Cliff Richard and Daniel O’Donnell. A duet made in hell, and playing on the radio.
Christmas really is coming, isn’t it?
Category: Scumbags
Much worse than idiots – people who know what they’re doing is bad, but don’t care.
A “tribute” to Augusto Pinochet
“My husband was under arrest. I went to see the commander of the regiment, and he told me not to worry, that they were going to release him for Christmas, that he was a good person. I went to see him December 31, but they told me he was not being held there any more. I came home. A truckload of soldiers had just left a sealed coffin at my front door a few minutes before.”
[Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Part Three, Chapter Four ]
Good riddance to the bastard. And isn’t that video of Baroness Thatcher cosying up to Pinochet in 1998 (long after we knew what he’d been up to) just sickening?
The Guardian’s obituary, the report above, the various Wikipedia articles on Pinochet’s favoured methods of disposal of troublesome opponents and these tables provide the necessary context to appreciate this statement. Good thing we aren’t supporting any mass-murdering dictators anymore.
[I was intending on putting this little tribute to Maggie’s own favourite dictator up the second I heard of his death, but my net connection was down over the whole weekend. Oh well, just as apppropriate now.]
“Britishness” at its “best”
Vandalising a WW2 memorial with swastikas and the SS symbol (as well as spraying what I can only assume from the context was JEWS OUT over a few nearby premises.) Wow, they really must love our country, musn’t they? You have to wonder what goes through British Nazis’ minds; it must be some form of obtuse doublethink.
And then there was the Nick Griffin/Mark Collett decision. Collett at least deserves prosecution for his part in maintaining the R*dw*tch hitlist (name starred out for obvious Google-related reasons), and this fact – given by both Channel Four’s Young, Nazi and Proud and the BBC Secret Agent programme – has never been capitalised upon despite R*dw*tch being run by an actual bona fide terrorist group and having caused many violent attacks against those listed on it. The fact that he wasn’t even charged over that is somewhat infuriating.
Admittedly, this government has done naff all against the various ALF/ELF/SHAC hitlists, anti-abortion hitlists, Christian Voice’s BBC hitlist and various others – they seem just not to care. Even the US has done more – these sites were ruled illegal by the Planned Parenthood/ACLA decision over the “Nuremberg Files” – so it’s not like the Home Office couldn’t get it shut down if it wanted to. Why it doesn’t, much like why it doesn’t go after the animal rights versions that cost millions to the taxpayer, is beyond me.
Now, I usually take a free speech position; scumbags are there to be refuted and ignored, not jailed. But hitlists are not valid free speech; they are threats against people and property which the site owners obviously intend to be acted on (in the way the Nuremberg Files greyed and scored out dead abortion doctors, for instance.) They contain information which is not meant to be public, sometimes even things like credit card numbers.
It’s basically terrorism – we’ll list you and you could just get a bunch of thugs wanting to stab you on your porch someday, just for saying “Nazis are bad, mmkay?”. At the very least, it’s much more of a terrorist act than some guy who has the “Attempt To Blow Something Up In A Completely Inaccurate Way Handbook” on his hard drive, which this government seems to find no problem prosecuting. There are some things it’s just impossible to get.
I’ll leave you with an obvious question drawn from the Griffin/Collett trial: since when was “we’ll show those ethnics the door” not racist, anyway?
Your privacy diminished, again
So we’ve just given in to the American demands for flight data.
Now, I can just about see why they’d want to know the names of people coming into their country, but they get that anyway when they look at your passport, along with DOB, a photograph of you, and currently biometrics of you as well. Why on earth they need to know whether you ate the fish or the chicken, or your credit card number, on the other hand… Isn’t that just overkill?
South West Trains have some bloody cheek
Anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to travel on South West Trains will have been rather aggrieved that they were allowed to keep their franchise, despite being one of the worst performing train companies in the country and despite the fact that many better performing franchises have had theirs taken away (eg. the National Express Scotrail franchise, which was awarded as best in the country a couple of times and still had their franchise taken away and given to First). They also have a big overcrowding issue: they control several of the big commuter routes into London and commuters loathe them (check out that “Megaplaint” Word document – wow!)
So what have they thought of to solve overcrowding? Bear in mind that SWT have brought in new trains that suck even compared to the new trains on other British lines. This is something they could, of course, have forseen, since it has been the most heavily overcrowded train company ever since its inception. What have they thought of?
They’re ripping out the seats.
