Instant discrimination

One usually has to waste time talking to a stranger before realizing that he/she is an idiot. But the fashion industry has come up with a shortcut in the assessment process. If you see someone who's paid $425 for a pair of jeans dyed to look like the wearer has been crawling in mud, you know right away that the person is an idiot.

Four wheels bad!

That was a pretty boring Russian Grand Prix. As Mr. Raikkonen said on the podium, everything happened right at the start. In fact, it was just like the last-but-one IndyCar race in Alabama. It's a good job we have MotoGP to give us a bit of excitement on a race track. We could have done with some this weekend.

More, more!

The News Quiz on Radio Four is normally a tedious rant by a gang of ageing lefty whingers. How refreshing it was to hear this week’s edition featuring some actual comedians who were funny. We need to have some or all of Hugo Rifkind, Katy Brand, Rich Hall and Kiri Pritchard-McLean on the show a lot more often.

Who came up with that one?

Sky Mobile is for bolshy twats who’d steal a bowlful of sugar from a café? That’s what the TV advert seems to be telling us.

Time, gentlemen, pur-lease!

Don’t you just wish we could have some new political myths and legends? The one about the Tories being the party of the mega-rich and Labour as the party of the masses is wearing a bit thin, for instance. Whilst the mega-rich pay an enormous share of the nation’s taxes, compared to the sheer numbers of raggedy-arse paupers who don’t pay any tax at all, they’re an insignificant minority in the electoral community.
    Which leaves me wondering why isn’t J. Corbyn the prime minister right now? And why isn’t he as likely to stay in the job as any president-for-life Putin, Assad or Kim Jong-current if he leads a whole army of electorate-dominating, non-tax-paying scroungers?
    In short, who provides all the votes that put the Tories in power from time to time? Maybe we’re supposed to believe that the mega-rich 1% have enormous numbers of staff, say one-half of the electorate, and the staff have to vote Tory as a non-negotiable clause in their contract of employment. Except, that doesn’t explain how Labour ever gets elected.

What do they do for a fun day in North Korea?

Line up all their tanks and self-propelled guns in three ranks on a suitable beach and blast salvoes out to sea. It must be costing the Chinese a bomb in blank ammo!

More cloth-ears

Heard on the Wix TV ad for screw-it-yourself websites that no one else will know about:
    “. . . easily change sex . . .”
Well, I suppose that’s bunged in to attract the diversity mob.

Breathing space; but probably not much

The coming election seems to have done small businesses a small favour. There isn’t time to barge the Treasury’s plan for 5 tax returns per year – one every quarter plus one for the full year – through Parliament in the time left. All sorts of other measures aimed at increasing the cost of doing business without the notional benefits the government is claiming have also been ditched; with the tacit approval of the Commons Treasury committee, which frowned on them.
    But we can be pretty sure they’ll be back with the next government unless heads can be banged together to drive some sense into them.

Don’t you just wish . . .

. . . that some politician would produce a bottle of yellowish fluid and present it to the meeja pack at a press conference with the words: “Here’s the piss you seem so desperate to take. Go on, take it, it’s all yours.”

Good news!

An interactive map of the hundreds of earthquakes which rock Britain every year has been compiled from British Geological Survey data to celebrate the 117th anniversary of the birth of Charles Richter. The map shows that the Manchester area is one of the most earthquake prone:
Earthquakes in Romiley
but seismic events on the scale of the (not-so) Great British Earthquake, which flattened parts of Colchester on April 22nd in 1884, are mercifully rare. And the really good news is that global warming isn’t producing an increase in the frequency of earthquakes.

Just a click away

Wikimeeja seems to be setting up its own fake news site to promote a Wiki world-view, which excludes all extremists (i.e. anyone who disagrees with the handful of couch-potato mafiosi, who decide what can appear on the site). Just what we need.

One less thing to worry about

The Liberals (with taxpayers’ money) want to know how the Tories will fill the Brexit Brown Hole. The simple answer is that they don’t have to, given that the brown hole is a Liberal invention.

What?

Jeremy Corbyn is pretending to be anti-establishment?? Who’s going to buy that when it’s plain that he belongs to a peculiar, anti-British, pro-terrorism, looney left establishment? Talking about buying, his best idea for buying votes is to offer 4 new bank holidays per year as compensation for the fact that wages have not returned to the levels before the crash engineered by New Labour in 2008. He thinks he’s playing the patriotism card if the holidays will fall on the saints’ days of the 4 members of the UK. No one seems to have reminded him that he’s seeking to set up shop in the last refuge of a scoundrel!

