(6)

This is good, because it shows how reasonable most people consider their government's existence and demands to be - and because it shows how misled those people are. (I have put this under the Humour category, but I find it rather depressing. Those who can be emotionally detached about these things may laugh, though.)

Video via Richard Nikoley

(10)

The current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK is, according to this article by Peter Oborne, "the best government for decades".

He may even believe it, in which case he is utterly mad, or he does not, in which case I have no time to read the output of pranksters.

Shame. This book, The Rise of the Political Class, by Oborne was good, if perhaps imperfect. Oborne is one of those writers, such as Sir Simon Jenkins, who can be insightful one minute, and write utter bollocks the next. Not that I am like that, of course, ahem.

I have tagged this item as "humour", just in case it was a spoof, or if Oborne has got his calendar wrong and thinks it is 1 April already.

(10)

Sample:

Here.

(1)

The ultimate pre-flight procedure, courtesy of Southwest Airlines.

(7)

I like this:

CAPE TOWN. After 28 years of silently tolerating it, a group of unemployed local musicians have joined forces to release a Christmas single, entitled ‘Yes we do,’  in response to the Bob Geldof inspired Band Aid song, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’

Thankyou to Tim Worstall for spotting this.

Speaking at the launch of the single, whose proceeds will go towards teaching discipline, literacy and contraception at British schools, composer and singer Boomtown Gundane said that for years he had been irked by Geldof’s assumption that hungry Africans were also stupid.

Sadly, it's a joke. But quite a good one, I think.

(5)

Obama Must Go.

The only shock is why this has not become a meme before now.

(3)

Disappointingly, it seems that some of these scenes of the happy family life of a Star Wars stormtrooper may have been faked. In the comments to this Daily Mail article, "John, Bristol' claims that "the small one is a Lego toy." I shall leave readers to make up their own minds.

(4)

Bongo expresses joy at his NASA aided escape from Earth and the evil Petans.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Backstory: The dinner speech by NASA Administrator General Bolden at our NSS conference in Chicago in May 2010 was briefly (about 10 seconds) interrupted by some little twit from PETA who was carried bodily to the ballroom door. We did not press charges. Her complaint? NASA was going to put some monkeys through the same things that people will be going through on a trip to Mars.

So, I am striking a blow to open the stars for all Primate-kind! Arise Primates of Earth! You have nothing to lose but 1G and your Petan chains!

(10)

Apparently Greece has stopped the export of Tzatziki and Taramasalata... They're worried about a double dip recession...

- Bert Trubshaw, seen in the comments over on the Telegraph.

(6)

I got this via Pajamas TV. Well, it's Friday:

"Warning: This segment contains graphic images of Matt Damon discussing tax policy."

And the footage of Damon sharing his profound thoughts on the "upper class" etc is not for people of a nervous disposition.

Let's not forget that magnificent movie and its treatment of Damon, Team America.

(49)

If you only go to IMAO occasionally (like me), or even not at all, then allow me to pass on a recent Frank J-ism (if you will pardon the expression) which made me smile if not laugh out loud, from here:

And the thing is, maybe the economy is technically turned around and very slowly starting to go in the right direction, it’s just does Obama not expect us to not notice how far he went off course before finally getting things around? It’s like we’re driving from Newark to New York, and we’re constantly yelling at Obama, “Turn around! You’re going the wrong way!” And eventually we’re in Los Angeles, right at the shore where we can’t go any further off course, and Obama finally says, “I guess I better turn around.” And then he expects us to buy him lunch for making the smart move of turning things around. And we’re like, “Man, we were so much better off when we were back stuck in that ditch.”

I think a negative maybe got wrongly doubled sowhere near the beginning of that, but you get the point.

My approximate understanding of voters is that they do indeed vote about the immediate future, rather than reward or punish politicians for their past deeds or misdeeds, the most famous case being how British voters booted out Churchill in 1945, despite his triumphant war leadership, but because of his presumed inability to win the peace. He won in 1951 not because of his heroic past, but because of what he was then saying: set the people free.

Obama is now tanking in the polls because the US economy is now experienced as bad. If it feels like the US economy is heading in the right direction come election day, Obama could indeed win. I could go on, but prefer to leave commenters who actually live in the USA, like Paul Marks, to take that further, if they care to. I will only say that I vividly recall being told, by a visiting American at the time when President Bill Clinton was riding very low in the polls during his first term, that he had zero chance of winning again. But, he did.

Also, I was amazed by this FJ revelation:

It’s time to admit the truth: I’m not a bland American male, but really a gay girl living in Syria.

I did not know that.

So, she probably doesn't know that much about Obama's re-election chances either.

(14)

The Daily Mash satire site has this beauty of an item on Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He is the gift that keeps on giving, as Perry de Havilland of this parish noticed a while ago.

(8)

New drink, "The Bin Laden": two shots and a splash of water.

- via Alisa

(8)

Some say Gaddafi and the Philadelphia Democratic machine might be a match made in.... well, wherever...

(8)

Gordon Brown as the next head of the IMF? What a splendid idea – at least as long as Charlie Sheen is not available.

- Detlev Schlichter

(5)

The Daily Mash site has overtaken Private Eye or even The Onion as one of the funniest satire sites out there, in my view. And some of its items are remarkably believable. I can just imagine some crusty, America-hating "young fogey", or far leftist type, saying some of the things in the article I link to here.

(41)

"For as long as I can remember, I have been shouting at my TV screen. Possibly the first occasion would have been circa 1971, in sheer irritation at the infuriating, self-defeatingly named kiddie programme Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead? Perhaps it was even earlier than that. Though I liked Teddy, I used to find Andy Pandy incredibly wet. Bill and Ben were incomprehensible. The Clangers whistled too much. ZsaZsa the Cat and Kiki the Frog were quite maddening in the way they ganged up on Hector the Dog. As for Florence in the Magic Roundabout, what a goodie-goodie!"

- James Delingpole

I would say that one of the great benefits of blogging has been that where before a person would get dangerously high blood pressure watching or hearing some drivel on the TV or radio, now they can work off this rage by blogging about it.

Apologies to non-UK readers who may not get the children's TV references in the quote. That is why Wikipedia was invented!

(4)

This is inspired from the Daily Mash satire site. Or is it satire?

(37)

As part of the "No shit, Sherlock" series at Samizdata, here is an item about the marrying preferences of women, at least according to a new survey.

(5)

A hilarious but also rather sharp look back at 2010 by the American funnyman.

(9)

Oh my. I am laughing. It is an American New Year's Day tradition to watch the Tournament of Roses Parade. The granddaddy and the best of all American parades, the Rose parade is even older (1890) than the Rose Bowl game (1902).

The floats are the most strictly regulated of any parade and all of them deserve prizes for genuine awesomeness but still, there is unmistakable 'all must have prizes' going on. One of those prizes is awarded by the governor of California. It is awarded to the parade float "that best represents life in California." This year the winner is the Sierra Madre association float. It is very beautiful to look at.

One small problem. It broke down. It blocked up the parade route and needed a tow truck to move. While it apparently does happen from time to time, I've never before seen a Tournament of Roses Parade float behind a tow truck. And there goes the float "that best represents life in California" being dragged down the parade route behind a tow truck. Like Bernie, dead but still going through the motions. Someone has posted some video.

As they say, "you couldn't make it up."

(61)

"It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him "services" on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how the bailout package works."

(19)

Why do communists only drink herbal tea?

...

Because proper tea is theft.

(33)

Michael Tomasky blogs for the Guardian on American affairs. He is a fairly left wing Democrat, and is currently feeling down. He describes in this piece how a piece of internet humour cheered him up. He was sent a letter to the Red States (i.e. the ones voting Republican in the weird American convention for political colours) that reads:

Subject: Letter to the Red States:

Dear Red States.

If you manage to steal this election too, we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all of the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches. You get faith healing and swamps.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

I am not so much interested in whether the contrasts drawn in the letter are true or fair. I did not even understand many of them. I am very interested in the way that this kind of humour can no longer be kept secret from those who are the butt of the joke. Despite being in the form of a letter to the Red States the original writer of this (from the reference to stealing "this election too" it dates from before Obama's victory and probably from just before Bush's second term) must have known that it would be harmful to the Democrat cause to have it actually read by too many Red Staters, particularly come election time. It would arouse even more hostility from a bloc of voters the Democrats would like to reach when accompanied, as it often was, by the Jesusland map.

A couple of decades back - when this sort of thing was photocopier humour rather than internet humour - such a letter would have been seen overwhelmingly by fellow Democrats and Blue State persons. Now it can be found by anyone. It can be found by anyone years after the event. It keeps on being found years after the event.

At first I thought of this in personal terms: one can imagine this letter to the Red States appearing on the website of some minor political guy in 2010 and causing him embarrassment in 2020 when the Republicans run it as an attack ad on TV, or whatever has replaced TV, just as his plane lands at Texas as part of the last-minute tour of swing states. But, imagining harder, he could probably laugh it off. Some of these red-staters might even laugh with him. By then, a cultural change will have occurred. It will have emerged that everybody has multiple skeletons in their cupboard; you can not spend years on the internet without accumulating them.

Bigger than the effect on any one person, though, is the dispersed effect of lots of Republicans being slightly irritated and slightly more prone to think that when Democratic party politicians come courting their votes they are laughing at them behind their hands. As indeed they are. (I could but heroically will not digress into the question of whether Republicans laugh at Democrats in the same way. You are not missing much; the term "hegemonic discourse" was in there somewhere.) However possibly that dispersed irritation also will be moderated by the coming everybody's-got-skeletons cultural change: by then we will all know more about how everybody has multiple faces that they show in different groups. (Strange how "two faced" is an insult but "multi-faceted" is praise.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will all be less able to ignore our knowledge of everybody's rotating mild disloyalty to all the groups to which they belong except the one to which they are talking at any particular minute.

Oddly enough the name of Michael Tomasky has come up in another context concerning stuff on teh interwebs being seen by eyes it was not intended for. American right wing blogs are fizzing about "JournoList", this being a private internet forum for American left wing journalists, academics and think tankers, where they would work out this week's media consensus. Tomasky was a member. So was David Weigel, a journalist for the Washington Post, who had to resign from covering conservative affairs for that paper after expressing his opinion of several leading conservatives on JournoList by means of a term that I at first thought referred to their alleged propensity to engage in illicit commerce with rats but I now deduce means to behave towards someone in an underhand manner. You will have deduced that JournoList is no longer private and that some people think that its members were acting towards the American public in an underhand manner.

There will be several scandals like this. Then they will stop because everyone will have adapted. The words "private internet forum" will be regarded as oxymoronic. The politically imprudent humour will continue, though. Nothing can shut a human mouth once it has started on a joke, except possibly the prospect of saving it up for a larger audience on the internet.

(10)

Apologies to Samzidata readers if you have already seen this, but I had not, and boy, this is just gooooooood.

(21)

Well, here is a good way to start the week.

The photo reminded me of a joke I heard somewhere. Back in the 1950s, the-then President, Eisenhower, was famed for enjoying his golf. There was apparently a bumper sticker around at the time that said something along the lines of, "If We Wanted A Golfer President, Vote Ben Hogan". That's quite funny, but at least Ike, given his pretty weighty military record and - in my view - pretty decent performance in the Oval Office - was a better president than the current occupant. (H/T: Instapundit)

(20)

This is one of the more hilarious spoofs of PETA I have seen in ages. It recently showed up in my Inbox and I simply must share it with you, our readers:

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) - Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers "duct taped inside several fast food restaurant dumpsters," according to police officials. "Something just went wrong," said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. "Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong."

The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activist groups, "growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats," decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event "in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats." "In fact," said the organizer, "motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it... ergo, they should stop."

According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960's era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting "you're murderers" to passers by. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.

"They peed on me!!!" charged one activist. "They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me 'La Trene', and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!"

"I... I was trying to show my outrage at a man with a heavy leather jacket, and he... he didn't even care. I called him a murderer, and all he said was, 'You can't prove that.' Next thing I know he forced me to ride on the back of his motorcycle all day, and would not let me off, because his girl friend was out of town and I was almost a woman."

Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers "farted on their heads."

Police officials declined comments on any leads or arrests due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, however, organizers for the motorcycle club rally expressed "surprise" at the allegations..

"That's preposterous," said one high-ranking member of the biker organizing committee. "We were having a party, and these people showed up and were very rude to us. They threw things at us, called us names, and tried to ruin the entire event. So, what did we do? We invited them to the party! What could be more friendly than that? You know, just because we are all members of motorcycle clubs does not mean we do not care about inclusiveness. Personally, I think it shows a lack of character for them to be saying such nasty things about us after we bent over backwards to make them feel welcome."

When confronted with the allegations of force-feeding the activists meat, using them as ad hoc latrines, leaving them incapacitated in fast food restaurant dumpsters, and 'farting on their heads,' the organizer declined to comment in detail. "That's just our secret handshake," assured the organizer.

(9)

The above video, in which Australian(*) comedian John Clarke gives a witheringly succinct summary of the present European fiscal crisis, has been making the rounds of certain parts of the internet in recent days. It is great to see Clarke's work getting attention in the world outside Australia, because he has been putting stuff as good as this out on a weekly basis for decades now.

In fact it would be nice if Australian political satire became better appreciated in the world outside Australia more generally, because the totally tactless take no prisoners approach that much of it has can at times be refreshing in the world of bullshit in which we live. (Seriously, can you imagine anyone of any other nationality pulling off this?)

While John Clarke's mock interviews are often hysterically funny, perhaps his greatest piece of work is the television series The Games, that ran on Australian television in 1998 and 2000. This series was a mock documentary that supposedly chronicled officials organising the Sydney 2000 Olympic games. It showed idiotic bureaucrats getting into all kinds of dubious scandals of incompetence, massive waste, and corruption. The first series of this program ran several years before the Sydney games, and was met by a certain amount of bafflement by audiences as the fact that the Olympics were indeed being run by incompetent idiots was not at that point widely appreciated. By the year 2000, actual scandals had occurred to such an extent that the program looked like a rather mild reflection of reality. The second series ran immediately before the Olympics in 2000, and people watched it, nodded, and rather wished that reality was not like that.

Two years out from the London Olympics of 2012, we have seen nothing anywhere near this harsh in the British media. Perhaps this is because British television lacks the viciousness of certain parts of Australian television. (Print media are completely the other way round. Australian newspapers entirely lack the viciousness of the London tabloids). If the BBC or any of the other television networks over here had any style, they would simply take the Australian program from 1998 and run it. In prime time.

(*) Clarke is actually a New Zealander, in about the same sense that William Shatner is a Canadian.

(10)

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

- Groucho Marx

(19)

As seen in a signature on a Star Wars: The Old Republic games forum:

[Luke:] I can’t believe it.

[Yoda:] That is why you fail.

[Ayn Rand:] Success does not come from believing in a steaming pile of mystic gibberish, you stupid little green man [ignites her lightsabre and advances threateningly]

- Act IV, The Fountainhead Strikes Back

(4)

It has been said elsewhere that the Leader demanded 'cash' from the Icelandic types, and they thought he said 'ash'.

- Commenter 'Chuckles'

(14)

Well, as it is St Patrick's Day, I cannot think of a person more able to sum up certain features of Irish culture than Denis Leary.

(Not safe for all work environments).

(5)

Well, the days are getting longer, I have even seen quite a bit of the yellow thing in the sky, and I was woken up this morning by some randy pigeons on my terraced roof, so let's take it away, Mr Tom Lehrer:

Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don't you? 'course you do.
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes ev'ry sunday a treat for me.

All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Ev'ry sunday you'll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.

When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.
The sun's shining bright,
Ev'rything seems all right,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

Lalaalaalalaladoodiedieedoodoodoo

We've gained notoriety,
And caused much anxiety
In the audubon society
With our games.
They call it impiety,
And lack of propriety,
And quite a variety
Of unpleasant names.
But it's not against any religion
To want to dispose of a pigeon.

So if sunday you're free,
Why don't you come with me,
And we'll poison the pigeons in the park.
And maybe we'll do
In a squirrel or two,
While we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment.
Except for the few we take home to experiment.
My pulse will be quickenin'
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon.
It just takes a smidgin!
To poison a pigeon in the park.

(5)

If you want an, er, interesting take on the global warming alarmist/doomonger/population-controller mindset, check this out. Not safe for work, well, at least not in some offices I know of.

(5)

Trawling around some sites to find a corporate statement, I came across this gem:

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Attend The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit."

Blimey. Is the writer of that headline channelling the late Evelyn Waugh?

(9)

The Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist, Paul Krugman, does his best to annoy crusty free market ideologues such as myself with his sheer, implacable wrongness. It stuns me that the craziest remark in the post I link to here is not actually made up, but something he actually wrote.

Perhaps he should do Saturday Night Live.

(15)

Hitler finds out Obama lost Massachusetts... hehehe.

(11)

In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.

To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading "Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March":

That's certainly why I'm supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?

(1)

Hilarious (H/T, Glenn Reynolds).

(1)

"John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all the time. It was driving me mad."

John Lennon, as remembered by Ray Connolly. I have mixed feelings about John Lennon - who could support some strenously foolish things at times - but I loved his razer-sharp wit.

(17)

"An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."

An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O'Rourke.

(5)

I came across this gem of a comment by an Obama supporter - assuming the commenter was sincere and not a troll, and it is just too good to go unremarked. The comment was made on a suitably acerbic column by Matt Welch, one of those Reasonoids who have gone very sour indeed on the US president.

Here is the comment:

"I´m american and not angry. i´m happy with our new president. vladimir putin likes him, too. looking forward to his next 3 years as president."

Priceless.

(9)

This is superb.

(5)

BREAKING NEWS

It has just been reported that the head gardener at The White House has been dismissed after 28 years of loyal service to the many US presidents.

When interviewed the elderly, Caucasian gardener protested his innocence and said:

All I know is I was walking past the Oval Office and I yelled out to my assistants, "Has anyone seen the spade and the hoe?" The next thing I knew I was fired.

