More smoke-screening

A Democrap senator tells the FBI it may have broken the law by doing its job of investigating Hillarious Clinton's emails close to the presidential election. That’s a cudda, mighta from an unreliable witness, who’s one of Hillarious’ apologists. Which suggests the Democraps are hoping to get their dodgy candidate into the White House and hoping she survives the inevitable impeachment proceedings if their campaign of intimidation fails.
   The Head Fed who released the news of the further investigation was accused of being long on innuendo and short on facts. By politicians. Pot. Kettle. Black.

Small Deal

We’re expected to be dismayed by the news that Dave the Leader’s decision to make no tax rises until 2020 a legally enforceable policy was done on the spur of the moment because he had nothing else to offer to the eager news meeja.
    But we already knew that Dave was like Tony B. Liar; all flash and no substance. So further proof of his general vacuity isn’t really needed.

Operation Elvenden = Epic Fail

The Metropolitan police farce has managed to waste £20 million on trying to convict journalists of paying public officials for information, which was published in the public interest. Not a single one of the charges has stuck despite 5 years of thrashing about.

Brexit Bonanza

Apple is using the fall of the pound as an excuse to slap huge price rises (e.g. £500) on its products. The response from users of rival products is a rather unsympathetic: “If you’re mug enough to buy Macs and i-stuff, you deserve to be swindled”.

Diversity has a lot to answer for

Further to yesterday’s comments on diversity and incompetence: the National Audit Office has published a report showing that the incompetents running the cash-strapped NHS are still failing to bill health tourists from foreign countries for NHS treatment received. Ignorance, incompetence and the politics of the British Medical Association all play their part.
    There is £2 BILLION pounds per year involved, so not petty cash.

A bit more spectacle

Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 supremo, has an idea for stopping drivers exceeding the track limits in defiance of the rules: 16" high walls where the stripy bits end and the solid red or green starts. He thinks a mini version of the walls of street circuits, like Monaco, will concentrate a few minds, and give the public a few more spectator-entertaining crashes of those who fail to concentrate.

Weird sense of humour

The teenager who has been busted for leaving a ball-bearing bomb on a Tube train is claiming that it was just a prank. Which raises the question of what he thinks would be something serious. Blowing up a nuclear power station?

Things I really didn’t want to know No. 198

You’re in hospital, you feel at death’s door and suddenly, your doctor sits down at your bedside and starts asking what you think about your condition. Because it has just been revealed that doctors don’t really know what they’re doing and they need input from the customer. Which more or less confirms that we’re doomed.

Maybe not that spiritual

A lot is being made of a Bronze Age-style barrow, which has been built in Cambridgeshire with niches to house cremated remains in a neat urn. It is being lauded as a revival of lost mysticism in an age of atheism and repellent rampant religion.
    But let us not forget that it is also a business and there is a 2-grand parking fee for storing an urn for 99 years. Which raises the interesting question of what happens when the time is up? A burial in a Bronze Age barrow was for the rest of eternity. But when the 99 years are up, is it into the black landfill bin to make a parking niche available to another lucky customer if there are no relatives available to cough up another parking fee @ whatever inflation has done to the current price after a century?

Want Cash? Create A Crisis

The Earth is facing a mass extinction, sez the WWF. No, not the World Wrestling Federation, the other one. Do we need to be worried? Not really. Mass extinctions have happened in the past during the planet’s 4.5 billion year history and, no doubt, there will be more before the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth in about 5 billion years’ time.
    Whenever there have been big changes in the climate, the Earth has continued to turn and life has continued in different ways. So why is the WWF trying to scare us? Because it wants more money off us for things like its part in the not-so-great Global Warming Swindle. There’s always a simple explanation if you take the trouble to look for it.

Untidy society

The flattening of the migrant camp @ Calais is making a lot of news, but it would appear to be an entirely self-inflicted wound on the French nation. This might seem rather Captain Obvious, but do they not have vagrancy laws and workhouses, in which to stash mendicants?

U-turn if you want to

The boss of the World Trade Organization has done a Brexit flip-flop. Having leapt aboard Dave the Leader’s Project Fear doom ‘n’ disaster bandwagon, he is now trying to grease up to Mrs. May. Now, he is telling the world that Brexit will not harm Britain and a vindictive attitude on the part of the EU will harm global trade.

Don’t mess with us!

Belgian carpet manufacturers are doing a bit of sabre-rattling in response to the generally hissy reaction of the EU’s management to Brexit. If EU bitchery results in a tariff barrier, which damages sales of their goods to the carpet-makers’ biggest market, there will be trouble, an industry spokesman assured our local news outlet.
    The Belgian fishing industry is also worried about loss of access to British waters, not to mention the manufacturers of the posh German cars so beloved of the highly paid in Britain.