Half-hearted copycats

Trust the French to copycat Britain and America. The winner of the first round of their presidential election is an ex-banker and head of a self-created ‘Ça va if the EU wants it’ socialist-ish party. Second place went to the ‘Vive la France’ party led by Marine Le Pen. Conventional socialists, Gaullists, swindlers and all the rest were binned.
    Of course, the dull socialist-ish is the favourite to win in a fortnight’s time, when the Establishment is expected to strike back. And M. MacRon’s lack of a party isn’t likely to be a problem. As a former member of President Hollande’s regime, the socialists are sure to rally round; if only in search of some job security.
    And if that doesn’t work, M. MacRon can always try to cash in on the Auld Alliance by heading for Écosse to challenge Wee Burney Sturgeon for the job of Queen of Scotland!

Who says the Scots aren’t weird?

Seven trips to the polls in three years – for elections to local councils, the European Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, IndyRef1 and Brexit (okay, not elections but they still involved voting), a general election in 2015 and one to come in June – and the Scots are complaining that they can’t stand the pace.
    The poor wee souls are complaining they’re politicked out. Which makes it all the more strange that some of them are busting a gut for yet another trip to the polls for IndyRef2.

What’s blue and useless?

No wonder the police have an image of being largely cosmetic and led by senior officers who are more concerned about meeting pointless diversity targets than in solving crimes and making life tough for criminals.
    Police Scotland has just been busted, via a leaked memo, for concealing the true extent of knife crime. There’s some sort of investigation going on, but no one is expecting to hear anything other than that the policy of making knife-crime vanish ‘just happened’ and, of course, no one is to blame.

Loud noise, little importance

The news meeja seem to be devoting a lot of attention to Wee Burney Sturgeon, even though she’s just a provincial governor, not a member of the House of Commons and irrelevant to the coming general election. Which leaves we English asking why we should pay any attention at all to Nicola the Nose, who thinks amputation would be a good idea as it would allow her to strut the world stage unencumbered by the body which feeds her the subsidies that keep her alive. But for how long?

The real story

We’re being told that the taxpayer has recovered the £20-odd billion pounds hosed into Lloyds Bank when it went bump in 2008. But why was that necessary? Lloyds Banking Group collapsed into insolvency because Gordon Brown had a word with the spiv running it at a party and got him to take over Halifax Bank of Scotland to save Scottish jobs to do Brown a political favour.
    Unfortunately, no one at LBG took the trouble to check how HUGE the Brown Hole in the accounts of HBoS was, and both banks fell into it. So much for Gordon Brown as a financial genius.

Pointless and expensive political gesture

Yesterday was the first day since coal-fired power stations came into use in 1882 that Britain has spent without electricity produced from coal. Was that something to celebrate? Not really, given that coal remains the cheapest fuel and that all yesterday’s energy was coming from gas, nuclear, a bit of ‘occasionally availables’ (wind and solar) and imports from France – all at a greater, going up to a significantly greater, cost compared to electricity from coal.

Bright idea

One MP’s solution to diesel pollution is to scrap diesel-engined cars and give the owner a bike instead. Let us hope it has a basket on the front to take home the shopping after a supermarket run.

Yawn and yawn again

Are we really bothered that a space rock ‘the size of Gibraltar’ going at 73,000 mph missed us by a million miles yesterday, making its closest approach at 1:24 p.m.? As it’s not big enough to cause an extinction-level event, we could almost hope that this rock had landed somewhere troublesome, like Syria.
    Apparently, it was our closest shave since Toutatis missed us by another million miles in 2004.

Each to his own trade

Boris Johnson, currently Foreign Sec., thinks that a campaign of strikes will get rid of the appalling President Assad. Maybe we could accelerate the process by exporting a few trade union leaders to Syria to show them how to organize the strikes.

It has been pointed out . . .

. . . that even though the Yanks are claiming their MOAB was the biggest bomb dropped since Hiroshima, in typical bloody Yank fashion, it’s not as heavy as the 22,000 lb Grand Slam developed by Sir Barnes Wallis of dam-busting, bouncing bomb fame. The RAF was unloading these earthquake bombs against difficult targets at the end of WW 2. Which means that if the Guinness Book of Records changed its policy on excluding weapons, the US MOAB wouldn’t get a look-in, seeing it’s 70 years late and not heavy enough.

Doing the nation a favour

The PM is a rotten spoil-sport for depriving Kim Jong-dimbleby of his hereditary right to perform as ringmaster of the party leaders in election yawncasts? But we know what all the party leaders will say; that they’re marvellous and everyone else is crap. So where’s the point in encouraging the meeja hangers-on to think it’s all about them?