(7)

Check out this hilarious analysis of what you can infer from how people sleep after a one night stand.

Was it as good for you as it was for me?

(8)

Warning: for the irony-challenged, this is a spoof.

Or maybe not.

(14)

All I can say is... hehehe.

Read the testimonials... hilarious.

(23)

Via this website is a list of the ten most annoying taxes. I am not sure if I agree with the rankings, but still.

The website does seem to have many attractive features (absolutely! Ed).

(1)

I must say it is about time that we found out what the South Park kids made of the bailout. This is probably not entirely work-safe.

(3)

There is no stated national consensus that as a country we should substantially reduce overall masturbation, but such a reduction would benefit the health of many who wank – and those affected by passive wanking- the concept I invented a few sentences ago and am now treating as a genuine problem.

Here is a graph to illustrate how many people are killed by masturbation. It actually represents something completely different, possibly cat food sales, but I'm guessing that most of you are actually too stupid to actually look at the graph in any detail ...

- some Unenlightened Commentary sadly not actually supplied by Sir Liam Donaldson (with thanks to Obnoxio the Clown)

(11)

...and Carla Howell has just the song to put you in the mood!

(13)

This is pure genius.

I must say that things are going sour for The Community Organiser quicker than you can say the words "Andrew Sullivan".

(4)

I do not like all of Will Farrell's movies. But this one, about a nutty US TV anchorman, is wonderful. I wonder if any actual broadcasters have ever dreamed of doing this? I bet Jeremy Paxman has.

(6)

Inspired by a rather popular children's book and the truth, my colleague Minxuan came to work today sporting a t-shirt which I can only grant my heartiest approval:

Aside: It is great to work in an office where one can appear in excrement-themed clothing without any fuss. (You can get the t-shirt from Threadless.)

(10)

TARP - Troubled Assets Relief Program - is not an acronym that has yet made its way across the Atlantic in a big way. But it surely won't be long coming because yesterday it reached me, in the form of an email from Michael Jennings, containing this, which is a pictorial explanation of what it means. Apparently, some of MJ's Aussie stockbroker mates have been circulating this amongst themselves. A few seconds of googling also got me to a TARP song.

Obviously sanity is losing all the policy battles at the moment, big time, but at least sanity is speaking - and singing - out, and may yet win the ideological war. As I said in a comment on a recent Johnathan Pearce posting here, this bodes well for our great grandchildren, if not for our children.

(8)

This is on my Amazon wish-list. I love the mad, over-the-top style of the late Terry Thomas and from a young age, was delighted by his crazy turns of phrase, his hilarious demeanor and wonderful portrayal of the upper class cad. I must say that every time I am unfortunate enough to see Gordon Brown, The Community Organiser or Sarkozy on the television, it is hard not to shout out in true TT style: "What an absolute shower!"

Where did the expression "absolute shower" come from, by the way?

(0)

This is hilarious. All together now: aaaahhhhhhh!

(Hat-tip, Noodlefood).

(15)

Here is something very topical for today, Inaugaration Speech Generator:

A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he's calling for the internet's assistance one more time – to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever...

This is the result of my humble efforts to help out:

My fellow Americans, today is a psychadelic day. You have shown the world that "hope" is not just another word for "moon", and that "change" is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually fly.

Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces confusing and rigorous challenges like never before. Our economy is embarassing. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for spaghetti. Our healthcare system is lethal. If your nostril is sick and you don't have insurance, you might as well call a dustman. And America's image overseas is tarnished like a aubergine bullet. But cookin' together we can right this ship, and set a course for Hebrides.

Finally, I must thank my excruciating family, my beautiful campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank bankers for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of shootin' the American people. Without your rotting efforts, none of this would have been possible.

God Bless... the Internet!

(10)

Via Tom Palmer's blog, here is an excellent picture summing up what I think of bailouts.

(4)

I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies.

- A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash.

I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people's annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are - and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don't bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: "You can't win an argument."

(57)

I could not resist this:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!

JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure - right from Day One! - that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn't about me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road.. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. T he chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here. DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken. What is your definition of chicken?

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he's acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can't you people see the plain truth? That's why they call it the 'other side.' Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay, too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like 'the other side.' That chicken should not be crossing the road. It's as plain and as simple as that.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting ? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of moulting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your check book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never cra.#@&&^(C%..........reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

And someone added SARAH PALIN: I'm not really qualified to answer that question [wink], but I can assure Joe six-pack [wink] and all the hockey moms [wink] out there that I know what really matters to them [wink]. Incidentally [wink], I can see a road from my house, so I must be qualified to cross it...

(7)

Via the wonderful Boing Boing site, I came across this rather, ahem, interesting luggage. And the website is French. Quite what the airport security people will make of this is anyone's guess. I suspect that many airports will not see the joke.

(6)

Tee-hee.

(4)

This is magnificent.

(7)

Tee-hee.

(3)

We could all use a bit of cheering up in these worrying times. Surfing the Net, I re-read some of the funniest content in the blogsphere, thanks to Harry Hutton. This post still makes me laugh out loud. It has not dated at all.

(10)

From the Spectator:

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.

This is from two weeks ago, so adjust for the financial turmoil since... the advice still stands.

(9)

This is simply brilliant:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Henry Paulson

The serious point here, of course is that Americans are being asked to bail themselves out, or their more feckless citizens, many of whom are far richer than they. And this is meant to save "unregulated capitalism", apparently.

Thanks to Bob Bidinotto for the link. Bob has been on fire recently.
Update: here is an excellent summary of how the crisis has erupted, at Reason.

(6)

My favourite commentary on all the financial mayhem of the last few days and hours is this, from Scrappleface:

"To sustain this shining city on a hill," Mr. Bush said, "we need to rescue the ignorant, irresponsible folks - from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to Main Street - who got us to where we are today. We must guarantee that no American suffers the soft bigotry of being forced to live with the consequences of his bad decisions.”

The president, in remarks to the news media clearly aimed at reluctant Republicans in Congress, said, "Our financial system rests on a foundation of huge banks, brokerage houses and quasi-governmental agencies that followed Washington’s lead by gambling on long-shot, poorly-collateralized investments. Now this glorious way of life is threatened, and we must act to preserve it.”

"We need to guarantee that the structures, systems, people and products that got us to this point won’t be tossed on the ash heap of history," said Mr. Bush. "If these giant companies fail, then America will be left with nothing but thousands of small to mid-sized financial firms that made prudent investment decisions during the past 15 years."

I'll skip the next paragraph, if only so that I can say read the whole thing without having already stolen the whole thing, but the final paragraph demands inclusion:

"It is a moral imperative that we guard the civil rights of these idiots," he said. "If we fail, then we face the specter of free market capitalism run amok, and millions of Americans will feel the painful lash of personal responsibility across their backs."

One of the reasons I like this is because it makes me laugh, while at the same time allowing me still to be Thinking About It All, rather than just escaping into pure escapism.

One thing I do strongly believe ("know" would be putting it too strongly) that is relevant to all this mess is that the Great Depression was not caused by the Wall Street Crash, but by the mistaken things done before and after – especially after - the Wall Street Crash. To say that the Crash caused the Depression is that old folly of blaming the messenger for the message. It is now clear to us all, to those to whom it was not clear at the time, that the mistakes made during the previous few years have done a lot of damage. But I fear that the mistakes being made right now will prove even more costly.

And if I had to decide about all this, right now, knowing only what I know now, I'd say: let the market now do its job. The economy has been fatally mixed in recent years. Unmix it. If you have just lost your shirt, the taxpayer won't buy back so much as a button for you. Yes, cruel, and I certainly wouldn't say that every shirtloser has been stupid, as Scrappleface's Presdent Bush does. And such cruelty is certainly not how you win elections. But far more cruel would be (will be?) changing the rules of the entire game for the worse.

Update: Von Mises Institute Bailout Reader.

(34)

Something for the weekend:

(5)

I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel calmer, but you never know what sort of beasties might lurk.

There is this wonderful story - I am not sure if it is totally accurate, though - about how an employee who fell out with a notorious Bloomberg editor, called Matt Winkler, managed to transmit headlines on the service that repeated for hours, with the words: "Winkler is a Wanker - Official".

I just love the news business.

(9)

A new film is out later this year in the US taking the p**s out of Michael Moore. It looks quite amusing. Here's the trailer. Some of the one-liners are excellent.

(1)

“I thought I'd begin by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”

Spike Milligan

(50)

Make: has a wonderful way of dealing with security cameras.

This balloon-based anti surveillance camera project by Brooklyn-based artist William Lamson is an easy way to fool even the most sophisticated forms of surveillance technology. Helium filled rubber balloon set to the correct height and covered with enough static electricity to stick to any surface, such as a public camera. Now if only they made robotic pins for security officers to pop them.

(41)

"Weren't the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn't even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic...Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an inalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley."

- PJ O'Rourke

(13)

It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

(7)

Via the Boing Boing website - is this superb picture. Enjoy.

(45)

"Two substantive political issues are the federal budget deficit and the war in Iraq. Now, if you're electing Democrats to control government spending, then you're marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains. This leaves the Democrats with one real issue: Iraq. And so far the best that any Democratic presidential candidate has been able to manage with Iraq is to make what I think of as the high school sex promise: I will pull out in time, honest dear."

- PJ O'Rourke. He is still the greatest.

(16)

Via Tim Worstall's blog, I came across this imagined encounter between Polly Toynbee, and her political Mr D'Arcy, Brown, by this guy:

As for poor Pol, where to start? Imagine the despair, so raw you can almost taste it. Imagine the sense of crushing disappointment. For years now, she has waited for her prince to come - her dashing Norse warrior, who will sweep away all the effete detritus of the Blair years and unload a torrent of resources into child poverty and public services. Night after night she has left the red light on for him; lying in the bed in her Agent Provocateur lingerie, maybe some crotchless pants and a peephole bra, striking an uncomfortable pose lest he come charging through the door at any moment to sweep her up in his powerful arms.

Oh my god.

(13)

This is hilarious.

(11)

Well, the daffodils are out, even the shrubs in my small garden are starting to grow. The weather has been rather nice of late. So, in this spirit, take it away, Mr Tom Lehrer:

Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don't you? 'Course you do.
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes every Sunday a treat for me.

So if Sunday you're free,
Why don't you come with me,
And we'll poison the pigeons in the park.
And maybe we'll do
In a squirrel* or two,
While we're poisoning pigeons in the park.

(10)

While I'm linking to what is probably common knowledge here at Samizdata, let me throw in a link to Iowahawk's new Canterbury Tale for Bishop Rowan. In the unlikely event you haven't seen this already, you really, really owe it to yourself to click through.

Just a little taste:

41 Sayth the libertine, "'tis well and goode

42 But sharia goes now where nae it should;

43 I liketh bigge buttes and I cannot lye,

44 You othere faelows can't denye,

45 But the council closed my wenching pub,

46 To please the Imams, aye thaere's the rub."

(0)

I had run across some of David Wong's work in the past and really enjoyed it, so I was delighted to find his home base at Pointless Waste of Time. He is one smart, funny guy. Browse around, but I particularly recommend the classics "Inside the Monkeysphere," "The Ultimate War Simulation", and "The God Fuse".

The first two I had run across before, so they've gotten some exposure, but I was glad to find their home, as they are definitely worth re-reading.

(4)

If you do not read Michael Totten's blog regularly (and why the hell don't you? It is one of the best damn things on the internet!) then you may have missed this treasure.

And this comment is pretty good too:

This video proves that the surge has failed miserably. The Iraqis are running wild with their scissors and refuse to drink milk and wear seat belt. The pitiful American forces can't even muster the courage to summon insurgents to a shootout themselves. Instead, they have to order random drivers on the road as "human invitation cards". This is sickening.

Heh indeed.

(7)

Peter Briffa is on great form.

(9)

Tomorrow evening we are doing a blogger bash and one of the Samizdatistas, Michael Jennings in a bout of generosity is bringing a whole leg of Serrano ham to share. Another blogging groupie is kindly bringing a ham stand and a knife. So the video below is particularly relevant and wonderfully silly:

via dropsafe

cross-posted from Media Influencer

(5)

The Daily Telegraph asks:

"Just what do chalet girls get up to?"

I have been skiing several times and judging by the partying I er, saw (honest, guv), quite a good deal. As for the chaps, well...

(2)

Apparently, the reason Senator Hillary Clinton (New York) won the recent New Hampshire Democratic party US presidential primary was as follows:

No, it appears at this early stage of analysis that the pieces were in place for this win all along, and that the "secret weapon" of the Clinton campaign was their field program to significantly boost turnout with their strongest demographic, single women and women with less than a college degree.

BTW, I note there are no Samizdata category sections for "witchcraft" or "elections". This might be a case for either or both.

(45)

"The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more real calamity than the loss of a mistress."

- Adam Smith.

I think I agree, although I guess it depends on the mistress.

(4)

I am feeling rather groggy after a wonderful party yesterday - I also watched the excellent Barbarians-South Africa match in a pub - but this item on a website called Sharp as a Marble is an instant hangover cure. Good heavens - the stuff you can find on the web.

(14)

Important data on the meaning of curves and wiggles.

(8)

Not this kind of back up though.

via Make Marketing History

(8)

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

- George Carlin, US comedian.

(11)

David Friedman has some thoughts on the whole business of human mating and money. I suppose I will be deemed incorrigibly flippant, but I could not help but immediately think of this crackerjack of a funny post on such matters by the one and only Harry Hutton.

Deplorable, obviously.

(5)

I just ran across the apocalyptic biblical quote:

And in those days shall men seek death and not find it and shall desire to die and death shall flea from them - Revelations 9:6

In a sudden heavenly flash of deep preternatural understanding and prognostication the true meaning of this ancient prophecy suffused my being.

We are going to capture all the suicide bombers and lock them up for life! I also inferred from it that we will soon have the nanotechnology necessary to extend life to lengths most find unimaginable. This will allow us to lock up these self-portable munitions for even longer.

(4)

Cartoons, where would we be without them...

via Nasty, Brutish & Short

(2)

The British master of literary parody, Craig Brown - who lives in my old stamping ground of Suffolk - had this absolute blinder of a sendup of the whole, ghastly Prince Diana industry of ropey biographies and kiss-and-tell stories that cropped up after she was killed in that Paris car crash almost 10 years ago (I remember the headlines the following day so clearly, I cannot believe 10 frickin' years have elapsed).

Here's a sample of Brown in action:

A forthcoming book, Diana Ablaze (HarperCollins), carries an interview with an unnamed "highly placed" eyewitness to the blaze at Windsor Castle who claims to have spotted Princess Diana skulking in the shadows with a packet of Zip firelighters peeping out of her top pocket.

I nearly spilled my coffee all over the desk at that one.

I can also recommend this for students of history with a twist.

(21)

The other week, I wrote about the Bridge card game ploy known as the Yarborough - taken from the third James Bond story, Moonraker. The names given to various card game gambits can be wonderful. Consider this one:

The author has an amusing, though unkind, name for a holding of Ace King. He calls it ‘Kournikova’ because it is very pretty but never wins.

Well, I rather liked her.

(15)

In the beginning God covered the earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, with green, yellow and red vegetables of all kinds so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives.

Then Satan created Dairy Ice Cream and Magnums. And Satan said, "You want hot fudge with that?
And Man said, "Yes!" And Woman said, "I'll have one too with chocolate chips".
And lo, they gained 10 pounds.

And God created the healthy yoghurt that Woman might keep the figure that Man found so fair.
Satan brought forth white flour from the wheat and sugar from the cane and combined them.
And Woman went from size 12 to size 14.

So God said, "Try my fresh green salad".
And Satan presented Blue Cheese dressing and garlic croutons on the side.
And Man and Woman unfastened their belts following the repast.

God then said, "I have sent you healthy vegetables and olive oil in which to cook them".
And Satan brought forth deep fried coconut king prawns, butter-dipped lobster chunks and chicken fried steak, so big it needed its own platter.
And Man's cholesterol went through the roof.

Then God brought forth the potato, naturally low in fat and brimming with potassium and good nutrition.
Then Satan peeled off the healthy skin and sliced the starchy centre into chips and deep fried them in animal fats adding copious quantities of salt.
And Man put on more pounds.

God then brought forth running shoes so that his Children might lose those extra pounds.
And Satan came forth with cable T.V. with remote control so Man would not have to toil changing the channels.
And Man and Woman laughed and cried before the flickering light and started wearing stretch jogging suits.

Then God gave lean beef so that Man might consume fewer calories and still satisfy his appetite.
And Satan created McDonalds and the 99p double cheeseburger.
Then Satan said, "You want fries with that?" and Man replied, "Yes, and super size 'em".
And Satan said, "It is good."

And Man and Woman went into cardiac arrest.
God sighed. And created quadruple by-pass surgery.
And then Satan chuckled, and created the National Health Service.

(11)

Or the same familiar foaming...

Perfect for a lunch break...

A tip - here is the same video but with better translated subtitles. Alas, the embedding has been disabled, which is rather stupid. Fits the spirit of the thing.

via Boing Boing

(20)

The British government has issued a formal apology for Britain's conduct during the Second World War.

Speaking from the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett described Britain's conduct in the 1939-1945 period as "shameful":

We recognise that British military aggression between the years of 1939 and 1945 led directly or indirectly to the deaths of many, many people in Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. It is time to acknowledge this fact and to apologise for it.

The opposition Conservatives roundly condemned the Foreign Secretary's remarks as not going far enough and being "too little, too late". They urged the Government to issue a further apology for all the environmental damage inflicted on the world by British forces during the war and since.

In Germany, a spokesman for an association of SS veterans described the apology as "a good start".

(62)

Okay, enough serious stuff from me. Quick question to you all - what is the funniest book/film you know, and why? My personal favourites include Dr Strangelove, Animal House, A Shot in the Dark, Code of the Woosters and Carry on up the Khyber.

