That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘Government’

A little birdie told me recently that a large bank in the city is due to announce another record quarter of profits, and with that another round of record bonuses will follow. The Daily Heil will no doubt bleat on about fat cats and that sort of thing but here’s why they should just sit quietly in the corner with a large box of shutthefuckup.

In the first quarter of this year the bank in question made £1.2bn profits and set aside half of that for bonus payments. It’s fair to assume that as my source described both the profits and the bonus this quarter as record breaking it will be in excess of that figure. The bonus pool for the year is rumoured to be as much as £14bn.

And around five and a half billion of that is going straight to the treasury.

That’s a lot of schools and hospitals.

Or it’s payback of about 3% of the national debt that Gordon has kindly run up for us.

Former Labour minister Ian McCartney, on an act to ban cigarette vending machines in England, NI & Wales:

“[Tobacco is] the only product in Britain that can be sold legally, which routinely kills and injures its customers”

I’m not sure that 863,000 people would agree with that statement though, you cockbag.

Or is calling the initiative aimed at advising police forces on how to increase the number of rapes reported, as well as convictions,  “The Rape Support Programme”  just a wee bit of a misnomer?

Just a thought.

I am currently holidaying in Florida and while there is a tropical storm brewing off the coast I have not been on the beach or kayacking in the Everglades and have instead been channel surfing during the rainstorms. I made the mistake yesterday of switching over on to CNN and thought I should share this little insight into how they do things over here:

Watching CNN is basically like punching yourself in the face with stupidity; if you ever wondered how Americans were led to believe things like the invasion and occupation of Iraq were a good idea then you just need to watch CNN for a few minutes to see the twisted version of reality they peddle in order to keep the US public fearful. I was watching a debate piece on the news that there may be stricter controls on the fuel efficiency of cars produced for the US market from 2o16 onwards. Let’s just say that last sentence back to ourselves out loud to make sure we didn’t miss anything. There “may be stricter controls”.  “May be”. Maybe.

That’s not “Obama is going to take away your truck”, that’s “if all goes well and this change in policy gets past all the corrupt senators and their oil lobby buddies, the car companies have got about seven years to start making cars that come somewhere near the sort of fuel economy that the world outside America and Saudi has come to expect for absolutely fucking ages”.

On a side note, I am renting a car here and have got a Toyota Prius and it’s totally the perfect car for the stop/start block by block driving in a country too thick to master roundabouts. I’m getting about 47mpg here and that’s while still driving like a cunt and slamming my foot down alternately on the gas and the brake pedals.

So anyway, CNN wanted to illustrate to the cattle what the new economy standards would mean. The target number is 35.5 mpg so they showed three typical vehicles and their fuel economy. In the blue corner, sporting stars and stripes and probably concealing a host of automatic weapons (for sport hunting, honest) there was a big truck, the sort you see all over the roads of suburban or rural America and parked outside every Steak & Shake. In the green corner was the aforementioned Toyota Prius, a car not suited for long distance journeys but perfect for nipping around town or cruising down a three lane suburban street between the traffic lights that seem to be placed every few hundred meters. In between the two, and set to illustrate exactly the sort of vehicle that Obambi wants the red blooded gun slinging american steak eaters to adopt was the tiny Smart for Two.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Smart car is an excellent vehicle and does indeed manage about 36mpg which is near enough dead on the 35.5mpg target they were discussing but it’s tiny and not something that the average fat bastard American could even fit in, let along work out how to switch on. It’s also painting a pretty bleak picture for them if they think that the roads will be filled with tiny cars that are small enough to fit in their trailers.

Surely a less worrying comparison would have been an Audi A4, a car which does 35mpg in the combined urban and highway tests. Maybe a nice Renault Scenic which can comfortably carry several passengers but is also capable of around 35mpg? How about just about everything in the Volkswagen range which can do high thirties to mid forties? The Smart car made a much more dramatic news piece though because it illustrated the extremes that CNN wants the cattlefolk of America to fear rather than the reality of what will happen if the bill goes through. The rest of the world (or at least the bits outside of Saudi and the US) have been managing quite well with cars that average around 30-40mpg for ages and the only reason the US has never bothered to catch up is because they have never had to, with petrol at around $2.50 a gallon at the pumps (that’s around 35p per litre) a car that pisses petrol out the back is still a cheap one to run, as the US government has never had the stones to tax the great American penis replacement they just have to hope that legislation will gradually force the big dinosaurs of car production to play catch up with the technology in almost every European’s driveway.

Of course the cynical would say that asking GM and Chrysler to sort out their fuel economy is as pointless as telling Jade Goody to sort out her elocution, a little fucking late in the day.

The media have their knives out and they are desperate to manipulate us into a general election as interesting and as socially important as the one in America last November; not content with the sort of landslide they brought about in 1997, they want this one to be hard fought because a close election sells more papers than another landslide will.