Good news for some

President Erdogan’s mission to make Turkey another Kim- or Putinocracy might be bad news for the Turkish people, but at least it’s good news for the EU. With him in charge, there’s no danger of Turkey qualifying for membership and imposing an even bigger bill on Germany’s luckless taxpayers.
    ● Erdogan will have to stay in power for a lot longer than the 2 x 5-year terms he’s planning to blag if he hopes to get close to the £160 billion eased out of Russia’s piggy bank by Vlad the Putin.

Burrocrats everywhere

It’s somehow comforting to know that French councils can be as stupid and vindictive as the ones we have here. Like Paris city council, which is trying to stop citizens from playing petanque in Place Dauphine because the pastime creates a lot of dust and the players talk noisily.
    No doubt the councillors are after a modern image for the area and they’d rather have zombies stumbling around peering at mobile phones instead of people actually daring to enjoy themselves by playing an old-fashioned, traditional game.

Every week, a show for you!

Good news! The Kimocracy in N. Korea has announced that it will launch missiles every week. Which will provide security of employment for the CIA’s hackers and the professionally outraged at least until the Koreans run out of missles.

Something he got right!

Looks like Mr. Corbyn knew what he was doing when he started building a general-election war chest. The printing and PR industries will be in absolute ecstasies if Parliament ‘does the right thing’ tomorrow.

Living comfortably in the past again

Mikhail Gorbachyov; yes, the man who put the skids under the Soviet Union is still around at 86; thinks that Russia and the West are in the grip of a new cold war. So he should be feeling right at home again.

Nothing to worry about

If the nation’s main focus is the emotional health of Prince Chazzer’s semi-orphan offspring, it’s comforting to know that nothing serious is going on in the world.

They dug the hole . . .

Was it the job of the West to prevent “the Islamic world’s most prosperous, democratic and pluralistic” country from racing into despotism with a Putin-style president-for-life? Of course, it wasn’t. If the Turks were willing to stand for being put under President Erdogan’s thumb by a rigged referendum, that’s their problem and it’s up to them to solve it, and definitely not the West.

Enunciating lacking

Either that or it’s a case of Cloth-Ears Syndrome; but it’s really weird, hearing TV adverts going on about the virtues of ladyboy furniture. I wonder what they’re saying really?

Weird war stories

We’re getting some curious stories coming out following the use of the MOAB in Afghanistan. The bomb was exploded at 7.32 p.m. local time. A bloke living in Pakistan, some 9 miles on his side of the border, claims he was woken up by the blast. Which raises the obvious question: What was he doing in bed at half-seven in the evening?
    Nothing on TV?

Pull the other one, mate

You really have to wonder how much politicians believe of the BS they spout. Take transport minister A. Jones for example. He’s claiming that putting the use of a satnav into the driving test will help to reduce road deaths and injuries.
    Really? Taking a driver’s eyes off the road will make other people safer?

Moot point

Does anyone give a rat’s ass that the Russian’s won’t be showing the Eurovision Song Contest on their state TV system? Thought not.

We are not alone! Hurray!

NASA is getting very excited about detecting hydrogen in the plumes of gas and vapour, which are shot out of the tiger stripes at the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Compounds of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen have already been detected, leaving NASA just two elements short of the Big Six basics for ‘life as we know it’. But its boffins are confident that phosphorus and sulphur are present in the hot, rocky core of a moon which features a 6-mile belt of liquid water under a frozen-solid outer shell.
    Could there be primitive life on our doorstep a mere 800 million miles away? No one knows. And before the “we’re not aloners” get too excited, let us not forget that their wish for life all over the galaxy could involve the doomsday scenario of mile-long spaceships parked over our biggest cities and scum-sucking aliens adding another bunch of slaves to their empire.

Believe it or what No. 192

“Trump drops biggest weapon since Nagasaki on Afghanistan” sez the headline. Really? If the bomb weighs 21,600 lbs, there’s no way that Mr. Trump could have lifted it enough to drop it. That certainly sounds like a bit more fake news!

Don’t get your hopes up, mate!

Sometime F1 champ Fernando Alonso has decided not to bother with the Monaco GP this year and to do the Indianapolis 500 instead. Given that the engine for his alternative ride will also be provided by Honda, which hasn’t done much of a job for McLaren in F1, it is to be feared that Mr. Alonso will just be swapping rear views of F1 cars for the same views of Indycars.