Equality and common sense don't necessarily mix

There are millions of pounds being wasted on promoting the lefty luvvy diversity agenda. But all that has been achieved is that idiots and incompetents are grossly over-represented. By what set of standards can this be considered value-for-money for the taxpayer?

It’s the job

Should we be surprised that the current prime minister is on tape telling bankers that the whole banking industry would flee Britain if we dared to vote of Brexit? Not really. She was part of Dave the Leader’s gang at the time and she had to do the Project Fear thing to keep on message. It’s what politicians do.

If only

They’ve had the by-election and Dave the Leader has been replaced by a shiny new Tory and he’s off into the sunset to write his memoirs (or have them written for him), and then see if anyone will give him a job involving lots of dosh for not very much from him.
    Just think, if they had democracy in Russia, the same could happen to Vlad the Putin. Which probably explains why they don’t have democracy in Russia.

Look who’s talking

Sir P. Green, the bad guy in the British Home Stores shambles, should be stripped of his knighthood says . . . a gang of rogues, thieves, expenses swindlers, hypocrites and liars in the House of Common Criminals. Is anyone who matters likely to be impressed by their opinons?

Walloonatic politics

Britain’s politicians should get their heads around the fact that Britain will never get a worthwhile trade deal with the EU on leaving as long as all of the regions have to approve it. This means that a couple of hairs on the tail can wag an entire dog with a population of 500 million.
    Realizing this truth means that our government can devote its energies to cutting off our payments to a corrupt and wasteful EU budget; make arrangements to support vital British industries which are receiving recycled British taxpayers’ cash from the EU, such as farmers; cut off the usual parasites at their EU knees (we all know who they are) and concentrate on making trade deals with non-European nations which have a wieldy administration.

You love it secretly

There are some people who moan their socks off about the Daily Mail, especially one guy who always shoves it in the bin if he comes across a copy @ his workplace. But, paradoxically, his pet hate seems to be making a positive contribution to his life.
    It gives him the Joy of Outrage when he scans a copy and sees lots of views which oppose his own and a Glow of Virtue when he rejects them. He also experiences the Guilty Pleasure of Censorship when he creates a safe space for weaker-minded colleagues and thrust the offending newspaper into the bin.
    Why did God create the Devil? To let some people feel self-righteous all over when they resist the Devil’s influence. Why did God create the Daily Mail? For much the same reason, it would appear!

Sock it to ’em!

What Britains needs is the smack of firm government, and that smack should be delivered to the back of the head of P. Hammond and every other Bremoaner wobbler until they get with the programme.

Tedious myth

I don’t go to the doctor very often. Which is a good thing. But on the rare occasions when I need to make an appointment, I have never met a “dragon” at the reception desk. Nor has anyone else, who has had my newspaper brandished at them after I’ve encountered this tedious cliché in some columnist’s efforts. Could we kindly bin this expression; except when the columnist is prepared to name names and publish a photograph to make his/her case?

Not just Bremain tunnel vision

There’s a lot of Bremain rage going around at the moment. The Bremainers feel let down by their fellow citizens, who failed to appreciate their point of view. They refuse to accept that they are in a political minority and they should accept that the political majority has a right to be heard. Which is a very leftie-luvvie point of view.
    Like leftie-luvvies, the Bremainers are convinced that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and the Brexiters must be made to admit their error to relieve the luvvie-Bremainers’ impure rage and frustration; or else.
    Exactly the same thing is going on north of the border, where those who failed to vote for Scottish independence in their “once in a generation” referendum are giving the SNP the hump to the same extent.

Exit bonus?

The Prime Minister says there will be give and take during the Brexit negotions (that’s a technical term for going through the motions of negotiating). As we’re leaving, it would be nice if the usual course of events were reversed, namely that the EU does all the giving and we do all the taking just for once.

Putin’s Manky, Rusty Sabre

The aircraft carrier is always accompanied by a powerful tug because it keeps breaking down. The plumbing doesn’t work and most of the toilets can’t be used. Water freezes in the pipes, which means that the supply to most cabins is cut off during the winter.
    One of ours? No, it’s the Admiral Kuznetsov, the pride of the Russian fleet which Vlad the hijo de Putin paraded through the Channel as his latest attempt to intimidate us with Russia’s military might.

