategy.
Friday, 19 March 2010
"My fellow officer and also, I'm very happy to say, my lover..."
A pretty magnificent headline from the BBC, this:
Srebrenica gay theory irks Dutch
And the story itself, for once, almost lives up to the billing:
[S]peaking at a US Senate hearing on allowing gay people to serve openly in the US military... Gen Sheehan [John Sheehan, a former Nato commander] said the former chief of staff of the Dutch army had told him that the presence of openly gay soldiers in the Dutch peacekeeping force were seen as "part of the problem" which contributed to the fall of Srebrenica.
He argued that since the end of the Cold War, European militaries had changed and he concluded "there was no longer a need for an active combat capability".
This "socialisation" process, Gen Sheehan said, "included open homosexuality" and led to "a focus on peacekeeping operations because they did not believe the Germans were going to attack again or the Soviets were coming back".
This is offensive nonsense. Homosexuality in the Dutch army had nothing to do with the massacre at Srebenica and it is, frankly, grotesque to insinuate it. It was because they were all stoned at the time.
Labels: Euroweenies, Random observations
Harry's Place being sued by George Galloway
It has been remiss of me not to note that Harry's Place blogger DavidT has been threatened with a lawsuit by "Gorgeous" George Galloway for associating him with "inflammatory and racist comments" in the course of a throwaway joke left in the comments to another blog. Unfortunately for Gorgeous, David was accurately quoting from the official Covenant of his chums in Hamas, which makes the damage to his reputation [sic] somewhat questionable.
More details are here. The best commentary comes from Carpsio and is well worth your time. Fortunately, David is a lawyer and well able to defend himself from these goons, but his cause is no less worthy of your support for all that.
Given some of the odious people Galloway chooses to surround himself with - indeed, given how odious he is himself - it is somewhat surprising that he is so thin-skinned. But Galloway has been gunning for HP for some time; so if we are at the stage where he is suing people for pointing out the flaws of his friends in their own words, it is perhaps as well that he does so on such transparently ludicrous grounds. This man is a stain on our politics.
Labels: Campaigns, Civil liberties, Scumbags, socialism
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Crowdsourcing the blogroll
OK, people. Some of you may have noticed that my blogroll is hideously out of date - indeed, some of you may say that blogrolls generally are out of date, but that's a different matter.
I get my daily fix from an RSS reader these days, like most other people, and that's a whole lot more up-to-date than my blogroll, with oodles of good stuff. But I'm increasingly aware that even there, there's loads of quality content that I'm missing out on.
So this is a quick bleg: which blogs would you recommend me to be reading every day? What are your go-to sites in the mornings? Which two or three feeds would you guess that I might not subscribe to, and suggest that I do? (Apart from your own blogs, please - I don't want this to turn into a dick-waving contest.)
It needn't be politics - I'm interested in sport, movies,
Labels: Admin
Unintentionally funny quote of the day
Nadine Dorries MP:
Mrs Dorries has also attacked Miss Rantzen, accusing the television personality of being a self-publicist who had a “scant” grasp of political issues.
Labels: Hypocrites, Tories
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Happy St Patrick's Day
Nursery Rhymes for Modern Britain
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor doggie a bone,
When she got there the cupboard was bare because she had spent 13 years creating public sector non-jobs for people with worthless degrees.
So the poor little doggie shat in her bed.
------------------------
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed at home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
And this little piggy flipped his London flat and his constituency home eight times and used your money to pay for a new conservatory, a massive telly and a vibrating chair and then tried to stop you finding out about it,
All the way home.
More at the Mash.
Labels: Humour
