Society

Move the fuckers to Salford

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By the time I grumpily stomped from the lounge at about 6.15 last evening, the BBC Six o’clock News had worked its usual spell and made me feel like I’d been anally violated by a grizzly bear who’d run out of lube.

The bulletin having worked its way through the BBC’s palette of PowerPoint effects while patronisingly explaining to me what a recession is, and played a pointless succession of clips of Rupert Murdoch saying nothing helpfully interspersed by Nicholas Witchell consdescending to explain what it was that Rupert Murdoch was not saying anything about, the final straw came while George Alagiah introduced an item about The Great Drought Of 2012.

You see, it rained quite heavily in some parts of the country yesterday.

But the bulk of England is in a drought. Half-empty reservoirs, hosepipe bans, etc.

And those two things BLEW GEORGE ALAGIAH’S TINY MIND.

Clearly, the BBC thinks it’s impossible for there to be a drought (brought about by a sustained, long-term period of low rainfall) alongside a couple of hours of rain.

The BBC almost certainly blames the European Court of Human Rights for “them” taking away our God-given right to water our petunias WHEN THERE’S CLEARLY LOTS OF WATER AROUND SO WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM, BLOODY JOBSWORTHS?

I didn’t wait to hear the “report” on this pressing “news” item, doubtless pointlesly topped and tailed by some poor schmuck in a raincoat who’d been told to drive around at great expense with his cameraman and sound engineer until they found somewhere where it was tipping it down with rain.

I pray that the Chief Executive of British Waterways (or whoever they interviewed for incisive insight and enlightened comment into this incredible phenomemon) replied:

“Two years – almost no rain. One day – heavy showers. Now fuck off, do the job we pay our licence fees for and go and report on what’s happening on South Sudan.”

But as there’s no mention of that on the front page of today’s Daily Mail I have to assume that didn’t happen.

Maybe tonight, eh, George?

No-one likes him: he don’t care

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It’s a very warm welcome back to the Ministry to our favourite religion-hopping, lunatic, crusading war criminal, Mr. Tony Bliar!

From the look of this picture it seems that it took the Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf a very short time indeed to get the measure of this crackpot zealot.

Cunt meets homophobe

Funnily, Bliar was in Liberia to tell the Liberians how to live their lives, just as he liked to tell various sets of little brown people how to live their lives back in the day when people still inexplicably gave half-a-shit about what he had to say.

The more I look at the photograph above the more I laugh. Albeit it’s the kind of mirthless laughter borne of the realisation that it took President Sirleaf mere minutes to come to the same conclusion about this pointy-headed cunt it took a large swathe of the British electorate a full decade to reach.

It’s just a shame she’s a nasty homophobe. Ah, well…

Thanks, anyway, Mr. Tony Bliar, for cheering an old Minister up. May it be years before you darken the doorstep of the Ministry again.

It’s Not Right But It’s Okay (In A Chancer’s Paradise)

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“We all knew she had issues,” said Satan Cowell.

“But we didn’t actually try to do anything about the issues we all knew she had. We just continued to make money off her by dragging her fraying body out as a freak show/guest star every so often for your entertainment so we could sell more advertising space. We played on her issues. We preyed on them. In fact, now I come to think about it I am a despicable cunt. What I’ve become shames and disgusts me. I shall now do the honourable thing and kill myself,” he didn’t continue.

A slowly growing sense of hopelessness and impending doom

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Story #1: London’s burning. Again.

Story #2: The markets are in freefall and various economies are failing. Again.

Story #3: There’s been a massive increase in crime in rural areas since the recession started.

I don’t know what story #4 was on the BBC’s early evening news yesterday because I switched off at that point.

Each of the stories was presented in isolation, with fuck all by way of analysis or thought apart from a flash of Stephanie Flanders’ revolting green skirt.

It’s all linked, of course, and none of it is remotely surprising for those with half-an-inch of long-term memory. It happened in the 80s during a recession. It happened during the 90s in a recession. Just because we didn’t have a recession for 15 years doesn’t mean we should raise an eyebrow that the slash and burn approach to economics adopted by PBD and Gideon have resulted in exactly the same social upheaval that occurred when That Bloody Woman did the same thing three decades ago.

There are only two differences now.

First, rolling news channels have been invented. They’ve got to fill all that airtime somehow. The riots of the 80s just got ten minutes at the start of the evening news bulletin. Now it’s all riots, all the time. Breaking news is the new light entertainment.

Second, our leaders – the people in whom apparently sane and rational individuals were inexplicably prepared to place their trust just over a year ago – were absent. Whatever other flaws she had (and I think she had a couple), you can’t imagine a complete vacuum in Downing Street when That Bloody Woman was in charge. Even Bliar and Arrivederci Gordon realised some bugger had to hold the fort.

Everybody deserves a holiday. Even PBD and Gideon. (Or, more accurately, their families.) But, in real life, everybody in my department is not allowed to go on holiday at the same time. It is shameful beyond comprehension that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London were all on holiday at the same time.

And I notice Chauncey Gardiner was on his hols, too, only deigning to come back from Devon’s Adenoid Extraction Recovery Unit AFTER PBD had announced he was getting on a plane to fly back from Tuscany. That tells you everything you need to know about our Leader (sic) of the Opposition.