Out of step

Oh, dear. The Chancellor is in the soup again. Mr. P. Hammond tried to shift the goalposts on immigration and got slapped down by the prime monster. Can he do anything right?

ESA does a Beagle 2

Beagle 2 was the brain child of the late Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University. It took a ride to Mars with the successful Mars Express mission in 2003 and all contact was lost during the descent. It was finally spotted in January 2015, when images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter appeared to show that half of the solar panels had failed to deploy and they had blocked the communications antenna.
    The European Space Agency sent a probe called Schiaparaelli to Mars along with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter with the object of testing the ESA landing system. Contact was lost with the probe yesterday during the descent to the surface, which means that ESA does not have something as effective as NASA’s bouncing ball technique for the vital last bit.

Garbage-time politics

Following the conviction of GCHQ, the government’s intelligence data HQ, for illegal hoovering of personal information, the midgets are at it. A Triv-Dem mouthpiece declared that “every pound the government spends on monitoring people’s emails, text messages and calls is a pound taken away from community policing”.
    But exactly the same applies to every pound wasted on pointless jobs at Liberal-run councils, all the cash wasted on overpriced “green” electricity and all the other global warming swindles embraced by the Liberals, and all the billions wasted by the public sector, as run by governments of all shades, on failing to get cost-effective deals on supplies.
    And dishonourable mention should also be made of David Cameron’s Troubled Families Programme, which has blown one billion pounds to no effect on trying to make bad people behave decently.

Why should we investigate if raider got in through open window? says top officer.

"Because it's what you're paid to do, you dozy bastard. No surprise you don't know that, though."
    No surprise that this attitude was taken by the Leicestershire police farce, which came up with the idea last year of doing burglary forensics only at even numbered houses. This latest stroke of policing genius was offered by the assistant to the big cheese, which shows how high up the food chain the rot has spread.
    Maybe the locals should decide that they can't be bothered paying the police precept in their council tax if their coppers can't be bothered providing value for money.

Empty posturing

After 10 years in power, the Scottish Nationalists have proved themselves to be as useless as any other governing party. But they still haven’t run out of interesting ways to waste English taxpayers’ cash. Wee Burney Sturgeon, their First Meenister, would like to open a Scottish embassy in Berlin. Apparently, no one has told her that diplomatic stuff is the business of the UK government, not regional assemblies.

Well, who’da thunk this!

Just before the programme started, the continuity announcer told us: “Expect some scenes of violence in Midsomer Murders”. I think the clue is in the title, Captain Obvious.

Well, who’da thunk it!

A Royal Marines reservist is under arrest for stealing vast amounts of guns ‘n’ grenades ‘n’ explosives over a period of 4 years due to negligent security. A mouthpiece for the National Crime Agency claimed that “the weapons we seized are extremely dangerous”. Which means what? That the general public might have thought that Marines are issued with harmless weapons if he hadn’t put them on the right track?

What about beating his wife? Has he stopped doing that?

Bank of England boss M. Carney has announced that he is not going to take instructions from politicians after the prime minister knocked him for scare-mongering, cutting interest rates unnecessarily and wasting cash on qualitative easing.
    What he really meant was that he would stop doing it as he did nothing but spout Project Fear at the behest of Messrs. Cameron and Osborne during their failed EU referendum campaign.

A pleasant change

When I look at the waxworks, posturing gits and outright crooks, who have bagged head of state jobs around the world, I do hope that the American people will have the courage to choose a man who is different and will be entertaining as their president rather than just another routine figurehead, who wouldn’t know truth, justice and the American way if they bit her ass off.

They’ll get you one way or another

Threats of a shopper boycott have forced Unilever to abandon their 10% across-the-board price rise using the value of the £ as an excuse. Especially as some of the items in dispute, like Marmite and Walls ice cream, are made from 100% British ingredients and not subject to fluctuations in the value of the £. Which won’t stop some less well publicized stealth price rises.
    Slight problem about boycotting Unilever at the Mansion, though. We don’t seem to use anything much made by Unilever as my staff have found better alternatives which offer much greater value for money.

Not fair; we’re outa here!

The government of the Maldive Islands, some 1,087 specks of coral in the Indian Ocean, has Mexited from the Commonwealth in a cloud of huff as a protest over the organization’s unreasonable requests. The Maldivians thought it unjust and unfair that they should be required to refrain from locking up political opponents and allow freedom of speech and an independent judiciary.

You have been warned!!

A Putin kite-flyer, V. Zhirinovsky, is ordering Americans to vote for Trump because Clinton will start World War 3, for which America will get the blame. He declared that: “A victory for Trump would be a gift to humanity. But if Clinton wins, she will be the last US president ever.”
    Crumbs!