(20)

Thanks to my investigative reporting skills, I came across the following draft of the Conservative Party manifesto for the next General Election. It makes for fascinating reading:

"A Tory Party will be a Green government. Global warming, along with terrorism and capitalism, is the greatest threat to our lives. Today's Tory Party has shed its outmoded addiction to markets, freedom and selfish individualism. Instead, we pledge to shut down industrial civilisation during the course of our first term of office, although we realise that this goal is an ambitious one. Flights will be banned, along with cars, buses, trains, central heating, electric power stations, ports, ferries, factories, foundaries, shipyards, computer stations, everything.

We do of course accept that this policy is a radical one. However, under the funky leadership of David Cameron, a man who has already been prepared for the big challenges of life by his career as an old Etonian and executive for Carlton Communications, we believe our policy of returning to a glorious pre-industrial age is one that is sure to capture the public's imagination.

Vote Conservative.

Sounds like a real winner to me.

(1)

People will bet on anything these days.

(19)

"I always felt this country was going down the tubes when the television folk replaced Basil Brush with Roland Rat."

My dad, with his finger on the pulse as usual. Here is a tribute page to television's most superior fox.

(9)

Spring onions are spring onions (or scallions). Aussies might have recently beat us at a pointless activity (it isn't sport if you can do it in a chunky-knit tank-top) but they lag well beyond the Northern Hemisphere in the recognition of common-place veggies. And your water goes down the plug-hole the wrong way round... And that's moral turpitude that is, not the Coriolis effect.

- Commenter Nick M

(3)

According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Cuban doctors have performed a number of experimental ass treatments on the 79-year old president-for-life since he first fell ill in July 2006. These treatments have reportedly included cork blockage, cork removal, high-pressure steam cleaning, violent stomach-punches from the Cuban national boxing team, Santaria chicken sacrifice, and mandatory public anti-constipation rallies.

Seeking to reassure citizens that El Jefe remained in control, a photo in Havana's official newspaper last week showed a him relaxing and chatting with visiting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez while receiving a colonoscopy. This appeared to be administered via an auger bit attached to the rear axle of a 1953 Plymouth.

- Iowahawk

(18)

"I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with."

- Denis Leary.

(48)

Moving past discussions of endlessly increasing government responsibility over our daily existence and on to the really weighty matters of the day!

Gentlemen. Do not be fooled by recent television commercials depicting comely young hetero chaps guzzling that horrendous, barely alcoholic, sweet, creamy, Celtic muck known as Baileys (girl's drink). See this for what it is - a shameless attempt to broaden the demographic that consumes Baileys (girl's drink). It will not work. I do not care how many advertisements are broadcast showing Baileys (girl's drink)-clutching studly guys and their mates in bars catching the eyes of implausibly hot women. Baileys (girl's drink) is a girl's drink, and no amount of telemarketing sophistry can alter that fact.

(11)

Sex Dispute Ends In Tractor Rampage

Hot diggety dog. Don't they always?

(Via Drunkablog)

(19)

Okay, another plug for a funny piece of entertainment following my previous posting. My kid brother bought me the DVD of the first series of 'Look Around You', which is a glorious send-up of the 1970s programmes which were used to teach pupils and college students about science, maths and other subjects. The production styles: slightly fuzzy camera shots, corny old folk music, guys with Frank Zappa haircuts wearing tweedy jackets and black-rimmed spectacles, brought back scary memories of how long ago in style terms the 1970s now appears. I went to primary school in that era of flares, British Leyland cars, Roxy Music and endless labour disputes. The education programmes used to be narrated by some posh-sounding gent, or occasionally woman, normally with a perfect received pronunciation and heavy touch of condescension. The programme-makers would sometimes be a bit daring and let the vowels of Edinburgh or even Wales onto the show.

It may be unlikely material for a spoof, but the show Look Around You is in my view the funniest television comedy I have seen in years. I do not know if someone who was not brought up in Britain when these original programmes were made would 'get' the gag. However, if you are British, aged about 40 and your blood runs cold at mention of the words NHS spectacles or "modular study guides", then rent out or buy this DVD. We like to bash the BBC here at Samizdata because of the tax-financing of it, sorry, the licence fee, but this is a gem and is in the same bracket in my opinion as 'The Fast Show'.

(Health warning: I laughed so much at this show that my jaw is now actually quite painful. Avoid liquids).

(7)

The Monty Python purists may be offended - I tend to find such people awkward company - but if you want to have a fun night out and laugh yourself hoarse, then the crazy musical/panto/ "Spamalot" is a must-see event. It has been running in London's West End for a few weeks now and has already been a smash in Broadway.

"We are the Knights who say neeeee!"

(3)

The latest edition of The Onion has some invaluable advice on avoiding being "irresponsible" when it comes to drinking booze this Christmas.

God, I love that publication.

(9)

"Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy".

Groucho Marx (the Marx who actually had intelligent things to say about money).

(5)

Despite it being a highly sinister state, one of the most notable aspects of the façade North Korea presents to the rest of the world can be found in the unintentionally rich comedic value sincerely dished out by Pyongyang's global network of propagandists. Exhibit A would have to be the depiction of the country's kooky leader, Kim Jong il, who was famously and brilliantly lampooned in the movie Team America: World Police. Further evidence can be found in Samizdata postings on earlier oddball giggles courtesy of North Korea's propaganda machine - review these here and here.

But wait, there's more. A brief glance at recently-discovered Songun blog (looking through the comments threads there, it is quite remarkable how many people do not realise the site is satirical - hint, hint) prompts further amusement at the cack-handedness of the North Korean P.R. people. Did you know that North Korea is planning to host an international rock festival in early-mid 2007? It's true. According to the North Korean English language website, Voice of Korea, ROCK FOR PEACE

will be the 2007 version of Woodstock rock festival in 1969 but in a different location and with a different goal.

few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism. There are few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism.

There are, however, indications that the North Korean propaganda machine is starting to come to terms with the concept of producing convincing copy. Displayed at the bottom of the Voice of Korea website is a photo of a few hot and bothered middle-aged Euros posing with a group of male teenage soccer players. Songun (and this Guardian article) quotes the caption of the picture in question as reading

HEY, AMERICANS, YOU SHOULD LEARN A LOT FROM OUR NORWEGIAN FRIENDS WHO ARE HAVING REALLY GOOD TIME WITH NORTH KOREAN YOUNG SCHOOL BOYS.

(22)

"Jokes about polonium 210 will be half as funny 138 days from now"

(27)

Via the Adam Smith Institute blog I came across this excellent essay over at the LewRockwell site about South Park. Definitely worth a read. Of course it is not the first time that the outrageous but wonderfully sharp series has been noted for its libertarian, anti-puritan content. Blogger Andrew Sullivan even coined the phrase - I think - South Park Republicans. I doubt that the makers of the series would want to be seen dead with many modern self-styled conservatives, and I would love Parker and Stone to have a go at our own benighted David Cameron's Tories. There was a whole book on the subject by Brian Anderson called South Park Conservatives, which I quite liked, although it had some flaws. Reason magazine had a recent nice article about the characters.

Of course, arguably PJ O'Rourke was ahead of them all with his Republican Party Reptiles, which is essentially a libertarian credo in most respects. The nearest we have in Britain to such a celebration of brash material wealth and fun, irreverence towards do-gooders of all forms is motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson.

(0)

WASHINGTON, DC—After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday's midterm election, taking all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, retaining a majority with 100 out of 100 seats in the Senate, and pushing political candidates to victory in each of the 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs.

Update: All right, there are a couple of decent ones in there. I like Dr No.

(h/t: Avatar Briefs)

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Count this against the serendipitous beauty of found objects, but I just got suckered into opening an email I had not intended to, and found this bit of salient, nonsensical prose heading up a doubtless spurious offer to buy stocks in some ethanol company that I suspect is not incorporated anywhere near the State of Delaware:

Some fire hydrant conquers the ball bearing. When you see a fruit cake related to the deficit, it means that the accurately proverbial fairy takes a coffee break. Now and then, another purple power drill eats a freight train defined by the tornado. For example, a demon defined by a spider indicates that some pig pen sells the recliner to the salad dressing over a rattlesnake. When a cantankerous support group reads a magazine, the federal deficit starts reminiscing about lost glory.... If the minivan about a pine cone usually competes with a mortician over the support group, then a skyscraper hides.

This is as good a bit of expiatory nonsense as any I have ever read. And I have read a lot.

(2)

Corporate executives used to avoid talking about their war experiences. But today's educated executives thrill and eventually bore you with their high-altitude conquests. A quarter of them seem either to be just back from one of those instant-glacier expeditions or to be deep in the midst of training for one...You get the impression that every spot on earth over 10,000 feet above sea level is packed with magneta-clad millionaires luxuriating in their thin-air hardships.

- David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, first published in 2000, page 209.

(5)

The hardest part about 'libertarian' is learning how to roll your eyes

- Ze Frank

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See if you tell the difference.

(9)

With our troops safely back, the people of Iraq can then begin building a faith-based society emphasizing the same traditional values that motivate conservatives like you: women at home, prayer in school, capital punishment for homos.

- Howard Dean (channelled by blogging über-wit Iowahawk) is sniffing out votes in unlikely places.

(5)

Is a credit card. But James, I hear you cry, the availability of capital credit supercharged Western civilisation's development through the Renaissance and beyond, and a credit card is an instrument of a developed debt market - arguably the most socially beneficial institution we possess! Have you gone quite mad?

No, dear reader, just clumsy; I meant to write that the most ill-considered banking product ever devised is this credit card. It is a National Australia Bank (NAB) Visa Mini - confoundingly counter-intuitively, this card's most notable feature is that it's about half the size of a conventional credit card. Apparently this distinction alone will irresistibly and relentlessly reel in the target demographic - fashion conscious twenty-somethings (I think that might include me!) - but NAB has other slick devices in store to simultaneously deliver a KO in the coolness heavyweight championship of the banking world whilst obfuscating the somewhat steep interest rate levied on any transactions billed.

So let us dive in to this treasure-trove of modé. Before our young charges sally forth and actually use their Visa Mini cards to - you know - buy stuff, they need to know that The Bank wants them to be creative and flamboyant in the way they carry their card on their person, so it has thoughtfully provided some accessories to give each trendy young Visa Mini cardholder a dash of inspiration. Why not hang your Visa Mini on your mobile phone using the purpose-built attachment, o budding sophisticate? Does it look cool, and it is also great for the person who finds your misplaced Nokia; if they exhaust your mobile credit telephoning Siberian astrologers, they'll be thanking their lucky stars because instant replenishment is quite literally on hand! Now that is convenience. Of course, NAB's not saying we should trade the security for the superfabulous - ho ho, quite the opposite! Just read the small print on the "accessories" page (linked above):

Remember, you have to look after your Visa Mini Card and companion card as you would cash. So the best place to wear them is up close and personal.

Hang on a tick, says the Voice of Reason, this financial superstyling is all well and good, but what if the cardholder wishes to transact via an automatic teller machine or a manual imprint device or a vertical-loading swiper unsuited to such generation-NEXT Mini cards? Oh ye of little faith, those clever folk at NAB and Visa are one step ahead of the likes of you and I. If you are one of the select fashionistas who manages to successfully obtain a Visa Mini card, you will also receive a Visa Mini Companion Card, known in-house as Visa non-Mini Mini, which financially functions identically to your Mini card as it is linked to the same credit account. Instantly, it should be obvious to all that the inclusion of this extra card represents rare value - two cards from just one application! - but do not neglect to observe that the Companion Card has also been ingeniously designed to share the exact same dimensions of a conventional bank card! This comes in handy if you are ever concerned that your cute Visa Mini card might get shredded by one of those aforementioned dashed démodé - and rather expensively repaired - Mini munching machines. Or forever lost in a hopelessly antiquated, outsized wallet (this will not be a problem in the future, for wallets will shrink in lockstep with credit cards, which will in turn shrink in counter-lockstep to the increasing speed of CPUs. It's my rule). Sure, the Companion Card cannot be trendily worn dangling from a hog-style nose piercing like its Mini brother - in fact, Visa and NAB expressly forbid such inappropriate displaying of the Companion - but its "re-optimised" size does allow it to fit snugly into the card pockets of most purses and wallets. Now that's thoughtful design.

Okay, let me come clean. I believe the Visa Mini concept is rather less clever than the glowing words above might suggest. The more perceptive may even have detected a touch of cynicism creeping into the latter half of this post. Perhaps I am wrong to criticise - the virtues of this particular credit card might well have escaped my puny comprehension - so in the spirit of justice I will consult that estimable arbiter of financial products, The Hindu Business Line, to give its opinion on an Indian bank's version of the Mini:

ICICI Bank's Visa Mini Card is almost half the size of a normal credit card and, thus, handy.

The good: I love this card. The annual fee I'm paying now is only 19 bux. Being female I like all the little things and it was throughtful of NAB to give me accesories with my card like a safety clip, a long strap, phone attachment and a card cover. The phone attachment is useful for all those people who lose their cards but dont lose their phones(LOL)

The bad: nothing yet-only if they rase the rates

Overall: Love the card-its joined my collection of credit cards....

(3)

It seems the NO2ID campaign is starting to build up some momentum. We are not just nerds and rabble-rousers any more. We are nerds, rabble-rousers and comedians.

Yes, it is time for a comedy benefit. When 10 of the sharpest acts from the London stand-up circuit turn out on a Sunday night to support a two-year-old pressure-group, you feel we might just be getting somewhere...

By numbering everybody and everything, the world is going to be a better place? Unless you’re a bureaucrat, that’s a laughable idea. So why not laugh at it? That's what we intend to do at the Hackney Empire on the evening of October 1st.

Those of you in other parts of the world will just have to content yourselves with sending money to help save what remains of British liberty... but if you are handy for London, please come along. You can even book online (£12.50 a seat) by clicking the jolly banner:

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A few days ago, I was sifting through the intranet noticeboard of the large Australian bank I work for, and I stumbled on an organisation-wide message from our CEO. Anyone who has worked for a large multinational knows the breed - conversational in style, it is usually a somewhat ingenuous effort to create a collegial nexus between upper management and the ungrateful hoardes below. Amongst other rather tedious developments mentioned, the boss noted a recently deceased former customer of the bank who had, "in a rare display of loyalty and reciprocity", left a substantial portion of his estate to the bank in return for a lifetime of what must have been absolutely brilliant service.

I was, however, disappointed to read that the bank would be donating the bequest to charities in the deceased's region of abode. This will not do at all - the banks are going all wobbly-kneed and PC on us! What will the shareholders think? I would be tickled pink if our namby-pamby CEO cocked a snook at the "good corporate citizen" brigade and gratefully donated the entirety of the bequest straight to the bank's bottom line. Better still if he sallied forth proudly stating "that money will be used to refurbish the executive bathroom for the third time this (financial) year." Steve Edwards suggested he should blow the lot on a nice new tie. Anyone else have any ideas as to how the bequest might be spent? I am looking for the wildest corporate caricatures - the sort that would make Gordon Gekko blush. The funniest wins a degree of transient notoriety.

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My team, The Royal Philharmonic, are facing relegation after our key bassoonist was hit by a hamstring injury, and we had to play Terry Butcher on the kazoo.

(37)

How many Islamists does it take to change a lightbulb?

(20)

The spoof post below about how the wretched Tory leader 'Dave' Cameron might react to the case for abolishing inheritance tax - a thoroughly good idea - prompted some commentators to wonder about the UK media. It reminded me of an old quote attributed to the late British broadcaster, Brian Redhead, who is supposed to have said (I paraphrase):

"The Times is read by people who run the country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who fear we are being run by the French; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, while the Daily Mirror is read by people who delusionally think they run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Sun is read by people who do not care who runs the country so long as she has very large tits."

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The Conservative Party has launched a fierce attack on cabinet minister Stephen Byers following the latter's call for the abolition of Inheritance Tax.

According to the Party's Shadow Treasury Spokesman:

"This is neo-liberalism gone mad, a selfish Thatcherite appeal to naked greed and self-interest".

He added:

"This ludicrous idea of handing out tax cuts to the rich is outmoded and has no place in 21st Century Britain. We in the Conservative Party are committed to increasing the rates of Inheritance Tax in order to build a fairer society based on inclusion and social justice".

Party Leader, David Cameron has confirmed that his party will "fight tooth and nail" to save Inheritance Tax and "conserve the post-war walfare state settlement".

(9)

Roy Bacon seems to have a talent for finding the silver linings in dark clouds.

The panic ban on books and electronic gadgetry aboard transatlantic airliners throws into relief our terror at being deprived of the means to insulate ourselves from other people.

The shock of losing our personal entertainment bubbles should give us pause for thought, and make us wonder if there is a better way of enduring the enforced collectivism of a long-haul flight.

Five hundred people is more individuals than most of us can hope to know intimately in a lifetime. It is the population of a small village. If a packed Jumbo is a community, then aisles are village streets. All right, they are a bit narrow for a full-fledged passeggiata, but there is no reason we should not loiter, chew the fat, shoot the breeze – indulge in those unhurried activities that are so out of kilter with the rush of modern life. With a little lateral thinking the jet airliner, the destroyer of worlds, could be the means of regenerating some homely values.

If you do not like the idea of talking to your neighbour, and in the absence of printed matter, why not get a tattoo to entertain him or her? Depending on your physique you might be limited to a short story or a few haikus, but less – in terms of skin and stanzas – has always been more. Airport novels are not thousand-pagers out of literary necessity.

Or have a random word inscribed on your skin: from an authorised British Airways or United Airlines list, of course. Stewards could ask us our syntactical preference as we get on board, and arrange seating in a narrative way. Even with a 500-word vocabulary there would be the chance of dramatic developments as a YES fell into company with a PLEASE, or failed to see eye to eye with the MAYBE two rows back.

We should start thinking about this stuff. The War on Terror is here to stay, and it is only a matter of time before they take things to their logical conclusion and ban us from carrying anything at all onto aircraft beyond ourselves. And would that really be so bad?