Does Brian Souter have blackmail material on Blair or something? Honestly.
The greed wins out: or does it?
If you don’t want football matches to be shown between 2:45 and 5:15, maybe you might wish not to allow TV companies to broadcast them. This thought has apparently not come to the SPL:
A licensee in Glasgow has been stopped from using a decoder to access and screen overseas broadcasts of Scottish Premier League matches.
The Court of Session in Edinburgh granted an interim interdict against The Spirit Bar in the east end.
[BBC News Scotland, “Licensee handed TV football ban“]
The basic situation is that all games are taped. Through a UEFA ruling, we can’t actually show most games live within the UK (those between 2:45 and 5:15 on Saturdays) because it’ll stop people being extorted by the clubs, but at the same time rights to all the games are sold to countries outside UK jurisdiction which aren’t subject to this limit.
Since the satellites that serve the Middle East are very much accessible from UK skies using a large (but standard) dish, you can entirely legally purchase a subscription from a Turkish satellite provider and thus gain access to SPL/EPL/other non-Sky football. Often with English commentary, too. A few people in the know – mostly satellite enthusiasts and pubs – have taken this up, and the football authorities are not happy.
Sky in particular are furious at this: the fees they charge pub-owners are astronomical (for a lesser service, too – the pub versions of Sky Sports are 4:3, not widescreen) and they don’t want to lose that easy, monopoly income. They’ve actually failed at this in the English courts, but obviously they’ve decided that the Scots might be an easier target.
Going straight to the point: it is not illegal for a pub-owner to posess a foreign decoder, the decoder owner pays the subscription fee to the foreign satellite company, the SPL/EPL/whatever are paid for the rights from the foreign broadcaster, and therefore if it gets picked up in Britain it should be none of their business. All prosecuting people does is shows us
- how silly the rule is
- how expensive Sky areand, most importantly,
- that more people really should do this
Yes! Buy a motorised dish! Screw Sky! Screw £30+ gate fees! Screw the SPL and EPL! And then maybe, just, they’ll see some sense.
Panic on the check-in at Heathrow
What on earth is going on? Here we have John Reid making one of his regular “freedom can get tae f***” speeches while obviously knowing what’s going on in the background, a “terrorist plot” allegedly foiled by the security services, and thus the introduction of yet another kneejerk “security” feature that seems to be designed to make people’s lives hell whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop anything bad getting on the plane.
(I mean, explosives getting set off by an iPod? The amount of effort needed to get the battery out of one of those things would make any terrorist attack using one about as effective as Richard Reid’s shoebomb. Maybe a mobile, but that would take time to set up too – and would be just as effective in the hold.)
What’s amazing is that these ‘security’ additions haven’t been thought about at all: instead they’ve just gone for a blanket ban. If you’re facing a threat from “liquid explosives”, (although the current Net rumour is that it was a production-of-HCN chemical reaction designed to incapacitate the entire aircraft) you don’t need to ban laptops, MP3 players, cosmetics or, of course, any and all reading material. Instead, you just have to force people to hand over their bottles of “water”.
Which idiot civil servant thought that banning (or rather, not allowing) reading material was a brilliant idea, and how much of an idiot does John Reid have to be for forcing it through? It’s a tell-tale sign that all that’s going on is a serious kneejerk reaction of the type that does nothing to improve the safety of British citizens. Spending (say) 24 hours on a flight to Australia with young kids, no reading material, no games consoles, nothing other than ludicrously priced airline mineral water is not going to be fun for those families who have to go through with it, or anyone else on the aircraft.
I was close to the weight limit for check-in baggage when I left Britain for Germany at the beginning of July. I return at the beginning of September. If I have to put all my books and my laptop in check-in (along with my laptop’s backup drive, AC adaptor and restore discs, wonderful, no chance of anything going wrong there oh no), it’ll probably take it over Easyjet’s 20kg limit and I’ll get charged oversize baggage – no-one is waiving the fee, because they don’t have to. Worse than that, I’m going to be stuck in Berlin SXF for a long time with absolutely nothing to do, followed by being stuck on a two hour flight to Glasgow with absolutely nothing to do other than read Easyjet’s pathetic in-flight magazine, followed by hoping beyond hope that my bag comes through unharmed with my laptop intact. Don’t know about you, but I’m dreading it.