In 1997 the tories, marred by a whole heap of sleaze, were forced out of Downing street after a catastrophic general election. The rebranded and rebadged New Labour were the darlings of the media because they had happily thown their policies and ideals aside in favour of press pandering and a photogenic leader. In a fantastic triumph of buzz words and bullshit over thought and consideration the New Labour party was elected in a fanfare of cock stroking*, back patting and general all round self congratulation. They proceeded to then do all the popular things like raising public spending without all the unpopular things like raising taxes to pay for it. They also engaged in a pointless and some say illegal** war (incidentally without actually allocating extra cash to the armed forces to pay for it; fuck the soldiers, they don’t need guns that work and body armour that is more effective than room temperature butter).

All the while the Tories were not really trying that hard at getting power back from the crazy Labour folk because they hadn’t worked out the whole media game; in a country were presentability and media savvy is more important than policies (and the basic ability to run a country without fucking it up) New Labour with all their ad men are always going to have an advantage over a succession of grumpy old men who are too busy considering how to name Britain Great rather than doing things the Labour way and paying a bunch of lovelies to blow the editor of the Sun***.

Then came Brown****.

Gordon Brown is a singularly uncharismatic scottish cunt ***** who made the mistake of spending the first few months of his time in Downing Street trying to get some work done rather than making endless repetitive speeches and greasing GWB’s pole. This pissed the media off a little because like the childish and self centered fuckbastards that they are, they hate the fact that someone might consider running the country to be a more important use of their time instead of submitting to the whiney meta discussion around the periphery.

At this point let’s clear something up: the media have realised that people take them seriously and that has made their collective ego about as big as Obama’s hairy swinging man mamba******.  The reactionary idiots who read many of the tabloids and hand wringing middle class broadsheets form their opinions on the badly thought out whimperings of the daily news and this means that the media can shape public policy in a way that the politicians can only dream of. The news folks have realised that rather than simply reporting the news in a clear, analytical and accurate way they can distort and manipulate the news to make politics more interesting.

I don’t want interesting politics, that nice bloke Mugabe had interesting politics. Germany had interesting politics during the thirties and forties. I want dull politics like we had for decades after the war when we ignored politics and set about being good at stuff.

So anyway, we had a boring PM for a bit but then the boy Cameron came along with his photogenic smug face, his videos of him caring for his window licker kid and his magical abilities to use stuff like YouLube, Twatter and Facerape. Cameron was stroking the egos of all the Apple fanboy new media sorts who sit around in Soho bars hoping that @stephenfry will respond to their tweets so they can guffaw about something in an ironic fashion; I mean if they use YouLube and Cameron, the opposition leader of parliament, uses YouLube then they must be at least as important as Cameron (and a hundred thousand Korean kids having a Rain Man moment on Guitar Hero).

Gordo responded with a YouLube broadcast which was as hideous as watching your dad do the fucking robot at a family wedding*******. This has put the press in a nasty position because Gordo has no hope of ever being popular again (even the cunting lying bastard spawn of the devil that make up the news can’t gloss that turd) and David Cameron has the potential to be a run away success at the next election. They hate that shit because even a van driving cash in hand dole fraudster from essex can work out that the next election is a foregone conclusion and anyone who votes Labour is a massive wanker; with that sort of certaintly there is no need for the newspapers to tell you what to think anymore. This problem can only be fixed by evening things up again a little and that means flinging the same expenses shit that the media threw at the Labour party but this time at the Tories.

Let’s get another thing straight: expenses are a totally godawful reason to vote a party out of power. Get rid of Labour because they took the country to war, they bankrupted us, they are trying to turn this place into a police state or because they want to fuck you up and watch a swan eating immigrant rape your peachy white daughter********, I don’t care what it is of their many disasterous policies that you hate but the fact that they tried to squeeze a little extra juice from their expenses gravy train is not a reflection on their otherwise inability to run a country. Elect the Tories or don’t, it’s your choice, but just make sure your reasons are based on the policies and promises they make to repair the damange of the last twelve years of Labour and not because you like David Cameron’s face or think that he would be a better leader because he didn’t have his gimp kid drowned at birth.

The expenses thing, for all it’s worth, is easily solved. Don’t want people employing their brother as their cleaner? Employ a central pool of Whitehall cleaners. Don’t want people claiming for a second home in Westminster? Provide digs for MPs to stay in while attending parliamentary business. Don’t want MPs taking the piss on their expenses? Publish every fucking claim in it’s minutae on the interweb each month so that constituents can check that shit out (let’s face it, the only reason anyone in honest about their expenses claim is because someone else normally has to approve them, take away that scrutiny and there is no deterrent).

And once that’s done we can tear up the papers and switch off the news because the world wide wank (or web, your choice) makes it easy for each and every one of you sycophantic twatdanglers********* to find out everything you need to make an informed decision about the policies and plans of your local electoral candidates.

* OK, probably not.

** Yeah, but it’s not because the US said it’s OK and if they say it’s OK then no cunt’s got the stones to argue.

***This may not have actually happened.

****Go on, you know you want that mental image.

***** I am led to believe that there are other sorts of Scots apart from the cunts but have no evidence to support this.

****** Go on, he’s the most powerful man in the world, don’t tell me you don’t think he’s hung like a fucking whale.

******* Or a really really really shit moonwalk (as popularised by alledged paedo Michael Jackson for all you kids that don’t remember the ’80s)

******** Not an actual policy.

********* Not you, Lulu.