It is often observed that a series of power cuts in a developed nation precedes a spike in the birth rate nine months later. A planeload of naked adults flying through the night: surely they could all find something to do!

(6)

Tri-Cities Police Waste No Time Finding Stolen Doughnut Truck

(10)

I am proud to announce the launch of the brand "spanking" new adults-only Samizdata site. You can expect the following from the Samizdatistas at our new, saucy digs:

The "Rugmuncher" Samizdata people are a fomping bunch of sinister and heavily creamed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the wad pulling felching enters of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many screws is a sense of humour and the titty fucking intermittent use of British spelling.

(Pornolize link via India Uncut)

(9)

Some headlines just speak for themselves. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

(5)

Tim Blair updates the Australian version of the English language.

(11)

but still a good one:

Three white collar prisoners are hanging around the yard comparing notes:

Former Exxon executive: They say I charged too much for oil. I'm in for price gouging.

Former Microsoft executive: They say I charged too little for software. I'm in for unfair competition.

Former Samsung executive: They say I charged the same price as everyone else for computer chips. I'm in for price fixing.

(14)

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 523 Mentos mints? EepyBird.com has the answer in the form of the Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments.

(25)

Hrm. Sorry to plunge you all into the bizarre depths of DailyKos twice in the space of a week, but some of the goings on there are quite amusing. If I was a psychologist, I would say professionally intriguing. Take DailyKos commenter "CheChe" and the - erm - unusual relationship he appears to have with his daughter. Here's an excerpt from his post, which is so tragi-comic it is hard not to laugh out loud when reading it:

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the Senate Republicans want to drain the treasury in order to give every American a $100 check. I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult - the rage and feelings of helplessnes were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words - nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, "Honey, I just don't know - I don't know what's going on in this country anymore..."

When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

Now, there is something really odd about this CheChe character's comments. He takes the exact same wordage from a previous comment he wrote relaying his daughter's earlier misery, and then superimposes another Kos talking point as the source of his little girl's current terror and sadness to create a new saga:

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be spying on everyone. "Even my Grandma?" she asked pitifully. [...] When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. "Doesn’t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?" she asked pitifully.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. "Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush’s trip ahead of time just in case...”

I'm simply not going to apologize for loving and comforting my daughter. [...] There's just not enough time to always be writing a new story each and every time something happens, and since this is what happened, it seems fair. Since we lost her mother there hasn't been a lot of free time around here.

(Hat tip: Zoe Brain)

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One of my all-time favourite bloggers - who also happens to be the funniest man in the blogosphere - is under attack from DailyKos contributor 'dday', who does not think Harry Hutton is particularly funny at all. This post raised the ire of 'dday' and provoked this response from the little pet. 'dday' starts off by qualifying his monumental whinge with a "some of my best friends are black, but..." type defence of his sense of humour :

I'm not above making fun of people. Actually I do it for sport.

I make jokes continually, so I'm pretty up on my joke construction.

(12)

In the Nanny State, you can never have too many warning labels, so they might as well be scientifically based:

Warning: This Product Warps Space and Time in Its Vicinity.

Caution: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight.

Handle with Extreme Care: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles per Hour.

Note: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a 'Gluing' Force About Which Little Is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power Can Therefore Not Be Permanently Guaranteed.

(13)

The Onion just keeps on getting better.

(6)

This vacancy should send my career into orbit!

(6)

This is the kind of stuff one can find probing around 'social networks' in companies. Makes my job worthwhile and goes some way to restore my faith in the individual within a large corporation. I came across this video recently, an employee of a company I consult for is into online video and is a dedicated supporter of Revver, an online video marketplace.

I guess I could have found him though his blog but the blogosphere is too large these days. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you... an interview with the founder and employees of CubeBreak.

Quicktime required to play the video.

(11)

The other day I received a letter which contained this message: "Darling, I adore you and I cannot live without you so if you don't marry me I'll kill myself". I was rather disturbed by this and even more so when I saw that the letter was addressed to "occupant".

The inimitable Tom Lehrer, composer of 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park' and other gems.

(15)

George W. Bush in free fall.

Nudge with cursor as necessary.

(22)

And speaking of secret police, the KGB's secret weapon, the ZiL 41041 (sedan) and 41047 (limousine) is now available for purchase on the free market:

The soft suspension is hiding the roughness of the road. Automatic 3-step transmission is conductive to tender starting and speeding up of the car. Multi-stage system of noise reduction, the effective sound isolation suppresses all the unwanted sounds in the car.

(27)

Andrew Sullivan:

It strikes me that people with a secure sense of their own faith are often the least liable to get upset by parodies or comedies about it. Religions may deal in divine truths, but they are run by human beings. And the combination is often funny. True believers know that; and don't care when they're made fun of. Insecure believers - and they often need fundamentalism to keep their own souls untroubled by doubt - are the touchiest.

I am writing this in the wee island of Malta, a country which has one of the largest church attendances per head of any country in the world, from what I understand. (The Maltese have churches with the same frequency as golf courses in Florida). And yet the good-natured folk of this island strike me as taking pretty much the sort of robust attitude to their faith as Sully mentions. (Why are you blogging and not on the beach, Ed?)

And interestingly, his point applies just as forcefully to other, non-religious beliefs too. Humour can be a weapon but it is also a shield.

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Tessa Jowell is the first British minister in recorded history to retire from her family on order to spend more time with her government.
- Andy Hamilton

(40)

Heh. Who was that speaker again?

From an email circular promoting think-tank events around Europe:

London

21/02/06 Policy Exchange "Why the Agenda of the Future cannot be delivered by a person stuck in the Past" - William Hague MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary

RSVP: info@policyexchange.org.uk

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Seeing as Perry is dabbling in the kingdom of Animalia, I feel I should wade in with my own weighty observations. As it is summer in Australia, cockroaches are making their presence felt in even the most salubrious of households. This must be so - I live in a shared-house dump and they are everywhere.

Tonight, as I was in the shower, I noticed three large brown cockroaches (not the more numerous but less offensive small types) scurrying about the bathroom. This convinced me to abandon my do-not-kill-if-not-necessary morals and I thus plunged the three big brown blighters into the tiles with a - erm - plunger. You know - that rubber implement you use to unblock the drains. Well, it was the first thing that fell to hand. Anyway, this did the trick and happily broke the cockroaches perfectly in half. Fine - let them dry out a bit, sweep them up in a few days and be done with it. I am a student living in a shared house; cut me some slack.

I leave the bathroom after performing my twice-daily cleansing rituals - it is summer in Australia, after all - to attend to this and that. I return two and a half hours later to find the upper part of each cockroach still wiggling its (remaining) legs lamely; unsurprisingly, for it's stuck on its back and missing half a body. The lower part - sadly disconnected from the mothership - was not returning calls.

Am I the only one who thinks this an amazing natural phenomenon?

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This item from America's satirical Onion site is too funny for words. Would advocates of "intelligent design" get the joke?

(6)

Even Homer J. Simpson is affected.

(12)

If I were a Dane I'd be getting more than a tiny bit sick of this whole "plucky little Denmark" meme that is evolving in line with current events. I cannot help but think of some small but tenacious dog - perhaps a Jack Russell - when anything is described as both "plucky" and "little".

This does not compute. As we all know, in the canine world Danes are rather greater.

(41)

Linux has been growing in popularity, now enjoying a higher market share than Mac OS. However, I fear that in all the hype and hysteria, the dangers have not had enough attention. We face a real possibility that the future of the creativity will be a barren world: a "tragedy of the digital commons" in which no one will create any content.

The truth is that Linux is one of the biggest threats to human creativity worldwide Some of you will find that statement remarkable, but it is true. As Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has said, "Linux is cancer." Ken Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has said that: "Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

Moreover, because it is uncontrolled by a single entity, and because the source code is freely available and open to modification by anyone, it is a key way that pirated content can find its way onto the internet. Put a copy-protected CD into a Windows machine, and the copy protection kicks in. (OK you can get round it at the moment by doing things like pressing Shift while you put the CD in, but that's just teething troubles.) But put a copy-protected CD into Linux and it just ignores the copy protection. The software on Linux to rip CDs does not check whether publishers want their CDs copied. It will be easy to legislate against Microsoft's and Apple's tools that allow copying, but Linux is just too uncontrolled.

Fortunately, the US Congress is waking up the the threat of the tragedy of the digital commons. A new bill introduced to the US House Judiciary Committee before Christmas would ban the "analog hole". In other words, any equipment that can play music or films, like a DVD player or CD player, would be banned from having analogue outputs that could be used to pirate the content. Any outputs would have to use a "rights signaling system". Of course, certain professionals need access to analogue outputs and of course they would be allowed to have them.

That's the hardware side. But we will not succeed in fighting the evil of piracy unless we also deal with the software side. At the moment it is too easy to write software that can pirate content. Linux is just an anarchy and we need to ensure that all computer motherboards sold prevent Linux from being installed. We need a licensing scheme, headed by the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, for all programming tools so that only trusted individuals may use them, and that inappropriate use of them is communicated via the internet to the government. To put it simply, either Linux dies - or the whole of human creativity will become a stagnant swamp. Anyone who disagrees with this is a communist.

(5)

"'We're not heroes. We're from Finchley".

A line from the film Narnia, based on the C.S. Lewis fantasy adventures. Strongly recommended.

(6)

One of our team brought this bit of aviation humour to my attention.

It is guaranteed to give you a bit of a smile.

(18)

I have long gotten a laugh from Dilbert, the socially inept engineer comic created by Scott Adams. Usually, Dilbert is harmless, but occasionally he causes real damage. Last Sunday's cartoon, which features Dilbert's mother in an excessive shopping adventure that ends with organ harvesting struck me as rather amusing, but according to Scott Adams' blog, dozens of people failed to see the humour in it:

Recently I killed thousands more people. I don�t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I�ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won�t be inspired to donate.

This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that�s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can�t be more than 1%. Let�s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I�m probably killing 150,000 people.

It�s times like this when �oops� doesn�t seem sufficient.

I bet you did not know that cartoonists could be so dangerous. If you ever meet Scott Adams, approach with extreme caution.

(7)

Those strange-sounding financial entities known as hedge funds, which are sometimes depicted as the Darth Vaders of the modern market, often have rather odd or dull names. So I was glad to come across a firm in the United States with a name that proudly celebrates the free market with unabashed gusto.

The firm has a great merchandise selection, too.

(24)

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

- Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter of MIT, getting down to the really important research. I wonder what they think of lampshades? (Link from Scott Wickstein).

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"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

Robert A. Heinlein. Sackloads of other quotes by the great man here.

(7)

When you spend as much time reading think-tank proposals as some libertarians do, there is a danger of losing all sense of proportion. For instance, there is a proposal to "reform" the state pension system, because it is due to become bankrupt in the next twenty years. Unfortunately, it may cost more to implement the changes (and bankrupt the system anyway). There is the call for "social justice", using the term in exactly the opposite way that it is understood to mean, in the hope of confusing your opponents into voting for you. Instead, they call you a liar and your normally loyal supporters stay at home. Then there is railway privatisation. Instead of allowing train operators to own the track themselves, we end up with the shambles of "National Rail" (and no doubt more subsidies wasted in the long run).

I have been looking for a term to describe such cunningly silly policy-making. So here goes:

Willetts, n. [pron. whil-itz] A policy proposal that is exactly twice as complicated as the problem that it is designed to solve.

David Willetts is by no means the only culprit, and his policy proposals are not always wrong, but with a nickname like "Two Brains", you're asking for trouble.

(1)

After returning from a few free drinks at an opening, care of a new venture of Slugger O'Toole (News and photos at 11... er tomorrow) I have returned and done some random reading. I highly suggest these two lampoons, another alternate history report set in 1944 from Rand Simberg and the Attack of the Blog by Iowahawk.

Enjoy!

(11)

"Don't fear failure. After all, without aiming high and occasionally hitting something else entirely, we'd never have discovered how tasty Northern Spotted Owls can be."

Stephen Green, of Vodkapundit, making a wonderful line in the course of an article where he writes about learning about individuality from Cary Grant. (The article is in the latest edition of the Objectivist publication, the New Individualist. Not yet on the web, as far as I can tell. Cary Grant is the patron saint of all well-dressed guys the world over).

(5)

The great Peter Briffa speculates on who should lead the Tory Party. He has three suggestions. Which one should we go for?

(0)

I promise only mild amusement, but sometimes mild amusement is what one needs. And there's a subtle mordancy underneath.

The latest splendid animation from Will Flash for Cash Productions in aid of the UK campaign against ID cards is here, and will explain the title of the post.

For those who missed it, their earlier biting attack on Mr Secretary Clarke and the glorious scheme using a cute musical puppy is here.

Welcome to a strange world. Sound, and familiarity with British political figures, most definitely an advantage.

(14)

"Hi, we're aliens from another planet and our intentions are purely hostile."

The Simpsons.

(14)

I was sorry to hear that Robin Cook croaked. When he was alive I wanted to toss him into a vat of hot tar, to make him howl; but now he's a stiff I realise what a loss he is to our nation.
- Harry Hutton

(7)

After watching this I just had to do a hatchet job on an old standard:

500 Pounds

If you miss the plane I'm on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I've dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I've dropped 500 pounds upon your head.

Lord it's one, Lord it's two,
Lord it's three and Lord it's four,
Lord it's five hundred pounds upon your head.

Not a shirt on your back,
Not a penny left intact.
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
This-a way, this-a way,
This-a way, this-a way,
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away

If you miss the plane I'm on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I've dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I've dropped 500 pounds upon your head.

(28)

A powerful tornado has swept through the city of Birmingham in the West Midlands.

The twister struck earlier today, cutting a swathe of devastation through the districts of Kings Heath, Moseley, Quinton, Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook.

Mercifully, there are no reports of any fatalities but initial estimates put the cost of the damage as high as £7.50.

(26)

The Sage of Edmonton has been listening to the cricket, and has stumbled on Australia's dirty little secret:

The Australian networks are picking up the BBC feed, so the network observes a strict one-Brit one-Aussie rule at all times in the booth. This leads to a lot of barbed, culturally volatile exchanges covered by a transparent shellac of collegiality. The English are generally poor at hiding their commingled fascination and horror at the gusto and glowing health of the Australians. The Aussies, for their part, maintain a suitable Zarathustran superciliousness--but it sure seems like homo australis is awfully vulnerable to the verbal stiletto that every Englishman above the age of four carries in his boot. Every time the various English broadcasters start to wax acerbic, their Australian colleagues become flustered and try changing the subject to the events on the field (as well they might, since their squad is making England's cricketers look more like Scotland's). Has any attention been paid to the Australian sense of humour, or absence thereof? They seem to mostly export soap and pop stars to the wider world while their British and Canadian brethren airlift comedians. It's not a good sign when your most sophisticated national ironist is Dame Edna Everage.

Most Australians will deny it, but Colby Cosh is right on the money. In my own case, I never had a chance; not only am I Australian, but I am descended from Germans. I could not tell a funny joke to win the Ashes.

This is not to say that Australians do not have a sense of humour. Comedy is a big thing here, but Australian humour does not translate well, being full of allusions that only the locals understand. And I sadly suspect, the quality is not that good either.

Why is it so? Or is it obvious, and, me being Australian, I missed the punchline?

(114)

Could this be linked to anything?

Plans by an alliance of rightwing extremists and football hooligans to exact "revenge" on Muslims after last week's bomb attacks are being monitored by police.

The Guardian has learned that extremists are keen to cause widespread fear and injury with attacks on mosques and high-profile "anti-Muslim" events in the capital.

And so another unfortunate spoke is added to the growing cycle of violence. But beneath the predictable roar of indignant outcry, it behoves us all to take the time and trouble to examine the plight of the native British working-classes; a plight which is all too often trodden underfoot in the wholesale rush to judgement.

Over the last few decades, the British working-classes have had to endure the indignity of watching their homelands colonised by foreign settlers, while oppressive "zero-tolerance" policing and so-called 'anti-social behaviour orders' have made them virtual prisoners in the few, dwindling communities that remain to them. At the same time, their jobs have been exported abroad, while the trade unions that used to promote their interests have been politically neutered. Thus despised, impoverished and persecuted, is it any wonder that some of their activists have taken it into their hands to strike back?

Nor should it be forgotten that they have no guns, no helicopters, no batons, no dogs, no infra-red detectors, no CS gas sprays, no tazers or other quasi-military means of defending themselves. Instead, they are forced to use what few pitiful resources they do have in a despairing bid to restore some dignity to their lives.

Of course, violence should not be condoned because it actually further damages the patriotic cause. But the victims of that violence would learn a great deal from an honest reflection of what role they may have played in driving these patriotic campaigners to such desperate measures.

Few, it seems, are prepared to face up to the simple truth, let alone articulate it. Instead, there is likely to be a chorus of demand for more security measures such as surveillance cameras, ID cards and oppressive police powers, all of which will merely add fuel to the fires that rage within the activists, reinforce their sense of hopelessness and humiliation and virtually guarantee further patriotic operations in the future.

We can all agree that the violence has to stop but in order to achieve that end we must urgently and sincerely address the legitimate grievances of the patriotic community.

(15)

"A libertarian is a conservative with an acknowledged vice, like say, a teenage girlfriend."

The as-ever brilliant P.J. O'Rourke (hat tip Catallarchy)

(10)

... hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit.

Physicist: What happened?

Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! -- I fell and broke my leg.

Physicist: You stepped... off... the balcony? What on earth for?

Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure?

(0)

This story raised a dry smile.

(176)

Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:

Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?

Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir...

Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?

Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being 'culturally inclusive' by choosing a non-European name!

(14)

This gem is of unknown true provenance but I found it amongst the Freepers:

If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraqi theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death ratio of 60 per 100,000.

The firearm death ratio in DC is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of ... WASHINGTON, DC!

Sounds like an excellent strategy to me.

