Who is doing the mocking?

China has made a mockery of justice -  Clive Stafford Smith

It wouldn't have mattered to Clive Stafford Smith if Akmal Shaikh had been the sanest and most intelligent man alive. Or if he had masterminded the distribution of the entire world's heroin supply. Stafford Smith would still have opposed his execution. But it doesn't stop at being opposed to the death penalty. In Stafford Smith's world it is the murderers, rapists and terrorists who are the real victims.

...this brings up Clive's great central concept - which is that, in a sense, no one is guilty. Or, rather, that the question of their guilt is not what is interesting; what is interesting is why they did what they did, if they did it. Clive disliked Tony Blair's suggestion that the legal system needed to be “rebalanced” in favour of the victim. He sees the system as being inherently biased against the accused, and as pursuing vindictiveness at the expense of comprehension. The prosecutors, he argues, should be consumed with doubt about the guilt of those they prosecute. Those with the defending mentality should prosecute instead - a fascinating suggestion which he then undercuts. “I would never be a prosecutor,” he says emphatically. “ I just don't want to be. That just reflects my bias.”...

If he were a young lawyer starting out in Britain today, who would he seek to represent? “Paedophiles. Even Guardian readers hate paedophiles.”

Wrecked 'em?...

True Tales of Urban Terrorism:   James Wolcott

I was once sitting next to a guy on the subway whose underwear exploded.

And his underpants hadn't been wired with any exotic device neether (sic).

I had to move, like, two cars down.

I and my fellow stampeding passengers didn't lose our nerve that day and America shouldn't lose its nerve now.

Clueless

Liberal Conspiracy -  Tory strategy: to hope for a credit downgrade

Political anoraks. They really haven't got a clue, have they? Whether Britain's credit rating is downgraded or not will have absolutely no effect on the actions of voters in the general election. It's a complete irrelevance. 99.99% of voters don't even know what it means. It's only trainspotting political nerds like the author of this tedious and pointless piece that get aroused by such details. 

Cunt Coughlin

When will the British people wake up to the enemy in their midst

...at a time when British Muslims are known to be providing the Taliban with bomb-making equipment to blow up British soldiers in Helmand, our mainstream broadcasters seem obsessed with allegations made by the former Guantanamo detainee Moazzem Begg – who himself is not a British citizen – that he was tortured by British intelligence officers during his interrogation.
Cunt Coughlin, arsehole, peddler of dubious 'intelligence' and gobshite for the UK security services.

I think the point is not that the victim wasn't British but that the torturers WERE! Or have I missed something? 

Bloody toffs!

Prime Minister to attack 'privileged few' in New Year message

Mr Brown will also declare that a “decade of shared prosperity” lies ahead.

I'm sure it does, it just won't be the NEXT decade. Although, I'm equally sure that, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Mr Brown's own personal finances will see huge advances over the next ten years as he signs up for several lucrative posts and joins the self same 'privileged few' he intends to castigate next week, .

Class War bollocks

The recent fuss about a 'class war' and whether or not Labour should pursue it as an election strategy is another example of how political activists, party supporters, jumped-up, self-regarding bloggers and the assorted ex-Trots who haunt the comments section of LibCon are unable to see the wood for the trees.

Are people concerned about 'class'? Do poll results show that bashing the toffs is popular with some of the electorate? Probably. But, so what? What effect will it all have on the outcome of the next election. Well, I'll tell you:

absolutely sweet fuck all! 

Like all recent elections, it will be floating voters who decide the outcome. And they won't be unemployed class warriors in safe Labour seats in the north-east. They will be people who vote on the basis of self-interest and they will be voting for the government they feel best supports that. They couldn't give a flying fuck whether the future prime minister was educated at Eton College or The Barbara Speake School of Stage and Drama.

And, as you can see from the image above, it's not exactly a new development. Yawn!

A theatre of the absurd

The Iraq "Inquiry"

Why does the extermination of an entire culture cause not a ripple in our public discourse? The answer is obvious: we don’t have any kind of discourse with those who wield power. The Chilcot ‘Inquiry’ demonstrates this down to a tee. It’s brazen in its disregard for the reality of the crimes the British state has committed in Iraq and continues to commit in Afghanistan. And brazen in the way it scoots a lot of very guilty-looking ‘witnesses’ through the process as painlessly as possible. How has this come to pass...

As far as Chilcot and his handpicked accomplices are concerned there are no guilty people here, merely passive witnesses to the crime, who regurgitate what is already known and has been for years. And if it made no difference the first (and second) time round, why should it this time? Indeed, Chilcot went out of his way to inform us that it wasn’t a trial, there was to be no attempt assign culpability or responsibility, no serious cross-examination. So what’s the point?

Read the rest

Slip Slidin' Away

Via A Welsh View

Dawn, leave them kids alone

Boys aged three 'must work more'

Boys aged three and four must be made to write more to stop them falling behind girls before they even reach school, the Government will order nurseries and childminders.

And who is behind these orders? Why it's the useless Dawn Primarolo, of course. She of botched Tax Credits fame.

No-Joy Powder

Fury as China executes British drug smuggler

MPs were scathing about China. Ken Purchase , a former Foreign Office ministerial aide and a member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, called China's actions "absolutely regrettable", adding that the country was trying to position itself in the mainstream of international affairs while persisting with "barbaric actions".

Would this be the same non-entity Ken Purchase (right) who voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war; voted very strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws; voted very strongly for introducing ID cards and voted a mixture of for and against the Iraq war?

It appears that the drug smuggler, Akmal Shaikh, was about as mentally ill as Stephen Fry (and me, come to that). He has been presented as some hapless halfwit who was tricked into carrying a suitcase full of heroin. He wasn't. Should he have been executed? I don't support the death penalty for non-violent crimes but the Chinese consider heroin a lethal drug which causes the deaths of thousands of people so maybe, as far as they were concerned, it was a crime of violence after all.

Now (don't) Wash Your Hands

Washing hands in hospital 'spreads disease'

Washing your hands in hospitals can actually make you more likely to pick up infections, according to one of Britain’s leading bacteriologists.

Prof Hugh Pennington said hospital taps were often crawling with dangerous germs. He said money needed to be spent urgently to replace hand taps with automatic infra-red systems to stop staff, patients and visitors picking up viruses.

Explosive bollocks

The boy who grew up to be a bomber

'There are many more like me', says failed underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Let's hope so. If they are, indeed, all like this hapless, useless, incompetent Nigerian twat then we have little to fear. We might be in for a spate of burnt crotches, though.

Not that his 'bomb' attempt was a complete 'failure'. True, it failed to damage the plane in any way but this pathetic damp squid will still usher in even more disruption at airports around the world inconveniencing thousands of people and involving governments and airlines in more expense.  And, of course, it strengthens the hand of those who want to make life more restricted and controlled for the rest of us. So, thanks a bunch, Umar. You fuckwit!