Noise instead of action

All the government outrage over EDF Energy’s announcement of a rise in its dual fuel standard tariff in June on top of the rise imposed on March 1st becomes synthetic under close scrutiny. E.on, npower, ScottishPower and SSE all announced price rises of 7-10% in March or April. The March price rise for EDF was 1.2% and the rise in June will be 7.2%. Which add up to a rounded 8½%, so EDF is no worse than the rest of the bunch.
    Where’s the other member of the Big Six? British Gas has frozen its dual fuel standard tariff until August. The eyes of its customers will start watering then.

In no one’s pocket

The scheme to squash the accusations that newly installed President Trump is in Russia’s pocket is going very well. Bombarding the Syrian air force has given Trump some credibility and also allowed Vlad the Putin to play the outraged despot. So win-win all round.
    But does the way Putin is rubbishing the idea that the Syrian regime deployed the sarin poison gas mean that it was actually provided by the Russians? Or even that it was Russian insurgents who released it so that Vlad could defend the Assad regime with a clear conscience? (For once.)

Purely cosmetic

We’re hearing a lot about all sorts of fancy scams for imposing ‘pay as you pollute’ charges on motorists, but what will they achieve in the end? Lots of cash flowing into government coffers but little or no change in pollution levels. The only way to stop air pollution in cities is keep out the vehicles causing the pollution. And like any government is going to grasp that nettle.

No big deal any more

“Fighting me is like climbing Everest,” a boxer bloke has told a newspaper interviewer. Clearly, no one has told the pugilist concerned that everyone and anyone is going up and down Mount Everest on the tourist trails.

Well, that’s reassuring!

Nothing like the Daily Mail for cheering you up on a Tuesday morning. Especially when it gets one of its writers to parlay the recent air-strike on the Russian province of Syria into World War Three in the Middle East. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea, when you think about it. Especially if that part of the world is turned into dust and all the displaced persons who are causing trouble in Europe are sent back there to get on with the rebuilding work.

It’s their turn now

The saintly Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph complains that the groupthink consensus
that Britain should be pathetically grateful that the EU let us join has been replaced by a Brexit groupthink equivalent.
    Mr. Booker, it should be pointed out, is a Remainer of conviction and he doesn’t appear to be aware of the saying: “turn-about is fair play”.

Is someone doing a rain dance?

What is it about motor sport that’s attracting so much rain all of a sudden? The previous MotoGP; a couple of weeks ago in the desert in Qatar; was blighted by rain. Same in China for the F1 Grand Prix over the weekend just gone. The Sunday race did actually go off okay; with a start on intermediate tyres; but there were fears that it would be rained off because the weather would be too bad to helicopter an injured driver to hospital within the permitted time.

BFD

A professor at the University of Nottingham thinks he's done something clever by destroying a plastic fiver. He had to freeze it down to 77 deg.K with liquid nitrogen before he shattered it with a hammer. Hardly an original way of destroying flexible objects; it's been done lots of time with flowers and fruit; and not a hazard which a fiver is likely to encounter in real life.

Egg on faces

Remember the uproar from the usual suspects when President Trump dared to point out that all was not sweetness and light in Sweden? Yesterday’s demented vehicle attack in Stockholm said otherwise.

Habit-forming in more than one sense

The Royal Society of Public Health has found that 90% of e-cigarette shops are selling to non-smokers, who are taking up e-smoking because they think it makes them look cool. Apparently, e-tailers have guidelines which say they should sell e-products only as a harm-reduction tool for smokers, and they should not be sold to non-smokers.
    The Vape trade association believes that 90% of its sales go to active and reformed smokers, and that the e-lifestylers are not a problem worth bothering about. And their cash looks just like anyone else’s.

Bigot zone

If a Conservative or a UKIP representative puts a foot wrong in public life, the roof falls in. If someone from the looney left, say, K. Livingstone or D. Abbot, does the same, their party does nothing. When it comes to standards in public life, they just don’t exist in some places.

Simple and obvious

If a man has surgery to make him look like, say, a seal, that wouldn’t make him a seal. So why should we believe that if a man has surgery to make him look like a woman, that makes him into a woman?

Nothing like planning ahead

Some of the experts who are predicting that 30 million jobs will be taken over by robots by 2035 are now worrying about what the government will do with all the redundant staff from transport, factory and office jobs when we have robots driving everything, building everything and screwing up all the record-keeping.
    Creative people like writers, actors and accountants will still be in demand but the experts think that there will have to be some cosmetic jobs for humans, whose work will command the same sort of premium as organic products today – not as good as what the machines do for twice the price.
    The experts think that giving employers a tax break will encourage them to take on cosmetic humans. But it is more likely that employers will realize it’s just not worth it any more, jack it all in and let the machines be entrepreneurs.

