Stop moaning about the weather!

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There were two stories that caught my eye on the local news last night. One was about farmers throwing away milk because the dairy tankers were unable to get up their snow covered farm tracks and the other story was how much extra the cold spell will add to this winter's heating bills.

 Can't farmers organize themselves to clear a bit of snow? They are farmers, FFS. They have tractors. In Scotland the local farmers are used and paid by the local authority to clear local roads, not just their own tracks. Instead the farmer last night simply moaned that his (private) road hadn't been cleared and gritted by the council.

As for paying higher bills. Use some of the money that you saved over the last few years when we had extremely mild winters. It's swings and roundabouts. Stop moaning, for fuck's sake.

Build character, skint yourself!

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Liberal Conspiracy -  It’s not class war, Dave, it’s just character building…
Life, for David Cameron, has been, for the most part, far too easy and far too short on genuine adversity and the kinds of difficult personal experiences that, once upon a time, would have been universally referred to as ‘character building’.
Difficult personal experiences?

There was a time when the worst we could expect from Unity was to be bored to death with his Wikipedia-lite blogposts but since he's got his feet under the LibCon table and his head  up the sainted Sunny's arse he's now not just boring but self-righteous and unpleasant to boot. He's in good company. Tedious cunt.

The blind leading the Bliars

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John Rentoul* - Best Prime Minister We Never Had
He (David Blunkett) reminded me of a list I was going to compile of Next Prime Ministers. For much of his time as Home Secretary, 2001-04, he was the only rival to Gordon Brown as "next prime minister". If he had survived, things might have worked out differently in 2007.

Those next prime ministers in full: John Moore, Ian Lang, Gillian Shephard, Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Portillo, Mo Mowlam, David Blunkett, John Reid, Alan Johnson, David Miliband.
We all know Rentoul is a complete twat but really, what the fuck is this guy smoking these days?

* He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning.
Nuff said.  Nurse!

What ho! Campbell

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First Post: Alastair Campbell will one day regret defending Blair
Campbell and Blair, the Jeeves and Wooster of this blackest of political farces.

The Campbell performance, masterly in its own way, has ensured that unlike the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the report from the Chilcot panel will not be the last word. There is now too much information, well attested and sourced and from all kinds of places, to give the Blair team the benefit of the doubt. Campbell's parting jibes as he left the hearing that this is all largely got up by the media were beyond risible.

Many of his colleagues in government past and present must be cursing his avalanche of eloquence yesterday, for his torrent of words warned friend and foe alike that he is a weapon of ultimate self-deception and that this is far from over.

If Cameron supports, they will oppose

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Cameron, Myleene and tabloid tales
Essentially, then, the word of a celebrity TV presenter is regarded as being more credible than that of the police.
What? Coppers not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I can't wait to see Anton Vowl repeat that line next time a demonstrator (maybe even a Labour supporting celebrity) complains of being roughed up by police and the cops issue a vehement denial. Or maybe when an innocent man gets shot in the head seven times by armed officers.

Andrew Bartlett, in the comments, equates waving a knife in your own home at some guys outside, who are clearly up to no good, with carrying a concealed blade through the streets of south London.
Myleene Klass felt threatened. Decides that reassurance lies in the shape of a knife. Public support. A young person - the most likely victim of violent crime - feels threatened. Decides that reassurance lies in the shape of a knife. Public damnation - with calls for jail sentences for carrying (not using) a knife.
I won't even bother to comment on that. It's just plain bonkers.

Harry Mount(ainous Cock)

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Man makes horrifying discovery. Victorian schools facades are just that, facades. Behind the 19th century walls of these schools lurks a terrible secret, they are not really Victorian at all! They are 21st century!

Goodbye, Mr Microchips (or why computers should be banned from our schools)
Have you been inside a primary school recently? The old blackboards are gone, and so are the wooden desks with those little inkwells. No great loss, perhaps, but what has replaced them is frightening.  Those handsome, Victorian red-brick board schools, set up under the 1870 Education Act, might look pretty much unchanged on the outside. But on the inside they have become little offices. Whiteboards, hooked up to computers, are the main teaching tool in the classroom. Whole areas are given over to ranks of gleaming screens.
Tosser.

Has the clawback begun?

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Stop and search powers illegal, European court rules
The ability of UK police to use "arbitrary" counter-terror stop and search powers against peace protesters and photographers lay in tatters today after a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights.

The Strasbourg court ruled it was unlawful for police to use the powers, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to stop and search people without needing any grounds for suspicion.

The widely-drawn ruling said that not only the use of the counter-terror powers, but also the way they were authorised, were "neither sufficiently circumscribed, nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse".

The use of these powers has grown fourfold, from 33,177 times in 2004 to more than 117,200 in 2008.

The Metropolitan police have used them most, but 11 other forces in England and Wales also make routine use of them.

A political furore ensued when it was disclosed that the whole of Greater London had been secretly designated for stop and search without suspicion since 2001.

Working like a charm

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Osama: 10 - United States: Nil by Eric Margolis
Except for Communists, a notorious bunch of liars, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good – in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked. But after the USSR collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington’s ruling circles and drove them to seek "full spectrum domination" of the globe and its energy resources rather than a cooperative new world order.

Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam gave bin Laden the blueprint for his later war against the west. Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, Osama, launched a seemingly quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive western power from the region.

Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990’s. He would oust the modern "Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel. Bloody attacks would enrage the US and lure it into one quagmire after another. Bin Laden was dismissed by western intelligence as a crackpot and "enragé." But both the dimwitted President Gorge W. Bush and the intelligent President Barack Obama fell right into Osama’s carefully-laid trap.


Twitter. The crack cocaine of the interwebs!

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When I closed down my Twitter accounts a while back I was under the impression that they would be deleted permanently and immediately, which was fine by me. I didn't want the temptation of sneaking back - burning bridges, and all that. Without the distraction of Twitter I happily got on with building up my blog again. I'd lost about 30,000 visitors a month (uniques) and I knew it would take time and a lot of posting to get things back to where they were.

It only took two weeks to get my Google rank back to 5 (from 4) and there has been a steady improvement in visitor numbers. I'm not a stats freak. I rarely even check my figures or my referals. I've always aimed my blogged at about a dozen or so people. These are who I have in mind when I decide to post something or link to something which, as a link-blogger, is what I mostly do.

Then I got an email from Twitter. Would I like to revive my accounts? Apparently they are dormant for six months during which time they can be easily restored, with all the old setting etc intact. I resisted, of course! For about two minutes :) Then I just had to crank them up again, not knowing whether I would actually restart Tweeting or not. I've decided that I will.  I'm HERE.