What was our Coalition administration’s stunning Plan B while everyone topped up their tans? William Hague and Vince Cable. The former, a man whose leadership credentials have already been roundly rejected by the British electorate in a plebiscite; the latter, a man whose sole achievement over the past 15 months has been to demonstrate his lack of temperamental suitability for ministerial office. It shows how well the Don’t Panic Double Act went that first Nick Clegg, then Theresa May and then finally PBD dragged their sorry arses back to work like a half-hearted zombie invasion.

Gideon remains absent, soaking up the Californian sun. Rome burns but it’s nothing to do with him, guv.

Of course, the real salt is yet to be rubbed into the wound. Wait for it – it’s coming: the emergency police powers. We’re inches away from a police state. But then maybe that’s what our politicians have wanted all along.

And one final thing. What the fuck has this got to do with the Olympics? How many people were murdered in Los Angeles in 1983? Or Beijing in 2007? Grow a fucking pair. If you want to try to shift attention away from the fact that you have wrought this on yourselves by pursuing exclusionary policies, fine. But some of us would have preferred all along if the £9.3 billion or more of public money being spent on the Olympics had been spent pursuing inclusionary policies.

Not for the first time, the Minister quotes with approval Tom McRae:
Rioters of London, remember to leave some real estate standing so mortgage companies have a product to deny you.
I wish the poor shopkeepers luck in claiming on their insurance or getting small business loans. The wrong buildings are on fire.

(Thanks to Radio Nixon for the post title.)

Dupe process

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Yesterday Ofcom pleased its political masters by repealing laws passed by Parliament. It may have repealed a dodgy law, but that’s beside the point: it’s not how our system is supposed to work. No matter how dodgy a law may be, it is not a quango’s job to repeal it. It’s the job of legislators. And a powerful regulator should be independent, and not heel to its political masters – although anyone who followed the history of the regulator will permit themselves a hollow cackle at that principle.

Ofcom repealed Sections 17 and 18 of the Digital Economy Act by expressing no more than an opinion: the justification to support that opinion is absent from its report. Ofcom could have set out its case in terms of explaining the legal framework, for example, but it didn’t. It could have argued the costs and benefits of each approach to web-blocking – but it didn’t, it hadn’t even attempted to do that kind of empirical research.

Instead, on page 43, we learn that: “It is our current belief that the blocking of discrete URLs, or web addresses, is not practical or desirable as a primary approach.” What’s practical is not defined, what’s “desirable” is well beyond Ofcom’s remit.

Imagine the uproar if a quango had interposed itself to block significant primary legislation: Britain’s entry into the Common Market for example, or the minimum wage. All are quite complicated issues, after all. The blame isn’t entirely Ofcom’s; the regulator was permitted to do this because ministers wanted to find a way to bury the Sections without Parliament formally repealing them. Again, this is dishonest, and not the way laws are made or unmade. Ed Vaizey has been trying to get industry to agree to self-regulation which would allow him to announce their imminent repeal (most likely in the next Communications Act).

The Conservatives came to power vowing to abolish Ofcom, and declaring war on what they saw as Leftish academic poseurs, and business-hostile bureaucrats. They now seem to be at the mercy of all three. How on Earth did that happen?

Andrew Orlowski, Ofcom bows to Google lobby, The Register

I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver

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The frightening pointlessness of rolling news channels was amply demonstrated once more last night, with BBC Radio 5 Barely Alive’s coverage of the Norwegian vileness.

First, the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner decided to opine – apparently in the absence of too much evidence – that the events bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.

“Seems a little surprising,” I thought. “A blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker apparently acting alone doesn’t seem too much like the multi-handed al-Qaeda atrocities we used as an excuse to bomb Arabic-speaking little brown people back to the Dark Ages.

“But, hey. This is the BBC. They wouldn’t just – you know – make it up as they go along, would they?”

This morning I awoke to the news that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian speaker is apparently a Christian fundamentalist with a history of decrying Islamism and multiculturalism.

Yet this morning’s Today programme was curiously bereft of Mr. Gardner fessing up to the fact he’d been talking shit 10 hours earlier.

Worse still, the BBC’s rolling news radio network inexplicably thought that the appropriate way to cover the tragedy was to phone up and ask for a comment from Jan Åge Fjørtoft.

Mr. Fjørtoft is an intelligent and erudite Norwegian who speaks fluent English, but I still don’t see what expertise he can bring to the analysis of these events in his capacity as a former professional footballer for Swindon Town, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Barnsley.

Maybe he was the only Norwegian in the duty producer’s contacts book…

Ironically, Mr. Fjørtoft was bumped mid-sentence by the stereotypically hyperventilating presenter precisely because the producers had managed to find someone to talk to who actually had some involvement in the day’s awful events.

If these rolling news networks can’t actually cover breaking stories with a semblance of competence, then what exactly IS their point?

But then perhaps I’m missing the wider point. Maybe the only appropriate reaction to acts as senseless as those in Oslo and Utoeya is utter senselessness.

Every serif helps

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For those who don’t get my typefaces fetish, compare this:

with this:

The food almost certainly tastes the same.  The cost of the items in the shopping basket is probably more or less the same.  But one sensory experience is incomparable with another.

It just takes a little bit more time, effort and care.

And what the fuck would Tesco know about that?

A feature about the branding and typefaces used by a family-run German supermarket chain called “tegut…” is published on the Fonts In Use website.

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