No wonder we voted Leave

The idiots at DfID got to blow an extra billion pounds on overseas aid last year; and the EU is to blame. Its financial geniuses insist on including income from crime; prostitution, drug dealing, extortion, bank robbery, etc.; in official GNP guesses, and as Dopey Dave nailed overseas aid at 0.7% of GNP, that’s more cash for DfID to shovel out with no idea where it’s going.

Bugger Balance Corporation

The BBC has a peculiar notion of what constitutes balanced reporting. With the EU membership referendum campaign over, the Beeb sees no reason why it should report Brexit and Bremoan views equally, and so has reverted to its role of a lefty, anti-British propaganda outlet.
    Let us hope that its management doesn’t expect the rest of us to treat their biased views with anything other than derision.

Dodgy is as dodgy does

Why would anyone care if Red Ken Livingstone thinks that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism at one time? Why should anyone care what this ancient was-been thinks about anything? Sensible people would ignore him, which suggests that all the commotion over his dotty views is nothing to do with Livingstone and everything to do with the commoters [n. one who causes a commotion].

He lied

The admission by, T. King, the government’s chief scientist during the New Labour era, that he was well aware that diesel is ‘dirtier’ than petrol (as far as emissions go) and kept quiet about it confirms what most of us have suspected for a long time. If it’s anything to do with the government, you can’t trust the politicians or their hirelings to tell the truth if a lie suits the politics of the moment better.

Well, why not?

There has been some discussion at the Mansion about the origin of the term Ms, the honorific used for ladies of uncertain marital status or stroppy disposition. I have always thought it should be used universally as it is clearly derived from ‘Mush’, the general honorific used in Hancock’s Half Hours, especially by the lad himself, as in: “Now, listen ’ere, Mush! Just how stupid do you think I am? No, don’t answer that.”

Cupcake Time

The usual suspects are agitating for the manager of Sunderland FC to get the sack because he told a female BBC reporter that she might [that’s might, not will] get a slap if she’s cheeky to him again.
    The snowflakes and cupcakes must be really hard up for something to moan about if that’s their best shot. Especially as it all happened 2 weeks ago.

Deceased Pedestrian-free zone!

A team from Historic England and Southampton University has found evidence that there was no zombie threat in the north of Yorkshire between the 11th and 14th centuries. The conclusion is based on the discovery of burials containing bodies with snapped thigh-bones, to prevent the revenant dead from wandering about, and no head to make sure they couldn’t see where they were going.

Health, wealth & Green happiness!

The Greens think the country would be more productive and healthy if we switched to a 3-day weekend. Maybe we should try it – and if it works out, go the whole hog and make Monday to Friday the weekend and work only on Saturday and Sunday.

Cosmetic suspects

12 suspects were arrested after Adrian Elms launched his murderous attack in Westminster last month and committed suicide by cop. The last of the suspects was released at the start of this month. None of them has been charged. Which rather makes it look like the police grabbed some bodies to make it look like they were following a trail and let the bodies go when the story dropped out of the news.

The DNA could do it

A professor in New Zealand has suggested testing water samples from all over Loch Ness in a bid to find out if the famous monster is for real. Professor Gommell reckons that his DNA detection technique is sensitive enough to identify all sorts of marine creatures from fish to seals and whales, and that anything anomalous would be detected.
    No, I’m not going to sponsor the gig!

Pure selfishness

If the Bremoaners had won the day on the EU membership referendum, would they have been as keen as they are now to have a second referendum to be sure the nation got it right the first time and everyone knew what they were voting for?
    Of course, not. And their current agitation is rooted in sheer hypocrisy. The referendum was a one-off, like the Cup final and the once-in-a-generation Scottish independence referendum. We got a result and whether or not a replay on another day would give the same or a different result is totally irrelevant.

Uncivil and incompetent non-service

Is this joined-up government? One part of it introduces rip-off business rates, which will generate thousands of appeals. Another part of it plans to get rid of one-third of the staff in the appeals department, which already has a backlog of a quarter of a million cases.

The real story

    Note that this is posted after 12-noon, so I can’t be an April Fool!
Mr. Tusk, president of the EU Council, has let the cat out of the bag. The EU establishment plans to chuck all sorts of irrelevancies into the Brexit process, turning it into negotions. In case anyone is wondering what they are, negotions is merely going through the motions of negotiation.
    Why? Because the EU is such a shambles that nothing can ever be agreed with all those contrary voices until well beyond the last second of the last day of the deadline.