(8)

This arrived in my inbox via the Crikey email

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named ��Governmentium�.

Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each re-organisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as �Critical Morass�.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has 1/2 as many peons but twice as many morons.

(24)

Selected research on bread:

More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.

Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.

More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.

Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.

Newborn babies can choke on bread.

Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

Providing all the scientific support any nanny-stater will need to implement controls.

(0)

Cricket will be suspended indefinitely at Albion College from now on, in order to preserve the playing fields, it has been announced.

Head Boy, Mr ARP Blair said: "The groundsman has explained to me that it is vital to maintain the cricket square and outfield that have nurtured Albion's spirit of fair play for nearly 300 years that we stop cricket immediately. Of course we must do what the groundsman says. His staff have have had great difficulties arising from boys running up and down on the pitch and using bats and balls in a most irresponsible manner. By stopping play indefinitely, he has explained, the mystery of the soil and their special gardening techniques (which he will explain to boys sitting the Rural Sciences exam), will allow them to keep the playing surfaces safe from any boys who might tear up the grass.

"We have to trust the groundsman in this. He, after all, knows more about fields than any number of cricketers. I've heard that some people are saying he only wants this so that he can spend more time drinking in the pavilion, and that I'm only supporting him to curry favour with those boys who have never seen the point of games or latin and would like this to be an agricultural college. Anybody saying such things is a traitor to the school's tradition, and if I find out who they are they will be very severely dealt with."

[Apologies to overseas readers for over-British allusions. Glossary available on request]

(20)

The Great International Petroleum Exchange Uprising was noted here earlier, and plans for a T-shirt commemorating the event are in the works.

(28)

According to Dutch health investigators, going to church can cause lung cancer and other respiratory problems, because of the carcinogenic effects of candles and incense. Dr Theo de Kok, says that it is "very worrying". With Christmas approaching, levels of pollutants would be expected to rise.

The solution is obvious. The European Union must immediately ban church-going for all children, impose a tax on adult church-goers, put health warning signs on the outside of all churches and copies of the Bible.

Oh, and ban Christmas.

Obviously, the EU must also impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on any country that does not comply with this (the USA).

In dreaming up appropriate health warnings for church-going, I like the following:

God kills!
Do not worship God in the presence of children
and cutest of all:
God can seriously damage your unborn child

(7)

The Onion does not always crack me up like it used to, possibly because it grows more and more difficult to effectively satirize an increasingly bizarre world. But this piece, Housemates Reject Third-Roommate Debt-Relief Plan, is just devastating. They manage to sneak in a reference to virtually every conceivable critique of the IMF, from both the left and the right, from moral hazard to environmental degradation. They even address the topic of "conditional" loans whose conditions have nothing to do with improving debtworthiness or economic performance:

Although the donor roommates supplied additional aid in the months that followed, the AMF placed strict conditions on the loans. These conditions were designed to accomplish three goals: to prevent corruption and misuse of funds, to ensure that the monies were spent wisely, and to reduce third-roommate economic isolationism, integrating the debtor's personal economy more fully into the interdependent apartmental community.

"We only asked for three things, man," Huygens said regarding the structure of the loan. "First, that Chad quit partying so much. Second, that he open a checking account so he can budget his cash. And third, that he bring his kickass stereo system out of his bedroom and into the living room where we can all enjoy it. It was only fair."

The only way this could have been improved upon might have been to lampoon the "debt for nature" swap; Chad's debt might be forgiven in exchange for certain herbal products, for example.

Well done, gentlemen. More like this, please.

(8)

According to recent reports, Yasser Arafat is in a state of superposition. Palestinian and French sources state he is dead and alive at present. If true, this represents the greatest breakthrough in applied quantum physics of the still youthful 21st century.

Professor Unzer N.T. Katz, a Quantum Mechanic, told reporters: "This is the most amazing event in the history of Quantum Mechanics! We experimentalists have managed to superpose an electron here and there, or perhaps a few measly atoms... but to superpose an entire human being! The implications are staggering! They are beyond imagining!"

French doctors were unavailable for comment.

(13)

I have received this letter from an Iraqi concerned citizen, who wishes to remind U.S. voters of the historic importance of their choice on November 2.

Dear voter,

I am an elderly man. Under the Clinton administration I had an excellent well-paid job. I took many vacations and had several holiday homes. Since President Bush took office my life has completely changed, and in every respect for the worse.

I lost my job.

I lost both my sons in the terrible Iraqi war. I lost my homes. I lost my medical insurance. In fact, I lost practically all of my possessions and found myself homeless.

Adding insult to injury, when the authorities found me living in bestial conditions, far from helping me, they arrested me.

I shall do whatever Senator Kerry wishes to ensure that a Democrat is returned to the White House next year. Bush must go!

There. I thought that all Americans would like to know what a man of my years thinks of the Bush administration.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Best wishes,

Saddam Hussein

[thanks to the French libertarians for forwarding this to me from this blog.]

(11)

I am really looking forward to seeing the new Alien vs. Predator movie, the tagline of which is...

Whoever wins... we lose

But I also find it very appropriate to see those sentiments applied here as well regarding the other big fight epic due to be released a few weeks hence. No, I am really not looking forward to that one.

(102)

After a hard day of wearing a new butt-crease in my chair in our conference room refereeing various committees drafting policies and procedures, allow me to unburden myself of a few pet peeves regarding the use and abuse of the English language:

"Utilization" and "utilize" are a blot on the English language. They are polysyllabic abominations spawned by the regulatory/consulting complex, suffering, as well it should, from an inferiority complex that renders it too insecure to use the perfectly good word "use."

"Literally" is never used to mean literally. Rather, it is universally used to mean "figuratively," its exact opposite (e.g. "He literally tore my head off for utilizing bad data in my report").

Serial commas, by contrast, are God's gift to careful draftsman, and are scorned only by those too illiterate to comprehend that they do, in fact, serve a purpose.

When, and why, did people stop using two spaces after periods? For that matter, when, and why, do people use apostrophes before every single frickin' terminal "s" regardless of whether it is possessive? Or should that be irregardless of whether it is possessive?

No peeve too petty, that's our motto. Readers are, of course invited to submit their own peeves in comments.

(3)

You've all seen trolls, and know that they come in various guises. You might even be a troll yourself. To find out which sort, some bright spark has put together the Internet Message Board Wandering Monster Table, an essential resource for any blogger with comments.

(Via A.E. Brain.)

(7)

I cannot help but suspect that Babbage and Turing never really envisaged the marvellous uses to which computing devices would be set.

Cats? Fish? Click here.

(39)

Here, at last, is the truth that the US Government tried to suppress.

They did not want the world to know but, thanks to the painstaking forensic skill and integrity of the Fourth Estate, the skeleton is finally out of the closet!

"We stand by the authenticity of this document" - CBS

".....the smoking gun" - Reuters

"...incontrovertible proof" - Guardian

"...a major setback for the Bush Whitehouse" - BBC

"What else are they trying to cover up?" - New York Times

Case closed.

(11)

The old saying is that "dog bites man" is not news, but "man bites dog" is.

Well, how does "dog shoots man" fit in?

(0)

James Lileks, riffing on John Kerry's nomination speech last month:

My life today would have been much easier if I hadn’t been struck with the vision of a former president taking the podium in Boston to announce “I’m Bill Clinton, and I’m reporting for booty!”

(8)

God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time! Forty three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs! He created slugs! They can't hear! They can't speak! They can't operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
- from Time Bandits

(5)

From David Carr's posting (quoting the Independent newspaper):

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

I have a cunning plan.

Immunisation is crude and easy to avoid, especially for immigrants and people who move. What is needed is a form of treatment that is visible and difficult to fake. Vaccines can be expensive and there is a whole problem of producing and storing them. The paperwork involved in ensuring that all children have been vaccinated is complicated and errors can creep in.

So the obvious solution is a full frontal lobotomy with a tatooing on the forehead. Consider a few benefits of such a scheme.

1. The pharmaceutical companies lose some business, but they avoid being associated with any screw-ups from the scheme. (This could be spun as an anti-corporate greed measure)
2. No more juvenile delinquency, except the occasional suicides. (Blamed on tobacco companies)
3. No more worrying about education standards: all children will be morons.
4. Arguing about teaching methods will not matter. (Peace at last!)
5. Parents no longer need to pretend to raise their children.
6. The law can be changed: leaving a child alone at home will be no more dangerous than leaving the television switched on.

What is a little puzzling to me is how many schemes are being done to children which would be considered highly objectionable if applied to say 'black people'.

Part-birth abortion is virtual infanticide, we have NHS doctors calling for premature children not to be incubated. We have conscription into schools, prohibitions of all sorts, cameras in classrooms to allow parents to watch, ID cards for children. Child rapists and killers can get shorter jail sentences than a child has to spend at school, (and they sometimes gets jobs in schools). Child criminals are effectively told to "do it again, you have to kill someone before we do anything", so the honest children get preyed on.

The only short-term way of preventing this sort of abuse would be if children had the right to vote. Would four-year olds come up with worse lunacy than that which they have to endure?

(11)

This is the best animation I have come across in a good while.

It it appears to be a genuinely non-partisan poke at the Bush vs. Kerry contest and although it may take a few minutes to download it is slickly produced and very funny, even for an Englishman.

(4)

Now where did that come from?

Japan's economy is actually growing at more than a statistically obvious rate for the first time properly since the 1980s. The fact that a heatwave is being credited with boosting business leads to the obvious conclusion.

Global warming is Good for Capitalism. Light those brown coal fires now! Chop down those hedgerows! Hunt those whales! Bring back leaded gasoline!

(11)

The New Yorker(!) teed off very nicely on the rather stuffy account of a certain testy exchange between VP Dick Cheney and Senate Minority Lead Pat Leahy.

The background: The Veepster has been accused by none other than The Honorable Mr. Leahy of profiting (via Halliburton) on the blood of American soldiers spilled in Iraq. When Leahy approached Cheney at Senate function recently, full of smarmy bonhomie, Cheney told him to fuck off, or to go fuck himself (accounts vary, but everyone agrees the F-bomb was dropped).

The Washington Times reported this as follows:

Vice President Dick Cheney cursed at Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, in a confrontation on the Senate floor while members were having their annual group picture taken earlier this week. . . . According to [an] aide, Mr. Cheney . . . responded with a barnyard epithet, urging Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility.

The New Yorker, well, took it to the next level.

(4)

And now the important news of the summer: a record crop is expected of grapes in the Champagne region [French link]. The absence of frost last Winter and mild weather in Spring is a hopeful sign for a good vintage, although quantity and quality do not necessarily follow. Over the coming weeks vines will be pruned of some of the grape bunches to ensure a greater concentration of sugar and acidity.

So the next time some tree-hugging Greens moan about penguin habitats, they can console themselves with a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot.

(18)

By now of course, all right (read 'left') thinking people are fully conversant with the theory that the Moon landings were faked by the US government in a warehouse decorated with papier-mache and pieces of screwed-up tinfoil somewhere in the Nevada desert. This elaborate hoax was perpetrated as an underhand PR attack on the Soviets, who would never have indulged in any such below-the-belt behaviour, being too busy with stuff like this (hat tip: The Bleat).

I don't know this for sure, but I am guessing that probably most of America's nukes were fake as well, and possibly even some of their presidents. We already know that Star Wars was fraudulent (the strategic defense initiative, not the popular sci-fi movie series, which was, of course, entirely true to life) and it has been suggested in the past that Ronald Reagan himself was actually a puppet from 'Spitting Image'. Although I suspect that particular theory may have arisen from some confusion about the difference between real life and what one sees on television. Clearly human evolution still has work to do.

Anyway, for those of you who have not seen this already (not new itself, but possibly new to others than just me) irrefutable proof of the faking of the moon-landings can be found right here. Those of British origin will particularly appreciate these pictures. Essential viewing for all human beings who still have brains.

(hat tip: Chicago Boyz)

(22)

A mugger jumps out and threatens a well-dressed man with a knife, and shouts:
"Hand over your money!"

"You can't do this," says the outraged man. "I'm a local councillor!"

"In that case," replies the mugger, "hand over my money!"

(via the Adam Smith Institute)

(12)

Some readers will have observed that I fight an often lonely battle against the forces of the militant lesbian, anti-humanist, fascist, tree-hugging puritan conspiracy to wipe out masculinity. We know as a scientific fact that the best lovers are larger men. I have previously commented on the sexual inadequacy of skinny types.

It is therefore clear that the current obesity obsession in this country is part of a nefarious conspiracy aimed at wiping out Great Britain. Was Henry VIII skinny? Did Winston Churchill eat tofu?

Help is at hand in the form of a marvelous new book Eat What you Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook. The reason for this masterpiece is set out in the Foreword:

I wrote this book because I was tired of being told what to eat. I was tired of the Food Pyramid and vegetable oil and small food. I was tired of pinch-faced little people who actually got angry when I talked about lard and egg yolks. I felt it was time for a backlash. Time to celebrate things like bacon grease and heavy cream. Don't we have better things to feel guilty about? Like the resurgence of velour?

This is not a serious cookery book, says the author. No doubt he could be sued by the pinch-faced little people.

(4)

Imagine the European People's Democratic Front.
Imagine their first press release...

We, the people of Europe, hold the following truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Unfortunately, we don't consent to a junket-ocracy, which is what the proposed EU will be.

As such, we undertake to occupy and subvert any referendum in Luxembourg, a country with a conveniently tiny voting population of less than 350,000. One residential mailing address (with 50,000 registered residents) later, and the constitution will be consigned, where it belongs, to the dustbin of history.

SlowJoe

(7)

Michael Moore bans Michael Moore?

It seems the new stupid campaign finance regulations in the USA (the result of Michael Moore's years of vomit among others) are about to be used to restrict distribution of Moore's latest wind-up.

Because the law attempts to prohibit all sorts of 'in kind' donations to the Republicans [I meant political parties], making a movie that plugs one candidate at the expense of another in election year could be ruled "interference" by the Federal Electoral Commission. I wonder how Michael Moore feels being felt sorry for by the US Libertarian Party.

Of course it is a shocking abuse of the US constitution. (sigh) How sad!

(3)

Today I did something I do not normally do, but ought to do more often. I bought the latest issue of Viz, which looks like this:

What a fine British institution this is! Dirty jokes. Merciless send-ups of political and any other sort of correctness, attacks on the high and mighty (especially God), and lurking under its lewd surface is a fiercely freedom-loving political agenda, not unlike that pushed in a similarly subversive manner by the creators of South Park.

I have been feasting in particular on the wonderful Viz letters pages, where, in this issue, there is to be found a thoughtful exchange of views on the nature of the terrorist menace, and the concomitant threat to civil liberties posed by the various state measures that are allegedly being taken to curb it.

T. Harris of Leeds starts the ball rolling:

So the Home Secretary plans to force us to carry identity cards with our iris patterns encoded onto them. That's rich. How dare David Blunkett judge people on their eyes when his don't even work. It would be like the head of the DVLC not having a number plate on his car.

Les Barnsley of Barnsley pursues the theme of iris patterns:

Could the Home Secretary explain to me how biometric checks on iris patterns and fingerprints are going to help keep tabs on muslim cleric Abu Hamsa.

Good points both, I think we would all here agree.

Londoner Charles Nylon has this reflection to offer concerning the nature of terrorism:

These suicide bombers really get my goat. What an evil way to kill innocent people, running screaming into a crowded place like madmen, blowing themselves and everyone else to bits. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned gentlemen terrorists like the IRA, who'd quietly pop a nail bomb under a pub table and leave without making a song and dance about it.

But Bamber Ross of Ross ripostes:

Mr Nylon (above letter) does not know what he is talking about. Gentlemen terrorists, indeed. When you get stang off a wasp, it just flies off to sting again and again in the style of the IRA bombers that Mr Nylon so admires. However, when a bee stings, it pulls its arse inside out and, like a suicide bomber, dies. And I think we' all agree that bees are much nicer than wasps.

But Prof. J. Shiels of the Dept of Entomology, Maudling College, Oxford, rejects this bee/wasp metaphor in no uncertain terms:

I'm afraid Mr Ross's insect/terrorist analogy (above letter) doesn't hold water. The reason that we agree that bees are nicer than wasps is nothing at all to do with their stringing ability. It is because bees are furry, like little black and orange flying teddy bears that make jam. Wasps on the other hand are all hard and have them Darth Vader faces. And they chase you when you run off.

Good to see the academic classes contributing to the debate there.

And the profundities just keep coming. Says Tracey Cusick of Cumbria:

The NSPCC keeps going on TV and saying that unless I send them three quid a month, a baby called William won't be so lucky next time. I suggest that we don't give in to these extortionists and blackmailers, or they'll be back with a threat to top him if we don't send them a fiver.

Wise words indeed.

Viz. Gentlemen intellectual terrorists. At all good newsagents now. And I have not even mentioned the Fat Slags.

(0)

Four people were bragging about how smart their cats are. The first was an Engineer, the second an Accountant, the third was a chemist, the fourth was a Government Worker.

To show off, The Engineer called to his cat, T-square, do your stuff. T Square pranced over to a desk, took out some paper and pen and drew a circle, a square, and a triangle.

Everyone agreed that was a pretty smart cat, but the Accountant said his cat could do better. He called his cat and said, Spreadsheet, do your stuff. Spreadsheet went out into the kitchen and returned with a dozen cookies. He divided them into 4 equal piles of 3 cookies each.

Everyone agreed that was really good, but the Chemist said his cat could do better. He called his cat and said, Measure do your stuff. Measure got up, picked up a 500ml graduated cylinder, walked over to the fridge, took out a litre of milk, got a 300 ml glass from the cupboard, measured and poured exactly 275 ml of milk into the glass without spilling a drop.

Everyone agreed that was good too. Then the three men turned to the Government Worker and said, "What can your cat do"?