Hooray for them!

The nation acknowledges its debt to Edstone Miliband and Calamity Clegg, who have appointed themselves leaders of the Bremoan campaign to ensure that it sinks without a trace like their respective party leaderships.

Refugees (from reality) given a good home

The BBC has opened its doors wide to lefty luvvie Bremoaners. Anyone who has a suitable gruesome catastrophe prediction to make about Brexit is guaranteed abundant air-time. The BBC, which has a sense of entitlement as big as all outdoors, sees nothing wrong with pandering to its own special interest group: the sneering elite.

Would it have made a scrap of difference?

We are being invited to believe that Mary Whitehouse was right and that if everyone had listened to her in the 1970s and 80s, then the country would be a much better place with no pornography and women placed on pedestals to be respected and worshipped rather than to make it easier to look up the lady's skirt. No Kardashians and no filth on Channel 4.
    Fine. If we can ignore the influence of the rest of the world around Britain, which didn't have the benefit of the Whitehouse crusade, and pretend the internet never happened. And that every other nation is fine and upstanding, and it was the British who encouraged them to embrace filth and degradation lustfully and enthusiastically.

“New, but not as we know it, Jim.”

The Russians would have us believe that Boris Johnson urging peace protesters to march on the Russian embassy over their bombing of civilians and other war crimes in Syria is a new form of diplomacy. That’s “new” as in we expected to forget all the decades of demos led by Russia’s paid stooges?

Shorter but better

According to the Europeon Union’s propaganda and popular enlightenment department, the Scots might have a much lower life expectancy than the English but they have a better quality of life. That’s despite their country having the worst rate of personal safety in the UK and the fact that they are worst off in areas such as nutrition and personal medical care.

The revenge of technology?

It was interesting to read that Samsung has been obliged to recall its latest range of portable phones as the replacement batteries, which were issued for an initial release of exploding ones, have proved to be just as explosive. Is this technology fighting back? Man has exploited technology relentlessly. Are the machines starting an explosive jihad against Man?

Another bullet dodged

Eight years ago, theGrauniad gave us 100 months to save the planet from soaring temperatures due to the Not-So-Great Global Warming Swindle (it's getting colder, it's October), melting ice caps (they're refreezing again after the usual summer melt), dangerously rising sea levels (nope), more hurricanes & more severe ones (nope), and more & more severe tornadoes (not in the United States, where the rate is at a record low).
    In fact, all that the rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide level has done over the last 8 years is to increase crop yields everywhere. Is it possible to be more than 100% wrong? Looks like theGroaner has managed it!

Something else off the Xmas list

Mondalez International, owner of the Terry’s Chocolate Orange, has shaved the sections internally so that the product looks the same size but now provides 10% less chocolate for the same price. So something else to stop buying, especially as the oranges are now made in Poland instead of York.

Thought for the day

If God is really such a good guy, why does he condemn people to burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity? Does this God person have no sense of proportionality?

Traingate becomes Guardiangate

The Grauniad has been obliged to issue a grovelling apology for its traingate scoop, which was printed instead of being checked and dismissed as just a “gizmo news release” from a Corbyn stooge. The Groaner also apologized for editing paragraphs out of the article to make Virgin Trains’ service look even worse.
    The whole fiasco arose after the Labour leader, J. Corbyn, sat down on the floor in a Virgin train with lots of empty seats and claimed he couldn’t find one; having abandoned his wife, who was travelling with him, because he wanted the story to be just about him.

Entirely wrong approach

There’s an energy crisis in Britain because successive governments have bought the not-so-great global warming swindle and failed to ensure that there is enough power generation capacity to meet demand. What’s the Big Solution? Wasting lots of money on smart meters to intimidate people into not using electricity. The ambition is to put in every kitchen, a gadget which goes crazy when the customer plugs something in, such as an electric kettle.
    But, as lots of others have pointed out, no matter what the gadget does, the customer isn’t going to unplug the kettle, or another gadget, until it has completed its job. So what’s the point of the gadget? What is needed instead is smart customers.
    Another false positive of the smart meter is that it eliminates the “misery” of an estimated power bill. But there are lots of energy customers who are capable of reading a meter and inputting the results at the power company’s website. Which means that a whole lot of cash can be saved by giving smart customers a suitable bonus in recognition of their efforts and dishing out smart meters only to those who need them.

