(S)haha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, !

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Wolfowitz to quit the World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz is to quit as head of the World Bank after a bitter promotion row involving his partner. The global lending body said Mr Wolfowitz would step down on 30 June and that it would begin the search for a successor immediately.
Now, what was it John Bolton was saying 16 hours ago?
John Humphreys: We're seeing the demise of Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank.
 
John Bolton: I see you're a gravedigger as well. I'm not at all sure I see the demise happening yet.


Closed thought system

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Melanie Phillips’s Diary - Bolton v the BBC

Melanie Phillips has become such a joke that it doesn't seem quite fair to keep drawing attention to her idiotic ramblings, but I will (at least until her HRT patches finally kick-in).

Read her piece about this morning's interview with Mr Pastry John Bolton (someone who cuts an even more ridiculous figure than Ms Phillips) and then play the actual Today programme interview (below) and listen to the sneering, arrogant, hateful little shit himself.
The exchange started coolly enough, so much so that for a while I thought Humphrys was for once going to conduct an interview about US foreign policy without betraying his own views. 

But then things took a sharp turn for the worse when his incredulity at what Bolton was saying — which, because it was based on truth, rationality, sense of proportion and intellectual honesty clearly struck Humphrys as utterly preposterous – prompted him to claim that America had ‘destroyed everything’ in Iraq.

Bolton told him sharply that this was totally untrue, that various Iraqi ministries had remained functioning, and that although undoubtedly America had made grievous mistakes in Iraq, that fact did not invalidate toppling Saddam in the first place. It was that point — that logically unanswerable point —which Humphrys just couldn’t get his head round.


Note to Humphreys - Bolton in NOT 'Mr Ambassador' any more!


SNP First minister

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Salmond elected as first minister
Alex Salmond has made political history after becoming the first Nationalist to be elected first minister of Scotland. The SNP leader was voted into office in parliament by 49 votes to 46, after he was supported by the Greens. The Lib Dems and the Conservatives abstained. Mr McConnell, the former first minister, congratulated Mr Salmond on his victory and said he would be proud to lead the largest opposition party the Scottish Parliament has ever had.
This was Salmond's speech earlier today prior to the vote:

Where are all the coppers?

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The Policeman's Blog
...This from the department that wants me to supervise each form before the end of each shift, fold them all lengthways so that I can then scan them both sides. Once scanned I send them on an email as an attachment but no more than 6 on each email - so that's only 3 forms per email.....oh, that is after I have gone to another office to get the scanner receipt so I can send proof that I have done it - then I can take all the forms to the mail tray in the front office with the envelopes marked up as 'STOPS Forms' enclosing no other paperwork but remembering to retain the receipt.

Good job I have no real police work to do. Did I mention that we have to photocopy them too - both sides - although the forms are bigger than A4 so we have to use A3 and cut them down.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghh hhhhhhh!!!



Catching up

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Wordpress.com To Celebrate 1 millionth Blog
Wordpress says that the one millionth blog will be created on the wordpress.com platform sometime next week, which also happens to be their 4 year launch anniversary. Last August the site had just 300,000 blogs, 1.6 million daily page views and 14.2 million unique monthly visitors. CEO Toni Schneider says they now have 7.5 million daily page views and 45 million unique monthly visitors. Scobelizer is no longer the largest blog on Wordpress.com, although it is still in the top 5, as is GigaOm’s Web Worker Daily.




Big Seed Marketing

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An interesting piece on combining traditional marketing methods with viral marketing techniques from Harvard Business review:

Viral Marketing for the Real World
Imagine, for example, that an advertising firm makes a standard ad buy on the Web, or directs TV viewers to a Web site, or uses an e-mail list to contact potential consumers directly. Regardless of the method used, the campaign will yield some large number, N, of conversions—people who are sufficiently interested to click on the Web ad or embedded link. Traditionally, that’s all it would be expected to achieve, but imagine now that these N viewers can also share the ad easily with anyone else. In other words, what would previously have been the entire audience for the message also becomes the big seed for a viral campaign in which the newly added people can forward the message to their friends, who may forward it to their friends in turn, and so on.
Via Kottke




Vidal on Cuba and the USA

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Robert Scheer interviews Gore Vidal on his recent tour of Cuba
 I’ve been reading the American press for 70 years, is it, now?  It seems like longer.  And I have never read a story favorable to another country.  Oh, yes, the Swedes have better medical care, better education, better day-care centers for working women ... but they’re all alcoholics.  And they commit suicide.  No, no, no!  Yes.  And I often ask sometimes when I have a dumb member of the press with me: “What is disturbing to you about Sweden?  It bothers you that people aren’t dying of various diseases, they’re not starving to death?  That they are looked after with a good education system and so on?  Do you think they’re so bored then that we have to just jazz them up with poverty and plagues, the things that make our lives so exciting here at home?”

You can’t get an answer because it is so deep-rooted, it is lumping Protestantism from the very dawn of our country.  And instead of dying out as it looked to be doing by 1945 when we all came home from the war, others were fanning it just for political gain, particularly in the South.  So the solid South, which had been solid Democratic for a long time, shifted over, and that changed everything, and that may have had something to do with the demonizing of Cuba.

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