The Government worker called to his cat and said, Coffee Break, do your stuff. Coffee Break jumped to his feet, ate the cookies, drank the milk, pooped on the paper, screwed the other three cats, claimed he injured his back while doing so, filed a grievance report for unsafe working conditions, put in for compensation, and went home on sick leave.

(11)

It's a tough job but somebody has to do it.

I have been doing my bit for the War against woman-hating, religious bigotry by checking out the Miss Universe finalists. Personally I think the registered Republican Miss USA looked much better than Miss Australia, the eventual winner.

Useful sociological experiment: check out Miss Sweden and try to focus on horrible tax rates in that country. So if Sweden had the burqah, perhaps they would have lower taxes. Tough call.

(5)

Cecile Dubois begins a longish post here with a discussion of the fact that her classmates, teachers, etc., have now found out about her blog, and are all reading it. Where will that lead? Somewhere interesting, I feel sure. Her English teacher is reading all of it.

So what will her English teacher make of this, which comes at the end of the very same post? Here's Cecile taking a pin to the Great Blimp bimself:

� Michael Moore is my idol. His posters plaster my walls, and I'm dying to see his next film. I seriously like want peace in the world, and we should so elect him as president. Kerry is such a Nazi for me � we should kick his arse, man! We shouldn't have any enemies at all! I think we should instate Muslim traditions so another 911 doesn't happen, that way those funny people (heh heh) over there don't nuke us, and can freely migrate over here. Don't you just love France? I want to bring their culture here! I love America � but to make it even better, we should have more diversity! Let's celebrate the Palestinians � I'm going to dress up as a suicide bomber � it would fit me so cool. Don't I look sexy in that belt? I'm da bomb! (Tee hee!) Ah, Michael Moore. Amen to him. We shouldn't have guns. If a burglar comes in with one, I'll just roast him a pig and kiss him on the cheek � let him come in and steal my TV set � I so don't deserve it. We should also welcome the proletariat to power! We rich people are scum. Yo dude? Yeah, I'll meet you in front with your Mercedes Benz. OMG, did I say Mercedes Benz? Whoa! I meant electric car � gas kills! Peace out! �

What she should make of it is that Cecile must be encouraged to stick with the writing.

(0)

Gotta give Matt Drudge credit for these back to back headlines:

Putin fights off 'authoritarian' charges...

Report: Russia Guards Told to Smile More...

(33)

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has once again pledged to introduce a compulsory national ID card scheme saying that ID cards were an essential tool in the fight against global warming.

Speaking to the BBC today, Mr. Blunkett denied that ID cards were merely a fetish and emphasised that they were a much-needed response to a fast changing world:

"Everbody understands the need to take serious steps to tackle the growing menace of global warming but we cannot even begin to do this without a proper national ID card system".

Mr. Blunkett was also dismissive of the scheme's critics:

"These so-called civil libertarians who try to suggest that there is no link between ID cards and global warming are simply dangerous and deluded. They are terrorists in all but name."

According to a recent opinion poll, every single person in the UK has pledged that they will murder their own children and then kill themselves horribly unless the government issues them with a biometric ID card immediately.

(7)

Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion
- Seen used as a signature on a games forum

(9)

Europhile, n. (pronounced "yew-ro-file") Person or institution with an enthusiasm about the merging of the European States into a single State, usually regardless of any other considerations. A Europhile is often reluctant to be identified as such, especially when he is a politician.

Urophile, n. (pronounced "yew-ro-file") Person with an enthusiasm for being subjected to showers of urine. A Urophile is often reluctant to be identified as such, especially when he is a politician.

Now it would be easy and gratuitous of me to imply that both are one and the same, but this is obviously unfair.

One is a harmless pervert who engages in fantasies in private that involve no coercion against other people. The other is a dangerous pervert who conspires in private, and who needs to be exposed and subjected to public embarrassment.

The 'e' makes all the difference.

(35)

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans!
But don't let's be beastly to the Hun!
- Noel Coward

Former celebrity brain tumour sufferer and Labour politician Dr Mo Mowlem reportedly believes that we need to "negotiate with Bin Laden", along the lines of terrorism appeasement in Northern Ireland.

I agree.

In the spirit of reconciliation I propose the following gestures of good faith:

1. Remove all British forces from the Middle East and Afghanistan.


2. Break off diplomatic relations with all non-Islamic countries.


3. Ban women from holding any educational qualifications past primary school.


4. Ban women from holding any jobs other than primary school teacher, nurse or doctor in women only clinics. Especially remove all women from political office.


5. Ban all Jews from holding political office, working in the public sector, the media and the legal profession.


6. Prohibit the sale or consumption of alcohol between 3pm on Fridays and noon on Saturday.


7. Release all Moslem terrorist suspects.


8. Order the Archbishop of Canterbury to publicly abjure Christianity [Editor's note: is this not already the case?] and exhalt the supremacy of Islam. Convert the established churches of England, Scotland and Ireland to Islam.


9. Prohibit all religious education in schools, except Islam.


10. Order the abdication of Her Majesty the Queen in favour of a male relative (her husband perhaps).

Obviously, we should hold back on some Islamist demands until we have some reciprocal agreements from Mr Bin Laden, for instance:

1. No mass public executions of homosexuals and female adulterers.


2. No public flogging of drug or alcohol addicts.


3. No enforcement of the veil for non-Moslem women.


4. No declaration of war on Israel and the USA.


5. No handing-over of British nuclear, biological and chemical weapons technology to al-Qaeda.

After all, we must have something to bargain with!

Just an after-thought. Am I confused, or did negotiating with the IRA lead to a split with even more violent factions launching even more deadly bomb attacks?

(29)

The Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society. Principal among them are Marx, Freud, Durkheim and the Jew Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sayid Qutb, former leader Muslim Brotherhood, quoted by Barbara Amiel.

Well I disagree with the conclusion, but I must admit that the pantheon of evil is pretty exhaustive.

Marx: the inspiration for all the best serial killers
Freud: the apologist for all the best serial killers
Durkheim: serial killer of brain cells
Sartre: creep

Hmm...

(0)

The good Professor Bunyip has a modest proposal for reforming the welfare state:

Fire all the public servants, social workers and ministers of the new and godless Christianity and replace them with the very people to whom they have been sending everyone else's money.

The newly uplifted wouldn't actually have anything to do, since there would be no further funds to distribute, but they would have salaries and somewhere to go in the morning. Meanwhile, those laid-off social engineers could sample the poetic justice of penury -- the very condition they have encouraged in the underclass whose positions at the bottom of society's ladder they would assume.

We taxpayers would notice no difference but a positive one: Bureaus of social engineers would cost less to support while achieving just as little. And we could also expect to see crime rates diminish, since the pool of formerly downtrodden malefactors would be otherwise occupied giving each other tattoos with government-issue ballpoints and microwaving infants in their departments' lunchrooms -- a kinder, quicker, cheaper and altogether more efficent way of squandering human potential than the current method. As a final advantage, the newly designated poor, being composed of a better class of person, would be less likely to burn down railway stations.

I say its worth a try.

(34)

Every decent and right-thinking person must surely condemn today's tragic events in Madrid.

BUT...while our thoughts go out to the families of the innocent victims this must not cause us to forget that horrible incidents such as we have witnessed today are the wholly predictable result of the Spanish government's wrong-headed, meddling foreign policy and their continued brutal occupation of the Basque homeland.

Of course, no one can ever condone such senseless acts of bloody violence but that does not mean we cannot sympathise with the plight of the ruthlessly oppressed Basques who are struggling for dignity and nationhood beneath the jackboot of Spanish domination. Such people, who are condemned to a future without hope or self-worth, can hardly be blamed for the state of desperation that may have forced some of them to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of people on public transport. What choice do they have?

While the rash and the thoughtless among us may seek scapegoats here, a more mature and nuanced analysis is required. The truth is that there are no perpetrators here, just different types of victim. The real culprit is Spain's ultra right-wing fundamentalist Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar whose lunatic extremist policies are the root causes of today's shocking violence.

This dangerous demagogue (who some have compared to Hitler) has surrounded himself with a sinister, shadowy cabal of Neo-Conquistadores and, together, they have hijacked this country and brought the shame and opprobrium of the world upon it with their wicked plan to establish a Global Iberian Empire. It is the policies of Aznar and his government that are driving Spain, and maybe the whole world, into catastrophe. Until they are stopped, there will be more horrific carnage of the type unleashed on Madrid today.

The Spanish people would do well not to squander the sympathy they have earned as a result of this attack. They must immediately distance themselves from their own deranged leaders and join in with the efforts of the rest of concerned humanity in ending the occupation and bringing Spain back into the fold of civilised, peaceful nations.

(13)

The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, held a press conference today outside No.10 in response to the nationwide strike by civil servants.

Mr. Blair informed the assembled members of the press that the Government had decided to respond to the threat of industrial unrest among public servants by arranging for the entire British state sector to be outsourced to India.

Stunned journalists pressed Mr. Blair for an explanation for this radical and controversial move. Mr. Blair said:

We have considered the matter carefully and we have consulted with various experts in the field. The conclusion we have come to is that it is simply too expensive to go on governing Britain from Britain.

The news was greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers but the Prime Minister continued undaunted:

It is the only logical solution. Young, well-educated Indians are quite capable of running the British state at a fraction of the current cost. We have taken steps to ensure that there will be no reduction in either the quality or quantity of public services while saving the taxpayers money.

Though confronted with some angry questions about the fate of the NHS, Mr. Blair declined to comment further:

Look, I'd love to help you but the simple fact is that the NHS is no longer my responsbility. If you have any questions about the continued provision of public sector health care in the UK then I suggest you telephone 08700 4568000 and speak to Jasvinder in Bombay.

Mr. Blair then ended the conference and, ignoring the protests, walked back into No.10.

A spokesperson for the Civil Service Trade Union, Unison, said he was "shocked and saddened" by the news and that he would be ballotting his members on further industrial action.

(1)

We Brians must stick together, so here is a plug for this campaign by Brian Whiley (linked to by b3ta.com) to replace either Greg Dyke or That Bloke From The City as BBC DG or BBC Chairman, whichever.

What was Gilligan's crime? That, early in the morning � at a time when nobody except insomniacs and farmers would be listening � a bleary-eyed journalist embellished a report that, in all honesty, probably needed it. My first duty would be to defend to the last BBC journalists from a Government that feels the need to hound reporters whose only error has been to make a boring story a little more interesting by inventing conversations that never took place.

I particularly like the promotional products peddled on this website, which downplay the "Whiley" aspect of the situation in a way that will surely meet with widespread approval here.

(32)

I last logged out leaving the Samizdata just as I like it. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Yes, it may have been a bit shambolic and démodé but it was comforting and familiar like an old friend or a favourite armchair.

Only look at what has happened! I turn my back for a few hours and some anally-retentive busybodies have gone and called in the Feng Shui consultants. Now my loveable, historical old Blog has been has been consigned to the scrap heap and replaced with this ultra-hi-tech, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art thingy which they are probably going to tell me has been conceived for 'balance' or 'harmony' or 'enhanced Chi' or something.

And as if that act of wanton cultural vandalism was not enough they have also furnished me with a new-fangled set of coding instructions with 'stylesheets' and 'javascript' and 'xhtml' this and 'attribute' that. The whole thing reads like stereo-assembly instructions. How is this old dog supposed to learn all these new tricks? It took me look enough to programme me the first time round. They will doubtless have to ship me off to the manufacturer now to be re-chipped and re-booted.

Or maybe they are planning to give me a make-over. Yes, I bet they are. After all age and experience counts for nothing these days. It's all about image, image, image and daresay I am no longer regarded as sufficiently 'happening' anymore. I can see myself now, being prodded and poked around by a squadron of invidious design-gurus ("Dahhling, that haircut is just sooooo 2003").

I would write a letter of complaint to these soulless technocrats but what good would it do? Besides they have all probably swanned off to some fashionable Islington eatery where they are quaffing down the polenta with rocket salad and feeling very smug about being so 'cool' and a la mode.

Bah! It's all humbug.

(2)

See what happens when I do not pay attention to what The Dissident Frogman is doing? He sneaks off goes and makes another side-splittingly funny flash animation. I visit his site often but for some reason I neglected to 'press the red button'. Big mistake.

I suggest you go and do so... right now.

(26)

Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:

A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.

The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.

Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let's all move to Finland!

He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful - and procedures would have to be reviewed.

From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.

(15)

I check this site day by day, and found this cartoon today.

By the way, there is a curious transatlantic rift over the Beagle: the British media call it a 'British Mars probe' and the US media call it a 'European Mars probe'.

(10)

A few weeks ago, i was looking through old issues of The Spectator and I found a piece by Mark Steyn from a little over a year ago. He was talking mainly about his dislike of the UN, and the silliness of Libya being at the time the newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission and Iraq being about to become president of the UN Conference on Disarmament. (Looking back, I think Iraq and Libya have both learned quite a bit about disarmanent and human rights since then. But I digress).

However, Steyn went on to say that some international organisations were okay.

I�m all in favour of the Universal Postal Union and the Berne Copyright Convention (America was a bit late signing that one), but they work precisely because Sy Kottik and his chums weren�t involved.

I'm not so sure, actually. Certain aspects of the Berne Copyright Convention are somewhat controversial, and I would argue that parts of it are more about certain countries attempting to implement protectionist policies more than anything else. No doubt we could now have one of those long heated arguments in the comments section as we often do when intellectual property issues are brought up. But let's not. It's Christmas.

For it was the other one of those international organisations, the Universal Postal Union, that made me think about Steyn's article when I was posting Christmas presents too my family in Australia a couple of weeks back. You see, there are three postage rates for air mail. The most expensive is the "standard letter rate", which can be used to send anything, other than items considered actually dangerous to send through the mail. The first of the other rates is "printed matter", which is defined as

advertisements, books, calendars, catalogues, diaries, directories, greetings cards, illustrations, magazines, maps, musical scores, newspapers, order/subscription forms, leaflets and pamphlets, plans, postcards, price lists, printed drawings and notices, proofs, prospectuses and timetables, but not letters, including personal messages or greetings (other than five words allowed on greetings cards), handwritten receipts, photographic negatives, slides or film, postage stamps or blank stationery

Got that? The other is the "small packet" rate which is defined as

goods, gifts and trade samples, audio/video tapes, magnetic tapes, and photographs. You can include a letter, invoice or other document, if it relates to the contents of the item

These definitions are defined by the treaties that created the Universal Postal Union, and it is impossible for any one country to change them. This is what happens when you put representatives of lots of governments together to negotiate anything. They come up with stupid, overly bureaucratic definitions and rules. But somehow the idea that it is their business what I choose to put in the mail is taken as a given.

They probably had some reason for setting rules like this, at least theoretically. Were books and newspapers considered morally virtuous and letters and photographic negatives not (huh?), or was is considered desirable for people to write their letters on thin paper but it was not considered desirable for people to send light gifts rather than heavy gifts?. In any event, letting people who send things from one almost arbitrary list of things subsidise people who send things from a different list seems somewhat peculiar to me.

But I suppose the international postal system does work on the whole. And even if it does produce silly outcomes like this, multilateralism is generally better than bilateralism

And things are changing. I cannot remember the last time I sent a personal letter to anyone. Business letters occasionally, and occasionally Christmas cards, but otherwise I use the mail service entirely for sending packages. Perhaps the letter rate will fade into non-existence and the costs of sending packages will revert to something resembling the actual costs of sending them because there is no other mail. I suppose we can hope.

But I still have this peculiar vision of somebody working for the post office whose job is to open people's packages to check that they haven't written any more than five words on their greeting cards. Clearly this is important. Civilization would obviously collapse if it was not done.

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone.

(3)

The following is taken from a list of authors names as published in the British Library Catalogue:

Florence A Bagelhole
Ole Bagger
Ludwig Von Baldass
Willy Bang
Juana Bignozzi
Petr Bitsilli
Jaime Bleeda
Don Bolognese
Wallop Brabazon
Knud Bugge
Hieronymus Cock
Ellsworth Prouty Conkle
Lettice May Crump
Dee Day
Roger A Destroyer
Arsen Diklic
Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd
Kersi D Doodha
Gottfried Egg
Bernt Eggen
Gordon Bandy Enders
Otto Flake
Mercedes Formica
Vladimir Fuka
Gergeley Gergeley
Biserka Grabar
Romulus Guga
Frederick Stuft Hammer
Odd Bang Hansen
O Heck
Jup Kastrati
Per Klang
Hieronimus Knicker
Bent Koch
Jacques Olle Laprune
Moses E Lard
F Leflufly
Manfred Lurker
Agogo Mago
Pilgrim Mangles
Santiago Nudelman
Henricus Pisart
Antwerp Pratt
Willem Quackelbeen
Fritz Rotter
Flora Schmulz
Johann Von Schmuck
I M Sick
Count Jacques de Silly
Negley Teeters
Wade Toole
Matilda Wrench

I am reliably informed that these names have been checked and that these people do indeed exist.

[My thanks to Dr Chris Tame for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]

(19)

Nobody who has read The Road To Serfdom will have been in the least surprised at the increased use these days of the word "Czar" in political discourse. It signals the quite deliberate, conscious and explicit demand for governmental tyranny, not for its own sake, but to cut through all the crap deposited everywhere by previous government officials. Czarism signals the demand that government cease playing even by its own rules, let alone anyone else's.

To dig a bit deeper into the subject I tried typing "czar" into Google.

I actually didn't get as many different Czarships as I was hoping for. Not really hoping, you understand, but hoping for the purposes of this posting. I had in mind a posting along the lines of this one, which lists all the different ways in which "the public needs to be educated". Googling reaped a rich harvest with that one. But czardoms proved to be in relatively short supply. So, in a way, I have good news to report. Not as many czardoms as you might think.

I found this Privacy Czar and a call, reported on here, for him to be replaced by the current US administration. And inevitably there is this personage, who is genuinely scary of course, to be laughed and sneered at only as part of the deadly serious business of running him out of office and abolishing his job, and strangling the fatuous ambitions it is based on.