It’s the way they write them

My eye fell on a headline in today’s Daily Mail reading: So who does want to succeed Nigel?
    Below it was a square comprising 4 blocks of text, each listing the qualities of a prospective replacement leader for UKIP, each with a purple headline.
    The first read: THERESA MAY FAN Oh, a Chinese lady with the same first name as the PM, I thought. But MAVERICK OUTSIDER, NIGEL’S BITTER RIVAL and SURPRISE CONTENDER showed that I had been guilty of putting my own interpretation on things yet again.

Innocent even though guilty

M. Mahmood, a.k.a. the Fake Sheikh, led lots of “celebs” into temptation and humiliation when he exposed their greed and susceptibility to drug deals in various newspapers. Now, he’s going to gaol for evidence tampering and the ambulance-chaser trade is busy lining up “celebs” to sue him for damages. The “celebs” are also hoping for a free pardon, but that’s looking unlikely in most of the cases.
    £800 million is being tossed around as the total of the claims. Which leaves the rest of us asking where the ambulance chasers and their gullible clients expect Mr. Mahmood to get that kind of cash from. And how this total of £800M was reached is also a mystery.

Frustrated & Nasty

In the good old days, there was patriotism and a “my country right or wrong” attitude. These days, the lefty luvvies can’t find enough uneducated people to patronize and bribe in this country so they have to look abroad for customers. Hence their even more poisonous than usual stance and their “my country, always in the wrong” message.

Recently in British government circles . . .

The Home Sec., A. Rudd, would have us believe that she can introduce legislation to make it easier to deport criminals from EU countries, who are currently unshiftable due to 2004 free-movement regulations. And unduly lenient prison sentences will be jacked up. Sadly, there is no danger that the judges who handed out the lenient sentences will be made to line up in a public place for a compulsory slap on the back of the head, as administered by Special Agent Gibbs of NCIS when one of his gang screws up.

Oh, dear! Our Chancellor, P. Hammond, has turned out to be a Corbyn-lite Brownite, who thinks “investing” the taxpayer’s cash; in the Gordon Brown sense of investing in a pint of beer down the pub; will cure all ills. Bummer. Living within the nation’s means seems to be off the table whoever is in power.

The Chancellor, a Bremoaner, is getting a bit of a booting from Cabinet colleagues over his attempts to talk Britain down to “prove” that the Project Fear created to frighten the electorate during the EU referendum campaign was justified. But his colleagues are letting him know that rigging the present to make himself look right in the past just isn’t on.

The goverment is planning to root out illegal migrants who are working here and take action against people employing them in a bid to make employers recruit British people.

Weird sports fan profiling

TV stations have some weird ideas about what sort of people watch American & Canadian football. On Sky, you get wall-to-wall funeral plans in the adverts during NFL matches. When watching the CFL on BT Sport, if it’s not some Cockney git saying he spends 24/7 on a betting website and he “gambles responsibly”, it's some smarmy arty-farty guy saying he treats his gambling deals like his arty deals. Do we conclude from this that N/CFL fans are all broke because they’ve spent their money on a funeral plan and gambled away the rest? (responsibly, of course)

All mouth & trousers

President Hollande of France, who presides over a basket-case economy, has accused Britain of not taking migrants. He clearly has not noticed that some 400,000 French economic migrants have crossed the Channel to Britain to get away from him.

What do “experts” know, anyway?

In 2007, an “expert” at Cambridge U. forecast that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013. Didn't happen.
   In July 2008, the Independent predicted that all the ice would be gone by September of that year. Didn't happen.
   In 2012, the “expert” predicted that the ice would be gone by this year. What we got was the earliest start to the refreeze for 19 years and the fastest rate of refreezing since the Danish Meteorological Institute began collecting daily records in 1987.

Mess without ending

The shambles of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has lost the QC who was its leading counsel, and also his likely successor. That’s in addition to three chairmen, all ladies who were blown away for one reason or another.
    And yet, the prime minister seems keen to keep this conspicuous waste of £100 million of taxpayers’ money chugging along to the inevitable catastrophe. Is she hoping to be gone before the blame lands?

Take that, you cads!

Boris Johnson has announced that he is prepared to bust a gut to get his partial ancestral home, Turkey, into the EU. The plan is widely seen as an act of defiance against the moaning minnie Eurocraps, who are threatening to do Britain over as we head for a clean-break Brexit from the EU.

Unreality TV

Putting cameras on coppers has resulted in a huge fall in complaints about police conduct. There are two reasons for this: No. 1 – coppers control when the cameras are switched on and they can switch them off when they want to be rude to a member of the public. No. 2 – coppers know when their camera is on and when they have to behave like a normal, decent person and stop being rude to the customers.