"Snow is seminal" says wanker

HARRY PHIBBS: It snows and the whole nation is paralysed. Where's our true grit (and the gritters?)

So it snows and suddenly all the London buses are cancelled. Tubes and commuter rail lines are closed. Both runways at Heathrow airport shut down. Millions of workers give up the ghost and hunker down for a cosy day at home.

All London buses have been withdrawn from service due to 'adverse weather and dangerous driving conditions.' Why withdraw ALL the buses? Is it really impossible for any of them to cover any of their routes?

Of course road accidents take place even in the best conditions but at the time of writing Scotland Yard report that while the weather has caused many minor accidents nobody has been seriously hurt.

Stopping all the buses is yet another example of our society being disproportionately risk averse. But after all it's a monopoly so sod the passengers. Let them walk to
work and never mind the danger of crashing to the ground in the 'adverse weather.'

So, nobody has been seriously hurt in accidents on the road despite the treacherous conditions?

Erm, let me see, that wouldn't, by any chance, be because there is virtually NO FUCKING TRAFFIC?

You tosser!

Shame on Yoo

The Last Chance Democracy Cafe: John Yoo — a scholar and a war criminal

Yoo’s crime was in writing legal memorandums that provided cover for torture later carried out by the Bush Administration in the name of the United States. Like Ernst Janning’s wrongful court judgments at issue in the movie, Yoo’s torture memos, on their face, probably had the appearance of proper legal process. But they were a fraud.

That waterboarding is torture has been settled for decades. The United States has punished people from other countries severely for using it against our people. Anyone with legal training, especially someone who claims to have taken the time to research the point, who would say otherwise, is a liar — and worse still an enabler of evil.

Sunday Papers

Nor the UK one?

The American Economy Is Not Coming Back By Dave Lindorff

America, and individual Americans, have been living profligately for years in an unreal economy, propped up by easy credit which inflated the value of real estate to incredible levels, and which led people to spend way beyond their means. Ordinary middle-class working people have been encouraged to buy obscenely oversized homes at 5% down, or even no down payment.

They have been lured into buying cars the size of trucks, one for each driving-aged member of the family (in our town, so many high school kids drive to school that the school ran out of parking spaces and the yellow school buses, largely empty on their runs, are referred to by the students as the “shame train,” an embarrassment to be seen riding).

They’ve installed individual back-yard swimming pools, unwilling to share the water with their neighbors in community pools. Boring faux ethnic restaurant franchises of all kinds have befouled the landscape, filling up with families too stressed out to cook, and willing to endure over-salted, over-priced and tasteless cuisine and tacky plastic décor night after night.

Prudence? Who she?

John Redwood: The overborrowed drag down the prudent

Many running good businesses are struggling for custom and cash as the credit and the orders dry up. Worse than that, the most imprudent banks are the ones that are walking off with the cash, as the government frantically pumps new share capital into them instead of making them address their underlying business problems .We all know that if we work hard and save for the future, it will be us who pay the higher taxes and pick up all the huge bills they are now running up. Policy seems to be based around the proposition that there is no limit to how much taxpayers should borrow collectively, to remedy a problem brought on by some taxpayers and some taxpaying banks and companies borrowing too much individually! Nor is there any apparent limit to how much taxpayers are made to put into weak banks, who carry on paying large salaries and bonuses.

Any reporters here?

Israeli Envoy: Attack on Gaza a ‘Preintroduction’ to Attack on Iran

After ordering a cameraman to turn off his camera, Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem engaged in a very frank discussion about the recent Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, calling it “a preintroduction” to an attack on Iran that Israel apparently expects within the year.

The Papers

The wheels on the bus...

LabourList.org

COMMENT OF THE DAY: Every Friday, the week's best comment will receive a bottle of House of Commons champagne!

Chris Cowin: "[Brown’s] original objective, set out before Labour came to power in 1997, could with hindsight have been better phrased as "we will abolish homegrown Boom and Bust"... in a sense Gordon Brown can be compared to the driver of a bus which has been travelling a rough and bumpy road. On taking the wheel, he promises the passengers that from now on the road will be smooth and there will be no more "Boom and Bust". He drives carefully along a fine new highway and all is well. But then a storm breaks out and the bus is buffeted from side to side. The passenger s at the back complain loudly that they were misled, that it is just as uncomfortable as before - but Gordon must not waste time arguing with them. He has to concentrate on driving the bus."

And that was the best comment they got?! Jeez.

Update: Friday 30th. FFS! This comment has just won the bottle of Champers.

Message from Grote to Scrote

Professor Honderich answers a neo-Zionist:

Dear Idan Gurel,

Thank you for your email.

With a pile of dead people in Gaza killed by what you call your defence force, I cannot bring myself to reply to your points. If you are convinced I am not good at argument, you might turn your attention to virtually the whole world, and ask why your neo-Zionism is at least adversely judged by all of it, loathed by much of it.

Ted Honderich

Grote Professor Emeritus Philosophy of Mind & Logic
University College London

Lordy, lordy!

He's done well for himself since he stopped working for Benny Hill

Is it a bird?...

Charlie Brooker: Obama's inauguration was the most inspiring thing we've seen in years - and the most terrifying, too

For the last eight years, watching America at work was like watching the scenes in Superman III where Superman, under the influence of red kryptonite, goes "bad" and grows stubble and gets drunk and starts vandalising the city and shouting at kids. He's only stopped when his geeky alter ego Clark Kent magically fights his way out from within, and stands blinking before him, in his nerdy suit and thick glasses. Evil Superman scowls, and the pair have a cathartic bust-up in a junkyard - at the end of which Evil Superman is finally vanquished. As a battered but unbowed Clark Kent gazes up at the heavens, the theme music swells, and he pulls his shirt open to reveal - ta da! - a fresh, clean Superman costume he'd been wearing underneath the whole time. Then he flies off and beats up Robert Vaughn or something, which is a shame because until then it had all been a pretty good metaphor for the redemptive spectacle of last November's election. And now it's just a silly action movie I probably shouldn't have mentioned in the first place.

An end to boom and bust?

James Grant, the man who saw the crash coming

The Wall Street Journal gets a swipe round its chops in every other essay in James Grant's book but the targets for his most withering and unwavering censure are - as he put it in a telephone interview with The First Post yesterday - "the criminally negligent and incompetent financiers" who cooked up this mess; and "our masters in central banks and governments" who "keep making determined efforts to thwart the price mechanism as an elegantly simple instrument of deliverance" from our present woes.

Allowing that mechanism to work unhindered would, in James Grant's view, "deliver General Motors to its deserved fate - which is bankruptcy"; and, though he was reluctant to be drawn on the question, Grant would prescribe the same fate, in principle, for RBS.

"The habits of mind of central bankers are perilously close to central planning in their conceits," he said. No individuals personify those conceits more, in Grant's book, than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his acolyte Gordon Brown. Mistaking a financial boom for economic stability, they were the architects of a palace of debt, with flying buttresses of over-valuation, as fanciful as Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein Castle.