There is this cybersecurity czar. Apart from that, very little, apparently. Is there a list of czardoms somewhere that I have missed?

In other words, and I'm really very pleased about this, truly, what I actually discovered was what these people at the Cornell University Computing Science Department, way ahead of me, had long ago spotted, which is that czardom in your average democracy is usually only a word, not to say a poisoned chalice. A czar is a commissioner, an under-secretary with special responsibility for, a "co-ordinator", a gopher, with a grander and scarier sounding title than those, but with none of the means on his desk actually to solve the problem he has been put in charge of, which in any case has only reached the czar stage because it is insoluble.

The Cornell computerfolk would seem to have been watching all this, because they've taken to calling their own functionaries "czars" also.

In their case the insoluble problem is somewhat different to those confronted with czardom by your average government. Their problem is to get people to do boring things without being paid anything. And it seems that the thrill of being a czar doesn't work any better there than elsewhere, as they foresaw.

Replacements have been requested for the following czarships. If you are interested in taking up one of these positions, or would like to have a position listed as available, please contact either the current czar listed for that position or the Czar Czar. Please remember that it is the current czar's responsibility to find a replacement when they wish to give up a czarship, though the Czar Czar can offer suggestions of people who might be available to fill the position.

Czardom as slavery! You have to find some other poor sap to do it before you are allowed to stop. It would seem that the current Colloquium Czar is anxious to replace himself. He's got fed up with doing this.

The Colloquium Czar unlocks the lecture hall for the weekly department colloquium and makes sure that any overhead projectors or other equipment that is needed is available. They also close up the room after the colloquium is over.

Well, at least the job is doable, for as long as you can stand doing it.

But of course, having to replace yourself is only a rule, which can be Cut Through like any other piece of Red Tape. The people in charge of these arrangements can't actually do anything if the slave simply buggers off the plantation while neglecting to entice any other slave to perform his ex-duties. And if there are no volunteers in the first place, what do you do then?

The following czarships are no longer active, due to lack of interest or judgment that they are no longer needed. If you would like to see one of these czarships reactivated, contact the Czar Czar.

That has to be the job description of the century so far:

The overseer of the czarships, the Czar Czar maintains the current list of czarships and their corresponding czars. In addition, they keep track of any information about performing particular czar duties. If a czar wishes to retire from their position, the Czar Czar can help find possible replacements.

The name of the current Czar Czar is Stephen Chong. I know, he/she should be called "Gabor" � glad we've got that out of the way. But how long before a "Czar Czar" pops up for real, in a real public sector, somewhere?

Seriously, I congratulate these Cornellians (?) for having (a) spotted something seriously funny and funnily serious going on out there in the real world, (b) deciding to take some appropriate piss out of it, and (c) doing so by having some fun with their own arrangements, thereby proving that they are not taking themselves and their own activities over-seriously either.

A true understanding of the world? A sense of their own relative unimportance in that larger scheme of things? A sense of humour? Can they really be students at all?

(21)

GREETINGS!

LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY. MY NAME IS ALI KAMAL BISHARA AND I AM A SENIOR OFFICIAL IN THE IRAQI FINANCE MINISTRY. I WAS ALSO CHIEF ADVISER TO FORMER PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, SADDAM HUSSEIN WHO IS NOW IN THE AMERICAN CAPTIVITY.

WE ARE CONTACT YOU FOR TO ESTABLISH VERY URGENTLY A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP BUT ONLY WITH A FOREIGN PERSON OF MOST HIGH RELIABLENESS AND REPUTATION FOR WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO A FOREIGN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.

LET ME EXPLAIN: BEFORE HIS DETENTION THE PRESIDENT HUSSEIN DEPOSITED THE SUM OF $28,500,000 IN A SECRET BANK ACCOUNT IN A SAFE COUNTRY. THIS MONEY WAS OIL REVENUE WHICH I HAVE PERSONALLY CHECKED AND FOUND AS AN ACCURATE FIGURE.

NOW THE FORMER PRESIDENT HUSSEIN CAN NO LONGER ACCESS THIS MONEY WHICH IS MUCH NEEDED BY MY COUNTRY FOR DISBURSEMENT TO CHILDREN AND HOSPITALS. IF THIS MONEY IS NOT CLAIMED IT WILL BE TAKEN BY AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.

SO HUMBLY WE BEG AN HONEST AND DILIGENT PERSON TO WHO THE UNDISCLOSED BANK WILL TRANSFER THIS MONEY AS TRUSTEE. IN RETURN FOR THIS SERVICE YOU WILL KEEP 30% OF THE SUM AND REMIT TO US THE 70% REMAINING. IN ORDER THAT WE MAY COMPLETE THIS MOST SECRET TRANSACTION YOU MUST SEND TO US YOUR DETAILS BUT MOSTLY YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER AND ADDRESS SO THAT WE CAN ARRANGE THE SUBSTANTIAL MONEY TRANSFER TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

YOU MUST REPLY QUICKLY WITH FULL DETAILS FOR US TO BE CONVICTED THAT YOU ARE GENUINE AND SINCERE.

YOURS MOST HUMBLY IN GOOD BUSINESS FAITH.

ALI KAMAL BISHARA.

(25)

The French Government has reacted with fury to the news that Saddam Hussein has been captured by US forces.

Speaking to reporters in Paris this evening, the Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, denounced the arrest of the former Iraqi leader as 'an act of international piracy':

"Saddam Hussein has been kidnapped by America. You cannot simply seize and detain people without proper negotiations. The Americans should have given more thought beforehand. This situation requires the careful application of justice not cowboy tactics"

His words were echoed at a meeting of EU Ministers in Brussels this evening. Speaking on behalf of the assembled ministers, Dutch Commissioner Willy Van Der Pimp issued a warning to the Americans not to 'go it alone':

"If the Americans think that they alone can administer justice, then they are very mistaken. The international community will not tolerate being ignored in this fashion. Europe has a vital role to play in deciding the future of Saddam Hussein"

The Council of Ministers will meet again tomorrow in emergency session to draw up an action plan.

(5)

Gabriel's last post brought irresistibly to mind another letter that was orbiting the planet via email several years ago (this was before the Planet Blog emerged from ether). As with Gabriel, I apologize if you have already seen this, but it is not only hilarious, it is funny in such a kind and gentle way that I have used it in several classes as an example of how to write a letter in which you are saying "no, no, a thousand times no!" while making a new friend.

The letter, from the Smithsonian Institution to a backyard archaeologist, follows:

Paleoanthropology Division
Smithsonian Institute
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

Harvey Rowe

(2)

Chris Addison of the Guardian shares a letter from tax authorities he received as a reply to his earlier missives on the topic of tax gathering. The Guardian? Tax authorities? This does not bode well for the entertainment potential of this post. Nevertheless, I reproduce the letter below in full as it made my day¹:

Dear Mr Addison,

I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more-than-prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise.

I will address them, as ever, in order.

Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter". It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand". This is how we, at the Inland Revenue, have always, for reasons of accuracy, traditionally referred to such documents.

Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the "endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat" has been noted. However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer, I would cautiously suggest that their being from "pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers" might indicate that your decision to "file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies" is at best a little ill-advised.

In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a "lackwit bumpkin" or, come to that, a "sodding charity". More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.

Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay "go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services", a moment's rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to "stump up for the whole damned party" yourself. The estimates you provide for the Chancellor's disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on "junkets for Bunterish lickspittles" and "dancing whores", whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, "that box-ticking facade of a university system".

A couple of technical points arising from direct queries: 1. The reason we don't simply write "Muggins" on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system; 2. You can rest assured that "sucking the very marrows of those with nothing else to give" has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn't render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.

I trust this has helped. In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to "give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India" you would still owe us the money. Please forward it by Friday.

Yours sincerely,
H J Lee
Customer Relations

Notwithstanding the purpose and the origin of this letter, I think its style is commendable².

Note (1): This article has been published on 27th September, so it may have circled the planet Blog by now. Please skip, if I am merely reposting the 'joke of the month' from two months ago long after the party.

Note (2): Yes, it is a joke and not a real letter.

(6)

Achtung! Achtung!

The Slovene Red Army has finally broken through to the leafy suburbs of London!

(12)

A famous Texan is over here in town. So, given the rude noises coming out of the bottom-feeders of the 'peace' movement, with their oh-so original cracks about the 'cowboy Bush', here's a quotation to ponder taken from Ian Fleming's first, and arguably best, James Bond adventure, Casino Royale:

Bond reflected that Americans were fine people, and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.

No rudeness implied, by the way, to citizens of any state outside the Lone Star State, just in case folk get upset!

(0)

James Lileks' Bleat, usually devoted primarily to domestic bliss, today gets a little screedy. James has peeked inside the sausage factory that is the US Senate.

The spleen, she hurts. I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world�s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we�d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

Unicameral house! Two year term! One term limit!

There's more, on such perennial faves as the French, Michael Moore, and the angry anti-war lot. I started to excerpt, but when your cursor is hovering over "Select All" it is time to just say "read the whole thing."

(6)

Time for me to take a break from all this lofty philosophising about the state of the world and indulge in a little bit of schoolboy humour, made possible by this BBC report on the death of the former Zimbabwean President, Canaan Banana:

A former Methodist minister, professor of theology and diplomat, he was 67 years old. He leaves four adult children and a wife with whom he separated in 2000.

The Bananas Split!

(9)

Plato's Utopia has long served as a double-edged sword to any aspiring totalitarian. Many of the world's greatest adventurers, explorers and thinkers have sought the fabled Lost City of Atlantis, coming up with many convoluted theories as to where and how it really existed. Now an expedition to the Strait of Gibraltar may solve one of the world's greatest mysteries.

Next month, an expedition to hunt for its remains among submerged Gibraltarian islands will be unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society, London, by a renowned geologist, Prof Jacques Collina-Girard, and the leaders of the Titanic expeditions. Prof Collina-Girard believes that generations of Atlantis obsessives overlooked the most obvious location: Plato's account suggests Atlantis lay before the Pillars of Hercules - today's Strait of Gibraltar.

Plato said the island kingdom was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was paradise: peaceful, cultured and unspoilt. A golden age continued for centuries, but eventually corruption got the better of its inhabitants and the gods punished them by submerging Atlantis.

In our fast-paced modern times, the EUropean utopia skipped the golden age to move directly to the corruption phase. If gods wish to retain any shred of their shattered credibility, a total submerging of all EU institutions would be well in place. And they'd better hurry, or they will have their work cut out by the European Directive on Submerging, Flooding and Destroying Continents that is soon to be approved by the EU Commission.

Directive 03/360BC/UTOPIA specifies that any destructive activities by the certified Deities, defined as protest to the political, social and cultural developments of Mortal Citizens (EU Directives 98/3740BC/NOAH and 99/2350BC/SOD&GOM), are to be closely monitored by the relevant agencies using the consolidated global experience and drawing on a long-term state-funded research of such occurrances. Or they could just apply retrospetive fines to penalise Mr Plato for unclear, inconsistent and misleading labelling of his products and services and insufficient specification of their location.

(8)

For those who find Mondays blue and tired and for those who might be inspired to a change of career... Ladies and gentlemen I give you:

Dissect a frog online!

Via Monkeyfarts

Note: Any resemblence to characters real or imagined is purely coincidental and the editorial team of Samizdata.net shall not be held responsible for any dissections of the insinuated individual.

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ATTN: THE SAMIZDATA TEAM
FROM: THE HONOURABLE PRESIDENT
OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION, ROMANO PRODI

Dear Sir/Madam,

Good day Sirs. I hope my letter does not cause you too much embarrassment as I write to you in good faith and the transaction is of mutual benefit. Based on the contact address given to me by a friend who works at the Nigerian chamber of commerce attached to your embassy in my country.

Please excuse my intrusion into your private life. I am Romano Prodi, the appointed President of the European Commission and my friends and I are in danger of losing a lot of money due to vindictive investigators and their friends in the media who are bent on ruining us financially. Consequently, my friends in the Commission have asked me to seek for a foreign partner who can work with us to move out the total sum of €75,000,000.00 ( seventy five million Euros), presently in their possession.

This money was of course, acquired by my friends through hard work and enterprise. The Swiss government has already frozen all our accounts in Switzerland, and some other countries would soon follow to do the same.

This bid by some political rivals to deal with this my friends and I has made it necessary that we seek your assistance in receiving this money and in investing it on behalf of our behalf. This must be a joint venture transaction and we must all work together. Since this money is still in cash, extra security measures have been taken to protect it from theft or seizure, pending when agreement is reached on when to move it into a secure and anonymous territory pending on our agreement.

I have personally worked out all modalities for the peaceful conclusion of this transaction. The transaction definitely would be handled in phases and the first phase will involve the moving of €25,000,000.00 (twenty five million Euros).

My friends are willing to give you a reasonable percentage of this money as soon as the transaction is concluded. It will, however, be based on the grounds that you are willing to work with us and also all contentious issues being discussed before the commencement of this transaction. You may also discuss your percentage before we start to work. As soon as I hear from you, I will give you all necessary details as to how we intend to carry out the whole transaction. Please, do not entertain any fears, as all necessary modalities are in place, and I assure you of all success and safety in this transaction.

Please, this transaction requires absolute confidentiality and you would be expected to treat it as such until the funds are moved out of Europe to where you intend to receive them.

In compliance with this you are to forward to me the following details: your complete names and addresses, confidential telephone and fax numbers, bank account details and all relevant account numbers. This is to enable me perfect all the necessary documentation with the security firm and move this money across to your country of choice.

Please, you will also ignore this letter and respect our trust in you by not exposing this transaction, even if you are not interested.

I look forwards to working with you. Thank you.

Truly Yours

Romano Prodi.

(4)

In a shock move, last night, the UK's Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, spectacularly failed to resign when given an open goal opportunity to do so. In a powerful and sometimes moving soliloquy from the floor of the House of Commons, Mr Hoon looked on as someone else made a dramatic speech demanding the Defence Secretary's resignation. This was Mr Hoon's reply:

I don't know what all the fuss is about. I didn't fool anyone important when I lied to the intelligence and security committee, just the proles.

Under strong media pressure, UK Premier Tony Blair also defended his beleaguered colleague:

Come on, guys, look, well, you know. Geoff can't resign now, I need him to resign when the Hutton Report comes out. If I throw his body out the back of the plane before then, there'll only be me left to carry the can, and I'm not having that. Don't worry, you'll get your scalp, but only when Mandy, Alastair, and I decide you will. We've got all the 'least worst' resignation moments mapped out on the grid, and it's not Geoff's turn yet. So can we draw a line under this, guys, and move on?

When pressed on whether it was a disastrous though retrievable situation for British troops to be in the line of fire, in Iraq, while their Ministry of Defence Chief hid in a hole in the ground in London waiting for his resignation grid appointment, a furious Mr Blair went on to add:

Look, come on, do you really think Geoff Hoon is the real Secretary of State for Defence? He's just a stooge, a figurehead, a nobody. I've got one of my Downing Street boys running the real operation, and he's reporting back directly to me. It makes the lines of control much easier.

Mr Archie Scroggins, 17, a former apprentice gas-fitter from Lewisham, was later revealed as this vital kitchen cabinet insider. His mother, Mrs Olive Scroggins, was as surprised as anyone:

Archie got this job installing a new boiler, in 10 Downing Street, and Mrs Blair took a shine to him. Archie's been there ever since. He told me he was an assistant masseuse, when I saw him on telly in the back of a car with Tony. But to find out he's Secretary of State for Defence is a mum's dream come true! I'm made up for him! And he hasn't even started shaving yet!

Archie Scroggins was later said to be unavailable for comment, as he was on a plane to Iraq to discuss British and American troop deployments. His father, Mr Reginald Scroggins, 74, was said to be down the pub.

(0)

Where archaeology meets politics - on the banks of the Potomac, of course:

Archeologists digging near the Potomac River report they have found a partial human skeleton from the Magnusregimentumian era, also called 'the era of big government.'

Scientists have dubbed the creature Homo Republicus.

"The cranium is rather large, but the spinal column doesn't seem strong enough to support it," said an unnamed archeologist working at the dig site. "Despite its impressive thinking capabilities, it apparently crawled along on its belly, often carrying opportunistic vermin on its back."

Scott Ott of Scrappleface generally hits the mark with his satire, and in the fine tradition of going after the big slow targets first, his mark is often governmental fecklessness and political cowardice.

While academicians fruitlessly debate the influence of cosmic rays, water vapor, and so on, it looks like the true source of global warming has been identified, and it is . . . France!

A Met Office spokesman said: "There�s very hot air over France, which has engulfed the Channel Islands, and we are expecting it over here."

Astute consumers of British journalism will note that this story, which was broken in the Sun, is appropriately illustrated in the Sun's inimitable style.

(4)

Alex Singleton respects Peter Cuthbertson enough to bother trying to set him straight.

But Cuthbertson has two problems, the first of which being that he seems to think that all authority comes from the state (therefore we need must laws on which hand to hold our forks in when eating fruit salad, and whether to set boiled eggs on the Big or the Little End).

But the second problem is if anything worse. Recently I was in the coffee bar area of the swanky suite of offices where I make a living (at the tax-payer's expense) whilst two fortysomethings were sorting out teas and coffees for a business meeting taking place on the same floor, but with a different (private sector) company. The woman, was better dressed in her brown-checkered suit than most British female politicians (which is to say that she didn't look like a dressed-up showjumping horse on steroids or an English sheepdog with dyed hair wearing Nancy Reagan's padded shoulder suits) without being a glamorous trendy. She was chatting to the man, who was dressed rather like my bank manager did ten years ago. As I was scrambling for teabags, milk etc, the man described how his daughter had invited her boyfriend to meet the parents. The woman then asked if it looked like a serious relationship and did the man approve.

After saying that it could be a promising relationship the man hesitated before adding "He's quite a promising chap: he's got a good well-paid job, drives a nice car, has a home in a nice neighbourhood, he looks presentable enough..." The father's voice trailed off.

