Thought for the day: Life is nature's way of delaying death.

Facebook: making sure you never lose touch with people you don't like.

Internal admin is not "industry".

Flying on a wing and a prayer may sometimes be necessary. Taking off on the same is another matter entirely.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Financial news

The New York stock exchange is presently unperturbed by the possibility of the U.S., the biggest economy on Earth, defaulting on its debts. Investors are said to be confident and this is reflected in the Dow Jones index. Everybody is happy. More follows....................

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Olympics special

It is now only one year until the opening ceremnony of the London Olympics which are exactly one year away in a year's time this time next year. Thought you ought to know this.

Adjust William

Enoch Powell famously said that all political careers end in failure. If the old buzzard was still with us, I can imagine a post-script noting that many now begin so. It is always dangerous to look back with too much uncritical fondness at political figures from the recent, readily recalled past, especially so with the likes of dear old Enoch, who was a bit of a card at times, but this shouldn’t bar us from appreciating the techniques they used and the skill with which complex ideas were distilled and transmitted in finely crafted paragraphs. The sheer vapidity of the vast bulk of political debate at U.K. level today is starkly highlighted when listening to some of the acknowledged masters of the post war era. Sceptics can look to the early days of televised parliament for positive identification of that now almost extinct species. A few linger, but they are old, elusive and seldom heard.

It should be a matter of national regret that the age of the great parliamentarian has gone and that public speakers of Powell’s calibre are not around to tears strips off the gormless lobby fodder now clogging Westminster’s benches. The role has now become so homogenised and commodified, we now have standard issue politicians: a 2/2 from Oxbridge in Politics, Philosophy and Economics with work experience as an adviser to somebody slightly further up the same hermetically sealed food chain is now widely considered to be sufficient qualification to run the country. Miliband, Cameron and their respective tribes clearly accept this orthodoxy and the frightening thing is that nobody seems to be challenging it except a few wizened old refusniks forever banished to the political hinterlands. It suits the markets, mind, so nothing worry about..........

Monday, July 25, 2011

Spot the self-referring paradox: Number 2651

From the BBC News website today:

Nick Martin
writes on our Facebook wall "At least the Norwegians have had the sense to try this guy behind closed doors and not give him the publicity he craves".

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Bargain basement bribery

There are more than a few aspects of the conflagration presently engulfing the Murdoch empire and the Metropolitan Police that don’t stack up, notwithstanding  what seems to be the inescapable truth that this all goes far higher, lower and wider than at first imagined. David Cameron has never convinced as a politician, even with the patronage of a beneficent Murdoch press, but he looks decidedly shaky now, appearing to be playing double-or-quits with his political survival.

Conspiracy theorists must be worried that they too are facing redundancy as it is hard to even imagine why he should appear so nervous and unsure, unless of course he’s so familiar with wrongdoing that he is merely trying to figure out which particular unnatural act is actually implicated. He either knows nothing at all, in which case we should ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing in Number 10, or he’s been a very naughty boy. Sadly, he is an honest chap and I believe he is sincere when he admits to being too uninteresting and shallow for honest-to-goodness corruption.

Murdoch: Custard Pie Horror

Breaking news.....

Rupert and James Murdoch were said to be shocked last night when, despite high security and with the eyes of the world watching, a man described only as "a banker" calmly marched in on proceedings and shoved a £14 billion bonus in the public's face. 

The Empire Strikes Out

Dear Rupe.......You don't mind if I call you Rupe, Rupe? No? Good. Very humbling for me too. There're a few questions I'd like to ask you. Where to start, eh? I mean, we go back years. So much has changed, but you haven't. You're still the same venal, mercenary, soul-less philistine you were as a boy. And, just as in your youth, you confuse friendship with bondage and see financial transactions as acts of love, no matter how perverse. Such is your currency, which I suppose makes you a (deleted for legal reasons). All well and good, but you broke house rules and the safety word has changed and it's not "humble". This is what you get for taking the piss.

All you've done is refine your profound personality flaws and one-dimensional conceit into weapons using the artifice of business. And guess what, Rupe? It's all as real as a Restoration Comedy and the curtain's staying up. By rights, you should be lucky if you can have a dump in private. Your slimy tendrils saw to it that many thousands would endure just this for far lesser sins.

By way of a starting point - there are so many - I'd like to ask about a couple of comments you made to the Commons select committee yesterday. In response to suggestions that your company suffered endemic corruption, you said, "Endemic is a very hard, a very wide-ranging word". It is indeed. You continued, "That that has been disclosed, I became aware of as it became apparent." One would have hoped that you did.

Oh, another thing. Just in case you thought differently for one fucking minute, whether or not you "agree to be interrogated" or are "more than happy" or otherwise to do so is immaterial. Given that you are getting on a bit, time is of the essence and we really do want to help you in any way we can to reminisce on the old days. We wouldn't want you snuffing it now, would we? Just think of all the hard work taken to reach this moment. Rupert, if needs be, I'll donate a kidney just to see you hang.

I promise we won't get bored, even with the tedious little details about who signed off the cheques and to whom and how you pimped successive Prime Ministers into dismal acquiesence to the forces of organised kleptocracy. And just to pre-empt you, you're dead right, sport, this does all have the carnival atmosphere of a lynching to it.

More follows......

Monday, July 18, 2011

Aye, but nothing............

Despite the arrests, resignations and a whirlwind of all-purpose, late-blooming outrage at the activities of those embroiled in the News Corps scandal, it is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done to detoxify the country from the pall of venality eminating from the Metropolitan Police and News International.