BBC Have Your Say seems to think that we should blame the terrorists for all the disruption and be thankful that we weren’t blown up, since obviously if we were allowed books some terrorist might find a way to break a window with a bound Qu’ran or whatever. If the plot was real, then I’m fine with the cancellations and the removal of water bottles et al; however, I won’t blame currently hypothetical “terrorists” for what British airline passengers are suffering right now. I will blame John Reid and BAA for being unmeasurably stupid, for instead of thinking about what was necessary to protect us they simply chose to follow the TSA-style kneejerk “Oh my god, let’s ban everything!” overreaction.
And this is his claim to be deputy leader? Pathetic.
If you liked this rant, take a look at Europhobia, where as always Nosemonkey lays it out in the best written of terms.
Mel Gibson is a drunk, speeding driver
The Oscar-winner, 50, was stopped after driving at 87mph in a 45mph zone in Malibu, California.
He failed a breath test, was charged with drink-driving and freed on bail.
Speeding and drink driving. Wow. Definite entrant into my “scumbags” category, especially since he only paid $5000 for his bail (probably because he’s a ‘sleb, or maybe… nah, not in 2006).
In case you’re wondering about my hatred of Mel Gibson: he’s a decentish actor who’s appeared in some decent films (the Mad Max series and Chicken Run) and he should stick to bloody acting instead of inflicting overwrought epics on us. Plus Braveheart comfortably takes the title of my least favourite movie of all time, followed up by Passion of the Christ, a 127-minute long torture scene with majorly uncomfortable homophobic overtones (in the Herod Agrippa sequences) and even more uncomfortable graphic torture (only made bearable with the addition of the Benny Hill music, a bit of a surprise in itself). I have seen Japanese movies which are much more bearable than Passion, despite being more graphic, because it’s obvious that the film-maker isn’t actually enjoying the depiction or (in the case of Takashi Miike), at least, is trying to make a point with it.
So Mel’s been in a lot of stuff I hate and, what’s more, was completely responsible for it, so anything that takes him down a peg is fine by me.
Plus, let’s face it, driving drunk is lame.
UPDATE: Gibson apparently made anti-Semitic remarks:
“The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: ‘F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’ Gibson then asked the deputy, ‘Are you a Jew?'”
Definite scumbag. See Orac for a decent historical discussion.
Good news, and follow-ups
In the good news, Jim Davidson has been declared bankrupt because he won’t pay his tax bill (serves him right for living in Dubai, not to mention being a racist, sexist little shit).
If you delve deep into the BBC Europe site, however, you find some much worse news relating to the League of Polish Families (UKIP’s bunk-mates in the European Parliament), a seriously dodgy ultra-ultra-Catholic political party which has an unfortunately large role in the current Polish government. One of the party’s founders said the following at a Europarl commemoration of 70 years since the Spanish Civil War:
Thanks to the Spanish army and Franco the communist attack on Catholic Spain was thwarted. The presence of such people in European politics as Franco guaranteed the maintenance of traditional values in Europe and we lack such statesmen today. Christian Europe is losing against atheistic socialists today and this has to change.
[BBC News, “Europe diary: Franco and Finland”]
Wow! And he has the cheek to call other people “revisionists”. Those people who Franco made disappear would probably differ on that one, but hey. “Atheistic socialists”? Give me a break.
One would suspect Jesus wouldn’t have appealed much to him.
Who’s the biggest wanker?
- eBay, for claiming that their real estate auction site is "not binding" when a buyer gets gazumped after putting in a $900,000 winning bid
- The vendors, for gazumping the seller to sell a house to a backdoor bid
- The buyer, for being willing to pay $900,000 for a house he's not going to live in because of somewhat dubious historical credentials.
When you realise that the gazumped buyer is Uri Geller, on the other hand – a man for whom the term "fraud" doesn't do enough justice – it becomes fairly easy to determine the answer to the question. Quoth the article:
"As the clock closed on the bidding [on] Sunday, I felt intuitively I got the price," Geller said.
"Suddenly the radio started playing an Elvis song. That was Elvis telling me we got the house."
[BBC News Online, "Elvis's home sold to Uri Geller", 16.05.2006]
What a load of utter bollocks.
Still, even though there's a bit of schadenfreude in seeing Geller get outmanoeuvred with no place to go, it doesn't say much for eBay's buyer protection for you and me, does it? So here's a few lessons we can take from this…
- Don't buy a house on eBay
- Don't be Uri Geller
That should do, I think.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 