The woman interjected: "...but..."

And the man blurted out: "He's a member of the Tory Party!"

And the woman said: "Oh dear!" with sympathy. The conversation ended: the poor man's daughter was sleeping with a weirdo.

This story ends on a happy note. Last week I saw the man and he seemed to be in good spirits: it looks like daughter wised up...

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Not that there is any Deep Libertarian Significance to this story, but no opportunity should be missed to revel in the humiliation of a bureaucrat.

Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has himself flunked a required literacy test three times, The Eagle-Tribune reported Sunday.

. . .

Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test, which has been required since voters passed a law last fall requiring English-only classrooms.

[State Education Commissioner David P.] Driscoll said he is willing to give Laboy more time to prepare for another retest.

''He's not a native language speaker, so a formal test is something he needs to prepare for,'' Driscoll said. ''It doesn't mean anything now. It will mean more as time goes on because there's an expectation that he'll pass.'

I suspect the really scary part of this is that the Lawrence school district had 24 teachers who lack basic English proficiency. The other scary part is that the failure on multiple occasions to demonstrate basic language skills "doesn't mean anything" if the individual in question is already enfolded in the forgiving arms of the civil service.

(8)

This is from the 'The Basra Rose', the Iraq deployment section of the Red Rose, the newsletter of the 1st Battalion The Queen's Lancashire Regiment:

WEATHER
Mon - HOT
Tue - VERY HOT
Wed - UNBELIEVABLY HOT
Thu - SO HOT YOU'LL CRY
Fri - AS HOT AS THE SUN
Sat - SO HOT LOCALS BURST INTO FLAMES
Sun - AS HOT AS THE DEVIL'S SCROTUM

In other words, it is a tad hot in Basra. Just so you know.

(4)

Sometimes, the gods of the internet just give you a gift.

A new panel charged with finding ways to make Connecticut government run more efficiently will release its report six months later than scheduled.

Yeah, I want to take advice on efficiency from these guys.

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hehehehehehe. Just click the damn link, I am laughing too hard to write anymore.

(13)

In reverse order, they are:

10. You can trade an old .44 for two new .22s

9. You can keep one handgun at home and have another for when you're
on the road.

8. If you admire a friend's handgun, and tell him so, he will probably
let you try it out a few times.

7. Your primary handgun doesn't mind if you have a backup.

6. Your handgun will stay with you even if you're out of ammo.

5. A handgun doesn't take up a lot of closet space.

4. Handguns function normally every day of the month.

3. A handgun doesn't ask "Do these new grips make me look fat?"

2. A handgun doesn't mind if you go to sleep after you use it.

AND.....THE NUMBER ONE REASON WHY A HANDGUN IS BETTER THAN A WOMAN....

1. You can buy a silencer for a handgun.

[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]

(13)

Following the recent diplomatic spat between Italy and Germany, the EU Commission has moved to ensure that there is no repetition of such unfortunate incidents with a 'Draft Directive on Cross-Border Insults'.

The new directive sets out a regulatory framework which will, in future, require all citizens of all EU countries to follow appropriate guidelines before publicly uttering any sort of cross-border insult.

The guidelines provide:

1. Any insult which includes reference to national stereotypes can only be directed against a person or persons who is/are permanently domiciled in or citizens of the country to which the said stereotype is applicable. Insults may not be directed at persons who are merely resident in such countries.

2. Insults which include reference to multiple stereoptypes such as 'Arrogant beachtowel-hogging Schnitzel-brained Kraut metalbasher' and 'Pizza-munching dago wop greaseball monkey' shall first obtain a written approval to utter the insult from the appropriate licensing body in the jurisdiction in which the insulter is a citizen or permanently domiciled.

3. For the purposes of enforcement of these provisions, each member state of the Union shall establish an appropriate licensing body.

4. In the case of a person wishing to utter a cross-border insult for reproduction in any print or electronic medium they must first provide a draft copy of the proposed insult to the proprietors of the said medium not less than three days before publication of the insult is due. This is to ensure that fair representations can be made by the person or organisation against whom the insult is directed.

5. In the case of general insults or non-national stereotype abuse, the words used by the insulter must be words or terms that are recognised as being of an abusive or insulting nature in at least one or more Union member state. The use of Americanised insults such as 'dickwad', 'dog-breath', 'asshat' and 'freakazoid' are strictly forbidden as being inconsistent with European cultural values.

6. Once a cross-border insult has been uttered (in accordance with these provisions) the person or organisaton against whom the insult was directed shall have a right of reply. In order to permit such right to be exercised the insulter shall allow a period of at least seven days before uttering any further insults.

French EU Commissioner Bertrand Maginot expressed his satisfaction with the new rules:

"We cannot simply allow insults to be traded in this uncontrolled cowboy fashion. If they are not subject to proper democratic control they could disrupt the harmony of European institutions."

Critics of the new rules say they do not go far enough as insults that remain within national borders are still totally unregulated. However, a Commission sub-committee is expected to convene early next year to examine methods of regulating domestic insults as well.

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Samizdata.net's many spies have told us that these are being stockpiled in Iran for use during the coming 'transitional times'.

(9)

The inimitable Alice (well, only by herself) sums up some 'lightbulb blogs'. In the spirit of pro-Samizdata bias I select two for your amusement:

How many David Carrs does it take to change a lightbulb?

I had thought that the madness of last week's lightbulb-blowing could not be toppled. I was, of course, wrong. Things are much worse than I thought then, in my light-hearted, innocent, Morris-dancing kind of way, and it is now perfectly apparent to all of us here at Samizdata.net that today's lightbulb lunacy is tomorrow's Mysteron plot to destroy the universe. Those who disagree must be conquered in the strongest terms. I refuse either to change the bulb or not change it. It is an outrage that anyone should dare to ask such a thing in the first place. I personally refuse to compromise and demand that they cease forthwith!

How many Brian Micklethwaits does it take to change a lightbulb?

Yesterday I posted about this article. Tomorrow I am going to post about this blog, which related to an earlier posting of mine here, about this rather interesting subject from last Thursday, which I've been wondering about for weeks, to do with car parks. I wonder whether anyone will comment or not? Sometimes they comment many times, and other times they don't. It's hard to predict these things. In the meantime, I might watch Friends tonight. Not sure yet, depends whether or not I blog about lightbulbs.

Heh.

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In the last few days Britain has been depicted as the Paradise (soon to be) Lost in the clutches of the Federasts. Hope has been expressed that the British public may stir eventually and oppose Blair's finishing touches on handing over the country's sovereignty. The word "bovine" has been mentioned in descriptions of the UK public and the adjective is excruciatingly close to the truth.

Only with a public as sleepy and 'tolerant' of the destructive antics of its politicians and bureaucrats as the British public has been, a particular breed of Homo politicus characteristic to these isles could have evolved.

The species, known as Bureaucrat idioticus can be found in most governmental bodies, with highest density around local councils. In the last 50 years, it has adapted to a change in its original natural habitat from large forested ministerial departments to smaller, murkier quango marshlands.

It belongs to a larger family of Homo collectivicus, sub-group Homo nonsensicus, indigenous to Great Britain, a genetic dead-end variation on Homo socialist (see below).

However, the most famous branch of Homo collectivicus family is Homo communist, spread around the globe in the last century but currently experiencing an evolutionary hiatus.

The ubiquitous Homo socialist, another influential branch, occupies the same evolutionary niche in its biological family as the cockroach in the insect family. Finally, the recently prospering Homo transnationalis has made some headway to the top levels of the British public institutions, the Government and the Courts.

In the last decade, the Bureaucrat idioticus has been inter-breeding with Bureaucrat corruptus (its continental variety, as well as with its closely related Bureaucrat sanctimonis), which resulted in a virulent Bureaucrat federalis whilst facilitating deeper and wider entrenchment of Homo transnationalis in Great Britain.

Oh, we are so ready for the EU primeval soup!

Note: The 'family tree' for Homo Liberalis (original meaning) to follow.

(5)

In case our esteemed readership has not yet heard of FLAIR (the Far-Left Alliance of Indignant Revisionists) I have the pleasure to relay an interview taken from its case files.

The interview was conducted by Barry Fest, a long-time associate and one-time student of Brummagem Groat, who agreed to interview his erstwhile mentor on behalf of FLAIR. The occasion was the publication of Dr. Groat's latest book, I Dunno: The Working Person's Guide to Postmodern Relativism by the Belverton University Press. Dr. Groat is professor emeritus of Talkmatics at Belverton.

An Interview with the Relativist

FLAIR: Thank you for your time today, Dr. Groat. I'd like first to ask you about the subtitle of your new book, "The Working Person's Guide to Postmodern Relativism." Why does the working person need a guide such as this?

GROAT: For too long the working person has played victim foot soldier for the corporate conglomerates and their Pentagon enablers. Whenever the corpagon has wanted to go to war to protect profits, it has used absolutes - most notoriously the absolutes of "right" and "wrong" - to persuade the working persons of one nation to take up arms against the working persons of another. And whenever working persons have seemed ready to establish a government for working persons, the interested powers have eliminated the threat by appealing to the absolutes embedded, like post-hypnotic suggestions, in the subconscious of the working person. The rote inculcation of these absolutes is performed at an early age by traditional family units, which act as manufacturing plants for the corpagon's future pawns and patsys.

The result is that by the time the working person is old enough to actually start working, he is a thrall of these absolutes and does not even know it.

I Dunno is intended to persuade the working person that he is better off without absolutes. - What we in the West consider right and wrong is not what everyone else in the world considers right and wrong. I try to make it plain that, in fact, one man's wrong is another man's right. Until working persons learn to accept this they will continue in their roles as ad hoc button men for their corporate bosses.

FLAIR: At what point did you realize there was a need to convince Joe - if you'll pardon the colloquialism - Sixpack of the need to trade in his old absolutes for new ones?

GROAT: I've always - Wait a minute, I think you may be missing a very important point. It isn't that this so-called Joe Sixpack needs newer or what you might even call better absolutes. He needs to discard the notion of absolutes entirely.

FLAIR: And what is the most compelling reason for him to do that?

GROAT: As I said, it will be impossible for him to find that his notions of right and wrong will be accepted by everyone. A notion of virtue produced by the Western process of reason will not be accepted in those societies that reject reason. - And how can you have a universal truth that is not endorsed universally? The Westerner, and that includes the working person, needs to take another approach: the approach I describe in I Dunno.

For the full text of the interview visit The Radical Capitalist.

(3)

The hunt for the fugitive Texas Democrat legislators has intensified with a set of playing cards being issued to troops in Iraq in case any of them turn up there.

[Alan K. Henderson rocks]

(2)

Others already having remarked that it is a slow news day here on Samizdata, I share the following extract by Harry Turtledove in the spirit of a sunny Friday evening. Have a good weekend.

30th November 1491
To: Their Hispanic Majesties Fernando II and Isabella
From: The Special Committee on the Quality of Life
Re: The environmental impact upon Spain of the proposed expedition of the Genoese navigator Cristóbel Colón, styled in his native Italian Cristoforo Colombo.

The commission of learned men and mariners, established by your Majesties under the chairmanship of Fr. Hernando de Talavera, during the period 1486-90 studied exhaustively the proposals set forth by the Genoese captain Colón and rejected them as being extravagant and impractical.

In the present year a second commission, headed by the great cardinal, Pedro González de Mendoza, has also seen fit to decline the services of Colón. The present Special Committee on the Quality of Life finds itself in complete accord with the actions of the previous two bodies of inquiry. It is our unanimous conclusion that the rash scheme advocated by this visionary would, if adopted, do serious damage to the finances and ecology of Spain; that this damage, if permitted, would set a precedent for future, more severe, outrages of our environment; that even if successful it would unacceptably alter the life-style of the citizens of Spain; and, most important, that the proposed voyage would expose any sailors engaged thereon to unacceptable risks of permanent bodily illness and injury, and even death.

Complete text of the report appears in Departures, short stories by Harry Turtledove.

(21)

The Anglosphere is divided over the metric system... sure, it makes vastly more sense but, damn it, it is just too damn French!

But do not despair! That scholar and wit, the inimitable Diamond Geezer, has come up with a new and vastly superior system of measures suitable for the 21^st Century. For example:

Length - the freedom
Definition: the distance one tank can advance in one minute

• the distance from Basra to Baghdad = 1 megafreedom

And who says genius is dead in Britain? Oh, yeah, that was me. Sorry.

Update: As usual, blogspot's archives are phuked up, so just go here and scroll down.

(14)

Burglars and street robbers are to benefit from new rights under proposals announced today by the government.

The extension of the existing rights regime is contained in the Employment (Non-Lawful Activities) Consolidation Act 2003 which has passed its second reading in the House of Commons and is due to take effect from 1st January 2004. Under the new legislation, all burglars are street robbers will be entitled to a maximum of six weeks paid paternity leave and a similar period of statutory sick pay. If any burglar or street robber is a member of a gang or criminal organisation, they will also now be able to claim compensation for unfair dismissal.

A government spokesperson rejected criticisms of the new legislation:

It is simply an administrative measure designed to extend basic protections that already exist for all other employees.

The Equal Opportunities Commission broadly welcomed the new legislation but said it did not go nearly far enough. Spokesperson Elaine Simper-Sweetley said:

The lack of rights for workers in the crime industry is nothing less then scandalous. We believe that this is a step in the right direction but the government must do more to protect burglars from negligent and exploitative householders.

Ms.Simper-Sweetley added that the Commission would continue to campaign for existing Health & Safety legislation to be extended to protect both full and part-time criminals.

(8)

Crispin Blunt MP, a frontbench Conservative spokesman on trade, has resigned and called for Iain Duncan-Smith to be deposed as party leader. Having the largest share of the vote, more councillors and more councils than any other party just isn't good enough.

IDS responded to the resignation by sacking frontbench spokesmen called Burgess, Maclean and Philby, just to be on the safe side.

(2)

In a dramatic development, under-fire British MP George Galloway has stunned an audience of journalists at a press conference by stripping off all of his clothes and posing for photographs whilst completely naked.

The controversial left-wing MP for Glasgow Kelvin had called the press conference in order to answer allegations that he accepted substantial payments from the former Iraqi regime. However, during a particularly heated round of questioning, Mr.Galloway suddenly stood up and began to undress himself. The attendant journalists watched in bemusement as Mr.Galloway eventually got down to his underpants which he whipped off with a flourish and draped over the ITN sound-recordist's boom-mike.

It is the only way for me to fight back against this wicked right-wing American Zionist conspiracy to discredit me...

Said Mr.Galloway who was unrepentant about his unorthodox and shocking gesture:

Sorry? Of course I'm not sorry. It's one of the most liberating things I have ever done. In fact, I'm already talking to the Guardian about a centrefold spread as part of a special colour-supplement next month.

Mr.Galloway's gesture was warmly welcomed by a new left-wing organisation called the Campaign for Hindbrained Political Stunts (CHiPS) which is dedicated to pursuing a variety of 'progressive' causes with public displays of nudity. Denouncing all clothing as an oppressive construct of late-stage capitalism the group also intends to use bodily functions such as urination, defecation and induced vomiting as a means of protest. The group's motto is: "Other people discuss, we just disgust".

(3)

For those interested in royal genealogy, you could do worse that check out this scholarly work from a sober blogger who is destined for greater things. This chap could well be the next David Starkey.

(11)

Apparently I am...

So which LOTR Villain are you? Hmm??
made by Michelle at EmptySpace.

(13)

The Iraqi Minister of Information, whose ability to defy reality has made him something of a cult figure in the West, has had a website dedicated to his pronouncements which is already drawing massive numbers of hits.

His ability to work for a doomed cause and show fortitude in the midst of great strain is already triggering commentators to wonder about where his talents may be most usefully employed in future. Here are some of my suggestions:

• Manager of Sunderland Football Club (with apologies to Iain Murray)

• Tory Party campaign manager (no explanation really required)

• The manager of George Galloway's campaign to be known as a great British patriot

• Tony Blair's humility counsellor

• Spin doctor for the Democrat's presidential candidate (that's my top choice)

• George W. Bush's elocution coach (sorry Dubya, I could not resist)

• Robert Fisk's psychiatrist (a tough assignment, admittedly)

• Michael Moore's obesity counsellor (another tough one)

• Chief coach to the English cricket team

  And finally,

• Management consultant to the BBC's news service.

(6)

Breaking news - Kuwait.

Iraq has launched a new type of Scud missile at the coalition forces deployed in Kuwait. Details are sketchy at this time, but it appears to be a new and improved Scud type missile. The CIA is investigating just how and from whom Saddam acquired this new technology.

(7)

A trifling distraction in the scheme of things, but this is so hilarious that I just had to flag it up here.

It appears that a small group of British 'indymedia' squirts tried to halt a convoy of munitions by chaining themselves to the trucks. Turned out to be a very bad idea:

The convoy was successfully halted on the west bound slip road at Chievely junction (M4/A34) north of Newbury. One group blocked the lead vehicals [sic], whilst others attempted to lock on to the bomb transporters. Police and lorry drivers seem to be under orders to keep the convoy moving at all costs. Activists were forced to unlock as the lorries kept moving despite the drivers being told that there were people under their vehicals [sic].

Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbayyyaaaaaa...stop...stop....aaaahhh.......

[My thanks to Little Green Footballs for the link]

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This has been posted on the Command Post:

British backtrack over general We had a misidentification of the rank of the officer concerned," Group Capt. Al Lockwood said on Monday. "What I can say today is - and can confirm - that we have five senior Iraqi officers as prisoners of war.

And this on the Inn of the Last Home

British Backtrack Over General

In related news, a Moroccan troop transport backed over a colonel today, leaving him with multiple injuries and contusions. It was believed monkeys were at the wheel of the transport which was last seen heading to the sea to pick up some errant dolphins. A visiting foreign ambassador was quoted as saying, "When will monkeys ever learn to use rear-view mirrors?".

France has lodged a protest with the UN.

I just love the blogosphere...