This is nowhere more evident than in the popular but lazy narrative which has it that the phone-hacking and bribery allegations presently circling News Corps like vultures  are simply an extension of the scandals that surrounded the banks and Westminster MPs' expenses. This is an agenda in no small way propagated and gleefully nourished by a media that has been slavishly following Murdoch's line simply to keep a market share. Even when taking issue with either his friends in big business or his media practices, he was setting the tenor of debate. Others sang in either harmony or discord, but Rupert & Son ran the rhythm section.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Times they are a Changin' Hands

Our reporters are watching this one closely and will bring you up to date with the latest intercepted messages, tales of nefarious behaviour and all round, perfidious ugliness just as soon as we scrape our jaws off the floor and stop laughing with undiluted joy.................... 

Reports are coming in that the Wicked Witch of Wapping has been formally arrested on appearing by appointment at a London police station. A shame really. Given some of the shit she's meted out to thousands of people over a long and ignominious career of unbridled spite and utter lack of human decency, I'd have preferred to see her being dragged screaming from her bed at five in the morning with the all the world's most mercenary papps present and correct, forewarned and fore-armed.

More follows..............

Friday, July 8, 2011

Armageddon special





WORLD TO CLOSE DOWN: breaking news with exclusive pictures!!!!!!!!! 
 
The universe yesterday (© Sky/ News Intergalactical)
The universe was rocked tonight by news that the once-popular planet, The World, is to be taken out of circulation after 4.5 billion years as a satellite of The Sun. In its heyday it was behind many sensational stories and set the agenda for other small deposits of utterly insignificant debris floating aimlessly near the asteroid belt. It was once famously recognised for the memorable and typically self-deprecating slogan, “all known life is there”.



It was perhaps most famous in recent centuries for shocking exposés such as the plagues of Egypt, brain-curdlingly awful daytime TV and for the prolonged periods in which it exercised total mind control over the planet's embarrassingly supine governments and alarmingly suggestible inhabitants, as well as its forensically detailed and grizzly experiment with brutalist realism, perhaps best exemplified in the infamous World War exclusives on which so many worked without fear or favour. 

Ian Hislop was too upset to speak (© Who cares?)
Long before all this, of course, there was that mind-boggling and arguably unrivalled stunt, the story that really made its name as the planet of choice for so many lower life-forms, the so-called natural selection scandal, involving absurdly large reptiles and massive, up-yours volcanoes, which some today still refuse to believe actually happened despite this being a story most other planets concur on and indeed covered extensively at the time. 

However, some World natives chose to rely for too long on undisprovable, intercepted messages from other dimensions, an activity endemic there and that was behind many of its most shocking misdemeanours and ultimately led to the catastrophic loss of direction that necessitated this final drastic solution. It is quite clear that this planet had been spinning unstoppably towards oblivion for considerably longer than the six and half thousand years, give or take, many of its inhabitants had claimed.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Heid the baw

I am delighted to report that the new Scottish government is seeking to set up a bespoke Scottish TV channel. I do hope, however, that the present model for Scottish news broadcasting is abandoned and that we might be treated to a more balanced news diet.
  
BBC's Reporting Scotland in particular is now simply a nightly football round-up with a couple of token items on quirky, niche subjects such as politics, health, the economy and the like. I have made my own sample study and have found that, on average, 15 minutes of each episode of R.S. consists of football news. Another 5 minutes is spent telling us what is coming up later in the programme, as if we are all on the edge of our seats and can't endure more than a few minutes suspense without soiling ourselves. UK news dispenses the same garbage, but with  better production techniques and an international dimension, however, packaging alone will never disguise the overwhelming stench of stool.

Football supporters are a well catered for minority and generally do not need a blow-by-blow account of the weekend's football results on a Monday. The suffering majority are not remotely interested in the minutiae of manager and player contracts, transfer agreements and minor players' even more minor injuries. The sheer presumptiousness of football is nowhere more manifest than at the daily press conferences held by clubs to announce utter trivia of significance to nobody other than themselves. 

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Credit where it's due

Listing the sins of this Westminster coalition is like housework; a depressing, never-ending chore enlivened only when one is required to stop and identify the new species taking root behind the fridge. But while the government set about cleaning up what they aver is a mess - some cynics say replacing it with a worse one - a glaring contradiction to their stated ideology stands out. It seems to defy a prime article of monetarist faith, the one which says public spending can only be a burden on wealth creation that merely encourages feckless dependency and deserves at least as much scrutiny as any nefarious prank involving sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt.  

While the thousand cuts they are so gleefully inflicting are being readily identified and deconstructed by all and sundry, one astronomically expensive example of the dead hand of state interfering in people's lives, a Keynesian monster that, if doctrine were adhered to, would  be considered the work of a monolithic, statist, command economy, has received little or no attention. This despite, on the face of it, being meat and drink to neo-liberal market evangelists everywhere, namely, the bizarrely complicated and hugely expensive - about £18 billion - working tax credits system. This is doubly strange, what with its architect being one Gordon Brown, at whose door it is now customary to lay the blame for every catastrophe from the fall of man onwards.

Current political orthodoxy – if such indeed exists in a world where governance is increasingly regarded as little more than an adjunct of big commerce – has it that if Gordon Brown thought of something, it must by definition be a bad idea. Surely the Working Tax Credits system is the beast incarnate, the very embodiment of the redistributive, anti-free trade tyranny that business abhors and gives markets fits of the vapours?